Self-Helpless

I have a page-a-day calendar that mocks me, which I keep for the perverse pleasure of it. The thing spews out positive thinking slogans commanding me to use mind-over-matter willpower to accomplish my material goals. A friend got the offensive timekeeper through her office, and sloughed it off on me, because she knows I hate this sort of motivational device. I deny on principle the efficacy of will or the power to impose consciousness on the physical world. What's more, it is laughably vain to interpret features of the environment as signs of personal favor; however, since I couldn't get a free 1994 Ecclesiastes Verse-A-Day Calendar, every morning I take the earnest axioms of my self-help version with a strong dose of irony.

America has spawned any number of fawned-over prophets of self-improvement, the forefathers of my calendar, Franklins and Emersons who preach self-reliance and an unswerving adherence to a personal vision. I would sooner consume a case of Nestle's Chocolate Diet Shake than slurp their humanist muck. For my dollar, the only domestic writer previous to Melville with the least idea of man's true relation to the cosmos is your Jonathan Edwards. Hold up as a model some penny-pinching, beat-box marching, early-to-riser with a Jaguar, and I'll start screaming about the Fundamental Attribution Error. Jonathan Edwards shows you what the future really holds: a sports car slipping over the rim of a black abyss and an eternity in the fire-y furnace,

"Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741) exposes the error of relying on human faculties to gauge our safety on life's highway. Edwards is no blustering snake-handler: he has been to college and read his John Locke, but it quenches not one lick of hell's fire to accede to the well-reasoned premises of empiricism. Sure, our senses reveal the world to us consistently and predictably, and from this data we make our plans and predictions. It seems so well-ordered and law-abiding and runs regular as a clock. Yet, despite all our experience of solid ground beneath our feet, we have nothing that may be counted as evidence "that man is not on the very brink of eternity, and the next step will not be into another world" (Edwards 154). The laws we observe in the sensory world rely on crude induction. To place faith in them is to extract meaning from a marionette show without recognizing the strings. Reverend Edwards has read not only Locke but also Descartes.

The sensible world sustains Man because the arbitrary will of God commands it. Creation is indifferent to reason, especially man's notion of reason. The air would refuse to swell our lungs, Edwards writes, the rocks would not bear our weight, and the Earth would not satisfy our hunger (157), except that God has stayed his hand against us. The only law that applies in what the foolish Romantic calls Nature is the rule of God, and by that standard, we are already condemned. If it were not God's pleasure to delay our execution, this world whose coherence we so complacently admire would vomit us out like poison.

Through chilling imagery, Edwards reveals the tenuous bonds that join us to this mortal life. Our assurance in the world of the senses is the slippery slope of Deuteronomy. On the basis of past successes and righteous deeds, we reason we are secure, but our argument offers no more protection from hell "than a spider's web would have to stop a fallen rock" (157). Cause and effect and linear experience of time are man-made constructs that do not bind Eternity. In God's eyes, our condemnation to the bottomless pit of hell coexists with our idiotic suspension above it. Edwards discerns the ever-present demons at the sides of the wicked, waiting like "greedy hungry lions that see their prey, and expect to have it, but are for the present held back" (153).

These metaphors convey the same idea: an instantaneous rupture in the perceived order of things occurring without warning. In Edwards' sky, "arrows of death fly unseen at noonday; the sharpest sight cannot discern them" (154). This is his vision of the Apocalypse, the coming judgment which will purify all matter, cleansing the very atoms of man's sin. Through imagery, Edwards enables his listeners to share his fearful vision to inwardly see it, and in so doing escape the bound complacency of our limited reason. From his argument against empiricism, it is evident Edwards regards a moment of inward experience of divine truth to be more real than a lifetime of mundane existence.

The reader does not move very far along in this piece without visualizing a new chasm or curtain of fire. Edwards invokes primal forces, fire and gravity, to jolt our attention. His mission is to convert us to his view, so first he stuns us with elemental might. Before we can be born again, we must be shocked out of our usual, self-obsessed way of seeing. If Edwards can divert our attention and get us to experience with our inner sense the incineration of our corporeal form, he can prepare us for conversion to a new life in the spirit.

Paradoxically, "Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God" delivers its tirade against man's corrupt reason with the dusty manners of an Oxford Dean of Logic. Edwards employs a form that resembles a mathematical proof. He enumerates his individual observations on a line from the Pentateuch, then starts numbering again to present his evidence of God's mounting wrath. Stripped of cumbersome paragraphing, Edwards' ideas seem spatially related, not ordinate and subordinate. The numbers appear to indicate "how many," not "in what sequence." I mean, "7. It is no security in the moment, that there is no visible means of death at hand," (154) seems equal and independent from "3. They are already condemned to hell" (152). Working with his hellacious, repetitive imagery, the form conveys a totality uncorrupted by linear perspective, like a splattered apocalypse by Jackson Pollock (to drag in the name of another depressive Yankee with an irritated retina).

Ultimately, Edwards is more successful in raising consciousness of the immediacy of hellfire and doom than gaining converts to Christ. In my case, a constitutional predilection enables me to fall through the cracks of earthly convention effortlessly, but I am lost when the reverend bids us to make a covenant with Jesus. It may be that metaphor accesses the idea of destruction of reality, but it is infinitely harder to represent a historical event: a difference between suggesting a similarity and an actuality. I have read none of Edwards' other works but in "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" he has plenty to say about chain-sawing the venomous Tree of Sodom and so forth and precious little to report about the personal conversion experience. It is almost as if the subject is too delicate to discuss. It's personal! Once Edwards has fascinated his audience with visions of Apocalypse, so they feel the vertigo of the abyss and the singeing heat of the furnace, perhaps the actual content of the individual dialogue with Christ is unimportant. A simple statement from the heart will do, especially beginning with the words, "O, MY GOD!"

(1993)