Cast Down. Mark J. Miller
a handbook for midcentury revivalism and establishing Edwards’s authority on the “marks” of conversion.33
Edwards had, since his college days, dreamt of publishing in London, but he may have been surprised by the transformation of his work in the emerging evangelical public sphere.34 Reflecting a widespread concern for the disappearance of local traditions in the face of growing transatlantic trade, Edwards began his longer letter by attributing Northampton’s lack of “corrupt[ion] with vice” to its “distance from seaports,” but his own influence and reputation depended on his narrative’s transformation and commodification in those same routes.35 The Faithful Narrative’s popularity was due to its timeliness—its status as “news”—and its narrative format, which could offer striking portraits of converts’ religious affections. These conversions became something of a succès de scandal. Watts and Guyse, wary of endorsing such “raised affections,” had repeatedly asked Colman for “some other minister in New England” to publish an account. Elsewhere, Watts, citing the “reproaches we sustain here, both in conversation and in newspapers,” explained they were obliged to “make some alterations of the language, lest we together with the book should have been exposed to much more contempt and ridicule.”36 What remained was “surprizing” enough: the narrative justified converts’ vivid imagination of hell as a “dreadful furnace,” of “blood running from [Christ’s] wounds,” and a rapturous sense of Christ’s “beauty and excellency.” Despite insisting that no converts had visions with “bodily eyes” or espoused innovative doctrines, dress, or styles of worship, the Faithful Narrative endorsed converts’ performances of bodily weakness, including fainting, collapse, and near death, as a holy “sinking” under the “sense of the glory of God” or “divine wrath” until God nearly “dissolved their frame.”
Edwards agreed that “there are some things in it that it would not be best to publish in England”; he took special care to condemn lay preaching by pairing the urge to preach with the urge to commit suicide, declaring both “strange, enthusiastic delusions.”37 But Edwards may have been more troubled by Watts and Guyse’s promotion, in their extensive editorial apparatus, of a simpler model of converts’ sense of grace, or “new light.” Edwards’s own model preempted critics who claimed that revival simply excited embodied “animal” passions by using faculty psychology and other Enlightenment theories connecting body and mind through sense and feeling. His account of conversion further distinguished between “natural” affections, such as sympathy, and “gracious” affective responses. As Edwards explained in a 1733 sermon descriptively entitled “A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God,” strong affections about the things of religion were no proof of grace: “A person by mere nature … may be liable to be affected with the story of Jesus Christ … as well as by any other tragical story … as well as a man may be affected with what he reads in a romance, or sees acted in a stage play.”38 Such natural affect, initiated by reading romances or seeing plays, could be evaluated rationally on the basis of its beneficial effect on the body and mind. In contrast, gracious affect, “imparted” by the “indwelling” of the Holy Spirit, could produce harmful affections and yet remain beneficial.39 As in Edwards’s typological practice, the affective experience of the gracious convert reveals earthly effects to be “images or shadows” of the “Excellency” of divinity.40
As this tension between Edwards and his editors suggests, the Faithful Narrative’s layers of ministerial comments, notes, revisions, and counterrevisions tried to manage and stabilize the meaning of revival conversion but tended to highlight and possibly contribute to the multiplication and proliferation of meaning.41 This tendency is clearest in Watts and Guyse’s introductory attempt to forestall criticism of Edwards’s two exemplary converts, a young woman and a girl whose conversions were almost entirely grounded in affective realizations of sin and grace, without any rational basis or sustained postconversion good works. In the postmillennial framework shared by many revivalists, converts who were young, female, poor, or “heathen” held special value as heralds of Christ’s return and the world’s end. These converts’ greater propensity to bodily weakness, corruption, and sin made their conversion more remarkable but also more suspect, especially if their conversion included “impressions on … imaginations” or visions. Edwards characterized this problem as one of narrative. “[S]ome weaker persons,” Edwards wrote, “in giving an account of their experiences, have not so prudently distinguished between the spiritual and imaginary part.”42 Edwards’s own conversion narrative addressed this suspicion by insisting on strict Calvinist limits to grace and describing “weaker” converts as easily corrected by his ministerial guidance. Edwards’s conversion narrative also dramatized this process of correction by narrating one young woman’s slow, agonizing silencing by disease and death, invoking affective conversion within a highly sentimental framework designed to moralize and moderate readers’ responses. The narrative thereby extended a ministerial tradition of adapting women’s sacred speech and performance for use by evangelical men, making confessions of guilt and displays of “inarticulate ecstasy and self-silencing” the most acceptable styles of women’s public revivalist worship in New England.43
In England, though, and increasingly in New England as well, women’s “inarticulate ecstasy and self-silencing” loomed in the shadow of Revolution-era female prophecy, ecstatic religious practice, and sacred violence.44 Watts and Guyse, rather than defending Edwards, bowed out. Stating only “we must allow every writer his own way,” they deferred to Edwards’s authorial privilege even as they undermined its basis in sound judgment, a compliment Edwards returned when he rewrote their introduction for his 1738 Boston edition.45 Other revivalists with access to print made more concerted efforts to transform Edwards’s account; John Wesley published an edition meticulously pruned of Calvinism, distributing it widely among his followers and sending it to every Anglican bishop. In its various published forms, the Faithful Narrative’s affective conversions broke free of Edwards’s limitations on lay speech and salvation. Edwards’s evocation and defense of affective conversion take shape through a traditional ministerial structuring and management of female preaching and performance, but conversion narratives after the Faithful Narrative, refracted through other revival practices, opened affective experiences and performances to further reinterpretation by a range of editors, readers, and listeners who helped produce new communities that challenged existing hierarchies of speech. In this and other ways, the popularity and power of the Faithful Narrative depended on its transformation by the evangelical public.
This process of transformation would come to be typical of the 1740s evangelical public, in which evangelical communities of letters, contributions to secular periodicals, and book publishing increased and were augmented by new evangelical periodicals in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Boston. The periodicals, consisting largely of letters from British Dissenters, traveling missionaries, itinerants, and settled colonial ministers, offered news of “extraordinary” affective religious performances, including fainting, visions, trances, and ecstatic speech.46 In the American colonies, such performances incorporated immigrant and creole English women’s spiritual practice as well as traditional spiritual practices from Welsh, Scottish, Dutch, Native American, African, and other communities variously marginalized and constrained.
Accounts of converts’ “feminine” performance sometimes cover over these multiple cultural influences on revival practice, in part because the language of revival conversion was structured by the sexed norms of Puritan religious performance.47 Conversion had been a cornerstone of Puritan social organization since the 1630s, when Puritan communities on both sides of the Atlantic began requiring accounts of religious experience for church membership and voting rights within the church. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New England Puritans often spoke or wrote and recited their accounts of conversion in front of congregations they hoped to join, with ministers occasionally recording and publishing those accounts. They usually described conversion as a movement from knowledge of sin to conviction, faith, mortification and penance or spiritual combat, and true but imperfect assurance of salvation. Well into the eighteenth century, Puritans and other dissenters emphasized the uncertain nature of assurance, often operating