Cast Down. Mark J. Miller
leave his own conversion narrative unpublished?63
In New England, the circulation of conversion narratives in the emerging evangelical public extended and magnified the existing conflict between the established church’s dual roles as, first, a gathered congregation of the faithful and, second, an instituted means to grace. As only the gracious, predestined by God, were called to convert, to whom did the narratives speak? What public roles and responsibilities did conversion entail, especially ministerial conversion? Edwards’s own conversion narrative, first published after his death as the “Personal Narrative,” presents a reticulated response to the disruptive consequences of affective conversion by intervening in the genre’s association of embodied performances of conversion with authoritative public religious expression.
Edwards likely composed the letter in which his narrative appeared around 1740, just as he was emerging as a leading moderate colonial revivalist.64 Facing increasing sectarian division and public skepticism about revival, his narrative responded by incorporating the intense physicality, self-doubt, and circularity characteristic of more marginal converts’ narratives but locating them in a more entirely affective register. Edwards’s rhetoric of self-abjection may therefore be understood as part of a larger public strategy authorizing intense performances of bodily suffering, increasing revivalist converts’ autonomy from some “gentle” norms of public behavior by encouraging greater self-control and attention to rank in public religious expression. Edwards’s attention to rank would also include a refusal to enter into the wide, less distinguishable, and more unstable sorts of address encouraged by fully capitalized print narratives of conversion and the various versions of the Faithful Narrative.65
Edwards follows Puritan conversion precedent by narrating the repeated erasure of a sinful “personality” but diverges by depending more entirely upon affect and sensation, or what Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner identify as a “perverse pleasure” in the “sentiment of annihilation and abjection.”66 Part of Edwards’s greater “perversity” lies in his narrow scope and lyrical account of sense and perception. While the Faithful Narrative followed the effects of conversion on a community of believers, exemplifying young women whose conversions were calculated to generate salvific public affect or sentiment, Edwards’s conversion narrative focuses on his highly individuated psyche and embodied affect. Because Edwards’s narrative seems so modern in its descriptions of psychic interiority and eroticized individual affect, his embrace of abjection appears psychologically and sexually perverse. Edwards’s apparent perversity is magnified by his composition of the narrative for the edification of a young acolyte, his future son-in-law. As part of a letter from an established minister to a younger man, the narrative is explicitly didactic, located in the immense body of eighteenth-century English advice literature calculated to control the passions of unmarried men.67 Constructed as an exemplum to confront the exigencies of the revival, Edwards’s conversion narrative intervenes in the genre’s support for disruptions of hierarchies of speech and publication, registering subtle shifts in the meanings of sex and rank.
Edwards’s representation of the relationship between his own affective state, his affective performance, his authorial self, and his ministerial role attempts to limit the disruptive potential of revival performance. He begins by outlining a two-stage process of conversion to the doctrine of predestination, first a rational “conviction” and then an affecting, “delightful conviction.” Echoing his earlier sermons on the “new light,” Edwards attributes his “delight” to his new affective capacity or disposition toward God brought about by his reading of scripture. To illustrate his divinely implanted sense, Edwards disperses metaphors of light and taste in Baudelairean profusion, describing God’s sovereignty as “an exceedingly pleasant, bright and sweet doctrine” and even, in carefully couched terms, his sense of what “seem’d to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost every [natural] thing.” Chronicling another series of affecting scriptural readings, Edwards describes his growing awareness of personal sin through formulaic expressions of personal abjection, including his “extreme feebleness and impotence” and his heart’s “innumerable and bottomless depths of secret corruption and deceit.”68
Edwards illustrates his increasingly affective sense of his own sin and God’s sovereignty by introducing the metaphor of violent bodily incorporation with Christ. These violent images become his narrative’s primary trope for explaining his affective experience of personal abjection and divine power. Incorporation replays the Puritan ideal of erotic submission to Christ in a more abstract, affective, and explicitly violent key. Edwards begins by expressing his desire to be “swallowed up in Christ” and “have [Christ] for my head, and … be a member of his body.” These phrases apply the metaphor of corporate or church embodiment (Christ as “head” of the church) to his own soul and perhaps gesture toward a “swallowing up” of rational thought in the soul’s victory over death. Then, compounding the metaphor of bodily incorporation, Edwards invokes the metaphor of grafting, imagining himself as a plant “cut entirely off from his own root” and forced to rely entirely on God, “grow[ing] into, and out of Christ.” His tropological account of bodily incorporation with Christ returns to a narrative description of embodied affective performances of an increasingly abstract and comprehensive sense of sin and God’s grace. To magnify the sinner’s essential unwillingness to submit to the divine and the irresistible, sovereign power of God to compel not only submission but also joyful submission through a desirable violence, Edwards amplifies the violence of these images and applies them to rational thought. Alternately absorbed and penetrated by the divine, Edwards was freed from “thought and conception,” swept up in a “flood of tears, and weeping aloud” for “about an hour,” and filled with competing desires “to be emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone” as well as to be cast into a pit so deep that only the “piercing eye of God’s grace” could reach him.69 These phrases, drawn from scriptural figures for the influence of grace, were commonplaces in Puritan spiritual autobiography and New England ministerial guides to conversion such as Stoddard’s A Guide to Christ.70 By introducing these expressions into a narrative form and using them to mark internal affective shifts in sense and sensation, Edwards imbues them with a greater affective power.
Edwards’s rhetoric of abjection resembles revival conversion narratives by women, the poor, and Native and African Americans, which tended to be more embodied and continued the older Puritan model of conversion as a recursive or sometimes unfinished process. The most remarkable narratives are visionary and deeply uncertain, only hinting at progress toward self-assurance. A brief 1754 narrative by Montauk Temperance Hannabal, recorded by Samson Occom, concludes with Hannabal’s description of a “Swoun” in which she “found [her] Self into great Darkness” with a voice guiding her to “Something” like “a Pole … Put over a Deep hole.”71 Narratives by European creole and immigrant women are similarly recursive, if usually more assured, describing spiritual development as an embodied battle with Satan and theoerotic absorption or penetration by Christ. Connecticut farm-woman Hannah Heaton, in a 1741 narrative, writes that she “thot [she] felt the devil twitch [her] clothes” and “whisper” suicidal urges “in her ear.” Naming and drawing on her experience at sermons by Gilbert Tennent and George Whitefield, Heaton described one revival in which “many were crying out” and she “thot the flor [she] stood on gave way.” Suddenly resigned to her fate, she “thot I see iesus with the eyes of my soul stand up in heaven a louely g[o]od man with his arms open ready to receive me his face was full of smiles he loockt white and ruddy and was iust such a saviour as my soul wanted.”72
Edwards’s wife, Sarah Edwards, offered a more abstract but similarly erotic sense of floating or swimming like “a mote of dust” in God’s “stream or pencil of sweet light.” “That night,” she wrote, “was the sweetest night I ever had in my life.”73 These narratives engage seventeenth-century Puritan models of sex in which “female” bodily weakness allowed for greater supernatural influence. They also connect “female” piety with other cultural traditions, such as James Gronniosaw’s possible invocation of West African spirit possession: in a narrative dictated to “a young lady,” Gronniosaw, a former slave in New York, “saw (or thought I saw)