Receptive Human Virtues

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Preface

Twentieth-century virtue ethics emerged as an attempt to overcome perceived inadequacies in modern moral thought. This discipline has been characterized largely by a return to premodern texts: Aristotle in philosophical circles, Thomas Aquinas in theological circles, and Plato and Augustine in the more recent work of scholars such as Robert M. Adams and Eric Gregory. Theological ethicists are increasingly appreciative of Jonathan Edwards, but Edwards is not generally considered a major player in virtue ethics specifically. It is likely that Edwards has been neglected both because of his Enlightenment context and because, at first glance, many of his ethical writings appear to point toward a view of virtue similar to that of other modern thinkers. The Nature of True Virtue, particularly when separated from its counterpart text The End for Which God Created the World, seems to characterize true virtue as a singular quality, a narrow benevolence similar to the virtue of David Hume and Francis Hutcheson.

This book argues, however, that Edwards develops a careful and complex theory of the virtues, although he does not treat the virtues systematically. Moreover, Edwards’s understanding of the virtues is important for contemporary retrieval because it gives rise to a distinctive view of moral agency and accountability that runs counter to a Kantian tendency to celebrate the autonomous workings of a human will detached from the natural world. Edwards’s different virtues come together in the sixteenth sermon of A History of the Work of Redemption, which extols the virtues of the incarnate Jesus Christ. In this text, Edwards delineates multiple categories of virtues characteristic of human experience. Using Edwards’s sermon as a starting point, this book explores the conception of these virtues that Edwards develops in his broader corpus. In articulating his view of each sort of virtue, Edwards consistently affirms that the triune God is uniquely and supremely virtuous. At the same time, he offers a compelling and nuanced vision of a range of human virtues that speak to the multiplicity of moral experiences characteristic of human existence.

Edwards’s human virtues are “receptive”: we necessarily receive them from God, and in this sense an Edwardsean moral agent is never fully autonomous. But Edwards is simultaneously clear that humans are the authors of our own actions, and that we remain authentic moral agents even as our pursuit of the virtues depends fundamentally on God. Edwards radically redefines the character of human responsibility in a world that God providentially oversees. In doing this, Edwards implicitly constructs an ethic that in some ways runs counter to what we might expect of a theologian committed to traditional Reformed notions of original sin, election, and predestination; such a theologian, we might reason, is likely to limit moral agency to only a select few. Edwards’s ethic does limit true virtue to the elect, but his account of moral responsibility simultaneously functions to make the virtues more accessible to all people than do conceptions of the moral life based in the notion of human autonomy. Edwards’s virtues ground a vision of morality rooted in acknowledging the limitations all humans share, an acknowledgment that is paradoxically crucial to the realization of our human potential.

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