The full title of the book by Avihu Zakai that I am reviewing here is Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of Nature: The Re-enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. Judging by the title alone, one might think that this book is exclusively about Jonathan Edwards' philosophy of nature. However, this first impression is proved wrong by the very first pages of the book.
The key category of this book is "re-enchantment" (nothing to do with magic or sorcery), a concept that Zakai has used also in his previous monograph, Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. With "re-enchantment," Zakai refers to Edwards' attempt "to provide a philosophical and theological alternative to mechanical philosophy that would take into account his profound religious and theological persuasions regarding God's sovereignty and the divine presence in the worlds" (Zakai, Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History, 118). But Edwards was not the only one engaged in the re-enchantment of reality, and Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of Nature contains fascinating discussions of a few of these re-enchanters.
In the Introduction the author tells us that the aim of the "study is to place Edwards's writings on natural philosophy in the broad historical, theological, and scientific context of a wide variety of religious responses to the rise of the New Philosophy of nature in the early modern period (focusing on astronomy, cosmology, and physics)" (1). More specifically, the context that Zakai plans to describe is composed by John Donne, Blaise Pascal, John Edwards (not to be confused with Jonathan Edwards), Robert Greene, G. W. Leibniz, Jonathan Swift, William Blake, and George Berkeley (although Zakai mentions and/or briefly discusses others, namely, Giordano Bruno, the Cambridge Platonists, the Physico-Theologians, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Gassendi, Alexander Pope, and a few others). Before doing that, however, some historical and intellectual background needs to be set forth.
The author does that in chapter 1, titled "Philosophia ancilla theologiae: Science and Religion in Jonathan Edwards's Thought." The chapter discusses the affinities between Edwards' thought and some general characteristics of Medieval, Scholastic, and Renaissance thought: theology as regina scientiarum (queen of the sciences), philosophia ancilla theologiae (philosophy/science as handmaid of theology), scala naturae (the great chain of being), omnia videmus in Deo (we see all things in God), and theatrum Dei gloria (the natural world as the theater of God's glory). Of course, there are specific qualifications and differences between Edwards and the several past approaches on those issues, but those are not the point and they do not damage Zakai's thesis. Through the exposition of the points I just listed, Zakai correctly shows how Edwards is significantly tied to the Christian theology and philosophy that preceded him.
Chapter 2, "The Rise of Modern Science and the Decline of Theology as the «‘Queen of Sciences,’" is an account of how the development of the "New Philosophy of nature" during the 16th and 17th centuries undermined both the previous view of God and nature and the relationship between theology and science. The author does that by expounding the principles of the respective philosophies of science of Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and others.
Chapter 3, "‘All Coherence Gone’—Donne and the 'New Philosophy' of Nature." John Donne, although perhaps not philosophically ingenious as the kind of Edwards and Leibniz, was nonetheless very knowledgeable about the philosophical and scientific ideas of his age (107-111). Zakai shows how, armed with that knowledge, the metaphysical poet used his artistic skills to offer a picture of "the disturbing effects of the New Philosophy upon the human imagination, or more specifically upon traditional definition and formation of religious identities, during the modern era" (6).
Chapter 4, "‘God of Abraham’ and ‘not of philosophers’: Pascal against the Philosophers' Disenchantment of the World," focuses on Pascal's polemics against the prevalent Early Modern philosophy of science which. For Zakai, "Pascal's Pensées are not only an ‘Apology for the Christian Religion’ in the strict sense but also a staunch defense of the Christian worldview, a reaffirmation of traditional Christian thought and belief with respect to God, the human condition, nature, and history," a work where Pascal is "resisting the demystifying of nature and the emptying of the world of theological considerations" (7).
Chapter 5, "Religion and the Newtonian Universe," begins with an exposition of Newton's, Clarke's, and others' unorthodox theological views which tended to Arianism and Socinianism and which were propounded by such thinkers as "rational," contrary (so they claimed) to the orthodox views. After that, the author expounds John Edwards', Greene's, Leibniz's, Swift's, and Blake's reactions to the new philosophy of nature. These accounts are important inasmuch as they place Edwards in an international intellectual context where several thinkers attempted in different ways to re-enchant that reality that the new philosophy of nature detached from God and his activity.
Chapters 6 and 7 directly discuss Edwards' philosophy of nature. They are the core of Zakai's book in that they constitute (combined with his Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History) Zacki's contribution "to restore Edwards to his due prominence in early modern philosophy" (232).
Chapter 6 contains good summaries of some of the "prevailing errors of the present day" (WJEO 16:727). These errors are some of Edwards's main targets, namely, deism, the new philosophy of nature, and the British school of Moral Sense. In addition to that, Zacki explains how Edwards' doctrine of God, philosophy of nature, and moral philosophy can be properly appreciated only when considered within this polemical context and as direct answers and alternatives to the three errors.
Chapter 7, "Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning," Zacki analyzes Edwards' philosophy of nature as a response to the new philosophy of nature's attempt to disenchant the world by detaching it from God and his sovereignty. More specifically, the chapter expounds how Edwards' discussions of the atomic doctrine, the laws of nature, the relationship between God and the world, the nature of creation, and idealism constituted Edwards' attempt to construct a global and universally theistic view of the nature of reality to oppose to the prevailing mechanistic philosophy. According to Zaki, this is what makes Edwards a universal philosopher worthy to have a significant position in the history of early modern philosophy and theology.
He [Edwards] was a bold and independent philosopher who engaged with Enlightenment ideas, attempted to understand the constitution of the natural world and ascertain God’s relation to the physical world. Nowhere is his force of mind more evident than in his reaction against the dominant scientific culture and imagination of his time—mechanical philosophy, the doctrine that all natural phenomena can be explained and understood by the mere mechanics of matter and motion—and, consequently, in his quest to provide a meaningful philosophical and theological alternative to the mechanistic explanation of the essential nature of reality, an alternative that reconstituted the glory of God’s absolute sovereignty, power, and will within creation. Through idealistic philosophy and natural typology, Edwards sought to mount a counteroffensive to materialist, mechanistic thought. In that way he constructed a teleological and theological alternative to the prevailing mechanistic interpretation of the essential nature of reality, whose ultimate goal was the re-enchantment of the world by reconstituting the glory of God's majestic sovereignty, power, and will within the order of creation. (234)
Jonathan Edwards
Minor Criticisms
"Bad news" first. The problems I see with this volume are minor, and most likely they are not even intentional on Zakai's part. However, they might cause misunderstandings in some readers. Therefore, with the risk of sounding pedantic, I will list them here as briefly as I can.
Zakai often mentions the "undemonstrated truths of faith" (40, 56, 76, 83). With no further qualification, "undemonstrated" is an ambiguous term, and it will meet the disapproval of virtually any Christian apologist, Edwards included. Scientific "demonstrated" truths (79, 64) is equally ambiguous: it is enough to consider how significantly science has changed from the Early Modern period.
In my modest opinion, Francis Bacon's (and others') philosophical assumptions are not presented for what they are, that is, strict empiricist assumptions under the pretense of "scientific" objectivity.
"Bacon is right that we can think we know something just because we have a word for it. We ought to be careful not to let words direct our thoughts. But Bacon s arbitrary in his choice of criteria for accepting words as meaningful or not. As Bacon adopts an empirical method, those words are fictitious whose objects cannot be verified by sense experience. This rules out many abstract terms (good, just, right, form, thing) as well as words referring to immaterial realities. This is an arbitrary restriction unless Bacon can show that empirical verification is the only standard for affirming something as meaningful, which he cannot do and still claim that his new idea (which like all ideas is not verifiable by the senses) is to be affirmed as meaningful." ~ Montague Brown, Restoration of Reason, 20 (see also 25-27).
Of course, one cannot say everything that there is to say, and I am going slightly beyond the stated goals of Zakai's volume. However, considering how prominent Bacon's philosophical presuppositions are in his philosophy of nature, at least a brief reference to this fact would have been appropriate.
Relatedly, the distinction between science and philosophy of science is not always properly assumed. What Bacon, Isaac Newton, and others proposed was not simply new scientific discoveries, but also a new philosophy of nature. The latter did not correspond with and did not necessarily follow from the former. Bacon and Newton did not divorce "physics and science in general form philosophy" (176) simply because this is impossible to do (even Kant, with all his faults, realized that to a certain degree, as it can be seen in the Preface of his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 8-9, 14). In fact, considering the great scientific knowledge of men such as Leibniz and Edwards, it can be argued that they criticised not simply "the metaphysical and theological implications" (232, emphasis added) of the new philosophy of nature, but also its hidden philosophical assumptions.
Finally, chapter 4 on Pascal (although good) seems at times to depict Pascal as a sort of skeptic who blindly forsakes his reason and abandons himself to faith (128, 133, 139, 144-145). I am not saying this was intentional. However, such a picture can still risk to mischaracterize Pascal (and quoting Voltaire and Jorge Louis Borges, great men of literature but poor philosophers, does not help). I believe that it is more faithful to Pascal's life and Pensées to develop the idea that Pascal, not in spite of but (also) because of his superb scientific skills, realized the limits of science and, for that reason, he came "to see natural sciences from a broader perspective" (D. R. Groothuis, On Pascal, 25), and to oppose those who ascribed to science abilities that it does not possess.
Strengths
Zakai uses his vast learning and a conspicuous academic apparatus in order to place Edwards in a group of selected re-enchanters of reality with transcendence. Zakai uses these thinkers as representatives of a general response to the new philosophy of nature. This contextualization is very helpful, especially for those who will read Edwards himself. This is because Zakai shows how Edwards frequents attacks on the new philosophy of nature, deism, mechanism, etc., are not the fixation of a minister obsessed with old ideas. Rather, these polemics are part of the sophisticated system of a thinker who was well aware of the great turn that Western thought was taking. And he was far from being the only one. In their own respective ways (and, in the case of a couple of them, with some exaggerations), all these reality re-enchanters attempted to proclaim that, contrary to the claims of many of their influential contemporaries, God is not only compatible with, but also necessary for, a view of reality that is both rational and existentially significant.
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| G. W. Leibniz and George Berkeley |
For the very reasons I just mentioned, this book might also help those who are inclined to over-emphasise (and, in a few cases, maximise) the "parting of the way" hypothesis, that is, the real and alleged irreconcilable differences between the thought of Edwards and that of the Reformed orthodox before him. Edwards' deep awareness of the international situation of Western thought, the historical timeliness of his proposal, and the philosophically comprehensive scope of his project will, perhaps, encourage a more irenic consideration of his genius, and lead to the realization that Edwards is much more than a too often parochial "continuity-discontinuity with the Reformed Scholastics" reading.
The variety of thinkers and points of view discussed in the book might not appear attractive to some readers. However, if the goal is to understand Edwards better as a universal philosopher, such minor inconvenience is a very small price to pay while reading this very informative volume.
Conclusion
Some of the thinkers discussed in Zakai's Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of Nature are prominent Christian thinkers with some of the greatest imaginations that can be found. Imagination does not have to be taken in a pejorative sense. Quite the opposite. Imagination here is intended as an important function of the mind, "the organ of meaning" (C. S. Lewis), "that distinctly human capacity by which we image anything and everything that is not immediately visible to our eyes" (Wilbourne), "the ability to grasp the way things fit together—the capacity of beholding wholes" (Vanhoozer).
Especially (but not exclusively) in the case of Edwards, his ability to see and grasp all things as united to the God-man Jesus Christ inevitably led him, not only to strongly oppose the errors of his days, but also to offer a vast and fascinating Christocentric view of reality. Zakai's Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of Nature is a good sequel of his Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History. The former (like the latter) will help to gain a contextual understanding of the significance of Edwards' magnificent view of reality. I recommend it.
“The emanation or communication of the divine fullness, consisting in the knowledge of God, love to God, and joy in God, has relation indeed both to God and the creature: but it has relation to God as its fountain, as it is an emanation from God; and as the communication itself, or thing communicated, is something divine, something of God, something of his internal fullness; as the water in the stream is something of the fountain; and as the beams are of the sun. And again, they have relation to God as they have respect to him as their object: for the knowledge communicated is the knowledge of God; and so God is the object of the knowledge: and the love communicated, is the love of God; so God is the object of that love: and the happiness communicated, is joy in God; and so he is the object of the joy communicated. In the creature's knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, the glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged; his fullness is received and returned. Here is both an emanation and remanation. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and God is the beginning, middle and end in this affair.” ~ Jonathan Edwards.
©
Review copy kindly provided by Bloomsbury.
