Revelations of Love and Operations of Grace: Jonathan Edwards Human Virtues

Contemporary studies of Jonathan Edwards virtue ethics have tended to focus on the relation Edwards establishes between virtue and the perfections of God, a feature of Edwards thought that is indeed distinctive. Building on this body of scholarship, this dissertation explores the implications of Edwards' situation of virtue in God's being for Edwards account of 'human virtues,' and human character traits that fall under the heading of 'natural goodness.' I contend that Edwards develops three categories of human virtues: virtues (such as love) that are fundamentally constitutive of God's being; virtues (such as humility) that are moral excellencies proper to creatures rather than to God as God; and virtues (such as repentance) whose moral excellency is logically related to an agent's capacity to sin. I explore these categories of virtues to show how they are at work in Edwards' own writing and how they lead Edwards to engage the writings of his theological and philosophical predecessors and contemporaries in noteworthy ways. My final chapter addresses Edwards' view of 'justice' and 'private loves,' which I suggest are not virtues but instead are forms of 'natural goodness' that humans can pursue independently of the intervention of divine special grace.

My recognition of these different sorts of virtues in Edwards thought constitutes an important hermeneutical contribution to understanding Edwards' ethics; with the exception of 'love,' the human virtues and attributes that I address in this study have not been explored substantively by previous scholars of Edwards' ethics. Additionally, this study is important for contemporary Christian virtue ethics because it demonstrates one way in which theories of virtue can be reconciled with historically Protestant commitments to the necessity of divine grace for human moral action. Edwards resists the idea that virtue can be taught or acquired through repetition, distinguishing his position from Aristotelian virtue theories that emphasize the acquisition of virtue through habituation and moral education. He develops an ethic of the virtues that is largely Neoplatonic and Augustinian, both in its representation of the virtues as perfections of God and in its rejection of habituation. Edwards articulation of commitments to a theory of virtue that is both theologically grounded and in many ways decidedly pre-modern is striking, given his eighteenth-century context, and suggests the merit of considering carefully this thinker who works out his theory of virtue in concert with substantive theological and philosophical commitments.