CONSENT, CONVERSION, AND MORAL FORMATION: Stoic Elements in Jonathan Edwards's Ethics

Abstract

The contemporary revival of virtue ethics has focused primarily on retrieving central moral commitments of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the Neoplatonist traditions. Christian virtue ethicists would do well to expand this retrieval further to include the writings of the Roman Stoics. This essay argues that the ethics of Jonathan Edwards exemplifies major Stoic themes and explores three noteworthy points of intersection between Stoic ethics and Edwards's thought: a conception of virtue as consent to a benevolent providence, the identification of virtue as a singular and transformative good, and an account of moral formation as simultaneously self-directed and received. Common ground between Edwards and the Stoics illustrates the value of recognizing Stoic moral thought as a philosophical framework that can enhance and undergird Christian ethicists' understandings of moral development and the nature of virtue.

THE ART OF RETRIEVAL: Stoicism?

“…Musonius, however, left us only some fragments to read 2 . To form a decent picture of the Stoic philosophical tradition during the Imperial period, we have to read the primary witnesses to the tradition: Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius (Cochran 2011, 625) 3 . And we must read them whole.…”

“…The “insights” that were Stoic were so because they corresponded to a lived intellectual structure, not an independent set of noetic truths. Moreover, the Stoic style is not most fundamentally a “receptive process” (Cochran 2011, 624) but a very active one, a way of being that both depends upon and results in discrete disciplines and exercises—physical as well as spiritual. This point is not new.…”

“…9 9 See, too, Cochran 2011, 640: “Although Edwards's account of moral formation differs from that of the Stoics, he shares with them a conception of humans as dependent on divine providence.” In order for Edwards to share a conception of dependence on divine providence he would have to share a conception of divine providence. But “dependence” and “divine providence” are here abstractions.…”

“…. Edwardsean virtue likewise arises from ‘spiritual knowledge’ of God's goodness” (Cochran 2011, 632).…”

“…10 10 In this sentence, for example, the word “dependent” has drastically different connotations for the Stoics and Edwards. Edwards believes that “the divine being” can and does actually act upon the human being from without, that is, “supernaturally” (see Edwards's language at Cochran 2011, 641). Humans are dependent upon this sort of action from God's side of the Creator/creature distinction.…”