Relational Consent: Reflections on Disability and Jonathan Edwards's Aesthetics

ABSTRACT

The author retrieves Jonathan Edwards's understanding of consent as a model for conceptualizing political participation. Edwarsdean consent both presumes and reiterates a view of human flourishing as fundamentally relational. Attention to this notion of consent in Edwards's aesthetics invites a reinterpretation of civic participation as compatible with intellectual disability.

KEYWORDS:

• church history
• intellectual disability
• moral theology
• self-determination
• vulnerability

Notes

1. Simplican (2015) made a point of noting that her critiques do not apply exclusively to social contract theories, but her critiques draw on other scholars of critical social contract theory (such as Carole Bateman and Charles Mills) who note various ways in which social contracts function to sustain patterns of domination and exclude particular groups from power. Locke and Rawls are major foci of Simplican's (2015) critiques (chapter 1 and chapter 3).

2. Simplican's (2015) concern echoes the argument of Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997), who recognized the ways that persons in authority make use of socially constructed figures (which Thomson called “normates”) who serve as ideal or archetypal human beings to sustain the power secured by their own “bodily configurations and cultural capital” (p. 8). Building on Thomson, Lennard J. Davis (2002) explained, “Normates thus enforce their supposed normality by upholding some impossible standard to which all bodies must adhere” (p. 38).

3. Deborah Beth Creamer (2009) describes both the “medical” and “social” models of disability, highlighting limitations of each conception.

4. So, for example, Edwards's early work The Mind affirms that the “consent” of “minds towards things … is choice” (Edwards, 1980, p. 362). In this note and elsewhere I follow a standard practice in Edwards studies by citing Edwards's texts by page number and volume number in the critical edition of Edwards's works.

5. As Roland Delattre (2003) put it, for Edwards beauty is a “distinguishing characteristic of God” (p. 281).

6. Love “flows out from” God (the Father) in the first place [[necessarily]] and infinitely toward his only begotten Son, being poured forth without measure, as to an object which is infinite, and so fully adequate to God's love in its fountain… and the Son of God is not only the infinite object of love, but he is also an infinite subject of it. He is not only the infinite object of the Father's love, but he also infinitely loves the Father. The infinite essential love of God is … an infinite and eternal mutual holy energy between the Father and the Son, a pure, holy act whereby the Deity becomes nothing but an infinite and unchangeable act of love, which proceeds from both the Father and the Son. Thus divine love has its seat in the Deity as it is exercised in the Deity, or in God towards himself” (Edwards, 1989, p. 373).

7. For further discussion, see Sokolowski (1982).

8. For example, Edwards maintains that God possesses an “infinite fullness of all possible good … a fullness of every perfection, of all excellency and beauty” and that God increases this good through allowing it to “flow out” as from a fountain. God communicates this fullness “ad extra” so that perfections in the created order are extensions of God's perfections (Edwards, 1989, pp. 432–434).

9. Edwards's account of the created order as the fulfillment of dispositions raises questions about whether Edwards sufficiently preserves divine aseity, the notion that God is sufficient for God's own existence. Certainly the arguments in The End for Which God Created the World are at risk for supporting this conclusion: Edwards presents God's perfections as “attributes which consist in a sufficiency for correspondent effects” (Edwards, 1989, p. 429), and he speculates that these attributes would not have had proper opportunity to be exercised if the world had not been created (Edwards, 1989, pp. 428-429). At the same time, Edwards implicitly suggests that God does not need to create by indicating that God is aware of God's own goodness whether or not God sees its effects (Edwards, 1989, p. 431), and certainly God's perfections are “infinite” independent from their communication to creatures. Lee's work provides further insight into Edwards's unique view of creation. For further exploration of the concern that Edwards's view might tend to compromise divine aseity, see Holmes (2004).

10. Other scholars likewise emphasize the unity in Edwards's human person, explaining that this unity is particularly ensured by Edwards's understanding of religious affections. See, for example, Lewis (1994, pp. 293–295) and Hutch (1978).

11. “He that sees the beauty of holiness, or true moral good, sees the greatest and most important thing in the world, which is the fullness of all things, without which all the world is empty…Unless this is seen, nothing is seen, that is worth the seeing” (Edwards, 2009, p. 274).

12. Edwards equates “holiness” and “excellence” with moral goodness. See, for example, Edwards (2009, p. 274).

13. Here I refer to the “spiritual sense,” noted previously. Edwards, similar to many other historical Protestant thinkers, believes that morally good actions are restricted to Christians who have been justified.