I. Antagonisms in Evangelical Religion and Academic Art in the Eighteenth Century

John Wesley and George Whitefield began as close partners in the gospel in the 1730s, but the Free Grace controversy that broke out over predestination in 1739 led to the early division of Methodism into Arminian and Calvinist factions. The dispute took on a public dimension when a sermon by Wesley and two letters by Whitefield were published in the early 1740s. After a kind of détente in 1744 the controversy continued to smolder, only to break out afresh with new antagonists in the 1750s when the erstwhile Oxford Methodist James Hervey published an apologetic for the doctrine of imputed righteousness in 1755, and again in the 1760s when the Wesleyan societies experienced perfectionist revivals. John Wesley and Augustus Toplady argued over the freedom of the will in the early 1770s, and this overlapped with the so-called Minutes controversy of the 1770s in which Calvinists reacted to the strongly Arminian remarks made by Wesley at the Methodist Conference of 1770. This last and most virulent of the Arminian–Calvinist controversies broke out in 1770 while George Whitefield's body was still warm in its grave in Newburyport, Massachusetts. All told, the Arminian–Calvinist controversy has to be seen as the most serious antagonism in the early evangelical movement.Footnote ² But was this all simply a matter of sectarian schism, or is there another way to understand this dispute?

Spirited debate can in fact be a sign not just of partis pris but of tremendous vigour in art and philosophy, as in theology and devotion. To appreciate this, the conflict between Wesley and Whitefield as religious leaders (See Figures 1–2) may be placed alongside the rivalry between the artists Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) (See Figures 3–4). Considering these two rivalries side by side tells us much about the conditions that allowed for vigorous debate within a common tradition in the eighteenth century. There are some controversies that mark the limits of a movement, but there are others that reflect the vitality of a movement and its internal ideals.

Moreover, the antagonism between Reynolds and Gainsborough as painters was fuelled in part by the new attention given to artists in the periodical press during the mid-to-late eighteenth century, especially in the reviews of the exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London.Footnote ³ This was the first time in history that artists did their work in the media spotlight, just as the evangelical preachers were likewise for the first time discussed and evaluated in the newspapers.

Fig. 1.

George Romney, “John Wesley,” 1789. Oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery.

Fig. 2.

John Russell, “George Whitefield,” c. 1770. Oil on canvas laid on board. © National Portrait Gallery.

Fig. 3.

“Self-portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” P.R.A. c. 1780. Oil on wood. Photo: John Hammond © Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Fig. 4.

“Self-portrait of Thomas Gainsborough,” R.A. c. 1787. Oil on canvas. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited © Royal Academy of Arts, London.

The rivalry between Reynolds and Gainsborough was expressed in various ways, but it is perhaps best illustrated by looking at two portraits these painters made of the same sitter in the 1780s. The subject was the actress Sarah Siddons (1755–1831), one of the most commanding figures of the period. Reynolds was the first to paint her in 1783. She had just taken London by storm the previous autumn as one of the great sensations of theatre history. His finished portrait was exhibited in 1784 and it was regarded by his contemporaries as his masterpiece (See Figure 5). The title was Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, and Reynolds painted figures of pity (with the dagger) and terror (with the cup) behind her. Her pose was copied from Michelangelo's Isaiah, and this sort of allusion was in perfect keeping with Reynolds's theory that good painting achieved a kind of poetry.Footnote ⁴ In striking contrast to Reynolds's elevated portrait of Sarah Siddons is Gainsborough's portrait of her five or six years later in very contemporary costume (See Figure 6). There is no historical quotation here.Footnote ⁵ Gainsborough, as one of the best portrait painters in England, had a reputation for being able to capture a true likeness. But for him, the truth sought in a painting was not an elevated general and intellectual truth, as for Reynolds, but an empirical truth according to nature.Footnote ⁶

Fig. 5.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse,” 1784. Oil on canvas. © Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California.

Fig. 6.

Thomas Gainsborough, “Mrs. Siddons,” 1789. Oil on canvas. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

There is a kind of parallel in the way these religious and artistic rivalries each ended. Whitefield was asked several times, “If you should die abroad, whom shall we get to preach your funeral sermon? Must it be your old friend, the Rev. Mr. John Wesley?” The repeated answer from Whitefield was, simply, “He is the man.” And so Wesley preached one of several memorial sermons for his friend on November 18, 1770 at the chapel in Tottenham Court Road in London.Footnote ⁷ Wesley claimed that he and Whitefield had long held in common a belief in the new birth and justification by faith, agreeing to differ on lesser matters and preserve brotherly love. He paid his testimony not only to Whitefield's greatness and his character, but also to his “catholic spirit.”Footnote ⁸ So there was a recognition at the end that there were still deep bonds that united them, notwithstanding their long controversy.

Something similar happened at the end for Reynolds and Gainsborough. After Gainsborough died, Reynolds devoted his next Discourse at the Royal Academy to his rival and paid him handsome tribute for his untutored genius. Part way through the lecture, Reynolds recalled, “A few days before he died, he wrote me a letter . . . and he desired to see me, once more . . . [I]f any little jealousies had subsisted between us, they were forgotten, in those moments of sincerity; and he turned toward me as one who was engrossed by the same pursuits.”Footnote ⁹ Here too, then, there were bonds that united the rival painters at the end, and this included not only friendship but also the sense of being “engrossed by the same pursuits.”

No wonder, with the passing of years, we look back and see more similarities than differences between the two painters. One standard art history text concludes that “for all the differences between them, the two artists had more in common, artistically and philosophically, than they cared to admit.”Footnote ¹⁰ Likewise, E. H. Gombrich sums up his discussion of the artists, saying, “today, after the passage of almost two centuries, the two masters do not seem to us so very different. We realize, perhaps more clearly than they did, how very much they both owed to the tradition of Van Dyck, and to the fashion of their time.”Footnote ¹¹ By changing just a few words, we might say something very similar about John Wesley and George Whitefield.

II. Evangelical Religion, Art, and Society in the Eighteenth Century

One of the reasons why these rivalries have some formal similarities is because they took place at the same time in similar social spaces.Footnote ¹² The Methodist evangelists, both Calvinist and Arminian, were not scholar-preachers nor gentleman-parsons, agents of a religious monopoly addressing a parish congregation of Established Church, supported by law and custom. Rather, these were popular-preachers who openly competed for the willing attention of individuals in public spaces, preaching in the market, on the common, or from the court house steps.Footnote ¹³ The world was their parish. Just as historians have argued that the consumer revolution introduced a new level of choice into Anglo–American society, so also the evangelical preachers appealed to the conscience and will in such a new way that the common refrain of the hearers was that it seemed in fact a new message.

Much of the same story could be told of the progress of art in the eighteenth century, as the public sphere became decisive for artists and their work. In a way, someone like Gainsborough, or, even more William Hogarth, could have said, “the world is my parish,” in the sense that through commercial success they had escaped the confines of aristocratic patronage where the parish was your world. Such a world with its rigid hierarchies was rapidly fading. The numbers tell the story in part. The Royal Academy established its annual summer exhibition in 1769 and from an initial 14,000 visitors, the numbers rose by 1780 to over 60,000 annually. Artists were no longer operating only within the narrow confines of royal and aristocratic patronage: their works were being viewed, purchased, and discussed by an expanding public.Footnote ¹⁴

There were a number of tensions that this shift toward a wider public brought to the surface. Augustan philosophers such as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and high theorists such as Joshua Reynolds argued that art could help to unify the upper ranks of society as a kind of republic of taste in a nation that had become more commercial.Footnote ¹⁵ Artists were to reach beyond technical skill to achieve a more universal truth, argued Reynolds,

This neo-classical ideal recapitulated many of the Augustan themes in the writings of moral philosophers, namely, that the disinterested contemplation of beauty would elevate the mind and lead to virtue, and a kind of refined sociability would spread and provide a basis for public life. If Reynolds's Discourses were an expression of this classical ideal in theory, then the Royal Academy was its institutional expression with its school, its collection of model works of art, and its public exhibitions.

As we shall see, the evangelicals entered this same debate on slightly different terms, but they too were interested in establishing a basis for a kind of public life in which contemplation of divine truth would lead to ethical transformation. Indeed, the very fury of their debates bears witness to how important this issue was to them. Though the strata of the public concerned with the sort of ideals expressed by Reynolds and Shaftesbury was more self-consciously refined than the audiences of the Methodist preachers, these publics still overlapped considerably in the emerging public sphere shaped by freer discourse and trade.

For example, it appears that Wesley sat for a portrait by Reynolds in 1755 which was later destroyed by fire, and he was certainly painted by several other leading painters of the day, including another of Reynolds's rivals, George Romney (1734–1802).Footnote ¹⁷ Reynolds's sister Elizabeth Johnson (1721–1792) was a God-fearing Methodist who wrote a commentary on Ezekiel. John Bacon (1740–1799) the sculptor, and John Russell (1745–1806) the foremost pastellist of the eighteenth century, were both respected members of the Royal Academy. And both were outspoken evangelicals.Footnote ¹⁸ Involved in the production of art, evangelicals were also involved in its consumption. Indeed, they were avid consumers of engraved portraits as an extension of their interest in biography and autobiography. Wesley received a letter in June 1778 complaining that there were no pictures in the Arminian Magazine. He heeded the criticism and provided engravings of lay preachers and others in the magazine from then on. It was similar with the other evangelical magazines. The tremendous interest in portraiture in eighteenth-century England, which far exceeded any other genre, was clearly evident among evangelicals. Evangelicals would always privilege the verbal “portraiture” of biography and autobiography, with its temporal horizon, over visual portraiture, with its spatial horizon, since their concern with conversion required something more than capturing a single moment in time.Footnote ¹⁹ But, still, their concern for character and individuality, as well as the publicity of their cause, meant that portraiture figured in their visual culture.Footnote ²⁰ There was thus plenty of traffic between the world of art and the world of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century, even though today these fields are studied in isolation.

But how successful was Reynolds's Royal Academy in its ideal of civilizing the nation as art was placed front and center in the new bourgeois public sphere? Two contemporary pictures of Royal Academy exhibitions give very different answers. In the first, by Ramberg (See Figure 7), we have a picture of the ideal “republic of taste” as art serves its civilizing function, and Sir Joshua himself guides the King in viewing the pictures among a well-dressed and well-mannered assembly. In the second picture, by Brandoin (See Figure 8), we have a Hogarthian burlesque of this ideal.Footnote ²¹ Beneath a grand painting by James Barry of the temptation of Adam, the assembled crowd seems to epitomize the primordial fall from grace both in matters of taste and morals. Like Hogarth's satirical paintings, this is a kind of continuous narrative of humorous details, which here combine to offer a damning critique of public taste as vulgar and ridiculous. In contrast to the elegant paintings on the wall, there is nothing air-brushed about the spectators. The bulbous nose and double-chin displayed by figures in the foreground would be delicately “improv'd” in most society portraits, reflecting back an image of Augustan society very different from the reality. This is true too in morals. From the flirtations in the foreground, to the amorous interests of the spectator on the far right, to the voyeuristic man with the telescope in the background looking up at the painting of Eve, the scene suggests the very opposite of the ideal that art would elevate the viewer to some higher aesthetic and moral plane. Though this is a caricature, it does ask a pointed question: can politeness and refinement of taste do the necessary work to provide for public morality in the expanding social spaces of modernity?Footnote ²² Clearly, Brandoin did not think so. In art, as in religion, there was always the possibility that democratization could pass over into crudely commercial populism and vulgarization.

Fig. 7.

Pietro Martini after J. H. Ramberg, “The Exhibition of the Royal Academy at Somerset House,” 1787. Hand colored etching. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 8.

Richard Earlom after Charles Brandoin, “The Exhibition of the Royal Academy in the Year 1771,” 1771. Mezzotint. © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2014.

Evangelicals were interested in the same questions posed by art theorists about the most effective means to improve society. And the general public who began to view pictures, read about pictures in the periodical press, and purchase their own prints were quite aware of evangelical religion as a presence in the public sphere. For example, John and Carrington Bowles were print-publishers with shops in the center of London, and they issued at least three prints that vividly displayed this interaction between fashionable society and evangelical religion. In the 1773 print by John Smith of “Miss Macaroni and her Gallant at a Print Shop,” (See Figure 9) we see four fashionably dressed persons gazing at the prints on display in a shop window. Two of the men are pointing to pictures of John Wesley and George Whitefield and other evangelical preachers in the top right, and their attitude is clearly one of derision. But we, the viewers, are meant to ask who really are the ridiculous ones here. The dog in the foreground, urinating on the leg of the man facing the shop window, suggests it is the onlookers who are most laughable. Under the title of the print are the lines, “While Macaroni and his Mistress here / At other Characters, in Picture, sneer, / To the vain Couple is but little known, / How much deserving Ridicule their own.” The evangelical clergymen in the top row are literally and metaphorically “looking down” on the fashionable characters walking past. This print is, then, one more example of the presence and visibility of evangelical religion in the public sphere, contesting with other voices the issue of what constitutes a moral society.

Fig. 9.

John Raphael Smith, “Miss Macaroni and her Gallant at a Print Shop,” 1773. Mezzotint. © Trustees of the British Museum.

It is worth noting three observations about the debates in art and evangelical religion in this respect. First, in both spheres antagonists were responding to common inherited problems on the basis of shared concerns. All artists were contending with the prejudice against English art, the challenges of a new commercial environment, the disproportionate predominance of portraiture, and so on. Likewise, all evangelicals were contending with the problem of widespread nominal religion, and they were univocal in their push for “true religion.” Secondly, in both spheres antagonists shared a common tradition within which they innovated. For portrait painters, this might be the tradition of Van Dyck.Footnote ²³ For the evangelicals, it was their inheritance in Puritan, Pietist, and Anglican devotion and the longer tradition of Trinitarian creeds and Reformation articles, to which they constantly appealed. Thirdly, in neither case did antagonists understand themselves to be the whole of the tradition. There were other real artists, just as for evangelicals there were other real Christians in other denominations, times, and places. This was, for example, precisely what Joseph Milner sought to celebrate in his History of the Church of Christ. Indeed, in both British Academic Art and British evangelicalism there was a mutual respect and even sometimes affection between those of different “schools.”Footnote ²⁴

III. The Inner Life of Doctrine: The Calvinist Sublime

Thus far we have been looking only at formal comparisons between antagonisms in evangelical religion and English art. But it remains now to look at the spirituality of the Arminian and Calvinist evangelicals in more detail. How did the spiritual ideals of Wesley, Whitefield, and their followers differ and lead them into such strong dispute? Elsewhere I have examined the theological points at issue in these debates and the spectrum of positions that emerged from high Calvinism to moderate Calvinism to hypothetical universalism to evangelical Arminianism.Footnote ²⁵ And there were specific, high intellectual issues at stake: the understanding of predestination, the order of the divine decrees, and the meaning of divine election; the claims of the moral law on believers and unbelievers; the extent and sufficiency of the atonement; the imputed or imparted nature of righteousness in justification; the nature of and constraints on the free offer of the gospel—and so on. On the whole, the debate revolved around discerning the relationship of divine and human agency. But what was at stake in terms of religious self-identity and spiritual aspiration?

To look afresh at these debates, and to sustain our experiment in interdisciplinary criticism, we may adopt something of the perspective of an art critic in reading the work of these evangelical antagonists. This is not as far-fetched as it might seem. For example, the Calvinist James Hervey's popular Theron and Aspasio (1755) was a fictional series of classical dialogues and letters between the non-evangelical Theron and his evangelical interlocutor Aspasio, and the book is framed throughout in terms of Augustan aesthetics.Footnote ²⁶ The dialogue form was itself, as the Earl of Shaftesbury had written, a “sort of Moral Painting,” or “Philosophical Portraiture.”Footnote ²⁷ The entire sixth dialogue in Hervey's work takes place in Theron's long gallery and is a discussion of various history paintings. Most chapters also include extended meditations on nature. And in the first letter of Aspasio to Theron, he moves from a long painterly description of the landscape he sees out the window of the summer house, where he is writing, to the reflection that the only thing missing in the landscape is some sort of “grand deformity.” “The ridges of a bleak and barren mountain, or the skirts of a sun-burnt tawny heath, would give additional liveliness to the ornamented parts of the landscape, and make their beauties strike with double vigour.” “So,” he continued, “a proper knowledge of the divine law,—of its sublime perfections, and rigorous sanction,—joined with a conviction of our own extreme deficiency, and manifold transgressions;—all this would endear the blessed JESUS to our affections, and powerfully recommend his righteousness to our desires.”Footnote ²⁸ From this, Aspasio launches into a program of self-examination according to the law, preparing his friend Theron, ultimately, to despair of his own righteousness and flee to the imputed righteousness of Christ. The subsequent letter from Theron reports that he has taken Aspasio's direction and spent more than three weeks examining himself, sitting each evening like a model for a painter “for a picture of my mind” and he was concerned to achieve a true likeness, “to take a true unflattering draught of all.”Footnote ²⁹ Thus, in a critical section of spiritual dialogue, Hervey framed important evangelical doctrines in terms of Augustan painting. Imputed righteousness is compared to the sublime tradition in landscapes, and self-examination is compared to the tradition of contemporary accurate self-portraiture associated, as we have seen, with Gainsborough.Footnote ³⁰

It is the aesthetic category of the sublime that seems to me especially relevant to appreciating the spiritual ideals of a Calvinist such as Hervey, and that animated the other leading Calvinist antagonists from Whitefield to Toplady, as well as the lay people who responded to their preaching. Hervey argued that a proper knowledge of divine law and its sublime perfections was essential to the spiritual landscape he had in mind. This is one of many examples of Calvinist evangelicals appealing to the sublime as they spoke of God. The evangelical Calvinist seemed time and again to seek repose in an experience of contemplation whereby he or she views God as utterly sublime in his sovereignty in a way that corresponds to the viewer feeling humbled, abased, and small by comparison.

It is important to emphasize how central the concept of the sublime was in several discussions in the eighteenth century—in art, aesthetics, literary criticism, ethics, and moral philosophy generally. The concept entered the mainstream of European thought after the classical treatise, On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus, was translated into French in 1674 and then later into English. From the Earl of Shaftesbury's Charactericks in 1714 to Immanuel Kant's third Critique in 1790, “the sublime” was a concept in continuous debate among philosophers. The most famous eighteenth-century discussion was Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), but Burke was only one of many thinkers giving attention to this question. Indeed, a modern anthology of texts on the sublime in the eighteenth century includes excerpts from fifty works in English.Footnote ³¹

One of the central issues in this long discussion was the link between the aesthetic realm and ethics. The tradition of civic humanism and moral sense philosophy sought to unite the contemplation of sublime objects with ethical refinement, as we saw earlier in Reynolds. There were attempts throughout the eighteenth century to separate religion from ethics and to establish in moral philosophy a basis for the ethical life grounded in human nature as such. And, again, in this the Third Earl of Shaftesbury figures largely.Footnote ³² The evangelicals vigorously resisted this separation, and offered their own religious version of the sublime, as we shall see.

What then is the sublime? The classic illustration given by Longinus and repeated by eighteenth-century writers was that we do not admire a clear little rivulet the way we do the mighty Nile River, or still more, the ocean in its vastness, just as we fail to notice small fire that burns in our hearth the way we are amazed by the boiling furnaces of volcanoes such as Mount Aetna “which can cast up Stones, and sometimes whole Rocks, from their laboring Abyss, and pour whole Rivers of liquid and unmingled Flame.”Footnote ³³ Thus, the sublime overwhelms us by its sheer vastness and power. Although Burke did not think painting was the best medium for communicating the sublime, Reynolds thought otherwise: “The sublime in Painting, as in Poetry, . . . overpowers, and takes possession of the whole mind.”Footnote ³⁴ Joseph Wright of Derby was one painter who, taking his cue from Longinus's example of the volcano, sought to express the sublime through his paintings of Vesuvius erupting (See Figure 10).

Fig. 10.

Joseph Wright of Derby, “Vesuvius from Portici,” c. 1774–76. © Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California.

This is not the place to go into a detailed discussion of the sublime in eighteenth-century aesthetics, or its revival in late twentieth-century post-modern criticism, but there is an important passage in Burke, where he spoke of the capacity for power to produce the sublime. His final example of this is the Godhead itself. He seems to picture God with arm upraised, as in Michelangelo's Last Judgment:

This seems to me precisely the experience of God that evangelicals promoted when they preached about the spirituality and extent of divine law and when the hearers claimed to be awakened in their consciences. Many of the ecstatic experiences recorded under evangelical preaching were, after all, experiences of terror. Mrs. Blackwell's description of a man who dropped down suddenly in the pew next to her at Everton, and lay thrashing on the floor, is arresting: “When he fell, . . . I felt [my] soul thrilled with a momentary dread; as when one man is killed by a cannon-ball, another often feels the wind of it.” One observer of the Everton revival wrote, “those that are offended at them who rejoice should consider how terrible a cup they received first.”Footnote ³⁶ One often reads of the phrase “the terrors of the law” in conversion narratives. George Tassie at Cambuslang was typical. He fell down in terror under the preaching, and exclaimed, “it was a very awfull thing, to be in the immediate presence of God.”Footnote ³⁷

This experience of the sublime as a preconversion dread when confronted with divine law, divine judgement, and the threat of hell was an experience shared by Arminians and Calvinists alike. And no doubt the new cosmology of vast interstellar space contributed to the sense of dread before the God who ruled over all this.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, Augustus Toplady, who wrote an account of natural history in which he described this new cosmology, could link the terrible immensity of space with divine judgment in the final verse of his famous hymn, “Rock of Ages,” anticipating the post-mortem experience of the believer: “When I soar through tracts unknown, / See Thee on Thy judgement throne, / Rock of Ages, cleft for me, / Let me hide myself in Thee.” In this stanza we have both the overwhelming vastness of space and awesomeness of judgement, as well as the sense of shrinking into minuteness as the believer hides in the cloven rock. It is a religious version of the sublime.

The Calvinist William Romaine published a sermon on Psalm 107 in which he described the composition of the psalm as “beautiful and sublime,” since it includes four paintings from nature given to us in lively and striking colors.Footnote ³⁹ (This is the psalm with stanzas that begin, “Some wandered in desert wastelands” and “Some sat in darkness and deepest gloom,” and so on.) Romaine, one of the leading Hebrew scholars of his generation, would have been well aware that Robert Lowth, in his Lectures on the sacred poetry of the Hebrews (1787), had included an extended analysis of the Longinian sublime in the Psalms. But like Hervey earlier, Romaine framed his discussion in terms of the tradition of landscape painting. The design of each “painting” in this psalm, said Romaine, was to represent our fallen state in the most affecting way so that the reader will cry to Jesus for deliverance. The first painting is of the wilderness, the second of a pit of darkness, the third of sickness, and the fourth of a storm. About this last Romaine wrote, “The Holy Spirit has here given us the representation of a storm at sea; which is so expressive and sublime, that the bare reading of it is sufficient to humble the pride of human genius . . . . [and one] cannot but tremble at this relation of it.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The Burkean elements of power, astonishment, and diminution are all here.

The distinctive of Calvinist spirituality was the ideal it sustained of finding repose in sovereign grace without diminishing this sense of sovereign power. The love of God, like his power, was sublime in its vastness. Before such power and love, one felt humble. Or as Burke said, “we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature.” Thus, Toplady wrote about abasement, saying, “the sweetest seasons this side of heaven, are, when the soul sinks, as into nothing, before the face of God, and is absorbed in the sight of Christ.”Footnote ⁴¹ Toplady himself made the link between Calvinism and the sublime: “Nothing,” he wrote, “on this side of Heaven is so sublime and animating, as the Christian Philosophy. And what is the Christian Philosophy, but another Name for Calvinism?”Footnote ⁴²

Isaac Watts had this same feeling for the sublime. “Let me survey the sublime glories of thy majesty,” he prayed, “thy power, thy wisdom, thy goodness, all unsearchable and all infinite. I would dwell upon them till I am lost in this boundless ocean of godhead, and swallowed up in adoration and wonder.”Footnote ⁴³ Or again, “above all, the riches of mercy manifest in the gospel, awaken and raise the holy soul to a sublime degree of astonishment.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Jonathan Edwards, perhaps more than any other evangelical in the eighteenth century, had a sense for this sublime, often signalled by his use of the words “excellent” or “excellency.” His description of Christian joy was of a joy of “vastly more pure, sublime and heavenly nature” than carnal delights, since it corresponded to God's own excellency.Footnote ⁴⁵ The “sense of divine things” and “sweet abstraction of soul” he described in his Personal Narrative seems likewise to have been a response to sublimity, or, as he said after reading 1 Timothy 1:17, “how excellent a Being that was.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Sometimes, evangelicals would speak of being “enlarged” in prayer or devotion, in the double sense of “set at liberty,” as a prisoner is set at large, and “expanded,” like a balloon. In the Longinian tradition of the sublime, there was a similar sense that sublime objects swelled the soul and made one conscious of the grandeur of the human soul. But more often, the reaction was the opposite. It was to feel the minuteness that Burke described so forcefully. In the first of C. S. Lewis's Riddell Lectures at Durham in 1943, he criticized a textbook that identified sublimity as merely the projection of sublime feelings onto things. Lewis argued that this was wrong in a number of ways, but not least because “the feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration.” The proper account of such a man's feelings would be “I have humble feelings.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The issue of whether the sublime produces feeling of minuteness or exaltation was debated in the eighteenth century, as was the issue of whether the sublime was more objectively or subjectively grounded. But certainly Lewis here described quite accurately the predominant emotion which Calvinist evangelicals felt in the eighteenth century as they contemplated God in the vastness of his sovereign power and love.

This became particularly clear in the Calvinist account of spiritual maturity. What was the goal of the spiritual life? What was its desideratum? Both John Newton and William Romaine quite clearly described the goal as contemplation. Newton described the mature believer as stronger for having “a more feeling and constant sense of his own weakness” along with “clearer, deeper, and more comprehensive views of the mystery of redeeming love; of he glorious excellency of the Lord Jesus . . . ; of the harmony and glory of all the divine perfections . . . [;] and of the heights, depths, lengths, and breadths of the love of God in Christ.” Newton called this stage of maturity “contemplation,” and he says that the great business of the mature Christian is “to behold the glory of God in Christ.” And the first outworking of such contemplation is that it produces, as in the sublime tradition, humility. “As he knows most of himself,” said Newton, “so he has seen most of the Lord. The apprehension of infinite majesty combined with infinite love, makes him shrink into the dust.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Once again, we hear echoes of Burke's “shrink into the minuteness of our own nature.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The sublime was the spiritual desideratum for the evangelical Calvinist. One longed to repose in this sense of the sovereign grandeur of God and to feel and a corresponding evangelical abasement. For both Newton and Romaine, and other Calvinists, this sublime contemplation was morally transforming: “By beholding, he is changed into the same image, and brings forth, in an eminent and uniform manner, the fruits of righteousness,” said Newton.Footnote ⁵⁰ This was the Calvinist answer to the contemporary question of the relationship between contemplation and virtue, raised in evangelical theology and in aesthetic and moral philosophy. Cornelius Winter preached a sermon on the third anniversary of Whitefield's death, and he argued similarly of the moral efficacy of evangelical contemplation, saying,

IV. The Inner Life of Doctrine: Wesley Agonistes

Yet it was precisely here that John and Charles Wesley differed with the ideals expressed in Calvinist spirituality. The Calvinist evangelical sought repose in the sublime contemplation of God in Christ, and though he might teach the believer his or her duties, virtue was seen to arise more or less unselfconsciously. The Arminian beliefs of the Wesleys, and their teaching about Christian perfection, combined to form a spirituality that sought not so much the rest of contemplation as the victory that follows travail. Wesleyan spirituality was agonistic. It is not, of course, that one cannot find the sublime in John and Charles Wesley or the agonistic refrain in various Calvinists. But Wesley's agon appears as his persistent challenge that the Calvinist sublime not collapse into ethical quietism. Against the Calvinist sublime, then, we may set Wesley agonistes.

The phrase Wesley agonistes, as a description of this spirituality of travail, is an allusion to Milton's drama, Samson Agonistes, or, Samson the struggler. Although John Wesley had read Milton and would have been aware of Handel's oratorio based on the poem which was first staged in London in 1743, it is not necessary to demonstrate that Wesley in any conscious way saw himself in the tradition of the classical agon, and its revived use by Milton, though he and his brother Charles had read Milton closely.Footnote ⁵² Even more than Samson Agonistes, it was Paradise Lost that influenced the Wesleys most profoundly. John repeatedly referred to and quoted from Paradise Lost; he kept an annotated copy in his possession throughout his life; he published his own very popular abridgement; he urged all his lay preachers to read it; he copied out sections worthy of memorization; and he commended Milton to the general Methodist public in his Arminian Magazine. Charles Wesley alluded to Milton in his hymns more than to any other source besides the Bible. The Wesleyan culture was thus deeply influenced by Milton and contributed to the popular revival of Milton in the eighteenth century. Indeed, there was some 120 re-printings of Paradise Lost over the course of the century.

The element from Milton to emphasize for the way it appears in Methodist spirituality is the element of the heroic or agonistic. From the war in heaven in Book 1 of Paradise Lost to the contest between God and Satan to the epic struggle of Adam and Eve with temptation, Milton presents a Christian version of the classical epic, with its attention to the heroic in the context of an agnostic struggle or contest. As a term of art, the agon so evident in Milton seems, to me, also to describe Wesleyan spirituality especially well, and to contrast with the Calvinist sublime.

The traditional agon could be an interior moral struggle, as in Wesleyan spirituality, not just a physical contest. The classic agon in the ancient world was found in the labors of Hercules, and these labors were readily taken up as symbols of the spiritual path.Footnote ⁵³ In the eighteenth century, there was great interest in the Choice or Judgement of Hercules, a story recounted by Xenophon in which the young hero met with two women who represented a choice between virtue and pleasure. Immensely popular, this story was paraphrased in English by Joseph Addison in the Tatler in 1709 “for the Benefit of the Youth of Great Britain,” and imitated widely in poetry and paintings. The allegory was included in the school textbook, the Preceptor (1748), used widely throughout the eighteenth century, and was also the subject of a dramatic oratorio by Handel (1751). The most thorough treatment of the allegory was, however, by the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who commissioned a painting of the subject by the Neapolitan painter Paolo de Matteis (1662–1728), and had an engraving made for the second edition of his Characteristicks (1714) (See Figure 11).Footnote ⁵⁴ Shaftesbury had published an essay, which he reprinted in the Characteristicks, that recounted his instructions for the commission, detailing every nuance the artist was to consider in executing the painting. Whereas many commentators had seen the choice before Hercules as agonistic, it was supremely Shaftesbury who interpreted the choice as an internal agon of the human spirit. Of the moments the painting could display, Shaftesbury thought it best to capture the moment when the dispute was far advanced, but not yet determined, saying that Hercules was here “wrought, agitated, and torn by contrary Passions.’ Tis the last Effort of the vitious-one [vicious one], striving for possession over him. He agonizes, and with all his strength of Reason endeavours to overcome himself.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The words used by Shaftesbury here—wrought, agitated, torn, effort, striving, agonizing, strength, overcoming—all of these words vividly evoke the agonistic contest. He later refers to Hercules's “Agony, or inward Conflict” as the principal action to be depicted.Footnote ⁵⁶

Fig. 11.

Paolo de Matteis, “The Choice of Hercules,” 1712. Oil on canvas. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

The Augustan refinement of Matteis's painting might make it hard for us today to appreciate the interior struggle of Hercules, but here music helps. In Handel's oratorio on the subject, this moment of choice is presented in a trio, where the counter-tenor takes up Hercules's question, “where shall I go?” while the soprano entices him to pleasure and the mezzo-soprano calls him to moral endeavor, up to the “fane” or temple of virtue. The voices begin independently the first time through the libretto, but they then increase in contrapuntal intensity as the trio continues, just as Hercules's moral dilemma intensifies. The trio resolves at the end on a plaintive note with Hercules's questioning and solitary voice. He is the quintessentially modern person, paralyzed by the weight of his own agency. In the recitative that follows, Virtue continues alone to urge Hercules to strive upward and mount the steep ascent.

For Shaftesbury, this agon was in the service of an ideal of virtue founded on human nature, rather than religion. It would be for Wesley to take up this internal agon of the human spirit and frame it as a response to divine grace.

Especially after the stillness controversy with the Moravians in the 1740s, the Wesley brothers were both very anxious to steer clear of any spirituality that hinted of quietism. Charles wrote a series of hymns in response to Moravian stillness, and these make clear that he equated the passive spirituality of the Moravians with doctrines of the Calvinists, as both likely to cut the nerve of moral earnestness. And so he wrote,

Wesleyan spirituality would be marked by this fear of a “pernicious peace” and a “sleep in sin,” and the exhortation was so often, as in John Wesley's sermon on Matthew 7:13, 14: “Strive to enter in,” and “Strive as in an agony.” “Strive . . . not only by this agony of soul, of conviction, of sorrow, of shame, of desire, of fear, of unceasing prayer; but likewise by ordering all thy conversation aright, by walking with all thy strength in all the ways of God, the way of innocence, of piety, and of mercy,” and so on.Footnote ⁵⁸ As so often in Wesley's letters of spiritual counsel, the mood of most of his sentences was the imperative.

In the late 1730s Charles Wesley's preaching was earnest and powerful, and many laypeople noted his sermons in their letters. He preached his sermon on “the three states” at least twenty-one times in 1738 and 1739, and the structure of the sermon is entirely agonistic. He traced the progression of an individual from the state of nature to the state of grace, through the middle state of struggle: “The first is a state of rest and acquiescence in sin; the second is a state of contention; the third is a state of victory.” The one who is striving to enter at the straight gate “resolves,” “strives,” “labours,” sometimes “prevails” but always “struggles.” Wesley exhorted the hearer who desires liberty, “labour after it, and never rest satisfied with anything less.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The hymn which above all others epitomizes the agonistic theme in Wesleyan Methodism is Charles's “Wrestling Jacob.”Footnote ⁶⁰ If the classic agon in the ancient world was found in the labors of Hercules, in later Christian literature this was elided into the figure of Samson, as in Milton's poem. But here, for the wrestling, struggling believer, Wesley took the patriarch Jacob at the River Jabok as his type. With Jacob, the Christian sings,

And in the night of travail the Christian cries to God:

And so the refrain continues at the end of each of the first fives verses, “Wrestling I will not let thee go, / Till I thy name, thy nature know.” In verse six the struggle intensifies and so does the resolve of the singer: “I rise superior to my pain,” and “I shall with the God-man prevail.” As the poem reaches its climax, it is in the extremity of weakness and exhaustion that God's name is revealed, and the new refrain through the end of the hymn is, “Thy nature, and thy name is love.” But even lame and helpless at the end of the poem, depending on God for the strength, the Wesleyan believer still seeks victory: “Lame as I am, I take the prey, / Hell, earth, and sin with ease o'ercome.” No matter how many times a Wesleyan Methodist is knocked down, he will stagger up and keep fighting.

To be sure, this was still an agony of grace, and the quest for sanctification in Wesley was profoundly different after Aldersgate than before. But the travail and relief that characterized most evangelical conversions was taken up and sustained in the pilgrimage of Wesley's Methodist people, as they wrestled toward sanctification, fell back, and wrestled again. This appears as the central motif in Wesleyan conversion narratives throughout the eighteenth century. And last of all for the Methodist was the experience of death, as one last travail, followed by victory. Charles Wesley wrote of this last agon: “Struggle through thy latest passion / To thy dear Redeemer's breast, / To his uttermost salvation, / To his everlasting rest.”Footnote ⁶¹