"I assert that nothing ever comes to pass without a cause"
About this Quote
Edwards’s line has the chill of a gavel: the world is not a loose pile of accidents but a courtroom record, every event entered with a prior reason. Coming from an 18th-century New England clergyman steeped in Calvinist theology, the claim isn’t a casual nod to “everything happens for a reason.” It’s an argument for moral architecture. If nothing occurs without a cause, then the universe is legible, ordered, and ultimately accountable to a sovereign God.
The specific intent is polemical. Edwards is fencing with the era’s growing confidence in human autonomy and random contingency, and also with a softer, more feel-good religion. Causation, for him, props up providence. It fortifies doctrines like original sin and divine foreknowledge: human choices are “free” in the sense that we act according to our desires, but those desires have antecedents and, at the highest level, a divine governor. The sentence is built to sound like common sense - an “I assert” that mimics philosophical rigor - while smuggling in metaphysical commitments.
Subtext: there are no alibis. If actions arise from causes, then you can’t hide behind spontaneity or bad luck; character and circumstance are implicated. That’s why the line is rhetorically potent and psychologically unnerving: it turns private impulse into evidence in a cosmic chain of responsibility.
Context matters too. Edwards lived at the hinge between Puritan theology and Enlightenment rationalism. He borrows the Enlightenment’s appetite for system and necessity, then redirects it toward revivalist ends: not to liberate the self, but to corner it, so grace feels less like an accessory and more like the only exit.
The specific intent is polemical. Edwards is fencing with the era’s growing confidence in human autonomy and random contingency, and also with a softer, more feel-good religion. Causation, for him, props up providence. It fortifies doctrines like original sin and divine foreknowledge: human choices are “free” in the sense that we act according to our desires, but those desires have antecedents and, at the highest level, a divine governor. The sentence is built to sound like common sense - an “I assert” that mimics philosophical rigor - while smuggling in metaphysical commitments.
Subtext: there are no alibis. If actions arise from causes, then you can’t hide behind spontaneity or bad luck; character and circumstance are implicated. That’s why the line is rhetorically potent and psychologically unnerving: it turns private impulse into evidence in a cosmic chain of responsibility.
Context matters too. Edwards lived at the hinge between Puritan theology and Enlightenment rationalism. He borrows the Enlightenment’s appetite for system and necessity, then redirects it toward revivalist ends: not to liberate the self, but to corner it, so grace feels less like an accessory and more like the only exit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|
More Quotes by Jonathan
Add to List
