Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards - meaning Summary
Eternal Judgment, Serene Vision
Borges imagines theologian Jonathan Edwards removed from history in a timeless, pastoral setting where divine attributes are perceived as both beautiful and terrible. The poem contrasts serene natural imagery with Edwards’s Calvinist sense of a world ordered toward selective salvation and pervasive damnation. It concludes with a provocative metaphor: God as a central, imprisoned spider at the heart of a vast web, implying divine power entwined with constraint and moral complexity.
Read Complete AnalysesFar from the city, far from the clamorous thoroughfare and from time, which is mutable, Edwards, now eternal, dreams and advances in the shading of trees tinged with gold. Today is tomorrow and is yesterday. There’s not one thing of God’s in this serene ambience that does not exalt him mysteriously, gold of the afternoon or of the moon. He counts it felicity for the world to be an eternal instrument of wrath, that the longed-for celestial was created for very few, thus for nearly all, the inferno. In the exact center of the gigantic web there’s another prisoner—God, the Spider.
Translated from the Spanish by Evelyn Hooven
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