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The beauty of the world consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either within itself, or with the Supreme Being. As to the corporeal world, though there are many other sorts of consents, yet the sweetest and most charming beauty of it is its resemblance of spiritual beauties. The reason is that spiritual beauties are infinitely the greatest, and bodies being but the shadows of beings, they must be so much the more charming as they shadow forth spiritual beauties. This beauty is peculiar to natural things, it surpassing the art of man.

Jonathan Edwards, Beauty of the World, 1725

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was colonial America's greatest theologian and philosopher. During his lifetime he was a teacher, pastor, revivalist, missionary, and college president. He was a towering religious figure in a Puritan age in which theology was the conduit for the culture's highest ideas. H. Richard Niebuhr called Edwards "America's Augustine." Just as Augustine sought to reconcile piety with logic and rhetoric, the highest forms of secular learning in the Latin world, so Edwards sought to reconcile piety with the science and philosophy of Isaac Newton and John Locke.

Edwards devoured everything from natural philosophy to polite literature, determined to know everything and how it fitted into God's universe. Many of his writings show him to have been deeply concerned by the reality of sin, but in Beauty of the World his preoccupation with the goodness of creation reflects his mystical side. He took for granted that beauty originated from God, who communicated various degrees of his "excellency" in creation. Equating excellency, beauty, and good, Edwards concluded that these qualities had to do with right proportions, regularity, order, symmetry, and harmony. For example: "that sort of beauty which is called 'natural,' as of vines, plants, trees, etc., consists of a very complicated harmony; and all the ...