Linguistic Power of Edwards’ Rhetoric

In this Digital Humanities project, I explored the psychological effect of Edwards’ language in “Sinners in the Hands on an Angry God.” The psychological connection to his choice of words is significant because this may explain the religious fervor provoked by the Great Awakening. The words that Edwards’ uses the most are God, wrath, hell, moment, power, angry, hands, and men. These words contain a negative connotation but suggest that there is something that man can do about this anger of God. The words in the first graph show that God and wrath occur the most times in the text. There is a correlation between the usage of these words and their psychological effect.

According to Psychology Today, words with a negative connotation do something within the brain (Newberg 2018). With the current technology, an fMRI charts the anxiety and depression provoked by negative words in conversation (Newberg 2012). These effects happen because chemicals release in the brain and these chemicals alter the brain functioning by stimulating negative feelings (Newberg 2012). Newberg illustrates the connection between negative words and their effects by saying, “But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision-making centers in the frontal lobe” (Newberg 2012). Although, the delivery of Edwards’ speech cannot be evaluated through vocal inflections and accented words, there is textual evidence od Edwards’ diction. Through this textual map of Edwards’ rhetoric, God, wrath, anger, and variations of hands are the most used words. The frequencies of these words, as illustrated in graph one and two, indicate that Edwards’ diction is passionate and intense by his word choice.

In the same vein, Newberg and Tabibina confirm his passionate rhetoric by exploring his use of words (Newberg 2012) (Tabibnia 2008). Newberg and Tabibina explore the use of words with negative connotations (Newberg 2012) (Tabibnia 2008). Through their findings, words like no, anger, and don’t provoke a negative emotion that manifests cognitively (Newberg 2012) (Tabibnia 2008). These are words that Edwards uses. This connects to Edwards’ sermon because these words scientifically cause a feeling of anxiety that could have led to this colony-wide change. Edwards’ clearly made a fear-provoking argument for the fate of sinners while preaching hope to the faithful (291-303). The physiological response to this type of argument simulates a threat in the brain, which caused people to mobilize to Edwards’ cause (Newborn 2012). This rhetoric put Colonists in quasi-survival mode (Newberg 2012).

Additionally, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, words can create lasting images in the mind (Tabibnia 2008). These images created in the mind explain why Edwards’ words impacted many people in the colonies. Tabibnia equates words to mental images. These images, especially when someone experiences negative words that create a scary image, creates a actively sacred or negative emotional human response (Tabibnia 2008). This demonstrates that the words in “Sinners of an Angry God,” had an immediate effect on the brain. The passing of this sermon between people, through pamphlets and re-telling of the sermon, made an inescapable impression in the mind (Tabibnia 2008). This impression caused a connection to the Puritanical “imagined community.” Over and over, this story would become part of the identity of Puritans and that repetition prompts a change.

Overall, it is scientifically proven that Edwards’ rhetoric impacted the brain. Therefore, it had a tremendous effect on the religiosity in the colonies and kickstarting The Great Awakening. With the continuous passage of this sermon, religious fervency emerged in the colonies. This fervency was even more than the previous years of following. This project shows the meticulous rhetorical quality of Edwards. He utilizes pathos and logos. The logos is in his pathos because of the scientific effect of his words to make people change. Another use of pathos in the text is the constant use of God in Edwards’ arguments. Edwards’ constantly references God, as seen in the text-mining map. The combination of pathos and logos in this text demonstrates further the effect that Edwards’ has in the colonies.

This project, further, asks the qualitative question of why Edwards’ sermon is well known in catalyzing The Great Awakening. His choice of words, with their psychological effect caused the colonies to take heed to his words. Centuries later, these words still have an impact. Continuously this text constitutes a part of the literary cannon and it is a tool to understanding the religious spread, culture, and historicity of Puritanical New England. This causes people to remember the power of Edwards’ words. When a sermon is very impassioned, people tend to call it “fire and brimstone preaching,” which alludes to the Edwards style of preaching.

Works Cited:

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The Bedford Anthology of American Literature: Beginnings to the 1865. Vol. 1, edited by Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson, Bedford/St. Martins, 2008, 291-303.

Jackson, Peter, and Jan Penrose. “Introduction: Placing ‘Race’ and Nation.” Constructions of Race, Place and Nation. Ed. Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose. London: University College of London, 1993, 1.

Newberg, Andrew and Mark Waldman. “The Most Dangerous Word in the World.” Psychology Today. Hudson Street Press, August 01, 2012. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/words-can-change-your-brain/201208/the-most-dangerous-word-in-the-world

Tabibnia, Golnaz, Matthew D. Lieberman, and Michelle G. Craske. “The Lasting Effect of Words on Feelings: Words May Facilitate Exposure Effects to Threatening Images.” Emotion (Washington, D.C.) 8.3 (2008): 307–317. PMC. Web. 22 Oct. 2018. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4727455/

Using Text Mining Tools

The goal of this process is to study and archive textual elements that explore the potency of Edwards’ rhetoric. In “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards chooses certain words to repeat. This is an intentional device by Edwards as a sermonic methodology. His multiple refrains connect him with the audience. I operationalized the connection of the words and their affects by using Voyant Text Mining and exploring Psychology Today and the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health.

The process that charted the psychological effect of Edwards’ words was lengthy and enriching. After reading “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards in class, I noticed religious images, scriptures, and metaphors that he used often throughout the text. I annotated the text to identify the words and images that are powerful in the text and the words that were repeated. The idea of this project stemmed from my curiosity why Edwards is in the literary cannon, widely studied, and how a project could explain the spread of Edwards’ ideas throughout the colony. At first, I attempted to do a project utilizing a networking tool to find the allusions of Edwards’ in other texts so that I could map the spread of the Great Awakening movement during its time and afterwards. Unfortunately, that project did not fit well into the confines of a semester, so I charted the spread of The Great Awakening through Edwards’ speech a different way. I decided to connect the psychological effect of the words to explain why his ideas spread rapidly and become a subject of study today.

My first step of the new project, after annotating the text in the textbook, I uploaded a Pdf of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to Voyant tools and used the text-mining feature. This feature extrapolated the words in a scientific fashion by charting the frequencies through graphs and putting the words together with the bigger words with the higher frequency and the smaller words occurring less in text. This tool efficiently counted how many times the words appeared in the text and created graphs to understand this pattern. After finding out the words that Edwards’ choose to repeat, I did research on the connotation of these words in psychological journals and case studies. After searching various sources which had nothing to do with what I wanted to study regarding the text, I came across two major sources that influenced my research. This allowed me to reduce my points to concur with concepts from Psychology Today and the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health case study.

Both sources were very helpful. The Psychology Today source presented many cognitive effects of negative words. For example, when one uses the word “no” or “don’t,” a chemical is released in the brain because a lexiconic barrier or contraction is in the sentence and this manifests physically by triggering the brain (Newberg 2012). Once the brain knows this barrier, it creates a chemical reaction (Newberg 2012). Therefore, this source explained why the words in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” are so significant. It synthesized the brain phenomena in which, negative words cause cognitive effects.

In the same manner, the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health case study was a great tool because it explained why the words in the text occur many times. This repetition has a scientifically proven impact on the brain. Both of these sources charted the use of these words throughout the text and provided an enriching psychological reading of the text.

I took notes on both sources and created mind maps to explore the connections between the journal article and case study. Through mind mapping techniques, such as a Venn diagram, I synthesized the information in both sources. I realized that they both talked about the brain reaction to information coming in. The differences between the two sources were describing what happens in the brain. The article by Newberg expressed the MRI findings of an experiment, charted the effect of when negative words enter a discussion (Newberg 2012). The case study and article by Tabibnia discussed the images in the mind that these negative words created and how words can stimulate brain trauma (Tabibnia 2008). It was as if these two documents responded to each other because the first talked about the physiochemical reaction in the brain and Tabibina described why that occurs (Newberg 2012) (Tabibnia 2008). I, then, applied this new information and re-read sections of the text with this new information and saw how the psychological effect in the text. Overall, this new reading of the text enriched both my literary analysis of the text and enhanced its historical relevance.

Works Cited:

Newberg, Andrew and Mark Waldman. “The Most Dangerous Word in the World.” Psychology Today. Hudson Street Press, August 01 2012. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/words-can-change-your-brain/201208/the-most-dangerous-word-in-the-world

Voyant Tools. Text-Mining. https://voyanttools.org/?corpus=94d03ad98d3988bad8284aae917d737c

ENG 216 American Writers I

Digital Humanities Projects – Fall 2018

Chenoa Baker

Linguistic Power of Edwards’ Rhetoric

Using Text Mining Tools