Thinking through an upcoming lecture on Edwards, I had a Borgesian moment: In 1731, there was a fire at the Cottonian library in England that nearly destroyed the single manuscript containing the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf . In the same year, Edwards preached a controversial sermon at his church in Northampton, entitled “God Glorified in the Work of Redemption by the Greatness of Man’s Dependence Upon Him in the Whole of It.” One fire nearly burned Beowulf, while another fire was being stoked up in Massachusetts.
My Borgesian thought was that Edwards is connected with the Beowulf manuscript mainly by the fact that he never saw or read it. And that got me wondering how the Great Awakening might have been different, how the history of the world might have been different, if Edwards had got ahold of that manuscript, learned Anglo-Saxon, and read Beowulf .
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