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Vol.24, No. 02 Sept. 11, 1998

Of Visions and a Visionary: Prof. Austin Flint Brings Jonathan Edwards to the Stage

By A-Dunlap-Smith

The scene is of a bed, and in it lies a man sick with smallpox. He will soon die. In his life he was a visionary, and here, in death, he has visions . . . hallucinatory remembrances of leading the people of a town in the Connecticut Valley to the gates of The City on the Hill - the New Jerusalem - just to have them refuse to enter and abandon him.

The dying man is Jonathan Edwards, renowned 18th century New England minister, and his deathbed hallucinations are the action of The Flaming Spider: Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, the latest play by Austin Flint, senior lecturer in Columbia's Writing Division of the School of the Arts and departmental representative for literature/writing at General Studies.

"It was the curve of his life, its rise and fall, that got me interested in Jonathan Edwards as a good subject for a play," Flint says; "in a way, Edwards was a tragic hero."

Two years in the making, Flint's Flaming Spider is scheduled in late October for staged readings in an appropriate setting: the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A production is also in the works for the spring at Yale University.

The play found its first public among the professors, students and theatre enthusiasts at Yale about a year ago. Coaxed to send the script to Yale's Jonathan Edwards College by a friend who teaches Scandinavian literature at the university, Flint did and was eventually invited to New Haven to give a talk. He has since returned there many times, and in May was made an Associate Fellow at Jonathan Edwards.

Playwright, Teacher, Translator

The Flaming Spider, a play in two acts, will be Flint's 11th theatrical production in New York in as many years when produced here. Several earlier works, such as Prison Light and Just War? A Modern, Living Newspaper on Panama, produced by the non-profit About Face Theater Co., were staged on Manhattan's Theater Row, just off Broadway on 42nd Street.

Flint is married to Aili Flint, lecturer in Finnish at Columbia. Together they have translated the works of Finnish dramatists into English. And, with one of his former students, he translated a collection of poems by Polish author Wislawa Szymborska in 1982, 12 years before she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

At Columbia this fall Flint is teaching playwriting and the structure and style of fiction, poetry and drama. He also supervises the senior theses of the literature/writing majors.

Flint, who this sunny summer morning is sitting in his Lewisohn Hall office by a window that looks down Broadway, discusses his new creation with fervor. A puckish grin never leaves his lips even as he details the tragic arc of Edwards' life. From behind large, tortoise shell-topped glasses his eyes occasionally twinkle. Flint is a tall, thin man with a head of wavy white hair whose spry nature and sprightly step, evidenced by the energy with which he strides across his office to give a colleague a birthday hug, belies what one student called his "almost grandfatherly" appearance.

A Paradoxical Puritan

Flint explains that Edwards' intellectual brilliance, oratorical skill and powerful use of metaphor--hell's agonies are like those of a spider held over a flame, for example--made him a very famous man, a sort of Puritan celebrity, who drew people to his sermons from as far away as Germany and England. A precocious boy, Edwards entered Yale when he was only 13. He shined in college and after graduating began a career in the ministry, a vocation that in pre-Revolutionary America attracted the most talented young men.

Edwards rose quickly in the Congregational Church. His ascendancy appeared limitless after he was made minister of its parish in Northampton, Mass., which was rivaled in importance only by Boston's.

It was here that Edwards delivered the sermon for which he is best remembered: "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Read as it too often is without knowledge of the circumstances that inspired it, the sermon leaves an austere and condemnatory impression of its author.

"Edwards was not your fire-and-brimstone, hell-and-damnation type preacher," Flint says, "but a sensual man who loved music, who fought to preserve hymn singing in church, who exhorted his parish to experience nature's beauties as a way to understanding religious experience . . . he even fathered 11 children, one of whom would father Aaron Burr, the man who killed Columbia's illustrious alum, Alexander Hamilton."

Yet when he delivered "Sinners . . . ," just 15 years after his Northampton investiture, a period called "The Great Awakening" of religious reform throughout the region during which it seemed that Edwards had induced his parish to embrace the utopic vision of the New Jerusalem, the pre-eminent theological star of his time was in fact about to fall out of the sky.

"The sermon was really Edwards' plea to his parishioners not to allow divisiveness and corruption to destroy the life of harmony that he worked desperately to get them to accept," Flint says. "Here was a man panicked by the sight of his flock deserting the fold."

Northampton would eventually vote Edwards out. He was banished to Stockbridge where he preached to a congregation mostly composed of Native American Indians. A few years later, the College of New Jersey, which would become Princeton, plucked Edwards from obscurity by naming him its president. But just three months into his term, Edwards died, killed by the very inoculation for smallpox administered to prevent catching it.

These events and people are called forth by the Edwards character in The Flaming Spider as he languishes on his deathbed. And they are acted in vignettes that Flint spins out as threads, until the pattern of Edwards' tragic life is, like a spider's web, revealed.

Staged readings at St. John the Divine will be on Sun., Oct. 25 at 3:00 p.m.; Mon. and Tues., Oct. 26-27, at 7:00 p.m.