Transcendental Trinitarian: James Marsh, the Free Will Problem, and the American Intellectual Context of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2017, Vol 8, Issue 9
Abstract
Historians of American religion and Transcendentalism have long known of James Marsh as a catalyst for the Concord Transcendentalist movement. The standard narrative suggests that the Congregationalist Marsh naively imported Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (Am. ed. 1829) hoping to revivify orthodoxy in America. By providing a “Preliminary Essay” to explain Coleridge’s abstruse theology, Marsh injected Coleridge’s hijacked Kantian epistemology—with its distinction between Reason and Understanding—into American discourse. This epistemology inspired Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott, and it helped spark the Transcendentalists’ largely post-Christian religious convictions. This article provides a re-evaluation of Marsh’s philosophical theology by attending to the precise historical moment that Marsh chose to publish the Aids to Reflection and his “Preliminary Essay.” By the late 1820s, the philosophical problem of free will lurked in American religious discourse—Unitarian as well as Trinitarian—and Marsh sought to exploit the problem as a way to explain how aspects of Trinitarian Christianity might be rational and yet unexplainable. Attending carefully to the numerous philosophical and religious discourses of the moment—including Unitarianism, Trinitarianism, Kant, Coleridge, and Scottish Common Sense—and providing close readings of the historical philosophers Marsh engaged, this article shows how James Marsh laid the epistemological groundwork for a new romanticized Christianity that was distinct from the Concord Transcendentalists, but nonetheless part of its historical lineage.
Authors and Affiliations
Jonathan Koefoed
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25765
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8090172
- Views 324
- Downloads 10
The Green Revolution in the World’s Religions: Indonesian Examples in International Comparison
Similar to progressive political movements, the programs of many religious and spiritual groups today are converging around a shared commitment to address the impending global ecological crisis. The paper explores this...
Unifying Themes in the Oeuvre of John M. Headley
The great variety of historical figures and themes found in the published works of John Headley since 1963 reveal a unity of themes and values. The numerous persons whom Headley studied all envisioned a humane universa...
Hamlet’s Religions
Pastoral challenges prompted pietists among Elizabethan Catholics and Calvinists to commend what historians now call an inward turn whereby the faithful, in a sense, become their own confessors. This article suggests t...
On Dealing with Destructive Emotions through the “Path of Self-Liberation”
In the majority of Buddhist systems and traditions, destructive emotions— hatred, craving and delusion—are considered as the main obstacle to enlightenment and dealt with as such through various methods of counteractin...
The Catholic Bishops vs. the Contraceptive Mandate
The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States have publicly opposed artificial contraception since they first issued a public statement condemning it in 1919. Thereafter, the bishops were generally unsuccessful in pe...