Transcendental Trinitarian
James Marsh, the Free Will Problem, and the American Intellectual Context of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3364696 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jonathan Koefoed (Belhaven University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 9 |
| Pages | 172 |
| Publication date | 2017-08-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/rel8090172 |
| OpenAlex | W2753630822 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 29 |
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
Art · Christianity · Epistemology · Literature · Marsh · Narrative · Orthodoxy · Theology · Transcendental number · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Religious studies
From Passions to Emotions
Common Sense
Without God, Without Creed
The Cambridge Companion to Kant
Transatlantic Transcendentalism
Literary Transcendentalism
James Marsh and the Germans
James Marsh and the Conservative Transcendentalist Philosophy
Problems in Publishing Coleridge
Stewart, Kant, and the Reworking of Common Sense
James Marsh and the Vermont Transcendentalists
Making the American Self
Churchmen and Philosophers
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
James Marsh and American Philosophy
James Marsh (1794-1842)
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |