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.
Highlights
In 1834, prior to composing his many notable works, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to his brother.“Do you draw the distinction of Milton, Coleridge & the Germans between Reason & Understanding
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 part of its historical lineage
At the precise moment that Marsh chose to publish his “Preliminary Essay,” the free will problem had become critically important in the American intellectual tradition— the Scottish Common Sense philosophy that grounded American thought
Summary
In 1834, prior to composing his many notable works, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to his brother. As scholars of Transcendentalism have long recognized, the reason-versus-understanding distinction had a specific lineage.. As scholars of Transcendentalism have long recognized, the reason-versus-understanding distinction had a specific lineage.3 It was Kantian language, co-opted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and filtered in a precise historical way by the University of Vermont philosophy professor and president, James Marsh. In a “Preliminary Essay,” Marsh pressed Coleridge’s reason-versus-understanding distinction hoping to reconstitute Trinitarian Christianity in America. At the precise moment that Marsh chose to publish his “Preliminary Essay,” the free will problem had become critically important in the American intellectual tradition— the Scottish Common Sense philosophy that grounded American thought. Marsh’s attention to the free will problem made his project much closer to Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy than is often recognized, suggesting that Marsh likely knew Kant and was a more synthetic thinker than is sometimes acknowledged. We gain a deeper historical understanding of the reason-versus-understanding distinction, its significance in its historical moment, and why the distinction proved so important to Transcendentalism
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