Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Supernatural Will in American Literature

Brad Bannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781472476296
• eBook ISBN: 9781317164555
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In a work that will be of interest to students and scholars of American Literature, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, the History of Ideas,and Religious Studies, Brad Bannon examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's engagement with the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards. A closer look at Coleridge's response to Edwards clarifies the important influence that both thinkers had on seminal works of the nineteenth century, ranging from the antebellum period to the aftermath of the American Civil War—from Poe's fiction and Emerson's essays to Melville's Billy Budd and Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Similarly, Coleridge's early espousal of an abolitionist theology that had evolved from Edwards and been shaped by John Woolman and Olaudah Equiano sheds light on the way that American Romantics later worked to affirm a philosophy of supernatural self-determination.

Ultimately, what Coleridge offered the American Romantics was a supernatural modification of Edwards' theological determinism, a compromise that provided Emerson and other nineteenth-century thinkers with an acceptable extension of an essentially Calvinist theology. Indeed, a thoroughgoing skepticism with respect to salvation, as well as a faith in the absolute inscrutability of Providence, led both the Transcendentalists and the Dark Romantics to speculate freely on the possibility of supernatural self-determination while doubting that anything other than God, or nature, could harness the power of causation.

1 President Edwards and the Sage of Highgate

Determinism, Depravity, and the Supernatural Will

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

—Samuel Johnson

Just over seventy years after it was published, Jonathan Edwards’ Freedom of the Will (1754) drew the criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Aids to Reflection (1825). Difficult, digressive, and by turns mystical and dogmatic, the latter work would go on to have a significant impact on American thinkers after it was reprinted by University of Vermont president James Marsh in 1829, the same year in which the first volume of the ten-volume edition of The Works of President Edwards was published in New York.¹ Eager to disseminate Coleridge’s conception of a self-determining and self-caused will amongst Americans, Marsh even made it clear in an 1829 letter to Coleridge that it was Edwards’ theology that he hoped to displace:

In theology, the works of Edwards have had, and still have, with a large portion of our thinking community, a very great influence… I trust your ‘Aids to Reflection’ is with a few exerting an influence that will help to place the lovers of truth and righteousness on better philosophical grounds.²

Marsh also endorsed Coleridge’s argument for free will in the influential prefatory essay to Aids to Reflection, which Marjorie Hope Nicolson identifies as “the first publication of American Transcendentalism,” calling attention, as Kenneth Cameron has noted, “to a growing dissatisfaction with prevailing opinions on man and man’s will.”³ That Americans would have thought of Coleridge’s theory of the will as a potential alternative to that of Edwards is apparent enough. In Aids to Reflection, Coleridge himself referred to Edwards’ theology derisively as “the new-England system, now entitled Calvinistic” as he affirmed free will over and against Edwards’ argument for causal and theological determinism, ultimately concluding that the “responsible” power of volition “must be spiritual, and consequently supernatural” (CW 9: 160, 251). Such affirmations of the power of self-determination as a wholly supernatural force had a major influence on the American Romantics, but they also lacked the empirical proof necessary to refute Edwards’ argument.

In this way, Edwards came to cast a kind of shadow over Coleridge’s influence, a shadow that was particularly visible to such literary figures as Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville—all of whom were influenced in various ways by Coleridge, though they also felt keenly the lasting force and continuing relevance of Edwards’ theology.⁴ Consequently, American Romanticism was largely preoccupied with the tension between supernatural self-determination and determinism as well as with an existential awareness of Original Sin that gave rise to the same problems of agency and determinism to which Coleridge and Edwards had offered slightly different, albeit equally enigmatic, solutions. This chapter traces the contexts and varying trajectories of Coleridge’s engagement with Edwards as a way of beginning to reframe his influence on the American Romantics—an influence that needs to be reconsidered in light of Coleridge’s sustained attention to the problems that Edwards had placed at the forefront of the American literary tradition.

“An Apparent and Accidental Resemblance”

In 1807, Coleridge registered his thoughts on Jonathan Edwards’ Freedom of the Will in the margins of Andrew Fuller’s Calvinistic and Socinian Systems Examined and Compared (1793). Here, Coleridge alleged that Fuller did not know the difference between Calvinism and Necessitarianism, “and alas! misled by Jonathan Edward’s [sic] book” had come to affirm “a world of agents that never act, but are always acted upon, and yet without any one being that acts” (CW 12.2: 802). A few months later, he made a more specific appraisal of Edwards in a letter to John Ryland, a Baptist minister and president of the Baptist college in Bristol:

I greatly admire President Edward’s Works; but am convinced that Kant in his Critique of the pure Reason, and more popularly in his Critique of the Practical Reason has completely overthrown the edifice of Fatalism, or causative Precedence as applied to Action.

(CL 3: 35)

But if Coleridge was as convinced as he claimed, he was not so content with Kant’s noumena that he could not be provoked by Edwards’ “notorious Tract, the Benevol. Of God demonstrated in the Eternity of Hell Torments” almost sixteen years later—and he was again compelled to respond, this time in a notebook entry in which he appears anxious to disavow the resemblance of his own convictions to those of the American theologian who had so emphatically denied the self-determining will:

Indeed from Edwards’ Book on Necessity it is certain (unless he had recanted and reversed his whole system of Theology) that his World is a Machine: and that his Convictions and mine can have no other than an apparent and accidental Resemblance—daring as my Paradox may be deemed when taking up my last proposition I affix the concluding Link of the chain in a [ …]

(CN 4: 5077)

That this notebook entry was left unfinished even in draft form is characteristic enough of what Thomas McFarland and subsequent scholars have depicted as the abiding philosophical and theological contest that occupied Coleridge’s mind as he struggled to reconcile his belief in the self-determination of the individual will with his faith in the absolute will of God.⁵ Here, Coleridge’s main point of contention is with Edwards’ theological determinism, which, though expounded in terms consistent with Calvinism, is ultimately grounded in the premise that a self-caused, infinite, and absolute mode of being necessarily exists and thus is the very nature of existence itself—or, as Edwards had put it in “The Mind,” an unpublished manuscript on which he likely began work in 1717 while still a student at Yale, “God and real existence are the same” (WJE 6: 345).

Coleridge had long been familiar with this view of God, having encountered it in Spinoza’s Ethics: “Existence belongs to the nature of substance… it must, therefore, be its own cause—that is, its essence necessarily involves existence, or existence belongs to its nature.”⁶ Indeed, noting that Coleridge adopted this as the first principle of the unfinished system of his Opus Maximum (1819–23), in which he describes God as an absolute will “causative of reality, essentially and absolutely,” Douglas Hedley suggests that Spinoza was Coleridge’s “immediate source of the language of causa sui.”⁷ The consequence of a will that was the absolute cause of existence, however, was that it left no room for the individual will to determine itself—and yet Coleridge wanted to maintain this first principle while developing a theory of the human will as its own final cause.

As is clear from his affirmations of Original Sin, Coleridge subscribed to the orthodox notion of innate depravity that kept humans separate from God. In his prose works, however, he also propounded a more formal theory of the heightened states of being and encounters with the supernatural that he had explored in his poetry. The speaker of Kubla Khan suggests that individuals can gain a kind of fleeting access to the daemonic unconscious, for instance, while in Aids to Reflection, the formulation is ecclesiastical: “By Faith in the Love of Christ the power of God becomes ours” (CW 9: 309). Though he would not have stated it this way, Edwards’ view of saving grace is similar. As he put it in Religious Affections (1746),

If God dwells in the heart, and be vitally united to it, he will shew that he is a God, by the efficacy of his operation… For in the heart where Christ savingly is, there he lives, and exerts himself after the power of that endless life, that he received at his resurrection.

(WJE 2: 392)

Of course for Edwards, the affirmation of the individual’s ability to wield supernatural power poses no problems for the simple reason that such power is always ascribed to the direct influence of God—it is precisely at this point, however, that Coleridge encounters difficulty in his attempt to affirm both the influx of the divine and the freedom of the individual will.

In this sense, the conflict between free will and necessity becomes one of the central concerns, if not the main point of contention, in Coleridge’s attempt to bring the notion of existence as a coherent whole together with a concurrent belief in the distinct character and freedom of its human inhabitants. The self-determining will became the defining feature of the philosophy and faith that Coleridge outlined in the Biographia Literaria (1817), Aids to Reflection, and the unfinished Opus Maximum, but the curious fact that he was an avowed “necessitarian” when he first composed the poetry for which he is generally known remains. Likewise, though he claimed in a letter of 1801 to have “overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern infidels—especially the doctrine of Necessity” (CL 2: 706), the deterministic origins and leanings of his early thought undoubtedly left an indelible mark, and while he was vigilant in distancing himself from pantheism, he could never bring himself to renounce Spinoza.⁸

This problem can also be reduced to the basic opposition between Plato and Aristotle, which Coleridge referred to in his philosophical lectures as “the first way in which, plainly and distinctly, two opposite systems were placed before the mind of the world” (CW 8.1: 232). That Coleridge tended to see things in terms of this opposition is evidenced in his persistent movement, sometimes in the space of a single work, between phenomenal and noumenal, ecclesiastical and antinomian, conservative and radical, and so forth. For Edwards, God’s absolute sovereignty ultimately dissolved the problem: the material world was the expression or extension of the divine world. As he put it in the unpublished “Images of Divine Things,” “We see that even in the material world God makes one part of it strangely to agree with another; and why is it not reasonable to suppose He makes the whole as a shadow of the spiritual world?” (WJE 11: 53). Nevertheless, as a public figure in his own time and a prominent defender of Calvinist thought, Edwards was as ecclesiastical and conservative as John Winthrop or Cotton Mather could have hoped. Influenced in significant ways by both Edwards and Coleridge, the American Romantics came to their own resting places at various points between the two, unable to believe in free will in the sense of absolute self-determination, as Coleridge did, and unwilling to fully accept the finality of causal determinism, which Edwards not only accepted but celebrated. Edwards’ skepticism and proto-pragmatic view of an ordered world of cause and effect also overlapped and established a continuity with the more rational philosophies of Hume, Locke, and Benjamin Franklin.

To Americans, then, Coleridge actually came in not as an outside influence but as a vital extension of the argument for free will developed by Edwards’ primary antagonist, Charles Chauncy, pastor of Boston’s First Church from 1727 to 1787, proponent of the American Revolution, and seminal figure in the history of American Unitarianism. Coleridge’s own attempt to establish a rational foundation for free will was beleaguered, however, by his difficulties in reconciling the notion of a sovereign creator with that of a self-determining creation. If all the events and actions of the physical world were ruled by Providence, then how could individuals control their own destinies? This question, along with various attempts to answer it coherently, stands at the center of Coleridge’s unfinished philosophical system. But whatever we make of Coleridge’s attempt to solve this ancient problem, the degree to which he believed the attempt itself was problematic is worth noting.

Strangely, Coleridge depicted his early interest in philosophical and theological problems as one that was rooted in a fallen, diseased state of being—as if his intellectual pursuits were indicative of a kind of preternatural sickness.⁹ “At a very premature age,” he writes in Chapter One of the Biographia, “even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysicks, and in theological controversy.” Never at a loss when it came to self-deprecation, Coleridge proceeds to align himself with the fallen angels of Paradise Lost, citing his early affinity for

directing [conversation] to my favorite subjects

Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,

Fix’d fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute

And found no end in wandering mazes lost.

This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious, both to my natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was auspiciously withdrawn… Well were it for me perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths.

(CW 7.1: 15–17)

It is also apparent that the theological controversies that perplexed Coleridge in his youth also forecast the structure of the metaphysical problems that would beset him in later years. For when he notes that he was unable to reconcile personality with infinity, he is only restating the problem of free will in terms that also involve the nature of God—as is clear from the long quotation of Kant that directly precedes Coleridge’s declaration that his head was with Spinoza, while his heart was with Paul and John. The last line of this quotation gives an adequate summary of Coleridge’s own concern:

“… For without any knowledge or determining ground of its own [God] would only be a blind necessary ground of other things and other spirits; and thus would be distinguished from the FATE of certain ancient philosophers in no respect, but that of being more definitely and intelligibly described.”

(CW 7.1: 201)¹⁰

Built into Coleridge’s struggle, then, was the necessity of developing a system in which God is the origin of the moral and spiritual, as well as of the material, world. In Coleridge’s view, if God was no more than a first cause, then there could be no supernatural source for the human will, which at its highest level received its power from, or became an agent of, the divine will. As various scholars have pointed out, in order to achieve this supernatural status, Coleridge supposed that the will would have to come into alignment with the mysterious faculty of reason, the objects of which he defined as “God, the Soul, eternal Truth, &c.,” while he described the understanding as merely “the faculty by which we generalize and arrange the phænomena of perception” (CW 4.1: 156).¹¹ As influential as Coleridge’s concept of the facul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: The American Mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• 1 President Edwards and the Sage of Highgate: Determinism, Depravity, and the Supernatural Will
• 2 Equiano and Woolman: “Both to Will and to Do”
• 3 Fate, Providence, and “Human Ken”: Emerson and Hawthorne
• 4 Pantheism and the “Gigantic Volition”: Poe and Melville
• Epilogue: Cormac McCarthy and the Red Badge of Coleridge
• Index