Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

So Ada quite naturally thought the stream and the ice might offera weapon of the spirit. Or, perhaps, a warning. But she refusedto believe that a book should say just how it should be construedor to what use it might be put. Whatever a book said would lacksomething essential and be as useless by itself as the dudgeon to adoor hinge with no pintle. 5Ada recognizes that her husband’s book of equivalencies lacks somethingessential. Frazier’s representation of Monroe’s mind in the Blue RidgeMountains in the 1850s probably works as a pretty fair characterization ofthe bent of the American mind in New England in the early 1800s.Whereas in Boston the Unitarians were emerging, in Connecticutthe Congregationalists remained dominant, feeling, as their name implies,neither the need for a priest as mediary between God and man, nor the needfor a hierarchical bishop to direct the church, rather trusting the people ofthe congregation to carry together the word, the spirit of God.Two young American Congregationalists in the 1820s and 1830sstruggled to reconcile their inner experience of the divine with the languageavailable to articulate that experience. In their frustration, each independentlyfound himself reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection,philosophical notes. Coleridge’s little book almost single-handedly catalyzeda linguistic, if not revolution, then evolution in the American mind. The twoyoung Congregationalists, James Marsh and Horace Bushnell, are similarin several ways. Both, through Coleridge’s influence, pioneered beyondthe thinking of the time. Both nevertheless managed to remain within theboundaries of the Congregational Church. Each did, however, go in a differentdirection from the other.How did Coleridge’s thinking affect their thinking? Back in Englandin the 1790s, the young poet-preacher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, fourteenthand favorite child of a minister, was assuming he would become a Unitarianminister, until the poet in him felt too stifled by the Unitarian singlemindedness.The artist in Coleridge felt so dynamically the relationshipbetween poet, poem, and inspiration that the theologian in Coleridge becamea Trinitarian, absolutely experiencing the parallels between the triads of poet,poem, and inspiration on the one hand, and Father, Son, and Holy Spirit onthe other hand.A keen philosophical thinker, Coleridge was also an astute observerof nature and a close friend of scientists, such as J. B. Priestly, who discoveredoxygen. What poet/philosopher/theologian Coleridge realized was that ifthe divine Creator is immortal, limitless, then His living creation has also its153