Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Semester of Degree Completion
1994
Thesis Director
Michael Loudon
Abstract
The present study focuses on the conception of immanence and the manner in which it evolved from the seventeenth century, as represented in Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans, to the nineteenth century, as represented in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's nature poetry and his collection of letters, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. Vaughan's conception of a basic immanence of reflected divinity in nature evolved, over the course of two hundred years, into Coleridge's version of an immanence based on reason. These two different conceptions of immanence in part formed the basis of the respective faiths of Vaughan and Coleridge. Vaughan's traditional Augustinian faith accepted unquestioningly the Great Chain of Being, whereas Coleridge's rationalist faith answered the theological challenges from the Age of Reason by exploring intellectually Christianity and accepting what tenets are reconcilable with reason.
The Age of Reason and scientific inquiry effectively destroyed the traditional faith in order, dominant prior to about 1700, by placing a trust in humankind's rational faculty and by effectively dissolving once-rigid boundaries between nature and humanity. Societal factors and Christianity's response to empirical inquiry also played crucial roles in this dissolution of Elizabethan cosmology. Vaughan, who believed so devoutly in order, unwittingly helped to destroy it by contributing to the relative elevation of nature by his intuitive insight into a simple immanence. He thus, quite unconsciously, linked nature and the divine, a belief which was later consciously espoused by Coleridge and the other Romantics.
Recommended Citation
Ryan, Tristum M., "The Transformation of Immanence: From the Augustinian Faith of Henry Vaughan to the Rationalist Faith of S.T. Coleridge" (1994). Masters Theses. 2055.
https://thekeep.eiu.edu/theses/2055
