Keeping alive the heart in the head

This article explores some remarkable correspondences of vision, philosophical sympathy, preoccupation with language, and sense of the artist's vocation in the writings of Jonathan Edwards and S.T. Coleridge. Both pursued doctrinal orthodoxy into new dimensions of thought and language. They explored the communication between God and humanity from both sides: God's ‘eternal language’ and man's receiving of that revelation. The article attempts to account for the similarities in terms of common experiences of the effulgent glory of God. Mediating between idea and experience, these two metaphysical empiricists brought a new appreciation of the creative process, of orthodoxy's need for the aesthetic imagination.