by Andrew J. Juchno
James Warley Miles (1818-1875) is an enigmatic figure in American religious history, one whose theology evades the neat categories that historians of religion tend to rely upon. In the few studies that treat Miles at length, there has emerged a consensus by minority that he—the nation’s most prolific nineteenth-century Episcopalian and a South Carolinian by birth—was a “theological liberal,” which is to say a theological progressive by southern standards (593-595). It is a repeated line in larger volumes on the American Old South that discuss Miles’s many disagreements with James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862)—a Presbyterian often held up as the epitome of southern antebellum Protestantism—yet it sheds only the dimmest of light on Miles’s complex theology. Miles’s leading biographer has even resorted to labelling him “Charleston’s transcendentalist,” a coy if descriptively unhelpful nod towards Miles’s misfit status in southern religious life. To work towards an understanding of the man and his beliefs beyond conventional labels, I examine Miles’s writing on the theological issue that divided American Protestants most prominently between north and south: the proper reconciliation of reason and faith.
In nineteenth-century America, most if not all Protestant theologians maintained that both the exercise of human reasoning faculties and trust in divine revelation could produce useful knowledge. There existed, however, a spectrum of opinion in Miles’s own day that, for the purposes of this essay, can be generalized and presented in broad terms.
In New England, among the intellectual heirs of seventeenth-century puritans and eighteenth-century evangelicals, theologians tended to privilege the lessons learned from observed phenomenon and deductive reasoning. At the extreme end of that spectrum sat the prolific Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) of Massachusetts, whose now-famous 1838 address to Harvard Divinity School presented a Transcendentalist epistemology that valued individual moral insight above the dusty words of Holy Writ. Not to overstate the northern impulse towards rationality, there were plenty who recoiled from the perceived anti-Biblicism of Emerson and other like-minded Transcendentalists. Unitarians in Boston, especially the Harvard professor Andrews Norton (1786-1853), defended Biblical veracity (miracles and all), and chastised those whom they believed to have been misled by an emergent strain of historical Biblical criticism migrating from Germany at the time.
In the south, a product of its unique religious heritage, theologians tended to err closer to unimpeded trust in divine revelation, though their rational muscles never fully atrophied either. As the prominent historian of religion E. Brooks Holifield has rightly shown, there existed in fashionable southern churches a “drive toward reasonableness” (100). Not surprisingly, Thornwell (the Presbyterian minister mentioned above) sat at the head of that charge. Given his ubiquity and wide readership in southern theological circles—Miles’s most immediate context—it is fruitful here to dive deeper into his position in order to set up a wider comparison with Miles.
A rigorous theologian, Thornwell began his 1847 exposition on faith and reason by defining terms. Human reason was, to Thornwell, used “not simply as a faculty of the mind, but as furnished with the lights of experience, the inductions of science, and the conclusions of philosophy” (6). Of those three categories, Thornwell gave “experience” primacy. Thornwell distinguished, too, that the Bible contained two divergent categories of revelation: those known to be of divine origins and those of questionable divinity. Reason had no jurisdiction over the former. “In regard to doctrines which are known to be a revelation from God,” Thornwell wrote, “there can be no question as to the precise office of reason. The understanding is simply to believe” (4). However, when skepticism against the legitimacy of revelation crept in, reason enjoyed some latitude. Guided by experience, history, and science, reason could only affirm but never reject the divinity of revelation per Thornwell’s understanding. In that sense, reason as a human faculty could never deny supernaturally imparted truths.
Although not an exhaustive account, such were the general southern and northern orthodoxies that defined the intellectual landscape of James Warley Miles’s America. Placing Miles on that spectrum of belief helps us to situate the particulars of his theology and, in the process, move beyond the current labels that impede our understanding of this chapter of America’s religious past.
Miles navigated the poles of southern and northern orthodoxies in his magnum opus The Philosophic Theology; or, Ultimate grounds of all religious reason (1849). Among the many questions that he sought to answer, Miles asked one that would have stirred both Emerson and Thornwell: “What relation, then, does the Christian consciousness bear towards the Christian records?” (70). It is useful here to pause and consider Miles’s definition of the so-called Christian consciousness, which we might understand to be a form of human reason. Unlike Thornwell, Miles conceived of reason as a natural faculty divorced from quotidian experience and inductive science. “[R]eason must seek an absolute ground…in something above experience,” Miles wrote, “she combines the suggestions of the universe, with the conceptions arising from her own consciousness and demanded by her own laws” (79). Miles’s foreignness among both northern and southern Protestant theologians—indeed, the very root of his difficult-to-place nature—came from the space that he gave such a loosely defined reasonable faculty to test divine revelation.
Unlike hard transcendentalists in the north, Miles believed that reason had discrete limitations as a gathering tool of facts. Echoing the concerns of early modern English natural philosophers, Miles was exceedingly wary of the limits of the perceptive capacities of humankind. He recognized, for instance, that “our vision… [cannot] reach beyond the narrow, mount-encircled, and cloudy valley in which we stand” (Miles, The Philosophic Theology, 91). It would have been imprudent at best for Miles to extend to the corrupted, postlapsarian human ability full latitude to test revelation. And yet, just because Miles did not share a position with Emerson does not mean that he edged much closer to his southern compatriots.
Miles differed markedly, too, from James Henley Thornwell. Whereas Thornwell conceded that some revelation was beyond rational human explanation (those known to be of divine origins), Miles took a near opposite position, asserting that God could only express revelation in terms understandable to the limited cognitive abilities of humankind. Certain that revelation ought to “contain intelligible truths of so superior a character, as to warrant belief of their having been communicated by God,” Miles held that all revelation “must approve itself to the conscience and moral wants of man” (54-55). Yet even here, at his farthest distance from Thornwell, Miles wrote in measured terms. Although Miles’s theology conscripted God’s ability to impart divine wisdom on humankind—a matter of practicality, to ensure that the newly enlightened could easily share their wisdom with the world—God retained the power to heighten humankind’s faculties. Miles wrote in no uncertain words:
And herein does Christianity astonishingly differ from every other professed revelation, in not appealing directly to this intuitional faculty in man, whereby he can test, from his own consciousness, its adeptness to his intellectual and moral nature; but at the same time it enlightens and elevates that faculty itself in its spiritual perception, to lay hold of the truths which Christianity reveals, and to find the sphere of Reason enlarged beyond what its natural power, unawakened by Christianity, could reach (91).
Put simply, reason maintained both a positive and a negative jurisdiction in Miles’s assessment of revelation. As such, Miles ultimately hypothesized that God and reason acted on one another. It was here that Miles’s theology isolated itself from and created tensions in the American intellectual and religious landscape, as he attempted what historian E. Brooks Holifield has aptly described as the “reconciliation of the finite and the infinite” (451).
There were, not surprisingly, a range of reactions to Miles’s unique position on the spectrum of belief. The newspaper of Maryland’s Catholic dioceses, for instance, “condemned it as ‘pantheistic’” (44). Writing for the Charleston Courier, one particular reviewer lamented in 1850: “Doubtless, the Rev. gentleman sacrificed those graces of language, for which he is famed, in this instance.”[i] Aside from Catholic critiques and stylistic aspersions, Miles was particularly chagrined by Protestant receptions of The Philosophic Theology. Depressed by the inability of his Anglican brethren to even entertain the work, Miles once bemoaned that “the Episcopalian high-churchman deemed me a heretic of horrid dye, while his low-churchman brother…cordially agrees with him in judging me a dangerous heretic, and moreover, adds his own opinion that I am unconverted.”[ii]
To be sure, all was not negative. One writer for the Southern Quarterly Review appreciated Miles’s direct confrontation with religious skepticism, going so far to assert that his “principles do not conflict…with any dogmas belonging to what is commonly called orthodox divinity.”[iii] The strangest bedfellow to emerge, however, lived beyond American soil—the German theologian Augustus Neander (1789-1850). Reviewing Miles’s book in 1859, Neander wrote, “We regard it a remarkable and gratifying sign of the times, one of those indicating the dawning era of a new development of theology, which is not to be repressed by any power of contradictory or retaliatory action.” In Germany, or at least within some German theological circles, the devout welcomed Miles’s unique perspective. Neander continued his appreciation of Miles: “Whilst the author thus places himself in the central point of Christianity, as the satisfaction of the fundamental necessities of our nature, and knows how to distinguish Christian consciousness and dogma, he is also elevated above the narrowness of sectarian opposition.”[iv] Perhaps, then, the inability of historians to find a label for Miles reflects the ambiguity of Miles in his own time and place.
What, then, to make of James Warley Miles? Given the peculiarity of his thought on faith and reason, he found no steady company among northern or southern theologians. The historians that try to paint him as a liberal southerner, or perhaps a conservative northerner, miss out on the larger audience that he wrote for. By his own account, Miles preferred Germanic company. As he scoffed, perhaps with a tinge of self-defense, “I would rather be called an infidel in the noble company of Neander and Arnold, than be lauded for the narrow-minded [orthodoxy] of Thornwell.”[v] A South Carolinian by accident only, Miles’s beliefs extended beyond the typical north-south conventions of antebellum American historiography to find company in Germany. The case of James Warley Miles, then, reminds historians that the comfortable boundaries we use to divide the religious lives of past peoples often creak and strain under idiosyncrasy. Faced with that tension, it is better to seek out the minute particulars of belief rather than explaining away differences with confused and confusing categories.
Andrew J. Juchno is a doctoral student in history at Boston College focusing on nineteenth-century American religious and cultural history.
Edited by Jacob Saliba
Cover Image: Gutenberg Bible on display at the New York Public Library, Joshua Keller, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
[i] No author listed, “A brief, but striking notice of Mr. MILES’ book,” Charleston Courier (March 5, 1850).
[ii] James Warley Miles, “Letter to David James McCord, April 24” in “Letters of James Warley Miles to David James McCord,” The South Carolina Historical Review and Genealogical Magazine 43, no. 3 (Jul., 1942): 188.
[iii] No author listed, “ART VIII.-Philosophic Theology, or ultimate grounds of religious belief based in reason,” Southern Quarterly Review 16, no. 32 (Jan. 1, 1850): 539-540.
[iv] Dr. Augustus Neander, “A German Judgement of an American Book,” Charleston Courier (July 19, 1859).
[v] Miles, “Letter to David James McCord,” 190.
