Natural Supernaturalism names the Romantic project of translating theological content — the sacred, the transcendent, the providential — into secular and naturalistic terms without sacrificing its affective and metaphysical weight. The phrase originates with Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, where wonder confronts the deadening force of custom; M.H. Abrams elevated it to a master concept for understanding how Romantic poets and idealist philosophers inherited the structures of Christian thought — fall, redemption, apocalypse, the circuitous journey — and redeployed them in poetry, aesthetics, and speculative philosophy. In the depth-psychology corpus, the concept resonates most powerfully through its structural parallel with Jung’s secularization of numinous experience: the psyche reclaims what theology had monopolized, preserving sacred awe within empirical and phenomenological frameworks. Abrams documents how Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge each, in different registers, sought to retain ‘what was valid in the myths’ by translating them into the concepts of speculative philosophy or imaginative vision. The attending tensions — between disenchantment and re-enchantment, between critique and preservation, between secular reason and numinous experience — make this term a crucial node for understanding the modern psyche’s ambivalent inheritance from Christianity.
to retain what was valid in the myths, or what Hegel called the “picture representation,” of the Biblical account, by translating them into the concepts and scheme of speculative philosophy.
Abrams defines Natural Supernaturalism as the Romantic philosophical enterprise of preserving the cognitive and emotional substance of Biblical myth by rendering it in the idiom of speculative philosophy.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
Sartor Resartus, 67-68, 308-311, 347, 498n.91; as educational journey, 308-310; “natural supernaturalism,” 384; on wonder vs. custom, 384, 390
The index entry confirms Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus as the origin point of the term ‘natural supernaturalism,’ anchoring it in the dialectic of wonder versus custom and the educational journey motif.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
“it did not so much concern us what Objects were before us, as with what Eys we beheld them” … the “celestial light” perceived by the child which is darkened, then obliterated, by “custom . . . with its weight, / Heavy as frost”
Abrams traces the perceptual dimension of Natural Supernaturalism through Traherne and Wordsworth, showing how the recovery of childlike, wonder-saturated vision is the experiential correlate of the broader theological-to-natural translation.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
Boehme, said Schelling, “was a miraculous phenomenon in the history of mankind. … As popular mythologies and theogonies preceded science, so did J. Boehme, in the birth of God, as he describes it for us, precede all the scientific systems of modern philosophy.”
Abrams illustrates how esoteric and theosophical sources — Boehme, Neoplatonism, Hermetism — fed directly into the speculative philosophy that constitutes the intellectual substrate of Natural Supernaturalism.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
I stand like an alien [Fremdling] before her and understand her not … so am an outcast from the garden of Nature, where I grew and flowered.
Through Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Abrams dramatizes the alienation from Nature that Natural Supernaturalism seeks to overcome — the fall into self-consciousness which the circuitous journey must ultimately redeem.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
Another such period was that of the civil wars in seventeenth-century England, when we find fervent eschatological expectations among various radical sects … who undertook to play their part in the violent preliminaries to founding His kingdom on earth.
Abrams contextualizes Natural Supernaturalism within a longer history of apocalyptic millenarianism, showing the Romantic secularization of eschatological expectation as a structural inheritance from radical Protestant movements.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
the destruction of the created world in an immense conflagratio … in order to make it new (Revelation 21:5, “Behold, I make all things new”), and the ultimate marriage with the Bridegroom
Abrams shows how the Biblical apocalyptic pattern — destruction and renewal, the sacred marriage — was available as poetic material precisely because Natural Supernaturalism retained its structure while displacing its theology.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
Jung’s and Campbell’s participation in this ‘de-mystification project’ does not involve the debunking of religion and religious belief associated with the Modern Enlightenment and its consequent ‘dis-enchantment’ of the world.
The passage positions Jung and Campbell as performing, in the register of depth psychology, an operation structurally analogous to Natural Supernaturalism: preserving the sacred’s power within a naturalistic, psychological framework.
, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting
In a desperate search for relief from the sense of “emptiness and darkness and wilderness” in his heart, he pored over the Bible … and abruptly underwent a conversion, after the prototype of Augustine’s experience in the Garden at Milan.
Abrams’s reading of Hamann’s conversion illustrates how the Augustinian spiritual autobiography — crisis, conversion, vocation — is one of the primary templates that Natural Supernaturalism secularizes and poeticizes.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
If the imagery of supernaturalism did not appeal to sober Chinese character, how did the Chinese followers of Enlightenment contrive to express themselves?
Suzuki’s contrast between Indian supernaturalist imagery and the Chinese Zen solution offers an oblique comparative perspective on the cultural specificity of Natural Supernaturalism as a Western, post-Christian phenomenon.
, Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series), 1949aside
The supernaturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.
James’s pragmatic defense of a ‘crasser supernaturalism’ against academic dismissal resonates with the Natural Supernaturalism project insofar as both seek to vindicate religious categories within an empirical-naturalistic intellectual culture.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902aside
That very opposition, sacred versus secular, however, is in itself typically Western. It is a sign of a significant rupture that never existed in the same degree in other cultures, and should never have existed in our own.
McGilchrist’s critique of the sacred/secular rupture in Western culture provides a contemporary neurological and philosophical framework that echoes the core diagnosis motivating Natural Supernaturalism.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside