S. T. Coleridge:
Religious Thinker
by Mary Anne Perkins
republished with permission from The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 187-199
the first part of a Fulcrum series of Eminent Anglicans of English Literature
The categories according to which Coleridge's various admirers and critics have represented him often appear irreconcilable: he has been portrayed, for example, as a radical Unitarian, a mystic, a theosophist and an orthodox Anglican with conservative leanings. Such descriptions sometimes reflect the nature of a critic's interest in a particular period of his life, or in one aspect of his thought and often as much evidence can be found to challenge as to support them. This is not only because of the complexity of Coleridge's evolving ideas but also because he was convinced that truth is revealed only by means of apparent oppositions, because of 'the polarizing property of all finite mind' (Friend i, 5isn). Even his early lectures, given at Bristol, contained a mixture of radical and conservative views. However, the development of his thinking, when traced across the spectrum of letters, notes and marginalia, is coherent and cogent. It shows the close relationship between his current reading and the religious ideas and questions which preoccupied him, and also his vast erudition and rigorous power of analysis and argument. He was always unwilling to subordinate his critical faculties to dogma of any kind, whether that of revolutionary radicalism, evangelical 'bibliolatry' (see below) or established Anglican convention. For this reason it is likely that his work and moral character would have attracted criticism from one quarter or another even if his private life had been respectably regular and conventional, which it was not. Yet it was precisely this wide-ranging critical spirit, blended with an intense desire for truth, which gave his writing on religion such penetrative power and which influenced and inspired many of both his own and succeeding generations.
Those who recognise the complexity of his religious thought and its evolution have sometimes suggested that it reflects the vacillations of his emotional life. Despite widespread admiration for his poetry and literary criticism, critics, particularly among his compatriots, have often dismissed his religious and philosophical arguments as muddled metaphysics. It has been argued that he - 'straddled too many fences' and 'lacked the ... power of integration necessary to launch a true theological movement'.' Such views have been sustainable partly because, until recent years, many of his most interesting arguments and accounts of his own beliefs and religious experience were inaccessible in published form. Many of the intellectual, moral and spiritual difficulties with which he passionately engaged were themselves consequences of his unrelenting pursuit of a systematic unity which would 'reduce all knowledges into harmony' (TT i, 2.48). As early as 1805, he insisted on the necessary interdependence of, on the one hand, the inner witness of conscience, faith and feeling and, on the other, the evidence of history, fact and external testimony (CN n, 2.405, 2.453). For him., philosophy, history, poetry, religion and science all bore witness to the truth of Christianity, to the unique value of the human person, and to history as a redemptive scheme1 through which the whole created order would be fulfilled and perfected. However, his was no blind faith; what makes his work far more stimulating than that of many of his pious contemporaries is the relentlessness with which he subjected his own beliefs to the challenge of historical, scientific and philosophical criticism.
Although there was always a reciprocity between Coleridge's religious views and his political and social ideals, this was perhaps most radically expressed in his youth. Between 1795 and 1800 he combined political commentary (in, for example, the editions of his own short-lived periodical, the Watchman, and in the Morning Post) with his Bristol lectures on the social and political implications and imperatives of Christianity, and wrote two of his greatest poems: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel'. The curiosity and keen insights which were characteristic of all his work on religious and spiritual issues are already evident in both poems. Central to the former is the theme of the self-imposed separation of the human individual from the rest of creation which is itself then plunged into chaos and fragmentation as a result of this act of alienation. Through spiritual redemption, the whole creation is then restored to a unified, harmonious community in which the individual (the Mariner) finds his own spiritual home. This idea of a created order which reaches the apex of its beauty and unity only through the Fall and Redemption of humanity became a constant motif of Coleridge's own spiritual and intellectual journey. His political and social commitments at this time, such as the plans to found a Pantisocracy - a classless Utopian society - in America, were born out of his search for the principles upon which human community, fragmented by the degeneration of morality and intellect, might be restored. His deep desire to find unity and coherence as the ground of reality was sometimes expressed in pantheistic terms; for example, in references to a universal Spirit: 'Life', he wrote to Thomas Wedgwood in 1803, 'seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have an opposite. God is everywhere ... and works everywhere; &. where is there room for Death?' (C7. n, 916). Soon after this, however, his notebook entries and letters demonstrate an intellectual conviction, at least, that God was both immanent (incarnate in mind, nature and history) and transcendent. In 1806 he set out his idea of God as essentially Unity and Distinction, a tri-unity in which, just as 'that Unity or Indivisibility is the intensest, and the Archetype, yea, the very substance and element of all other Unity and Union', so too is 'that Distinction the most manifest, and indestructible of all distinctions'(CL II, 1196). Here he identifies the principles of 'Being, Intellect, and Action' with 'the Father, the Word, and the Spirit'. This tri-une relationship, he argues, 'will and must for ever be and remain the "genera generalissima" of all knowledge'. The passage is followed by an explicit rejection of the 'intelligential’ position of Unitarianism. From this point his letters and notes adopt the Christian Trinity as the only adequate (more accurately, the least inadequate) symbol of ultimate reality. In a late notebook, he described its 'sublime perfection & prominent Object' as 'to effect what in no other way can be effected, the union of Personality with Infinity in the Godhead' (CN iv, 5262). It was both a revealed truth which required the response of faith and an intellectual principle: 'The Trinity', he declared, 'is indeed the primary Idea, out of which all other Ideas are evolved - or as the Apostle says, it is the Mystery (which is but another word for Idea) in which are hidden all the Treasures of knowledge' (CN iv, 52.94). It was 'the only form in which an idea of God is possible, unless indeed it be a Spinozistic or World-God' (CM n, 1145). In his mature and later years he vehemently opposed those sects which refused to accept God as tri-une in accordance with the doctrines and creeds established by the great Councils of the Church. The 'Socinians', who denied that Christ was the Logos, eternally with God 'from the beginning' (CM in, 305), and the 'Arians' who believed the Son of God was a created being (though far surpassing all others) were his main targets. Their positions were, he believed, intellectually and morally flawed.
By his middle years, Coleridge's reading, psychological speculations and examination of his own dream states, moods and motives, had convinced him that the primal reality - the primary term of the Trinity - must be Will rather than Being, and that this was reflected in human nature. The relation of will to reason became, thereafter, an intensely important issue to him. But if 'Coleridge's own stake in Christianity was existential' it was not only, as Thomas McFarland suggests, in the sense that it gave his 'miserable and shattered' life final meaning.2 For Coleridge, as later for Sýren Kierkegaard (1813-55), the will was the crucial factor through which finite and infinite reality could be reconciled and through which the individual achieved personhood and redemption. This pre-eminence of the will subverted the materialistic, mechanistic philosophies which he had admired in his youth.1 He never abandoned a critical scientific approach which accepted the determining power of natural law, yet he believed, with the German thinkers who influenced him - for example, Jacobi, Kant, Fichte and Schelling - that the opposite pole, that of human free agency, was an essential characteristic of human history beyond the scope of physical science.
In the Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge wrote tolerantly of pantheism which, at this point, he declared 'not necessarily irreligious or heretical; though it may be taught atheistically' (BL i, 2.47), but as he became focused on the principle of 'distinction-in-unity' he increasingly distanced himself from any notion of an 'anima mundi (world spirit). Later, he argued emphatically that pantheism and atheism were synonymous: to say that 'all is God' was to deny God. It was, except in the barest logical terms, an insignificant proposition; if there is nothing which is not God, the term 'God' is meaningless and superfluous. His criticism of a tendency to pantheism in the work of his German contemporary, Schelling, and, to a lesser degree, in that of Jakob Bohme (1575-1624) and Spinoza (1632-77), is in marked contrast to his admiration for what might now be termed the 'panentheism' ('all in God') of the early Christian writer, Origen (c. i85-c. 284), and of John Scotus Erigena (810-77).4 Even in the early poems, lines such as 'tis God/Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole' ('Religious Musings') are more representative of this latter tradition than of pantheism in which Nature and God are identified. Although Coleridge writes, in The Eolian Harp (1796-1828), of the 'one intellectual breeze' which sets vibrating the 'organic harps' of 'animated nature' and is 'At once the Soul of each, and God of All', in the poem as a whole - as in 'Religious Musings', with its 'Monads of the infinite mind' - his imagery has more in common with the Christian metaphysics of the German philosopher, Leibniz (1646-1716), than with the monism of Spinoza. Like the former, he struggled to get beyond the dichotomy of monism and dualism.
With his increasing commitment to the search for a unified system, his focus on political and social criticism began to shift. Religion was now no longer simply the basis for personal and social improvement. There could be no contradiction, he maintained, between its doctrines and principles and the whole range of human reason and experience. For example, the discoveries of the physical sciences, properly understood, must be compatible with Christian belief and teaching. His Notebooks reveal that his interest in, for example, evolutionary theory, magnetism, electricity, hypnosis ('animal magnetism') and astronomy was inspired, at least in part, by a drive to understand how they could be seen in the context of fundamental Christian principles about God, nature and man. The philosophies of the Enlightenment had produced a 'science of man' which was inadequate in that its dominant mechanistic model of cause and effect could not explain some of the most fundamental human experiences: those, for example, of the poetic imagination, of free agency, of the sublime, of revelation. Coleridge found in the work of his contemporaries, particularly in the new German philosophies of nature,5 ways of thinking which acknowledged these aspects of reality. These ideas, furthermore, were consistent with some of the most enduring and recurrent ideas about reality; ideas which he had already encountered in his avid reading of intellectual history. The philosophies of German Romanticism and Idealism emphasised the need to reconcile finite with infinite reality. Philosophies of nature, theories of history, aesthetic principles were perceived as essentially intertwined with spiritual truths. Coleridge's own attempt to develop a 'dynamic system' was aimed at a similar integration of ideas, feelings, experience, conscience and actions. For example, the famous statement concerning the primary and secondary imagination in the Biographia Literaria (i, 304) is only one of many which propounds a relationship between the human imagination and the divine act of creation. Imagination is that power which perceives and realises unity in multiplicity; which recognises symbols as not just representing, but participating in, universal, infinite and eternal realities. It reflects both God's fiat ('Let there be... and there was', Genesis i) and the divine energy which infuses all the forms and the life of nature. Imagination, in the poet, the prophet, the historian ('a poet facing backwards'), the mystic, is the power which reconciles the multiplicity of life and thought in a higher unity.
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum