Crossref Citations
This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by Crossref.
Hill, John Spencer
1983.
A Coleridge Companion.
p.
103.
Article contents
The Augustinian “Cause of Action” in Coleridge's: Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
Extract
During the period of his greatest poetic achievement Coleridge was deeply concerned with two fundamental religious questions: the origin of evil and the relation of faith and reason. To his quest for solutions which would satisfy both “head” and “heart,” the poet brought a wide knowledge of patristic writings. As Aids to Reflection shows, the most permanent and profound theological influence upon Coleridge was that of the great Platonist Church Father, St. Augustine. Evidence in Coleridge's early theological lectures, notebooks, and letters, as well as his retrospective account in the Biographia Literaria of his religious conflict at Stowey, indicates that the foundations for this later Augustinian influence were laid in the years 1795–1798.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1967
References
1 See The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coburn, Kathleen, 2 vols. (New York, 1957–1961), I, 161Google Scholar (c) and I, 6; and Miss Coburn's notes. This edition is hereafter cited as N. See also Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross, J., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907), I, 132–37Google Scholar. This edition is hereafter cited as BL.
2 In his second sermon on faith (1794) Coleridge cites Tertullian (N6). His statement, in the same sermon, “Memory itself an act of faith …,” may refer to Augustine's intricate analyses of memory, which anticipate the modern conception of the unconscious yet diverge from it by relating memory to faith. See Confessions, X, viii-xxvii, and The Trinity, Bks. X, XIV, XV. See also Morgan, James, The Psychological Teaching of St. Augustine (London, 1932), 177, 201, 214–17Google Scholar. In his Theological Lectures of 1795 Coleridge referred to Augustine and implied knowledge of all the other writers in the Patristic Age of the fourth and fifth centuries (f84:see Appendix, p. 203). In another passage in the Theological Lectures Coleridge implied knowledge either of the whole corpus of patristic writings, or of all patristic writings in Greek (f86–f87). The True Intellectual System of the Universe, by Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonist, which Coleridge borrowed in 1795 and 1796 (N200n), abounds in quotations from the Greek and Latin Fathers, including Augustine, who is cited at least twenty-five times. See The True Intellectual System of the Universe (Faksimile-Neudruck der Ausgabe von London 1678: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1964), 223, 524, 540, 541 (two refs.), 601, 607, 610 (three refs.), 621f., 624, 628, 776, 797, 805, 812 (two refs.), 816, 817, 820, 821 (two refs.), and 822 (two refs.).
3 Cf. W. G. T. Shedd, Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions, in his edition of The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 7 vols. (New York, 1868), I, 37, 48, 49, sof. This edition is hereafter cited as CW. See also Boulger, James D., Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 128Google Scholar, n. Meyrick H. Carré places Coleridge in the line of descent of Augustinian Realism in England by virtue of his study of the Cambridge Platonists. See Realists and Nominalists (London, 1946, 1950), 31.
4 The external evidence of this relationship is presented in the form of an appendix. See below, pp. 203–11.
5 See Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Griggs, Earl Leslie, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1956–1959), I, 396Google Scholar. This collection is hereafter cited as CL. The Ancient Mariner was completed on March 23, 1798. See Hanson, Lawrence, The Life of S. T. Coleridge: the Early Years (London, 1938Google Scholar; repr. New York, 1962), 253.
6 Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 60. Carl. R. Woodring suggests that Coleridge's statement on original sin in March, 1798, “probably represents something not far from Coleridge's considered view at the noontide of Pantisocracy [i.e., 1795] …”: Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 65. Certain passages in Religious Musings (1794–1796) tend to support this view. See below, p. 197.
7 Shedd's pre-Freudian description of Coleridge's view of the will in bondage to original sin recognizes the unconscious element in it. See p. 182 below, where Shedd's description is quoted. The closest modern analogue to Coleridge's conception of original sin, psychologically considered, is, I believe, Jung's conception of the “shadow” archetype of the collective unconscious. See AION: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, IX, Part II (New York, 1959), 8–9, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. The Mariner seems almost to adumbrate Jung's “shadow.” A brief but excellent account of Coleridge's position in the historical context of pre-Freudian awareness of the unconscious is given by Whyte, Lancelot Law, in The Unconscious Before Freud (Anchor Books, Garden City, N. Y., 1962), 60, 125, 126Google Scholar. James Volant Baker, in his examination of the role of the unconscious in Coleridge's critical theories, affirms that Coleridge's position is close to Freud's. See The Sacred River: Coleridge's Theory of the Imagination (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 250. SirRead, Herbert, in Coleridge as Critic (London, 1949)Google Scholar, links Coleridge, by way of the celebrated Mesmer, with Freud (23); and also with the Jungian conception of a collective unconscious (27). Read also quotes from The Friend (CW, II, 463f.) in support of his view that “writing before Kierkegaard was born, Coleridge had already formulated the terms of an existentialist philosophy …” (30). Boulger states that “there is a common existential and volitional basis for Christian thinking shared by Coleridge, Kierkegaard, and the modern revival of orthodoxy in Germany” (217; cf. 81).
8 Outler, Albert C., ed. and trans., Augustine: Confessions and Enchiridion, The Library of Christian Classics, VII (Philadelphia, 1954), 15Google Scholar. Cf. Roberts, David E., Psychotherapy and a Christian View of Man (New York, 1950), 104Google Scholar; Watson, Robert I., The Great Psychologists from Aristotle to Freud (Philadelphia and New York, 1963), 82–96Google Scholar; and Barrett, William, Irrational Man: a Study in Existential Philosophy (Anchor Books, Garden City, N.Y., 1962), 95, 101, 111Google Scholar. Though Freud saw a parallel between Augustine's conception of original sin and his own conception of neurosis (Roberts, loc. cit.), the eighteenth-century philosophes sank their differences to oppose the conception of original sin as the very core of Augustinianism and medieval dogma. See Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 141Google Scholar. Coleridge explicitly rejected Augustine's dogmatic addition of the idea of punishment to his earlier conception of original sin (CW, V, 216). On this dogmatic addition, made in the course of the Pelagian controversy, see Burnaby, John, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London, 1938Google Scholar; repr. 1960), 189–92.
9 BL, I, 134, 137.
10 Table Talk, CW, VI, 324 (May 31, 1830).
11 For Coleridge the fall of Adam was secondary and posterior to a mysterious “spiritual fall or apostasy antecedent to the formation of man …” (CW, I, 290; cf. CW, VI, 303; and Boulger, 158–59). This inexplicable pre-Adamitic fall or apostasy is original sin, noumenally considered. The fall of Adam relates only to “phenomenal sin … that is, of sin as it reveals itself in time, and is an immediate object of consciousness. And in this sense most truly does the Apostle assert, that in Adam we all fell. The first human sinner is the adequate representative of all his successors” (CW, I, 269, n.). Hence the “mythos” of Adam (CW, V, 209) symbolizes the universal fact — as Coleridge regarded it — of “connate” self-will. In calling Adam truly symbolic, Coleridge invoked the example of Augustine (CW, I, 270, n.). Cf. De Trinitate, XII, xii, 17–19, where Augustine gives an account of the Fall as symbolic.
12 “Any possible link with the Fall … if such a link is there … lies in the corruption of the human will by original sin and must be imported into the poem from outside, to explain the Mariner's motive, when he is not able or willing to explain it himself”: House, Humphry, Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951–52 (London, 1953, 1962), 98.Google Scholar
13 For Coleridge's own account of his relation to Jacobinism and of his “whole Plan of Revolution” see CL, II, 1001, 999 (October 1, 1803).
14 CL, I, 396. In his demythologizing of the Fall, in his published works, Coleridge denounced “hereditary sin, — guilt inherited,” as a “monstrous fiction” and a perversion of “the mystery of Original Sin” (CW, I, 295).
15 CW, V, 16.
16 CW, I, 49f. Shedd discounted Coleridge's emphasis on the effect which a change in his philosophic opinions had on “his renunciation of Socinianism and reception of Trinitarianism …” In “his case, as in that of Augustine … the change from error to truth had its first and deepest source in that profound and bitter experience of an evil nature, which every child of Adam must pass through before reaching peace of soul, and which more than any other experience, carries the mind down into the depths of both the nature of man and of God” (CW, I, 45).
17 CW, I, 284f. The “Brahmin Mythology” and even “the religious Atheism of the Buddhists” taught “the deep sense of this fact, and the … promised remedy …” “In the assertion of Original Sin the Greek Mythology rose and set.”
18 Confessions, II, iv, 9.
19 Michalson, Carl, The Hinge of History: an Existential Approach to the Christian Faith (New York, 1959), 98Google Scholar. Both Augustine and Coleridge are mentioned (98, 99).
20 Oates, Whitney J., ed., Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, 2 vols. (New York, 1948), I, xv-xviGoogle Scholar. This edition is hereafter cited as BWStA.
21 Confessions, VIII, v, 12.
22 Shedd, CW, I, 48.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 See Enchiridion, Ch. xxviii, 104–08. See also Outler's note, Augustine: Confessions and Enchiridion, 403; and Oates, BWStA, I, xxvii. Coleridge interpreted Augustine's view of “the remanence of the will in the fallen spirit” as similar to “the locomotive faculty in a man in a strait waistcoat” (CW, V, 208–09; cf. 448).
26 Cf. Robert Penn Warren, A Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment Reading, Selected Essays (New York, 1958), 232.
27 See Shedd's analysis, CW, I, 46–50. Cf. “Paley Not a Moralist,” CW, I, 292. For Pelagius' view of the will, see Pontifex, Mark, ed. and trans., St. Augustine, The Problem of Free Choice, Ancient Christian Writers, No. 22 (Westminster, Md., 1955), 11Google Scholar. See also Burnaby, John, ed. and trans., Augustine: Later Works, The Library of Christian Classics, VIII (Philadelphia, 1955), 192Google Scholar: “The theology of Pelagius was the theology of deism: his ethics the ethics of naturalism.”
28 Shedd, CW, I, 48.
29 See Pontifex, iof. For Coleridge's criticism of the atomistic self implied by the “Self-love” of the eighteenth-century empirical philosophy, see Muirhead, John H., Coleridge as Philosopher (London, 1930Google Scholar; repr. New York, 1954), 142f. For Augustine's “conception of will, as an autonomous determination of the total self,” see Cochrane, Charles Norris, Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford, 1940Google Scholar; repr. London, New York and Toronto, 1957), 446ff.; in relation to Pelagius, 452ff.
30 Cf. Warren, 232. See also Paley, William, Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), in The Works of William Paley (Cambridge, Mass., 1830), III, 33.Google Scholar
31 See The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: The Modern Library, n. d.), 170. In Lecture VIII, The Divided Self, James quotes passages from Confessions, VIII, v, vii, xi.
32 Outler, Introduction, Augustine: Confessions and Enchiridion, 15.
33 See Confessions, VIII, vii, 16—xi, 27. See also Lehmann, Paul, The Anti- Pelagian Writings, in A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine, ed. Battenhouse, Roy W. (New York, 1955), 217.Google Scholar
34 Shedd, CW, I, 49. Cf. Boulger, 158.
35 See The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912Google Scholar; repr. 1962), I, 196, n. This edition is hereafter cited as PW.
36 BL, I, 137.
37 Confessions, VII, xix, 25.
38 See Gilson, Etienne, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (New York, 1960), 155f.Google Scholar
39 See the article, Grace, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. Hastings, James (New York, 1914), VI, 365f.Google Scholar
40 Cochrane, 450f. See also Burnaby, Augustine: Later Works, 34: “… what was really at stake in the Pelagian controversy was the reality of the divine presence, through grace, in the soul of man.”
41 CL, I, 397.
42 CL, I, 349.
43 “A Poem of Pure Imagination …,” 232.
44 To the concept of nature in Greek rationalism Augustine added the “idea of nature as sacramental, symbolic of spiritual truth …”: Crombie, A. C., Augustine to Galileo: the History of Science, A.D. 400–1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), xiiiGoogle Scholar. Cf. the analysis of the conscious and subconscious memory in relation to the creation and the Creator, Confessions, X, viii-xxvii; and the comment on the passage by Butler, Cuthbert, Western Mysticism (New York, 1924), 39fGoogle Scholar. Whyte quotes as evidence of Augustine's knowledge of the unconscious the famous paragraph from Confessions, X, viii, 15 (op. cit., 73).
45 The quoted phrase is from J. Mitchell Morse, Augustine's Theodicy and Joyce's Aesthetics, ELH XXIV (1957), 32.
46 Cf. Whitney J. Oates: “… it is impossible to dissociate from one another the Augustinian theories of the will itself, its freedom, the origin of moral evil, and of God's grace” (BWSt.A., I, xxvii-xxviii).
47 Lovejoy, Arthur O., The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 67Google Scholar. See also 71, 72, 97f.
48 Augustine, , Of True Religion, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. and trans. Burleigh, John H. S., The Library of Christian Classics, VI (Philadelphia, 1953), 265Google Scholar: Ch. XLI, 77. This work is hereafter cited as OTR. See also Confessions, XII, vii, 7; and Lovejoy, 67, 71, 72, 97f.
49 Lovejoy, 67. See also Confessions, XIII, ii, 2.
50 Lovejoy, 67.
51 Confessions, VII, xiii, 19.
52 Confessions, VII, xvi, 22.
53 Confessions, XIII, xxiv, 35–37.
54 Confessions, VII, xiv, 20.
55 Confessions, IV, xiii, 20; xv, 24.
56 OTR, XLI, 77. Cf. The City of God, XIX, 13. On Augustine's metaphysical view of order, see Bourke, Vernon J., Augustine's Quest of Wisdom (Milwaukee, 1947, 3rd pr.), 75, 92, 275Google Scholar. Cp. Coleridge, N256, and Religious Musings, lines 230, 45–58. The “elect of Heaven” anticipate, albeit in a “desultory” way, the Mariner's blessing of the water-snakes as participants in the divine order: “They nor contempt embosom nor revenge:/For they dare know of what may seem deform/The Supreme Fair sole operant …” (lines 54–56).
57 XI, 22.
58 Augustine's Theodicy and Joyce's Aesthetics, 34.
59 Chapman, Emmanuel, Saint Augustine's Philosophy of Beauty (New York, 1939), 41.Google Scholar
60 OTR, XLI, 77. As the context shows, “soul” (anima), applied even to worms, is for Augustine equivalent to life or the life-principle.
61 OTR, XLI, 77.
62 Cf. Bosanquet, Bernard, A History of Aesthetic (Meridian Library, New York, 1957), 134.Google Scholar
63 XI, 23.
64 OTR, XLI, 77.
65 BL, II, 12.
66 X, vi, 8.
67 Chapman, Saint Augustine's Philosophy of Beauty, 34–35, 40–41, 77.
68 Chapman, 12.
69 Chapman, 64f.
70 Chapman, II, 29, 42. See also Bourse, Augustine's Quest of Wisdom, 57, 215, 245; Burnaby, Augustine: Later Works, 34f.; Morgan, The Psychological Teaching of St. Augustine, 20, 209, 216; and Brett's History of Psychology, ed. and abr. R. S. Peters (London, 1953), 207–15.
71 Cf. Gayle S. Smith, A Reappraisal of the Moral Stanzas in The Ancient Mariner, Studies in Romanticism III (1963), 44, 46, et passim.
72 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 96.
73 BL, I, 132.
74 Lovejoy, 96.
75 Lovejoy, 97.
76 Lovejoy, 97, 226, 288, 362, n.34.
77 CL, I, 395f.
78 Introduction, The Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a Selection (London, 1938), 25f., 15f.
79 Cp. lines 146–52, 88–93, 46–53; and The City of God, XIV, 28.
80 PW, 108, n. The quoted phrase is from Thomas Merton's Introduction to the Modern Library edition of The City of God (New York, 1950), xi.
81 Cp. N256 and The City of God, XIX, 11–14. See also my note, Augustine and ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ Modern Language Notes LXXVI (1961), 119, n.
82 Quoted by Hanson, The Life of S, T. Coleridge, 241f. The letter is dated March 3, 1798. For Coleridge's own account of the “compound of Philosophy and Christianity” in his early political period, see CL, II, 998–1003 (October 1, 1803).
83 See My First Acquaintance With Poets, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Howe, P. P., 21 vols. (London and Toronto, 1930–1934), XVII, 108.Google Scholar
84 CW, I, 293f.
85 See Harding, D. W., The Theme of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ Scrutiny IX (1941), 340fGoogle Scholar. Reprinted in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: a Handbook, ed. Gettman, Royal A. (San Francisco, 1961), 76–83Google Scholar. See also Humphry House, Coleridge: the Clark Lectures 1951–52, 96.
86 CW, I, 214.
87 On the relation of “saving principles” and works, see CW, II, 289. Cp. the Augustinian doctrine of grace, in which “man's good works do not, and indeed cannot, precede its gift. Good works are possible after the gift of grace, for then man's will has been transformed to the state of being able not to sin … [;] grace is given so that good works may be performed”: Whitney J. Oates, BWSt A., I, xxx.
88 Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 505f.
89 XIX, 27; XXI, 27. Cf. Enchiridion (XVII, 64) and The Spirit and the Letter (XXXVI, 65).
90 X, xxix, 40; xxxi, 45; xxxvii, 60.
91 On the significance of prayer in The Ancient Mariner, see Parsons, Coleman O., The Mariner and the Albatross, Virginia Quarterly Review XXVI (1950), 108f., 122, et passim.Google Scholar
92 Maritain, Jacques, Existence and the Existent (Pantheon, 1948), Ch. III, Sect. 25Google Scholar; repr. in Four Existential Theologians, ed. Will Herberg (Anchor Books, Garden City, N.Y., 1958), 53.
93 CL, I, 541–542.
94 Daniel D. Williams, The Significance of St. Augustine Today, in A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine, 10.
95 “The classic objection to romantic psychology is that it accepts an inner dualism …,” as, for example, “the Christian awareness of grace and sin”: Barzun, Jacques, Classic, Romantic and Modern (Anchor Books, Garden City, N.Y., 1961), 49Google Scholar. The Mariner is Coleridge's Apostle to the Age of the Discursive Understanding and embodies his tribute to mystics like Jacob Boehme and George Fox, whose writings “contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me … [a] presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of DEATH …” (BL, I, 98).
95a BL, I, 173; CW, II, 460. Cp. The Trinity, X, v, 7.
96 CW, I, 214.
97 The Right Reverend Carpenter, W. Boyd, The Religious Spirit in the Poets (New York, 1901), 148, 150f.Google Scholar
98 BL, Preface, I, v.
99 See f (foliation) 84 of the manuscript of the Theological Lectures delivered by Coleridge at Bristol in 1795. The manuscript is bound in a volume titled Lectures and Sermons, 1795–1796, which is in the Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto, and will be edited by Miss Kathleen Coburn. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Miss Lorna D. Fraser, Librarian, Victoria University Library, for kind permission, in the absence of Miss Coburn in England, to examine the Theological Lectures. These Lectures are hereafter cited as TL. In view of the publication status of the manuscript, no direct quotation will be made from it. Although this restriction was not enjoined by the owners of the manuscript, it seems to me to offer the only fitting way to make use of the Theological Lectures at the present time.
100 TL, f83–f84; Confessions, Bk. V, iii, 3–6; vi, 10–11; vii, 12–13; xi, 21; xiii, 23; xiv, 24–25; and Bk. VI, xi, 18. See also The Usefulness of Belief, III, 7, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. Burleigh, 295f.
101 Confessions, VII, xvi, 22. “In making the will the cause of sin, St. Augustine introduced a trait that distinguishes the Augustinian outlook throughout the middle ages”: Left, Gordon, Medieval Thought: St. Augustine to Ockham (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1958Google Scholar; repr. 1962), 44. Bishop Julian of Eclanum, a supporter of Pelagius, accused Augustine in 418 A.D. of having invented the notion of original sin. See Bourke, 191. Though verbally very close to “the Platonists,” and especially Plotinus (see Outler's note, op. cit., 150), in his definition of the origin of moral evil, Augustine regarded them as intellectually proud, in scorning Christ the Mediator, and as incapable of freeing man from original sin. See Confessions, VII, xxi, 27; cf. Green, William M., INITIUM OMNIS PECCATI SUPERBIA: Augustine on Pride as the First Sin, University of California Publications in Classical Philology (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950), XIII, 420, 426, 427, 429.Google Scholar
102 TL, f20.
103 N 256.
104 See Augustine, and “The Ancient Mariner,” Modern Language Notes LXXVI (1961), 119 and n.Google Scholar
105 See Confessions, XIII, ix, 10, and The City of God, XI, 28. On Augustine's equation of the will and love, in his conception of conation, see Burnaby's note on “Amor and Charitas” in Augustine: Later Works, 35f.
106 N209.
107 Oates, BWSt. A, I, 258.
108 Bk. I, vi, 12-viii, 15, The Soliloquies, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. Burleigh, 30–32.
109 The Soliloquies, I, v, 11; vi, 12.
110 The Soliloquies, I, iv, 9.
111 See Confessions, VII, xxi, 27; The City of God, X, 24; and The Trinity, VIII, ii, 3; XV, xxvii, 49–50.
112 On the relation of Augustine's doctrine of Divine Illumination to Platonism, see Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (London, 1950), II, 62–67. On Augustine's view of the failure of Platonism to provide an adequate doctrine of the Logos, see Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, Ch. XI, esp. 428–30. The crux of this failure was for Augustine that Platonism “began by envisaging the ‘subject’ as in some sense ‘opposed’ to the ‘object’ world.” This fundamental error, according to Augustine, could be obviated only by abandoning “the logos of Plato in favour of the logos of Christ” (Cochrane, 430).
113 N88 n,
114 TL, f128. In Literary Remains (CW, V, 539), however, Coleridge implies a retraction.
115 VIII, 4 (BWSt. A., II, 104–105). Cf. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher, 113f.
116 CW, VI, 264 (January 6, 1823). See also CW, V, 552; I, 167. Cf. Augustine's Tractate XV, iv, 19, in his Homilies on the Gospel of John, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Schaff, Philip (New York, 1888Google Scholar; repr. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1956), VII, 104; and The Teacher, XI, 38, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. Burleigh, 95. The latter is “Augustine's classic statement of the essence of the Illumination theory”: Bourke, Augustine's Quest of Wisdom, 116.
117 BL, I, 134, 136–137.
118 BL, I, 137.
119 BL, I, 134; and Robert E. Cushman, Faith and Reason, in A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine, 288. I am greatly indebted to Professor Cushman's brilliant essay, as will in part appear.
120 BL, I, 134–135. The role of the “heart” in religious faith is emphasized by Coleridge in relation to both of his discoveries. See BL, I, 135, 136. Cf. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker, 95.
121 BL, I, 135.
122 Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 413, 410.
123 See Cushman, Faith and Reason, 289f., 293, 306. See also Carré, Realists and Nominalists, 12, n.; and Cochrane, 394, 414–416, 435ff., 477ff.
124 Cushman, 289.
125 Cushman, 289, 305.
126 Cushman, 300f.
127 William M. Green, INITIUM OMNIS PECCATI SUPERBIA: Augustine on Pride as the First Sin, 409. Cf. Coleridge's similar view on “fidelity to our own being” in his “Essay on Faith” (CW, V, 557), which represents his religious thought “during his Unitarian period”: Boulger, 101 and n. Guilt and remorse imply an ontological self, standing in an I-Thou relation to the will of God (CW, V, 558–562). Reason is “the representative of the infinite” and is “one with the absolute will … above the will of man as an individual will” (CW, V, 562). The crux of the relation of faith and reason, as envisaged by Augustine, is the movement from objective knowledge of the existence of God (cognitio) to subjective acknowledgment of His sovereignty in the finite will (agnitio). See Cushman, 289f. Unlike Tertullian, Augustine and Coleridge regarded faith as the fulfillment of reason, not its displacement. With Augustine, “the very possibility of faith depends on reason”: Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine, 29. Cf. Boulger, 81, 101, et passim. Coleridge's two discoveries at Stowey, as well as his affirmation of original sin, represent a movement in the direction of agnitio. Cp. the deistic conception of Godhead held by Coleridge at the outset of his religious conflict (BL, I, 133).
128 XII, ix, 14; xi, 16-xii, 17–19; xiv, 21. XII, xv, 24 contains a frequently cited passage on Divine Illumination which is offered in explicit rejection of Plato's doctrine of recollection. Cf. Burnaby, “Argument,” Augustine: Later Works, 93f.
129 Cf. Hanson, The Life of S. T. Coleridge, 303f.; and Shawcross, BL, I, lxxxiii-lxxxvii.
130 TL, f170–f171; f174. “The idea [of imagination as a ‘dim analogue of creation’] is already implicit in ‘The Aeolian Harp’”: Baker, The Sacred River, 121. In Coleridge's maturest formulation of the Trinity “he recreated philosophically one of his greatest and earliest imaginative utterances: ‘The One Life, Within us and Abroad’”: (sic, “The Eolian Harp,” line 26), Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker, 141f. See also Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher, 201.
131 See Bundy, Murray Wright, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1928), 157Google Scholar, 161f.; and Ambrosi, Luigi, La Psicologia della Immaginazione nella Storia della Filosofia (Rome, 1898), 37, 38, 39Google Scholar. In his comment on Cudworth's The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Basil Willey calls attention to similarities between Cudworth's “account of knowledge” and Coleridge's theory of the imagination. “Cudworth, of course, makes no such application of his theory [of knowledge]”: The Seventeenth Century Background (Anchor Books, Garden City, N.Y., 1955), 161. Since Cudworth drew on Augustine's doctrine of Ideas and his doctrine of rationes seminales (see Carré, op. cit., 31) — which play an important part in his theory of imagination — it seems probable that the similarities noted by Willey came about through Coleridge's following to their sources (as Lowes affirmed was his practice) Cudworth's references to Augustine's De Trinitate and his De Genesi ad Litteram. The latter work contains the fullest exposition not only of the saint's doctrine of rationes seminales — a close parallel to Coleridge's concept of natura naturans — but also of his threefold analysis of vision. Bundy stresses the importance of “the connection between ‘vision’ and ‘imagination’” and thinks that “Augustine … is the immediate source of Dante's theory of vision” in the Divine Comedy (233).
132 Bk. XIV, xii, 15ff. See also Burnaby's introduction to The Trinity, in Augustine: Later Works, 26–30; and his Note on Terminology, 34–36.
133 See The Trinity, XV, xi, 20. Cf. Burnaby, Amor Dei: a Study of the Religion of St. Augustine, 146f.
134 Coleridge copied in his notebook for January-March, 1801, an excerpt from one of Augustine's letters to Nebridius which constitute the locus classicus for his influential distinction of phantasia and imaginatio. See N915 and N915n; cf. Letter VII, Letters of St. Augustine, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, I, 224–26. See also Bundy, The Theory of Imagination …, 158f.; and BL, I, 61.
- 1
- Cited by