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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
From his college days onward Coleridge considered himself, and was considered by his intimate friends, the champion of religion, and particularly of the Christian religion. That this championing of Christianity was frequently attested in his letters and writings; that the most ambitious poem of his youth—Religious Musings— was written in the spirit of its title; that he occasionally preached from Unitarian pulpits; that all his later prose writings were predominantly religious; that he at no time considered the writing of poetry his prime purpose—these facts lead to the conclusion that religion was the dominating interest throughout most of his life.
1 “I have read all your Religious Musings with uninterrupted feelings of profound admiration. You may safely rest your fame on it.”—Charles Lamb, in a letter to Coleridge, 1796.
“ I was reading your Religious Musings the other day, and sincerely I think it the noblest poem in the language next after the Paradise Lost.”—Charles Lamb, in a letter to Coleridge, January 5, 1797.
2 “I thank you for these lines in the name of a necessarian and for what follows in next paragraph, in the name of a child of fancy.” —Charles Lamb, in a letter to Coleridge, June 10, 1796.
3 The early Unitarians were literalists in interpreting the Scriptures, and naturally held the Gospel of St. John in high esteem. But later this Gospel grew in disfavor with them because it emphasizes the Divinity of Christ. Coleridge, however, never followed the Unitarians very closely, either in their early literalism, or in their rejection of the Divinity of Christ. He always retained a profound reverence for the Gospel of St. John. See the quotation near the end of this article from Notes on the Book of Common Prayer, also Table Talk, June 6, 1830: “It is delightful to think, that the beloved apostle was born a Plato,” etc.
4 Priestly made an almost identical combination of Necessity and Unity in his philosophy. A recent commentator, C. C. Everett, in Immortality, and Other Essays, says of him:—“His belief in necessity was simply an intense form of faith in God. Since everything was determined by God, what place is there for grief or anxiety? It was a marvel to his childlike mind that Calvinism, starting as it does from the thought of the sovereignty of God, could reach results so terrible. The sovereignty of God meant to him the sovereignty of a wise goodness. He believed that Calvinism thus carried at its heart a principle that would one day transform it into a system of beauty.” It may be suspected but cannot be proved that Coleridge got his ideas ready-made from Priestly. First, there seems to be no direct evidence in the case. Secondly, it is well-nigh impossible to track Coleridge specifically in his borrowings, because of his subtly intermixing materials from various sources and of his interpenetrating them with something of his own. It appears he was only in general indebted to Priestly.
5 “Poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thought, human passions, emotions, language.”—Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, Chapter XV.
6 The original sources of these passages are books of travel and history, such as Cranz's History of Greenland. The use Coleridge makes of them is all his own.
7 It may be said that Kubla Khan (1798) advances a step farther. But from it have vanished logical structure and discoverable sequence of ideas; what remains is a fragment of pure esthetic luxury.
8 Against the Necessitarian, materialistic, and associational philosophies of the eighteenth century this charge of passiveness is made again and again in Coleridge's later writings—The Friend, Biographia Literaria, etc. It is striking that he should have made it so unequivocally thus early in this letter. He had remarkable prescience of truth which needed only the confirmation of other writers to bring it to maturity. One therefore can sympathize with his resentment against all attacks on him of plagiarism.
As if to make his renunciation irrevocable Coleridge a few years later (1804) again wrote to Poole: “I love and honour you, Poole, for many things; scarcely for anything more than that, trusting firmly in the rectitude and simplicity of your own heart, and listening with faith to its revealing voice, you never suffered either my subtlety, or my eloquence, to proselyte you to the pernicious doctrine of Necessity. All praise to the Great Being, who has graciously enabled me to find my way out of that labyrinth-den of sophistry, and I would fain believe, to bring with me a better clue than has hitherto been known to enable others to do the same.” It might seem strange or absurd that a poet should feel an abasement of spirit for having held a certain metaphysical doctrine. But Coleridge was keenly aware that when he renounced this doctrine he was renouncing the whole trend and body of English thought from John Locke to William Godwin, and that a duty had been laid upon himself to find at least a working hypothesis to take its place.
9 Those who suppose that if his poetical powers had remained unimpaired Coleridge would have continued writing Ancient Mariners and Christabels imagine a vain thing. He never had an exalted opinion of The Ancient Mariner and did not publish Christabel until urged by Byron. In fact, these poems did not represent for him the highest truth of life after 1799.
10 Biographia Literaria. See the whole passage, close of chapter XIV.
11 The passages beginning respectively with, “O Lady! we receive but what we give,” and, “But now afflictions bow me down to earth.”
12 For his conception Coleridge was indebted to the poem Chamouni at Sun-rise, by Frederike Brun, a German poetess. But Coleridge, as DeQuincey said, “created the dry bones of the German outlines into fulness of life.”
13 But he also quotes Dante to the effect that such Reason is unattainable.
14 “That which, contemplated objectively (that is, as existing externally to the mind), we call a law; the same contemplated subjectively (that is, as existing in a subject or mind), is an idea. Hence Plato often names ideas laws; and Lord Bacon, the British Plato, describes the laws of the material universe as the ideas in nature.”—Coleridge in Constitution of Church and State.
15 In addition to the reason already given why it is almost impossible to track Coleridge in his borrowings from numberless authors, is his conception of the nature of truth. First : “I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible.” Secondly, he conceived truth as a process and a growth, and his own intellect as in a state of development, and therefore changing. Those who try to specify narrowly his indebtedness are inevitably driven to use such words as ‘probably,’ ‘perhaps,’ ‘reasonable to suppose,’ etc.
16 The words ‘refer,’ ‘ground,’ ‘bottom,’ ‘deduce,’ used in the sense of grounding or bottoming opinions in principles, or of deducing them from principles, are great favorites with Coleridge.
17 “Conscious that in upholding some priciples both of taste and philosophy, adopted by the great men of Europe, from the middle of the fifteenth till toward the close of the seventeenth century, I must run counter to many prejudices of many of my readers,— ” Wordsworth is the only contemporary quoted approvingly, and in the 1818 edition he is quoted oftener than any other single writer.
18 “When I make a threefold distinction in human nature, I am fully aware, that it is a distinction, not a division, and that in every act of mind the man unites the properties of sense, understanding, and reason. Nevertheless it is of great practical importance, that these distinctions should be made and understood… . They are more than once expressed, and everywhere supposed, in the writings of St. Paul. I have no hesitation in undertaking to prove, that every heresy which has disquieted the Christian Church, from Tritheism to Socinianism, has originated in and supported itself by arguments rendered plausible only by the confusion of these faculties, and thus demanding for the objects of one, a sort of evidence appropriated to those of another faculty” (Section i, Essay iii).
19 Hobbes's system “denies all truth and distinct meaning of the words, right and duty; and affirming that the human mind consists of nothing but the manifold modifications of passive sensations, considers men as the highest sort of animals indeed, but at the same time the most wretched.”—This is one of the many severe strictures of Coleridge on all systems in which “at all events the minds of men were to be sensualized” and reduced to a passive state.
20 Coleridge does ample justice to Rousseau's disquisitions on pure reason and free-will as inalienable qualities in man's being. But these high powers must not be abased to the use of expediency and worldly prudence which are primarily requisite in matters of government. Therefore Rousseau's system, he argues, “as an exclusive total, is under any form impracticable.”
21 The changes in Coleridge's political views correspond to the changes in his religious development. In 1795, when he was in strong sympathy with the French Revolution, he recommended, in his Bristol address, “a practical faith in the doctrine of philosophical Necessity” as a panacea for the troubled times. In 1798, when he had lost faith in the leadership of France for liberty, he expressed the doubt, in France: An Ode, whether liberty could make its home anywhere but in the realm of Nature—“ nor ever didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power.” In 1809 he expressed the idea that true liberty is to be wrought out, not by means of political legislation, but in the souls of men in a transcendental spirit of self-conquest. Political government is thus the outcome, not the cause, of liberty.
22 “What is faith, but the personal realization of the reason by its union with the will ?” (Section II, Essay ii) . “Faith is a total act of the soul: it is the whole state of the mind, or it is not at all; and in this consists its power, as well as its exclusive worth” (Section I, Essay xv).
23 Man derives his sense of reality of the objects of nature from an experience which “compels him to contemplate as without and independent of himself what yet he could not contemplate at all, were it not a modification of his own being” (Section II, Essay xi). This re-emphasizes that “in our life alone does nature live,” as asserted in Dejection: An Ode (1802).
24 “I have attempted, then, to fix the proper meaning of the words, Nature and Spirit, the one being the antithesis to the other: so that the most general and negative definition of nature is, whatever is not spirit; and vice versa of spirit, that which is not comprehended in nature; or in the language of our elder divines, that which transcends nature. But Nature is the term in which we comprehend all things that are representable in the forms of time and space, and subjected to the relations of cause and effect: and the cause of the existence of which, therefore, is to be sought for perpetually in something antecedent.”
25 In Chapter vii of Biographia Literaria, composed 1817, Coleridge says that according to Necessitarians “we only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. In all these cases the real agent is a something-nothing-everything, which does all of which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself does. The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will, must, on this system, be mere articulate motions of the air.”
26 These almost startlingly penetrative passages anticipate, so far as prophecy can anticipate, the evolutionary thought of a later generation, especially on its ethical side, as expressed, for instance, in the poetry of Browning.
27 Coleridge considers many other articles of the Creed, such as Election, The Trinity, Baptism, etc., but since these are matters for the Speculative, not the Practical, Reason to consider, they admit of great varieties of opinion without affecting the character of the Christian.
28 Of his transition period Coleridge writes in Biographia Literaria (Chapter x) : “For a very long time, indeed, I could not reconcile personality with infinity: and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John. Yet there had dawned upon me, even before I had met with the Critique of Pure Reason, a certain guiding light. … I became convinced, that religion, as both the corner-stone and the key-stone of morality, must have a moral origin; so far at least, that the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will.”
