Review of Barbeau (ed.), Coleridge's Assertion of Religion

The Coleridge Bulletin, 27 NS 27, pp. 45-55., 2006

Harvard Theological Review, 1983

This essay concerns two closely related subjects: the religious philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the need for a new vision in Christian theology today. Though it is the second, more ambitious and adventurous topic that deserves the more sensitive treatment, it is rather to Coleridge himself that I have given the greater part of my attention. The reasoning behind this procedure is based upon a fairly simple fact: Coleridge's religious thought is still largely unknown to most people in the philosophical and theological communities. During the past twenty years or so, as many of Coleridge's hitherto unpublished notebooks and other manuscripts have been brought to light, a number of scholars of English literature have begun to study his thought, including his theology, with greater care. 1 But it is still rare to find a researcher outside literature per se who knows much of Coleridgean philosophy, beyond (perhaps) a few phrases from his theory of the imagination in the Biographia Literaria. 1 I have thought it !j Robert Barth, S J , and Thomas McFarland may be mentioned especially in this connection See, respectively, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge Harvard University, 1969) and Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford Clarendon, 1969) 2 The best known of Coleridge's observations on the imagination can be found in the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation m the infinite I AM The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate, or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify It is essentially \itaU even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead (Biographia Literaria, J Shawcross, ed [Oxford Oxford University, 1907] 1 202) One finds this passage quoted frequently in recent works dealing with the theological ima-gination. As but one among numerous examples, see Ray L. Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968) 200 As I hope to show, the imagination is only the tip of a Coleridgean iceberg.

Entry on Samuel Taylor Coleridge fot the 3 volume 'Thoemmes Dictionary of British Classicists' (Bloomsbury/Thoemmes 2004). The entry focuses on Coleridge's classical scholarship as influenced by his wider metaphysical views of the importance of language and philological research as the keys to understanding western culture. Particular attention is given to the ways in which Coleridge's philosophy of language mediated his theological views and his understanding of both myth and race.

Modern Believing, 2012

The Heythrop Journal, 2020

This article argues that in his theory of reason as universal Logos, Coleridge held reason, and its constituent (Platonic, divine) ideas, to be transcendent to nature and the human mind. In this view, although nature is suffused by universal reason, and the human mind is transformed by it into an enlightened, spiritualized existence, reason remains a timeless and transcendent power to which the human mind is open, rather than a characteristic that it possesses. Drawing from Coleridge’s ‘Lecture on the Prometheus’ (1825) and related texts, the article argues, in sections II–IV, for the prominence of ‘the transcendency of the Nous’ as a tenet that informs his wide-ranging polar, hierarchical philosophy of reason and ideas. Section V then discusses the chiasmatic structure of Coleridge’s theories of how nature and spirit interact across the divide that for him is central to existence. The article concludes by reconstructing, in section VI, Coleridge’s theory of mind as fractally organized, with opposed poles of reason and sense, each with its distinctive form of heightened, noetic or intuitive experience. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/heyj.13345

International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 2020

Literature & Theology, 2021

examination of Jefferson shows is the shift from 'Christian faith and theological truth to Christian cultural identity and its relationship to the nation state' (p. 353).

The article grapples with the complex networking between exponents of German Romantic Idealism and S T Coleridge's metaphysics and transcendental speculations, paying specific attention to Biographia Literaria. It argues that Coleridge was immensely influenced by and distinguished himself from German philosophers like Hegel. These philosphers advanced complex, enigmatic and controversial positions on hermeneutic and phenomenological questions of asethetics and sublime, being, nature and mind and spirit, body and soul, the subjective and objevtive and plenitude. The question of influence and/or confluence situates Coleridge's Romantic and idealist speculations in the context of acknowledging the German idealists and submitting to shared ideologies, but at the same time accentuating his formulated opinions prior to and after he met with or read their works. Biographia Literaria as a seminal treatise on English Romanticism expresses how this networking grounded Coleridge's metaphyics in line with artistic and aesthetic concerns. In other words, Coleridge's conviction that a poet was an ardent expression of the mutual inclusivity between phliosophy and creative writing lends credence to his rigorous critical broodings on continental philosophers. His theorisation of imagination in philosophical and poetic expression owes much to both these influneces and his personal stance.

The Aids to Reflection, Coleridge's most influential theological work, is in a strong polemic with two very important works on religion – David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and William Paley's Natural Theology. The main focus of the present paper will therefore be that of outlining Coleridge's perspective with reference to Hume and Paley's views on natural theology. In doing so, it will hopefully become clear that an empiricist account of religion can only amount to the apologetic genre of natural theology. On the one hand, by showing his interest towards the cultural history of natural theology, Coleridge exposes the poverty of empiricism and its inability to move past demonstrations of God's existence and arrive at a spiritual understanding of the self in relation to God. On the other hand, he re-categorizes Reason, by rediscovering its original meaning as Logos and positing it as the structure on which true morality should be build, unlike in the empiricist system of common-sense ethics. The characters from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion assert the consequences of living in a sceptical and empirical mindframe. Coleridge not only combats such attitudes, he also asserts the need to think in terms of Platonic and Kantian otherworldliness and rethink spirituality. He is no Christian dogmatist however, so questions such as what is the true faith are open in Coleridge's open, aphoristic and dialogical construction that makes up Aids to Reflection. In discussing the three philosophers, I bore in mind Renate Lachmann's concept of participation in the sense that the three texts are distancing and surpassing one another.