Mr. Traill's recent volume has recalled the poet-philosopher who
died just fifty years ago, leaving a strongly marked but indefinite
impression upon the mind of his time. The volume has done something
to renew and vivify the impression both in respect of Coleridge's
poetry and criticism. His work as a critic has never, perhaps, been
better or more completely exhibited. It is recognised generously in
all its largeness and profundity, as well as delicacy and subtlety;
and justice is especially done to his Shakesperian commentary, which
in its richness, variety, felicity, combined with depth and acuteness,
is absolutely unrivalled. But Mr. Traill cannot be said to have even
attempted any estimate of Coleridge as a spiritual thinker. It may be
questioned how far he has recognised that there is a spiritual side to
all his thought, without which neither his poetry nor his criticism can
be fully understood, cleverly as they may be judged.
It is not only out of date, but outside of all intelligent judgment
to quote at this time of day Mr. Carlyle's well-known caricature from
his _Life of Sterling_, and put readers off with this as a “famous
criticism.” We now know how to value utterances of this kind, and the
unhappy spirit of detraction which lay beneath such wild and grotesque
humors. Carlyle will always remain an artist in epithets—but few will
turn to him for an intelligent or comprehensive estimate of any great
name of his own or of recent time.
We propose to look at Coleridge for a little as a religious thinker,
and to ask what is the meaning and value of his work in this respect
now that we can calmly and fully judge it. If Coleridge was anything,
he was not only in his own view, as Mr. Traill admits, but in the
view of his generation, a religious philosopher. It is not only the
testimony of men like Hare, or Sterling, or Maurice, or even Cardinal
Newman, but of John Stuart Mill, that his teaching awakened and
freshened all contemporary thought. He was recognised with all his
faults as a truly great thinker, who raised the mind of the time and
gave it new and wide impulses. This judgment we feel sure will yet
verify itself. If English literature ever regains the higher tone of
our earlier national life—the tone of Hooker and Milton and Jeremy
Taylor—Coleridge will be again acknowledged, in Julius Hare's words, as
“a true sovereign of English thought.” He will take rank in the same
line of spiritual genius. He has the same elevation of feeling, the
same profound grasp of moral and spiritual ideas, the same wide range
of vision. He has, in short, the same love of wisdom, the same insight,
the same largeness—never despising nature or art, or literature, for
the sake of religion, still less ever despising religion for the sake
of culture. In reading over Coleridge's prose works again, returning
to them after a long past familiarity, I am particularly struck by
their massive and large intellectuality, akin to our older Elizabethan
literature. There is everywhere the play of great power—of imagination
as well as reason—of spiritual perception as well as logical subtlety.
To speak of Coleridge in this manner as a great spiritual power, an
eminently healthy writer in the higher regions of thought, may seem
absurd to some who think mainly of his life, and of the fatal failure
which characterised it. It is the shadow of this failure of manliness
in his conduct, as in that of his life-long friend, Charles Lamb, which
no doubt prompted the great genius who carried manliness, if little
sweetness, from his Annandale home, to paint both the one and the other
in such darkened colors. We have not a word to say on behalf of the
failings of either. They were deplorable and unworthy; but it is the
fact, notwithstanding, that the mind of both retained a serenity and
a certain touch of respectfulness which are lacking in their great
Scottish contemporary. They were both finer-edged than Carlyle. They
inherited a more delicate and polite personal culture; and delicacy can
never be far distant from true manliness. Neither of them could have
written of the treasures of old religion as Carlyle did in his _Life
of Sterling_. Whether they accepted for themselves those treasures or
not, they would have spared the tender faith of others and respected
an ancient ideal. And this is the higher attitude. Nothing which has
ever deeply interested humanity or profoundly moved it, is treated
with contempt by a good and wise man. It may call for and deserve
rejection, but never insult. Unhappily this attitude of mind, reserved,
as well as critical, reverent as well as bold, has been conspicuously
absent in some of the most powerful and best known writers of our era.
There is a striking contrast between the career of Coleridge and that
of his friend Wordsworth. Fellows in the opening of their poetic
course, they soon diverged widely. With a true instinct, Wordsworth
devoted himself, in quietness and seclusion, to the cultivation
of his poetic faculty. He left aside the world of politics and of
religious thought, strongly moved as he had been by the interests of
both. It may be said that Wordsworth continued a religious thinker
as well as poet all his life. And to some extent this is true. The
“Wanderer” is a preacher and not only a singer. He goes to the heart
of religion, and lays again its foundations in the natural instincts
of man. But while Wordsworth's poetry was instinct with a new life of
religious feeling, and may be said to have given a new radiancy to its
central principles,[2] it did not initiate any movement in Christian
thought. In religious opinion Wordsworth soon fell back upon, if he
ever consciously departed from, the old line of Anglican traditions.
The vague Pantheism of the _Excursion_ implies rather a lack of
distinctive dogma than any fresh insight into religious problems or
capacity of co-ordinating them in a new manner. And so soon as definite
religious conceptions came to the poet, the Church in her customary
theology became a satisfactory refuge. The _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_
mark this definite stage in his spiritual development. Wordsworth
did for the religious thought of his time something more and better
perhaps than giving it any definite impulse. While leaving it in
the old channels, he gave it a richer and deeper volume. He showed
with what vital affinity religion cleaves to humanity, in all its
true and simple phases, when uncontaminated by conceit or frivolity.
Nature and man alike were to him essentially religious, or only
conceivable as the outcome of a Spirit of life, “the Soul of all the
worlds.”[3] Wordsworth, in short, remained as he began, a poet of a
deeply religious spirit. But he did not enter the domain of theological
speculation or attempt to give any new direction to it.
In all this Coleridge is his counterpart. He may be said to have
abandoned poetry just when Wordsworth in his retirement at Grasmere
(1799) was consecrating his life to it. Whether it be true, according
to De Quincey, that Coleridge's poetical power was killed by the habit
of opium-eating, it is certainly true that the harp of Quantock[4]
was never again struck save for a brief moment. The poet Coleridge
passed into the lecturer and the poetical and literary critic, and
then, during the final period of his life, from 1816 to 1834, into
the philosopher and theologian. It is to this latter period of his
life in the main that his higher prose writings belong, and especially
the well-known _Aids to Reflection_ which—disparaged as it is by Mr.
Traill—may be said to contain, as his disciples have always held to
contain, all the finer substance of his spiritual thought. It is true
that it is defective as a literary composition. We are even disposed to
allow that it has “less charm of thought, less beauty of style,” and
in some respects even less “power of effective statement,”[5] than is
common with Coleridge; but withal it is his highest work. These very
defects only serve to bring out the more its strong points, when we
consider the wonderful hold the book has taken of many minds, and how
it has been the subject of elaborate commentary.[6] It is a book, we
may at the same time say, which none but a thinker on divine things
will ever like. All such thinkers have prized it greatly. To many such
it has given a new force of religious insight; for its time, beyond all
doubt, it created a real epoch in Christian thought. It had life in it;
and the living seed, scattered and desultory as it was, brought forth
fruit in many minds.
What, then, were its main contributions to religious thought, and in
what respects generally is Coleridge to be reckoned a spiritual power?
(1.) First, and chiefly, in the _Aids to Reflection_, Coleridge may
be said to have transformed and renewed the current ideas of his
time about religion. He was, we know, a man of many ambitions never
realised; but of all his ambitions, the most persistent was that of
laying anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. This was “the
great work” to which he frequently alluded as having given “the
preparation of more than twenty years of his life.”[7] Like other
great tasks projected by him, it was very imperfectly accomplished;
and there will always be those in consequence who fail to understand
his influence as a leader of thought. We are certainly not bound to
take Coleridge at his own value, nor to attach the same importance as
he did to some of his speculations. No one, indeed, knew better than
Coleridge himself that there was nothing new in his Platonic Realism.
It was merely a restoration of the old religious metaphysic which had
preceded “the mechanical systems,” that became dominant in the reign
of Charles the Second. He himself constantly claims to do nothing
more than re-assert the principles of Hooker, of Henry More, of John
Smith, and Leighton, all of whom he speaks of as “Platonizing divines!”
But the religious teaching of Coleridge came upon his generation as
a new breath, not merely or mainly because he revived these ancient
principles, but because he vitalised anew their application to
Christianity, so as to transform it from a mere creed, or collection of
articles, into a living mode of thought, embracing all human activity.
Coleridge was no mere metaphysician. He was a great interpreter of
spiritual facts—a student of spiritual life, quickened by a peculiarly
vivid and painful experience; and he saw in Christianity, rightly
conceived, at once the true explanation of the facts of our spiritual
being and the true remedy for their disorder. He brought human nature,
not merely on one side, but all sides, once more near to Christianity,
so as to find in it not merely a means of salvation in any limited
evangelical sense, but the highest Truth and Health—a perfect
philosophy. His main power lies in this subjective direction, just as
here it was that his age was most needing stimulus and guidance.
The Evangelical School, with all its merits, had conceived of
Christianity rather as something superadded the highest life of
humanity than as the perfect development of that life; as a scheme
for human salvation authenticated by miracles, and, so to speak,
interpolated into human history rather than a divine philosophy,
witnessing to itself from the beginning in all the higher phases of
that history. And so Philosophy, and no less Literature, and Art, and
Science, were conceived apart from religion. The world and the Church
were not only antagonistic in the Biblical sense, as the embodiments
of the Carnal and the Divine Spirit—which they must ever be; but they
were, so to speak, severed portions of life divided by outward signs
and badges: and those who joined the one or the other were supposed to
be clearly marked off. All who know the writings of the Evangelical
School of the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth century,
from the poetry of Cowper and the letters of his friend Newton, to the
writings of Romaine, John Forster, and Wilberforce, and even Chalmers,
will know how such commonplaces everywhere reappear in them. That they
were associated with the most devout and beautiful lives, that they
even served to foster a peculiar ardor of Christian feeling and love of
God, cannot be disputed. But they were essentially narrow and false.
They destroyed the largeness and unity of human experience. They not
merely separated religion from art and philosophy, but they tended to
separate it from morality.
Coleridge's most distinctive work was to restore the broken harmony
between reason and religion, by enlarging the conception of both, but
of the latter especially,—by showing how man is essentially a religious
being having a definite spiritual constitution, apart from which the
very idea of religion becomes impossible. Religion is not, therefore,
something brought to man, it is his highest education. Religion, he
says, was designed “to improve the nature and the faculties of man, in
order to the right governing of our actions, to the securing the peace
and progress, eternal and internal, of individuals and communities.”
Christianity is in the highest degree adapted to this end; and nothing
can be a part of it that is not duly proportioned thereto. In thus
vindicating the rationality of religion, Coleridge had a twofold task
before him, as every such thinker has. He had to assert against the
Epicurean and Empirical School the spiritual constitution of human
nature, and against the fanatical or hyper-evangelical school the
reasonable working of spiritual influence. He had to maintain, on the
one hand, the essential divinity of man, that “there is more in him
than can be rationally referred to the life of nature and the mechanism
of organisation,” and on the other hand to show that this higher life
of the spirit is throughout rational—that it is superstition and not
true religion which professes to resolve “men's faith and practice”
into the illumination of such a spirit as they can give no account
of,—such as does not enlighten their reason or enable them to render
their doctrine intelligible to others. He fights, in short, alike
against materialistic negation and credulous enthusiasm.
The former he meets with the assertion of “a spirituality in man,” a
self-power or Will at the root of all his being. “If there be aught
spiritual in man, the will must be such. If there be a will, there
must be a spirituality in man.” He assumes both positions, seeing
clearly—what all who radically deal with such a question must see—that
it becomes in the end an alternative postulate on one side and the
other. The theologian cannot prove his case, because the very terms
in which it must be proved are already denied _ab initio_ by the
materialist. But no more can the materialist, for the same reason,
refute the spiritual thinker. There can be no argument where no common
premiss is granted. Coleridge was quite alive to this, yet he validly
appeals to common experience. “I assume,” he says, “a something the
proof which no man can give to another, yet every man may find for
himself. If any man assert that he has no such experience, I am
bound to disbelieve him, I cannot do otherwise without unsettling
the foundation of my own moral nature. For I either find it as an
essential of the humanity common to him and to me, or I have not found
it at all.... All the significant objections of the materialist and
necessitarian,” he adds, “are contained in the term morality, and all
the objections of the infidel in the term religion. These very terms
imply something granted, which the objector in each case supposes not
granted. A moral philosophy is only such because it assumes a principle
of morality, a will in man, and so a Christian philosophy or theology
has its own assumptions resting on three ultimate facts, namely, the
reality of the law of conscience; the existence of a responsible will
as the subject of that law; and lastly, the existence of God....
The first is a fact of consciousness; the second, a fact of reason
necessarily concluded from the first; and the third, a fact of history
interpreted by both.”
These were the radical data of the religious philosophy of Coleridge.
They imply a general conception of religion which was revolutionary
for his age, simple and ancient as the principles are. The evangelical
tradition brought religion to man from the outside. It took no concern
of man's spiritual constitution beyond the fact that he was a sinner
and in danger of hell. Coleridge started from a similar but larger
experience, including not only sin, but the whole spiritual basis on
which sin rests. “I profess a deep conviction,” he says, “that man is a
fallen creature,” “not by accident of bodily constitution or any other
cause, but as diseased in his will—in that will which is the true and
only strict synonyme of the word I, or the intelligent Self.” This
“intelligent Self” is a fundamental conception lying at the root of his
system of thought. Sin is an attribute of it, and cannot be conceived
apart for it, and conscience, or the original sense of right and wrong
governing the will. Apart from these internal realities there is no
religion, and the function of the Christian Revelation is to build
up the spiritual life out of these realities—to remedy the evil, to
enlighten the conscience, to educate the will. This effective power
of religion comes directly from God in Christ. Here Coleridge joins
the Evangelical School, as indeed every school of living Christian
Faith. This was the element of Truth he found in the doctrine of
Election as handled “practically, morally, humanly,” by Leighton. Every
true Christian, he argues, must attribute his distinction not in any
degree to himself—“his own resolves and strivings,” “his own will and
understanding,” still less to “his own comparative excellence,”—but to
God, “the being in whom the promise of life originated, and on whom
its fulfilment depends.” Election so far is a truth of experience.
“This the conscience requires; this the highest interests of morality
demand.” So far it is a question of facts with which the speculative
reason has nothing to do. But when the theological reasoner abandons
the ground of fact and “the safe circle of religion and practical
reason for the shifting sand-wastes and mirages of speculative
theology,” then he uses words without meaning. He can have no insight
into the workings or plans of a Being who is neither an object of his
senses nor a part of his self-consciousness.
Nothing can show better than this brief exposition how closely
Coleridge in his theology clung to a base of spiritual experience,
and sought to measure even the most abstruse Christian mysteries by
facts. The same thing may be shown by referring to his doctrine of
the Trinity, which has been supposed the most transcendental and, so
to speak, “Neo-Platonist” of all his doctrines. But truly speaking
his Trinitarianism, like his doctrine of Election, is a moral rather
than a speculative truth. The Trinitarian idea was, indeed, true to
him notionally. The full analysis of the notion “God” seemed to him
to involve it. “I find a certain notion in my mind, and say that is
what I understand by the term God. From books and conversation I find
that the learned generally connect the same notion with the same word.
I then apply the rules laid down by the masters of logic for the
involution and evolution of terms, and prove (to as many as agree with
my premisses) that the notion 'God' involves the notion 'Trinity,'” So
he argued, and many times recurred to the same Transcendental analysis.
But the truer and more urgent spiritual basis of the doctrine of the
Trinity, even to his own mind, was not its notional but its moral
necessity. Christ could only be a Saviour as being Divine. Salvation is
a Divine work. “The idea of redemption involves belief in the Divinity
of our Lord. And our Lord's Divinity again involves the Trinitarian
idea, because in and through this idea alone the Divinity of Christ can
be received without breach of faith in the Unity of the Godhead.” In
other words, the best evidence of the doctrine of the Trinity, is the
compulsion of the spiritual conscience which demands a Divine Saviour;
and only in and through the great idea of Trinity in Unity does this
demand become consistent with Christian Monotheism.[8]
These doctrines are merely used in illustration, as they are by
Coleridge himself in his _Aids to Reflection_. But nothing can show in
a stronger light the general character of the change which he wrought
in the conception of Christianity. From being a mere traditional
creed, with Anglican and Evangelical, and it may be added Unitarian
alike, it became a living expression of the spiritual consciousness.
In a sense, of course, it had always been so. The Evangelical made
much of its living power, but only in a practical and not in a
rational sense. It is the distinction of Coleridge to have once more
in his age made Christian doctrine alive to the reason as well as the
conscience—tenable as a philosophy as well as an evangel. And this
he did by interpreting Christianity in the light of our moral and
spiritual life. There are aspects of Christian truth beyond us—_Exeunt
in mysteria_. But all Christian truth must have vital touch with our
spiritual being, and be so far at least capable of being rendered in
its terms, or, in other words, be conformable to reason.
There was nothing absolutely new in this luminous conception, but
it marked a revolution of religious thought in the earlier part of
our century. The great principle of the Evangelical theology was
that theological dogmas were true or false without any reference to
a subjective standard of judgment. They were true as pure data of
revelation, or as the propositions of an authorised creed settled
long ago. Reason had, so far, nothing to do with them. Christian
truth, it was supposed, lay at had in the Bible, an appeal to which
settled everything. Coleridge did not undervalue the Bible. He gave
it an intelligent reverence. But he no less reverenced the spiritual
consciousness or divine light in man; and to put out this light, as
the Evangelical had gone far to do, was to destroy all reasonable
faith. This must rest not merely on objective data, but on internal
experience. It must have not merely authority without, but _rationale_
within. It must answer to the highest aspiration of human reason, as
well as the most urgent necessities of human life. It must interpret
reason and find expression in the voice of our higher humanity, and so
enlarge itself as to meet all its needs.
If we turn for a moment to the special exposition of the doctrines
of sin and redemption which Coleridge has given in the _Aids to
Reflection_, it is still mainly with the view of bringing out more
clearly his general conception of Christianity as a living movement of
thought rather than a mere series of articles or a traditionary creed.
In dealing first with the question of sin, he shows how its very idea
is only tenable on the ground of such a spiritual constitution in man
as he has already asserted. It is only the recognition of a true will
in man—a spirit or supernatural in man, although “not necessarily
miraculous”—which renders sin possible. “These views of the spirit and
of the will as spiritual,” he says more than once, “are the groundwork
of my scheme.” There was nothing more significant or fundamental in
all his theology. If there is not always a supernatural element in
man in the shape of spirit and will, no miracles or anything else can
ever authenticate the supernatural to him. A mere formal orthodoxy,
therefore, hanging upon the evidence of miracles, is a suspension
bridge without any real support. So all questions between infidelity
and Christianity are questions here, at the root, and not what are
called “critical” questions as to whether this or that view of the
Bible be right, or this or that traditionary dogma be true. Such
questions are, truly speaking, inter-Christian questions, the freest
views of which all Churches must learn to tolerate. The really vital
question is whether there is a divine root in man at all—a spiritual
centre, answering to a higher spiritual centre in the universe. All
controversies of any importance come back to this. Coleridge would have
been a great Christian thinker if for no other reason than this, that
he brought all theological problems back to this living centre, and
showed how they diverged from it. Apart from this postulate, sin was
inconceivable to him; and in the same manner all sin was to him sin of
origin or “original sin.” It is the essential property of the will that
it can originate. The phrase original sin is therefore “a pleonasm.”
If sin was not original, or from within the will itself, it would not
deserve the name. “A state or act that has not its origin in the will
may be a calamity, deformity, disease, or mischief, but a sin it cannot
be.”
Again he says: “That there is an evil common to all is a fact, and
this evil must, therefore, have a common ground. Now this evil ground
cannot originate in the Divine will; it must, therefore, be referred
to the will of man. And this evil ground we call original sin. It
is a mystery, that is, a fact which we see, but cannot explain; and
the doctrine a truth which we apprehend, but can neither comprehend
nor communicate. And such by the quality of the subject (namely, a
responsible will) it must be, if it be truth at all.”
This inwardness is no less characteristic of Coleridge's treatment of
the doctrine of atonement or redemption. It is intelligible so far as
it comes within the range of spiritual experience. So far its nature
and effects are amply described or figured in the New Testament,
especially by St. Paul. And the apostle's language, as might be
expected, “takes its predominant colors from his own experience, and
the experience of those whom he addressed.” “His figures, images,
analogies, and references,” are all more or less borrowed from this
source. He describes the Atonement of Christ under four principal
metaphors: 1. Sin-offering, sacrificial expiation. 2. Reconciliation,
atonement, καταλλάγη. 3. Redemption, or ransom from slavery. 4.
Satisfaction, payment of a debt. These phrases are not designed to
convey to us all the Divine meaning of the atonement, for no phrases or
figures can do this; but they set forth its general aspect and design.
One and all they have an intelligible relation to our spiritual life,
and so clothe the doctrine for us with a concrete living and practical
meaning. But there are other relations and aspects of the doctrine of
atonement that transcend experience, and consequently our powers of
understanding. And all that can be said here is, “exit in mysteria.”
The rationalism of Coleridge is at least a modest and self-limiting
rationalism. It clears the ground within the range of spiritual
experience, and floods this ground with the light of reason. There is
no true doctrine can contradict this light, or shelter itself from its
penetration. But there are aspects of Christian doctrine that outreach
all grasp of reason, and before which reason must simply be silent. For
example, the Divine act in redemption is “a causative act—a spiritual
and transcendent mystery _that passeth all understanding. 'Who knoweth
the mind of the Lord, or being his councillor who hath instructed
him?' Factum est._” This is all that can be said of the mystery of
redemption, or of the doctrine of atonement on its Divine side.
And here emerges another important principle of the Coleridgian
theology. While so great an advocate of the rights of reason in
theology, of the necessity, in other words, of moulding all its facts
in a synthesis intelligible to the higher reason he recognises strongly
that there is a province of Divine truth beyond all such construction.
We can never understand the fulness of Divine mystery, and it is
hopeless to attempt to do so. While no mind was less agnostic in the
modern sense of the term, he was yet with all his vivid and large
intuition, a Christian agnostic. Just because Christianity was Divine,
a revelation, and not a mere human tradition, all its higher doctrines
ended in a region beyond our clear knowledge. As he himself said, “If
the doctrine is more than a hyperbolical phrase it must do so.” There
was great pregnancy in this as in his other conceptions; and probably
no more significant change awaits the theology of the future, than the
determination of this province of the unknown, and the cessation of
controversy, as to matters which come within it, and therefore admit of
no dogmatic settlement.
(2.) But it is more than time to turn to the second aspect, in
which Coleridge appears as a religious leader of the thought of the
nineteenth century. The _Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit_ was not
published till six years after his death, in 1840; and it is curious to
notice their accidental connection with the _Confessions of a Beautiful
Soul_, which had been translated by Carlyle some years before.[9]
These _Confessions_, in the shape of seven letters to a friend, gather
together all that is valuable in the Biblical criticism of the author
scattered through his various writings; and although it may be
doubtful whether the volume has ever attained the circulation of the
_Aids to Reflection_, it is eminently deserving—small as it is, nay,
because of its very brevity—of a place beside the larger work. It is
eminently readable, terse and nervous, as well as eloquent in style.
In none of his writings does Coleridge appear to greater advantage, or
touch a more elevating strain, rising at times into solemn music.
The _Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit_ were of course merely one
indication of the rise of a true spirit of criticism in English
theology. Arnold, Whately, Thirlwall, and others, it will be seen,
were all astir in the same direction, even before the _Confessions_
were published. The notion of verbal inspiration, or the infallible
dictation of Holy Scripture, could not possibly continue after the
modern spirit of historical inquiry had begun. As soon as men plainly
recognised the organic growth of all great facts, literary as well as
others, it was inevitable that they should see the Scriptures in a new
light, as a product of many phases of thought in course of more or
less perfect development. A larger and more intelligent sense of the
conditions attending the origin and progress of all civilisation, and
of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social
ideas advance, necessarily carried with it a changed perception of the
characteristics of Scriptural revelation. The old Rabbinical notion
of an infallible text was sure to disappear. The new critical method
besides is, in Coleridge's hands, rather an idea—a happy and germinant
thought—than a well-evolved system. Still to him belongs the honor of
having first plainly and boldly announced that the Scriptures were to
be read and studied, like any other literature, in the light of their
continuous growth, and the adaptation of their parts to one another.
The divinity of Scripture appears all the more brightly, when thus
freely handled. “I take up the work,” he says, “with the purpose to
read it as I should read any other work—so far as I can or dare. For
I neither can nor dare throw off a strong and awful prepossession
in its favor, certain as I am that a large part of the light and
life in and by which I see, love, and embrace the truths and the
strengths organised into a living body of faith and knowledge have
been directly or indirectly derived to me from the sacred volume.”
All the more reason why we should not make a fetish of the Bible, as
the Turk does of the Koran. Poor as reason may be in comparison with
“the power and splendor of the Scriptures,” yet it is and must be for
him a true light. “While there is a Light higher than all, even the
_Word that was in the beginning_;—the Light of which light itself is
but the Schechinah and cloudy tabernacle;—there is also a 'Light that
lighteth every man that cometh into the world;' and the spirit of man
is declared to be 'the candle of the Lord,'” “If between this Word,” he
says, “and the written letter I shall anywhere seem to myself to find a
discrepance, I will not conclude that such there actually is. Nor, on
the other hand, will I fall under the condemnation of those that would
_lie for God_, but, seek as I may, be thankful for what I have and
wait.”
Such is the keynote of the volume. The supremacy of the Bible as a
divinely inspired literature is plainly recognised from the first.
Obviously it is a book above all other books in which deep answers to
deep, and our inmost thoughts and most hidden griefs find not merely
response, but guidance and assuagement. And whatever there _finds_ us
“bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Spirit.”
“In the Bible,” he says again, “there is more that _finds_ me than I
have experienced in all other books put together; the words of the
Bible find me at greater depths of my being, and whatever finds me
brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from
the Holy Spirit.”
But there is much in the Bible that not only does not find us in
the Coleridgian sense, but that seems full of contradictions, both
moral and historical; the psalms in which David curses his enemies;
the obviously exaggerated ages attributed to the patriarchs; and the
incredible number of the armies said to be collected by Abijah and
Jeroboam (2 Chron. xiii. 3), and other incidents familiar to all
students of Scripture. What is to be made of such features of the
Bible? According to the old notion of its infallibility such parts
of Scripture, no less than its most elevating utterances of “lovely
hymn and choral song and accepted prayer of saint and prophet,” were
to be received as dictated by the Holy Spirit. They were stamped
with the same Divine authority. Coleridge rightly enough emphasises
this view as that of the fathers and reformers alike; but he no less
rightly points out that not one of them is consistent in holding to
their general doctrine. Their treatment of the Scriptures in detail
constantly implies the fallacy of the Rabbinical tradition to which
they yet clung. He no less forcibly points out that the Scriptures
themselves make no such pretension to infallibility, “explicitly or by
implication.” “On the contrary, they refer to older documents, and on
all points express themselves as sober-minded and veracious writers
under ordinary circumstances are known to do.” The usual texts quoted,
such as 2 Tim. iii. 16, have no real bearing on the subject. The little
we know as to the origin and history of many of the books of the
Bible, of “the time of the formation and closing of the canon,” of its
selectors and compilers, is all opposed to such a theory. Moreover,
the very nature of the claim stultifies itself when examined. For “how
can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible
expression?”
But if the tenet of verbal inspiration has been so long received and
acted on “by Jew and Christian, Greek, Roman, and Protestant, why can
it not now be received?” “For every reason,” answered Coleridge, “that
makes me prize and revere these Scriptures;—prize them, love them,
revere them beyond all other books.” Because such a tenet “falsifies
at once the whole body of holy writ, with all its harmonious and
symmetrical gradations.” It turns “the breathing organism into a
colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice,” which no man
hath uttered, and no human heart hath conceived. It evacuates of all
sense and efficacy the fact that the Bible is a Divine literature
of many books, “composed in different and widely distant ages under
the greatest diversity of circumstances and degrees of light and
information.” So he argues in language I have partly quoted and
partly summarised. And then he breaks forth into a magnificent passage
about the song of Deborah, a passage of rare eloquence with all its
desultoriness, but which will hardly bear separation from the context.
The wail of the Jewish heroine's maternal and patriotic love is heard
under all her cursing and individualism—mercy rejoicing against
judgment. In the very intensity of her primary affections is found the
rare strength of her womanhood; and sweetness lies near to fierceness.
Such passages probably give us a far better idea of the occasional
glory of the old man's talk as “he sat on the brow of Highgate Hill,”
than any poor fragments of it that have been preserved. Direct and to
the point it may never have been, but at times it rose into an organ
swell with snatches of unutterable melody and power.
(3.) But Coleridge contributed still another factor to the impulsion
of religious thought in his time. He did much to revive the historic
idea of the Church as an intellectual as well as a spiritual
commonwealth. Like many other ideas of our older national life this
had been depressed and lost sight of during the eighteenth century.
The Evangelical party, deficient in learning generally, was especially
deficient in breadth of historical knowledge. Milner's History, if
nothing else, serves to point this conclusion. The idea of the Church
as the mother of philosophy and arts and learning, as well as the nurse
of faith and piety, was unknown. It was a part of the Evangelical
creed, moreover, to leave aside as far as possible mere political and
intellectual interests. These belonged to the world, and the main
business of the religious man was with religion as a personal affair,
of vast moment, but outside all other affairs. Coleridge helped once
more to bring the Church as he did the gospel into larger room as a
great spiritual power of manifold influence.
This volume _On the Constitution of Church and State according to the
idea of each_ was published in 1830, and was the last volume which
the author himself published. The Catholic Emancipation question had
greatly excited the public mind, and some friend had appealed to
Coleridge expressing astonishment that he should be in opposition to
the proposed measure. He replied that he is by no means unfriendly to
Catholic emancipation, while yet “scrupling the means proposed for
its attainment.” And in order to explain his difficulties he composed
a long letter to his friend which is really an essay or treatise,
beginning with the fundamental principles of his philosophy and ending
with a description of antichrist. The essay is one of the least
satisfactory of his compositions from a mere literary point of view,
and is not even mentioned by Mr. Traill in his recent monograph. But
amidst all its involutions and ramblings it is stimulating and full
of thought on a subject which almost more than any other is liable to
be degraded by unworthy and sectarian treatment. Here, as everywhere
in Coleridge's writings, we are brought in contact with certain large
conceptions which far more than cover the immediate subject in hand.
It has been sometimes supposed that Coleridge's theory of the Church
merely revived the old theory of the Elizabethan age so powerfully
advocated by Hooker and specially espoused by Dr. Arnold in later
times. According to this theory the Church and State are really
identical, the Church being merely the State in its educational and
religious aspect and organisation. But Coleridge's special theory
is different from this, although allied to it. He distinguishes the
Christian Church as such from any national church. The former is
spiritual and catholic, the latter institutional and local. The former
is opposed to the “world,” the latter is an estate of the realm. The
former has nothing to do with states and kingdoms. It is in this
respect identical with the “spiritual and invisible church known
only to the Father of Spirits,” and the compensating counterpoise of
all that is of the world. It is, in short, the Divine aggregate of
what is really Divine in all Christian communities, and more or less
ideally represented “in every true church.” A national church again
is the incorporation of all the learning and knowledge—intellectual
and spiritual—in a country. Every nation in order to its true health
and civilisation requires not only a land-owning or permanent class
along with a commercial, industrial, and progressive class, but
moreover, an educative class to represent all higher knowledge, “to
guard the treasures of past civilisation,” to bind the national life
together in its past, present, and future, and to communicate to all
citizens a clear understanding of their rights and duties. This third
estate of the realm Coleridge denominated the “Clerisy,” and included
not merely the clergy, but, in his own language, “the learned of all
denominations.” The knowledge, which it was their function to cultivate
and diffuse, embraced not only theology, although this pre-eminently
as the head of all other knowledge, but law, music, mathematics, the
physical sciences, “all the so-called liberal arts and sciences, the
possession and cultivation of which constitute the civilisation of a
country.”
This is at any rate a large conception of a national church. It is put
forth by its author with all earnestness, although he admitted that it
had never been anywhere realised. But it was his object “to present the
_Idea_ of a national church as the only safe criterion by which we can
judge of existing things.” It was only when “we are in full and clear
possession of the ultimate aim of an institution” that we can ascertain
how far “this aim has ever been attained in other ways.”
These, very briefly explained, are the main lines along which Coleridge
moved the national mind in the third decade of this century. They
may seem to some rather impalpable lines, and hardly calculated to
touch the general mind. But they were influential, as the course of
Christian literature has since proved. Like his own genius, they were
diffusive rather than concentrative. The Coleridgian ideas permeated
the general intellectual atmosphere, modifying old conceptions in
criticism as well as theology, deepening if not always clarifying the
channels of thought in many directions, but especially in the direction
of Christian philosophy. They acted in this way as a new circulation
of spiritual air all around, rather than in conveying any new body of
truth. The very ridicule of Carlyle testifies to the influence which
they exercised over aspiring and younger minds. The very emphasis with
which he repudiates the Coleridgian metaphysic probably indicates that
he had felt some echo of it in his own heart.—_Fortnightly Review._