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Coleridgean Polarity and Theological Vision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

James S. Cutsinger
James S. Cutsinger
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
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Extract

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 During the past twenty years or so, as many of Coleridge's hitherto unpublished notebooks and other manuscripts have been brought to light, a number of scholars of English literature have begun to study his thought, including his theology,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. 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 76 , Issue 1 , January 1983 , pp. 91 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1983

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References

1 Barth, J. Robert, S.J., and McFarland, Thomas may be mentioned especially in this connection. See, respectively, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1969)Google Scholar and Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969).Google Scholar

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 in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination 1 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 vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (Biographia Literaria, Shawcross, J., ed. [Oxford: Oxford University, 1907] 1. 202)Google Scholar

One finds this passage quoted frequently in recent works dealing with the theological imagination. As but one among numerous examples, see Hart, Ray L., 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.Google Scholar

3 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (general editor): Vol. 4, The Friend, ed. Rooke, Barbara (Princeton: Princeton University, 1969); quotation from 1. 110.Google Scholar

4 Coleridge on Logic and Learning: With Selections from the Unpublished Manuscripts, ed. Snyder, Alice D. (New Haven: Yale University, 1929) 1.Google Scholar

5 Biographia Literaria, 2. 6.

6 Coleridge speaks of the “esemplastic” power of the imagination in the Biographia Lileraria, 1. 107; for his theory of life, see the whole of his “Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life,” Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, ed. Stauffer, Donald A. (New York: Random House, 1951) 558–606; for examples of Coleridge's distinction between reason and understanding, see The Friend, 1. 514–20 and Aids to Reflection, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1971) 211–25.Google Scholar

7 Muirhead, John H., Coleridge as Philosopher (New York: Humanities, 1930) 217Google Scholar; Barth, J. Robert, S.J., The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University, 1977) 11.Google Scholar

8 The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coburn, Kathleen (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949) 268.Google Scholar

9 Biographia Literaria, 2. 6.

10 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coburn, Kathleen (New York: Pantheon, 1961) vol. 2, entry 2332.Google Scholar

11 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Griggs, Earl Leslie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959) 4. 688.Google Scholar

12 The Friend, 1.473.

13 This descriptive phrase is taken from The Friend, where such “Landing-Places” were frequently employed.

14 Biographia Literaria, 1. 85–86.

15 The Friend, 1. 94n.

16 Relativism, Knowledge, and Faith (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960) 34.Google Scholar

17 Quoted by Owen Barfield in What Coleridge Thought (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 1971) 203 n. 24. I must acknowledge my great debt to Mr. Barfield for his incomparable assistance, both scholarly and personal, in all of my work on Coleridge.Google ScholarPubMed

18 “Unity or unition, and indistinguishable unicity or sameness,” writes Coleridge, “are incompatible terms. We never speak of the unity of attraction, or the unity of repulsion; but of the unity of attraction and repulsion” (Aids to Reflection, 206–7nn.).

19 Notebooks, vol. 2, entry 2344.

20 Ibid., entry 2705.

21 The Friend, 1. 479.

22 “Magnanimity,” in Omniana, or Horae otiosiores, by Southey, Robert and Coleridge, S. T. (London, 1812) sect. 129.Google Scholar

23 The Collected Works, ed. Coburn: Vol. 6, Lay Sermons, ed. White, R. J. (Princeton: Princeton University, 1972), “The Statesman's Manual,” 89.Google Scholar

24 Biographia Literaria, 1. 74.

25 John 17:21.

26 Quoted from Coleridge's fragmentary manuscript Opus Maximum by Boulger, James D. in Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University, 1961) 139.Google Scholar

27 Tracy, David, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1975) 8.Google Scholar

28 The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979) chaps. 3 and 4.Google Scholar

29 God with Us: Three Meditations (New Haven: Yale University, 1946) 47.Google Scholar

30 Though they are similar in several respects, Coleridgean polarity and the dipolar theism of contemporary process-theologies should therefore be distinguished. Where the latter seems concerned predominantly with conceptual transformation, with the criticism of classical theism, the former's chief object is perceptual change and the criticism of empirical cognition. Coleridge's main interest is not in substituting one idea (even the idea of polarity) for another idea, but in widening the range of human perception itself, in transforming vision and in finding a freshness of sensation.

31 Husserl, Edmund, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (trans. Gibson, W. R. Boyce; New York: Collier, 1962) 78.Google Scholar

32 Language and Myth (trans. Langer, Susanne K.; New York: Dover, 1953) 10, 11.Google Scholar