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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Understanding Coleridge's classic work On the Constitution of Church and State requires paying close attention to the system of distinctions and relations he sets up between the state, the ‘national church’, and the ‘Christian church’. The intelligibility of these relations depends finally on Coleridge's Trinitarianism, his doctrine of ‘divine ideas’, and the subtle analogy he draws between the Church of England as both an ‘established’ church of the nation and as a Christian church and the distinction and union of divinity and humanity in Christ. Church and State opens up, in these ‘saving’ distinctions and connections, important considerations for the integrity and role of the Christian church within a religiously plural national life.
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2. Given the scope of this essay, I have not engaged directly with the secondary literature dealing with Coleridge's political theory. Those who are interested might consult, among recent works, Knights, Ben, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Miller, John T., Ideology and Enlightenment: The Political and Social Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987)Google Scholar; Leask, Nigel, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought (London: Macmillan, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morrow, John, Coleridge's Political Thought: Property, Morality, and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (London: Macmillan, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregory, Alan, Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Edwards, Pamela, The Statesman's Science: History, Nature, and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. Church and State, p. 121.Google Scholar
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6. Mill, , Coleridge, pp. 207–12Google Scholar; see also Elliot, Hugh S.R. (ed.), The Letters of J.S. Mill, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1910), pp. 4–7.Google Scholar
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10. Church and State, pp. 55, 55*.Google Scholar
11. Avis, Paul, Church, States, and Establishment (London: SPCK, 2001), p. 51Google Scholar. Avis is paraphrasing a passage from Coleridge's ‘table talk’, cf. Coleridge, , Table Talk (part-volume I; ed. C. Woodring), Volume 14 of Coburn (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 482.Google Scholar
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13. Coleridge's clearest discussion of the distinction between ‘reason’ and ‘understanding’ is found in Aids to Reflection, Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion B, Aphorisms VIIIb and IX. In Church and State we find, ‘The Understanding, which derives all its materials from the senses, can dictate purposes only, i.e. such ends as are in their turn means to other ends.’
14. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Aids to Reflection (ed. John Beer), Volume 9 of Coburn (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 232.Google Scholar
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19. Notebooks III, 4443 f. 36. Coleridge, following Fichte and Schelling here, appeals to ‘the German word for sensation or feeling … Empfindung, i.e. an inward finding’ (Church and State, p. 180).Google Scholar
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21. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Lay Sermons (ed. R.J. White), Volume 6 of Coburn (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 72.Google Scholar
22. The earliest sections of Church and State, including the ‘Mystes’ dialogue were written in 1825, though the final work was not completed till 1829. The manuscripts of the Opus Maximum were written between 1819 and 1823 but Coleridge went on planning and re-planning the work. In 1828, as the likelihood of completion receded to a hopeless distance, he produced his most ambitious plan yet. See Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Opus Maximum (ed. Thomas McFarland), Volume 15 of Coburn (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, pp. c–cv.Google Scholar
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28. Opus Maximum, pp. 203–204Google Scholar. As our purpose is to elucidate the constitutional arguments of Church and State, it will suffice here to focus on the Eternal Son. Coleridge, however, understands the Spirit as also proceeding, by the same logic, from the Father and the Son. As the fullness of the Father's self-communication, the Son is also eternally causative and so wills the completion of the Divine communication by returning his own fullness to the Father. This ‘perichoresis’ is the reciprocal act of the Father and the Son, and as a Divine act it is causative of reality. The Spirit is thus the being of the reciprocal willing of Father and Son, the substance of mutual love: ‘eternal unity in the eternal alterity and distinction’, Opus Maximum, p. 209.Google Scholar
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30. Opus Maximum, p. 207Google Scholar. In a marginal comment on Waterland's Vindication of Christ's Divinity, Coleridge refers to Christ as ‘that Idea Idearum, the one substrative truth which is the form, ma ner, and involvent of all truths’.
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32. Church and State, pp. 54, 75.Google Scholar
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37. This prerogative, however, should be understood in the light of Coleridge's general caution regarding the extent of the State's coercive power: ‘the Magistrate's duty is not to punish or attempt to prevent all acts that may indirectly and in their remote consequences injure society … but such acts as are directly incompatible with the peace and security of society, leaving all else to the influences of religion, education, sympathy, necessity of maintaining a character, etc.,’ Coleridge, , Marginalia (part-volume I, ed. G. Whalley), Volume 12 of Coburn (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 248.Google Scholar
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53. Chadwick, , The Victorian Church, II, p. 438.Google Scholar
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55. ‘Denominations’, in sense of ‘kinds’, not churches.
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61. Norman, Edward, Christianity and the World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 2.Google Scholar
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63. Coleridge, , Marginalia, part-volume I, p. 233.Google Scholar
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