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Grace and Nation: Coleridge's On the Constitution of Church and State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Alan Gregory
Alan Gregory
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

AnglicanismChurch of EnglandRomanticismColeridgeestablished churchreligious pluralismChurch and statepolitical theologyTrinitarianismdisestablishment
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Anglican Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , December 2007 , pp. 187 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) and The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust 2007

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References

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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

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