Abstract
Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit is Coleridge’s principal attack upon Bibliolatry, that unthinking reverence for the Bible which offends the rights of reason and rejects interpretation by means of an external frame of reference. His devotion to Scripture arises from an appeal to the whole experience of man, the Bible received inasmuch as it finds him ‘at greater depths’ of his being, bringing with it ‘an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit’.1 Revelation must be authenticated in man’s human essence. ‘Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it.’2 The first part of this chapter will examine how, in the task of reflection and self- discovery, man necessarily employs his faculties of reason and will in responding to divine initiative. The authentication of revelation, therefore, is the assent in a new and objective form to that to which he is already subjectively related.3
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Notes
See Huw Parry Owen, ‘The Theology of Coleridge’, Critical Quarterly, 4 (1962) 59–67.
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1971) pp. 65–71.
See David Pym, The Religious Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Gerrards Cross, 1978) p. 70;
Geoffrey Rowell, Hell and the Victorians (Oxford, 1974) pp. 69–70.
F. J. A. Hort, ‘Coleridge’, Cambridge Essays (London, 1856) p. 328.
The texts used for these works by Kant and Fichte will be the translations by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York, 1960), and by Garrett Green (of the second edition of 1793), Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (Cambridge, 1978), respectively; cited henceforth as Religion and Attempt.
See Helen Gardner, Religion and Literature (London, 1971) p. 134.
CN, III 4005. See also Aurel Kolnai, ‘The Thematic Primacy of Moral Evil’, Philosophical Quarterly, VI (1956) 27–42.
See Friend(CC), I, pp. 154–61: The essay on ‘Reason and Understanding’, ‘the leading thought of which’, wrote Coleridge, ‘I remember to have read in the works of a continental Philosopher’ (p. 154). He refers to Jacobi, David Hume … oder Idealismus und Realismus: Werke, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1815) pp. 8–17; Von den Göttlichen Dingen
Beilage A: Werke, vol. 3 (1816) pp. 429–35. See also F. J. A. Hort, op. cit., pp. 321–4.
Henri Nidecker, ‘Notes Marginales de S. T. Coleridge’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 7 (1927) 142. The copy of the 1794 edition, annotated by Coleridge, is in the British Library.
T. A. Rixner, Handbuch der Geschichten der Philosophie (1823), trans. and quoted by Lovejoy, op. cit., p. 55.
See Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864; London, 1959) p. 169.
See John Coulson, Religion and Imagination:‘in aid of a grammar of assent’ (Oxford, 1981) p. 60.
Newman, Historical Sketches (London, 1872) vol. 3, pp. 41–2.
Notebook 26 (c. 1817–18) ff. 14–17. See further James D. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven, Conn., 1961) pp. 154–7.
See G. N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale, 1969) pp. 57–8.
James Beattie, Essays on the Nature and Immutability of Truth – in Opposition to Sophism and Scepticism (Edinburgh, 1776) p. 89. On Beattie, see also above, Ch. 5, p. 81.
CL, IV, pp. 791–2. On Kant, see further H. J. Paton, In Defence of Reason (London, 1951) pp. 157–77;
P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment (London, 1974) pp. 178–88.
See David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought (London, 1974) p. 101;
Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown, Conn., 1971) Appendix: ‘Polar Logic’, pp. 179–93. Also, see above, Ch. 3.
Logic, pp. 241–2; 17 Cent., p. 89. See also J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London, 1930) pp. 84–5.
Marginalia on Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785); see Nidecker, op. cit., 337.
Emil L. Fackenheim, ‘Kant and Radical Evil’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 23 (1954) pp. 350–1.
See letter to J. C. Lavater, 28 Apr 1775: ‘God must have hidden some supplement to our deficiencies somewhere in the depth of His decrees’ (Arnulf Zweig (ed. and trans.), Kant’s Philosophical Correspondence, 1759–99 (Chicago, 1967) p. 80). See also Religion, pp. 179–90;
D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Kant’s Philosophy of Religion’, Philosophy, 50 (1975) 135–6.
See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. T. K. Abbott, 6th edn (London, 1909) p. 151.
See A. O. Lovejoy, ‘Coleridge and Kant’s Two Worlds’, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, Md., 1948) p. 272.
Elinor Shaffer, ‘Metaphysics of Culture: Kant and Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970) 199–218.
See Mary Midgley, ‘The Objection to Systematic Humbug’, Philosophy, 53 (1978) 147–69, esp. 151 Midgley criticizes the assumption often attributed to Kant, that our feelings do not concern morality.
See also, Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (London, 1980) pp. 258–61.
Shaffer, op. cit., 212. See also Luther, The Bondage of the Will (1525), trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (London, 1957) p. 270: ‘And I do not accept or tolerate that middle way [mediocritatem] which Erasmus … recommends to me, namely to allow a very little to free will, so that the contradictions of Scripture … may be more easily removed.’
See: Alice D. Snyder, Coleridge on Logic and Learning (New Haven, Conn., 1929); Boulger, op. cit., pp. 121–4;
T. McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton, NJ, 1981) pp. 342–81.
Stephen Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (Cambridge, 1970) p. 181.
Church and State, p. 4. See also Basil Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (Harmondsworth, 1969) p. 53.
Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford, 1969) p. 191.
D. G. James, The Life of Reason: Hobbes, Locke, Bolingbroke (London, 1949) p. 270.
Stephen Happel, ‘Words Made Beautiful by Grace: on Coleridge the Theologian’, Religious Studies Review, 6 (1980) 206.
Laurence S. Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist (Ithaca, NY, 1977) pp. 25, 258–9. The concluding phrase Lockridge quotes from the Opus Maximum MS in the Victorian University Library, Toronto. OM, B3, ff. 166–71.
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Jasper, D. (1985). The Later Prose and Notebooks. In: Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07509-6_7
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