Abstract
Thus wrote Mary Wamock in an article published in Theology in November 1980, entitled ‘Imagination Aesthetic and Religious’. This study has sought to trace in Coleridge’s writings his endeavours to perceive the nature of divine revelation in his experience of poetic inspiration and creativity. His habits of self-reflection prompted his insights into the psychology of belief, and his concern for language as a poet led him to a concern for the nature of ‘God-language’ in theology and religious discourse. This final chapter is not so much a conclusion in a formal sense, as it does not attempt to draw together and sum up the arguments of those which precede it. Rather, it seeks to illustrate the continuing importance of those matters which concerned Coleridge, as a Christian thinker who worked primarily through the categories of literature and poetry. Its approach is not historical, nor does it attempt to describe writers and theologians who have, in some way, been directly influenced by Coleridge,2 not least because, invariably, Coleridge is greater than any example given, slipping through its confines with an elusive abundance of creativity.3
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If religion is concerned with the relation between man and nature, or between man and God, if it must explore the difference between time and eternity, between goodness and badness, between the helplessness and the power of human beings, between their deep solitude and their superficial sociability, then knowledge of such things must come from the significance we find in our sensory experience, in what we actually see and hear.1
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Notes
Mary Warnock, ‘Imagination – Aesthetic and Religious’, Theology, LXXXIII (1980) 404.
For example, A. M. Allchin, ‘The Theological Vision of the Oxford Movement’, in Allchin and John Coulson (eds), The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium (London, 1967) pp. 56–7.
O. W. Jones, Isaac Williams and His Circle (London, 1971) pp. 145–7, uses Allchin’s work.
See, for example, on E. B. Pusey, Alf Härdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist (Uppsala, 1965) pp. 135–6.
Austin Farrer, ‘Revelation’, in Basil Mitchell (ed.), Faith and Logic: Oxford Essays in Philosophical Theology (London, 1957) pp. 84–107.
Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision (London, 1948) p. ix.
H. D. Lewis, ‘Our Experience of God’ (London, 1970) p. 156.
For another discussion of the nature of divinely authorized images and stories, see W. A. Whitehouse, ‘R. B. Braithwaite as an Apologist for Religious Belief’, in Whitehouse, The Authority of Grace: Essays in Response to Karl Barth, ed. Ann Loades (Edinburgh, 1981) pp. 137–44.
See Huw Parry Owen, ‘The Theology of Coleridge’, Critical Quarterly, 4 (1962) 60–1.
Helen Gardner, The Limits of Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1956) pp. 25–6.
David Pym, The Religious Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Gerrards Cross, 1978) p. 70.
In F. F. Bruce (ed.), Promise and Fulfilment; repr. in Austin Farrer, Interpretation and Belief ed. Charles C. Conti (London, 1976) pp. 39–53.
See, for example, M. Jadwiga Swiatecka, The Idea of the Symbol (Cambridge, 1980) p. 65.
Frank Kermode, ‘The Structures of Fiction’, Modern Language Notes, 84 (1969) 891–915.
Helen Gardner, In Defence of the Imagination, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1979–80 (Oxford, 1982) p. 114.
Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1977–8 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978) pp. 63–4.
John Coulson, review of In Defence of the Imagination, in Theology, 86 (1983) 71.
Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London, 1977) p. 18.
Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling (1851) Part I, Ch. 8, in Alan Shelston (ed.), Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings (Harmondsworth, 1971) p. 317.
F. D. Maurice, The Kingdom of Christ (London, 1883) dedication to the 2nd edn, vol. 1, p. xi.
H. D. Traill, Coleridge (1884, London, 1909) pp. 205–6.
George Watson, The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism (1962; rev. edn Harmondsworth, 1964) p. 130.
McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford, 1969) pp. 142, 218, 231, 236, 244, 379–80, etc; and his Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton, NJ, 1981) pp. 135–6, 281, 402–6, etc.
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York, 1964) The Nature of Religious Language’, pp. 55–7.
See David Jasper, ‘Supporting the Radicals: a Poetic Contribution’, The Heythrop Journal, XXII (1981) 407–16;
Don Cupitt, The World to Come (London, 1982) pp. 77–89.
Lord Coleridge (Geoffrey Duke, 3rd Baron), quoted in Kathleen Coburn, In Pursuit of Coleridge (London, 1977) p. 27.
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Jasper, D. (1985). Conclusion: Inspiration and Revelation. In: Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07509-6_8
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