Coleridge’s Trinity: The Defence of Immanence

Abstract

Up to this point, I have dealt primarily with the pantheism controversy itself, and have shown that Coleridge was more engaged with it than has been suggested before. Even McFarland focuses on it merely as one episode in a more general tradition of pantheism, and sees it, moreover, within the ambit of his concept of the conflict between the philosophy of the ‘It is’ and the philosophy of the ‘I am’. Furthermore, I argued in Chapter 8 that the problems that arise from pantheism had a more general importance for Coleridge, and that in many ways he was concerned that his own thought and beliefs might contain some kind of hidden pantheistic tendencies, or even that his thought might collapse into pantheism, as he supposed that Schelling’s had done.¹

Dieß ist der empirische Begriff, den jeder der Abstraktion unfähige Mensch von Gott sich bildet. Um so mehr blieb man bei diesem Begriff stehen, als man sich fürchtete, mit der reinen Idee des absoluten Seyns auf einen Spinozischen Gott zu gerathen. (SW I 309n)