The Scriptures: The Interpretation of the Old Testament

Abstract

In the last decade of his life, Coleridge wrote with a renewed sense of divine calling and mission. He thought of himself as both a biblical critic and a theologian, and he devoted time each day to studying and writing on the Bible (CN V 5938). Correspondingly, the Bible became a more prominent aspect of the planned magnum opus than in earlier years. Biblical language permeates the distinctively philosophical sections on natural and revealed religion in late accounts. In the fifth of six parts (presumably forming an entire volume of its own), Coleridge even proposed to take up the “Letters on Scripture” (later published as Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit), and to examine each book of the Bible in order to form “a real History of the Bible,” “a complete Substitute for the German Introductions to the Old & New Testaments” (CN V 5868). Coleridge’s revised plan for the opus demonstrates that the biblical commentaries that fill the late notebooks are not random jottings but are rather a fundamental part of a larger project that he hoped to see through to publication during his lifetime. One September 1830 notebook entry offers a profound testament to his intentions:

In the scattered Notes on the Scriptures contained in these Flycatchers, and which, God permitting and assisting, I intend to bring into some Sequence, corresponding to the Order of the Books in our Bible—my Object is—not to explain the geographical or historical primary meanings, except where some philosophical principle is involved therein … but I take the Books, as they must be read by the great Mass of Mankind, as Books of no time because for all times—not so much what David consciously meant or understood himself to mean, but what we may and ought to understand by the Words. (CN V 6463)

Alas!—the main hindrance to the use of the Scriptures, as your Manual, lies in the notion that you are already acquainted with its contents … You say, you are already familiar with the Scriptures. With the words, perhaps, but in any other sense you might as wisely boast of your familiar acquaintance with the rays of the sun, and under that pretence turn away your eyes from the light of Heaven.

S. T. Coleridge (LS 24)