Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR (1772–1834), English Romantic poet, literary critic, journalist, philosopher, and religious thinker. With William Wordsworth, Coleridge helped inaugurate the Romantic era with the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798). A devoted writer, he later worked sporadically as a journalist and lecturer. His life was shadowed by an unhappy marriage, ill health, and a lifelong drug addiction.

Raised in the Church of England by his minister father, Coleridge became a Unitarian during his student years at Cambridge, but he returned definitively to a trinitarian theology in 1805. Although essentially orthodox in his adherence to Church of England doctrine, Coleridge was often daringly innovative in his theological speculations on such concepts as the Logos, the Trinity, original sin, and the church. Aids to Reflection (1825) contains profound insights into the nature of faith and the relationship between faith and reason; On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830) offers a conservative view of the nature of the church and its "clerisy"; and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (published 1840) introduces into England the approaches to scripture of the German "higher criticism." His Notebooks (published 1957–) and Marginalia (published 1980–) also contain perceptive reflections on doctrine, church history, and theological controversy.

Coleridge was one of the most widely read men of his century. Hence, the influences on him were many, including David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, and William Godwin (whose necessitarianism he later rejected); Plato and the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists; the medieval Schoolmen; mystics like Jakob Boehme and (to a lesser extent) Emanuel Swedenborg; philosophers in the so-called pantheist tradition like Giordano Bruno and Barukh Spinoza; and the German transcendental philosophers, especially Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling. Each was interpreted, however, according to the needs of Coleridge's own organic philosophy and used to further his own theological speculations.

Coleridge's influence on subsequent religious thought was widespread, both in England and in the United States. He is commonly seen as a forerunner of the Broad Church movement through such disparate thinkers as Thomas Arnold, Julius Hare, and, especially, F. D. Maurice. There are also strong affinities between Coleridge and John Henry Newman, particularly in the two writers' approaches to religious epistemology. Through the writing of George MacDonald, Coleridge had—especially in his views on symbol, which are deeply grounded in his theology—an indirect influence on the imaginative literature of such writers as G. K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. Among Coleridge's poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with its anguished spiritual odyssey, became a paradigm for imaginative and spiritual journeying. In the United States, Aids to Reflection was particularly influential, made known especially by James Marsh, by W. G. T. Shedd (who published a seven-volume edition of Coleridge in 1853), and by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through Emerson, Coleridge's influence on American Transcendentalist thought was considerable.

Coleridge struggled against rationalism—both within the Protestant tradition and in the secular world—and against materialism, and he wrote vigorously of the need for a renewal of the spiritual dimensions of society and culture. His most important contribution to the religious thought of his own time may well be his introduction into England of German idealist thought and of higher criticism of scripture, while his most lasting contribution may be his reflections on the nature of religious language, especially on the role of symbol in religious experience.

The central resource for the study of Coleridge is The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols., edited by Kathleen Coburn (Princeton, 1970–); the lengthy introductions to these volumes are especially helpful. The most complete studies of Coleridge's religious thought are James D. Boulger's Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven, 1961) and my work Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass., 1969; 2d ed., 1987). Basil Willey's Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 1972) is, in the author's own words, an "intellectual and spiritual biography"; it brings both learning and good sense to Coleridge's complex life. Stephen Prickett's Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge, U.K., 1976) traces skillfully and perceptively the influence of Coleridge, especially his analysis of religious language, in religious writing of the later nineteenth century. James Cutsinger's The Form of Transformed Vision: Coleridge and the Knowledge of God (Macon, Ga., 1987) is a helpful analysis of Coleridge's theological foundations, and my book Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination (Columbia, Mo., 2003) explores the role of the religious imagination in Coleridge's work.