Coleridge's bible: Praxis and the "I" in scripture and poetry

NEXT to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's bed in his small attic room at Dr. Gillman's Highgate residence, 3 The Grove, the last eleven years of the poet's life, sat two books. One was Luther's Table Talk. The other was the authorized version of the Bible. The Bible inspired Coleridge, in something of the same fashion that Shakespeare's portrait had Keats. During the 1820s Coleridge wrote little on literature; the 1825 essay on Aeschylus' Prometheus which bored Charles Lamb was his last formal effort at literary criticism. Yet, though he jokingly called himself in that decade an "Author of Tomes, whereof, tho' not in Dutch, / The Public little knows, the Publisher too much" (CL 5.lix), he continued to publish. In particular, his study of Scripture accelerated. Besides his ongoing work on St. John's Gospel, Aids to Reflection ( 1826) earned its own place on many an Anglican's bedside table in the next fifty years and found a wide American audience. Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, a series of seven letters written around 1825, was published posthumously by H. N. Coleridge in 1840 as Letters on Inspiration.

Of course, he had written on the Bible throughout his career, as early as the six "Lectures on Revealed Religion" in Bristol in May and June of 1795. The Statesman 's Manual (1816), baffling Dorothy Wordsworth and angering William Hazlitt, had applied Biblical strictures and institutions to English life in a year of recession. So the religious core of Coleridge's thought deserves its increased scholarly attention. Anthony Harding's study of "inspiration" in Scripture and poetry has placed him historically in nineteenth-century religious currents. J. Robert Barth has continued to explore his theology relative to Christian tradition. Basil Willey and David Pym have traced the poet's growth over the years from Unitarian to "staunch" Church of England man. H. W. Piper has analyzed the relationship of symbol and his work on the Bible, and Graham Davidson has discussed the evolution and political relevance of his religious thought. Most recently, Ronald Wendling has described his "progress" to Christian faith within the context of his personal crises and lifelong emotional conflicts.

My own focus is on a relatively neglected aspect of Coleridge's hermeneutic those last years: his insistence on the essential practicality of Bible study. Its proper role is not to resolve conceptual problems posed by the Understanding, such as "Will virtuous non-Christians be saved?" or "Is Jesus present in the Eucharist in real or only symbolic terms?" In such matters the earnest quest for "proof" texts and the deductions of scholasticism will both end in frustration. No. We read the Bible "to teach us our duty" (AR 177); it is for our immediate use as social and therefore moral beings, who act and don't just think in the world. So what did this author known widely for "Dutch sublimity," his rolling, seemingly endless monologues on Schelling and Fichte, "summmject and ommmject," mean by "practical"? How did this value fit into his Christian thought? And what does this thrust toward praxis imply about his more widely known views on the literary imagination?

COLERIDGE read for four decades in at least seven languages. Yet in the Bible, he claimed, more "finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together" (Confessions 582). Most of us might say we "found" the Bible. But to Coleridge Scripture was less an object than an experience, a direct encounter, at the same time about the past and about himself. Rather than precategorizing it as infallible, as does the theory of what he usually called "plenary inspiration" and occasionally "Bibliolatry" or the "Automaton Scheme" (CL 5.617), we should read it like any other book. Literalism reveres Scripture as a plaster saint: it "petrifies at once the whole body of Holy Writ with all its harmonies and symmetrical gradations,-the flexile and the rigid,-the supporting hard and the clothing soft,-the blood which is the life . . ." (Confessions 591). "Bibliolatry," in other words, excludes us from the wrestling with story and symbol which a plunge into the book as a human document provides us. So Coleridge's first rule is the need for imaginative involvement; Scripture's effect on the reader must not be accretive or partial, but central and a movement of the whole person. It demands not "belief," an acquiescence of the Understanding based on external evidence, but faith, a linking of the Reason and Will, a movement of soul at its deepest level. In linking itself with the self-evident truths of our Reason, Scripture "proves" itself in the arena of our universal human experience. Coleridge's "great object" was the conviction that "the Bible and Christianity are their own evidence" (Confessions 586). Inspiration is as inspiration does.

Coleridge was not much concerned with outright denial of God's existence, an Enlightenment version of materialism which had run its course (AR 394-95). His attack on Biblical literalism has a rather different focus: in asserting that God revealed his word directly at every point, we remove the specifically human from Scripture. Instead of rich and complex literary characters, deeply human ones, the wild prophetess Deborah and the tormented patriarch Job become abstractions, puppets in the hands of a divine ventriloquist. And the ventriloquist merely mouths our own interpretation: ultimately, Bibliolatry worships our own voice.