natur philosophie 25

"Naturphilosophie" and Christian Orthodoxy in Coleridge's View of the TrinityAuthor(s): Raimonda ModianoSource: Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 17, No. 1/2 (Nov., 1982), pp. 59-68Published by: Pacific Ancient and Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1316395 .

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NA TURPHIL OSOPHIE AND CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY IN

COLERIDGE'S VIEW OF THE TRINITY RAIMONDA MODIANO

From his earliest attempts to develop a system of natural philosophy Coleridge recognized that a proper explanation of the laws of the physical universe and of the emergence of life ultimately depended on a viable concept of the Absolute, the personal God of Christianity. This is what he found amiss in the works of German Naturphilosophen and what in his estimate was singularly responsible for the most flagrant errors in their doctrines. Schelling, for example, attempted to burn a candle at both ends, by giving the self and nature an equal share in originating the same series of productive acts. In declaring nature a self-subsistent entity, Schelling inevitably slipped into pantheism, making God "a part of the universe, nay, a product of the same."' Heinrich Steffens fared no better when, in following Schelling, he declared the oneness of nature and the Absolute.2 Even Kant, although not adventuring beyond physics in his analysis of the forces of nature, came dangerously close to pantheism when, in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, he explained the permanence of matter without any reference to spirit.3 For Coleridge the only correct answer to a theory of life was a transcendent deity, and the only alternative to pantheism was a system firmly grounded in the theistic doctrine of the trinity.4 But the trinity was not for Coleridge merely a convenient article of faith, something he could always turn to whenever he wanted to assert his superiority vis-a-vis the German philosophers by virtue of his clean religious views. Rather, the trinity represented for Coleridge the key to philosophic thinking as such. It is the doctrine of the trinity, he wrote, "that connects Christianity with philosophy," making religion as indispensable to the philosopher, as redemption is "to the moralist and psychologist."5 Through the concept of the trinity, Coleridge hoped to provide a secure basis for dynamic philosophy by bringing it within the sphere of Christian theology, a task to which he devoted many years of "incessant Thought, and . .. positive labor."6

Critics have generally regarded with skepticism Coleridge's efforts to synthesize German philosophy and Christian dogma. According to Bate, the "central difficulty that had blocked" Coleridge's magnum opus was "that of reconciling the 'dynamic philosophy' of nature with the Christian dualism of God and the created world."7 Wellek's position on this subject is well known: in order to make room for his religious views, Coleridge incorrigibly bends and misrepresents the radical theories of German philosophers. "It is a truly Coleridgean inconsistency," Wellek writes, "that he still asserts subjective idealism side by side with a belief in the Triune God and the historical creed of Christianity."8 It would be fruitless to deny that in some instances Coleridge's flights out of transcendental idealism into religious exhortations betray the

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urgency of belief rather than the rigor of analytic thinking. But one should not conclude from such instances that Coleridge would automatically sacrifice his allegiance to German philosophy in the face of contending Christian values. What Wellek and other critics have missed is the extent to which Coleridge reshaped fundamental Christian tenets in order to make them compatible with the principles of dynamic philosophy. This is most evident in Coleridge's conception of the trinity. In Coleridge's hands this most orthodox Christian dogma is rendered unorthodox, a fact that critics have acknowledged, but without being able to pin down thoroughly the source of Coleridge's unconventional handling of the doctrine. The source is actually not that obscure. Coleridge's most prominent statements on the trinity appear in writings concerned with various concepts of German idealism and of Naturphilosophie in particular. His marginalia to Boehme and Oken, as well as numerous notebook entries, indicate that Coleridge extracted .a philosophical model for the trinity from the Naturphilosophen, especially from Schelling,9 whose conception of the Absolute has as much bearing on Coleridge's notion of the trinity as the doctrines of the Church Fathers. We need to reexamine the claim, often made by Coleridge and reiterated by critics, that a system based on the trinity is directly opposed to the pantheistic systems of the German philosophers. Coleridge's conception of the trinity is essentially dynamic philosophy "repeated in a finer tone."'1

Coleridge's main revision of the concept of the trinity consists in his addition of a fourth element to the traditional triad of Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Originally, Coleridge claims, God is an absolute unity of form and essence, subject and object, having the ground of reality within himself, and possessing simultaneously all of his ideas and attributes." Coleridge names this state of undifferentiated, all-inclusive unity Prothesis or Identity and equates it with the absolute Will, the absolute Subjectivity, and with God as divine ground.'2 Through an "immanent Energy" in his consciousness God manifests his existence to himself in "a three-fold Act, total in each and one in all, "begetting the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Father represents God's primary act of self-assertion, the "I Am in that I Am." This marks the stage of relative subjectivity in divine consciousness, or, in Coleridge's terms, of "Ipseity." But in the very act of self-affirmation, God also begets the Son who stands for the Logos, the Word, the "deitas objectiva," complementing what at the opposite end is the "deitas subjectiva" in the Father.'3 Coleridge placed great emphasis on this phase of divine creativity. God's gesture of coming to know himself through the Son is an important model of how in a lower sphere man can attain an ideal self and become a fully self-concious and moral being. The Son is for God what another human being, "intensely similar, yet not the same," is for man.'4 He represents the "essential Symbol" or "real Image of God," the "sole adequate, Idea in God, of God."'5 Finally, God expends a second Energy (in order, not in time) to bring to full synthesis the Father and the Son, Ipseity and Alterity, the relatively subjective and the relatively objective, creating the Holy Ghost who represents the essence of love and of community.'6

Coleridge felt that his most important contribution to trinitarian theology was the distinction between God as ground (the Prothesis) and God as person.

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Ostensibly, Coleridge's insistence on this distinction was meant to protect his system from an error he often spotted in the works of the Naturphilosophen, namely that of placing polarity in the Absolute, and implicitly of representing the Deity as capable of development, not therefore, as a perfect being whose ideas are fully realized. Schelling, for example, like Fichte, described the eternal act of self-consciousness, which is the Absolute itself, as a strife of opposing tendencies, of subject and object, unlimited and limited activity. As long as Coleridge adhered to the notion of an original unity in the Godhead, prior to all division, he was confident that he did not deviate from the scholastic definition of God as "actus purissimus sine ulla potentialitate."'7 This view, repeated by Coleridge in many writings, has been responsible for the obfuscation of a most important source of Coleridge's concept of the trinity. In fact, the differentiation between an original unity in the Absolute and a triad of subsequent activities belongs, among others, to Schelling. Schelling, too, claims that the Absolute is originally an undivided unity, neither essence nor form but both simultaneously, and he distinguishes the phase of identity (A=A) from the moment of synthesis, which is a reconstituted unity after the Absolute divides itself into subject and object. There is a remarkable similarity between Coleridge's description of the "three-fold Act" of divine creativity and Schelling's unfolding of the series of acts by means of which the Absolute progresses from a state of identity to a state of antithesis, during which it perceives itself as divided into subject and object, and finally to a state of synthesis by which it returns to its original unity. 8

As late as 1830 Coleridge was still using a four-fold pattern and categories of dynamic philosophy to render his view of the trinity.19 In effect, for Coleridge God's creation of the trinity is an act of attaining self- consciousness. In order to know himself, God generates his own object, abandoning his original unity just as in Schelling the Absolute must, for the sake of self-knowledge, abandon its state of original identity.20 "Without the Son," Coleridge wrote, "in which and by which God is manifest to himself," he would not attain existence "in the same sense that a circle would not be without a center & a circumference."21 The separation between God the Father and the Son generates interaction and as it were, a flow of energy. This again shows the influence of Schelling's view that the Absolute is essentially an act, not an entity, a ceaseless movement from identity to antithesis and from antithesis back to identity. Coleridge is clearly attracted to the idea of a dynamic, self-conscious God, to a "God of action," as Boulger well observes, "known by events rather than as a subject to be contemplated."22

If it is true, then, that Coleridge borrowed from the Naturphilosophen a dynamic model for the trinity, how does his system overcome the pantheistic pitfalls from which the German philosophers evidently could not escape? Moreover, can we take for granted Coleridge's claim that in revising the traditional concept of the trinity by adding a fourth term he merely upheld the scholastic view of the deity? Some commentators have been unimpressed by Coleridge's meddling with the trinity, suspecting some foul heretical deviousness on Coleridge's part. Shedd, for example, believes that

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Coleridge's view of the trinity would have been "more successful, certainly more continuous and progressive," if he had not committed the error of "leaving the scheme of the Triad for that of the Tetrad, in his construction.... The error in this scheme consists in this: its assumption of an aboriginal Unity existing primarily by itself, and in the order nature, before a Trinity - of a ground for the Trinity . . . which is not in its own nature either triune or personal, but is merely the impersonal base from which the Trinity proper is evolved. In this way, we think, a process of development is introduced into the Godhead which is incompatible with its immutable perfection.... ."23

Shedd omits from this summary an important feature of Coleridge's conception of the trinity by which he hoped to remove the impersonality of an original ground. He equated the Prothesis with the Absolute Will. Coleridge was well aware that something called "Ground" can be easily confused with Spinoza's amorphous substance unless it is designated as Will. As he wrote to Edward Coleridge in 1826, "the supreme Reality, if it were contemplated abstractly from the Absolute Will, whose essence is to be causative of all Reality, would sink into a Spinozistic Deity."24 By contrast, when God is seen as Absolute Will, he appears from the very beginning as a self-sufficient and self-conscious being, substantially different from an impersonal ground in nature. Will thus ensures the personeity of God prior to its manifestation through the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Shedd is, however, right in stating that a pattern of development is inherent in Coleridge's representation of the trinity. This is clearly the result of Coleridge's use of categories from dynamic philosophy. But the question as to whether the notion of a dynamic deity automatically conflicts with the scholastic conception of God as a pure act without any potentiality is not so easily settled. Coleridge may not have been entirely wrong in thinking that the two views are not incompatible. If God's idea of his own perfection includes a process of development, and if this idea is fully realized, then God still retains his identity as "a pure act without any potentiality." All that is required by the scholastic definition is that God's ideas be always real or "intensely actual" and that his "Thoughts" be "anterior to all but himself alone."25 Furthermore, by virtue of the dynamical scheme he uses, Coleridge affirms the completeness of God's creative act. Nothing more can be added or substracted from the four phases that mark God's attainment of self-consciousness. God's manifestation of his dynamic energy does not therefore preclude the idea of his "immutable perfection." Here Coleridge was well served by a characteristic of Schelling's philosophy, namely the emphasis on a process of continuous activity in the Absolute, a process, which, nonetheless, is carried out in conformity with a rigid model of interactive categories that is both complete and, in Schelling's estimate, unalterable by time.

A more tenuous point regarding Coleridge's revision of the concept of the trinity concerns his claim that, unlike the Naturphilosophen, he was able to avoid the error of placing polarity in the Absolute. The difficulty here is posed by Coleridge's use of the terms "Thesis-Antithesis" to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son. How does this relationship differ from one of polarity, such as the polarity between subject and object in Schelling's system? Coleridge was well aware of this problem and in his

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various elaborations of the trinity he tried to redefine the dynamic model he borrowed from the Naturphilosophen. Instead of polarity, Coleridge emphasized the distinctness of each component of the trinity and he carefully avoided a language of opposition or strife in presenting the relationship between the Father and the Son. Polarity, as a model of explaining the motor of all activity both in the Absolute and in nature, had for Coleridge one serious flaw. Opposites, as he often stated, are always of the same essence.26 Hence, subject and object, nature and mind, man and God, the body and the soul, when viewed as polar entities, tend to merge into an amorphous indistinctness that eradicates their individuality. For Coleridge a system that abused polarity inevitably sacrificed qualities such as distinctness, diversity, and the essential disparateness of various orders of being. (Despite his fondness for the dynamic law of "Extremes Meet," Coleridge had serious reservations about the widespread application of this law, a fact that critics have not sufficiently acknowledged.) In Schelling's system Coleridge perceived a constant regression to a state of identity; the same power tends to fulfill all functions, to the point where the difference between the various phases of activity in the Absolute is lost. Thus, self-consciousness is in turn an original identity, an original antithesis and an original synthesis.27 Through the trinity Coleridge hoped to provide greater specificity to the various functions of divine creativity, a specificity guaranteed in a way by the very nomenclature of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Coleridge never tired of stressing the prominence of distinction in the kind of unity that the trinity represented. "The Idea of God," he argued, embodies a unity in which "Individuality is the intensest," and "Distinction the most manifest, and indestructible of all distinctions." This is why the trinity serves as "the Archetype, yea, the very substance and element of all other Unity and Union" and "must forever remain the 'genera generalissima' of all knowledge."28

The need to emphasize distinctness rather than polar sameness in the Godhead drew Coleridge's attention to the figure of the Son. The Son, by virtue of his double nature, human and divine, proved to be Coleridge's best chance of substantiating his claim that individuality was a constitutive part of the triune God. The Son, though born out of the divine ground, possesses an inviolable identity of his own that is "one with but not the same as" that of his divine parent. He is self-subsistent like the Father and the Absolute Will, but not "self-originated." Coleridge spent much time trying to capture the sensitive distinction between two essentially indivisible, yet self-subsistent powers, and I cannot here present the details of his analysis.29 He felt that if man failed to understand the primordial distinction between the Father and the Logos, he would also fail to understand other distinctions such as "the chasm infinitely infinite between the Deity and the creature," between the eternal and the human mind. This is what ultimately led to the "human aversion to conceive or admit the personeity" of God, which is the same thing as "the Distinctness, of the Word and the Spirit."30

As Boulger notes, Coleridge fully realized that "on the validity of the 'distinction' granted to the Logos within the greater unity of Identity hinges the strength of philosophical dualism of Creator and created, Absolute and individual will, God and created finite substance."3' Moreover, the

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independent status of the Son guaranteed a different relationship with the Father from one of opposition. Coleridge was much more comfortable with a model of activity that involved participation of free agents in each other's sphere of being rather than strife. Through the trinity Coleridge managed to humanize what in the systems of the Naturphilosophen is an abstract relationship between subject and object in the second phase of the transformative acts of the Absolute. He presents the interaction between the Father and the Son as an exchange of camaraderie made possible by the unifying influence of the Holy Ghost. It would be difficult to think of the law of "Extremes Meet" with reference to a relationship in which, as Coleridge described it, love "proceedeth from the Father to the Son," and "is returned from the Son to the Father" and "this circulation constitutes the eternal unity in the eternal alterity and distinction, the life of Deity in actu purissimu."32

But difficulties remain. The difference between polarity and mere distinctness is tenuous at best. In his later years Coleridge came to feel the burden of the dynamical scheme he used for the trinity. In defining the Holy Ghost, for example, he observed that this power should not be regarded as a synthesis of the Father and the Son, but as "ens simplissimum," as a "substantial Act proceeding from the Father and the Son and the Community of the Father and the Son."33 It is clear that even the term "synthesis" and not only polarity made Coleridge uncomfortable, suggesting that he had doubts about the safety of distinctness in the trinity within a methodological framework that retained the features of dynamic philosophy. And yet Coleridge could not abandon the idea of the dynamic God. The potent image of a God of action was attractive to Coleridge as an antidote to the states of indolence and paralysis to which he often fell prey. Coleridge's identification of the supreme Deity with the Absolute Will and his claim that even in man will is deeper than mind or reason,34 are undoubtedly related to his personal sense of inadequacy with regard to "the power to do, the manly effective will."35 But as is so often the case with Coleridge, emotional needs merely sharpened his speculative insights. By identifying the original unity in divine consciousness with the Absolute Will, Coleridge was able to retain the categories of Schelling's dynamic system without incurring the risk of pantheism. And his further transformations of the Schellingean model show that he developed deft strategies of integrating the scholastic view of the Deity and the representation of a dynamic Absolute. Coleridge's apprehensions about the model he was using for the trinity need not be interpreted as a failure to synthesize dynamic philosophy and Christian thought. In fact, I would like to suggest here that it was not his failure but the measure of his success that worried him. As Coleridge well knew, any synthesis, if it is to be genuine, can no longer be identical with its original components. As expected, Coleridge could not be entirely comfortable with the inevitable alteration of Christian dogma after its contact with dynamic philosophy. He was particularly apprehensive about the public's readiness to receive a new doctrine of the trinity that had absorbed so may concepts from German philosophy as to appear unconventional. In Coleridge's case, uncertainties about the reception of his ideas translated easily into uncertainties about himself and the material he was presenting. There are, undoubtedly, inherent

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conceptual difficulties in Coleridge's new version of the trinity, especially that delicate dividing line between polarity and distinctness in the Godhead. Coleridge was not able to subscribe to the principle that Kant would so serenely advocate, namely that "difficulties are not doubts."36 For Coleridge, as for most of us, difficulties and doubts went together, but in the end neither detracted from his success in proving that after all Christianity and dynamic philosophy were not unreconciled opponents.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

NOTES 'See Coleridge's response to F. W. J. von Schelling's Einleitung zu seinem

Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (Jena & Leipzig, 1799) in his letter to J.H. Green of September 30, 1818. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956- 71), IV, 874.

21nGrundzjige der philosophischen Naturwissenschaft (Berlin, 1806), a work Coleridge annotated, Steffens adhered to Schelling's view that nature is not separate from the spiritual essence that constitutes the Absolute. Every product of nature is infinite and indestructible, having its "home in the divine being" (Vorrede, p. XII). For Coleridge's awareness of the pantheistic "blasphemy" implicit in Steffens' concept of the Absolute, see his marginal note to Grundzuge, p. 28, quoted in Henri Nidecker, "Notes Marginales de S.T. Coleridge, "Revue de Litterature Comparee, 11 (1931), 275.

31n his marginal notes to Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Naturwissenschaft (Riga, 1787) pp. 116-118, Coleridge described Kant's analysis of the permanence of matter as a "mere Sand-rope of Assertions," and as atheistic in conception. He accused Kant of making substance synonymous with God and of confusing God with the sensible world. Coleridge's annotated copy of Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde is in The British Library.

4"Even while my faith was confined in the trammels of Unitarianism...," Coleridge wrote in a note to Jacob Boehme's Aurora, "I saw clearly as a truth in philosophy, that the trinitarian was the only consequent Medium between the Atheist and the Anthropomorph." Marginalia, vol. 12 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. George Whalley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), I, 566. See also Marginalia, I, 645-646, 679. For discussions of Coleridge's concept of the trinity see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 191-255; James D. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961),esp. pp. 94- 142; J.Robert Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 85-104, and Craig William Miller,

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"An Examination of the Key Terms in Coleridge's Prose Writings," Unpublished Dissertation (University of Washington), pp. 7-43.

5Anima Poetae, ed. E.H. Coleridge (London: Heinemann, 1895), p. 288. 6From Coleridge's description of his often projected magnum opus in

Collected Letters, IV, 736.

7Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (New York: Collier Books, 1973), p. 214.

8Rene Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England 1793-1838 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1931), p. 124.

9See e.g. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957 [vol I] ; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961 [vol II]; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973 [vol. III]), III, 4427, 4428, 4429; Marginalia, I, 562-565, 646-647, 679. In his marginal notes to Lorenz Oken's Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (Jena, 1809) Coleridge commented on both the inadequacy of Oken's conception of the Absolute as well as on the possible adaptations of his views to an orthodox rendition of the trinity. See esp. Coleridge's note to vol. I, p. 19 of Lehrbuch (cited in Notebooks, III, 4428 n.), where Coleridge detects a possible convergence between Naturphilosophie and Christian orthodoxy.

'oFrom John Keats's often-quoted letter to Benjamin Bailey of 22 November 1817.

"See Notebooks, III, 4427 and Collected Letters, II, 1195. 120n the distinction between God as divine ground and God as person, see

Marginalia, I, 561 n. 5.

'3See Marginalia, I, 564; Notebooks, III, 4427 and Notes, Theological, Political and Miscellaneous, ed, Derwent Coleridge (London, 1853), pp. 395- 396.

'4Notebooks, I, 1679.

'5Collected Letters, IV, 771.

16Marginalia, I, 564. 17For Coleridge's use of the scholastic definition of God, see On the

Constitution of the Church and State (vol. 10 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), ed. John Colmer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), Appendix E, p. 234 and Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (London: Clarendon Press, 1907), I, 94.

8"For Schelling's analysis of the series of activities in the Absolute or self- consciousness, see his System des transcendentalen Idealismus (Tiibingen, 1800) and Einleitung zu seinem Entwurfeines Systems der Naturphilosophie, both of which Coleridge annotated.

'9See Notes, Theological, Political and Miscellaneous, pp. 395-396.

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20See the important notebook entry written in 1818 (Notebooks, II, 4427), where Coleridge takes over Schelling's dynamic model and transplants it into the doctrine of the trinity.

21 Marginalia, I, 679.

22Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker, p. 134. 23Aids to Reflection, vol. I of The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, ed. W.G. Shedd (New York: Harper, 1858), Introduction, p. 44. Boulger in Coleridge as Religious Thinker, p. 134, and Bate in Coleridge, p. 217, also argue that Coleridge introduces potentiality and becoming in God.

24Collected Letter, II, 1195. 25Ibid.

26See e.g. On the Constitution of the Church and State, pp. 24* and n.3, 117.

27See Systems des Transcendentalen Idealismus. 28Collected Letters, II, 1196. 29See the note from Opus Maximum quoted by Boulger, Coleridge as

Religious Thinker, p. 138. 30Marginalia, 573-574, 565.

31Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker, p. 138. 32From Opus Maximum, quoted by Boulger, Coleridge as Religious

Thinker, p. 141.

33Quoted by Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker, p. 141. 34See e.g. Collected Letters, VI, 600.

35Notebooks, II, 2086.

36Prolegomena and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, transl. Ernest Belfort Bax (London: George Bell and Sons, 1883), p. 145 n.

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APPENDIX COLERIDGE'S VIEW OF THE TRINITY

PROTHESIS 1DENTITY

THESIS ANTITHESIS IPSEITY ALTERITY

SYNTHESIS COMMUNITY

IDENTITY The Absolute Will, the Good, the Ground

IPSEITY The I AM, the Father,

the Supreme Will Being

A L TERITY The Son, the Logos,

Truth, the Supreme Mind, the only begotten Word,

Intellect

COMMUNITY Life, Love, the Holy Spirit, Action

PROTHESIS The Absolute Subjectivity

THESIS The Relatively Subjective

Deitas subjectiva

ANTITHESIS The Relatively Objective

Deitas objectiva

SYNTHESIS The relatively subjective united with the relatively objective

PROTHESIS: GOD AS GROUND

THESIS, ANTITHESIS, SYNTHESIS: GOD AS PERSON

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natur philosophie 25

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