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Religion and the reflective self: Coleridge’splatonism revisitedLeslie Armour aa The Dominican College of Philosophy & Theology, Ottawa, and The University of Ottawa

Version of record first published: 04 Jun 2010

To cite this article: Leslie Armour (2002): Religion and the reflective self: Coleridge’s platonism revisited, British Journalfor the History of Philosophy, 10:3, 467-475

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1 Dr. Hedley refers throughout to the edition edited by John Beer, Collected Works of SamuelTaylor Coleridge, vol. 9, Princeton: The University Press, and London: Routledge, 1993.

RELIGION AND THE REFLECTIVE SELF:COLERIDGE’S PLATONISM REVISITED

Leslie Armour

Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: AIDS TO REFLECTION and theMirror of the Spirit. Douglas Hedley. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000, pp. xiv + 330. £40 (hb.). ISBN 0-521-77035-1.

Douglas Hedley’s book is an attempt to explore the philosophical systemthat underlies and holds together the aphorisms, meditations, and didacticessays that form Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection.1 Coleridge’s book appearedin 1825 when, battered by failures in his personal relations and the troublesof his eldest son Hartley whose life had begun to mirror his own, andworried by trends of thought his younger son Derwent was encountering atCambridge, he sought refuge in the structure and meaning of the inner life.

Coleridge had not given up hope for the world. He dreamed of a clerisythat would civilize the land and of a social order that would balance land-owning classes and the new industrialists, bring peace to all and permit –though it could not guarantee – the happiness of many. But he had turnedinward. Neither the passionate loves nor the revolutionary fervour of hisyouth remained and there were those, like Hazlitt, who had come to thinkhim lost in conservatism.

The term ‘Spiritual Religion’ occurs throughout Aids to Reflection. Bythat is meant a religion based on revelation rather than natural evidences,but the ‘revelation’ is in the workings of the inner life. ‘Spirit’ is not meantspookily. Coleridge doesn’t think that religious revelation can be graspeddirectly but only through other things, chiefly one’s whole life and theexperience of the mind.

Coleridge is recommending a journey after the manner of the Itinerar-ium of St. Bonaventure though he does not map it out so precisely. FromColeridge’s ‘aids’ for the journey, Dr. Hedley has built something like asystematic account of reality and knowledge according to Coleridge. He hasdone it with great care and some subtlety, but the result is more like a mapof the intended destination along with some details of the ground to be

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British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10(3) 2002: 467–475

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covered. It is not a timetable for the journey but it is not really an accountof it either. Dr. Hedley is looking for the elements of a philosophical systemand addressing philosophers interested in systems.

Aids to Reflection begins in an examination of Coleridge’s own spiritualstate, and it is the philosophical analysis of the structure of the inner life thatchiefly interests Dr. Hedley. He sees the work as clearly Neoplatonic,centred on the fact that human beings reflect the image of a triune God. Itis not a Neoplatonic system centred on the One that transcends being butNeoplatonic in that it sees God as truth, and truth as reflected in humanbeings in a way that enables them to transcend petty ends and transitoryhappinesses. Coleridge’s ostensible aim was to provoke reflection. ButHedley sees in the book a missionary aim, albeit a gentle one. Coleridgereally wanted his readers to take the spiritual journey and feared that theymight fall into the hands of spiritual cutpurses along the way. Coleridgethought that Derwent (who edited an edition of the work in 1831) and otherslike him needed intellectual insight to prevent them from falling into thehands of a motley crew of Socinians, Unitarians, Deists, and Utilitarians.

The first target of the book is thus the people Coleridge took to bephilosophers who had lost touch with the genuinely spiritual and becomeabsorbed in worldly orders and pleasures, or had opted for simplicities thataccorded easily with popular world-views. In Coleridge’s view , such peoplehad really cut themselves off from their own inner reality. His thesis wasthat, in an Augustinian way, truth and beauty are within us, and it is withinourselves that we are to find the way to transcend ourselves.

Hedley sees Coleridge’s work – as did Coleridge himself – as a continu-ation of English Platonism. He makes a good case for continuity, but thereis a forking of the ways which the reader should bear in mind. Hedleyespecially draws on Cudworth and Berkeley (the Berkeley of more Platonicmoods), though Henry More is mentioned a number of times and BenjaminWhichcote occasionally. The Cambridge Platonists, however, were broadchurchmen, none more so than Ralph Cudworth. Cudworth’s aim was toshow that there is a system within which everything can be accommodatedin the way intended by the ‘infinite overflowing fulness’2 of the divinity.Coleridge in old age, as Hedley insists, was worried lest too much accom-modationism was watering away Christianity.

Hedley also sees Coleridge, as many people have, as a precursor of theBritish idealism of the later part of the century. And there is certainly a lineof thought that connects Coleridge to T. H. Green and to the Cairds. Butthe most self-absorbed of the British idealists (or the least socially involvedof them ), F. H. Bradley, is wryly self-deprecating in a way that does notsuggest Coleridge. At the other extreme of idealist involvement with theworld, Bernard Bosanquet is hardly given to self-examination at all. Aidsto Reflection became a central text of the American transcendentalists, and

468 LESLIE ARMOUR

2 See note 8 below.

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the most obvious idealist followers of Coleridge as searchers of the innerlife are the American ‘personalist’ idealists from Borden Parker Bowne toEdgar Sheffield Brightman and Ralph Tyler Flewelling.3 Josiah Royce alsoused Schelling in ways that remind one of Coleridge.

Dr. Hedley is surely right to see a common core of idealist notions. Thefly-leaf of his book contains a quotation from Cudworth.

Mind and understanding is, as it were, a diaphanous and crystalline globe, or akind of notional world, which hath some reflex image, and correspondent ray,or representation in it, to whatsoever is in the true and real world of being.

This passage – from Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe 4

– does, indeed, announce central elements of Coleridge’s project. Dr.Hedley makes the most of the connection and agrees with Coleridge thathis most important ideas were found in England before he encountered thephilosophy of Friedrich Schelling, from whom he no doubt eventuallyborrowed a lot.5 But Cudworth’s ideas look very different when they areseen from the perspective of Coleridge’s inner life, and it is not a complaintabout Dr. Hedley’s book to insist that Cudworth and Coleridge are also inequally if not more important ways very different. It would take a differentbook to tell the story of these ideas from Cudworth’s perspective and to seethe rich undergrowth of Cambridge thought in a way that would do it morejustice than Dr. Hedley, necessarily looking through Coleridge’s eyes, canmuster in this one.

Dr. Hedley’s book emphasizes the complexities of philosophy andreligion at Cambridge, and indeed, in more senses than one it is aCambridge book, but the perspective is always Coleridgean. Since Hedleyhas in a sense set himself up as a surrogate Coleridge, working out thesystem which he thinks must have been in Coleridge’s mind, he has – forthe most part wisely – refrained from adopting conflicting points of view.

But the reader needs to bear this in mind and understand the Cud-worthian perspective, too. There is a problem, as well, in trying to grasp thewhole cast of characters Coleridge and Dr. Hedley address. For the seeds ofthe ideas that Hedley wants to work out were used by others and cross-breda little to produce plants that Coleridge did not admire and that are not quiteCudworthian either. Jeremy Taylor, for instance, was a man much liked and

COLERIDGE’S PLATONISM REVISITED 469

3 All three were associated with universities of Methodist origin in which ‘enthusiasm’ hadgiven way to philosophical reflection.

4 Vol. ii, p. 517 of the 1845 edition edited by John Harrison (London: Thomas Tegg). Dr.Hedley uses it, no doubt, because it has an excellent index as well as J. L. Mosheim’s still-valuable notes. The quotation is on p. 638 of the original published in London by RichardRoyston, 1678.

5 Schelling occupies fifteen or so pages of Dr. Hedley’s book and there are half a dozen otherreferences to him, but the context as well as Dr. Hedley’s concern with the Cambridgeconnections really prevents a full analysis of Coleridge’s connection to him.

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admired on all sides, but Coleridge treats him as a Crown prosecutor mighttreat an old lag. And even Locke, whose connection to the CambridgePlatonists is real and important in its own way, is not allowed a defence.

It is best to start thinking about the issues, as Dr. Hedley does, with bothCudworth and Coleridge in mind. The titles of their books are good cluesto the differences between them. Coleridge is concerned with reflection. Asmuch as Locke, he sees reflection as an internal activity. But he means thetitle to suggest two things. One is the Neoplatonic return to God, literallythe return of things to their maker. The other is the mind’s awareness ofitself.

One might think that what one needs for the first is the traditional ideaof the reflection of God in nature. But for Coleridge – and I think Dr.Hedley agrees with him – the way back is not through Archdeacon Paley’sexamination of the detailed facts of the world. The surprise of the arch-deacon’s discovery of a watch lying unattended on the ground as if it werea natural object is twofold. First of all it seems unlikely that so manyelements could come together by chance in their present form. One maysometimes find lumps of gold in river beds, but not metal in sheets or steelworked into springs.

The second surprise is that the parts work together for a purpose.6 ButColeridge is not interested in surprises. Dr. Hedley rightly notes thatColeridge is not fond of arguments from miracles. Nor is he interested inexperience considered as sensory data, for that is Hume’s well-defendedground, and Hume’s point is that they are given just as discrete impressionsand, as such, none has any necessary connections to any other. If they aretaken as passively received atoms, nothing follows from the study of them.

The reflection has to take place in our own experience. This wouldrequire a very different notion of experience from that of Hume and,indeed, from what one might think of as classical empiricism. Coleridge’snotion of ‘experience’ is much closer to the first meaning given in theOxford English Dictionary and to the meaning of the same word in French:experience is an activity, essentially an experiment. It is in the working ofthe mind that we learn about it. But what is revealed is the nature of minditself and the way in which mind as such is reflected through individualminds. Coleridge has room for revelation but, as Dr. Hedley insists, it is notBiblical revelation in which true propositions are somehow announced byGod to us. Revelation for Coleridge is a process by which the workings ofour own minds show their relations to the divine mind. This does involvean argument to the effect that mind is ‘senior’, as Cudworth put it, to the

470 LESLIE ARMOUR

6 The argument may be puzzling in two senses. It seems to be a combination of a claim aboutprobabilities or improbabilities, and a claim like Aquinas’s about finding that things worktogether. But Paley’s objects have been made – forced if you like – to work together andAquinas is talking about a whole world and its governance, a world composed of thingswhich, unlike Paley’s, naturally work together.

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material world. We can see from watching it at work that certain logicalrelations establish its priority. The underlying argument is that the world isintelligible and that things must have properties by virtue of which they areknowable and which enable them to be the subjects of true propositions.They form an intelligible system and this system has a logical priority whichmust be acknowledged in our descriptions of them.

Cudworth even more emphatically than Coleridge thinks that the divinemind and the human mind are closely related and that truth consists inideas. But he is much more concerned with the world as it is available tothe intellect. An intelligible world open to us implies a shared mind whichgives us a commonality, and a shared mind can grasp ideas implanted in theworld in objective ways. Dr. Hedley says that Coleridge liked Cudworth’sconclusions but found his methods antiquated. Cudworth’s ‘method’ is tocall on common experience, to reflect on the Scripture as the record ofpublic interaction with God, to study the ancients and the Church fathersas the record of the human interaction with the intelligible world, and toattend to the ways in which nature exhibits principles. He searchesconstantly for central concepts which figure in human experience and triesto show how they connect when we consider their logical work.

Cudworth takes seriously each noun and adjective of his title ‘the TrueIntellectual System of the Universe’. Coleridge wants to stimulate thepractice of reflection. Cudworth’s mind is much closer to Aristotle’s agentintellect than to Coleridge’s active imagination.

The differences between them are brought out rather clearly because Dr.Hedley’s book centres on the problem of the Trinity and on the kind ofTrinitarianism that Coleridge – now fully converted from Unitarianism –felt was both the signal gift of Christianity and the clue to the working ofthe divine mind.

This turns out to be a legitimately central idea. But it is also a centralpuzzle of Hedley’s study. Such an emphasis must initially seem curiousbecause Coleridge says in Aids to Reflection that he is not going to talkabout the Trinity, though he allows himself to ruminate on it a little as thebook goes on.

As we see the ideas unfold, though, we see that Hedley is right.7 A notionof the Trinity underlies much of what Coleridge wants to say and isevidently at the centre of his thought.

This is Hedley’s most profound insight, but it is not without difficulty.There are two obvious ‘defences’ of the notion that Trinitarianism is philo-sophically necessary.

One is the tradition that God is love and that God’s love is perfectlyexpressed. God loves the world but the world cannot love God perfectly.

COLERIDGE’S PLATONISM REVISITED 471

7 In his review of Beer’s edition of Aids to Reflection (Times Literary Supplement, 17 June1994: 3–4), Thomas McFarland insists that one must understand the centrality of the Trinityin Coleridge’s thought.

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Self-love in the usual sense is inadequate, too. Only a divine person couldachieve the necessary love, and even then perfect love must have anelement of community. A close variant of this version, surely that of RalphCudworth, is that love is the essential nature of God. One who grasps its‘benevolent overflowing’ will surely understand why people should not besimple monotheists: the true sense of the divine love is only given

if by it be meant, eternal, self-originated, intellectual Love, or essential andsubstantial goodness, that having an infinite, overflowing fulness and fecunditydispenses itself uninvidiously, according to the best wisdom, sweetly governsall, without any force or violence . . . and reconciles the whole world intoharmony.

Cudworth adds that ‘love in some rightly qualified sense, is God’.8

The other obvious defence of the Trinity is that all religions struggle tohave God in the world without limiting either the divine unity or perfec-tion. If God appears in the world in ways that perfectly reflect the divinenature without exhausting it, this can be achieved. And it would seem thatthe second and the third persons of the Trinity might achieve this. Butthough Coleridge accepted that God is love, and his interest in Schellingsuggests a preoccupation with the third person of the Trinity in a way thatJosiah Royce later developed, Dr. Hedley does not see him in these terms.He says (p. 73) that Coleridge chose to ‘revive the idea of the immanentTrinity’. Essentially this makes the persons of the Trinity reflections of oneanother, not exactly personalities at all. And Coleridge uses ‘personeity’ todescribe them, though Dr. Hedley does not think this means ‘impersonal-ity’, but it leaves everything somewhat foggy. Whatever the right expla-nation might be, Coleridge is determinedly Trinitarian. He wants nothingto do with Schelling’s notion of the rupture in the godhead and, as Dr.Hedley insists, he fears ‘subordinationism’ and wants the Father, the Son,and the Holy Spirit to be precisely equal. The relation between them is oneof ‘self-explication’, but this seems always to teeter on the edge of simplemonotheism. It is not, however, that Coleridge is in danger of becoming aUnitarian again, but that he insists on seeing all these issues through theinner life, his own and God’s. Coleridge is a man wrapped up in himself.His troubled personal life suggests that he could never quite think ofhimself as a member of a community in which he was not at the centre, andthe lifelong preoccupation with his own inner states underlines the situationthat made it impossible for him to escape from himself. By contrast,Cudworth was always reaching out and seeing the human being as anelement in an organic community, indeed, as an element in an organicuniverse.

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8 True Intellectual System, Royston 1678; 123 (the page number is misprinted 117 in theBritish Library copy); Harrison-Tegg 1845, vol. 1: 179.

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One must not forget that Aids to Reflection started with Coleridge’scareful reading of Archbishop Robert Leighton, whom he took to be areliable supplier of essentially religious exercises. But Leighton’s philoso-phizing is obviously of less importance. Coleridge’s speculations do in theend centre on the Trinity. Dr. Hedley passes over this, presumably as irrel-evant to Coleridge’s purposes, but Leighton was clear that we cannot knowanything much about the Trinity. He said ‘the Trinity’ is ‘to be received andadored with the most humble faith, but by no means to be curiouslysearched into’. He repeats his doubts about the intelligibility of the Trinityninety-one pages later and, indeed, doubts that we can know much aboutGod.9 We call him ‘pure spirit’, but Leighton notes that the Greek sourceof this expression meant wind.

If the reader has any regrets about Dr. Hedley’s book, they are likely tobe that he does not occasionally depart from Coleridge’s perspective andexamine the case for some of Coleridge’s targets. He devotes the centralpart of a chapter to Coleridge’s distaste for Jeremy Taylor (1613–67). Tayloris tagged a representative of the ‘Arminians’ at Cambridge whose ‘revul-sion from the asperity of the Augustinian-Calvinist emphasis upon humandepravity and need’ led him to a soft view in which he developed too muchfaith in human beings and their self-sufficiency (p. 229). Taylor, who endedhis career as Bishop of Down & Connor, and administrator of Dromore,was born in Cambridge and educated at Gonville & Caius, though hemoved to Oxford and was awarded an MA in 1635 and was made a Doctorof Divinity ‘by royal mandate’ in 1642. He was a man who seems to havebeen universally liked. Charles I gave him his watch just before his execu-tion, and he was briefly imprisoned at Chepstow, but Cromwell providedhim with protection. He was the ultimate ‘broad church’ divine, and thebasis of his theology was that one could trust human beings to weigh theirown evidences. As much as Coleridge, he wanted people to reflect on theirown inner experiences, but he clearly wanted this to take place in acommunity of shared experiences, and it was because of his belief thateveryone has a place in the continuum of human experience that hebelieved that the church must be broad enough for all. In reality, the linebetween this view and Coleridge’s is a line between individualist reflectionand the experience of a community, and in this, perhaps, Taylor was at thepoint of intersection of the various traditions of the Church of England.10

Locke also figures tantalizingly in Dr. Hedley’s book in a way that willmake Locke’s admirers want to take pen in hand. But the subject of Locke

COLERIDGE’S PLATONISM REVISITED 473

9 The Whole Works of Robert Leighton, London: James Duncan 1840, 4 vols.: 4; 229, 330,10 On Taylor, see C. J. Stranks, The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor, London: Society for

the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 1952. Stranks compares him to LancelotAndrewes (p. 17) and says their Arminianism became characteristic of the High Churchparty. This Arminianism was very much a Cambridge trait. Stranks associates him withHenry More and George Herbert. But Taylor is more protestant.

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and Coleridge is a slippery one. Coleridge’s view of Locke is ambiguous.Certainly Aids to Reflection was an outcome, in part, of Coleridge’s ownmeditations on Locke’s notion of reflection, and Coleridge began to thinkabout the peculiarity of Locke’s Essay with its attacks on innate ideas whichare combined with an account of the richness of the inner life. One mightput it that the empty cabinet of Locke had a lot of shelves in it. Yet JamesMarsh in his celebrated preliminary essay to his edition of Aids to Reflec-tion painted Locke’s metaphysics as the semi-official view of the world, andthe one which was to be overcome.11

Dr. Hedley makes much of Locke on Trinitarianism. Locke assuredBishop Stillingfleet,12 who was worried about the doctrine of the Trinity,that there was nothing in the Essay that contradicted orthodoxy. But it isclear from Locke’s Adversaria Theologica as it appeared in Lord King’s Lifeof Locke13 that Locke wanted the first person of the Trinity to be superiorto the others, though he assigned functions to the other two persons of theTrinity which are certainly consistent in other respects with orthodoxy.Locke himself, in his Common-place Book,14 remarks that Cudworth hadthe best account of the origin of the doctrine of the Trinity. Cudworth tracesthe doctrine’s development from the church fathers and, of course,discusses Philo at some length.

Most interesting, in the end, is the argument for the existence of God inthe Essay, in Chapter X of Book IV.15 The argument is that knowledgecannot come from nothing or from anything but another mind. Knowledgeis a different kind of entity, though Locke does not use the scholasticlanguage which insisted on a different mode of being. The Coleridgeandoctrine is precisely that our minds reflect the eternal mind that Locke isputting forward. Since Locke claimed to be a Christian, he would haveclaimed that Jesus could especially reflect this divine mind and also that thedivine intelligence is what makes history intelligible. (Though one wouldinfer that Locke didn’t think much of history as written by human beingsfrom the fact that he added ‘we can be sure’ to Pierre Nicole’s assertion thatall historians are liars when he translated Nicole’s essay.16)

The further we go in recognizing Coleridge’s absorption in the inner life, the more we are likely to take Coleridge to be a mystic. But he was

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11 This essay is reprinted in Beer’s edition of Aids to Reflection (see note 1) pp. 491–529.12 Letter to Stillingfleet, London: A. & J. Churchill, 1697, First Reply, 1697, Second Reply, 1699.13 Peter King (seventh Baron King), The Life of John Locke with extracts from his Correspon-

dence, Journals, etc., London: H. Colburn, 1829, new edition with index, Bell & Daldy, 1864,pp. 342–6. Lord King’s book appeared after the first edition of Aids to Reflection, but twoyears before the 1831 edition, London: Hurst Chance – the version used by Beer as the‘copy text’ for the edition Dr. Hedley uses. Coleridge worked on the text between the twoeditions.

14 King, 1864: 298.15 ed. Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon 1975: 619–24.16 Discourses Translated from Nicole’s Essays, London: Harvey and Darton 1828: 52.

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struggling to find an objective and universally useful account of experience.Dr. Hedley underlines Coleridge’s opposition to enthusiasm. Coleridgeobjected to be being taken as a mystic in the sense of someone who is over-whelmed by religious experience and loses objectivity. But this, too, is aslippery subject. Enthusiasm – in the eighteenth-century sense in which itwas the basis of Methodism – is the extreme form of the absorption in selfreflection that characterizes Coleridge, and it is a danger of which he wasclearly aware.

It was not only the loss of rational objectivity that Coleridge feared ofcourse; it was also no doubt the preoccupation with mystical unity thatwould undermine the doctrine of the Trinity. Coleridge constantly wantedto be practical and helpful.

Attached to Daniel Stuart’s copy of Aids to Reflection in the BritishLibrary,17 there is a box with a note in Coleridge’s handwriting which castslight on his concerns with reason, and since it was written after the book,perhaps shows a certain worry about too much absorption in self-reflection.It reads:

Practical Reason alone is reason in the full and substantive sense. It is reasonin its own sphere of perfect reason, as the source of IDEAS, which Ideas intheir conversion to the responsible will become Ultimate Ends. On the otherhand Theoretic Reason, as the ground of the Universal and Absolute in aLogical Conclusion, is rather the Light of Reason in the Understanding.

There is a shorter but similar note in John Coleridge’s copy.18

These notes also suggest that God must be understood through morethan one expression. The God of universal logic, eternal and unchanging,is one characteristic of God the father. Practical reason which illumines theworld – and is really reason itself – seems to be the characteristic activityof the third person.

Coleridge thinks personality is the essence of the real, and his innerreflection suggests that it is involved in all our thinking. Yet there is no neatcharacterization, and focusing on the centrality of personality is what leadsto the kinds of enthusiasm and mysticism that Coleridge disliked. Dr.Hedley, like Coleridge himself, is inevitably better on the dislikes than onthe likes.

But this is a book that will, as it is intended to, provoke much reflectionboth in Coleridge’s sense and in the now usual sense: it will force us torethink our ideas about Coleridge, the Cambridge Platonists, and idealismin general.

The Dominican College of Philosophy & Theology, Ottawa,and The University of Ottawa

COLERIDGE’S PLATONISM REVISITED 475

17 C 134 c./o.18 British Library C 126 d. 3. (This is a copy of the 1825 edition, London: Taylor & Hessey).

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