Coleridge The Bible And Religion

Barbeau reconstructs the system of religion that Coleridge develops in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840). Coleridge's late system links four sources of divinity the Bible, the traditions of the church, the interior work of the Spirit, and the inspired preacher to Christ, the Word. In thousands of marginalia and private notebook entries, Coleridge challenges traditional views of the formation and inspiration of the Bible, clarifies the role of the church in biblical interpretation, and elucidates the relationship between the objective and subjective sources of revelation. In late writings that develop a robust system of religion, Coleridge conveys his commitment to biblical wisdom.

An account of the intellectual and theological ferment of nineteenth-century Britain - the dynamic period when so many of the ideas and attitudes we take for granted today were first established (including the impact of biblical criticism upon traditional theology, and the belief in a social as well as a spirtual mission for the Church). Key figures include Coleridge, Newman Carlyle, Matthew Arnold and F. D. Maurice. Unavailable for some time, the reappearance of this updated Second Edition will be welcomed by theologians and intellectual and literary historians alike.

This volume reveals new perspectives on the sources of Coleridge's vivid symbolism and on the religious nature of his quest for joy. It offers a close analysis of The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel and a discussion of Coleridge's influence on the other Romantic poets.

Never was there a book less entitled than the "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit" to the honour of effecting a revolution in theology, or becoming the manifesto of any school of inquirers accustomed to habits of sound and accurate reasoning. With not a little to remind us of the reach and originality of thought which distinguish the other writings of Coleridge, it is marked to a most vicious excess with looseness and inaccuracy of conception; it betrays a painful ignorance of the main facts and fundamental principles involved in the question at issue; and, by the confident, but impotent attempt which he makes to marry a mystical philosophy to an unsound theology, he only shows that he has strayed into a province of speculation with whose guiding landmarks he was completely unacquainted. Nor is this failure to grasp, and inability to deal with, the necessary conditions of the problem to be solved, so conspicuous in Coleridge's discussion of the doctrine of inspiration, altogether due to his limited and defective preparation for dealing with the subject; it is in no small measure to be attributed to the exigencies of his position and argument.

Few figures who were active in the English Romantic Movement are as fascinating as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Aside from his own visionary verse, Coleridge is famous for his colourful friendships with fellow-poets Wordsworth and Southey, and above all for his well documented drug-taking and creative use of opium. But it is less widely appreciated that he was also a key figure in Anglican thought, whose writings are continually referred to by modern Anglican theologians. Coleridge's journey from the Unitarianism of his father towards a later commitment to Anglican Trinitarianism of a type he had rejected in his youth involved a rigorous philosophical process of imaginative liberal thinking. Over the last 200 years, that thinking has provided Anglicanism with many valedictory tools as well as a measure of robust self-belief. Offering a major contribution both to religious history and the history of ideas, Graham Neville here charts the particular liberal tradition in British religious thought which stems directly from Coleridge. He shows why Coleridge's thought remains so significant, and traces the ways in which his subject's theological ideas profoundly influenced later British writers and scholars like F.D. Maurice, F.J.A. Hort, F.W. Robertson, B.F. Westcott, John Oman and Thomas Erskine (once called the 'Scottish Coleridge'). Dr Neville further relates the pioneering ideas of Coleridge to current developments in theology and scientific method.