Coleridge

"A complex critical portrait of one of the most influential writers in the world, Samuel Taylor Coleridge"--Provided by publisher.

By examining Samuel Taylor Coleridge's and John Henry Newman's parallel approaches to the central question of Christian apologetics - the existence of God - Coleridge and Newman: The Centrality of Conscience documents more fully than ever before the extent of Coleridge's influence on Newman. Both men sought to develop an argument for God's existence by understanding conscience as the moral self-awareness that makes us human. The study provides fresh readings of three texts by Colerdige and three by Newman. The result of these comparative readings is a rhetoric that both informs and invites the reader to personal reflection.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the central figure in the dissemination of higher criticism, the analytical and historical study of the Bible begun in Germany in the late eighteenth century by Lessing, Herder, and Eichorn.

Why should anyone bother with Coleridge either as a theologian or a political theorist? At first in desperation, but now quite deliberately, Alan Gregory convincingly suggests that one should bother because Coleridge mounted an imporant critique of reductionist explanations of human society and moral agency, and because Coleridge has much regarding that important enterprise to teach us still. While Gregory also offers a perceptive outline of early British conservatism, his main concern is with Coleridge's attack on reductionism, including his defense of the will against associationism, his criticisms of Enlightenment historiography, his discussions of the inadequacies of political economy, and the Trinitarian arguments against monism. There is, Gregory remarks, no grasping the range or inner dynamic of Coleridge's thought without appreciating his religious vision, his theology. Indeed, Coleridge himself affirmed that should we try to conceive a man without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth, of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite...the man will have vanished.

First published in 1979, this book provides thorough a guide through Coleridge’s diverse body of work, looking not just his poetry but also his literary criticism and theories, plays, political journalism and theory, and writings on religion and philosophy. The author is careful to avoid emphasising one aspect of his work over another and consequently the whole emerges as a richer, more complete body of thought — less esoteric and more concerned with the world. It challenges the notion of the ‘damaged archangel’, showing he was a successful playwright, long-standing contributor to one of the foremost papers of the day and a literary figure of note in touch with leading thinkers and writers.

This exciting new study examines Coleridge's understanding of the Pantheism Controversy - the crisis of reason in German philosophy - revealing the context informing Coleridge's understanding of German thinkers. It establishes the central importance of the contested status of reason for Coleridge's poetry and later religious thought.