Blind to the Real Presence:
Coleridge and the Tension of Opposites
As much as any writer, and certainly more
than most, Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge actively seeks for coincidences of opposites.
According
to N. M. Goldsmith,
Coleridge was thinking out thoughts which
had been half
conscious in Pope and a number of other men
of a religious
temperament since the seventeenth century,
. . . the feeling
that a mechanistic theory of the mind which
denied the
validity of intuition, concentrating
instead on men's
capacity for deduction and analysis, was a
philosophy of
death.
<1>
Thus,
as Coleridge develops his theories of the coincidence of
opposites
and other theories of the way the mind works, he will
be
carrying on many of the ideas that Pope developed, although in
most
cases he tries to take them further. <2>
Unlike Pope, Coleridge gives a particularly
personal slant to
the
problem of the coincidence of opposites.
Sometimes,
especially
in his philosophical prose, Coleridge does present a
generalized,
overall discussion of the problem, but most often,
especially
in his poetry, he explores the issue from an intensely
personal
point of view. The problem tears him
apart and he
reveals
that tearing most painfully and most despairingly.
I do not intend to review all aspects of
his struggles with
opposites,
which have been thoroughly studied by many critics,
but
simply to set out some of the main lines of Coleridge's
interest,
leading up to one of his late poems, "Lines Suggested
by the
Last Words of Berengarius," a poem that
epitomizes the
dead
end in which Coleridge found himself when he tried to
reconcile
opposing forces in his poetry. My line
of inquiry will
show
how, even though Coleridge seems largely to come to terms
with
the issue of the coincidentia oppositorum in his
philosophical
writings, he finds dead ends instead of solutions
in his
poetry. I do not belittle
Coleridge. I admire his
bravery
as much as Richard Holmes and Thomas McFarland do in
passages
quoted below. Rather, his heroic
struggles give us a
sense
of the enormous difficulty of the problem and allow us to
admire
Shelley's and Blake's solutions even more.
Coleridge's desire to reconcile opposites
is closely
connected
to his desire to see wholeness whenever possible. In
his
essay "On Method" he defines the superior man in terms of
wholeness:
What is that which first strikes us, and
strikes us at once,
in a man of education, and which, among
educated men, so
instantly distinguishes the man of superior
mind? Not the
weight or novelty of his remarks; not any
unusual interest of
facts communicated by him. . . . It is the unpremeditated
and evidently habitual arrangement of his
words, grounded on
the habit of foreseeing, in each integral
part, or (more
plainly) in every sentence, the whole that
he then intends to
communicate. However irregular and desultory his talk,
there
is method in the fragments.<3>
Similarly,
when Coleridge contemplates writing an epic, the
encyclopedic
genre of wholeness, he can be satisfied with nothing
less
than all. While most writers of epic do
feel a need to
surpass
the accomplishments of their predecessors, <4> Coleridge
seems
unable to omit anything. In a letter to
Joseph Cottle in
early
April 1797, after agreeing with Wordsworth "that Southey
writes
too much at his ease," Coleridge laments Southey's
reliance
"too much on story and event in his poems, to the
neglect
of those lofty imaginings, that are peculiar to, and
definitive
of, the poet." Meditating by
contrast on
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge imagines his epic:
The story of Milton [Paradise Lost] might
be told in two
pages--it is this which distinguishes an
Epic Poem from a
Romance in metre. Observe the march of
application, his laborious polish, his deep
metaphysical
researches, his prayers to God before he
began his great
poem, all that could lift and swell his
intellect, became his
daily food.
I should not think of devoting less than 20
years to an Epic Poem. Ten to collect materials and warm my
mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable
Mathematician, I would thoroughly know
Mechanics,
Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy,
Botany, Metallurgy,
Fossilism,
Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine--then the
mind of man--then the minds of men--in all
Travels, Voyages
and Histories. So I would spend ten years--the next five to
the composition of the poem--and the five
last to the
correction of it. So I would write haply not unhearing of
that divine and rightly-whispering Voice,
which speaks to
mighty minds of predestinated
unwithering.
<5>
Future
whispers of glory notwithstanding, such an ambitious
project
seems almost doomed to failure from the start.
If
Coleridge
insists on including everything, and on having all
knowledge
before getting started, he must fall short.
Many commentators on Coleridge have noted
this encompassing
tendency,
which Thomas McFarland defines as fundamental to
Coleridge
and to his age:
To understand Coleridge's thought, both in
its own structure
and in its relationship to the thought of
his contemporaries,
it is necessary to refer all its
manifestations constantly
and explicitly to the systematic unity, the
total organism
which he, and almost all other thinkers of
his era, accepted
as the necessary condition of any
intellectual activity at
all.
<6>
McFarland
explains this tendency as a responsibility to vast
amounts
of data, based on a philosophical belief in complexity
rather
than simplicity, in accumulation rather than
improvisation:
If one tends to travel light
intellectually, to live, as it
were, out of a suitcase--after the manner
of Wittgenstein, or
Schlick, or even
of Socrates--then no great housekeeping
abilities are called for; but if one tends
to admit
intellectual responsibility for an enormous
amount of data,
with a continuing urge to accumulate still
more, then the
internal economy of this intellectual
establishment becomes
increasingly important. It is this
principle of internal
economy that we call system. <7>
As a
philosophical system, such inclusiveness is more than
admirable. It seems the apex of liberal, educated open-
mindedness. What McFarland sees as Coleridge's central
idea sets 3
up a
principle of inclusion that requires the thinker to include
almost
all possible systems of thought:
The deeper . . . we penetrate into the
ground of things, the
more truth we discover in the doctrines of
the greater number
of the philosophical sects. . . . all these we shall find
united in one perspective central point,
which shows
regularity and a coincidence of all the
parts in the very
object, which from every other point of
view must appear
confused and distorted. The spirit of sectarianism has been
hitherto our fault, and the cause of our
failures. We have
imprisoned our own conceptions in the
lines, which we have
drawn, in order to exclude the conceptions
of others.
[Coleridge then quotes Leibniz] J'ai trouve que la plupart
des sectes ont
raison dans une bonne partie de ce qu'elles
avancent, mais
non pas tant en ce qu'elles nient. [my
translation: I have found that most sects
are quite correct
in most of what they proclaim but not so correct
in what they
deny.] <8>
The
lack of inclusiveness arises from the exclusion of opposites
from
most systems of thought. Any partial
truth is limited if it
does
not acknowledge the truths that oppose it, because it
relegates
those opposing truths to the category of falsehood:
. . . the most influencive
Errors have ever been . . .
partial Truths mistaken for the whole
Truth, Truths divorced
from their correspondent and supporting
opposites, and
coverted into
contrary Falsehoods by being reciprocally
unbalanced and disintegrated . . . he alone
deserves the name
of a Philosopher, who has attained to see
and learnt to
supply the difference between Contraries
that preclude, and
Opposites that reciprocally suppose and
require, each the
other.
<9>
Over
and over again, Coleridge explicitly sets such open-minded
inclusiveness
as his goal:
'My system,' he told his nephew, 'if I may
venture to give it
so fine a name, is the only attempt I know
ever made to
reduce all knowledges
into harmony. It opposes no other
system, but shows what was true in each;
and how that which
was true in the particular, in each of them
became error,
because it was only half the truth.'
<10>
Keats
was one of the first to recognize the probable result of
such an
attempt at vast inclusiveness. In his
definition of
Negative
Capability, he finds in Shakespeare an example to be
admired,
but in Coleridge an example to be lamented:
several things dovetailed in my mind, &
at once it struck me,
what quality went to form a Man of
Achievement especially in
Literature & which Shakepeare
posessed so enormously--I mean
Negative Capability, that is when man is
capable of being in
uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without
any irritable
reaching after fact &
reason--Coleridge, for instance, would
let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude
caught from the
Penetralium of
mystery, from being incapable of remaining
content with half knowledge.
<11>
While we can lament the negative result of
Coleridge's system
building,
we can also praise what he did accomplish:
The rich multi-level quality of Coleridge's
imagination was
obviously achieved at tremendous cost. It contains terrible
tensions and contradictions. . . . the
essential terms of
Coleridge's reconciling system are
dialectical. They stem
initially from his awareness of
contradictions within his own
experience, . . . between radical disbelief and traditional
faith. . . . when he read Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason . .
. Coleridge found the fundamental
encroachment of the subject
upon the object in human experience. In the Aids to
Reflection he urged, as the greatest
assistance to clear
thinking, the re-introduction into English
of 'subjective'
and 'objective' reality--terms which are
now in completely
current use. <12>
Thus,
within the concern for systematic wholeness, Coleridge
insists
on the inclusion of opposites. One of
the primary sets
of
opposites of course is that between subject and object, which
also
can be defined as inner and outer:
The notebooks record the collisions of a
hugely developed
sense of inner reality with a hugely
developed sense of outer
reality, with neither sense giving
ground. <13>
As so
often, Coleridge mocks his extreme interest in this issue,
making
it into a weakness that bores his listeners.
He makes the
issue
extremely personal as he implicitly, like Keats,
participates
in all of existence. His delight in
revealing
differences
(we shall later encounter the term desynonomize) is
overcome
by his delight in making connections, as the circling
ripples
of his imagination try to include all:
I feel too intensely the omnipresence of
all in each,
platonically speaking, or psychologically
my brain-fibres or
the spiritual light which abides in the
brain marrow, as
visible light appears to do in sundry
rotten mackerel and
other smashy
matters is of too general an affinity with all
things.
And though it perceives the difference of things,
yet is eternally pursuing the likeness, or
rather that which
is common. Bring me two things that seem
the very same, and
then I am quick enough to shew the difference, even to hair-
splitting; but to go on from circle to
circle till I break
against the shore of my hearer's patience
or have my
Concentricals
dashed to nothing by a Snore, this is my
ordinary mishap. <14>
Through these pathways of logic Coleridge
continues to
explore
the question. Although he tries to
penetrate the
coincidence
of opposites, the problem always remains a stand-off
for him. As the foundation of his always promised opus
maximum,
it may
have prevented him from completing that amibitious
project:
It was with logic as the focal point that
Coleridge early
began his investigation of the
'Coincidentia oppositorum,'
the idea of the reconciliation of
opposites. By 1803 he had
formulated a detailed prospectus of his
'great work.' <15>
His project to fill a notebook with
examples of "extremes
meet"
was based on his belief that all philosophy was contained
in that
phrase:
Extremes meet--a proverb, by the bye, to
collect and explain
all the instances and exemplifications of
which would
constitute and exhaust all philosophy. <16>
This obsession with opposites dominates
much of Coleridge's
writing,
both poetic and philosophical. In the Biographia he
even
defines contraries as the basis not only of philosophy but
of all
creation:
the transcendental philosopher says; grant
me a nature having
two contrary forces, the one of which tends
to expand
infinitely, while the other strives to
apprehend or find
itself in this infinity, and I will cause
the world of
intelligences with the whole system of
their representations
to rise up before you. <17>
Thus,
in Coleridge, as in Cusanus, the entire philosophical
structure
begins with a statement of contrary forces, centrifugal
and
centripetal.
Although Coleridge wants all, although
nothing less than the
whole
Truth will satisfy him, again and again he finds reasons to
back
away from the holistic vision that attracts him. One of the
most
excruciating tensions of contraries that Coleridge felt
himself
caught in was the tension between pantheism and
orthodoxy. His conversation poem "The Aeolian Harp,"
composed in
1795,
illustrates that tension. After setting
a scene of
domestic
bliss with cottage and wife, inspired like almost every
Romantic
poet by the Aeolian Harp, Coleridge suddenly imagines
. . . the one Life within us and abroad,
Which
meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in
light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every
where--
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill'd
. . .
And
what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them
sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
But thy more serious eye a mild reproof
Darts, O beloved Woman! nor such thoughts
Dim and unhallow'd
dost thou not reject,
And biddest me
walk humbly with my God.
Meek Daughter in the family of Christ!
Well hast thou said and holily disprais'd
These shapings fo the unregenerate mind;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.
As we see in this poem, Coleridge will have
good reason to
sympathize
with the Berengarius (see discussion below) who had
trouble
perceiving the Real Presence in the Eucharist and who
found
himself struggling between conscience and the Pope. No
matter
how hard he tries in his poetry to achieve this oneness
with
all of life, Coleridge always falls back into isolation:
The quest for a 'something one &
indivisible' underlying and
animating the world is perhaps above all
others the unifying
principle of Coleridge's multifarious
writings, although it
will be seen how his statement of the 'One
Life' is
persistently checked and qualified. <18>
Because
of his sensitivity to his audience, in this case his wife
Sara as
spokesman for orthodox Christianity, Coleridge recants
his
pantheism almost as soon as it is spoken.
For, like
Bernegarius, whom I will discuss at the end of this chapter, he
will
not be able to live in his society, and certainly not as a
clergyman,
if he does not hold to the orthodox line.
Ironically,
seeing
more unity than is officially allowed will place him into
a form
of excommunication, which will separate him from those
closest
to him instead of increasing the social oneness that is
implied
by a belief in pantheism.
6
Instead of blaming Coleridge for his
inability to resolve
this
problem, McFarland defines the problem as existing in the
nature
of things rather than in Coleridge himself:
Inability either really to accept or
wholeheartedly to reject
pantheism is the central truth of
Coleridge's philosophical
activity. . . . As with the dilemma of Hamlet, who, not
indecisive in himself, is confronted with
alternatives that
in themselves admit of no right solution,
so with the dilemma
of Coleridge: he could not resolve the
ambivalences of the
Pantheismusstreit
without diminishing one whole side of his
awareness and vital commitment. And so he bore the pain of
conflicting interests rather than choose
the anodyne of a
solution that did violence to the claims of
either side in
the conflict. <19>
Thus
McFarland agrees with Holmes in attributing courage to
Coleridge's
failure to reconcile opposites. Indeed,
in their
formulations,
Coleridge's refusal to let either side of the
opposition
win constitutes his admirable strength.
McFarland
thus
paints Coleridge as braver than most, able to bear almost
unbearable
tensions because of his principled refusal to
compromise.
Indeed, for all these writers who are
concerned with the
coincidence
of opposites, the question of whether the problem
exists
in the very nature of things is an important one.
Cusanus,
Pope, and Blake definitely believe that the coincidence
of
opposites is fundamental to the make-up of the universe and of
humanity. They assert that belief in various ways and
stand by
it. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley,
to varying
degrees,
want to believe in the coincidence of opposites, but
fail to
maintain and assert consistently and strongly their
vision
in that direction. McFarland defines the split in
Coleridge
as one between head and heart:
We are here interested in the emotional
attraction of
pantheism for Coleridge; on the rational level
his attitude
to pantheism is clear and unfailingly
censorious. <20>
In
"The Aeolian Harp" Coleridge reaches for pantheism in an
attempt
to obtain and reconcile all. Such a
reconciliation would
necessitate
the joining together of philosophical opposites.
Then he
finds himself also compelled, with just as much force and
in the
reverse direction (like his very description of the forces
of the
universe quoted above) to reject that wholeness.
Therefore
he finds himself caught in a higher coincidence of
opposites,
one that vacillates between accepting and rejecting
the
coincidence of opposites.
In his late, politically conservative work,
On the
Constitution
of Church and State, Coleridge combines his
philosophical
and religious ideas with political ones to propose
what he
calls the clerisy, a kind of mediating force made up of
the
intellectual estates of universities and schools in addition
to the
clergy, that would provide for the constructive balance of
opposites
in society:
Coleridge presented this national clerisy
as the great
reconciling and sustaining body within the
Constitution as a
whole, which would balance those forces of
permanency and
progression which are continuously in
conflict within the
nation. . . . The clerisy would be the dynamic centre of
renewal within national life, its object
'to secure and
improve that civilisation,
without which the nation could be
neither permanent nor progressive'. <21>
In that work, Coleridge makes a distinction
to clarify his
conception
of opposites. As with all these thinkers
into
7
opposites,
some terms take on great importance, while others seem
unimportant.
Permit me to draw your attention to the
essential difference
between opposite and contrary. Opposite powers are always of
the same kind, and tend to union, either by
equipoise or by a
common product. Thus the + and - poles of the magnet, thus
positive and negative electricity are
opposites. Sweet and
sour are opposites; sweet and bitter are
contraries. The
feminine character is opposed to the
masculine; but the
effeminate is its contrary. Even so in the present instance,
the interest of permanence is opposed to
that of
progressiveness; but so far from being
contrary interests,
they, like the magnetic forces suppose and
require each
other.
Even the most mobile of creatures, the serpent, makes
a rest of its own body, and drawing up its
voluminous train
from behind on this fulcrum, propels itself
onward. <22>
Barfield
dismisses this distinction:
The distinction between 'opposite' and
'contrary' made in . .
. Church and State . . . may, I think, be
ignored. In common
use both terms are taken to connote mutual
exclusion.
Coleridge was there apparently attempting
to 'desynonymise'
them by appropriating this connotation to
one of them
('contrary') only. The distinction however is not one that
he maintained. While, in the footnote, 'contrary' is made
virtually equivalent to 'contradictory,'
elsewhere it is not
infrequently synonymous with 'opposite.'
<23>
Similarly,
Blake asserts fundamental distinctions between
negations
and contraries, which Damrosch dismisses as
inconsequential. In Blake, "contrary" is the
favorable term:
everything
needs its contrary. In Coleridge
"opposite" is the
favorable
term: opposites tend to union. In Blake,
"negation" is
the
pejorative term. Negations try to cancel
out the forces they
feel
opposed to. In Coleridge
"contrary" is the pejorative term:
contraries
try to cancel each other out. Blake's negations are
defined
in terms of religious systems that try to impose their
reifications
onto others. Coleridge, however, simply
finds
logical
impossibility in certain statements of opposites:
Opposites, he well observes, are of two
kinds, either
logical, i.e. such as are absolutely
incompatible; or real
without being contradictory. The former he denominates Nihil
negativum irrepresentabile, [Engell's
footnote: "Nothing in a
negative sense, not representable"
(the logical opposite)--
i.e. the state of a body both at rest and
in motion, as
C[oleridge] goes
on to explain, following Kant] the connexion
of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something--
Aliquid cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in
motion and not in motion, is nothing, or at
most, air
articulated into nonsense. But a motory force
of a body in
one direction, and an equal force of the
same body in an
opposite direction is not incompatible, and
the result,
namely rest, is real and representable. <24>
This distinction between opposites and
contraries, between
dynamism
and stasis, seems to haunt Coleridge's poetry.
In his
Dejection
Ode, Coleridge is at least in part answering his friend
William
Wordsworth's Intimations Ode, which wonders why childhood
bliss
disappears:
There was a time when meadow, grove,
and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled
in celestial light,
8
The glory and the freshness of a
dream.
. . .
Whither is it fled, the visionary
gleam,
Where is it now, the glory and the
dream?
Although
Coleridge's memory is not of such perfect bliss, he does
remember
something similar to Wordsworth's memory:
There was a time when . . .
. . .
hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own,
seemed mine.
Coleridge
does not specifically recall the glow in Nature that
Wordsworth
recalls; he had only hope. Whereas
Wordsworth
directly
perceived something outside himself that gave him a
feeling
of warmth and joy, Coleridge's perception of joy outside
himself
was only a hope; even less than a hope, it only "seemed"
to grow
around, comfort, and belong to him.
Finally, Coleridge
receives
no reciprocity; he has to perform the whole task
himself:
I may not hope from outward forms to
win
The passion and the life, whose
fountains are within.
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live
Coleridge
sets himself the impossible task of virtually creating
Nature
by his own power. In that sense
"All Nature is but Art"
is an
impossibly heavy burden.
His metaphor of marriage with Nature makes
the herculean task
even
more painful:
Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the
power,
Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in
dower
A new Earth and new Heaven.
Although
the syntax becomes rather confusing, Coleridge here
makes
Joy the father of the bride. Only Joy
can give the dowry
of a
new Earth and new Heaven. But where does
that Joy come
from? It can come only from within the poet, who in
this
metaphor
is the bridegroom. Thus Coleridge sets
up a short-
circuit. Asking for a new Earth and a new Heaven from
outside,
he can
imagine it only as coming from within himself, just as
earlier
in the poem, when trying to receive joy from Nature, he
asserted
that he could receive only what he gave.
He has put
himself
in the impossible double position of groom and father of
the
bride! Therefore Coleridge is left with
an insoluble
dilemma,
which degenerates further into "Reality's dark dream."
By contrast, when Wordsworth tries to
answer the problem of
joy in
the last half of Intimations Ode, he constructs two
outside,
benevolent forces with which to interact, one in Nature
and one
in the idealism of Platonic metempsychosis.
He is
grateful
for obstinate questionings that give him an origin and a
goal
beyond Nature. While the homely Nurse
tries to keep him as
an
inmate, Wordsworth's babe escapes because of the Platonic
glory
from which he came. Even though
Wordsworth in remarks
outside
the Intimations Ode claimed that reincarnation was only a
hypothesis,
not his firm belief, the tone of the poem is strong
and
certain, not at all like Coleridge's doubts and hesitations.
Wordsworth
is able to thrust himself, by the willing suspension
of
disbelief, into a position that might not accord with his
Christian
orthodoxy, a move which, as we saw in "The Aeolian
Harp,"
Coleridge is not able to sustain.
9
Thus Coleridge's poem implies a kind of
stasis in the total
system
rather than a dynamic reciprocity. In
both "The Aeolian
Harp"
and the Dejection Ode, Coleridge does not measure up to
Wordsworth's
dynamic recreation of the dead-ends of perception.
Instead
of setting up a reciprocal system, Coleridge thinks that
glory
can arise only from within. By putting
the whole burden on
himself,
Coleridge remains in stasis, unable to move because he
doesn't
really seem to believe in a corresponding outside
opposite. He has put himself in a position perilously
close to
that of
the Alastor poet (see later chapter on Percy
Shelley),
who
ignores the outside world in preference to his solipsistic
musings. He can not therefore imagine the opposites of
self and
other
coming together, as do Blake and Shelley.
His philosophical theory finally does not
fully enter his
poetry. Wordsworth's tentative hypothesis strongly
invests the
Intimations
Ode (and "Tintern Abbey") but Coleridge's strongly
held
belief remains tentative and hesitant in "The Aeolian Harp"
and the
Dejection Ode.
Like Cusanus, Coleridge begins his whole
system with opposite
forces:
Now the transcendental philosophy demands;
first, that two
forces should be conceived which counteract
each other by
their essential nature; not only not in
consequence of the
accidental direction of each, but as prior
to all direction,
nay, as the primary forces from which the
conditions of all
possible directions are derivative and
deducible: secondly,
that these forces should be assumed to be
both alike
infinite, both alike indestructible. The problem will then
be to discover the result or product of two
such forces, as
distinguished from the result of those
forces which are
finite, and derive their difference solely
from the
circumstance of their direction. When we have formed a
scheme or outline of these two different
kinds of force, and
of their different results by the process
of discursive
reasoning, it will then remain for us to
elevate the Thesis
from notional to actual, by contemplating
intuitively this
one power with its two inherent
indestructible yet counter-
acting forces, and the results or
generations to which their
interpenetration gives existence, in the
living principle and
in the process of our own self-consciousness. <25>
But it
is this movement of the coincidence of opposites "from the
notional
to the actual" that Coleridge does not achieve in his
poetry. Like Cusanus and like Pope, his reasoning
from what he
knows
seems to hold him back. Blake's method
of rejecting Reason
as a
method and going straight to intuition penetrates that
limit. As long as we reason only from what we know,
we are
limited
because, as Blake emphasizes in "There is No Natural
Religion,"
we start with certain pre-conceived definitions of
what is
avaiable to our perception. Perceiving more than
empiricism
allows and thus refusing to allow the limits of
empiricism
and reason to control us, we can perceive miracles
through
expanded perceptions. Empiricism, like
any deadening,
abstract
system, tells that we do not have the experiences that
we have
because they do not fit the official system.
Coleridge's famous definition of the
Imagination does try to
bring
together the divine and the human, even while it
distinguishes
between them:
The IMAGINATION then I consider either as
primary, or
secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold
to be the living
Power and prime Agent of all human
Perception, and as a
repetition the finite mind of the eternal
act of creation in
the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of
the former, co-existing with the conscious
will, yet still as
identical with the primary in the kind of
its agency, and
differing only in degree, and in the mode
of its operation.
10
It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in
order to re-create; or
where this process is rendered impossible,
yet still at all
events it struggles to idealize and to
unify. It is
essentially vital, even as all objects (as
objects) are
essentially fixed and dead.
FANCY, on the contrary, has no other
counters to play
with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no
other than a mode of Memory emancipated
from the order of
time and space; and blended with, and
modified by that
empirical phaenomenon
of the will, which we express by the
word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory it must
receive all its materials ready made from
the law of
association. <26>
First,
Coleridge defines the human imagination as a repetition of
the
divine mind, not as an identical force, as will Blake.
Second,
although he claims that the secondary imagination is
"identical
with the primary," he clearly gives it a lesser place
not
only by the denomination "secondary," but also by saying that
it
differs in degree from the primary. It
is clearly lesser on
some
kind of measurable scale. But the
greatest diminishment in
the
definition comes when, after defining the secondary
imagination
as having the power to re-create, he immediately
qualifies
the marvelous power with a resounding, discouraging,
"where
this process is rendered impossible."
So, after being
relegated
to a lower level in the scale of imaginations (but soon
to be
reassured by hearing that the fancy is even lower), the
secondary
imagination must find frequent frustration, of the kind
that we
have seen in "The Aeolian Harp."
Struggling to idealize
and to
unify in that poem, Coleridge found himself forced to
recant. And now in his definition of the marvelous
power of the
creative
imagination, he finds himself forced to qualify to the
point
of frustration.
In her study of the imagination, Mary
Warnock defines
Coleridge's
concept in very strong and constructive terms:
something working actively from within to
enable us to
perceive the general in the particular, to
make us treat the
particular, whether something we see or
something we call up
as an image, as symbolic, as meaning
something beyond itself.
. . .
Imagination . . . must try to create one thing (one
thought or one form) out of the many
different elements of
experience; and this entails extracting the
essence of the
differing phenomena of experience. <27>
This
explanation, like Coleridge's definitions, implies the
abstraction
of total system, not a Blakean imagination of minute
particulars. Most people naturally think that oneness,
total
unity
can come only from abstracting, from generalizing about the
characteristics
that different particulars have in common, but
the
idea of the coincidence of opposites helps us break through
that
limitation to see unity and disparity simultaneously, just
like
seeing two parts of an optical illusion at the same time.
Warnock
reproduces an optical illusion that can be seen as either
a
rabbit or a duck.<28> As in the
more famous optical illusion
of two
faces or a vase (reproduced in Prickett's Words and
the
Word),<29>
most people think that they can see only one or the
other,
that their powers of generalizing and abstracting from
vague
lines must choose. (For more discussion
of this optical
illusion,
see chapter 7: Internal Eternity.) They also naturally
think
that words must abstract and generalize.
As Coleridge continues to explain his
theory of imagination
in the
following chapter of Biographia Literaria,
he continues to
define
it in terms of reconciling oppositions:
The poet . . . diffuses a tone and spirit
of unity . . . by
that synthetic and magical power to which
we have exclusively
appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put
11
into action by the will and understanding,
and retained under
their unremissive
though gentle and unnoticed control,
reveals itself in the balance or
reconciliation of opposite
or discordant qualities: of sameness with
difference; of the
general with the concrete; the idea with
the image; the
individual with the representative. <30>
Deirdre
Coleman and Peter Otto, in their introduction to
Imagining
Romanticism, deconstruct Coleridge's definition, by
revealing
how fancy apparently undercuts imagination:
What is not so often remarked is that the Biographia passage,
in the course of mapping the progression of
the 'I AM' to the
primary and then to the secondary
imagination . . . maps a
strange countermovement to its own
argument. Coleridge's
affirmation of presence is shadowed by a
regressive movement
of inversion and loss. . . . Repetition and
reduction suggest
that the primary imagination is engendered
by a process which
more closely parallels the repetitions of
fancy than the
vital and idealizing activities that it is
itself said to
undertake: the vital is born from the
mechanical; the
original finds its moment of birth in the
secondary and
derivative.
<31>
But
this apparent undercutting of Coleridge's idea, if seen from
the perspective
of the coincidence of opposites, actually
strengthens
it. For, as Blake will make even
clearer, the
dynamism
of the coincidence of opposites always produces
reversals
of this kind. When making distinctions,
or
desynomizing, Coleridge is not separating words into discrete
categories
that never interact. Rather, he is
setting up a
dynamic
movement back and forth between opposites.
When Stephen Prickett
analyzes Coleridge's attempts to
desynonymize words, he also deconstructs Coleridge's approach and
then
seems surprised when he discovers that Coleridge is trying
to re-synomize with another coined term, "esemplastic."
We can
learn
from the coincidence of opposites not to be surprised at
this
kind of maneuver, and recognize it from the beginning. Or
perhaps
the power of the coincidence of opposites is always to
surprise,
always to keep the dynamics of our awareness of world
and
words alive.
When Prickett
traces Coleridge's defition of imagination back
to
Greek thought and to the word logos, he concludes:
For Heraclitus,
for instance, the logos, or God, was seen as
the common connecting element in all
extremes. . . . For
[Coleridge] the biblical logos is part of
an even earlier
philosophic tradition where the 'Word'
combines under tension
opposite or discordant qualities in a
creative unity. <32>
Prickett is uncovering the fundamentally religious foundation of
Coleridge's
coincidence of opposites:
there is almost a suggestion that the
Primary and Secondary
Imaginations are, as it were, typologically
linked in a
manner analogous to the Old and New
Testaments: that is, that
we only fully come to understand the
unconscious activity of
sense-perception through the conscious activity
of artistic
creation.
<33>
This
insight by Prickett is very similar to one that I
will
develop
later in Blake. For now, we can
recognize that in
Prickett's reading the primary imagination, like the Old
Testament
God, begins all life, but does not fully realize its
potential. The secondary imagination, like the New
Testament
12
God,
fulfills His potential by sending his son to link the realms
of
divine and human, in a move similar to the one insisted on by
Cusanus. Without Jesus as the divine humanity,
according to
Cusanus
and Coleridge and Blake, the gap between divine and human
remains
unbridgeable.
The source of the whole of Coleridge's
definition is the
primary
imagination of God, the great "I AM," existence itself.
Without
that fiat, there would be no further commands such as
"Let
there be light." Without the great
"I AM," who is able to
contain
all opposites, there would be no existence.
Although
from
God's point of view, as it were, the imagination is the
repetition
of the great I AM, from the human perspective, the
imagination
is based on two forces, self (centripetal) and other
(centrifugal):
C[oleridge]
summarizes an outline or schema of a definition
of the imagination that has clear similarities
to long
deductions and definitions of the
imagination in Fichte and
Schelling. Two forces or concepts in dynamic tension
both
find themselves in the imagination, which
reconciles and
unifies them: the self or mind ("I
am") with nature or the
cosmos, the subjective with the
objective. <34>
Logic and social injunction cannot dissolve
the boundaries
between
man and nature, or between man and God; in fact they
strengthen
those boundaries. Only the imagination,
which
dissolves
and dissipates in order to re-create, can overcome the
boundaries. In Pope there was no real attempt to overcome
the
boundaries. The distinctions were crucial, fundamental to
humans,
and only from the mysterious power of God's viewpoint did
the
opposites coincide. In Blake and Shelley
and Coleridge, the
human
participates in the conjunction of opposites not just by
accepting
the mystery imposed from on high, but by participating
in the
divine as fully as in the human.
Coleridge often seems to
wish he
could attain that height; Shelley and Blake actually
accomplish
the feat.
One of the strangest characteristics of
Coleridge's
definition
of the imagination is its placement in the Biographia.
It
comes right at the end of chapter XIII, right at the end of
part I,
with a promise:
I shall content myself for the present with
stating the main
result of the Chapter, which I have
reserved for that future
publication, a detailed prospectus of which
the reader will
find at the close of the second volume.
<35>
As Engell drily remarks, "The
prospectus does not appear in the
1817 ed
and apparently was never written." <36> And what made
Coleridge
decide to state only the main result--the definitions
of
imagination and fancy--and save the rest for a future that
never
came? It was "a letter from a
friend, . . . [a] very
judicious
letter, which produced complete conviction on my mind,"
<37>
a conviction that appears in the quotation above.
Just before the "letter from a
friend," Coleridge has been
building
his definition based on the interpenetration of opposite
forces:
The counteraction then of the two assumed
forces does not
depend on their meeting from opposite
directions; the power
which acts in them is indestructible; . . .
and as something
must be the result of these two forces,
both alike infinite,
and both alike indestructible; and as rest
or neutralization
cannot be this result; no other conception
is possible, but
that
the product must be a tertium aliquid,
or finite
generation. Consequently this conception is
necessary.
Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than an inter-
penetration of the counteracting powers,
partaking of both.
[[Coleridge's page contains
asterisks]] <38>
At this
point a line of asterisks interrupts the headlong
13
momentum,
and the Coleridgean short-circuit kicks in. Just as in
"The
Aeolian Harp," when orthodoxy denies pantheism; just as in
the
writing of "Kubla Khan," when the person from Porlock
interrupts
the poet's recall of his reverie; just as we shall see
later
in his understanding of Berengarius; Coleridge always
blames
outside forces for his inability to see the real presence,
the
mystical wholeness. He puts himself into
an impossible bind:
on the
one hand, as in the Dejection Ode, he must re-create all
of the
outside world single-handedly; on the other hand, he can
not
finish his writing because of the interruptions and
misunderstandings
of the outside world:
Thus far had the work been transcribed for
the press, when I
received the following letter from a friend
. . . [ellipsis
in original] Dear C.
You ask my opinion concerning your
Chapter on the Imagination, both as to the
impressions it
made on myself, and as to those which I
think it will make on
the PUBLIC, . . . As to myself, and stating
in the first
place the effect on my understanding, your
opinions and
method of argument were not only so new to
me, but so
directly the reverse of all I had ever been
accustomed to
consider as truth, that even if I had
comprehended your
premises sufficiently to have admitted
them, and had seen the
necessity of your conclusions, I should
still have been in
that state of mind, which . . . you have so
ingeniously
evolved, as the antithesis to that in which
a man is, when he
makes a bull. In your own words, I should have felt as if I
had been standing on my head. <39>
This
interruption, which was composed by Coleridge himself (and
don't
some of us suspect as much about the person from Porlock?),
stops
the idealistic rush just as surely as the reproving glance
of Sara
quells the unregenerate musings in The Aeolian Harp. But
instead
of being thwarted by something from outside, as Coleridge
makes
it appear, he is being thwarted by something inside. In a
bizarre
revisiting of the Dejection Ode from a different angle,
Coleridge
tries to make us believe that he can not project his
joyful
theory because the cruel world will throw it right back at
him as
if in a rejecting mirror. In that poem,
he could not
receive
any joy from nature because he could receive only what he
gave. In this passage from the Biographia
he can not receive the
joy of
a delighted audience because he will not give it.
The spurious letter states as its primary
concern the
impression
that Coleridge's definitions will have on the reading
public. While this concern for audience is certainly
a
legitimate
one, Coleridge is going to great pains to fabricate a
resistant
reader to interrupt his attempt to explain his theory
to the
general public, whose reaction he fears.
His fictitous
interlocutor
objects to the theory, among other reasons, because
it is
"the reverse" of what he has previously believed. Thus
Coleridge
fears that his readers will use their ordinary,
everyday
logic and refuse to admit anything that contradicts it,
especially
a theory that wants them to accept a coincidence of
opposites. His theory, he thinks, is so opposed to the
prevailing
ideology that it has no chance of acceptance.
The
cousin
of the person from Porlock then goes on to explain
that
instead
of making a bull,<40> he feels that he has received one
that
has stood him on his head. In other
words, Coleridge's
pronouncements,
like Cusanus's, are usually seen as Lewis
Carroll-like
jokes that disturb good, decent folk instead of
revealing
fundamental truths.
When Owen Barfield elucidates Coleridge's
thought, he
emphasizes
the concept of "polarity," which was so important that
Coleridge
invented a short-hand symbol for it:
he habitually employed the symbol )-(, to
avoid the tedium of
writing out in full some such phrase as 'is
polarically
14
related to' or 'is the polar opposite
of.' <41>
According to Barfield's explanation of
Coleridge's ideas, the
importance
of polarity is not just its usefulness or its
applicability
or its potential for the imagination to use; it is
a law
of the universe, a fundamental fact of existence:
Polarity is, according to Coleridge, a
'law'; it is a law
which reigns through all Nature; the
duality of the 'opposite
forces' is the manifestation of a prior
unity; and that unity
is a 'power.' It is not, that is to say, any abstract
'principle of unity' or of identity--a
point which it is
hardly possible to over-emphasise,
since that is precisely
what it is commonly presumed to be . .
.
Polarity is dynamic, not
abstract. It is not 'a mere
balance or compromise,' but 'a living and
generative
interpenetration.' Where logical opposites
are contradictory,
polar opposites are generative of each
other--and together
generative of new product. Polar opposites exist by virtue
of each other as well as at the expense of
each other; 'each
is that which is called, relatively, by
predominance of the
one character or quality, not by the
absolute exclusion of
the other.' Moreover each quality or
character is present in
the other.
We can and must distinguish, but there is no
possibility of dividing them.
But when one has said all this, how
much has one
succeeded in conveying? How much use are definitions of the
undefinable? The point is, has the imagination grasped
it?
For nothing else can do so. At this point the reader must be
called on, not to think about imagination,
but to use it.
Indeed we shall see that the apprehension
of polarity is
itself the basic act of imagination. <42>
Barfield insists on activity and not just
contemplation:
what does the principle of contradiction,
without more, offer
to a mind?
What does the mind obtain by 'submitting all
positions alike . . . to the criterion of
the mere
understanding'? Quite literally nothing. The principle of
contradiction tells us nothing of what
nature, or anything
else, is.
It tells us only what it is not; and, in doing so,
clenches our absurd detachment from
it. <43>
Although
Barfield is partly correct here, he does give a
misleading
impression. To the extent that the
coincidence of
opposites
means submitting all positions to a criterion of
understanding,
or reason, it is only negative. Often
opposites
in
Coleridge do simply negate each other.
In "The Aeolian Harp"
the
poet's reverie is stopped dead by the reasoning contradiction
of
orthodoxy spoken by Sara. But in a more
dynamic use of the
coincidence
of opposites, as in Blake, the contradiction which
affronts
mere reason encourages us to expand our imaginations and
see
more than limited reason allows. The
obvious result of
contradiction
is the telling us what is not, but the larger
result
is telling us what is, in the largest possible sense.
Monism
can easily degenerate into exclusive dogmatism.
But the
coincidence
of opposites allows us to rise above preconceptions
to a
larger view. While telling us what is
not, and keeping us
from
reifying, the coincidence of opposites also allows us the
leap of
imagination which sees the universe whole, which can see
both
the vase and the faces in the optical illusion, which can
see
both the human the divine, both the living and the dead,
which
can overcome the limitations of the reason to see into the
divine
world.
In a description of metaphor, Barfield
captures precisely
the
power of the coincidence of opposites.
It is not just an
15
abstraction,
but a basic feature of existence and of language:
seeing
the coincidence of opposites is recapturing a kind of
primitive
innocence, but is also participating in a wholeness
which
reason forbids. Trying to insist on no
coincidence of
opposites
denies a fundamental fact of existence.
The element of contradiction is most
apparent in that
particular form of symbolic utterance
called a metaphor; but
it is certainly (for the understanding)
characteristic of
figurative language as a whole. Primitive language is
instinctively figurative. The further back
we penetrate in
the history of speech, the more symbolic,
and therefore the
less logical, it shows itself to have
been. There are, for
instance, Hebrew roots, whose semantic
range is so wide that
one end of their gamut of meanings appears
to us to be
positively the reverse of the other. Living opposites have
not yet been reduced to
contradictions. <44>
In 1827 Coleridge published a poem on the
subject of the monk
Berengarius, who was the focus of an eleventh-century controversy
that
helped the Church clarify its position on the Real Presence
in the
Eucharist. Berengarius
denied the Real Presence. Like
many in
the ongoing argument before the Church pronounced the
final
word, Berengarius believed in a symbolic, spritual presence
of
Christ in the bread and wine rather than a physical one.
During
his struggles with the Church over this issue, he signed
three
professions of faith (in 1055, 1078, and 1079), each one
more
explicitly acknowledging the Church's orthodox position.
Coleridge's
poem sympathetically captures the uncertainty, the
difficulty
of seeing a mystery that the mind confesses to, but
which
the understanding refuses to grasp.
According to Robert J. Barth,
Coleridge himself remained
firmly
in line with Anglican doctrine on the Eucharist, while
arguing
against Catholic beliefs:
In his occasional comments on the sacrament
of the Eucharist,
Coleridge remained faithful . . . in his
consistent assertion
of the real presence of the Body and Blood
of Christ in the
sacrament.
For the mature Coleridge, this was never in
doubt.
What did occasionally attract his attention was the
matter of how Christ is present in the
Eucharist. <45>
This
issue of how the Real Presence entered the bread and wine
was
indeed the focus of much of the Berengarian
heresy.
Coleridge
himself had no strong objection in principle to the
Catholic
doctrine of transubstantiation, but saw no need for such
a
doctrine and no clear biblical justification.
Like
Berengarius, he could not accept that the physical body born of
Mary
was the same one that appeared in the Eucharist: "applied to
the
phenomenal flesh and blood, it is nonsense." <46> But
clearly,
like the Berengarius of his poem, Coleridge did not
think
the matter worth fighting over. For
Anglicans, the mystery
of the
Real Presence remains a mystery; how it happens is not
prescribed
by doctrine. For Catholics, however, and
particularly
for Berengarius, failure to see the Real Presence in the
prescribed
way can result in excommunication and eternal
damnation.
LINES
Suggested by the Last Words of Berengarius
Ob. Anno
Dom. 1088
No more 'twixt conscience staggering and the
Pope
Soon shall I now before my God appear,
By him to be acquitted, as I hope;
16
By him to be condemned, as I fear.--
Reflection on the
Above
Lynx
among moles! had I stood by thy bed,
Be of
good cheer, meek soul! I would have said:
I see a
hope spring from that humble fear.
All are
not strong alike through storms to steer
Right
onward. What? though dread of threatened
death 5
And
dungeon torture made thy hand and breath
Inconstant
to the truth within thy heart!
That
truth, from which, through fear, thou twice didst start,
Fear
haply told thee, was a learned strife,
Or not
so vital as to claim thy life: 10
And
myriads had reached Heaven, who never knew
Where
lay the difference 'twixt the false and true!
Ye, who
secure 'mid trophies not your own,
Judge
him who won them when he stood alone,
And
proudly talk of recreant Berengare-- 15
O first
the age, and then the man compare!
That
age how dark! congenial minds how rare!
No host
of friends with kindred zeal did burn!
No
throbbing hearts awaited his return!
Prostrate
alike when prince and peasant fell, 20
He only
disenchanted from the spell,
Like
the weak worm that gems the starless night,
Moved
in the scanty circlet of his light:
And was
it strange if he withdrew the ray
That
did but guide the night-birds to their prey? 25
The
ascending day-star with a bolder eye
Hath
lit each dew-drop on our trimmer lawn!
Yet not
for this, if wise, shall we decry
The
spots and struggles of the timid Dawn;
Lest so
we tempt th'approaching Noon to scorn 30
The
mists and painted vapours of our Morn. <47>
Allan John
Macdonald explains Bernegarius's heresy in a way that
is
reminiscent of the disinction between Aristotle's Law
of Non-
Contradiction,
based on reason and nature, and Cusanus's
coincidentia
oppositorum, based on a higher divine law.
Macdonald
explains what is
the fundamental principle of the whole Berengarian criticism
of the Catholic dogma of
Transubstantiation. It is contrary
to the evidence of the senses. . . . Secondly, reason
compels an admission that it is contrary to
the law of nature
that one thing can be changed into another
without the
breaking-up or annihilation of its original
elements. <48>
So the
issue joined by Berengarius pitted a rational
explanation
against
a mystical one. The Church's position
was that the
opposites
of bread/wine and flesh/blood do coincide in the
Eucharist. Just as the mystery of the Incarnation made a
supposedly
impossible combination of spirit and flesh in the
person
of Jesus, so does the mystery of the Eucharist bring
together
the food and the risen body. Although we
can still see
the
bread and wine, they are in reality the body of Jesus. But
since
we can still see the bread and wine, reasoned Berengarius,
the
doctrine of the Real Presence requires us to deny the
evidence
of our senses.
17
As Coleridge explores the issue, he sets up
a carefully
constructed
opposition: to believe or not to believe.
Whatever
the
intricacies of the theological arguments, Berengarius
is torn
between
obedience to the order of the Pope to conform and the
decision
of his own conscience. The two sides of
the opposition
can not
possibly be reconciled on this earth, but they may be
reconciled
in heaven. Berengarius
has been condemned by the Pope
for not
being able to see the Real Presence in the Eucharist.
Opposed
to this condemnation, Berengarius's own conscience
would
acquit
him. Berengarius
hopes that God will agree with
Berengarius's conscience and acquit him also, but His fear of
God's
condemnation, following the Pope's, is set in contrast to
his
hope of acquittal by his conscience. For
indeed, his
unstated
fear is that even his own conscience may not acquit him;
he
might die and find that he has to condemn himself. His hope
of
acquittal is based on a perspective above the earthly;
perhaps,
for some reason that he can not see on earth, God, like
his
conscience, will acquit him. Here and
now he is painfully
balanced,
"staggering" between conscience and Pope.
His deepest fear is that the two sides are irreconcilable.
After
death he will be in the presence of God, who may provide
the
missing element that will bring together the opposing earthly
forces. Perhaps, Berengarius
implicitly hopes in Coleridge's
poem,
God can leap over the dead-end that stymies him and the
Pope. The hopeful formula coincides exactly with
those of
Cusanus
discussed in my introductory chapter: what appears to be
in
opposition on earth actually coincides in the mind of God.
Cusanus's
certainty is missing here, of course; the coincidence
of
opposites is merely a projected hope into the future. As in
the
Dejection Ode, the hope is not a Wordsworthian
certainty.
But Berengarius's only way out of the unbearable tension is to
die and
find that the opposites no longer will tear him apart.
The
poem implies that a higher resolution is possible, and hoped
for,
but the fear is based on the fact that the coincidence of
opposites
can not happen on earth, where Aristotle's Law of Non-
Contradiction
reigns.
Ironically, the hope that opposites can
coincide in God in a
way
that they can not on earth is embodied in the very problem of
Berengarius's heresy: his inability to acquiese
to the doctrine
of the
Real Presence. He can not accept the
church's doctrine
that in
the Eucharist the body and blood of Christ actually
appear
in the bread and wine. As we have seen
in Coleridge, in
"The
Aeolian Harp" and in the Dejection Ode, he is caught in an
impossible
bind, impossible because of the constraints of logic.
Although
this logic is not explicitly discussed in the lines to
Berengarius, the dilemma certainly suggests that logical trap.
If Berengarius is right, and divine and human do not become a
perfect
coincidence of opposites in the Real Presence of the
Eucharist,
then Berengarius has strong reason to doubt that God
can
solve the problem of the opposition of conscience and Pope by
somehow
bringing them together in a miraculous, divine
coincidence
of opposites. But if God can indeed
effect a
coincidence
of opposites when Berengarius appears before him in
heaven,
then surely he can effect a coincidence of opposites in
the
body/blood and bread/wine of the Eucharist.
If God can not
make
flesh and spirit coincide on earth, then he might not be
able to
resolve the problem of perceiving that paradox when
Berengarius gets to heaven.
Berengarius is
being judged by the Church because he cannot
see; he
cannot see the Real Presence that the Church demands that
he
see. The metaphor of sight guides the
poem from the
beginning:
the lynx is legendary for its superior sense of sight,
while
moles are blind from living underground.
Coleridge is thus
performing
another twist on the themes of opposition: although
Berengarius's official heresy was that he could not see,
Coleridge
defines him as better at seeing than his contemporary
accusers
were.
In line 3, in Coleridge's apostrophe to Berengarius ("had I
stood
by thy bed" also means if I had been you, and in a
fundamental
way, I am like you) he attempts to take a reconciling
18
view,
that is to imagine what God's position on the matter might
be. By seeing a hope springing from the fear,
Coleridge makes
fear
yield its opposite.
As another part of his reassurance,
Coleridge continues the
separation
that had been set up in Pope/condemnation/fear vs.
conscience/acquittal/hope. He adds "hand and breath" to the
former
set of terms and "truth within thy heart" to the latter
set. Now the latter set of terms receives most of
the value,
whereas
before the two sets of terms had been equally balanced.
The
condemnation by the Pope is further devalued by being linked
to
"dungeon torture," whereas the acquittal of conscience is
linked
to "truth." So Coleridge has
set up an equation in which
heart
equals spiritual equals acquittal while hand and breath
equal
physical equal condemnation.
Line 13 implies that the ignorant, who do
not trouble their
brains
with the question of the Real Presence, do go to Heaven
without
worrying about it. In fact, the whole
problem seems to
be that
Berengarius was too smart: if he had not ever worried
about
the Real Presence, as ordinary people do not worry, then he
could
have gone to heaven along with them.
And, in line 9, if he
had not
possessed fear, he might have defied the Pope and gone to
hell. His learnedness would have been better off as
ignorance.
He is
better off if his potential courage becomes fear instead.
Coleridge
obviously sympathizes deeply with someone whose fears
wisely
overcame his bold reaches into heterodoxy, someone, who,
like
the Coleridge who took on responsibility for all knowledge,
was
just too smart for his own good.
In his intelligence, Berengarius
had to go through the agony
of
twice recanting and finally dying without really knowing the
answer
to his problem before death. Berengarius, like Coleridge,
from
being too intelligent and too scrupulous, by considering too
curiously,
has worried about "the false and true," but has
finally
decided that the issue of the Real Presence is not
important
enough to take a stand on. The fear of
earthly torture
may
have saved Berengarius from the eternity of hellish
torture.
The
Inquisition wins again, just as in "The Aeolian Harp."
Whereas the first stanza of the poem addresses
Berengarius
himself,
the second stanza addresses Bernegarius's modern-day
accusers. By implication, they are parallel to the Pope
who
condemned
Berengarius.
Since they do not understand the
perspective
of Berengarius (and by implication do not understand
that of
Coleridge) those who judge are not seeing from God's
perspective,
which might very well include the coincidence of
opposites. Most ironically, their accusation, like the
Pope's,
arises
because they accuse Berengarius of not seeing from
God's
perspective
when he does not see the Real Presence.
After the first stanza addresses Berengarius and the second
stanza
addresses his accusers, the third stanza speaks in first
person
plural, including all, especially Coleridge's
contemporaries. In this third stanza Coleridge speaks from a
lengthy
historical perspective, as if he were trying to see from
God's
point of view. With the greatest
tolerance and a vast
sweep
of time, Coleridge tries to reconcile the agonized
oppositions
of the beginning of the poem.
In line 29 the sun of enlightenment,
brighter in the
nineteenth
century than in the eleventh, rises and removes
darkness. The earlier starless night had been broken
only by the
single
light of Berengarius.
The sequence of dawn, morn, noon
sets up
a time-line of progress. The dawn was Berengarius's
time,
with only incipient light. By
Coleridge's time, the morn,
more
light appears, but even though we can see better than did
previous
ages, we should not condemn Berengarius, who did his
best
with his limited light. And if we do
judge Berengarius
harshly,
says Coleridge, then we can expect that the brightest
time,
the noon that will arrive in the future, will also judge
us. Like Berengarius,
we can hope to suspend earthly judgment
19
and
obtain heavenly acquittal. Since God
will have forgiven, so
should
we, all the more so because Coleridge feels himself in the
same
problem when he tries to see the everlasting presence in
Nature.
Coleridge, after imagining the prayer said
by Berengarius
before
his death, declares his sympathy for one who would declare
what he
fain would see, even if he couldn't see it.
As in "The
Aeolian
Harp," Berengarius/Coleridge sees more than
others do,
but his
ideas do not fit the established system's doctrine. Over
and
over he attempts to see a coincidence of opposites that he
cannot
see, falls back from his position, confesses his
inability,
but then tries to remain orthodox nonetheless.
As
contrasted
with the definite assertions of the coincidence of
opposites
in Shelley and Blake, Coleridge always hesitates.
Therefore
he understands and sympathizes with the apparent
weakness
of Berengarius.
Raoul Heurtevent, in his study of the heresy of Berengarius
(without
reference to Coleridge), introduces an argument very
similar
to Coleridge's: according to Heurtevent, in an age
when
an
issue is not questioned, the language is necessarily less
precise.<49> Thus, before Berengarius
questioned the Real
Presence,
the Church had not worked to define the issue
precisely. After the language has been made more precise
because
of
controversy, it is not fair to implicate someone by means of
that
precise language without respect for its earlier, more naive
context. Coleridge's similar point also calls for
open-
mindedness:
in our more tolerant and enlightened time, we can
better
understand the dilemma of Berengarius, who saw more
clearly
than his contemporaries, although they thought that he
could
not see.
The issue between Berengarius
and the Church was precisely
the
same issue between Coleridge and Nature: a distinction
between
what the senses require and what faith requires.
Il [Florus, one
of the debaters in the Berengarisn issue]
distinguait nettement les deux cotes
de la question
eucharistique. Ce que voient les
sens, et ce que disent la
raison et la foi
ne concordent pas. Quant a l'explication,
elle est simple: c'est un mystere.
<50>
[my translation] He clearly distinguished
the two sides of
the question of the Eucharist. What the senses see and what
reason and faith say do not coincide. Why?
Simple. It is a
mystery.
Finally, the matter can be referred back to
the first
principle
that I discussed in Nicolas Cusansu, who refused to
let
the
power of God be limited by Aristotle's Law of Non-
Contradiction:
all sections of Berengarian
opinion are agreed that the
accidence of bread and wine remains after
consecration, . . .
By making this denial [that bread and wine
can also be flesh
and blood], the Berengarians
leave out of account the will of
God, for, according to the Psalmist, God
can do anything that
He wills, and if God is almighty He can
will a change to take
place in natural objects. <51>
Thus,
despite his yearnings for wholeness, expressed especially
in his
philosophical and political prose, Coleridge in his
poetry,
specifically in "The Aeolian Harp," the Dejection Ode,
and
"Lines Suggested by the Last Words of Berengarius,"
chooses
the
limits of Aristotelian reason and Christian orthodoxy over
the
callings of his beloved coincidentia oppositorum. He had
good
reason to; most of us make the same kind of decison. His
brilliance,
the bright noon of his mind and soul, remind us of
the
scale of the struggle:
Coleridge lives and gains more life with
each generation, not
because he completed metaphysical systems,
like Schelling,
Fichte, and
Hegel, whose Procrustean achievements only feebly
20
command our attention today; and not, as
Dr. Leavis and T.S.
Eliot and a hallowed tradition of
Anglo-American commentary
would have it, because he was a poet and
critic in spite of
his metaphysical preoccupations; but because
he honoured to
the full the demands of a reticulated
response to all the
data of his consciousness--because, in
short, his was a mind
of rare integrity. He did not, like Goethe, stifle his
metaphysical interests the better to breathe
in the green
world of things, and he did not, like the
transcendental
systematists,
distort the texture of experience to achieve a
completed network of abstraction.
Coleridge's endeavour was always
towards system. But
this orientation was first of all the need
to connect rather
than the need to complete. <52>
In the
four years of his life remaining after the lines to
Berengarius, Coleridge pursues a new train of thought that leads
us on
to Blake:
During the last few years of his life,
Coleridge seems to
have reflected often on a Christological
doctrine which,
until then, had held no special place in
his thinking: the
doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ . .
. In Notebook 41
. . . "Christ [must] be considered not
only as a spiritual
divine Man but as the essential Divine
Humanity." <53>
Had he
lived to explore the issue more fully, Coleridge would
have
certainly, like Pope, chosen conservative, orthodox paths.
The Berengarian tension of defying established authority he
obviously
chose to solve in a Berengarian fashion: recant all
heresies,
live in orthodoxy. Blake will explode
those cautious
fears,
living to the full the implications of the Human Form
Divine,
maintaining both his orthodoxy and his defiance in a
white-hot
coincidentia oppositorum.
21
Notes
to Chapter 3: Blind to the Real Presence
1. N.
M. Goldsmith, "A Reconciliation of Opposites: Concepts of
the
Mind in Pope and Coleridge," Prose Studies, 7 (1984), p. 6.
2.
Although we do not know whether Pope had read Nicholas of
Cusa, we do know that Coleridge had.
In his notebooks (ed.
Kathleen
Coburn, 1957-71) in 1803, we find the following entry in
the
context of musings over "the nature of Being which Creatures
possess":
vide Cusan.
Dialog. de Genesi, quomodo idem identificando
pluralitatem producit.--<The
Hebrews called God "Space." -->
(I: 1379)
This
cryptic note, although it does not tell us very much, does
tell us
that Coleridge thought that Cusanus was an important
reference
in the question of one of the fundamental aspects of
the
coincidence of opposites: the Many and the One.
3. The
Friend, Second Section, Essay IV, 1818, in The Portable
Coleridge,
pp. 339-40.
4.
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must
sink
Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in
words
To which the heaven of heavens is but a
veil.
All strength--all terror, single or in
bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form--
Jehovah--with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal
thrones--
I pass them unalarmed. (Prospectus to The Recluse)
5. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
ed. Earl Leslie
Griggs
(
6.
Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition
(Oxford:
Clarendon, 1969), p. xxxix.
7.
McFarland, p. 139.
8. Biographia Literaria; qtd. in
McFarland, p. 135.
9. Notebooks;
qtd. in Wheeler, p. 54.
10. Table
Talk; qtd. in Richard Holmes, Coleridge (
1982),
pp. 51-52.
11. Letters
of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (
43.
12.
Richard Holmes, Coleridge (Oxford UP, 1972), pp. 51,52.
13.
McFarland, p. 111.
22
14. Notebook,
Dec 1804, no. 2372; qtd. in Mary Warnock,
Imagination
(Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1976), p. 80.
15.
Wheeler, p. 50.
16. The
Friend; qtd. in Wheeler, p. 57.
17. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and
(Princeton
UP, 1983), 1:296.
18.
Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in
Coleridge's
Critical
Thought (NY: St. Martin's, 1988), p. 23.
19.
McFarland, p. 107.
20.
McFarland, p. 120.
21.
Holmes, Coleridge, p. 64.
22. On
the Constitution of Church & State, ed. John Barrell
(London:
Dent, 1972), p. 16.
23.
Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (
Wesleyan
UP, 1971), p. 201.
24. Biographia, 1:298.
25. Biographia, 1:299.
26. Biographia, 1:304-05.
27.
Warnock, pp. 83-84, 92.
28.
Warnock, p. 185.
29.
Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word: Language,
Poetics and
Biblical
Interpretation (Cambridge UP, 1986), p. 163.
30. Biographia, 2:15-17.
31.
Coleman, Deirdre, and Peter Otto, "Introduction," Imagining
Romanticism
(West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hiss Press, 1992), p. x.
32. Prickett, Words, p. 15.
33. Prickett, Words, p. 17.
34. Biographia, 1:299.
35. Biographia, 1:304.
36. Biographia, 1:304.
37. Biographia, 1:300, 304.
38. Biographia, 1:300.
39. Biographia, 1:300.
23
40.
congruity,
and real incongruity of ideas, suddenly discovered."
41.
Barfield, p. 34.
42.
Barfield, p. 35.
43.
Barfield, p. 110.
44.
Barfield, p. 232.
45. Barth, Doctrine, p. 175.
46.
Qtd. in Barth, Doctrine, p. 177.
47.
48.
Macdonald, p. 256.
49. Raoul Heurtevent, Durand de Troarn et les Origines de
l'Heresie Berengarienne (Paris: Beauchesne, 1912).
50. Heurtevent, p. 184.
51.
MacDonald, p. 341.
52.
McFarland, p. 110.
53. Barth, Doctrine, p. 136.