Coleridge and The Supernatural

Coleridge and the Supernatural
Author(s): Leslie Brisman

Source: Studies in Romanticism , Summer, 1982, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer, 1982), pp. 123-
159
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25600346
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LESLIE BRISMAN
Coleridge and the Supernatural
My point
in aof
notedeparture is Coleridge's
on Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical use
Polity.ofHooker
the offers,
term supernatural
as a reasonable ground in which to root faith, the idea that the desire for
happiness is natural in man: "Now if men had not naturally this desire
to be happy, how were it possible that all men should have it? All men
have. Therefore this desire is natural."1 Unlike the desire for Christian
blessedness (which some men have and most do not, at least by that
name), the general desire for happiness is not determined by an exposure
to a specific culture or dispensation. Natural, for Hooker, means "per
taining to human nature generally," whereas supernatural means "per
taining to God's Christian dispensation." Hooker thus happily proceeds
on natural ground, in the footsteps of Aristotle rather than Aquinas,
when he delineates three forms of desire:
Man doth seek a triple perfection: first a sensual, consisting in those

things which very life itself requireth either as necessary supple
ments, or as beauties and ornaments thereof; then an intellectual,
consisting in those things which none underneath man is either
capable of or acquainted with; lastly a spiritual and divine, consist
ing in those things whereunto we tend by supernatural means here,
but cannot here attain unto them.
Introducing the term supernatural into his definition of this third form
of desire, Hooker does not mean that it takes supernatural means to
make us tend to the divine; rather, supernatural means (the Christian
gospel) are vouchsafed to us on earth to aid us in the pursuit of a natural
desire that cannot be satisfied on this earth. The desire for spiritual
satisfaction becomes itself religious; but the desire begins in nature, in
common human nature, and Hooker ends the paragraph by returning
us to the principle that the third and highest form of desire is, no less
than the first two, the offspring of mother nature: "So that Nature even
in this life doth plainly claim and call for a more divine perfection than
either of these two [desires] that have been mentioned."
i. The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. John Keble (1862; rep. New York: Burt
Franklin, 1970), 1, 256. Subsequent citations are from the same paragraph, i.xi.4.
SiR, 21 (Summer 1982)
123

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124 LESLIE BRISMAN
It is in response to this last sentence that Coleridge writes,
Whenever I meet with an ambiguous or multivocal word, without

the meaning being shown and fixed, I stand on my guard against
a sophism. I dislike this term 'nature,' in this place. If it mean the
light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, it is an inapt
term; for reason is supernatural.2
To be sure one could say of Coleridge's supernature no less than Hooker's

nature that it is an ambiguous or multivocal word. But the charge is less
interesting than the accouterments, and Coleridge escalates the rhetorical
arms race he instigates by putting on the armor of God, going back to
Scripture for the phrase "light that lighteth every man that cometh into
the world." Yet why pick this quarrel with Hooker, why deny him his
desire to ground in nature the desire for something more than nature?
It may be that we have here a little illustration of that cardinal principle
of poetic influence that a man is known by the father he keeps, and
known best by the aspect of the father against which he keeps guard.
Coleridge establishes his ground over and against Hooker just where
Hooker sounds most "romantic": in trying to ground the transcendent
in the natural. Imagine Hooker to be repeating the nineteenth psalm:
"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his
handywork." Nature declares the more-than-natural; that is, human
nature, with its desire for the more-than-natural heaven, reveals to us
a God above nature. Phrased thus, Hooker's dictum sounds as romantic
as it is Biblical; but in accord with Coleridge's typological reading of
the psalms, Hooker's emphasis on the natural may be said to form a
model Old Testament text which the romantic interprets in the spirit of
the New, Wordsworthian Testament: the Presence that is not to be put
by has its dwelling in heaven (in the light of setting suns)?and in the
mind of man. Though the glory and the dream fled from the earth with
the death ofthe incarnate Son, a Presence called by the church the Holy
Spirit still makes its dwelling in the mind of man. Taking this indwelling
Spirit to be a fundamental faculty of mind, Coleridge binds Christian
2. Notes on Hooker, from Literary Remains, in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, ed. Shedd (New York: Harper & Bros., 1876), v, 39. The quotation from John
is a favorite with Coleridge, and it reappears throughout the notebooks and marginalia.
See, for example, the entry of 13 December 1827 (entry 15 of Notebook 36) and entry 50
of Notebook 37?both to appear in The Collected Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
vol. 5, ed. Merton Christensen and Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton U. Press). I
am very much indebted to Professor Christensen for allowing me to see the typescripts
for Volumes 4 and 5 before their publication. The Collected Notebooks is abbreviated
henceforth as CN.

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COLERIDGE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 125
piety and natural piety, Biblical criticism and the theory of

nation.
Coleridge borrows the term Reason from Kant, but all his own is its
association with the Holy Spirit over and against the Understanding and
the "natural" faculties of mind.3 Both the imaginative leap from ordinary
sight to perception "into the life of things," and the leap of faith from
matters of the Understanding to the sweet reasonableness of Christian
doctrine are leaps energized by the Holy Spirit?leaps ofthe Spirit. He
can therefore take as a cardinal imaginative and religious principle Paul's
dictum, "no man can say Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost."
Coleridge uses this not only against Hooker, but against the natural
theologians of his own time: "How little have our latter Divines, ofthe
School of Paley and Watson, meditated on the last clause of [Paul's]
verse. If only by the Spirit, then assuredly not by arguments of the
common Understanding grounded on miracles."4 For Coleridge it is
neither Hooker's "arguments of the common Understanding" nor the
sight of miracles (and hence the agency of the senses) but the capacity
of the mind to come to faith without logical proof or evidence of the
senses that declares the supernatural agency of human Reason.
Calling the Reason supernatural, Coleridge pushes the crucial bourn
between heaven and earth back to earth, to man, to a line traced (or
retraced, rather, in every imaginative experience) within the mind of
man. If the Understanding is the natural faculty?the faculty that, under
the name fancy in the famous definitions, plays with fixities and counters
of sense experience?then the Reason, as the supernatural faculty, is
ultimately to be identified with (not just mediated by) the imagination.5
3. Kant's Vernunft actually represents one of two streams flowing into the Coleridgean
river here. The other is a native English one, and is traceable to Bacon (who saw
imagination as messenger between sense and reason) or Spenser (who, in Book n of The
Faerie Queene, distinguished the fort of reason from the rather limited space presided over
by Phantastes, personification not of imagination but of the image-making faculty).
Though the distinction between Reason and the Understanding is Kant's (and it is for the
Kantian Reason that I reserve the capital letter), the assimilation of German idealism and
English Protestantism is Coleridge's own. Hooker, Bacon, and Spenser regarded the
reason as a natural faculty; when Coleridge "super-naturalizes" it, Reason and imagination
are identified with what Protestantism acknowledged as the inner light. See the discussion
of "the light that lighteth every man" below.
4. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Number 12, Marginalia, vol. 1, ed.
George Whalley (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980), p. 462. The Collected Works is
abbreviated henceforth as CW.
5. At least at one point Coleridge called the imagination an oscillation "connecting
Reason and Understanding" (See Coleridge on'the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta F.
Brinkley [Durham, N.C.: Duke U. Press, 1955], p. 694). And in Marginalia, George
Whalley identifies imagination as the medium Coleridge intends between Reason and

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126 LESLIE BRISMAN
Unlike the image-making faculty, the Imagination is "the living Power

and prime Agent of all human Perception"?the agent and power by
which human perception is distinguished from mere physical, animal
sight.6 "Human perception" is man's capacity to view the world whole,
to view the world as the organic creation of the living Power, God.7
Understanding (p. 70, n. 27). Perhaps the best way to understand how imagination can
be the medium between the supernatural and natural faculties and also be entitled to be
called itself supernatural is to compare the second?or better (since it involves synecdoche
rather than comparison)?the third person of the Trinity. Imagination, the Son and the
Holy Ghost are sometimes apprehended as mediators, at other times taken to be at one
with the higher term.
6. The relation between imagination and image-making faculty, a relation so curiously
elided in Biographia Literaria, is a plaything ofthe Renaissance. The best statement I know
about the confusion between the two faculties is by John Guillory: "Obviously mental
image-making is not the essence of poetry, and it may not even be a very important part.
Poets give us words, not images. That poets cling to this trope indicates a desire for
continuity with an archaic poetic self, the vatic figure who really saw the thing he wrote
about; and this desire coexists with a contradictory "Satanic" impulse to ground the poem
wholly in the self, to deny an origin that is prior or other" {Poetic Authority: Spenser,
Milton, and Literary History [Yale U. Diss., 1979], p. 253).
Distinguishing between imagination and the image-making faculty, Coleridge would,
I believe, have identified both the primary and secondary imagination as manifestations
of the supernatural, the God-in-man. Though there is significant variation among the
individual interpretations of primary imagination, I think we can distinguish three basic
positions. The first, propounded by Shawcross and I. A. Richards, and more recently
defended by McFarland and Barfield, identifies primary imagination with the image
making faculty or with an unconscious faculty closely allied to it. The second position
also sees imagination as involved in ordinary perception, and might be called the philo
sophical or phenomenological one. In The Romantic Will (New Haven: Yale U. Press,
J976), pp. 20-23, Michael G. Cooke elaborates a metaphysics of ordinary perception that
allows him to hold on to both halves of the definition of primary imagination. Other
interpreters of the phenomenology of ordinary perception include Walter Jackson Bate
("Coleridge on the Function of Art," in Perspectives of Criticism, ed. Harry Levin [Cam
bridge: Harvard U. Press, 1950], pp. 141-47), and J. R. de J. Jackson, in Method and
Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1969), p. 112. My own
position could be called a third (rather than simply an extension of the second) because I
see primary imagination involved in the religious sense of the unity of things rather than
the philosophical category ofthe universals. My closest precursor is, I believe, J. B. Beer,
who sees the primary imagination "at one with reason," and equates its kind of "percep
tion" with the imaginative mode of Kubla Khan, the maker in the first verse paragraph
of Coleridge's poem (Coleridge the Visionary [London: Chatto & Windus, 1959], pp. 170,
248-49).
7. Many discussions ofthe definitions treat "prime Agent of all human Perception" as
though the word human were not there and perception meant ordinary seeing, a faculty
man shares with the brutes. But compare this passage from "On Poesy or Art": "As soon
as the human mind is intelligibly addressed by an outward image exclusively of articulate
speech, so soon does art commence. But please to observe that I have laid particular stress
on the words 'human mind,'?meaning to exclude thereby all results common to man

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And the "primacy" of the primary imagination is the prim

By this Coleridge understands not just the temporal prio
Creator over his creation but the primacy of thou-consciou
the world of things. Coleridge imagines God Himself explic
gnomic self-definition in Exodus: "I am all that truly is, an
art?how??my Son: in the eternal This day have I ever begot
Interpreting "this day" as an eternal present, Coleridge lays
for seeing imagination as man's capacity ever to repeat (thi
infinite / am in saying, with God the Father, "Thou art!" t
The primary thing in a man's life is this capacity for religi
this supernatural faculty; secondary to that, though like it in ki
poetry-making faculty. The secondary imagination, whic
describes as "co-existing with the conscious will," returns t
the act of creation to "the eternal self-affirmant, the I AM
. . . the pure idea of the will."9 Were the primary imagina
many critics have asserted, the mere image-making faculty
ary could in no way be described as "identical with the prim
kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the
operation." But if we understand the "kind of its agency" a
ural, we can understand why poetic creation differs only in
mode from divine creation or the perception of creation as
why poetic creation is "essentially vital, even as all objects (
are essentially fixed and dead."
If we assimilate the quarrel with Hooker to the theory of
nation, we can understand Coleridge's romanticism as a form
Protestantism. The quest romances of Coleridgean romantic
mapped on a Mercator projection in which east means an
mode, and west a more "enlightened," symbolic Christianity
jectivism of such romanticism is that by which the kingdom
not "temporal, visible, objective" but here and now, "wit
and all other sentient creatures, and consequently confining myself to the ef
by the congruity of the animal impression with the reflective powers of the
not the thing presented, but that which is re-presented by the thing, shal
of the pleasure. In this sense nature itself is to a religious observer th
(Biographia Literaria, by S. T. Coleridge, ed. with His Aesthetical Essays by
[London: Oxford U. Press, 1907], 11, 254).
8. CN 4.4523.
9. Notes on Donne, in Shedd, v, 103.
10. "My kingdom is not of this World" is capable of two interpretations. If "the world
be [of this age], it is rather favorable than otherwise to the Millenarian Scheme, as set
forth by Lacunza, & my zealous friend, the Rev. E. Irving?but if it mean spiritual?i.e.
subjective, as opposed to temporal, visible, objective, it in this case overthrows the
Scheme" (Entry 15 of Notebook 35, to be published in CN 5).

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128 LESLIE BRISMAN
Its zeal for the sublime is religious zeal, not to be reduced to pheno
menology or psychology, and its semiologies?its dramatic portrayals
of excesses on the planes of signifier or signified?are variations on the
metonymy par excellence, the Son as nom-du-pere, His name's sake.11
Coleridge's promised essay on the supernatural, in which the "powers
and privileges of the imagination" are further declared, was not prom
ised in vain after the definitions of primary and secondary imagination;
the essay was written about the privileged, "reformed" meaning of
supernatural, and it was already written in The Rime, in every poetic
exercise of the Holy Spirit or Reason in its secondary manifestation as
poetic power. Coleridge's distinction between the Reason and the Un
derstanding, his labeling the Reason supernatural, lead thus not to Ger
many but to Jerusalem, or back through Germany to Jerusalem. The
goal is not idealism but God, not Plato but Paul, not Kant but Emmanuel,
the Lord is with us.12 Idealism, like John the Baptist, "was not that
light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true
Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world" (John
1:8-9).
With this metaphor, we must return to Coleridge's note to Hooker
and admire a very beautiful and characteristic maneuver. Hooker is
talking about a desire all men know regardless of whether they are
vouchsafed the Christian means to the satisfaction of this desire: "Nature
even in this life doth plainly claim and call for a more divine perfec
tion. ..." To this Coleridge objects that the faculty that claims and
calls for a more divine perfection is itself divine. But observe what
happens as he pauses before denominating the desire Reason and calling
it supernatural. At this point of uncertainty, a "top of speculation" that
begins as a semantic uncertainty and becomes an either/or moment of
faith, Coleridge queries: "if it mean the light that lighteth every man
ii. Marginalia, p. 428. Coleridge makes sense ofthe familiar Biblicism "for His name's
sake" by identifying His name's sake as Christ's sake. Christ is both the nomen (the
particular name or named person) and the Numen (spirit or Power) "to which he had
from everlasting communicated his own deity." See also entry 69 of Notebook 36, to be
published in CN 5.
12. The terms of such discourse necessarily create strange bedfellows, but against the
formidable Kantians, Rene Wellek and Thomas Weiskel (in The Romantic Sublime: Studies
in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1976]),
I would pit the various works of Thomas McFarland and Geoffrey Hartman. Multifarious
as it is, all of Hartman's work may be said to be ultimately Jerusalem oriented, and
McFarland's monumental Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition singles out Kant (as opposed
to the pantheists that go back to Lessing and Spinoza and forward to the "neo-Kantians"
Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer) as the one true idealist through whom Col
eridge returns to the eternal "I am" and Christianity.

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that cometh unto the world." Does Hooker mean that? Inso
phrase Coleridge quotes refers, without special dispensation
man, the answer is yes, that is a decent paraphrase; Hooker
nature human nature at its highest, antecedent to or exclusiv
of Christ. But Coleridge's paraphrase is no neutral one. The
lighteth every man that cometh unto the world is Chri
answering Milton in the great sonnet on his blindness, Cole
prevent that murmur"?the murmur of desire thwarted in
nature, of Understanding, of purely sensory perceptions?loc
there, already there, in the mind of man. The desire for a m
perfection is the kingdom of God within man, whether
knows it through the historically vouchsafed doctrine of Ch
Carried to its Blakean extreme, the substitution of "the li
lighteth every man" for "nature" denies the churchly under
a historically vouchsafed Christian dispensation. And this f
does not go.13 His next sentence in the note returns us to h
historical Christianity, albeit in a manner I find a bit ob
that reason in man must have been first actuated by a direc
from God, I have myself proved. ..." Perhaps he means by t
the principle he articulated elsewhere that there are in natur
(everything in nature is traceable to something else in natur
the first motion of Reason, as the supernatural faculty, mu
a direct revelation; perhaps he simply "proved" revelation to
having decided to grant it historical authenticity in order to
freely for the independence of faith from miraculous inte
Whatever the origin of the thought of this proof, I susp
intends this statement of self-assurance of his orthodoxy as
his more general claim about the supernaturalism of Re
following note on Hooker he laments the general confoundin
with the Understanding:
13- Throughout this study I ignore the change in Coleridge from Unita
tarian beliefs, and treat Coleridge the poet as though he were always of th
party without knowing it. To hold that the Logos is "communicative and
intellect, in God and Man" (letter of September 25, 1816) is to hold a view
denomination. I realize the risk in this, but the fact is that Coleridge's
allegoric in the sense Blake's could be said to be, and so one must see h
symbolist?though not necessarily Church of England Trinitarian?all alo
incarnate in particular poems negotiates the crossings between pantheistic
moral tropes; but Coleridge's intellectual history does not negotiate such
date.
14. "He customarily presents us with completed opinions based on unexpressed argu
ments" (McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, p. 236).

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130 LESLIE BRISMAN
In Hooker, and in the great divines of his age, it was merely a

occasional carelessness in the use of the terms that reason is ever
put where they meant the understanding; for from other parts o
their writings, it is evident that they knew and asserted the distin
tion, nay the diversity of the things themselves; to wit, that ther
was in man another and higher light than that of the faculty judgin
according to sense.15
Alas for the writers of the Reformation, they knew not Kant! But
"higher light" in this quotation an equivalent for "the true light th
lighteth every man" in the preceding note? In identifying the high
light of Reason with the inner light of Christ, Coleridge does not w
to empty Christianity of its historical myth and reduce Christ to a figur
for the higher light. That would be Blakean allegory, and would invol
from Coleridge's point of view, a loss not to be sustained. He write
several places of the sadness of the dissenters' appropriation of a C
tian significance without its substance, and the sadness of the Unita
demythologizing of Christ.16 If Jesus simply represents Christian virtues
or if the eucharist simply re-presents to the memory Jesus' last supp
religion has turned into melancholy allegory. Coleridge's own,
radical Protestantism distinguishes symbol from allegory in that t
contemporary ritual and the historical Jesus are seen to participate s
ecdochically in the significance for which they stand. The allegoric
Jesus is the light that lighteth every man, Christian or non-Christian
is a figure for the kingdom of God within?within the mind of ever
fully conscious man. The symbolic Jesus is the light who once cam
earth to lighten the burden of sin for every man, or every believer
every one of the elect; a synecdoche for the kingdom of God, J
declared to the apostles "that he had dwelt a brief while with or amo
them in order to dwell in them permanently."17
The Coleridge note on Hooker with which I began implicitly
pounds this concept of the symbolic with its inclusion of the histori
and the allegorical: Coleridge asserts "that faith as the means of salva
was first made known by revelation; but that reason is incapabl
seeing into the fitness and superiority of these means, or that it i
mystery in any other sense than as all spiritual truths are mysteriou
15- Notes on Hooker, in Shedd, v, 40.
16. See Shedd, v, 23, and Notebook 36, fols. 32V-33, quoted by Robert J. Barth, S.
Coleridge and the Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1969), p. I79n.
17. Notes on Waterland, in Shedd, v, 424. On the symbolism-allegory distinction
The Statesman's Manual, in CW, num. 6: Lay Sermons (Princeton: Princeton U. P
[Bollingen Series] 1972), p. 30. See also Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbo
Mode (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1964), pp. 15-19.

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do deny." The faith first made known by revelation is the faith

who dwelt a brief while with or among them; the Reason ca
seeing the fitness and superiority of Christian faith is the Chr
dwells in us permanently. As both poet and Christian Coler
committed to this symbolic mode, and he translates into a mult
of contexts a faith in the historical (or narrative) progress from
to an internalized spiritual truth. But before we examine some
poetic consequences or analogues of such faith, we must pause ov
dual faith as a principle for reading scripture generally.
Were it not that Coleridge preempted the term supernatural an
ued it (as Blake did the word holy) to a more general, hum
meaning, we could describe the symbolic faith as the faith in t
natural, the natural, and the historical progression between th
term that Coleridge (unlike Blake) reserves for the older an
specific sense of supernatural is miraculous.18 Thus for Coleridge
of God was once miraculously incarnated on earth, and the pri
redemption he first made known lives on as the salvific means b
we transcend our natural selves. This same distinction betwe
time miraculous revelation and a subsequent potential spiritual
eridge applies to the Bible at large. That is, he accepts the tenet
the prophets of the Bible were miraculously inspired, and find
Bible itself the supernatural traces of a divine glory once?but a
ently?made manifest. The two tropes for God's presence (o
accurately, for the holder of the symbolic faith, the two m
revelation) are voice and writing. Unlike Jacques Derrida, C
would not dismiss as mystification the idea of Presence and its
tion with voice; but while granting it temporal priority, he might c
in giving priority of importance to the trope of writing and the
of the trace. Thus, for example, when Paul says "for we say un
by the word of the Lord . . ." (i Thess. 4:15), Coleridge pre
regard the supernatural authority ofthe apostle as his power of insig
interpretation of a prevenient text. To believe that "St. Paul de
himself to have derived this assurance by a direct revelation from
18. Occasionally Coleridge, like Blake, uses the term miracle for something w
but not preternatural, such as a change in heart. (See The Friend, i, 431, in CW
ed. Barbara E. Rooke (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1969). But he also mad
formal distinction between the two concepts of preternatural and non-preterna
der, and he assigned the terms miracle and supernatural just the opposite way from
"The miraculous nature of the giving [of the Spirit] does not depend on the p
kind or quality of the gift received, much less demand that it should be confin
power of working miracles.' For 'miraculous nature' read 'supernatural charact
can subscribe this pencil note written so many years ago, even at this present
March, 1824" (Marginalia on Jeremy Taylor, in Shedd, v, 145-46).

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132 LESLIE BRISMAN
is to degrade Presence into the mystique of the miracle; but to belie

that Paul means "such appears to me to be inferred from Christ's ow
account . . . The Gospel, written or oral," is to privilege the eternal,
supernatural power of interpretation over the preternatural, historical
pearance of Christ.19 The voice of the living Jesus was present to th
apostles, Coleridge thought, and the voice of God was once mirac
lously present to the prophets; but the Bible, as a written document
subject to inspired interpretation, is the natural?or rather the n
miraculously produced?record of such voice, and the God who wo
not show Moses His face revealed Himself to us in His going?in t
traces that mark the historicizing of revelation, in the written record
interpretation and reinterpretation. One may wish to summarize Col
eridge's hermeneutical principle as the principle that there is nothin
supernatural about the composition of the Bible, but once again we fin
the term supernatural preempted, for though the Bible was not mirac
lously written by a divine hand or a divine voice dictating to so man
automaton recorders of the Word (Coleridge's own figure), any trace o
the voice of God, however blurred, can, if rightly understood, raise u
above the natural curse: "Only in the apprehension of this do we live
a higher life."20 Coleridge came to see Biblical criticism as the riches
field for the exercise of self-transcendence. And the Bible itself is bot
the record of, and our means to, the sublime. It contains, though it do
not constitute, Christian religion. Coleridge catches the turn from s
pernatural in the sense of "miraculous" to supernatural in its more r
mantic sense when he says, "the faithful recording of the words of t
prophets does not of itself imply, or seem to require any supernatur
working, other than as all truth and goodness are such."21 In the phra
"any supernatural working" he is using .upernatural in its older sense;
19- Entry 17 of Notebook 41 (April 12, 1829), to be published in CN 5.

20. Coleridge is responding to an objection that he does not distinguish "the histori
from the doctrinal in his defence ofthe Pentateuch." Though it is characteristic of C
eridge's Biblical criticism to move freely between historicizing explanations (like "that
what people believed at the time"?or "the text was probably corrupted at just this poin
and homiletic, typological, mythmaking readings, Coleridge held to the Protestant rig
to determine, among the ghostly shapes of interpretations, the one visitation we rega
as holy: "We cry Halt! to the stream-march of associate Thought & fix our attention
some one appearance only as far as we anticipate a representative value therein?and a
such appearance have, besides their common and individual import, a higher significan
and only in the apprehension of this do we live a higher Life. [Just as this is true
ourselves as Biblical critics, so] this is eminently true of ourselves as individuals?'unle
above himself he can / Erect himself, how mean a thing is Man'" (CN 4.4711).
21. Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, ed. H. St. J. Hart (Stanford: Stanford U. Pres
1957), p. 44

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correcting himself, he recapitulates what he understands to be th

of Christianity.
II
Coleridge's view of the relation of miracles to faith may be regarded as

the very center of his religious thought. In the note on Hooker he writes
that he does not "deny that faith as the means of salvation was first
made known by revelation." The temptation to be resisted is the temp
tation to read behind "I do not deny" the whispered confession "I really
do deny, but that is another matter." Coleridge's faith in the authenticity
of miracles could be explained as his sop to Cerberus, his concession to
a conscience of religious orthodoxy that the miracles may have been
authentic, in order to argue that it is no matter, that the supernatural
operation of the will is free from the tyranny of the miraculous, the
tyranny of the evidence of the senses over the Reason. But such an
argument would palpably misrepresent both the note to Hooker and
dozens of other references in the notebooks. The faith of Coleridge the
symbolic thinker is that the special revelation of God to his prophets
did occur, and that these oracles of God participate synecdochically in
the Biblical statement; the special miracles performed by Jesus did take
place literally, and these events now serve allegorically as reminders of
God's concern for man. A notebook entry for November, 1801 records
this conviction so central to both his poetic imagination and the special
inspiration of his religious prose:
Miracles must be judged by the doctrine which they confirm [,] not
the doctrine by the miracle [.] The Romanists argue preposterously
while they would prove the truth by miracles, whereas they should
prove the miracles by the truth.22
In Coleridge's day it was not just Romanists (and in our day it is no

longer Romanists) who argue preposterously; but though the contro
versy over the evidences of Christianity was an internecine Protestant
one, Coleridge uses the Catholics polemically to represent holders of a
doctrine "we" communally reject. Whether or not one believes in the
literal truth of a particular Bible story, Protestants ought to share the
conviction that one does not reason that way, that religious argument
should not proceed from miracles but up to them, symbols or literalisms
as they may be. Faith must not be grounded in what Coleridge calls the
Understanding: the faculty that assimilates sense impressions. If the
supernatural faculty within is to respond to the supernatural without, it
22. CN, I.I0I0.

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134 LESLIE BRISMAN
must do so freely, through the conscious will, unbound to one's ow

or others' perceptions of a suspension of the laws of nature.
Though it is easy to understand what position Coleridge rejects and
why he so often repeats that rejection, it is harder to explain the phras
that so elegantly turn on its head the rejected doctrine. Granted the
impossibility and the undesirability of making the doctrine depend o
the miracles, what does it mean to judge the miracles by the doctrin
which they confirm? Does judge mean "decide about authenticity" or
"weigh its spiritual significance"? In the phrase "prove the miracles b
the truth" does prove mean "test" (attest to) the historical occurrence
or "demonstrate that these mythic actions are valid symbols of mora
truths"? As a religious thinker Coleridge stops short of affirming thi
second, more Arnoldian position. In his own terms, the miracles are n
allegories of general ethical principles; they are symbols whose authe
ticity (and that means historicity as well as suitability for allegory)
supported by the sense we have that it is fitting that one vouchsafed
divine power expend that power in charitable acts. Take, for example
the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Reading the story in Mark, Mat
thew, or Luke (Matt. 14:13-21; 15:32-39; Mark 6:32-44; Luke 9:10-1
the Arnoldian Protestant, unlike the Augustinian allegorizer, would se
its meaning as exclusively figurative. He might see in the story a parab
of the Word of God given in a frail man's still small voice but effica
ciously preached to the multitudes; the sharing of the bread allegorical
represents the dissemination of the Word, for man does not live
literal bread alone. Blake might have concurred: Jesus preaching for
giveness of sins?and the word catching on! Can you have greate
miracles than these? But Coleridge accepts the literal miracle as such,
and then questions, with Jesus, whether it is not wrong to use th
miracle as a basis of faith.
My example is not arbitrarily chosen, for both Jesus and Coleridge
comment specifically about the story of the loaves and fishes. Colerid
uses this miracle to exemplify the allegorical mode and his dissociatio
from it:
The understanding of Metaphor for Reality (Loaves and Fishes =

Apostles, Fisherman, Christ's Doctrine/&c Sec) one of the Fountains
of the many-headed River of Credulity which overflowing covers
the world with miscreations & reptile monsters, & then gives its
huge supply thro' its many mouths into the Sea of Blood.23
23. CN, 2.2711. The episodes involving Jesus feeding the multitudes are among the
most adverted to in the notebooks.

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Perhaps the most striking thing about this passage is that i

to the allegorical mode Coleridge releases a surprising rush of
imagery, as though he momentarily turned the spigot to d
the work that the valve of literalism must do. The open
remains difficult, perhaps because Coleridge himself, eager to
figure he prized, rushed past the statement of principle. H
meant to say "the understanding of reality for metaphor"?t
act of taking the fish and loaves, which are realities (litera
loaves) as metaphors (figures for the apostles or Christ's doc
I think, rather, that he meant to valorize and reserve for u
nificance the term metaphor. In this reading "the understan
aphor for reality" refers to the process of mistaking symbol
and fish were literal, but they came to be true metaphors for
"realities" (signifiers with less ultimate, more "real" signifie
and moral principles).
In clarifying the relation of signifier and signified, we ma
Coleridge himself does elsewhere, to Jesus' own words in th
John. Whereas the synoptic gospels give us the story of loave
by itself, John 6:30 ff. has Jesus return to the miracle story of
of the chapter in order to demonstrate, as it were, the
maxim that "with each miracle worked there was a truth
which thence forward was to act as its substitute."24 Th
worked, and its truth misprized or forgotten by verse twent
people say to Jesus: "What sign shewest thou then, that we
and believe thee? what dost thou work?" Coleridge now:
strangely does Jesus answer them [!] Was it not natural for h
referred to his stupendous miracles, done in their own pre
day or two before?"25 Jesus declines to answer "You have ju
sign! Are your bellies empty and the sign forgot?" Instead, h
to the recently past literalism of the miraculous feeding, th
literalism of the Old Testament feeding. The people sugg
match the Mosaic miracle?bread from heaven?and Jesus r
ily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread fr
but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. For t
God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life
world." The principle of exegesis Jesus proclaims is that
reading. He does not deny the historicity ofthe manna, but
Coleridge that the truth of the miracle which he now revea
24. The Statesman's Manual, in CW, num. 6, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: P
Press, 1972), p. 9.
25. CN 3.3846.

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136 LESLIE BRISMAN
forward [is] to act as its substitute." He says "It was not Moses w
gave you bread from heaven," rather than "Moses did not give y
(literal) bread from heaven." The latter would be the allegorist's readin
the former asserts the one-time physicality of the bread and then ma
the metaphoric displacement (from literal to figurative bread) coincid
with the displacement of source (from Moses to God the Father). Mose
manna, and Jesus' own miracle of the loaves and fishes, are emblems
God's participation in and valorization of human history; the metapho
displacement participates synecdochically in the great translation fr
the kingdoms of this world to the kingdom to come.
In turning from the past ("it was not Moses who gave you") to th
present ("it is my Father who gives you") Jesus symbolically represen
two principles of Biblical exegesis that are also two principles of litera
theory for Coleridge. The first is the principle of copresence of signif
and signified. As Coleridge says, turning to this passage in John and
rejecting the allegorical reading,
If Scripture do not mock our common sense, and the plainest words
are not to be interpreted into the most outrageous metaphors for
the most commonplace truisms, Mountains in labor with a Mouse,
he is at once (he, not merely his moral precepts) he is at once the
Feast and the Master of the Feast.26
Blake (for those who do not joy in his plain words the way Christian
do in those of Jesus) is always open to the charge of using the most
outrageous metaphors for the most commonplace truisms. Such is th
charge to which prophetic speakers and prophetic writers?I think t
latter term legitimate?are subject in all ages.27 Coleridge's hermeneut
principle here could be taken as a welcome reminder that no poet
wholly allegorical, that all literary texts worth reading as literary tex
are to some degree self-referential: the "meaning" of their characte
and motions is not translatable into truisms, the signified is not so
thing isolatable from the signifiers.
When the text is the Bible, Coleridge's first hermeneutic princi
yields an emphasis on the symbolic, representative Christ who simu
taneously "represents" us all ("the purpose of our Lord's mission and
miracles was to represent the Universal in an Individual") and redeem
26. CN 3.3847.
27. Though it is fashionable to bemoan the term "prophetic" for Blake's major poe
as though inspired meant "disorganized" or "deluded," one ofthe consequences of rea
romantic texts as radical Protestant proclamations is to restore to respectability the enth
siasm that, no less than what Keats saw as Wordsworth's egotism, is "a revelation
spirit."

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us in that privileged representation. To be baptized into the deat

Christ (Rom. 6:3) is "to take up the cross of Christ?what was effe
at once in the unity of the Root must be repeated successive
individually in each twig or fibre that grows out ofthe Root."28
same principle of symbolic participation in the reality represent
tains to Biblical criticism generally. Coleridge rejects as "beautifu
I fear, far too refined and sentimental," a reading ofthe Biblical
mogony as "representative" of the way "every Dawn re-create
world to us . . . First all indistinction, darkness?then a Breeze
Break of Light?then the distinction of the Sky?then of L
Water?then of Trees & Grass?then the Sun rises. . . ,"29 T
Coleridge toyed with such a view, he rejected it as an interpretat
Genesis and recognized that he was indulging his fancy rather th
imagination in considering it; because it mythologizes the quo
rather than symbolically represents and participates in an overw
ingly greater reality, such a reading trivializes rather than transc
Making familiar things seem a bit more supernatural was Wordsw
half of the task in Lyrical Ballads anyway, and the notion that Cr
stands for the re-creation of each day would be?like the notion th
Eucharist represents the daily wonder of bread brought forth fro
earth?a naturalization of the Spirit. Coleridge was troubled b
hexameral Creation, particularly by the creation of light the fir
and the sun on the fourth. Though it would not do to note th
fact" we see daylight before we see the sun, Coleridge found a re
much more to his supernatural taste in the idea that metaphysical
anteceded the idea of the (literal) sun. In the Genesis account of th
day, "Light and Darkness are here used as the Powers of Ligh
Darkness."30 Coleridge never developed a theology of evil, but
the Power of Light he meant the Son?the Light that lighteth
thing that would come into the world?then the promulgation of
Son could be represented as the work of the first "day" of creati
Alternatively, "the Powers of Light & of Darkness" could represe
the ultimate Powers in themselves but abstractions of their earthl
ifestations. In this reading, the first day's work was the work of alleg
but allegory that itself participates synecdochically in the hexam
progress from Gnosticism to nature, from metaphysical to physica
The idea that the first day's work was allegorical?like the theolog
idea of a prevenient begetting of the Son?participates in a sym
reading of Creation.
28. Entry 14 of Notebook 41, to be published in CN 5.
29. Entry 12 of Notebook 42, to be published in CN 5.
30. CN 4.4625.

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138 LESLIE BRISMAN
For symbolic poets like Coleridge himself, such exegeses point equa
to a principle of composition. The imitation of Christ, for the poe
means the work of composing miracle stories where we feel "at onc
the presence of the Signified?the Presence of God as the Master?w
narrative presents signifiers, stories of feasts. Actually, though Co
idge's theory of the symbolic half licenses this interpenetration of term
we should use the symbolic terms the other way round: Christ the f
is the ultimate signified, while the Gospel narrative gives us storie
Jesus as presider over the table, master of the feast. For the secular writ
the equivalent of feast rituals and miracle stories are the fictions t
require our suspension of disbelief. These may be preternatural (deal
with events impossible in the course of nature) or natural (dealing w
incidents of ordinary life); but both kinds of poems strive, accordin
this first principle, the principle of copresence, for the sacramental
substantiality of signified and signifier, feast and master of the fea
Each text weaves about itself a hermeneutic circle trismegistus:
poem declares the consubstantiality of signs and signifiers to be ho
holy, holy, and the critic who would violate its sanctum to be play
with a consuming fire. He may not be physically (professionally
stroyed, but like the Unitarian or Socinian casting a cold eye on Ch
tological mythology, he will find his intellectual fire turned into the fir
of hell: all light and no heat.31
The poet who believes that Christ is the signified, not just the gr
signifier, is committed to avoiding even the appearance of reduction
truism that talk about signifiers and signified tends to have. How m
richer is the trope of feast and master of the feast! I have said that
should take Christ as master of the feast in the sense of a characte
narrative signifier pointing elsewhere. (Coleridge himself loved to
on numen and nomen, the name that is here and the numinous reality th
is what Milton called "the meaning, not the name.") Yet the trope
more complex than that, and "master of the feast" both actualizes a
summarizes, or synecdochically represents, Christ in his various pe
gogical poses. Christ as feast means that not Christian precepts but
himself (his authority for saying "I am he whom the prophets foret
I am he whom you desire") is what is taught; the "elsewhere" alway
implied by metaphoric language is, ironically, here, within you. At
31. See The Friend, Essay xiv: "The light of religion is not that of the moon, l
without heat: but neither is its warmth that of the stove, warmth without light. Rel
is the sun, whose warmth indeed swells, and stirs, and actuates the life of nature, but w
at the same time beholds all the growth of life with a master eye, makes all objects glo
on which he looks, and by that glory visible to all others" (CW 4, 1, 105; reused in 6
cf. CN 1.467, 1233).

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same time that we feel the rich display of consubstantial sign

commonplace before recoiling from it or relinquishing it t
feast, to be the divine Signified above and beyond all figurat
this Word is to acknowledge simultaneously the presence o
His absence?his transcendence of any figurative represen
absent signified already points beyond the incarnate Chr
Evolver," the ultimate signified behind Coleridge's second p
The attempt to articulate a theory of poetry based sole
idge's first principle, the principle of consubstantiality, is b
ited success. Once one has articulated the consanguinity of s
signified, and the correlative fraternity of all signifiers, all thin
earth as signs pointing beyond themselves, there remains o
less, if priest-like task, of identifying passages where we se
language specially heightened into expressions of copresenc
an idea of Christian history, without a theory of how the
symbol is related to the idea of narrative, one is in danger o
repeating the phrase "oneness of things" and reducing s
greatest and most complex passages of poetry to the One L
Here then is a second principle related to Coleridge's read
miracle of the fishes and loaves: Just as Jesus came not to de
or the literal but to recapitulate and fulfill the movement fr
type to truth, so must the poet attempt to give us the real mira
commonplace before recoiling from it or relinquishing it t
preter who will sublime facticity into "truth." If the first p
be represented by the faith that Christ is the bread whereof
the second principle can be represented by the prayer, Give
32. For this sin against the holy spirit (or an argument that could be suc
through less graceful hands) see J. Robert Barth, S. J. The Symbolic Imaginat
and the Romantic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1977), esp. pp. 3
72. Though Barth thanks McFarland in his preface, Barth's book is written wi
of Mc'Farland's distinction between the spirit of pantheism and the spirit of
religion. Barth might retort that one function of his book is to correct th
immanent God and a transcendent God are contraries the way McFarland
as being. The author?the projector, rather?of Logosophia saw it as his dut
and the place of the Logos to represent?the reconciliation between the
limited extent it is possible to substitute for the Bloomian formula I adop
(ethos-logos-pathos) the mediate position of the theological and poetic
tropes of "I am" and tropes of "it is." "The Eolian Harp" would be the clea
of a trope of pathos or pantheistic "it is" (nature as organic harps swep
intellectual breeze) restituted by a trope of ethos or Christian "I am" (Sara
as stern preceptor). Bloom has taught us to see the "daemonization" of
putting on power in hyperbolic self-glorification, as a trope of pathos fou
sion; but at such moments of assertion, "I am all" falls into what McFarlan
as the extravagance of pantheism, and is properly an "it is" trope.

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140 LESLIE BRISMAN
our daily bread: imaginary gardens with real loaves and fishes in the
Believe that the act of re-presenting those is divine, and the transu
stantiation will be added unto you. Though "miracles must be judge
by the doctrine they confirm, not the doctrine by the miracles,"
history recounted in and by a poem must be the progress from mir
to doctrine. The literary critic is the interpreter of such progress,
cartographer of its labyrinth.
Ill
Let us test this second principle against a humble example of a text
where the first principle alone would yield no raptures:
PITY
Sweet Mercy! how my very heart has bled
To see thee, poor Old Man! and thy grey hairs
Hoar with the snowy blast: while no one cares
To clothe thy shrivell'd limbs and palsied head.
My Father! throw away this tatter'd vest
That mocks thy shivering! take my garment?use
A young man's arm! I'll melt these frozen dews
That hang from thy white beard and numb thy breast.
My Sara too shall tend thee, like a child:
And thou shalt talk, in our fireside's recess,
Of purple Pride, that scowls on Wretchedness?
He did not so, the Galilaean mild,
Who met the Lazars turn'd from rich men's doors
And call'd them Friends, and heal'd their noisome sores!33
I would not argue either that this poem is among the handful of
eridge's most memorable achievements or that it presents a proble
exegesis that requires abstruse research into Coleridge's religious m
ings. But partly because the turn to Sara or her equivalent is cruc
a number of Coleridge's greatest poems, it is worth pausing over t
sonnet and inquiring whether the formal turn or turns of the poem
illuminated by Coleridge's sense of the religious turn from miracl
doctrine. On first reading one might instinctively locate the turn of
poem between wretchedness and Christ, between the dash at the e
the first eleven lines and the parousia of Christ, the signified, in th
three. But is Christ the signified or another signifier for the com
place truth, the moral virtue announced in the poem's title? Prese
33- The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxf
1912), 1, 93

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Coleridge himself in the role of the Good Samaritan, the poem p

the same problem as the parable in Luke 10:29-37. Is the Samar
Luke the type of the Christian or a figure for Christ? Does th
signify charity, or does it point rather to salvation, unobtainable
priest, Levite, and the Judaism they represent? One reminder
cannot rest with the notion of the necessary copresence of Ch
virtue and Christ comes in the gospel story closely tied to the
of lepers where Jesus sanctions the expenditure on him of oil th
have been used for "sweet mercy," for charitable purposes.
(26:6-13), Mark (14:3-9), and John (12:1-8) all set the scene
anointing at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper. Leaving
Jesus the healer of leprosy, does Coleridge's poem stop shor
problem of the relationship between charity and soteriology? O
Coleridge's choice of where his poem goes and where it stops im
serve as an interpretation of the gospel?a new gospel in fourteen
with a new version of the relation between miracle and doctrin
One corollary of the second principle, that poetry reflects Ch
history as well as the atemporal vision of the One Life, is that w
take very seriously both the history or narrative sequence wit
poem and the intertextual history or the relation of the poem
drafts, precursor texts, and references. Consider first this alte
ending of the sonnet, published by Coleridge in 1793 and 1803:
He did not scowl, the Galilean mild,
Who met the Lazar turn'd from rich man's doors,
And call'd him Friend, and wept upon his sores.34
Coleridge may have been moved by purely aesthetic conside
(revulsion from the suggestion of weeping "on" the sores) to pr
version that reads Christ "heal'd their noisome sores." But sinc
ing is a demonstration of pity, while healing is an efficacious ac
efficacious than Coleridge's hospitality?the decision to leave th
with the work, the miracles of Christ, rather than the pity, the
of Christ, is not a purely aesthetic one. The preferred version sa
on the altar of faith, the pathos of "wept"; gaining decorum
relation of Coleridge's charity to the divine mercy, the second
regains the richness of a symbolic faith, a richness otherwise s
provide the poor fare of allegory, Christ as a figure for charity.
Far from resting with the consubstantiality of charity and Chr
poem reminds us also of the temporality of the Logos in th
itself. Coleridge's reference to Christ's healing is actually a
34- Ibid, app. crit.

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142 LESLIE BRISMAN
references remarkably condensed into the sonnet's concluding couplet

and the startling phrase, "and call'd them Friends" (stronger still in th
version that has "and call'd him Friend") makes this living word,
though actually spoken by Christ, a synecdoche for the whole operati
of the Logos in history. Jesus was thought of as the friend of sinne
and publicans; he did address his disciples as friends (John 15:15); bu
there is no single occasion on which he heals a leper and calls h
"friend." Coleridge's poem refers first and most specifically to the sto
of Lazarus in Luke:
There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine
linen, and fared sumptuously every day: And there was a certain
beggar named Lazarus, which laid at his gate, full of sores, And
desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's
table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to
pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into
Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; And in
hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar
off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abra
ham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip
of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tortured with
this flame. . . . Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou
wouldest send him to my father's house: For I have five brethren;
that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place
of torment. Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the
prophets; let them hear them. And he said, Nay, father Abraham:
but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he
said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will
they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. (Luke 16:19
31)
That Coleridge may have been especially drawn to this passage we can
surmise from its conclusion, its authoritative word from heaven that
faith cannot be based on miracles?even resurrection from the dead.35
If Abraham does not yet appear to be proclaiming the Coleridgean
maxim that "miracles must be judged by the doctrine which they con
firm, not the doctrine by the miracle," all that is needed is to have the
doctrine here proclaimed in Luke confirm the miracle, the resurrection
of Lazarus, effected in John. This connection, this path from Luke to
John (the Gospel Coleridge most preferred), is the gospel according to
Coleridge. His sonnet refers specifically to the Luke story through the
35- Coleridge refers to the episode in Luke in The Friend. See CW 4, 1, 432.

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figure of "purple Pride," the clothing of the rich man in L

The sonnet refers to the story in John (11:1-12:10) by reachi
the pathos of 11:35: "Jesus wept." Though "heal'd their noi
may refer to miraculous healing, it describes a charitab
domesticated from the awesome resurrection of Lazarus from
the phrase "wept upon their sores" marks an even more ra
tication or reduction of the preternatural element. Colerid
deny the literal resurrection of Lazarus, but by choosing to
more frequent, more familiar action of Jesus healing the sick
with Milton "to prevent that murmur," the murmur of the s
the seekers after preternatural manifestations of Christ. He pre
miraculous, going before it with his own domesticated form
charity and arresting the sonnet just there, in the natural everm
to be something else.
In the notebooks there are any number of occasions on
eridge denies the allegorical interpretation of Christ and in
historicity of the symbolic instance.36 "If Christianity be indeed
of Redemption [and not, we might specify, a set of metaph
redernptiveness of right conduct] we may be assured that it
must be such as that all must converge to one point, & with
the essential faculties and excellencies of the human Be
Christ in the Man, and the Man in Christ, will be one in on
incarnate God (man in Christ) and what Blake called the divin
(Christ in man) converge when and if the Good Samaritan is
and a figure for Christ, when and if the Jesus who cures th
the ultimate disease of death is both a divinely charitab
himself "the resurrection and the life." To go beyond "conv
a concept of spiritual history we need to think of kenosis as
act, and we need to think of kenosis both as the postponem
"doctrine" (for Coleridge the true supernatural) so the pret
miracle can transpire first, and as the postponement of
revelation so the divine humanity can act in human time. Jes
the symbolic sense in which he is the resurrection and the l
to give local habitation and a name to an act of resurrection
of Lazarus. He also postpones the sacramental for the cha
suffers the anointing in Bethany (in preparation for his own
after having raised Lazarus. He can say "the poor always ye
you" (John 12:8) because he has brought Lazarus back from
36. See in particular Entry 29 of Notebook 36, fols. 32V-33, and Barth,
Shedd, v, 23, and entries 12 and 13 of Notebook 41?on Christ as "Divin
in a different sense from Blake's.
37. CN 3.3803.

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144 LESLIE BRISMAN
be with Mary and Martha his sisters.38 One can hear Coleridge m
tating on just this sort of temporalization of the symbolic when
speculates that Christ on the cross "in repeating Eli Eli, lama sab
thani, really repeated the whole 22nd psalm."39 If we read Jesus' qu
tation out of its Old Testament context we emerge with pure humanis
the affecting idea of the man-god in agony momentarily forgetting
identity?or at this moment learning the essence of human ident
the way Cleopatra learns to renounce the moon and call herself
more but e'en a woman." Coleridge's speculation that Jesus recited th
whole psalm restores the temporality of symbolism. The psalm begin
with the cry of human despair and concludes with divine triumph: "Y
to him shall all the proud of the earth bow down; before him shall b
all who go down to the dust, and he who cannot keep hims
alive. . . ."In place ofthe pathos of having Jesus cry out that God ha
left him, Coleridge restores the logos, the temporalized word retraci
spiritual history through the psalm and through the path from the p
to the crucified Christ.
Eschewing allegory, the Coleridge poem symbolically participates i
a kenosis of sorts, a humbling to the conversational and domestic (t
level of real loaves and fishes) that lets us see the man before he is un
to the logos. Ultimately, I should like to argue that the whole proje
ofthe domestication ofthe sublime?that the "theology" as well as th
style of the conversation poems, for example?is the expression in p
etry of the imitation of Christ. In this sonnet, however, the theolog
overtones to the stylistic shift enter like lords unannounced, "certain
expected, and yet there is a silent joy in their arrival." In a sense the r
turn of Coleridge's sonnet (the conversion it reenacts) is just wh
literary tradition would put it?between the octet, with its grand sty
and the sestet, with its surprising discovery of "my Sara" and "firesid
recess." My belief that Coleridge's rewriting Hooker's nature as supe
nature represents a development in literary theory might here find
croscopic emblem. Pushing back into the mind of man the bourn
tween the natural and supernatural, Coleridge establishes not just for
romantic period but for the ever-enduring romanticism thereafter t
antithesis of natural and supernatural since mythologized by Yeats
related to literary theory by Harold Bloom, who calls his work "ant
38. This is a risky interpretation, but even if the recent resurrection of Lazarus is
meant to be taken as the context (or ameliorating circumstance) in which we encoun
"the poor ye have always with you," the fact remains that the privileging of the so
iological over the humanistic has been delayed to this late point in the gospel stor
imagine that Coleridge would have rejected as inauthentic the attempt in John 12:6
soften the antithesis between salvation and charity.
39. CN 3.3891.

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thetical criticism."40 The antitheses in antithetical criticism

tween the present and the past and that between the natur
supernatural?though the way these two sets of terms align
and as various as is poetry. For Coleridge both antitheses ar
in the Christian difference between New and Old Testament
(into the supernatural) and first birth (from Adam, into the
a usage Coleridge would have applauded, Bloom calls logo
or moments of poetic turning between tropes of ethos a
pathos. Though this is not exactly what Bloom means by hi
might denominate ethos the doctrine or teaching of Christ
eridge's sonnet) and pathos the facticity of Christ. The ultim
pathos for the Christian is the passion of Christ, and it is in
find in the sonnet's opening line that the ethos of pity is i
troped as the pathos of passion: the bleeding heart. It is
even cliche?but for Coleridge it becomes the only thing ne
must not allegorize this old man either as St. Paul's vetus ho
avatar of Jesus being brought home to Samuel and Sara, the
century Mary and Martha. But we need to see in the rheto
poem a symbolic participation on the part of "the Galilean m
turn from purple Pride to humble "friends." I know no spec
sor text for Coleridge's sonnet, though I sense its best lines
most purple figures) to be in the spirit of King Lear on the
sense one must first admire phrasing like "this tatter'd vest / T
thy shivering" before finding the style as well as the pover
answered antithetically by "sweet mercy." The reversal
sounds repeats on an auditory level the reversal, or turning
the self, that Bloom has associated with another meaning of
this poem it is rhetoric?the orotund phrase?that represent
(the poet vaunting in his craft), and if we feel the presenc
rhetoric in terms of an older style, we sense that the precur
composite, has been absorbed into the poet's id, his natural
thetical to this is the supernatural element present first as
charity and ultimately as Christ, the figure of capable imag
IV
At this point a number of questions crowd in at once: Must we carry

the burden of antithetical criticism?and Coleridge's specifically Chris
tian antitheses?to every poem? What happens when one approaches a
40. For Coleridge's own sense of the antithesis of nature and spirit as fundamental t
theology, philosophy, and poetry, see, for example, Charles Richard Sanders, Coleridg
and the Broad Church Movement (Durham: Duke U. Press, 1942), pp. 24-25. For the mo
Yeatsian sense of antithetical (vs. primary man) in Coleridge, see Leslie Brisman, "C
eridge and the Ancestral Voices," in Romantic Origins (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1977).

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146 LESLIE BRISMAN
major Coleridge text? Does not awareness of Coleridge's Christian

impoverish the range of reference of his poetry? The last is the easie
to answer, and one may do so with an emphatic No. Just as a psycho
alytic perspective does not reduce all to sex but discovers, in sexuality
a transportable keyhole through which to view many mansions,
Coleridge's Christianity proves no heavily-guarded door but an openi
into an infinite variety of reconstructions of the redemptive relations
between narrative and symbol. Using the Coleridgean key to the kin
dom, we may say of literature what he says of religion, that it
"distinguished from philosophy on the one hand and from history o
the other by being both at once."41 Coleridge's insistence on the reali
of miracles and the historical Jesus distinguishes his Christianity fr
the ahistoric pure philosophy (or pure commonplace) allegorical Chri
tianity. In this he has ever so much more to offer than Matthew Ar
nold?poet and prose writer about religion and literature?who c
ceived of the supplement to philosophy constituted by religion a
literature as emotion. For Coleridge, poems not only preach the one l
within us and abroad; they constitute, in their narratives or sequenc
of tropes, the path from grosser to purer, from sensory perception u
to Reason and God. It does not matter that in writing The Destiny o
Nations, Coleridge had not worked out his distinction between fan
and imagination; the progress he outlines there is one recapitulat
throughout his career:
Fancy is the power
That first unsensualizes the dark mind,
Giving it new delights; and bids it swell
With wild activity; and peopling air,
By obscure fears of Beings invisible,
Emancipates it from the grosser thrall
Of the present impulse, teaching self-control,
Till Superstition with unconscious hand
Seat Reason on her throne.
(11. 80-88)
The preternatural events of Christabel or The Rime, like the miracles of

Jesus, "unsensualize the dark mind"; they are first motions ofthe spirit
beginning its great ascent. We have seen Coleridge argue what appears
to be just the reverse, that miracles as such sensualize the mind and bind
it to the evidence of its senses; but the report of miracles is a literary
phenomenon, like the preternatural in poetry, and is not taken as proof
41. Notebook 26, fols. 51V-52, quoted by Boulger, p. 173.

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of the doctrine. Both preternatural poems and conversation po

capitulate the spiritual progress from "obscure fears" to manife
And the conversation poems are conversion poems, turning
scure shades of possible sublimity to the light (the lighted and l
form) of love. Coleridge "believes in" the sublime as he bel
miracles: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but
love shutteth out fear."42 If this summarizes the relation betw
two Testaments of the Bible it summarizes too the relationship
the One Life passage and the domestic setting of "The Eolia
or the stupendous depression of "Dejection" and its address in
stanza to "gentle Sleep." Yet these spiritual resonances are no p
tean bed. The difference between a reductive and an enriched r
"Dejection" or The Rime might be summarized in Coleridge's c
on Psalm 68:34: "His worship and strength is in the clouds." Co
does not tell us what clouds means in an allegorical way we cou
to when we meet clouds in the skyscape of any of his poems.
comments: "The 'clouds' in the symbolical language of Scriptur
the events and course of things."43 It is the events and course o
in a poem?the history of revelation and the historicity of the
movement from miracle to moral?that constitute the glory of s
and literature.
Let us turn to a passage in which Coleridge reads scripture fo
guides us Hermes-like in narrative movements become stra
narrow paths of interpretation. This passage will illustrate, I thi
Coleridge's substitution of supernatural for natural in Hooker an
the course of modern biblical criticism; but it will also allow us
to The Rime with a renewed sense of Coleridge's investmen
supernatural in poetry. The passage I wish to consider begin
long preamble of argument and leads up to the miraculous resu
of a biblical quotation.
Like the mariners in The Rime who theologize from the w
deciding matters of good and evil on the basis of climatic
readers of scripture who see its relevance conditional on its sup
alism degrade themselves
into mere slaves of sense and fancy, which are indeed the app
medium between earth and heaven, but for that very cause s
in a desirable relation to spiritual truth then only, when, as a
42. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs
Clarendon Press, 1959), m, 468. The two Biblical quotations thus juxtapose
111:10 and 1 John 4:18.
43. Shedd, v, 26.

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148 LESLIE BRISMAN
and passive medium, they yield a free passage to its light. It was
only to overthrow the usurpation exercised in and through the
senses, that the senses were miraculously appealed to.44
This we may take both as a general principle for reading scripture an

as the necessary connection between the Protestant imagination and th
poetry ofthe sublime. Wordsworth in The Prelude actually uses the te
usurpation to express the overthrowing or overgoing of the senses in t
climactic visions of Mont Blanc and Snowdon.45 At such moments, n
less than at the crisis moments of Coleridge's so-called supernatur
poems, the senses are miraculously appealed to in that the mind, vau
ing (to use Longinus' term) in its survival past the decay of sense, lear
its own sublimity. The limits of the understanding point beyond, to t
Reason, to the supernatural in man. Coleridge continues:
The natural Sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he

is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up
the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the night-season,
and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its own purifi
cation: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven,
but to prevent its interception.
We might call this symbolic or poetic prose since the analogy it state
symbolically participates in the spiritual progress it describes. We begi
we think, strictly with analogy: the natural sun is like?like what? Th
supernatural Son? the inner light? The first of these answers seems t
external, too tied to a specific moment in history, while the second
prematurely internalized. Actually it is one idea of progress that is bei
compared to another, and so the deep truth that Christianity is an ide
of progress (philosophy plus history) is buried in the very condition o
the analogy. If the temporal designation, "ere he (the natural sun or
Christ) is fully arisen," licenses personification (poetic symbol of inc
nation) it allows us to specify the operation of the supernatural logos
nature as the miracle-making of Christ's ministry. The Holy Spirit i
or rather emerges as?the power of such troping, and the splendid figu
of the breeze chasing away the usurping vapors of the night-seas
comes to describe not simply the silencing of the pagan oracles but th
suppression of primitive religious belief. Enlightenment from the sens
and sensory-based magic both characterizes and constitutes Christianit
Old Testament law and lore, Moses' sceptor and his divining rod,
44- The Statesman's Manual, CW 6, 10.
45. The Prelude, vi.600; xiv.49.

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both dismissed as vaporous shapes of the night-season whos

part of the glory of the day. Christ, coming to fulfill the ol
process of transcending it, overthrows the usurping air of m
ing spirits through his own exorcisms. More generally, he
the sensory basis of religious awe through his own miracle
Coleridge believes that the incarnate Christ used supernatur
not to prove anything but only, when necessary, as a pract
establishing the conditions for (or as a practical application
ciples of) the Word; he prevented interception of the Word
out demons of hunger and disease as well as those of witch
theless, this is reading the end of the sentence into the middle,
middle the sentence calls for our spectatorship before the m
logical, more Herculean task of routing the old gods in an old
Precisely at this point, after the phrase "the usurping vapo
night-season," we feel the wheels of this spiritual jet losing c
the runway of nature: though there is a natural and a s
meaning to the vapors and the night season, there is an exc
beyond natural meaning in the religious terms converts an
Another way: the distance between converts and a word lik
between minister and a word like "agent" is a spiritual dist
secular equivalent in the world of metaphor rather than Chr
also spiritual distance. What this means is clearer still in the
follows: "not surely in proof or elucidation of the light fr
In terms of night vapors and the natural sun, the word pro
sense and the word elucidation is an awkward borrowing. B
are so much more at home in religious argument?the logic
than in physics?the logistics of the sun?that we must retr
view the poet's metaphor-making as spiritual progress from
metaphysics. Though the vehicle designated by the modern
taphora is a truck, it is a supersonic carrier in Coleridge, and
it breaks is that between the speed of literal sound and the
God's voice. Christianity, like the penance of the ancient m
rooted in time; but both reach out in their fixity for the
neying moon, the motion of the stars, and the hastened pro
air ministering to "its own purification."
Against the New Critics and their fixity or preservation in
the individual literary creation?against also the present-
struction" critics and their reduction of literature to rhetor
gives us a theory of literature as spiritual progress measured
textually (along the lines of poetic influence that turn pre
usurping night vapors) and intratextually, in the motion of

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150 LESLIE BRISMAN
fabricating tropes.46 Thus Harold Bloom is very much in the Colerid

tradition when he denominates logos the turning between a trope o
ethos or limitation and a trope of pathos or representation. Consider
choice piece of Christ's poetry quoted by Coleridge in The Statesman
Manual following the sentence I have been examining. "A wicked a
adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall be no sig
given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas." The first part of th
sentence repeats a familiar trope of ethos: the Old Testament prophet
preaching monotheism, tropically represented it as monogamy, and u
adultery as a figure for betrayal of the religious trust. Not only has t
trope been used by the prophets, it seems also to recur to and sum
the injunctions of the decalogue, from "thou shalt have no other go
before me" to "thou shalt not commit adultery." Like the Children o
Israel at Mount Sinai who demanded a manifest god, those who cove
a sign (and thou shalt not covet!) lust not after the parousia ofthe na
godhead, the one not so manifest, but after other gods, usurping nig
vapors. The whole ethos of Israel is thus caught in the opening trop
Against this, countering and completing it, is "the sign of the proph
Jonas." This is a trope of pathos in the sense of power to move?
move men to repentance and to move the sayings of Jesus into a res
tuting role: "The Men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with th
generation and shall condemn it, because they repented at the preachi
of Jonas, and behold, a greater than Jonas is here" (Matt. 12:40). Th
is, to be sure, pure trope: Jesus does not literally mean that the men
Nineveh will be present at the Last Judgment, and probably he does n
literally mean that there will be a Last Judgment. "The men of Ninev
is a synecdoche for all those who have understood the prophetic me
sage of Christ without requiring the historically incarnated Christ; t
final judgment is a metalepsis, or far-fetched figure, troping on the trope
ofthe men of Nineveh. "The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgme
is also a hyperbole, a trope of what Bloom calls daemonization
putting on the power. When the low (the dead) are exalted (broug
before the throne of God) in this sublime vision, the weakness of fai
46. McFarland points to Coleridge's canonization by a different school: "The

Critics, casting about for anchorage in the critical tradition, adopted him almost una
mously as the founding father of the New Criticism" (Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradit
p. i). But if McFarland himself is right about the centrality and pervasiveness of Co
idge's religious thought (see the conclusion to "The Origin and Significance of Colerid
Theory of Secondary Imagination," and Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition passim) t
the author of the projected Logosophia is best interpreted in terms of the narrative lo
incarnated in these turns or passages between tropes, not as the unacknowledged fat
of the school of criticism that privileges the trope of irony above all turns from it.

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of those seeking a sign shall be requited; or rather it is requ

very strength of this imagining, this trope for the present
sign-seekers. The crossing from the trope of ethos to that
negotiated by Christ, the logos living and acting in such pa
All this depends on our seeing, with Coleridge, that C
intermediary between tropes rather than the final literalis
tion of which the Book of Jonah and this passage in Matthe
studies in typology. It is here that Coleridge shows himse
father of modern literary criticism but godparent to mod
criticism, for in an appendix to The Statesman's Manual he
reading of the Matthew passage in a fashion very much li
narily employed nowadays by biblical scholars. He rejects as
Matthew 12:40 and its interpretation of "the sign of Jonas
the trope of ethos (adulterous generation) and that of path
ment day . . . ) Matthew inserted, "For as Jonas was th
three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man b
and three nights in the heart of the earth." This Coleridge
gloss of some unlearned, though pious christian of the fir
which had slipt into the text.'"47 His first reason for this ju
less like a reason than an insistence on his right of interpr
thew 12:40 "is at all events a comment on the words of ou
and no part of his speech." Though most commentators w
there is nothing about the presentation of the sentence itself w
it indisputably as belonging to one speaker rather than an
Son of Man" is referred to in the third person, but Jesus co
What Coleridge has caught, rather, is a sense of decorum?o
of thing Jesus characteristically says and does not say. Imp
principle of reading the New Testament like that Coleridg
articulates in regard to the Old: one accepts the oracl
supernaturally given, but recognizes the transmission of vo
ture as a human process governed by the intellectual, s
historical limitations of the particular writer. Accepting the
voice of God and the verse in the Bible are different thin
opens up the possibility of reading verses thirty-nine and f
supernatural, and verse forty as the Porlockian interruption of
and not very good interpreter.
Coleridge's second reason might be termed the contextua
though the context is ultimately larger than the particula
Jesus: Matthew 12:40 "interrupts the course and breaks do
and application of our Lord's argument, as addressed to me
47- The Statesman's Manual, CW 6, 58 (Appendix B).

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152 LESLIE BRISMAN
their unwillingness to sacrifice their vain traditions, gainful hypocr

and pride both of heart and of demeanor, demanded a miracle for
confirmation of moral truths that must have borne witness to their
divinity in the consciences of all who had not rendered themse
conscience-proof." Coleridge argues that since Jesus is deprecating
appetite for signs, he would not merely substitute one sign for oth
Coleridge sees the resurrection as one more sign of the same so
miracles: preternatural events all of whose authenticity he does
dispute, but whose relation to faith is supplemental rather than essen
We are commanded by Jesus to free faith from miracle, and this f
Coleridge means that faith must stand on its own, independent of
resurrection as well as of the tricks of the arch-magician in his fi
incarnation.
The argument to which Coleridge assigned the number three deftly
combines two arguments, the first of which is commonsensical, even
humorous, while the second summarizes the common ground of Higher
Criticism. Here is the first part:
The text strictly taken is irreconcileable with the fact as it is after

wards related, and as it is universally accepted. I at least remember
no calculation of time, according to which the interspace from
Friday evening to the earliest dawn of Sunday morning, could be
represented as three days and three nights. As three days our Savior
himself speaks of it (John 2:19) and so it would be described in
common language as well as according to the use of the Jews; but
I can find no other part of Scripture which authorizes the phrase of
three nights.
In this passage the two sources of hermeneutical authority?the inner

light and scripture?join hands. The genial phrase "I at least remember"
appears to set on equal footing research into one's personal memory and
research into the scriptures. The irony is that in this case the inner light
is a surer guide than is a plain appeal to scripture, for the passage
Coleridge cites is a most problematic one concerning just the sort of
question about signs and the resurrection that troubled Coleridge about
Matthew. In John 2:18, after Jesus has cleansed the Temple, the people
ask, "What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these
things?" Jesus answers, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will
raise it up." It is interesting that Eichhorn interpreted both "this temple"
and "three days" figuratively: "Abandon our prevailing religious insti
tution and in a short time I shall have set up another in its place."48 But
48. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Einleitung in das neue Testament (Leipzig, 1804), 11, 264:
"Wenn von Jesus seiner Austreibung der Kaufer und Verkaufer aus den Tempelgebauden

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for Coleridge (as both the above passage and a marginal not
horn assume) the resurrection after three days was a literal t
The important question is not whether "three days" is acc
"three days and three nights" will not do; the question is wh
in either passage intends the resurrection as a proof of his au
it happens, we do have a Coleridge gloss on the passage from
gloss in which he argues that Jesus spoke more than Jews
could understand?that Jesus meant He would raise Himself.
eridge, the King James translation, "What sign shewest tho
is taken (by Christ) to mean "What truth are you pointing
than "What are your credentials? Give us a miracle as a proof
Coleridge would, I think, have disapproved of the Jerusa
translation, "What sign can you show us to justify wha
done?" No sign can justify him now, and even the resurrecti
be a sign of God's favor to Jesus retroactively justifying him
rather, the indicator of manifest divinity. The Jews in Joh
eridge might argue, are as much mistaken as the scribes an
in Matthew 12:38, since the question about Jesus' authority
point about the spiritual appropriateness of his action in its
(They may indeed have asked what justification Jesus ha
reinterprets the question to be the better one in which sign mea
directive rather than miracle.) From Coleridge's point of view
meddlesome gospel writer misses the point when he "cla
figure of speech: "But he spake of the temple of his body."
idge, interested in theology as the coincidence of history an
Jesus spoke historically rather than atemporally in a pur
speech. The metaphor stands as "an allusion to the chara
Messiah as the Shekinah whose presence constituted the prope
the Templarity, of the Temple."50
ein Beweis gefodert wird, dass er zu dieser Machthandlung ein Recht h
antwortet (2,19): 'brecht diesen Tempel ab und in kurzer Zeit soil ein andr
stehen'; so kann er nur den Tempel als Bild des religiosen Instituts der Jud
und gesagt haben: 'gebt euer ganzes bisheriges religioses Institut auf; ein an
in kurzer Zeit an seine Stelle gesetzt haben."'
49. See the Notebook entry N47.26 (fol. 24-fol. 26), to appear in The Collected
Volume 5. I am indebted to Professor Merton Christensen for this referenc
50. Coleridge is commenting on the passage in Eichhorn cited above, n
bold, even for Eichhorn: and (let me add) as flat as it is bold. A more appro
as sublime Reply can scarcely be imagined than this allusion to the character o
as the Shekinah. ..." (To appear in vol. 11 of The Marginalia [Collected Co
Coleridge reinfuses a sense of history into the philosophy of Christian chan
by Eichhorn, thus returning Christ to the Temple while the temple image
the body of Christ. The gospel writer makes "temple" an allegory; Colerid
it (and conversely, to Christ in the temple) symbolic presence.

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154 LESLIE BRISMAN
Coleridge's third reason for rejecting Matthew 12:40 continues:
This gloss is not found either in the repetition of the circumstanc

by Matthew himself (16:4) nor in Mark (8:12) nor in Luke [11:
30]. Mark's narration doth indeed most strikingly confirm my sec
ond reason, drawn from the purpose of our Savior's argument: for
the allusion to the prophet Jonas is omitted altogether, and the
refusal therefore rests on the depravity of the applicants, as prove
by the wantonness of the application itself.
Here Coleridge anticipates redaction criticism as it is practiced toda

Coleridge did not know that Matthew used Mark?rather than the o
way round?but he understood the principle that we look for par
accounts in the Gospels and proceed on the faith that Jesus is (or J
said) what these writers have in common, and we interpret the dif
ences as reflective of the biases and limitations of the writers as in
uals.
Though he refers to Mark, where the allusion to Jonah is absent
altogether, Coleridge's argument about Matthew is that Jesus did say
"there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas"
(Matt. 12:39), but that Jesus did not give, and would not have concurred
with, the gloss that follows. Discrediting the gloss, this argument de
mands that there be an alternative reading of sign that will make sense
of Jesus sanctioning "the sign ofthe prophet Jonas." Coleridge concludes
his third reason for rejecting Matthew 12:40 by attributing to the evil
and adulterous generation?and, by extension, to miracle-hunters in all
ages?the inability to read truly, to read sign as pointer rather than as
proof. "All signs must have been useless to such men as long as the
great sign ofthe times, the call to repentance, remained without effect."
The Hebrew ot can mean "sign" in the sense of "remembrance"?a
remembrance of the covenant, for example?as well as "wonder,
omen"; Matthew's word, the Greek semeion, like the English sign, can
be a directional signal as well as an indicator. The progress from pre
ternatural omen to moral imperative is, for Coleridge, the progress from
the Hebrew to the Greek testament and the doctrine of Christ. We
might, indeed, say doctrine and essence of Christ, for though He himself
was a wonder, a sign that declared his own supernatural significance,
the Incarnated Christ is a directive, a sign that must point us towards
self-reformation. Interpreting the great sign of the times as a directive,
a call to repentance, Coleridge restores the resurrected god, the god who
is "the resurrection and the life," from magic to moral force, from

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preternaturalism to the supernaturalism of the will transcendin

clination to evil.51
The wicked and adulterous seekers after signs surviv

tion. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner it is they w
from heaven" (Matt. 16:1) or at least interpret the h
preternatural signs and wonders: When the albatro
ocean is stilled:
all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!
(11.93-96)
Creatures of the Understanding rather than the h

mariners' spiritual and imaginative perception is limite
A change in sensory perception brings a change in th
Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
(11. 97-100)
Here the simile that compares the natural sun to
suggest the kind of hermeneutical limitation with wh
approach what they take to be indicators of the exis
of a preternatural power. What is the plain sense of sc
the plain (nor dim nor red) sun? If they see a sign in
see in the uprisen head of God?the resurrection of H
spilled blood?a preternatural wonder on which to bas
tious faith. More precisely, they would make the mi
polator in Matthew and interpret the sign of Jonas as
rather than, in Coleridge's words, as "a threatening ca
At this point in The Rime the mariner himself make
not distinguished from the miracle-mongers about hi
involves an oppressive exposure to signs as indicat
hang the albatross about his neck "in sign" of his guilt
the skeleton ship is "a sign in the element far off."
51. The King James Bible renders yetzer not as "inclination" o

tion": the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.

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156 LESLIE BRISMAN
"Romanists argue preposterously while they would prove the truth

by miracles."52 If the mariner himself could emerge from his Romanism,
he would be released from the burden ofthe miraculous, the nightmare
ofthe poem's preternaturalism, and stand not as proof of what "really"
happened at one point in world history or personal history but as proof
of the historical progress of the Spirit. Unfortunately for the mariner
himself, an overdose of signs is homeopathic medicine that works for
wedding guests and readers of the poem, but produces a death-in-life
for the patient at hand. This is not to suggest that the mariner comes to
no insight, but rather that (somewhat like Lazarus returned from the
dead) the mariner achieves a moment of vision only to be plunged back
into his own pre-Enlightenment age. If one could entertain the thought
of allegorizing the mariner's story as that of an early Christian, one
might say that the mariner has seen the face of God and been marked
with a tongue of flame, but he can only communicate his vision in terms
that either reduce the supernatural to weak morality ("He prayeth well
. . ." as a type ofthe sayings of Jesus) or represent the supernatural as
the preternatural (the Holy Spirit as polar spirit).
One need not allegorize the mariner, however, to believe that he
reaches a moment of vision where he "sees into the life of things"?
where he leaps beyond his historical or psychological limitations and
apprehends, with Coleridge, a meaning of "Spirit" very different from
"polar spirit." I think one can even specify the onslaught and the closure
of this vision. In the same way that the mariner fixes his eye on the
wedding guest and holds him, the mariner himself is fixed by the "curse
of a dead man's eye" (1. 260). Antithetical to this fixity, a motion and
a spirit rolls through the heavens:
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide;
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside.
(11. 263-66)
The moment is marked by the most extraordinary of marginal glosses

that Coleridge added to the poem: "In his loneliness and fixedness he
yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn,
52. CN i. ioio. Given the frequency of debate about evidences within Protestant circles,
there is to be sure something unfair about calling the argument from miracles a Romanist
position. Yet there is something authentically Protestant about the resistance to arguments
from miracles, whose tyranny over the senses would be like the tyranny of a church
dominating over the individual, Protestant will to faith. Perhaps we can borrow Coler
idge's term and take it as a given that the ancient mariner himself is, in this symbolic sense,

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yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs t
and is their appointed rest, and their native country and t
natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are
expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival." The
motion is at once heimlich (domestic, in an idealized sense) and un
(beautiful to the point of sublimity); projected onto the stars,
revealed in the motion of the stars, is the motion of the heart
is at once human pity and divine grace. What is so "moving" a
passage is precisely its humanness, its special combination of de
community, domesticity, recognition, love, and desire for lor
sublimity, surety, power.
In one of the most persuasive studies of the poem, Jerome M
cautions against confusing the many layers of consciousness that
the mariner from the poet and us;53 but just as there is an inspired
of continuity in Coleridge's symbolic reading of scripture, a str
goes from his early Unitarian days to his later high church m
so there is a strand that connects mariner and glosser, balladeer and
moon and Christ at just this moment. The mariner might be o
the moon on Saturday night, April 14, 1805, the date of this
Coleridge's Notebook:
In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yo
moon dim-glimmering thro' the dewy window-pane, I seem r
to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for som
within me that already and forever exists, than observing any
new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have alway
obscure feeling as if that new phaenomenon were the dim Aw
of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature / It i
interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is Logos, the Creator! an
Evolver! 54
If the "forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature" is the Christ

within us, the supernatural, then Christ the Evolver connects the mari
ner-in-situo with the speaker of the poem, the wedding guest, the ballad
minstrel, the antiquarian editor, the poet, and the reader. "The Evolver"
is a later addition even to this notebook entry, but "The Destiny of
Nations" identified the same spirit as "heavenly Truth / With gradual
steps, winning her difficult way" (11. 124-25). The Spirit presides over
the evolution from primitive Christianity to Coleridge's symbolic read
ing of scripture; it presides also over the mariner's movement of mind,
a Romanist {fiat: it is an ancient mariner). His personal "penance" can point to, even if it
can never escape into, a Protestant Reformation.
53. "The Meaning ofthe Ancient Mariner," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 35-67.
54. CN 2.2546.

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158 LESLIE BRISMAN
his turn from moon to water snakes, and from those beyond the shad
of the ship to those within it. Seeing them move "in trails of shinin
white," then with flashes "of golden fire," he is moved to "a forgott
or hidden Truth of his inner Nature. ... It is Logos, the Creator."
Freed for a moment from the anxiety of preternatural influence, th
mariner achieves what we would belie in labeling a moment of faith.
is better called a moment of vision or moment of originality?a mome
of incarnating?or incordinating?the Logos:
O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware.
(11. 282-85)
A spring is an image of origination, of inspiration, and gushing is

representation of motion of heart?the power to move beyond the self
One may choose to call this a moment of poetic power, a moment wh
the mariner himself is brought to speech by a power identified with that
inspiring the poet and inspiriting the world. Yet if the mariner is "da
monized" by such a power, power has its price, and what follows
think, is not divine gift but an expression of a monstrous repression.
we were to read the lines that follow as an echo of those that have ju
been uttered, we would be witnessing how vision passes into faith: On
once find the spring of love in your heart and the rest shall be give
unto you: "Sure my kind saint took pity on me, / And I blessed them
unaware." This would be the supplementary awareness of miracle add
to vision ofthe supernatural. Yet the surety here seems less that of Go
benison than the mariner's own defense against his own best momen
I think we do better, therefore, to read "Sure my kind saint took pi
on me" as a return of the state of mind that keeps the mariner boun
within his preternatural world even as he is granted a moment of insig
of what lies beyond it.
Readers will disagree about the nature of this repression. For some
Coleridge's insight about the unintelligibility ofthe universe could on
escape his conscious censorship if the poem appeared to repress th
insight and assert a more palatable moral. For others, the poem is so
essentially about the condition of depressive melancholia that its prete
naturalism must be interpreted as the machinery by which the poet c
be true to the oppressive state of mind he takes as his subject. For others,
the poem is profoundly involved with Coleridge's own struggle for
place in literary history, and the force and arbitrariness of the pret
natural will to power must be interpreted as a counter-thrust to divin
Reason, the angelic supernaturalism of Paradise Lost. These interpret

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tions stand over and against the one in which the preternat
supernatural are closely allied, in which the relation between t
spirit and an absent deity who loves man (and bird and beast)
problematic, and what the gloss calls "daemons" are related to
daimon (the inspiration of the creative genius) rather than the
exorcized by Christ. Except for this last, most conventional
reading, what the interpretations of the poem represent, even
mere variety, is that the askesis of the mariner?what the poem
"penance"?may not be an expression of the progressive reve
Christ the Evolver but a parodic version of it, a mark of the ty
a preternatural, gnostic demiurge from which the mariner, un
readers, cannot escape.
Trembling like a guilty thing surprised by the "loud upro
marks the end of his ghostly hold on the wedding guest, the m
utters what purports to be a summary of his progress but what
as a reminder of his arrest of consciousness at the preternatural
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
(11. 597-600)
In the following stanza this terrible memory is restituted by the th
of walking together to the kirk, a "motion" and communal sp
that earlier enskied for the mariner in the motion of the stars
moment, however, the mariner catches what we might call the
opposition between the preternatural and the supernatural, the f
the truly supernatural is not best revealed but most obscured w
preternatural is in the ascendant. This opposition stands as our
reminder that the agon of consciousness presided over by the d
within the poem may yield to, but in itself is not to be identifie
the work of Christ the Evolver, tutelary spirit of the evol
consciousness from mariner to poet, from Romanism to roma
Like those who might have witnessed miraculous events at the
Christ, the mariner "hath been stunned, / And is of sense
(11. 622-23). But for us who reason not the truth from the evid
the senses, the mariner has "strange power of speech." A wand
metonymy for the miraculous, the mariner is a sign of a possible sp
significance in the best sense of "sign" or "wonder": an indicato
way, a directive for conversion. If the preternaturalism of the
the darkness against which the stars can be discerned, it is for the
to read the signs and rise the wiser the morrow morn.
Yale University
157.40.136.107 on Tue, 07 Mar 2023 12:54:06 UTC

Coleridge and The Supernatural

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