Rime and reason: Jonathan Wooding investigates Samuel Taylor Coleridge

‘Coleridge enthusiastically defends George Fox.’

One night in 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was busy turning a dream into a poem. The text became famous as ‘Kubla Khan’, but it was never fully completed – Coleridge was interrupted by a ‘person from Porlock’ and found that the rest of the poem ‘had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast’. Who knows what was lost?

But plenty remains, and I’d like to hold this glittering-eyed old voyager in the Light for a brief spell. Alongside ‘Kubla Khan’ came, of course, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (with its ‘secret ministry’) and ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (and its ‘shaping spirit’), but also a weekly paper called The Friend! In 1809-10, at a time of revolutionary and atheistic fervour, Coleridge became concerned about the state of religion and culture. In response, he issued a series of personal essays, in twenty-eight parts: The Friend: A literary, moral, and political weekly paper (our own magazine got going much later).

In his paper, Coleridge forewarns his readers that he will presume upon their friendship, and ‘avail myself of the privileges of a friend before I have earned them’. He wants to ‘prevail on’ readers ‘to go into themselves and make their own minds the Object of their steadfast attention. Look, here, at how the subjective and the objective’. dimensions are so carefully woven together. Look at the mutuality that’s involved, the disciplined attention and inner voyaging. I’m happy to sit with friend Samuel, to be prevailed upon, to meet him in the irreducible things which are mortally eternal. As he writes: ‘It is still the great definition of humanity, that we have a conscience, which no mechanic compost, no chemical combination of mere appetence, memory, and understanding, can solve; which is indeed an Element of our Being!’ I hope so.

The poet Malcolm Guite, in his book Mariner: A voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2017), tells us ‘Coleridge financed the journal by selling over five hundred subscriptions, over two dozen of which were sold to members of Parliament’, before this eclectic and madcap publication was ‘crippled by a financial crisis’. But if The Friend was a financial disaster, and only ever had a few readers, it nevertheless helped Coleridge himself to realise the foundational principles of his vocation. Writing ‘6,000 words each week’ was Coleridge’s response, it seems, to hearing his friend William Wordsworth’s great (unpublished) epic poem of interiority, ‘The Prelude’ (originally called ‘The Poem to Coleridge’). We can say that his concern became with the torch of being, the nature of consciousness, with perception of truth and with the role of the creative imagination. If Quakers can refer to the Inner or Inward Light as that of God in every person, then we might well respond positively to Coleridge’s obsessive exploration of the truth-revealing faculty he calls the ‘primary imagination’, instrumental to witness and wisdom in us all. It is in The Friend, ‘Essay II’, that he writes of this as a ‘torch’, which he seeks ‘to kindle’ in his reader, then to ‘leave it to himself [thus] to choose the particular objects, which he might wish to examine by its light’.

Hear how Coleridge sounds like a latter-day George Fox: ‘By sophistry, by evil habits, by the neglect, false persuasions, and impostures of an apostate Priesthood… the understandings of men may become so darkened and their Consciences so lethargic.’ He goes on to align himself with the true freedom-fighters of his age, and ‘the agitating Truths, with which Thomas Clarkson, and his excellent Confederates, the Quakers, fought and conquered the legalized Banditti of Men-stealers’.

There can be no doubting the intensity of Coleridge’s admiration for the Religious Society of Friends. He is recorded to have said, for instance, that ‘ideal democracy was realized by a contemporary – not in a nation, for that is impossible, but in a sect – I mean by George Fox and his Quakers’. In 1833 he is recorded as saying he has ‘something of the Quaker’s mind… inclined to wait for the spirit’. When it comes to ‘offering spiritual consolation to any one in distress or disease. I believe that such resources, to be of any service, must be self-evolved in the first instance.’ In Chapter IX of Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge speaks of his ‘obligations to the Mystics’, and enthusiastically defends George Fox against more sophisticated, solely rationalistic writers: ‘The writings of these Mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system.’ It is from these writers that Coleridge claims to discern ‘the indwelling and living ground of all things’.

But did Coleridge find his contemporary Quakers wanting? Do Friends still undervalue the nature of the religious gift? Other writings show Coleridge distancing himself from Friends. In 1811 we find a report of him apparently making fun of a Meeting he had attended: ‘After dinner he told us a humorous story of his enthusiastic fondness for Quakerism, when he was at Cambridge, and his attending one of their meetings, which had entirely cured him.’ Cured him of his ‘enthusiastic fondness’, I suppose, though it’s more likely he was repelled by a dangerous enthusiasm he found there – in 1833 we find suspicion of enthusiasm and zealotry: ‘A Quaker is made up of ice and flame. He has… no mean temperature… becomes a fanatic.’ In his Lay Sermons (1816-17), Coleridge criticises the materialistic side of contemporary Quakers, their failure to put up sufficient resistance to the ‘cupidity of a trading people’. They’re neglecting their theology too, he says: ‘Learning, and more particularly theological learning, is more rare among them… than among any other known sect of Christians.’ Goodness!

Malcolm Guite outlines Coleridge’s exhilarating and original quest to understand the nature of the Inward Light – to create ‘a theology of the poetic imagination and make the link between the experience of the sublime, of heightened meaning in great literature, and the indwelling of the Logos in every soul’. The definitive account of this interior ‘torch’ nurtured by friendship, and leading to apprehension of truth and personal freedom, is given in the Biographia Literaria. At the close of Chapter XIII, we read this: ‘The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.’

This remains for me, after decades of pondering, a thrilling account of the life of the mind in both its quotidian and sublime operations. There is no contradiction here of scientific method, rather an elucidation of it – a re-enchantment of science and an affirmation of personal agency. And, for sure, in its understanding of humanity’s Inward Light, of consciousness as a surpassing gift and ‘shaping spirit’, it played a crucial role in my seeking membership of our Religious Society. It is the milk of paradise.

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Comments

What a gift that STC has blessed you unaware, bringing you into the circle of Friends through his ‘madcap’ mystic Friendly newsletter.
Thank you once again for sharing your scholarship and Malcolm Guite’s text.  Much to ponder and explore.

By bigbooks1963@gmail.com on 24th August 2023 - 14:03

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