Coleridge's Light in Malta and Rome

Abstract

In his room in Malta on February 12, 1805, at precisely 1:30 in afternoon, Coleridge records decisive moment, after a 7 or 8 year ... passage from Unitarianism, at which awful Truth of doctrine of Trinity burst upon him. Coleridge wrote in Notebook entry 2448: Christ. No (Notebooks, 2: 2448). entry comes after another recorded at noon, in which Coleridge claimed that metaphysics and radical theology of lower Platonists is in agreement with the true meaning of Plato, and harmonizable with doctrines of orthodox Xstian (Notebooks, 2: 2447). Notebooks from this period reveal a confluence of reflections on aesthetics and Christian belief. From these one can conclude that Mediterranean climate awakened Coleridge's sense how sunlight plays in cognition of form. Shortly after arriving at Malta, Coleridge drew following parallel: The eye cannot behold Sun ... nor Soul God ...--The Light shines about, not into (Notebooks, 2: 2164). entries reveal Coleridge's discovering principles of aesthetic form in Mediterranean seascape. These are basic elements: first., principle of unity in multeity, a Coleridgean term first presented in Malta notebooks (Notebooks, 2: 2344); secondly, distinction, developed later in Biographia Literaria, between Fancy and images ordered by thought and reality (Notebooks, 2:2543); third, aesthetic intuition, originating in senses, by and through which ideal is an object (Notebooks, 2: 2274); fourth, act of seeking in nature expression of human soul, in form (Notebooks, 2: 2546). In all of these elements, role of light dominates Coleridge's attempts to formulate an account of aesthetic intuition in which natural objects, human, subjectivity, and spiritual realm in God, coalesce. After Malta, Coleridge traveled to Rome, where he spent a good deal of time looking at Italian paintings. Notebooks, which are sketchy and incomplete, are dominated by comments on paintings of American artist, Washington Allston, whom Coleridge met shortly after arriving in Rome. experience of Italian art and its influence on Coleridge appear in his assessment of work. Allston's Landscape in Diana and Her Nymphs in Chase is described in detail in a spring, 1806, Notebook entry (2: 2831), with special attention to its composition, whereby effect of light organizes parts into a whole. Coleridge catches way various elements in painting are illuminated by sunlight, constituting form of unity in painting which he describes as [t]he divine semitransparent and grey-green Light. entire effect of this canvas is telescoped, in very next Notebook entry, onto his aesthetic experience in Rome where he spent month before at Vatican and inside Sistine Chapel: quiet circle in which Change and Permanence co-exist, not by combination or juxtaposition, but by an absolute annihilation of difference/column of smoke, fountains before St. Peter's, waterfalls/GOD!--Change without loss--change by a perpetual growth, that past, & future included in Present//oh! it is aweful (Notebooks, 2: 2832). An entry written during a stay at country villa in Olevano Romano records how use of light function both to illuminate objects and as a wholly separable component: What Tone to colors, chiaro-Oscuro to Light & Shade: viz, such a management of them that they form a beautiful whole, independent of particular Images colored, lit up, or shaded (Notebooks, 2: 2797). Unfortunately, if Coleridge did make a more fuller record of his aesthetic experiences in Rome, as he says he did, they are lost (see Holmes, 64). But later writings explain how artistic representation, as seen through paintings, informs his understanding of way natural symbolism points to spiritual truths. …