Inside without Outside: Coleridge, the Form of the One, and God

Abstract

The word ‘aesthetic’ is capable of expressing at least two meanings: a basic, even etymological, sense, where perception or aisthēsis is the focus; and a broader, though more common, meaning, in which attention is directed through perception to a certain form or pattern, as in music or art. Any sensitive consideration of the relationship between Romanticism and religion in the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge must be faithful to both these meanings.1 This essay intends to stress that double significance by examining, not the meanings individually, but the unity between them, between perception and form. More precisely, I aim to propose the following thesis: that, for Coleridge, romantic religion can best be served only when the second reference of ‘aesthetic’ is allowed to permeate and transform the first; or, in the terms supplied by his Biographia Literaria, only when the ‘secondary imagination’ of the artist or poet begins to alter and enhance the ‘primary imagination’ of human perception as a whole.2 Before turning to this thesis, however, it is important initially to be reminded of three essential facts: Coleridge’s extraordinary attentiveness, his special attentiveness to attention itself, and his attentive quest for unity.