Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church by Luke Savin Herrick Wright

Abstract

Luke Savin Herrick Wright. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. viii+296. $35. Writing in the summer of 1818, Byron expresses his exasperation with Coleridge's turn from writing poetry to the abstruser musings of philosophy and theology: And Coleridge too has lately taken wing / ... / Explaining metaphysics to the nation. / I wish he would explain his explanation. For Byron, this shift in genre coincides with Coleridge's betrayal of the older poet's earlier political sympathies. Coleridge insisted that the apparent reversal of his allegiances obscured an underlying consistency in principle, a principle that demanded adjustments in perspective as it continued to unfold. In Coleridge and the Anglican Church, Luke Savin Herrick Wright argues that Coleridge's self-justification has some basis. The professed consistency arises not, as has sometimes been proposed, from his interest in continental idealist philosophy, but rather from his ongoing engagement with an Anglican tradition. Wright charts this engagement carefully, suggesting that it spans a broader stretch of Coleridge's life and thought than is often assumed, exploring both its initial motivations and its extended consequences for Victorian theorists of the relationship between church and state. No single thread, no matter how lengthy and sturdy, could tie together the sheer range of Coleridge's ambitions and commitments. Yet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church helpfully illuminates the extensive--if not comprehensive--significance of Coleridge's commitment to High Church Anglicanism. At its best, Wright's study grants Byron's jocularly jaundiced wish: it explains the explanations that Coleridge offered repeatedly and length over the last decade of his life. Wright begins with the assertion that Coleridge's religious views led him to articulate a sustained opposition to the dominant vision of church-state relations throughout his career, even if the terms of this opposition changed, sometimes profoundly, over time. Wright identifies William Warburton's The Alliance between Church and State (1736) as providing the primary theological justification for the status quo Coleridge sought to contest. This prevailing consensus sees the relationship between church and state in terms of contract theory: at its most basic, Warburtonian theory can be summarized as a belief that church and state cooperate because each recognizes a mutual benefit in such a relationship--Warburton was, broadly speaking, a utilitarian (17). For Coleridge, among others, conceiving the intersection of theology and politics in this way sacrifices spiritual integrity to expediency. The alternative vision that he eventually develops conforms to a traditionally Anglican model of organic union in which church and state are virtually identical; to be a member of one of these corporate bodies is inevitably to be a member of the other (26). Coleridge's theological views led him by the culmination of his career to a traditionally Tory politics as well, serving as a bridge figure between the old-fashioned High Churchmen and the Tractarians ... [and as] a part of the gathering forces of Toryism that would emerge as the Conservative party a generation later (30). It would have been difficult to predict Coleridge playing this transitional role on the basis of his stated positions in the 1790s, a point Wright partially concedes. While Coleridge's earlier politics were conspicuously radical, however, Wright contends that his religious convictions were more conventional than is often assumed. His avowed Unitarianism, for example, can be seen as a relatively conservative form of dissent that did not fix itself on ontological conceits but was rather a strictly biblically based interpretation of Christianity that saw the true emphasis of religion as the teaching and ethics of Jesus (44-45). Similarly, Coleridge's Lectures on Revealed Religion of 1795 preached a 'social gospel' based on the Old Testament law of Jubilee rather than embarkfing] upon an elaborate discussion of the Trinity (60). …