Religious Musings Research Articles

Writing “Supreme Reality”: Coleridge’s Religious Musings and Shelley’s Queen Mab

This article argues that Shelley’s experimentation with prophecy in Queen Mab closely connects him to the Coleridge of Religious Musings. Prophecy, in Coleridge’s hands, is a means of social criticism as well as a divine calling. Shelley relished such doubleness, transforming prophecy into an imaginative mode that marks his entire poetic career. Religious Musings, with its multi-faceted preoccupations, spoke to Shelley’s early ambitions as a philosophical poet in Queen Mab. Religious Musings was a model for Shelley that he would return to with a keen sense of his own mastery of Coleridge’s twist on the prophetic mode.

Venedikt Erofeev: ‘Moskva-Petushki’, ili The Rest is Silence by Svetlana Shnitman-McMillin

Reviewed by: Venedikt Erofeev: ‘Moskva-Petushki’, ili The Rest is Silence by Svetlana Shnitman-McMillin David Gillespie Shnitman-McMillin, Svetlana. Venedikt Erofeev: ‘Moskva-Petushki’, ili The Rest is Silence. Nauchnaia biblioteka. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2022. 248 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ₽396.00. Venedikt Erofeev lived from 1938 to 1990, and in that time wrote a handful of long and short prose works and a play, but is best known for his ‘poema’ Moskva-Petushki, first published abroad in 1973 and in the Soviet Union only in 1988–89 (ironically, given its subject-matter, in a journal entitled Trezvostˊ i kulˊtura: ‘Sobriety and Culture’). The narrator Venichka travels by train from Moscow to the small suburban town of Petushki, drinking heavily and increasingly beset by alcohol-fuelled hallucinations, all of which enable him to engage in philosophical, artistic and, in particular, religious musings. Indeed, reality and fantasy are often confused. Back in Moscow he is attacked by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and stabbed in the throat (another irony is that Erofeev died of throat cancer in 1990). This, the first full-length monograph devoted to Venedikt Erofeev’s ‘masterpiece of Russian literature’, as Mark Lipovetskii notes in his ‘Introduction’, was first published in Switzerland in 1989. Essentially a re-issue [End Page 553] of the original volume, it contains some significant updated material, not least in the name of the author, who published in 1989 under the name Svetlana Gaiser-Shnitman. Since little if anything was known about Erofeev in 1989, there is some welcome additional and updated background information on his life and times. Most of the changes are of a structural nature, such as the removal of some subsection headings and their incorporation into the body of the main text. Others no doubt originate in the publisher’s marketing department, and it is to this reviewer’s regret that photographs of Erofeev, as well as the many illustrations of the poema’s numerous religious motifs, have been omitted from this edition. Quotations in French, Italian, English and German from the earlier edition have now been translated into Russian, with the original languages deleted, and some quotations expanded. A most welcome addition is the updated bibliography on the secondary literature on Erofeev that has blossomed since the 1980s. What remains is an excellent and detailed analysis of the philosophical and aesthetic depth of a work now considered a classic of Russian postmodernism. The Rest is Silence remains the definitive study of Erofeev’s poema over thirty years since its original publication. The author provides an exhaustive and rewarding study, paying particular attention to references to religious motifs in the art of Andrei Rublev, El Greco, Diego Velazquez, Rembrandt, Pieter Breughel and Giovanni di Paolo. The analysis of the many references to Shakespeare, Rabelais, Dante, Pascal, Villon and Bergengruen testifies not only to Erofeev’s depth of erudition, but also to Dr Shnitman-McMillin’s powers of perception and scrupulous attention to detail. It is to be hoped that this study will find its way into English translation, and thus make Erofeev’s work more accessible to both undergraduates and the broader public, given that Moskva-Petushki is now available in more than one English-language edition. David Gillespie Moscow City University Copyright © 2022 David Gillespie

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

Assuring the Antecedents of Pantheism and Metaphysical Speculation in Coleridge’s Poetic Work

This article is about the poetic work of Coleridge's pantheism and metaphysical speculations. As he is one of the most influential poets of the romantic period in the field of English literature. He considered the wonderfully imaginative, psychological, metaphysical and pantheistic romantic poems with comparing other greatest poets by a recognized location. There are number of aspects in Coleridge’s personality and also in his writings consists of philosophy, religion, metaphysical aspects, irony, imagination, metaphor, and pantheism. In this research article, the discussion is taken from his most impressive poems “The Ancient Mariner”, “The Eolian Harp”, “Religious Musings” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, which shows Coleridge’s representation of of terms Patheism and metaphysical spaculations. Coleridge gave two philosophical declarations. These two declarations are related to his concept of "one Life”. They are related to the different theories and symbolically different. The first declaration appears after Coleridge connotation with the breeze that has caressed the lute, the second declaration is about his previous experience where he had been little more than a passive lute being caresses by the breeze. Hence these two declarations come to know after a representation of imagination and after explaining of fancy in the period of Romantisicim.

Crusoe’s Crusade: Defoe, Genocide, and Imperialism

Cet article revient sur l’appel fait par Robinson Crusoé à tous les chrétiens, dans Serious Reflections , de lancer une croisade contre païens et musulmans — croisade à la fois évangélique et militaire, visant à convertir tous les volontaires à la foi chrétienne, et à éliminer les païens récalcitrants. Comme le montrent les deux premiers volumes de ses aventures, Crusoé (et avec lui Defoe) ne doutait pas de pouvoir convertir les habitants des Amériques et de l’Afrique sub-saharienne, mais l’Asie et l’Afrique du nord lui paraissaient cause perdue. Defoe croyait-il réellement à cette proposition qu’il fait énoncer à Crusoé, incarnation de l’esprit rationnel et pragmatique de l’Angleterre protestante ? L’écrivain tolérant qu’était Defoe cherchait-il à dénoncer le fanatisme affleurant sous les sages méditations spirituelles de Crusoé et sous ses positions coloniales supposément « bienveillantes » ? En s’appuyant sur l’ouvrage de Claude Rawson sur les contradictions de la rhétorique génocidaire de la première modernité, et en prenant en compte les changements d’attitude face à la notion de guerre sainte (y compris dans les écrits de Defoe lui-même sur la violence coloniale), cet article montre que la croisade proposée par Defoe peut s’interpréter comme réel effort de sa part pour saisir les problèmes religieux dans le monde. La proposition génocidaire de Crusoé révèle la peur profonde de Defoe de voir la chrétienté menacée ; mais son expression sous forme d’un récit de fiction indique aussi les réticences de l’auteur quant à la mise en pratique d’un tel plan.

Peter Sloterdijk as an Ally of TheologyIn the Shadow of Mount Sinai, PeterSloterdijk, Polity, 2016 (ISBN 978‐0‐7456‐9924‐0), vi + 71 pp., pb £9.99Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews 1993–2012, PeterSloterdijk, Polity, 2016 (ISBN 978‐0‐7456‐9166‐4), xxii + 328 pp., pb £17.99Not Saved: Essays after Heidegger, PeterSloterdijk, Polity, 2017 (ISBN 978‐0‐7456‐9699‐7), xiv + 288 pp., pb £17.99

AbstractPeter Sloterdijk is an acute philosophical commentator on contemporary culture and has much to teach theologians anxious to be in dialogue with that culture. He began as a tough Nietzschean, determined to look unpleasant truths in the face: ‘There is no longer any knowledge of which one could be a friend (philos). Faced with what we know, the idea of loving it no longer occurs to us, but we ask ourselves instead how we can manage to live with it, without being turned to stone’. Some of his remarks on the training of the human animal smacked of eugenicism. But he also showed a religious penchant, editing an anthology on Gnosticism and developing an interest in spirituality. His religious musings, focused on Gnostic and Augustinian themes, may actually weaken him as a theorist. Today, despite radical gestures, he is perhaps best characterized as a mainstream liberal (as shown in his ardent praise of Emmanuel Macron). He views religious and philosophical traditions in a naturalistic perspective, and this can lead him into crassly reductive accounts of both. His reception of Heidegger reduces the question of Being to one of the material anthropological environment. His study of monotheism as a ‘rage bank’ whisks away its doctrinal and mystical depths. Yet his appreciation of religion as a praxis of interiority, his desire to embed religious and philosophical discourse in concrete anthropological knowledge, and his worrying about the strands of violence in monotheism put him in dialogue with theology.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the ‘strain of words | That shall be life’: ‘Home at Grasmere’ on ‘Religious Musings’ in Dove Cottage Manuscript 28

When Wordsworth's unpublished poem ‘Home at Grasmere’ was printed posthumously in the 1880s, its readers and reviewers would only describe it as ‘prose’. This article suggests that understanding what they were so offended by can illuminate aspects of Wordsworth's blank verse style whose significance we no longer intuitively sense. It dwells on one of those aspects – repetition – before going back into the compositional history of ‘Home at Grasmere’ to explore Wordsworth's deliberation about its effects and importance, in the stylistically and intellectually combative context of his earliest work on the poem, in the blank pages and margins of a printed copy of Coleridge's 1796 work ‘Religious Musings’. The article elucidates some of the arguments with ‘Religious Musings’ that Wordsworth's work on ‘Home at Grasmere’ conducts in this manuscript (now classified as DC MS. 28). In particular, it suggests that Wordsworth's divergence from and condemnation of the diction of ‘Religious Musings’ here plays an important part in his divergence from and condemnation of its treatment of sensation and suffering. It ends by suggesting an ethical dimension to the repetitions of ‘Home at Grasmere’, to which its first readers were rightly sensitive.

Surrogacy in Nigeria: Legal, ethical, socio cultural, psychological and religious musings

Surrogacy in Nigeria: Legal, ethical, socio cultural, psychological and religious musings

EDITOR’S SELECTION: Walking the "Path of Piety": Charles Peirce, Religious Naturalism, and the American Literature of Transformation

the appreciation of Charles Peirce’s religious dimension has been slow to mature, due in part to the disparate nature of his prodigious output, but also due to a certain blindness of his interpreters. Michael Raposa, in his essay “Peirce and Modern Religious Thought” (1991), argues: “Some early interpreters of Peirce, like Hartshorne and Goudge, argued that his religious perspective was inconsistent with the basic thrust of his philosophy. Many later commentators have implicitly endorsed this argument by systematically ignoring the religious dimension of his thought.” In contrast, Raposa suggests “that what Peirce had to say about religion is remarkably continuous with what he wrote about a variety of philosophical, mathematical and scientific topics. . . . Peirce fashioned his conception of God out of the very materials that his semiotic and his synechism supplied” (Peirce’s Philosophy 349). Raposa offers a fuller account in Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion (1989), while other systematic accounts of Peirce’s religious perspective include Robert S. Corrington’s An Introduction to C. S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (1993) and the more recent Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature (2011) by Leon J. Niemoczynski. Identifying Peirce as a theologian with a spiritual cosmology of the sacred may require a leap of faith, though less of a leap if one considers Peirce’s religious musings within his architectonic of evolutionary realism, evolutionary love, and his interweaving of spontaneity and creativity (Hausman 18–19). Corrington defines his own overview of Peirce as an “emancipatory reenactment” (Introduction to C. S. Peirce xii), and Niemoczynski terms his own study a “constructive interpretation” and creative extrapolation of Peirce (ix), while Raposa’s systematic account elaborates “a conception of theological method, a task that Peirce clearly never himself assumed,” requiring “a sketch of how this might look as it takes shape” (Pierce’s Philosophy 357).

Ben Brice, Coleridge and ScepticismColeridge and Scepticism. Ben Brice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. x+229.

<i>Ben Brice</i>, Coleridge and Scepticism<i>Coleridge and Scepticism</i>. Ben Brice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. x+229.

Religious Musings on Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon is arguably the most well-known British artist after J.M.W. Turner, and his centenary in 2009 has been well documented in both the art world and the mass media. The BBC archive contains a comprehensive range of interviews and footage of the artist. To commemorate the centenary, the Tate has put together the third retrospective on Bacon (the previous ones were in 1962 and 1985 and were also held at the Tate), which has brought together some of his best works from different periods of his life. This extensive exhibition then moves to the Prado (Madrid) from 3 February–19 April 2009, and on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York from 18 May–6 August 2009.

A cacophony of religious, psychological, and theological musings.

A cacophony of religious, psychological, and theological musings.

Christabel and the Origin of Evil

I N a 1796 notebook entry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge envisioned writ ing Origin of Evil, an Epic Poem and at some point enthusi astically discussed the project with Charles Lamb, who reminded him in 1797 when in town you were talking of the Origin of Evil as a most prolific subject for a Long Poem.' George Whalley famously speculated that Coleridge never wrote this poem because as time went on he came to realize that he had already embodied his epic theme in The Ancient Mariner, and Peter Kitson has suggested similarly that perhaps this project became 'Religious Musings.'2 My alternate sug gestion is that Christabel embodies Coleridge's long-considered poem on the origin of evil. My related suggestion is that the text's rumina

Timing the Apocalypse: The Career of Religious Musings

Coleridge’s early poem Religious Musings is normally taken to illustrate the apocalypticism that appeared in British radical discourse with the outbreak of the French Revolution. In this essay I try to reassess the poem’s apocalyptic commitments. Rather than simply exhibiting apocalyptic tendencies that were common in radical circles, Religious Musings presents a critique of revolutionary apocalypticism. This critiques is visible first of all in the alternative forms of temporal experience that Coleridge clusters alongside the poem’s announcement of the coming apocalypse: the presence of the desultory and of the life in time experienced by the elect unsettles the poem’s apparent apocalypticism. In the end, Religious Musings finds value in temporality: for Coleridge, even at this early stage in his career, events find their primary significance in relation to time. I also suggest that this commitment to temporality should not be read as a loss of hope for political change; rather, by recognizing the constraints that time and history place upon political actors, Coleridge means to salvage the possibility of liberal politics. I conclude the essay by examining the role that Religious Musings plays in Coleridge’s 1796 collection, where it appears as the final poem. Religious Musings provides in its emphasis on temporality a model for organizing and thereby validating the diversity of genres, emotions, and ideas that marks Coleridge’s first book of poetry.

Necessary Evils: Unitarian Theodicy in "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere"

What we have most to dread, is the almost irrecoverable debasement of our minds by looking off from God, living without him, without a due regard to his presence and providence, and idolizing ourselves and the world, considering other things as proper agents and causes; whereas, strictly speaking, there is but one cause, but one sole agent in universal nature. --Joseph Priestley, Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity NO QUESTION IN COLERIDGE STUDIES HAS RESISTED RESOLUTION MORE effectively than the question of the Christianity of The of the Ancyent Marinere. Contemporary readers often feel that no theological paradigm survives the nightmarish ironies of Coleridge's tale, of course, but that very feeling requires some assumption about the text's theological investments, so the issue of the poem's religious outlook remains a pertinent one. It is an issue that I will reconsider here by invoking Coleridge's Unitarianism. Critics tend to hurry the poet past his Unitarian period, convinced that the glib optimism of Joseph Priestley could accommodate neither Coleridge's visionary interests nor his responsiveness to injustice and suffering. I What troubles me about that conviction is that it seems so thoroughly at odds with the historical record. For in 1797-1798 Coleridge was still zealously engaged in the Unitarian cause: preaching to Unitarian congregations, corresponding with Unitarian ministers on theological questions, and revising his doctrinaire Religious Musings. He renounced his candidacy for the vacant ministry at Shrewsbury not on doctrinal grounds but simply because the Wedgwood legacy allowed him to act on his aversion to ministerial routine. (2) In turning from Coleridge to The moreover, we turn from a devout Unitarian to a conversion narrative organized around Christian motifs from the moment Coleridge introduces Crucifixion imagery into it. Is there no connection between the poet's religious beliefs and the poem's religious speculations? There is indeed, critics reply, but they defend the connection by denying or misrepresenting Coleridge's Unitarianism. For Robert Penn Warren, Coleridge's mythmaking reformulates the orthodox Fall occasioned by Original Sin, in the process ignoring Unitarian and Necessitarian doctrine. (3) For James Boulger, conversely, The Rime depends crucially on Necessity, but on a version of Necessity more reminiscent of Hume than Priestley. (4) Jerome McGann advocates reclaiming The Rime for historical understanding by looking not to Coleridge's Unitarianism but his interest in Higher Critical hermeneutics. (5) With William Empson, we at last encounter outright insistence on the Unitarianism of The thankfully. Yet we also encounter a reconstruction of Coleridge's Unitarian faith so tendentious as to create more problems than it resolves. My effort to negotiate these contending positions will appeal to the Unitarian convictions expressed in Coleridge's own letters and prose writings and Priestley's theological treatises. My essay will concede Warren's claim that The Rime celebrates the One Life, but then argue that the poem displays a typically Unitarian disinterest in Original Sin and the loss of Eden. I will agree with Boulger, against Warren, that the idea of Necessity shapes Coleridge's narrative profoundly, but I will also argue that Coleridge's conception of Necessity is providential rather than skeptical. While accepting McGann's case for a historicist Rime, with the Mariner as a figure of superstition, I will ignore the marginal glosses tie privileges arid concentrate instead on the 1798 text. My concern with The Rime as a Unitarian theodicy, finally, marks the divergence of my argument from Empson's reading. By looking narrowly at the poet's distaste for notions of a hereditary guilt demanding expiation, Empson concludes that Coleridge's Unitarianism disallowed the redemptive rationale of pain and evil--and there I cannot agree. …

(M)Othering the Nation: Guilt, Sexuality and the Commercial State in Coleridge's Gothic Poetry

(M)Othering the Nation: Guilt, Sexuality and the Commercial State in Coleridge's Gothic Poetry Robbie B. H. GoA In an intriguing, if cryptic, notebook entry of 1799, Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks of "Commerce and its Effects disguised as a Fairy Tale" (CPW, I: 616). It is not clear if he is referring to the spell which commerce and its commodities are supposed to exert on human participants, although he does say in the poem "Religious Musings" that commercial man is "Toy-bewitched,/ Made blind by lusts" (CPW, I: 114), while in the Lay Sermon he uses the term the "sorcery of wealth" to describe the dominance of commerce over all other aspects of human life (199). This quality of enchantment attributed to commerce, would also seem to fit into Coleridge 's poetics, what in the Biographia Literaria is described as that "magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination" (II: 16). His own poem "Christabel" accords with this definition , as a "supernatural" poem that "pretended to be nothing more than a common Faery Tale" (CPW, II: 6-7, 238). Magical narratives which also convey some essential truth about the (in its own way magical) power of commercial relations, would go some way to relate the "world-historical" Coleridge (Shaffer 56, 101), who, as Storch puts it, "marshals all the resources of the mind, including the imagination , towards an understanding of the human condition in historical terms" (449), with the poet of a "querulous egotism" (Watson 51) whose JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.3 (Fall 2003): 270-291. Copyright © 2003 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. (M)Othering the Nation 271 "introverted" poetry expresses, in Butler's terms, the "elevation of the self's truth" (83). The Biographia maintained that the magical power of the imagination could rescue "the most admitted truths from . . . impotence " by producing "the strongest impressions of novelty" (I: 82), thus establishing the basis of a poetics which was also a politics of the commercial state. Coleridge's various and rather desultory prose comments on the evils of England's economic condition, in writings like The Watchman, his essays for the Morning Post, the Lay Sermons and elsewhere, form a backdrop for the gothic romance which emerges in the poetry—a romance in which the anxieties of the commercial state are played out in the psycho -sexual terms of desire, repression, alterity and regression. Not incidentally , this pairing of commerce and the miraculous tale bears more than passing resemblance to William Godwin's account of the relationship between his gothic novels and his political ideas: in his preface to his 1805 novel Fleetwood, Godwin describes the "miraculous" and "surprising" elements in his novels as a reinforcement of the politics of his PoliticalJustice , both kinds of discourse working in different ways "to effect a grand and comprehensive improvement in the sentiments" of men in society (xvi). Clemit insists that the Godwinian novel is a "consciously political form" intended to oppose the values of "aristocratic culture" (14); she thus passes a considerable part of the political burden from Godwin's explicit treatise PoliticalJustice (which in any case undergoes a series of revisions and retractions), to the novels' literary mechanism and their sentimental influence. Godwin's profound but problematic influence on Coleridge is evident from as early in the latter's career as the 1795 Bristol lectures, and Coleridge's gothic project both derives from and distinguishes itself from Godwin's attempt to depict "things as they are" in the fantastical form of the gothic novel. This literary project can thus be seen in terms of the "channeling" of "desiring production," the "coding" and "decoding of flows" of economic and political desires, which Deleuze and Guattari (9-10, 240) attribute to the capitalist state. In this formulation, the gothic, with its neurotic sensualization of the affairs of the state, its imagination of the perverse psycho-sexual drama of power, is a prime example of such literary codes, "so true is it that the schizo practices political economy, and that all sexuality is a matter of economy" (12). In the case of Coleridge, poetry is a means of articulating a sentimental response to the evils and...

Coleridge Beginning a Career: Desultory Authorship in Religious Musings

Coleridge Beginning a Career: Desultory Authorship in Religious Musings

Young Coleridge and the philosophers of nature

The ancient tradition of knowledge wrestling with the spirit of Newton the elect band of patriot sages how natural philosophers defeated the Whore of Babylon nature and the language of God Religious Musings - a desultory poem? the vital question poetry of generation and decay.

THE COLERIDGE CIRCLE AND THE ‘ANSWER TO GODWIN’

IN March 1798 Wordsworth placed '1300 lines' of blank verse within his plan for a master-poem called The Recluse.1 As a recent critic has shown, 'he did so as a convert to the philosophical system of the One Life', inspired by Coleridge to project 'an updating and expansion of Religious Musings'.2 But The Recluse, like Religious Musings, is grounded in a larger, Unitarian reformation of radical thought: Wordsworth's epic, and the poetry written for it in 1798, are the most significant products of Coleridge's opposition to Godwinian atheism. The zeal in promoting an 'Answer to Godwin' seen in the 1795 Lectures extends more widely, and more diversely, than has been recognized. From the time of his declaration, '[Southey] is Christianizing apace' (CL i. 153), and on through his later relations with Wordsworth, Coleridge consistently helped to subvert allegiances to Political Justice.3 Further, he gave Dissenters a language in which to express their Christian antipathy to its atheism. Coleridge's anti-Godwinism, at once associationist and Unitarian, is visible in the work of several of his contemporaries. The ways in which he proselytized friends and correspondents, of surprisingly different sympathies, reveal The Recluse as itself originating in his wish to generate an 'Answer to Godwin'. Though complicated by his friendship with Southey (who 'all but worshipped' the philosopher4), Coleridge's own attitude to Godwin emerges in the overtly 'complimentary sonnet'5 of December 1794:

Hartley, Pistorius, and Coleridge

This paper announces no great discovery, but it contains fresh material of interest to students of Coleridge, of David Hartley and the philosophical tradition which he represents, and of Anglo-German literary relations. Our starting-point is lines 35-45 of Religious Musings, where Coleridge declares that the life and death of Christ freed the human soul from the bonds of idolatrous fear:Till of its nobler nature it 'gan feelDim recollections; and thence soared to Hope,Strong to believe whate'er of mystic goodThe Eternal dooms for His immortal sons.From Hope and firmer Faith to perfect LoveAttracted and absorbed: and centered thereGod only to behold, and know, and feel,Till by exclusive consciousness of GodAll self-annihilated it shall makeGod its Identity: God all in all!We and our Father one!1