THE WATCHMAN'S ORGANIZED DISSENT

The modern age's “love of knowledge,” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes it in the first issue of The Watchman (his ill-fated newspaper issued for less than three months in the spring of 1796), did a great deal to weaken the traditional social authority of established religion. But it also did a great deal to sustain the life of religions. The philosophy of the modern age did not simply disenchant the world: it did not, that is, replace ancient mythologies with empirical truths, religion with science. In fact, the “love of knowledge” was significant – and it earns a privileged place in Coleridge's initial conceptualization of The Watchman – for enhancing rather than suppressing the visibility of religious beliefs and the dissension among them.

The claim I am ascribing to Coleridge first arises in this issue of the newspaper in connection with a story – also told by the likes of Godwin and Hume – about the defeat of Constantinople by the Turks. As a consequence, we are told, learned Greeks were driven west into Europe, an event that happily coincided with the invention of printing. That story does, in fact, look very much like a uniform movement from darkness to light: “The first scanty twilight of knowledge was sufficient to shew what horrors had resulted from ignorance.”