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Coleridge's Reputation as a Religious Thinker: 1816–1972

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Philip C. Rule
Philip C. Rule
Affiliation:
Lansing-Reilly Hall, University of Detroit, Detroit, Michigan 48221
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Extract

Two recent publications that appeared during the Coleridge bi-centennial prompt this bibliographical survey of Coleridge's reputation as a religious thinker. Neither Norman Fruman's Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel nor René Wellek's contribution to the latest edition of The English Romantic Poets gives an adequate picture of Coleridge's ideas on religion and the profound effect they had on the English-speaking theological tradition. More concerned with debunking Coleridge's originality, both writers appear generally indifferent and unsympathetic to the large body of Coleridge's later writings that constitute by far the greater part of his canon and are the source of his wide influence on succeeding generations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , July 1974 , pp. 289 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1974

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References

1 Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vols. XII and XIII: The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill: 1812–1848, ed. Mineka, Francis E. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1963), 221.Google Scholar

2 Quoted in Apologia pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions, ed. Svaglic, Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 94.Google Scholar

3 Duffy, John J., Problems in Publishing Coleridge: James Marsh's First American Edition of Aids to Reflection, in New England Quarterly 43 (1970), 195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Duffy, John J., From Hanover to Burlington: James Marsh's Search for Unity, Vermont History 38 (1970), 27–48Google Scholar, which speaks of the Hedge Club which “met and discussed with excitement Coleridge's and Marsh's distinction between Reason and Understanding” (43). Among the club members were Orestes Brownson and Frederic Hedge. Hedge later published the American edition of Essays and Reviews. For a picture of Coleridge's influence on the educational theory of the University of Vermont see The Remains of the Rev. James Marsh, with a Memoir of His Life by J. Torrey (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1843)Google Scholar; Huntincton, C. A., The University of Vermont Fifty Years Ago (Eureka, Calif.: Thomas Howard, 1892)Google Scholar; Lindsay, Julian I., Tradition Looks Forward, The University of Vermont: A History 1791–1904 (Burlington, Vt.: Univ. of Vermont Press, 1954).Google Scholar For more on Marsh and his peers and disciples see Goddard, H. C., Studies in New England Transcendentalism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1908)Google Scholar; Nicholson, Marjorie, James Marsh and the Vermont Transcendentalists, Philosophical Review 34 (1925, 28–50)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wells, R. V., Three Christian Transcendentalists: James Marsh, Caleb Sprague, Frederic Henry Hedge (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1943).Google Scholar

4 Reprinted in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Shedd, W. G. T. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), I, 67–109.Google Scholar

5 John J. Duffy writes that “in later years at Columbia Dewey acknowledged to Herbert Schneider and others that the influence of Marsh's lectures on psychology and Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, which were used as texts in the younger Torrey's philosophy courses, were still sufficiently meaningful in the 1870's to shape irrevocably the thinking of many undergraduates there including Dewey himself,” in From Hanover to Burlington, 31. See also John Dewey, James Marsh and American Philosophy, a lecture delivered at the University of Vermont in 1929 and reprinted in the Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1941), 131–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See also Brown, J. W., The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969)Google Scholar, and Smith, H. Shelton (ed.), Horace Bushnell (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965).Google Scholar Smith's introduction gives a good summary of the New England Protestant mind in the first half of the nineteenth century and lists the main points that divided theologians at that time. For other responses to Coleridge see Maesden, George M., The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970).Google Scholar

7 Life and Letters of Fenton John Anthony Hort, ed. Hort, A. F. (London: Macmillan, 1896), I, 97.Google Scholar

8 As narrated to Hort's son, Life, I, 306. “Coleridge” appeared in the Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University (London: John W. Parker, 1856).Google Scholar

9 Of interest in this connection are Fletcher, J. B., Newman and Carlyle: An Unrecognized Affinity, Atlantic Monthly 95 (1905), 669–79Google Scholar; and Tristram, Henry, Two Leaders: Newman and Carlyle, Cornhill Magazine 65 (1928), 367–82.Google Scholar

10 Essays and Studies (London: Chatto & Windus, 1875), 274.Google Scholar

11 This preface seems to have been written in 1967.

12 For example, in treating the state of theology from Lux Mundi to the mid-1950's, J. K. Mozley does not give Coleridge a significant place in the development of English theology. Some Tendencies in British Theology, from the Publication of Lux Mundi to the Present Day (London: SPCK Press, 1951).Google Scholar