Coleridge and Newman: The Centrality of Conscience 9780823295319

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Coleridge and Newman

STUDIES IN RELIGION AND LITERATURE

John L. Mahoney, series editor 1.

John L. Mahoney, ed. Seeing into the Lift ofThings: Essays on Religion and

2. 3.

David Leigh, S.J. Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiographies. J. Robert Barth, S.J. The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic

4.

Beth Hawkins. Reluctant Theologians: Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Edmond

Literature.

Tradition. ]abes.

5.

J. Robert Barth, S.J., ed. The Fountain Light: Studies in Romanticism and

6.

Religion. Essays in Honor offohn L. Mahoney. Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard, eds. Shakespeare and the Culture of

7.

Mark Knight. Chesterton and Evil.

Christianity in Early Modern England

Coleridge and Newtnan THE CENTRALITY OF CONSCIENCE

PHILIP

C.

RULE,

S.J.

Fordham University Press New York

2004

Copyright© 2004 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means--electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other-except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Studies in Religion and Literature, No. 8 ISSN 1096-6692 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rule, Philip C. Coleridge and Newman :the centrality of conscience I Philip C. Rule.-lst ed. p. em.- (Studies in religion and literature, ISSN 1096-6692 ; no. 8) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8232-2315-9 1. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834-Religion. 2. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834. Biographia literaria. 3. Conscience--Religious aspectsChristianity-History of doctrines-19th century. 4. Christianity and literature-Great Britain-History-19th century. 5. Newman, John Henry, 1801-1890. Apologia pro vita sua. 6. Christian literature, English-History and critcism. 7. Conscience in literature. I. Title. II. Studies in religion and literature (Fordham University Press) ; no. 8. PR4487.R4R85 2004 2003023741 821.'7-dc22

Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

To J. Robert Barth, S.J. brother andfriend

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction

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1

1. The Age, the Issues, the Men

11

2. Conscience, Consciousness, Person, and GodExpanding One's Horizon

41

3. The Developing Self: Biographia Literaria and Apologia pro Vita sua

65

4. Developing Individuals in Developing Societies: On the Constitution ifthe Church and State According to the Idea if Each and An Essay on the Development if Christian Doctrine

96

5. Development and Belief: Aids to Reflection in the Formation ifa Manly Character and An Essay in Aid if a Grammar ifAssent

130

Postmodern Postscript

161

Works Cited

167

Index

179

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The ideas expressed in this book developed in stages over a period of more than forty years. My early interest in Newman, during theological studies, coincided with my introduction to the transcendental method of Bernard J. Lonergan, S.J., who was himself strongly influenced by Newman. I am grateful to two teachers whom I shall always remember, James]. Doyle, S.J., and Joseph]. Wulftange, S.J., for introducing me to Lonergan and his writings. During my graduate study days my interest in Coleridge was kindled by the work of my friend and colleague ]. Robert Barth, S.J., who passed along for my comments daily installments of what would become his influential study Coleridge and Christian Doctrine. Finally, it was Stephen Pricket's Romanticism and Religion that brought to my attention Coleridge's Opus Maximum manuscript at the University ofToronto. Added to the debts I owe these people are those owed to the vast army of Coleridge and Newman scholars and editors upon whom I have relied over the years. I am grateful to the University of Detroit and to the College of the Holy Cross for generous research leaves and grants to further my work. I am grateful, most of all, to the Jesuit Institute at Boston College for a yearlong residential fellowship, during 1992-93, that enabled me to finish the first draft of this book. At the end of that year I was fortunate in having the draft read by David J. De Laura of the University of Pennsylvania, and by Fred Lawrence andJ. Robert Barth, S.J., both ofBoston College. These scholars-experts respectively in Newman, Lonergan, and Coleridge-provided valuable input for which I am profoundly grateful. It was at this juncture that the godfather of this book began to enter the foreground. John L. Mahoney of Boston College provided endless support, encouragement, and prodding through a slow process of revision and trimming. Words cannot express my gratitude toward this gracious gendeman, scholar, and friend. My final debt is to J. Robert Barth, S.J., a friend of forty years. We have agreed and disagreed, shared joys and sorrow, and simply enjoyed one another's company. Never one to need encouragement to stop and

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

smell the roses, I profited by his gentle but firm admonitions to stop writing another review or an article in another area and get back to the book. It is with brotherly gratitude that I dedicate this book to an eminent Romantic scholar and friend.

P. C. R. Worcester, Massachusetts 14 June 2003

INTRODUCTION The purpose of this work is to show why Coleridge and Newman belong in the long line of Christian apologists who through the ages have attempted to provide a foundational philosophy for the doctrines and practices of revealed religion. 1 Like Augustine and Aquinas before them, each tried to think through the Christian experience and the Church's historically formulated doctrines in the available contemporary systems of philosophical understanding. As Augustine turned to Plato, Aquinas turned to both Aristotle and Plato. So Coleridge turned to Plato, Kant, and the German idealists; and Newman, in his highly original manner, turned to the British empiricists. And both men were attracted to and relied heavily on certain late-sixteenth-century and seventeenthcentury English divines. This study is interdisciplinary in two senses. It focuses on the interplay between religious experience and the rhetorical expression of that experience; and it is a study that addresses two, possibly three different audiences. In the world ofliterary studies, those who concentrate on Coleridge and Romantic studies may find the material on Newman new and refreshing, while they may find the material on Coleridge rather familiar. Correspondingly, those who concentrate on Newman and Victorian studies may find the opposite to be the case. For a third group, philosophers and theologians, some more familiar with Newman than with Coleridge, I am trying to bring Coleridge into the mainstream of modern Christian theology where he rightly belongs. Finally, there may be those in philosophical and theological circles who may be surprised by the currency of the ideas discussed here.

1. This has long been recognized about Newman in philosophical and theological circles. See James Collins, God in Modern Philosophy (Chicago: H. Regnery, Co., 1959), 326-76; and Frederick Copleston, A History if Philosophy, vol. 8, Part 2 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), 270-88. Copleston deals with both Coleridge and Newman, but in spite of the similarity of their positions draws no comparison between them.

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COLERIDGE AND NEWMAN

What I see as preponderant and central in their religious thought is the concept of conscience, understanding the word in its earlier usage as both conscience in the moral sense and consciousness in the psychological and epistemological sense. Thus conscience is moral self-awareness, a reflexive judgment. What I suggest, further, is that focusing on the centrality of conscience in their writings allows us to see them both as thinkers moving toward a systematic defense of Christianity. Each left, incomplete and unpublished, what is in substance a working paper on an "argument" for a personal God from the consciousness of conscience. I will try to show that these arguments or proofs are an attempt to render explicit their own concrete cognitive activities, a process that led them to employ a rhetoric of persuasion that invites readers to imitate them in their reflexive activity. In centering my study narrowly on conscience and its role in religious belief, I want also lay to rest the persistent opinion that neither writer, however brilliant, was systematic in his thinking. In the past, up to the 1970s, many critics said there was system neither in their individual works nor in their respective canons as a whole. Perhaps what Coleridge called the Biographia Literaria could apply to each of his works-"an immethodical miscellany." Yet John Stuart Mill, that most critically rigorous of Victorians, wrote that "few persons have more influence over my thoughts and character than Coleridge has"; and he went on to add that "on the whole, I can trace through what I know of his works, pieced together by what I have otherwise learned of his opinions, a most distinct thread of connection. I consider him the most systematic thinker of our time, without excepting Bentham, whose edifice is well bound together, but is constructed on so much a simpler plan, and covers less ground." 2 In 1858, Newman's contemporary Richard Simpson felt quite the opposite about the man he so much admired, and wrote that "Newman gives us colossal fragments, but he does not usually construct a finished edifice. He is like Homer, from whom all the Greek philosophers took their texts, as St. Thomas culls the principles of his science from Scripture .... The judicial oblivion he has left to us has found too faithful an echo in ourselves; and the consequence has been that Dr. Newman has 2. In The Earlier Letters offohn Stuart Mill·1812-1848, ed. Francis E. Mineka, vol. 12 of The Collected Works offohn Stuart Mill, ed. F. E. L. Priestly (Toronto and London: University ofToronto Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 221.

INTRODUCTION

3

almost ceased from literary production." 3 A year later, in 1859, Newman himself wrote to William Froude and seemed to confirm Simpson's opinion, as he lamented: "It seems a great cause of sadness to me, when I look back on my life, to consider how my time has been frittered away, and how much I might have done, had I pursued one subject which I spoke oflong ago-but it is not one to be taken up by halves, and how many years have 1?" 4 When he wrote those words, the Apologia was five years in the offing; and the proposed work to which he alluded, the Grammar ofAssent, which would become a classic study of religious belief, appeared eleven years later. It is my hope in this essay to show that their unpublished writings on conscience and religious belief provide a unifying thread for their other writings. Parallel readings of their biographies, their writings on Church and State, and their "self-help" books on faith will suggest that everything they wrote springs from and returns to a conviction that the human person can rise, under the direction of conscience or moral selfconsciousness, to a level of self-transcendence that enables the person, aided by faith, to come to the new cognitive horizon that is God. As we shall see in Chapter 1, their ideas on human consciousness and conscience got a mixed reception in the nineteenth century. Both were branded as subjective idealists. After a period of intense interest in Coleridge's ideas on religion, in both England and the United States, his reputation as a religious thinker waned, in this country at least, until James Boulger's Coleridge as a Religious Thinker appeared in 1961. Newman's ideas, in a sense, went underground for decades. Even among Roman Catholics he received little serious consideration, in Englishspeaking circles, on his own terms, because of an unsympathetic Thomistic philosophy that had lost sense of its own historical origins and was not open to philosophical change. It was, in fact, German and French thinkers who were most responsive to his then-radical ideas on development and conscience. It must be recalled that Newman was more often than not branded as a "modernist" by the end of the nineteenth century. This is, of course, profoundly ironic, for it was "Modernism" that Newman himself excoriated under the label of"Liberalism." It was not until1970 that 3. The Rambler (December 1858), 258. 4. John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries iffohn Henry Newman, 31 vols., ed. Charles Stephen Dessain (London: Oxford University Press, 1961-), vol. 19,284. Cited hereafter as LD.

4

COLERIDGE AND NEWMAN

John Coulson's masterful study Newman and the Common Tradition, inspired by the thinking of Vatican II, established Newman as a leading spirit in contemporary Catholic theology. Trying to deal with Coleridge and Newman together, across the range of their published writings, has at times seemed an exercise in madness. Newman published some forty volumes of writings, and the Birmingham Oratory over the past forty years has published thirty-one volumes of letters and diaries. Coleridge's collected writings, still in progress, come to sixteen volumes, many of them in turn divided into multiple volumes. Then, there are Coleridge's letters, notebooks, and marginalia. The scholarly debt owed to all involved in the editing of these magnificently produced editions is simply beyond words. My indebtedness to critical commentaries on both men and on allied subjects is enormous. The list of works cited cannot begin to trace this indebtedness. If I do not appear to be engaged in critical dialogue with many of these sources, it is largely because I had the sense that I was striking out in new territory simply by narrowing my focus to the deeply personal role played by conscience in the life and writings of Coleridge and Newman. The fact that this study, from inception to finish, has engaged my attention for almost thirty years makes it more difficult to trace influences. My methodology has grown out of the fact that Newman had a profound influence on the thought of the late Canadian theologian Bernard]. F. Lonergan. Granting this well documented influence, I began to realize that it might be profitable to reread Newman-and Coleridge, who had in turn influenced Newman-through the lens of Lonergan's more sophisticated and more rigorously systematic approach of selfappropriation. I am fully aware that this violates a cardinal law of cultural and current historical studies, namely initiating a dialogue between historically conditioned texts and the present. 5 But meaning can transcend its historical origins. Shakespeare does say something to the human spirit today even though he obviously wrote for his contemporaries. Epigones of Marx and Freud in the contemporary critical scene do not consider the thought of their progenitors limited to the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century context of London or Vienna that generated 5. I find validation of such a dialogue in David P. Haney's recent study, The Challenge

of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

INTRODUCTION

5

their writings. Why cannot the same be said of writers like Coleridge and Newman? I realize, too, that this approach places me in the delicate position of trying to reconcile an analysis of historical texts with a consideration of a perennial problematic: How can one reasonably believe in the existence of God? But perennial questions and perennial attempts to answer such questions create a living tradition and discourse in which successive attempts to find answers create a cumulative body of knowledge. Unlike the sciences, where new students can begin where their predecessors left off, philosophy and theology require their learners to assimilate all that has gone before them. My confidence in the viability of my approach might be put this way. Bernard Lonergan's own systematic analysis of human consciousness and its cognitive activities derives in part from St. Thomas and Kant and in part from Newman, resulting in his particular approach to "Transcendental Thomism."To that extent his own work is an "interpretation" of Newman. I am simply using this interpretation to produce a reading of Newman and Coleridge that suggests a coherence and modernity of thought often unrecognized. My methodology also derives, in part, from Lawrence Lockridge's stimulating essay "Explaining Coleridge's Explanation: Toward a Practical Methodology." 6 Lockridge suggests that besides the genetic and historical approaches there is a third approach, which he calls the structural? I will follow this method in that I will be looking for what Lockridge describes as "the continuities in doctrine or steady development toward some settled point of view" (48). For I think what Lockridge says of Coleridge applies equally to Newman: "A steady structure of thought centered in self-realization informs almost everything that Coleridge says about morality, and also everything he does about it" (51). Such an approach, I realize, runs the risk of falling under the censure of a critic like Thomas McFarland, who asserts that the reading of Coleridge requires a very broad context. McFarland, for example, faults fellow critics Joseph Appleyard and Owen Barfield for their limited critical contexts. He singles out a passage from Appleyard that was later endorsed by Barfield: 6. "Explaining Coleridge's Explanation: Toward a Practical Methodology for Coleridge Studies," in Reading Coleridge: Approaches and Applications, ed. Walter B. Crawford (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), 23-55. 7. "Explaining," 47-49.

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COLERIDGE AND NEWMAN

What is wanting in the sizable bibliography ofliterature on Coleridge is a full scale study of the development of his philosophy which will consider him on his own terms and not as a representative of something else, whether it be German idealism, English Platonism, pantheistic mysticism, semantic analysis, or depth psychology. The idea or organizing insight ought to be internal to his thought, so as to see what that thought is and not merely what it is like or unlike. 8

McFarland's criticism of such an approach is, of course, that there can be no intelligent interpretation of a text without a broad, comprehensive context. In his chapter ''A Complex Dialogue: Coleridge's Doctrine of Polarity and Its European Context," McFarland lays to rest the question of originality and, more importandy, ftrmly establishes Coleridge's stature as one of the great philosophic minds of the nineteenth century. 9 But is even the context he provides adequate? How far can and must one go in establishing a proper context, and will even that always guarantee a correct reading or an adequate estimate of a writer? Let me suggest here two limitations to McFarland's approach by relating the discussion ftrst to Newman and then, strange as it may seem, to Leo Tolstoy. In his chapter on the Magnum Opus McFarland says that "the Magnum Opus should be regarded as one of the most prophetic works of the nineteenth century, and in terms of the depth and power of the intellectual currents it stood against, one of the most heroic as well" (363). He goes on to compare Coleridge with a number of great nineteenthcentury ftgures: But perhaps by reference to five names in the forefront of the Western tradition, specifically Plato, Kant, Spinosa, Schopenhauer, and Darwin, one can at least indicate why Coleridge is very much more than just another Christian conservative like Newman, Keble, and Hurrell Froude, and other members of the Oxford Movement. Though Coleridge can be seen as ranging himself with some of the goals of that movement, he also understood in a way that none of its members did, what was really happening in the culture of his time. Indeed, the men of the Oxford Movement sometimes seemed to be equipped with a knowledge of Greek grammar and 8. Joseph A. Appleyard, Coleridge's Philosophy ofLiterature: The Development of a Concept ofPoetry: 1791-1819 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), ix. Qyoted in Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 4. 9. Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms ofRuin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Modalities ofFragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 289-341.

INTRODUCTION

7

high-minded devotion to the Church Fathers and very little else; certainly they were insulated against social and economic realities by wealth and upperclass privilege, and they had little of Coleridge's awareness of the complex interactions of scientific, philosophical, and theological tides and currents. (363-64) Such a sweeping charge begs some comment. In trying to do so I will concern myself first of all with Newman, who was certainly not considered a conservative by his Anglican contemporaries or by later generations of Anglicans and Roman Catholics. He was considered by many to be a subjective idealist who has sold out to change and the progress of modernity. To say that Newman was "unaware of the complex interactions of scientific, philosophical, and theological tides and currents" or that he was "insulated against social and economic realities by wealth and upperclass privilege" betrays McFarland's lack of familiarity with his life and thought as revealed in his writings and correspondence. That he lacked Coleridge's intellectual breadth is true, but that he lacked Coleridge's cultural and intellectual awareness is simply false. Much of what McFarland says here is not only uninformed but vaguely derisive. In a footnote accompanying his charge that Tractarians were concerned "with a high-minded devotion to the Church Fathers and very little else" he relies largely on Dwight Culler's Imperial Intellect. Speaking of the great intellectual heroes of the Western tradition, McFarland writes that "comparing Darwin's eager voyage to the South Atlantic and the Pacific with Newman's attitude, Culler says of Newman that 'to him the world of cities was little more than a fretful dream, and the only voyage was that which he took in the silence of his own heart or among the works of his beloved fathers"' (363). Had McFarland continued the quotation, it would be clear that Culler's intent is not in the least disparaging nor his comparison of Newman to Darwin the least bit invidious. For the very next sentence reads: "Like Thoreau, he had traveled a good deal in Oriel, and further afield was simply further from home." 10 Darwin and Newman were concerned with two entirely different landscapes, the one outer, the other inner. Even Coleridge would suffer by comparison with Darwin, as McFarland puts the case. Mter all, Coleridge journeyed no further than the parts of western Europe familiar to his

10. A. Dwight Culler, The Imperial Intellect: A Study ofNewman's Educational Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 83.

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contemporaries. Furthermore, as Frederick Copleston has pointed out, the fact that Kant never left the confines of East Prussia and lived out his career as "an excellent professor in the not very distinguished university of a provincial town'' in no way diminished his intellectual greatness.11 Finally, I am not sure what McFarland means or is implying by his comment that the Tractarians were "equipped with a knowledge of Greek grammar and a high-minded devotion to the Church Fathers and very little else." Certainly the Greek and Latin Fathers are no small part of our Western tradition. One need only mention Augustine's name to make that point. In terms of the specifically Christian tradition, they were and remain a major theological source. What, again, of the "highminded devotion"? Is this to be read as "having or showing high ideas, principles" or in the pejorative sense of"haughty"? And what, furthermore, of Newman's profound familiarity with the great English divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? They were writers who also greatly influenced Coleridge. Should not both groups of"Fathers" be essential context for the study ofboth Coleridge and Newman, who were primarily Christian thinkers conversant with their Christian sources? Newman not only possessed a masterful grasp of Greek and Latin languages and literatures, but was an astute historian of the early centuries of the Church at a time when historical methodology was in its infancy and he had few models to follow in his research and writing. A word needs to be said about McFarland's grouping Coleridge with Plato, Kant, Spinosa, Schopenhauer, and Darwin to suggest that he is not "just another Christian conservative" like Newman and other members of the Oxford Movement. There is a half- truth here. Coleridge was not conservative, but he was a Christian and a devout one. McFarland finds Coleridge "in a special way a hero of existence" who, "though life bore him down, ... fought from his knees"; 12 but he seems unwilling to recognize that Coleridge's heroism was inspired by his faith in the God of revelation. His faith was the focus of both his personal existence and his intellectual endeavors. Without commenting on it explicitly, 11. Copleston, A History ofPhilosophy, vol. 6, part 1, 209. 12. Romanticism and the Forms ofRuin, 132. McFarland's canonization of Romantic writers continues in his later work, Romantic Cruxes, where we find Charles Lamb is "in truth a secular saint" (52); Hazlitt's virtue is a "controlled pessimism" (86); and admirers ofDeQyincey's life and writings "class him among the heroes of existence" (94). Thomas McFarland, Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

INTRODUCTION

9

McFarland shows this in quoting Sara Coleridge's moving description of her father's death: "My father, since he felt his end approaching had expressed a desire that he might be as little disturbed as possible .... he then said that he wished to evince in the manner of his death the depth &sincerity of his faith in Christ." 13 McFarland, however, does not pursue this, and the scene is swallowed up in his impressive presentation of the context of continental philosophical thought against which Coleridge's achievements are measured. This raises a final question: When does one stop casting one's net? Let me take what might seem at first to be a quite extraneous example. Richard F. Gustafson's study of Leo Tolstoy's life and writings reveals an interesting parallel between that Russian Orthodox thinker and Coleridge the Anglican, and Newman the Anglican turned Roman Catholic. Tolstoy, too, articulated what Gustafson, borrowing the language of Karl Rahner, calls a "theology of consciousness" derived not from Western philosophical thought but from Russian philosophers and the writings of the Greek Fathers of the Church, writings which Newman, equipped with his knowledge of"Greek grammar," pored over, meditated on, and translated. Gustafson says that "in my presentation ofTolstoy's theology of consciousness I have borrowed some terms and observations from Karl Rahner, who follows in the German tradition and, now under the influence of Heidegger, grounds his theology in the phenomenon of consciousness, in a manner similar to Tolstoy, although Rahner is, of course, more sophisticated than Tolstoy." 14 Perhaps the coming full cycle ofWestern and Eastern theological traditions in Newman is, in fact, a very Coleridgean phenomenon, one suggesting that we should broaden our context for reading Coleridge so that it includes the major Christian writers. But this is once again to anticipate my argument, so let me finally turn to a brief summary of this study. In Chapter 1 I will provide a synopsis of the age and the issues that concerned nineteenth-century English Christians. Then I will spend some time comparing Coleridge and Newman; and I will consider at some length Coleridge's possible influence on Newman, bringing my focus to bear on conscience as moral self-consciousness. In Chapter 2 I will consider the two manuscript texts on the proof of God's existence 13. Romanticism and the Forms ofRuin, 134. 14. RichardT. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 265, n. 4.

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from conscience and will interpret them in the light of the transcendental method of Bernard Lonergan. My purpose there will be to show the specific relation between conscience and consciousness and how both Coleridge and Newman were trying to lead readers to enter into a process of self-appropriation in which they would discover what it truly is to be a fully human being-a person-to be a subject simultaneously aware of the self and of others as selves-subjects and not objects. Both Newman and Coleridge, in spite of the latter's life-long absorption with metaphysics, based their philosophical and theological systems on phenomena accessible to everyone-the conscious self, at once knowing and loving, which through the process of knowing and loving achieves selftranscendence and can (that is, has the inchoate potency to) know and love a totally transcendent Other, whom some call God. In Chapter 3 I will focus on this self-appropriation and self-transcendence as it appears in Biographia Literaria and Apologia pro Vita sua, which are genetically if not historically prior to their other writings because the self is the starting point of the transcendental method under consideration in this study. In considering On the Constitution if the Church and State and An Essay on the Development if Christian Doctrine, Chapter 4 will look at selftranscendence as it relates to individuals living in both secular and sacred society, State and Church. Chapter 5 will consider how the selftranscendence, latent in the process of self-appropriation, can, aided by faith, lead to belief, as seen in two "self-help" books: Aids to Reflection in the Formation ifa Manly Character and An Essay in Aid if a Grammar ifAssent. The Postscript will try to present a postmodern assessment of the viability of the approach to belief developed by these two nineteenthcentury writers. A final point. This study is aimed at providing a fresh reading of major texts, three by Coleridge and three by Newman. It is not intended as a general study of the two that tries to synthesize the ideas of each and then compare them. It rather focuses on a foundational insight and then watches that insight work itself out in the rhetorical strategies of the texts under consideration. This may result in occasional apparent inconsistencies resulting largely from one of the writers saying something in one context and then seeming to say something different in another context. Some of these differences I will deal with in footnotes. Others I will leave to the more capacious understanding of those familiar with one or both of my subjects.

1

The Age, the Issues, the Men Wandering between two worlds, one dead The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. Their faith, my tears, the world deride! come to shed them at their side. The words God, Immortality, Duty ... she pronounced with terrible earnestness,how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. This condition of the two great departments ofknowledge,the outward, cultivated exclusively on mechanical principles; the inward, finally abandoned, because cultivated on such principles, it is found to yield no result,-sufficiently indicates the intellectual bias of our time, its all pervading disposition toward that line of inquiry. 1

I How can one best describe the age? Hard? Dickens called his 1859 novel

Hard Times for These Times, dedicating it to Thomas Carlyle, who a generation before had lamented that "this is not a religious age."2 Hard Times is, in fact, a moral fable that reduces to satiric caricature certain negative

1. Matthew Arnold, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," 85-89, in Poetical Works, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1969); Frederick Myers's recollection of a conversation with George Eliot, in Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 464; and Thomas Carlyle, "Signs of the Times," in Carlyle's Complete Works, the Sterling Edition, 20 vols. (Boston: Estes and Lauriat Publishers, 1885), vol. 13, part 1, 471. 2. "Signs of the Times," Complete Works, vo!. 13, part 1, 478.

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aspects of what the nineteenth century inherited from the Enlightenment and the progressive rationalism of the two previous centuries. Without denying or impugning any of the advances in society, social reform, or scholarship brought about by critical reason, Newman preached in 1839 that the previous century was "a time when love was cold."3 Nineteenth-century England was indeed becoming a world dominated by hard, cold facts. To listen to Thomas Gradgrind's opening exhortation to Mr. McChoakumchild is to hear an indictment of all that is cold, mechanistic, rationalistic, and utilitarian in the society of that day: Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts, sir! 4 These "reasoning animals," taught to hold suspect the entire aesthetic and affective dimension of human experience, would make their moral decisions based on hard, cold facts, on pure reason unadulterated by feeling and emotion. By clumsily suggesting to his daughter, Louisa, a specious algebraic equation rather than love as a motive for marrying Josiah Bounderby, Thomas Gradgrind maneuvers her into a tragically mismatched marriage. Later he is forced to watch the marriage collapse and then witness his son, Tom Jr., fall victim to the very principle of enlightened self-interest that his system dunned into these "reasoning animals." Tom, always mindful of"number one," shamelessly tricks the laborer Stephen Blackpool into taking the blame for his own crime. When Gradgrind confronts Tom's captor, Bitzer, another perfect product of his educational system, he asks whether his heart is accessible "to any compassionate influence." Bitzer replies that "it is accessible to reason, sir.... and to nothing else." Gradgrind continues to plead: "If this is solely a question of self-interest with you"; but Bitzer, the disciple, in a moment of profound irony, interrupts to lecture the master: "But I am sure that you know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to is a person's self-interest. It's your only hold. 3. John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.,1896), 197. Cited hereafter as US. 4. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1961), 11.

THE AGE, THE ISSUES, THE MEN

13

We are so constituted. I was brought up in that catechism when I was very young, sir, as you are aware." 5 This confrontation is not unlike that between Victor Frankenstein and his monstrous creation in the bleak, frozen Alps where the creature admonishes the creator for his failure to endow him with sufficient feelings of gratitude and love, virtues the creator himself ironically lacks. The three divisions of Hard Times, sowing, reaping, and garnering, echo several biblical parables about farming. "The One Thing Needful" of Book I, Chapter I, is answered at the end of Book III, Chapter I, by ''Another Thing Needful." In the Gospels, of course, it is faith. In Hard Times it is not supernatural faith but some complex reality that includes love, feeling, and imagination-something more than logic or pure reasoning. Concretely in the novel it is the world of wonder and fancy symbolized by Mr. Sleary's circus. By the end of the novel Thomas Gradgrind Sr. might indeed have agreed with Newman that "after all, man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal." 6 If this is true, then perhaps Hard Times really is indicative of something very wrong with the Enlightenment vision of human nature-"Man the Machine," as La Mettrie described it, a being in which love, feeling, and imagination are vastly inferior, indeed, are liabilities, to Reason, the quasi-deity enshrined in an elaborate fleshly mechanism. Dickens's moral fable highlights the pervasive dilemma of the period from the 1790s through the 1850s on which I want to focus, the impact a number of specific ideas were having on people's understanding of themselves as moral beings. Much has been written by historians about the general religious situation of the period, but my exclusive interest here is the condition of personal religious experience; and it is for this reason that I begin with fiction and will return to it afterward, when I take an overview of the situation. The novelist's imaginative grasp of human experience captures more fully how people were feeling than does the historian's social analysis. During the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, the full force of the Enlightenment project began to have its effect on people's religious lives and reached ultimately to all levels of social life. No part of private or public life was more deeply 5. Hard Times, 281-82. 6. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid rfa Grammar rfAssent (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870), 94. Cited hereafter as GA.

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touched than that of individual and institutional religious life-private practice and public worship. "In fact," writes G. Kitson Clark, "it might not be too extravagant to say of the nineteenth century that probably in no other century, except the seventeenth and perhaps the twelfth, did the claims of religion occupy so large a part of the nation's life, or did men speaking in the name of religion contrive to exercise so much power."7 One striking difference between the nineteenth and previous centuries was that internecine religious conflicts paled in the presence of an external enemy who battled religion not by direct attack but by ignoring or scorning it. Rudolph Otto's 1926 preface to Friedrich Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers describes the intellectual atmosphere of Germany in 1799 in language that would apply with little change to nineteenth-century England: "A mighty pulsing current of the powers, talents, and strivings of the human spirit surged forward. Only one human interest seemed laggard amid this universal stir and excitement and it was precisely the interest which for so long had been the first, indeed almost the only one: religion. Among the bearers and representatives of the intellectual life of the nation, among the cultured, the status of religion was very low. It seemed superannuated, something whose hour of doom had struck, forcing it to make way for newer and more energetic powers." 8 In an 1858 lecture, "A Form of Infidelity of the Day," Newman describes a particularly English version of these cultured despisers of religion: "Such is the tactic which a new school of philosophers adopt against Christian Theology. They have this characteristic, compared with former schools of infidelity, viz. the union of intense hatred with a large toleration ofTheology. They are professedly civil to it, and run a race with it. They rely, not on any logical disproof of it, but on three considerations; first, on the effects of studies of whatever kind to indispose the mind toward other studies; next, on the special effect of modern sciences on the imagination, prejudicial to revealed truth; and lastly, on the absorbing interest attached to those sciences from their marvellous results." 9 While 7. G. Kitson Clark, The Making r:fVicturian England (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 20. 8. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), vii-viii. 9. John Henry Newman, The Idea r:fa University (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), 403. Cited hereafter as Idea. Charles Darwin confessed that his long exposure to scientific studies rendered his mind insensitive to all matters of religion. See Charles Darwin, Autobiography ofCharles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 85-96.

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Newman's energies were largely turned inward toward reform and revitalization, first in the Church of England and then later in the Roman Catholic Church, it is clear that he was also keenly aware of the larger problems religion faced as a result of the new learning baptized by Bacon and confirmed by the philosophes. For those who still felt, with varying degrees of orthodoxy, a strong sense of the need for religion in their lives, the age was full of ache and anxiety. In 1852, the speaker in Matthew Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," who might well have been a contemporary of Bitzer and Tom GradgrindJr., stood before the ruins of that ancient center of faith and described himself forlornly "Wandering between two worlds, one dead I The other powerless to be born." In a more parochial vein, his father Thomas Arnold had lamented, "When I think of the Church, I could sit down and pine and die." 10 Matthew Arnold, older than when he described the visit to the ravaged monastery, pronounced: "Two things about the Christian religion must be clear to any one with eyes in his head. One is, men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is." 11 From all quarters came endless repetitions of the dilemma: people apparently needed or wanted what the Judaeo-Christian tradition had long provided but seemed no longer able to provide it. The Christian churches rolled into the nineteenth century armed either with such outmoded weapons as medieval scholasticism or eighteenthcentury natural (rational) theologies. The latter were produced not by unbelievers but by dedicated divines and intellectuals trying to keep Christianity attuned to the times and respectable, if not acceptable, to the rationalists of the day. Neither proved adequate since neither came to grips with the intellectual, scientific, and social revolutions that were under way. Culturally, secularization was a fact that was beyond reversal if not dispute. 12 Higher criticism was dramatically changing traditional understanding of the sacred writings of Christianity. 13 The maturing physical and nascent life and behavioral sciences were slowly fashioning 10. Qyoted in Charles Kingsley, Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories ofHis Life, ed. Fanny Kingsley (New York:]. F. Taylor, 1900), I, 104. 11. Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1883), 35. 12. See Owen Chadwick, The Secularization ofthe European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 13. See Stephen Neil, The Interpretation ofthe New Testament: 1861-1891 (New York: Oxford Univesity Press, 1966).

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a new concept of what it was to be human. 14 The widening horizons of cosmic geography and history were gradually imposing on people the humbling reality of the relativity of human experience and knowledge as they were increasingly forced to see themselves as just one of many successively and currently different cultures set against a backdrop of millions of years. The number of available absolutes, formerly so abundant, was shrinking with alarming rapidity. At the deepest level, the ultimate Mystery-the Mysterium Tremendens-which is the ground of all religion, seemed to be retreating further behind a cloud of unknowing. Just as persons were feeling the power of possessing an "autonomous reason," they became painfully aware of being alone in the universe, cut off from traditional community resources and unable to find, in the very reason they revered, a fixed point of reference for their moral lives. Charles Kingsley's Yeast provides a poignant description of the seeming irrelevance of religion even to a pious insider. The hero Lancelot Smith visits St. Paul's Cathedral one day while "the afternoon service was proceeding. The organ droned sadly in its iron cage to a few musical amateurs. Some nursery maids and foreign sailors stared about within the spiked felon's dock which shut off the body of the cathedral, and tried in vain to hear what was going on inside the choir. As a wise author-a Protestant-has lately said, 'the kernel is too small for the shell.' The place breathed imbecility, and sleepy life-in-death, while the whole nineteenth century went roaring on its way outside. And as Lancelot thought, though only as a dilettante, of old St. Paul's, the morning star and focal beacon of England through the centuries and dynasties, from old Augustine to Mellitus, up to St. Paul's Cross sermons whose thunder shook thrones, and to noble Wren's masterpiece of art, he asked, 'Whither all this?' Coleridge's dictum, that a cathedral is a petrified religion, may be taken to bear more meanings than one. When will life return to this cathedral system?" 15 In 1841, a fellow Anglican was similarly struck by a sense of"the nineteenth century roaring on its way outside." In a letter published on the occasion of his Tract 90, Newman wrote that "the age is moving towards something and most unhappily the one religious communion among us, which has of late years been practically in possession of this something, is the Church of Rome. She alone, amid all 14. See Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner (New York: Doubleday [Anchor Books], 1958). 15. Charles Kingsley, Yeast (London: Parker, 1851), 313-14.

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the errors and evils of her practical system, has given free scope to the feelings of awe, mystery, tenderness, reverence, devotedness, and other feelings which may be especially called Catholic. The question then is, whether we shall give them up to the Roman Church or claim them for ourselves."16 The warm glow of faith was being frozen out by the chill light of reason. Newman, as we have seen, spoke of the eighteenth century as "a time when love was cold." Coleridge had felt the draft too, for in 1802 he wrote: "Socinianism, moonlight; Methodism, a stove; 0 for some sun to unite heat and light!" 17 Such an attitude did not go unnoticed by other intellectuals. "We are not," Walter Bagehot once exclaimed, "indeed, of those, most disciples of Carlyle and Newman, who speak with untempered contempt of the eighteenth century." 18 Reason, which was not of course the villain of the piece, had indeed achieved in many areas what people of faith had failed to do. The rights of man had led to a wave of religious toleration and a slow but gradual movement toward the democratization of English society. This and the striking growth of various branches of learning promoted the process of secularization mentioned above, a process of moving many aspects of life out from under the control of religion. While this secularization should not be confused with secularism, a limiting of one's interest and reach to this world alone, it was no doubt hurried on by a growing loss of interest in a transcendent world. But in itself it was nothing more than a pushing back of the sacred and its ministers into the confines of the sanctuary. In spite of the deleterious effect this would indirectly have on organized religion until properly understood and accepted, secularization was no more than a long-overdue process of rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. It was a success story occurring across the ocean and which Alexis de Tocqueville recorded in DemocracyinAmericabetween 1835 and 1840. 19

16. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita sua, ed. Martin]. Svaglic (London: Oxford University Press, 196 7), 154. This is referred to hereafter as Apo. 17. Samuel Coleridge, Anima Poetae, quoted in Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., ed. John Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), I, 252, n. 31. 18. Walter Bagehot, The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, 20 vols., ed. Norman St. John Stevas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), I, 219. 19. See Owen Chadwick's Secularization, as well as Richard]. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman, eds., Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Beliif(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), where several of the writers offer corrective evaluations of Chadwick's idea of secularization.

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If an appropriate separation of the secular and the sacred was ultimately healthy, another separation followed with less happy results for the average person. One aspect of the Enlightenment directly deleterious to religion was a mistaken and often militant belief that by throwing off the misguided and harmful harnessing of reason by faith, that religion no longer had a place in public life or public affairs. An ethics based exclusively on autonomous or instrumental reason took over the marketplace, while religion was driven indoors to the pious atmosphere of the hearth. 20 The hearth was, of course, a place of warmth, security, tender feeling. In canonizing critical reasoning, the Enlightenment dismissed not only the irrational but also the nonrational aspects of human experience. In doing so it unreasonably, and therefore paradoxically, denied the legitimate claims and role of faith in human life. Such a stress on the exclusive power and clarity of reason relegated faith, affectivity, and imagination to the realms of poetry, religion, and the domestic hearth-all of equal irrelevance to the likes of the fictitious Thomas Gradgrind and such real-life utilitarians as Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. 21 The utilitarian education John Stuart Mill received from his father was, of course, roundly criticized in his autobiographical telling of "a crisis in my mental history." 22

II I have sketched out these general and somewhat obvious effects of rationalism on religion only to provide the context in which to consider a more specific problem. While most religious people were not caught up in theological questions about such central Christian doctrines as Original Sin, the Incarnation, and the Trinity, they were concerned about finding and holding on to an anchor those truths traditionally provided for their moral life and decision making. Once religion provided such an anchor: God

20. This trend toward domesticity can be put in its larger context by reading Peter Gay's The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, val. 1, Education ofthe Senses (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), and vol. 2, The Tender Passion (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 21. See Newman's Idea, 33-35, where he discusses this phenomenon in the context of arguing the legitimate place of theology among university faculties and subjects. 22. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed.Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969), 80-110.

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calls all human beings in their freedom and immortality to do good and avoid evil, with the help of God's grace, thereby assuring their eternal salvation. Iflove does not sufficiently motivate them, the fear of hell should. But as the fear of hell became less operative, the need grew for more positive, personalized reasons for following the dictates of conscience. 23 If, as George Eliot opined in her later years, the idea of God is "inconceivable" and the idea of immortality is "incredible," where is one to anchor duty that is "peremptory and absolute"? Where, then, is the cogency of Kant's famous philosophical assertion, that "belief in a God and in another world is so interwoven with my moral sentiment that as there is little danger in my losing the latter, there is equally little cause for fear that the former can ever be taken from me"? 24 Furthermore, freedom is a prerequisite for responsible moral behavior. We cannot rationally or logically hold human beings responsible for their actions if we do not conceive of them as having radical personal freedom, that is, freedom that is at the core of their humanity itsel£ This is a point Coleridge will argue strongly in his Aids to Reflection. Another aspect of rationalism was the growth of an increasingly deterministic philosophy and psychology-a trend that would come to dramatic fulfillment in Freud's reductive theory of human behavior that sees freedom and religion as illusions, or even more radically in what reductive cognitive philosophers like Daniel Dennet have recently proposed, that human consciousness is merely a "virtual reality," a software created by our biological hard drive. 25 Thus it is easy to understand George Eliot's "terrible earnestness" in realizing the peremptory and absolute demands of duty in the absence of God and a future life, the twofold anchor of traditional Christian morality. Eliot and her contemporaries, in rejecting that anchor, had two choices, a morality based on either a purely subjective affectivity or a purely objective rationality. If the former, however, could

23. See Geoffrey Rowell, Hell and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 24. Immanuel Kant, The Critique ifPure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), 650. 25. See Sigmund Freud, The Future ofIllusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott, rev. and ed.James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964). For a contemporary exposition of consciousness as virtual reality see Daniel C. Dennet, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). Dennett's thesis, a most fascinating analysis of consciousness based on the analogy of computer software, has been strongly .attacked even by John Searle and other pragmatists as excessively reductionist.

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be a kind of moral solipsism, the latter could be a cold, sterile version of virtue as its own reward. Hard Times, as we have seen, is a moral fable about a world, pushed to the point of caricature one must admit, based on a purely rational morality, devoid of any form of human affectivity and certainly devoid of supernatural faith. Two other novels, both of whose protagonists might also have been, like Matthew Arnold, contemporaries of Bitzer and Tom Gradgrind Jr., show us with a greater degree of psychological and social realism the struggle in young men and women to find a basis for moral decision making. In Great Expectations and The Mill on the Floss we find, in fact, described at the psychological level, the discovery of a moral code and a process of decision making that Coleridge and Newman developed into an epistemology that would attempt to reunite religion and morality, faith and reason, God and the human spirit. In Hard Times Dickens distanced himself from his characters, who were two-dimensional parabolic types. In Great Expectations, however, he explored the burgeoning moral life of young Philip Pirrip from within. "Raised by hand," the young, orphaned Pip is exposed to the worst embodiment of the biblical maxim "Spare the rod and spoil the child." His elders constantly remind him that children are "naterally wicious," and "the tickler" is always at hand to beat into him the difference between right and wrong. His stealing food for the runaway convict elicits from Pip no real or specific pangs of conscience, only an understandable fear of the punishment that awaits him upon discovery. Pip's moral life at this point is shaped totally by an external, objective code and the fear of punishment, something that experience has shown to be ineffective in the long run, inside or outside of fiction. Pip's real growth in moral awareness and moral rectitude begins to develop around the person ofJoe Gargery, his brother-in-law and his father-figure. Throughout the novel a battle is waged for Pip's soul between Joe the adoptive father and Mrs. Havisham the presumptive godmother. Pip's first real pangs of conscience arise over the realization that he has betrayed Joe in lying to family and friends about the elaborate carriage and large dogs fed on chunks of expensive veal at Satis House. It is his first moment of what I shall in Chapter 2 call moral self-awareness and self-transcendence that allows him to place the interests of others above his own. Later, as the novel reaches its climax, Pip learns that, all along, his benefactor has been the convict Abel Magwitch and that he has chosen the heartless Estella over faithful and loving Joe; and realizing this, he experiences full selfawareness and moral conversion. He achieves moral maturity in realizing

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that his central flaw lay in his ingratitude toward Joe. He is able to transcend his own selfish and ultimately self-destructive desires and put others before himsel£ Now Pip's moral values are truly internalized in his recognition of himself as a "moral being," a person conscious of his essential orientation to others and his responsibility to and for them. He is no longer motivated by fear of punishment, or by some vague sense of obligation to an abstract moral code. He now truly knows himself in being conscious of the essential interrelatedness and interdependence of human beings. The initial grasp of his individuality-the childish realization in the graveyard "that this shivering little creature is Pip"26-has ripened into an awareness that Philip Pirrip is a moral being, a person whose individuality is shaped and enriched by his encounter, through love, with other individual selves. One's sense of duty, obligation, and responsibility arises from no merely abstract law, whether bred in the reason or revealed from above, but from loving relationships with others. In Great Expectations that loving relationship, for dramatic purposes, is focused on one person, Joe Gargery. In The Mill on the Floss George Eliot broadens this relationship to include a community of others. In her childhood the great moral presence in Maggie Tulliver's life is her father and all that he represents: affection, community, stability, and the past. After his death Maggie transfers this moral allegiance to her brother Tom whose own moral code, inculcated by his father, is objective, rigid, and ultimately lacking in affectivity. Tom lives by a kind of blind, unthinking adherence to certain moral absolutes, one of which is unquestioning loyalty to the family. When Maggie searches for a moral anchor after the family's decline in fortunes, she first tries the rigorous self-denial ofThomas aKempis's Imitation of Christ, which in fact provides only a formalization, if not a rationalization, of her almost masochistic willingness to subordinate herself to the wishes, first of her father, and then ofTom. Standing on the brink of adulthood, Maggie is faced with a seemingly insoluble dilemma. She is offered two choices for married love: If she marries Philip Wakem, she will hurt Tom and the memory ofher father. If she marries Stephen Guest, she will hurt Lucy, her cousin and Stephen's fiancee, and her whole family. Given the social restrictions of the age, Maggie, like Antigone, is faced with a no-win situation, one intimated 26. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1963), 10.

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early in the novel in her story about the woman accused of being a witch, who if she survives the test of immersion in water would forthwith be burned at the stake because her survival proves her a witch. Maggie's drowning prevents her from making a final decision, but it is clear in what direction Eliot's narrator is moving. Maggie must choose the human community, concretized and localized in her provincial society, otherwise she would have nothing else on which to base her moral decision. 27 If God does not exist, if we are not immortal, then on what are we to base the "peremptory and absolute" demands of duty? A further, and here not altogether unrelated, question is whether we even have the freedom to make responsible moral choices given the deterministic philosophy implicit in the texture of the narrative. Revealed religion is thus not accessible as a motive and Dr. Kenn's words to Maggie, after her overnight river trip with Stephen, simply makes explicit the failure of Christianity to provide the kind of community and fellowship where "every parish should be a family knit together" that would provide the moral bonds to sustain the individua1. 28 Throughout the novel it is clear that there are only two available moral anchors: the past with its memories and the present, living community of shared humanity. Carol Gilligan, in her study of women's moral development, uses Maggie T ulliver as an example of the kind of moral decision making peculiar, if not exclusive to women. She finds women's moral decisions more relational-more conscious of the "other"-and focused more on the harm one's actions might do to others in contrast to an exaggerated autonomy in men's moral decisions based on a rigid and objective sense of right and wrong. Using the very metaphors that dominate The Mill on the Floss, Gilligan asserts that "illuminating life as a web rather than a succession of relationships, women portray autonomy rather than attachment as the illusory and dangerous quest. In this way, women's development points toward a different history of human attachment, stressing continuity and change in configuration, rather than replacement and separation, elucidating a different response to loss, and changing the metaphor 27. Maggie's dread of separation from her brother Tom echoes manifestations elsewhere in fiction of the Victorian anxiety over the separation of head and heart. In David Copperfield, David considers Agnes Wickfield as a sister, even calling her that as he contemplates proposing to her. In jude the Obscure, Jude and Sue Bridehead are consistently described by themselves and other characters as two parts of a divided whole. 28. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1963), 518.

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of growth."29 While critics have faulted Gilligan for distinguishing these two moral approaches so rigorously along gender lines, they agree that she has identified two basically different ways of facing moral decisions: a formal and abstract way and a richly contextual way involving the concrete presence of the other or others. What Eliot clearly wanted was a naturalistic humanism, a religion ofhumanity that would allow individuals to achieve a kind of self-transcendence that would ground one's sense of duty. 30 Such a religion would provide common bonds in the present and with the past, common bonds across the face of the earth. Put negatively, the test of moral character is the willingness or unwillingness to hurt others or cause pain. Eliot was absorbed by this pursuit for most of her life. 31 Thus Pip and Maggie's moral choices are based on loving relationships to others and stand in sharp contrast to the moral choices of young Tom Gradgrind and Bitzer, which are based on the principle of enlightened self-interest. 32 However otherwise admirable, the Utilitarian principle of providing the greatest possible good for the greatest number of people is a qualification of rather than an emanation from its central doctrine of the radical autonomy of the individual. This natural attraction to and concern for others is, as we shall see in Chapter 2, the starting point for Coleridge and Newman in their respective attempts to bring together religion and morality, God and the individual human being, through an examination of human conscience and consciousness. My reason for using these three novels to describe the moral dilemma caused by the profound shock to religious and moral life is that even letters and journals often do not allow us to judge adequately what in fact went on in the minds and hearts of individual men and women in the past; but if literature is a reliable index of the sensibility of an age, we can 29. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women 5 Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 48. 30. I realize this is pressing the term "transcendence," which normally connotes more than "intersubjectivity," but it is used increasingly in common parlance as the basis of a kind of humanistic altruism. 31. See Peter C. Hodgson, The Mystery Beneath the Real· Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000). Hodgson's thorough and informed study of Eliot's religious concern is moving. I remain unconvinced, however, by his thesis that she aspired to something more than a "religion of humanity." 32. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals ofThought: The Intelligence ofEmotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). I find remarkable confirmation of my readings of the novels in Nussbaum's use ofliterature, music, and art to develop her own thesis on the cognitive nature of emotions and their importance in developing a moral code.

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get some handle on the moral and religious sensibility of the period under consideration. 33 The following observation by Newman suggests that there were real-life models for people like Thomas Gradgrind. "Public men," Newman says, "care very little for books; the finest sentiments, the most luminous philosophy, the deepest theology inspiration itself, moves them but little; they look at facts, and care only for facts." 34 These novels and other novels and poems give substance to the angst people like Matthew Arnold and George Eliot felt in a world where moral and religious values were losing their traditional foundations and little or nothing was offered in their place. While Coleridge and Newman were profoundly theocentric in their metaphysical grounding of all reality in God, they saw the need for a new psychological and epistemological way of leading people to recognize that ground and its implication for the self and its relationship with other selves.

III Before turning, however, to Newman's and Coleridge's own efforts to explore anew those traditional foundations, I would like to present a brief comparison of the two men and deal with the question of Coleridge's influence on Newman. 35 I will mention here what I will take up in greater detail in Chapter 3: the search for a central insight each had into his own life experience and how that experience eventually gave rise to the central doctrine of conscience as a way of finding God. I do this relying on Erik Erikson's study of the autobiographical origins of his central insight into "identity" as it arose out of his own life experience. 36 33. The general thrust of most of the essays in Victorian Faith in Crisis, for example, is that psychosocial causes played a large if not dominant role in religious conversions during the nineteenth century. Fiction, however, seems to suggest that a deep personal search for a moral anchor was more widespread. 34. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development ofChristian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), 231. This is referred to hereafter as Dev. 35. John Coulson was the first writer to deal at any length with Coleridge's influence on Newman in a brief one-page appendix titled "How Much of Coleridge Had Newman Read?" Newman and the Common Tradition.· A Study in the Language of Church and Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 254-55. My treatment here is more extensive and analytical. 36. Eric Erikson, "Autobiographical Notes on the Identity Crisis," Daedalus 99 (1970):730-59. Erikson's own sense of"identity'' grew out of his experience of being successively "adopted" by a stepfather and by Anna and Sigmund Freud. Analysis of and generalization on that experience gave rise to his psychological theory of identity.

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At first glance, Coleridge and Newman may seem to have had little in common. Beneath the surface, however, I believe there were strong similarities, the foremost of which was an unusually heightened sense of self-awareness and a rare capacity for writing about the landscape of the inner life in both its affective and cognitive aspects. In The Prelude Wordsworth addressed Coleridge as "one I More deeply read in thy own thoughts" than he was.J7 Newman's ability to make his inner life utterly transparent is poignantly exemplified by George Eliot's candid and plaintive admission that "the Apology now mainly affects me as the revelation of a life-how different from one's own, yet with how close a fellowship in needs and burthens-I mean spiritual needs and burthens."38 Coleridge died a year after Newman published his first major work, The Arians ofthe Fourth Century (1833), but by the middle of the nineteenth century critics began to compare the two. In the Christian Observer for 1850 an anonymous reviewer of Corifessions ofan Inquiring Spirit violently attacked Coleridge's view of inspiration, saying that, along with Parker and Newman, he was one of"Satan's agents." In 1856,James Martineau published a major review essay of the writings of Coleridge, Carlyle, and Newman, pointing out the powerful personal influence each wielded, respectively, in his philosophical, literary, and religious responses to the age. From Martineau's time there has been a small but steady stream of scholarship comparing Coleridge and Newman. 39 Both men underwent profound religious conversions as a result of grave illness. Coleridge fell seriously ill in 1805 during his stay in Malta when he was thirty-three. This illness marked a turning point in his life; for his acceptance of the Trinity, previously held only on philosophical grounds, now helped him resolve his doubts about incarnation and redemption and satisfy his great personal need for redemption. 40 By sheer coincidence Newman's illness occurred in Sicily when he was thirty-two. In the Apologia he

37. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799,1805,1850, ed.Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), II, 210-11 (1850). 38. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-56), IV, 158-59. 39. For these and other examples of conservative and progressive reactions to Coleridge see Philip C. Rule, S.J., "Coleridge's Reputation as a Religious Thinker: 1816-1972," Harvard Theological Review 67 (1974):289-320. 40. See J. Robert Barth, S.J., Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 9-10.

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reflects that, at the time, "I began to think I had a mission" (Apo, 43). Upon recovering he returned to England and the beginning of the Tractarian Movement. In 1813, estranged from Wordsworth and struggling with opium addiction, Coleridge again found his religious consciousness deepened. He said, "a new world opened to me, in the infinity of my Own spirit!"41 There were of course striking differences in their personal lives. Coleridge, a married layman with a family, had journeyed from a flirtation with Unitarianism back to active membership in the Church of England, even resuming, late in life, the practice of receiving the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. 42 Theologically he remained staunchly Protestant and a great admirer of Luther's writings. Newman was a celibate Anglican priest who moved, over a long period, from Low Church Evangelicalism through the High Church party into the Roman Catholic Church. While both men were intimately familiar with the sixteenth-century and seventeenthcentury Anglican divines, Newman fell increasingly under the influence of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the early church. Newman and Coleridge both admired the earlier English theologians precisely because they represented a "unification of sensibility" that had been fragmented by rationalist thinking. The results of that fragmentation were a separation of thought and thing, knowing and feeling, head and heart, subject and object, to name just a few. We will see Coleridge and Newman grappling with some of these issues in the later chapters of this book. 43 Intellectually there were pronounced temperamental differences. Coleridge, a self-styled "library cormorant," read widely and voraciously. His breadth and depth of reading have few if any parallels in the annals of English literature and thought. 44 Newman's early discipline in

41. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols., ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-71), III, 463-64. This will be referred to hereafter as CL. 42. This long intellectual odyssey has been recently explored by Ronald C. Wendling in Coleridge's Progress to Christianity: Experience andAuthority in Religious Faith (Lewisburg/ London: Bucknell University Press/Associated University Presses, 1995). 43. I have dealt at length with these issues and the influence of the early divines in my essay "Newman and the English Theologians," Faith and Reason 15 (1989):65-90. 44. H.]. Jackson suggests that Coleridge's reputation as a genius or polymath is deserved but less singular than modern readers might assume, but she concedes that "it would, however, require a genius or polymath to reproduce his kind of knowledge today." Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, vol. 7 (5 vols. to date) of The Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), III, xv. Cited hereafter as CM.

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the classics and mathematics, and the subsequent influence of the Oriel Noetic ideal of multum non multa as the goal of intellectual training, sharpened the focus of his reading. 45 While aware of the intellectual and scientific developments of the age, he did not read German and thus cut himself off from the direct and immediate influence of that important body of thought, both philosophical and theological. 46 Newman's interests were sharply focused on the history of early Christianity, the nature of religious experience, and education.47 Coleridge's interests ranged across the spectrum of human experience chronologically and geographically, ever seeking out ore for the vast synthesizing furnace of his mind and imagination. This difference is due in part to Coleridge's predominantly philosophical bent and to Newman's almost antiphilosophical temperament. Newman was a historian and a rhetorician who leaned toward a slow meticulous gathering of data, unconcerned about, if indeed not suspicious of, the value of metaphysics. In 1836, Newman told R. H. Froude that "you and Keble are the philosophers and I the rhetorician" (LD, V, 225) Thomas Acland spoke of Newman's "severely practical philosophy" (LD, IV, 256). 48 Critics after Rene Wellek have looked more favorably on Coleridge's original contributions to philosophy in nineteenth-century England. And it was, of course, his "higher philosophy'' that Newman singled out for praise even while holding suspect his metaphysical speculations about central Christian dogmas. Not only did Newman not think of himself as a philosopher, he

45. A phrase borrowed from Pliny the Younger, who in a letter to a young man seeking advice on a course of study advised: "Remember to make a careful selection from representative authors in each subject, for the saying is that a man should be deeply, not widely, read." Epistle VII, 9, 15. Pliny Letters and Panegyrics, 2 vols., trans. Betty Radice (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1972), I, 507. Emphasis added. Pliny's plan of studies provides a remarkable insight into the kind of training in classical languages and composition Newman and his contemporaries received at Oxford. 46. See Marvin R. O'Connell, The Oxford Conspirators: A History ifthe Oxford Movment (London: Macmillan, 1968), 227. 47. In 1859, he wrote in his journal: "Now from first to last, education, in this large sense of the word, has been my line, and, over and above the disappointment it has caused as putting conversions comparatively in the background, and the offense it has given by insisting that there was room for improvement among Catholics." John Henry Newman, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Henry Tristram (London: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 258. This is referred to hereafter as A W. 48. Late in life Newman said "My turn of mind has never led me toward metaphysics; rather it has been logical, ethical, and practical." Stray Essays on Controversial Points (Privately published, 1890), 94.

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apparently did not think of himself even as a professional theologian. In a copy of the first edition of the Essay on Development Newman wrote: "John Henry Newman 1846. This is a philosophical work of a writer who was not a Catholic, and did not pretend to be a theologian, addressed to those who were not Catholics."49 Newman was indeed a gifted rhetorician, and if there is any discipline in which he felt competent, it was in the Greek and Latin classics, secular and sacred, and the study of Church history or what is now called historical theology or the historical development of Christian doctrine. Coleridge, with his metaphysical temperament and his enormous intellectual curiosity, was a mind constantly on the move, constantly in search of new intellectual terrains. Although Newman's journey to Rome was long and difficult, he said retrospectively, from the vantage point of twenty years: "From the time I became a Catholic, of course, I have no further history of my religious opinion to narrate. In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but I have had no variations to record, and have had no anxiety whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment. I have never had one doubt" (Apo, 214). Coleridge at the same age had just published his Biographia Literaria, his own intellectual and religious odyssey up to that point, the first fruit of his self-confinement at the Gilmans in an effort to rebuild his fragmented and apparently failed literary life. In many ways Newman was a far more practical and active man than Coleridge. As a young don and priest at Oxford he poured himself into the politics of university life and preached and ministered to his parishioners at St. Mary's and the little village church ofLittlemore that was part of the parish. He was a popular tutor who also found time for his intellectual pursuits, the first fruits of which was The Arians of the Fourth Century, a book which 150 years later remains a major study of early Church doctrinal development. When the Tractarian Movement began, he poured a remarkable amount of time into meetings and conversations with colleagues that he meticulously recorded in his diaries. Subsequent to his conversion to Roman Catholicism he established the Birmingham Oratory and then the Catholic University in Dublin. While he had no wife and children, the burden of caring for his mother,

49. This copy is in the library of the Birmingham Oratory.

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keeping a watchful eye on his emotionally troubled brother Charles, and providing direction for his two sisters until their marriages kept him very much involved in the routine matters of family life. He was not, as Thomas McFarland has suggested, cloistered from the hardships and cares of the workaday world. 50 In spite of these differences there is a striking similarity between the two men which is the focus of this essay. Both insisted on the primacy of the moral order and the corollary that morality and religion are inseparable. The challenge of human existence is not just to speculate about the mystery of the universe but freely to respond to it. To grasp the whole of human experience is, ultimately, to confront mystery, not as an evasion of intelligibility and reason but as the necessary horizon that makes possible our experiencing, understanding, judging, and choosing. To speak of the known is implicidy to acknowledge the unknown and the unknowable. What John Stuart Mill observed about the difference between Bentham and Coleridge applies as well to Newman. Newman, like Coleridge, was more interested in the "why" of things than in the "what." Such an intellectual bias led them inevitably to focus on the moral dimension of human experience; and they both had an implicit faith in the normal, healthy operation of the questioning process that structures our cognitive operations. This line and style of questioning led both men to be conscious of the existence and primacy of the will, human freedom, even in the processes of understanding and reasoning, and to see the will as the starting point for explaining the ontological and cognitive orientation of human beings to God. What led them along similar lines of thought? Setting aside for the moment the question of Coleridge's influence on Newman, there are clear signs that the originality of their insights into the role of conscience in knowing God is to be found in their respective analyses of their own personal religious experiences and self-awareness. Both had a strong sense of sel£ By this I do not mean merely that they were introspective or given to soul-searching. Rather each was adept at the very difficult philosophical process of self-appropriation, a process whereby one becomes reflexively or explicitly aware of oneself in the act of knowing. Another striking parallel seems to account for the early beginning of this process. An almost precocious imaginative grasp of the single self existing in the

50. McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms ofRuin, 363.

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vastness of the universe, if their recollections can be relied on, may well have grounded in them, at a very early age, a strong preconceptual religious sensibility. · Early childhood experiences seemed to have produced in both of them a heightened sense of the unity of all things in God. In one of several autobiographical letters to Thomas Poole, Coleridge writes that from his "early reading ofFaeryTales, & Genii, &c &c-my mind has been habituated to the Vas~& I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belie£ I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sigh~even at that age. Should children be permitted to read Romances & Relations of Giants & Magicians & Genii?-1 know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative-I know of no other way of giving the mind a love of'the Great' & 'the Whole' "(CL, I, 354). Speaking ofhis childhood reading of the Arabian Tales and other such stories, Newman says, "my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers and talismans" (Apo, 15-16). He added that those "childish imaginations" were instrumental in "isolating me from the objects which surrounded me, in confirming me in my mistrust of the reality of material phenomena, and making me rest in the thought of two and only two supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my creator" (Apo, 18). Although Newman does not speak explicitly of"the Vast" and "the Whole," these concepts seem implied in his twofold grasp of self and creator. 51 For as Coleridge's consciousness never led him to "regard my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief," so Newman confirmed himself in his "mistrust of the reality of phenomena." This might sound as if both Coleridge and Newman belonged to the intuitionist camp; but in fact both men disdained what Coleridge called "mechanistic materialism" and Newman branded as Liberalism, the arid, skeptical rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. They were not Humean intuitionists; but they did espouse direct nondiscursive knowledge, in a Neo-Thomistic sense, as will become clear further on in this chapter.

51. As we will see in Chapter 2, Newman does not trace in psychological detail, as Coleridge does, the early childhood growth in moral self-awareness. In the Apologia he compresses the first fifteen years of his life into three pages and the Proof for God's existence does not expand on his primal insight, which, if it occurred early in childhood would be preconceptual. But in the Proof the awareness of self precedes the awareness of God.

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Their sense of the wholeness of human experience and the universe led both men to attempt a comprehensive synthesis of Christianity, a project interrupted largely by circumstances for Newman and, more often than not, by temperament for Coleridge. In historical retrospect both men can be seen as involved in Christian apologetics, that branch of theology which addresses itself to current philosophical and religious issues. In spite of the inclination each might have had toward synthesis, the call of specific issues claimed their time. For example, Newman's Arians if the Fourth Century, originally conceived as a volume in the projected series on Church history, was published as an independent study because of its "Catholic tendencies." In fact it turned out to be a preliminary study of the process of doctrinal development, an issue that lay at the core of the Tractarian Movement. 52 Even the Essay on Development, a logical expansion of the theory latent in the study of the Arian controversy, was written primarily to answer the personal question of whether Newman should take the final step to Rome. Coleridge's On the Constitution if the Church and State, which contained years of reading and reflections, was written as a specific response to the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act. Even the autobiographical writings ofboth men were more occasioned by pressing motives than prompted by any desire leisurely to explore and explain the sel£ 53 Despite the apparent occasional character of their writings, there was a constant underlying drive toward synthesis. The scholarly world has long been aware of Coleridge's unrealized dream, the Magnum Opus, a sort of"Summa Philosophica etTheologica."Thomas McFarland, editor of the recent edition of the Opus Maximum (a preliminary effort to get the project off the ground), has elsewhere provided a fascinating preview of how the Magnum Opus was in fact the organizing pattern of all his other writings. Long projected but never completed, the work was, McFarland argues, the organizing goal within which all his writings fit as pieces of a whole. 54 Seldom noticed, however, is the fact that Newman also contemplated an Opus Magnum. Left behind in his unpublished papers is a short outline for some "prologomena" he was going to prefix to a translation of the Scriptures he had been commissioned to make. His early biographer Wilfrid Ward says that "this introduction was to be 52. See W. R. Lyall's letter to H.J. Rose in LD, III, 105. 53. This will be discussed in Chapter 3. 54. McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms if Rui~, 342-81.

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a work of Apologetics especially designed to counteract the influence of agnostic propaganda which was being carried on in the name of science."55 Ward says Newman destroyed the unfinished manuscript in 1877, but what remains is tantalizingly tided: "In festo S. Gregorii, 1857, Opus Magnum." This projected work served a purpose in Newman's thought similar to the Magnum Opus in Coleridge's, and his aspirations predate 1857, as is clear from an enthusiastic letter of 1826 to his sister Harriet in which he spells out with Coleridgean bravado a vast synthesis of secular and Christian thought (LD, I, 284-85). Because Ward represents an indirect living contact with Newman himself, his comment on the purpose of the prologomena carries some weight. "Father Neville," he writes, told the present writer that Newman spoke to him of combining in these Prologomena the argument for religion derivable from its history of the Chosen People with the argument urged from the point of view of the individual in the 'Grammar of Assent.' He had already in a famous work (Essay on Development) traced the argument from history in Christian times. He was now to trace it in the story oflsrael. And as the 'Essay on Development' and the 'University Sermons' were, in his opinion, mutually complementary, so this work-the sequence and amplification of both-was to fuse in one the two arguments; to express, what he had always maintained in opposition to disbelievers in revelation and even in natural religion, that the correspondence of religious belief to reality was evidenced in its life and growth in the race as well as the individual. Psychologists tell us that the development in history of the species is epitomised in the growth of the human fetus: a view which presents a certain analogy to Newman's treatment, a religious belief in the race and in the individual alike. The first rough sketch of this work was written with great labor and involved much reading. 56 Granting these pronounced similarities in their approach to issues vital to the Christian community, it only remains to ask what direct or indirect influences Coleridge's writings might have had on Newman before we turn to their respective "proofs" for God's existence which underlie all their writings.

55. Wilfred Ward, The Life offohn Henry Newman, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), I, 423-25. 56. Ward, The Life offohn Henry Newman, I, 425.

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In an 1830 sermon, "The Influence ofNatural and Revealed Religion Respectively," Newman says: While, then, Natural Religion was not without provision for all the deepest and truest religious feelings, yet presenting no tangible history of the Deity, no points of his personal character (if we may so speak without irreverence), it wanted that most efficient incentive to all action, a starting or rallying point,-an objective on which the affections could be placed, and the energies concentrated. Common experience in life shows how the most popular and interesting cause languishes, if its head is removed; and how political power is often invested in individuals, merely for the sake of definiteness of the practical impression which a personal presence produces. How, then, should the beauty of virtue move the heart, while it was an abstraction? "Forma quidem honestatis, si oculis cerneretur, admirabiles amores excitaret sapientiae"; but, till "seen, and heard, and handled," It did but witness against those who disobeyed, while they acknowledged It; and who, seemingly conscious where their need lay, made every effort to embody It in the attributes of individuality, embellishing their "Logos," as they called It, with figurative actions, and worshipping It as the personal development of the Infinite Unknown. 57

In 1843, when this sermon was published in Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, the following footnote was appended to the passage just quoted: "The author was not acquainted, at the time this was written, with Mr. Coleridge's Works, and a remarkable passage in his Biographia Literaria, in which several portions of this sermon are anticipated. It has been pointed out to him since by the kindness of a friend, [Mr. Thomas D. Acland.]-Vide Biog. Lit. vol.l. p.199."58 Newman's reference is to that section of Chapter Ten of the Biographia Literaria in which Coleridge expands on his point that "religion as both the corner-stone and the key-stone of morality, must have a moral origin," and says that "the belief of a god and future state (if a passive acquiescence may be flattered with the name belief) does not always beget a 57. US, 23-24. The Latin quotation is a brief paraphrase of two sentences in Cicero's De Officiis, Book I, Chapter 1: "It is here, Marcus my son, that you discern the very shape and countenance, so to say, of the honourable. In Plato's words, 'If wisdom could be seen with the eyes, it would arouse astonishing feelings of love for it.'" In On Obligations (De Officiis), trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7. The phrase "seen, heard, and handled" clearly echoes I John, 1: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and touched with our hands." 58. US, 23, unnumbered footnote. The square brackets are Newman's.

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good heart; but a good heart so naturally begets belief, that the very few exceptions must be regarded as strange anomalies from strange and unfortunate circumstances."59 Before commenting on this further I would like to present a series of Newman's letters and published texts that center on this point. Newman had been introduced to Coleridge's writings in 1835 by his friend Thomas D. Acland (alluded to in the footnote to the sermon), who wrote him after receiving a copy of the recently published Arians of the Fourth Century. Acland replies in his letter of thanks that when I came to one page of your book I literally jumped from my chair and screamed with delight, I mean the passage in illustration of what you mean by economy. Wilson had given me such an awe {you know I used to be afraid of you) of your severely practical philosophy that I would not have dared to broach before you the result of my Coleridge reveries as I look back on them now; but if I could have mastered the clearness of thought and expression, and summoned courage to sport the "view" before you, it should have been in the words you have used; beginning: "What e.g. is the revelation of general moral laws" to the end of the correcting principle in the page .... I cannot say how rejoiced I felt to discover that this great and comprehensive key to all philosophy had obtained the sanction of a calm mind like yours. (LD, IV, 256) Again, it important to turn immediately to the passage in Arians ofthe Fourth Century to see just what is this "great and comprehensive key to all philosophy." There, discussing the theological concept of"Economy," Newman says: What, for instance, is the revelation of general moral laws, their infringement, their tedious victory, the endurance of the wicked, and the "winking at the times ofignorance," but an "Economia'' of greater truths untold, the best practical communication of them which our minds in their present state will admit? What are the phenomena of the external world, but a divine mode of conveying to the mind the realities of existence, individuality, and the influence of being on being, the best possible, though beguiling the imagination of most men with a harmless but unfounded belief in matter as distinct from the impressions of their senses? This at

59. If Newman used a first edition of the Biographia, the passage cited from vol. 1, 199, corresponds to what is found in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engel and W. Jackson Bate, vol. 7 (2 vols.) of The Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, 202-203. Cited hereafter as BL.

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least is the opinion of some philosophers, and whether the particular theory be right or wrong, it serves as an illustration here of the great truth we are considering. 60 In a diary entry for 29 March 1835, Newman wrote: "During this spring, from Christmas down, Acland lending me some of Coleridge's works, I have for the first time read parts of them; and am surprised how much I thought to be mine, is to be found there. I believe at Froude's in 1831, I carelessly looked into the Idea of Church and State [sic], and had read two or three sentences in Jemima's Aids to Reflection" (LD, V, 53). Just a month before that entry, however, he wrote to Samuel Rickards about the similarity between Alexander Knox and Coleridge, expressing a view that anticipates his 1839 encomium of Coleridge, and other Romantic writers: I suppose Knox is tempted to say what he says about schism from a wish to see what is good in everything. This he seems to be seeking in other cases: and it does not argue that he would, if interrogated, have defended what happens to have been overruled for good. Yet he is not to be excused altogether, certainly to judge from the little I have read of his letters. He is a remarkable instance of a man searching for and striking out against the truth by himsel£ Could we see the scheme of things as angels see it, I fancy we should find he has his place in the growth and restoration (so be it) of Church principles. Coleridge seems to me another of the same class. With all his defects in doctrine, which are not unlike Knox's, he seems capable of rendering us important service. At the present he is the oracle of the young Cambridge men, and will prepare them (please God) for something higher. Both these men are laymen, and that is remarkable. (LD, V, 27) Whether suffering from the effects of an aging memory or being still ideologically disinclined to admit Coleridge as a religious colleague, at the age of eighty-three he wrote to W. S. Lilly asserting he had never read a word of Coleridge or Kant (LD, XXX, 391). Yet it is clear that Coleridge was on his mind in some way during the years of the Tractarian Movement. In a letter of 17 January 1836 to R. H. Froude about a meeting with Sir James Stephen he says that "I could not in my first talk make out to my satisfaction that he was too much of 60. John Henry Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895}, 75-76. Cited hereafter as Arians.

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a philosopher-looking (in Coleridge's way) at the Church, Sacraments, doctrines, etc rather as symbols of philosophy than as truths, as the mere accidental signs of principles" (LD, V, 225). This allusion to Coleridge's philosophical intrusions into theology anticipates his judgment in the 1839 essay already cited that although Coleridge "instilled a higher philosophy in inquiring minds," nevertheless, he "indulged in a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate." In the 1841 essay quoted above, Newman spoke of the "age moving toward something," a something only the Church of Rome possessed. In another article written in 1839, the year he praised Coleridge's "higher philosophy," he associates that "something" with Coleridge among others. "Look at the state of literature in London," he writes, "the old Benthamism shrivelling up, and the richer warmer philosophies succeeding. Consider the state of our Universities; at Cambridge, Utilitarianism, Shelleyism, and Coleridgism, edging forward and forward, no one knowing how, to a more Catholic theology." 61 In 1853, in some unpublished theological papers on faith and certainty, there is another, almost quaint, passing reference to Coleridge: "(Digression-on grace generally as a stimulus enabling not superseding the intellect. Thus opium in natural things. Coleridge said wonderful things under its influence, but still natural)."62 From this one can conclude that, like so many other contemporaries, Newman took at face value Coleridge's headnote to "Kubla Khan." Although he does not cite it, Newman used the "Treatise on Method" in preparing his lectures on education which became The Idea of a University. 63 There is, in fact, only one other reference to Coleridge in his published writings, but this is indeed a significant one. In the Grammar ofAssent Newman quotes a passage from Archbishop Leighton and then says that "Coleridge quotes this passage, and adds, 'Another and more fruitful, perhaps more solid, inference from the facts would be that there is something in the human mind which makes it know that in all

61. John Henry Newman, "Prospects of the Anglican Church," in Essays Critical and Historical, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895), I, 304. Cited hereafter as Ess. 62. John Henry Newman, Theological Papers on Faith and Certainty, ed. J. Derek Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 37. Cited hereafter as TP. 63. In pointing this out Dwight Culler notes that "an analysis of Coleridge's Treatise in Newman's autograph is preserved in MS Preparatory Work for 'Office and Work.'" In The Imperial Intellect: A Study ofNewman's Educational !deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 307, n. 16.

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finite quantity, there is an infinite, in all measure of time an eternal; that the latter are the basis, the substance of the former; and that, as we truly are only as far as God is with us, so neither can we truly possess, that is, enjoy our being or any other real good, but by living in the sense of his holy presence."' Sensing that the reader may not be with him on this point, Newman candidly asks: "What is this argument for? How few readers will enter into either premise or conclusion! And of those who understand what it means, will not at least some confess that they understand it by fits and starts, not at all times! Can we ascertain its force by mood and figure? Is there any royal road by which we may be indolently carried along into accepting it? Does not the author rightly number it among his 'aids' for our 'reflection,' not instruments for our compulsion?" (GA, 305). It should first be pointed out that this citation suggests Newman was familiar with Aids to Reflection and had read more than the "two or three sentences" he thirty-five years before allowed he had glanced at in his sister's copy. What Newman is suggesting here is that only by an act of self-appropriation will one arrive at the moral consciousness that will make such words understandable and meaningful. Throughout this concatenation of texts the central point of the kinship between Coleridge and Newman is that a human being is by definition a moral being, a being defined by freedom and moral self-awareness. Conscience, as I shall suggest in the next chapter, is the bridge between the finite and the infinite, between the human person and divine personhood. Others have pointed out that both men put great stress on the moral life and, in religious terms, on holiness; but the point I am trying to make is that for Coleridge and Newman our cognitive operations have by nature a moral and religious dimension. Morality both grounds and transcends intellectual activity. Human freedom, the ground of morality, positions persons in an open-ended relationship to ultimate transcendent reality. In an age of hard cold facts both writers were keenly aware that to some this sounded like subjectivism or intuitionism, to others like nonsense, what Carlyle called "this thrice-refined pablum of transcendental moonshine."64 In a passage that on first reading seems strangely out of place in a literary autobiography, Coleridge speaks about "the highest and intuitive knowledge as distinct from the discursive," comparing it to

64. Thomas Carlyle, Life offohn Sterling, in Carlyle's Complete Works, the Sterling Edition, 20 vols. (Boston: Estes and Lauriat Publishers, 1885), II, 61.

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Wordsworth's "vision and faculty divine." After quoting Plotinus on the mysterious nature of this knowledge, he adds that they and only they can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who can feel in their own spirits, the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that the potentia/works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a correspondent world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit; tho' the latter organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased will contemplate a man of simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? Poor man! He is not made for this world. Oh! herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfilment; for a man must either rise or sink. 65 Newman, in an 1832 sermon, "Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth," makes a strikingly similar observation. Talking about the nature of apprehending "moral Truth," he says that it is an old proverb, that men profess a sincere respect for Virtue, and then let her starve; for they have at the bottom of their hearts an evil feeling, in spite of better thoughts, that to be bound to certain laws and principles is a superstition and a slavery, and that freedom consists in the actual exercise of the will in evil as well as in good; and they witness (what cannot be denied) that a man who throws off the yoke of strict conscientiousness, greatly increases his producible talent for a time, and his immediate power of obtaining goods. At best they will admire the religious man and treat him with deference; but in his absence they are compelled (as they say) to confess that a being so amiable and gentle is not suited to play his part in the scene oflife; that he is too good for this world; that he is framed for a more primitive and purer age, and born out of due time. Makarisantes humon to apeirokakon, says the scoffing politician in the History, ou zeloumen to aphron;-would not the great majority of men, high and low, thus speak of St.John the Apostle, were he now living?66

65. BL,1,241-42. 66. US, 85-86. I have transliterated the Greek. Newman cites Thucydides: "While we admire your simplicity, we do not envy your folly." Peloponnesian Wars, 4 vols., trans. C. F. Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), III, 169 (Bk. V, Ch. 105).

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What grounds this conviction is the inseparable relationship between our intellectual and volitional activities. As we shall see in the next chapter, both Coleridge and Newman begin with an analysis ofhuman consciousness that reveals this interrelatedness. The proof, if you will, of such a position is found not by argument or demonstration, but by providing seriously concerned readers with aids, or helps, to make this same discovery for themselves. Thus Coleridge offered Aids to Reflection in the Formation ofa Manly Character and Newman offered An Essay in Aid ofa Grammar ofAssent. The word "aid" is operative in both, because they are, in a real sense, self-help books. In turning now to a consideration of their respective working papers on the proof of God's existence from conscience or moral selfconsciousness, we will observe each man rendering explicit, through reflex consciousness, the normal implicit activities of experiencing, understanding, judging, choosing, and loving. It is as close as one can come to observing another person in the most interior act of coming to know what one's knowing is and what are the implications of that knowing. Subsequent chapters will suggest that their desire to share this process of selfappropriation with others provided the subject matter and shaped the rhetoric of their major writings for which they are best known. As my brief sketch of the age and the problems the individual faced in orienting oneself to others, and ultimately, through faith, to the Other, makes clear, the starting point in this unbelieving age must be the self. In this Coleridge and Newman are at one with their contemporaries. Where they differ from them is in their description, if not definition, of what it is to be an individual. Enlightenment rationalism saw the human individual as primarily, if not exclusively, an autonomous reason. Newman and Coleridge saw the human individual, in Newman's words, as a "seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal" ( GA, 94). They saw the individual, further, as a social being. A person's autonomous rationality is complemented by an innate relationality; and it is precisely this latter characteristic that grounds moral duty and love. Because autonomous reason began to reject the possibility of revelation and, even more radically, the existence of a revealing God, Coleridge and Newman sought out a new apologetic by going to the root of the problem and showing that human beings are more than just reasoning animals; and an analysis of our concrete cognitive and affective operations will reveal God as the ground of our knowing and loving. Furthermore, the traditional proofs for God's existence, even when granted, often

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resulted merely in the belief that God exists, a God who is more an object or an abstraction than a supremely personal transcendent subject who invites personal response. In a sense this new apologetic tries to put a face on the God it discovers. Therefore, I believe, Coleridge and Newman anticipated the modern theological approach informally called the "from below" method. Such a method charts a theological anthropology based not on abstract philosophical assumptions about human nature but on a study of the concrete person already in and conditioned by history and tradition. 67 While such an approach clearly relies on the observation of others, its starting place is the grasping of the self, a process of appropriation to which we will now turn.

67. On this point see John R. Sachs, "Transcendental Method in Theology and the Normativity of Human Experience," Philosophy and Theology 7 (1993):213-55.

2

Conscience, Consciousness, Person, and GodExpanding One's Horizon I begin with expressing a sentiment, which is habitually in my thoughts, whenever they are turned to the subject of mental or moral science, and which I am willing to apply here to the Evidences of Religion as it properly applies to Metaphysics or Ethics, viz. that in these provinces of inquiry egotism is true modesty. In religious inquiry each of us can speak only for himself, and for himself he has a right to speak. 1

I While the view expressed above by Newman would have shocked many of his contemporaries, it was the inevitable starting point for an apologetic response to reason's contention that there is no God to know, or if there is a God, that God is unknowable. For the individual, self was indeed the obvious starting point for a generation no longer responsive to the "Evidences of Religion," those common external signs which betokened the credibility of divine revelation. To our modern sensibility the concept of individuality (inwardness, subjectivity, self-determination) is considered a great Romantic legacy of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, when many different voices spoke out on behalf of the individual. Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women had a right to education because they possessed reason, which is "the simple power of improvement; or, more properly speaking, of discerning truth. Eveiy individual is in this respect a world in himsel£"2 In a more overtly political context Coleridge asserted

1. Grammar ofAssent, 384-85.

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NE~IAN

that "a people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions. In the strict sense of the word knowledge is power."3 In his essay "Theory of Life," he applied the idea of individuality in the broadest philosophical sense when he said, "By life I everywhere mean the true Idea of Life, or that most general form under which life manifests itself to us, which includes all its other forms. This I have stated to be the tendency to individuation, and the degrees and intensities of life to consist in the progressive realization of this tendency." 4 A generation later, Newman, in an 1838 Parochial Sermon, imagined a town teeming with individuals and reflected that "every being in that great concourse is his own centre, and all things about are but shades of a 'vain shadow,' in which he 'walketh and disquieteth himself in vain.'"5 The highlighted phrase recurs in his writing until, in 1870, in the Grammar cfAssent, it becomes a philosophical principle: "everyone who reasons, is his own centre; and no expedient for attaining a common measure of minds can reverse this truth" ( GA, 345, emphasis added). Finally, in 1850,John Stuart Mill, fearing the encroachment of herdlike middle-class values and ideas on freedom of thought and action, stated that "in proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself and is therefore more capable of being of value to others."6 But "at present individuals are lost in the crowd" (62). Echoing Wollstonecraft and Newman, he asserted that "the unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many independent centers of improvement as there are individuals" {66).7

2. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 53. 3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Louis Patton, vol. 2 of The Collected Works ofSamuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 4. 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 7 vols., ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), I, 391. S. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), IV, 82. Cited hereafter as PPS. 6. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. David Spitz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 59-60. 7. Moral philosopher Charles Taylor sees a strong Coleridgean influence on Mill and considers On Liberty as "one form of a widespread attempt to integrate Romantic notions of personal fulfilment into the private lives of denizens of a civilization run more and more by the canons of instrumental reason." Sources ofthe Self The Making ofModern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 458. Taylor's study and

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Freedom to choose, individuality, growth-these are ideas dear to the modern heart, but they were considered at best a mixed blessing by many contemporaries of Coleridge and Newman. In the political sphere such ideas could lead to subversive thoughts and actions, to an elevation of the individual over the community. Marilyn Butler, for example, has thoroughly documented the repressive, conservative, anti-Jacobin influence on late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century English fiction and on Jane Austen in particular. 8 There were also philosophical and theological fears that individuality would lead to subjectivism and relativism, and these in turn would lead to skepticism. The prophetic command ofThomas Carlyle's Diogenes Teufelsdrockh to "Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe" 9 perhaps best sums up late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century ambivalence about individuality. Turn away from the brooding and self-destructive inwardness or self-consciousness of Byron's metaphysical heroes and turn outward to some altruistic, worldaffirming purpose in life. Coleridge and Newman, however, pressed the centrality of the individual and of one's inwardness in examining religious experience by insisting that religion grows out of the concept of conscience, which is also central to individual growth in moral selfawareness. Their focus on consciousness and conscience would provide for both men a structured pattern of thinking that would underlie writings often considered occasional and disparate in purpose; and it would give rise to a rhetorical discourse calculated to evoke personal response as much as to inform their readers. The similarity of their approach is underscored by the fact that what we are about to look at are unpublished working papers that began to spell out the central idea that permeates their respective published works. Here, regardless of any influence of Coleridge on Newman, it is clear that they were thinking along parallel lines in forming a Christian apologetic tailored to the sensibilities of their age. The very individuality that caught the imagination of

J. B. Schneewind's magisterial The Invention ifAutonomy: A History ifModern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) have greatly enriched my reading of Coleridge and Newman's efforts to develop a personalized proof for the existence of God. Regrettably, while Taylor does recognize Coleridge's role in the development of the modern sense of self, neither writer mentions Newman. 8. Marilyn Butler,Jane Austen and the War ifIdeas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), especially Chapter 4, "The Anti-Jacobins," 88-123. 9. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Charles F. Harrold (New York: Odyssey Press, 1937), 192.

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their contemporaries, for weal or woe, would become the starting point of their reflections on religion, belief, and morality. In an 1825 sermon Newman said: "Thus self-knowledge is at the root of all religious knowledge; and it is in vain,-worse than vain,-it is a deceit and a mischief, to think to understand the Christian doctrines as a matter of course, merely by being taught by books, or by attending sermons, or by any outward means, however excellent, taken by ourselves" (PPS, I, 42). In a letter of 1859 (written but not sent) to Charles Meynell, he says that "we are so constituted that we do naturally argue from ourselves to God, and Scripture encourages and sanctions this process" (TP, 162). Speaking in the same vein, and relating his position to the traditional evidences of Christianity, which were seen as reasonable, objective arguments for accepting it on faith, Coleridge asserts confidently that "in order to an efficient belief in Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual truths, to every subject not presentable under the forms of Time and Space, as long as we attempt to master by the reflex acts of the Understanding what we can only know by the act of becoming" (BL, II, 244). We shall now look at each of these men going through the process of becoming more fully human through a reflexive grasp of human knowing.

II In the early 1820s Coleridge began dictating what is known as the Opus Maximum to Joseph Green and James Gillman. Some twenty-five years before, he had written to Thomas Poole describing a course of studies for young men that would cover "Man as Animal," "Man as an Intellectual Being," and "Man as Religious Being" ( CL, I, 209). 10 Thomas McFarland says these three headings "precisely denominate the idiosyncratic amalgam of scientific investigation, philosophy, and theology that characterize Coleridge's general commitment of thought and the detailed 10. The part of the Opus Maximum manuscript on which I focus is housed in the Victoria College Library, University of Toronto, and consists of three vellum-bound volumes. Cited hereafter as OM. Fortunately, since the long-awaited edition of the complete Opus Maximum in the Collected Coleridge appeared only weeks before this essay was sent to the copy editor, I was able to use this text: Opus Maximum, ed. Thomas McFarland, vol. 15 ofThe Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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content of the Opus Maximum as we have it." 11 Volume 1 deals largely, and very sketchily, with cosmology and cosmogony. But even here Coleridge is laying the groundwork for his reflections on human beings as spiritual, that is, intellectual and religious. His predilection for the organic over the mechanistic grounds a vital hierarchy rising from the senses, to the intellectual, and then the religious. In true Coleridgean fashion, these stages in the process of transcendence are distinct but not separate from one another. 12 Only the move from the religious to an apprehension of God requires the mediation of faith. He says in Biographia Literaria that "Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own Horizon; and that Faith is then but the continuation" (II, 247). In moving in the next two volumes to the intellectual and religious (I would suggest "moral" is a better word than "religious" in this context), Coleridge lays down one assumption or postulate in his scientific analysis of the moral dimension of human experience. This postulate is "the Existence of the Wit/which a moment's reflection will convince us is the same as Moral Responsibility, and that again with the reality and essential difference of Good and Evil." (OM, 11). And it is precisely our consciousness of this responsibility that distinguishes human beings from animals, for "Brutes may be and are scious but not conscious" (OM, 23). But unlike the postulates of geometry or exact sciences, moral postulates can be demanded but not "extorted" (OM, 54). They cannot be extorted precisely because a person is free to accept or reject them without being subjected to general ridicule. Because we are conscious of this free agency in moral choice, we implicitly assume the source of the agency. He makes the bold statement that "the consciousness of a conscience is itself conscience" (OM, 21). I take this to mean that moral selfconsciousness is the defining characteristic of a human being. One might object that elsewhere Coleridge says the will or the imagination is the defining characteristic. I would suggest that this apparent shifting is a 11. McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms ofRuin, 357. 12. These stages are in fact similar to what Bernard Lonergan calls experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding. According to Lonergan the transcendental precepts are: "Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible." In following these precepts one experiences an intellectual conversion which is in turn followed by a moral conversion and then a religious conversion. In the latter, one learns to love and be open to the possibility of being loved by God. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 231,240-42.

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matter of emphasis because of the particular context in which he is writing. But he does put the emphasis on the moral dimension defining a person as person. We read in On the Constitution ofthe Church and State that "morality is no accident of human nature, but its essential characteristic" (I, 289). 13 Since for Coleridge and Newman our cognitive faculties are oriented toward doing, not just knowing, consciousness of conscience, or moral self-awareness, informs all of our cognitive activities. Two other assumptions emerge from this conscious selfappropriation. First, we implicitly trust our cognitive faculties, although we can be deceived and can deceive ourselves at times. Second, our intellectual or spiritual faculties are active. We freely choose to exercise them or not. They are not passive like the senses. And they are not mechanical or impersonal, operating in some kind of logical or mechanical manner. The whole person chooses to understand, reason, judge, and choose. We freely choose to believe or trust our human capacity to know and reason. This freedom is a belief in oneself. As theologian Karl Rahner says, "When freedom is really understood, it is not the power to do this or that, but the power to decide about oneself and to actualize oneself." 14 Can one, however, argue from one's own "consciousness of conscience" to that of one's fellow human beings? Coleridge says that "these assumptions we have found comprised in one position: man is a responsible agent and in consequence hath a Will Have I a responsible Will? eConcerning this each individual must be exclusively the querist and respondent" (OM, 54). That many human beings are seemingly without conscience-do not arrive at moral consciousness-is, Coleridge confesses, "a giant difficulty" (OM, 28). He points out, however, that "nothing can become the object of consciousness but by reflection, not even the things of perception" (OM, 30). Turning to a point that he would develop at length in his Aids to Reflection, he says "the solution of the problem must be sought for in the genesis or origination of the 'Thou.' But in order to do this I must require from the reader an energy of attention correspondent to the subtlety of the subject, far beyond

13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer, vol. 10 of The Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 24. Cited hereafter as C&S. 14. Karl Rahner, Foundations rfChristian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea rfChristianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 38.

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what I shall have occasion to require in any following part of the work" (OM, 75). The very fact that Coleridge wrote Aids to Reflection suggests he believed humans capable of such life-enhancing reflectivity, but it in no way diminishes the belief, stated here, that many do not achieve it. 15 A glaring example of the general failure to develop a profound moral self-awareness presents itself in the plight of three culturally oppressed groups of human beings during the very time period under study: women, slaves, and children. The inability of many, if not most people to achieve genuine moral self-awareness and thereby to truly and effectively see these groups as other subjects, other "I"s, is the focus of most of the literature in defense of the human rights of women, slaves, and children. From Blake's "Songs oflnnocence and Experience" and Wollstonecraft's Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman, to Hanna More's "Slavery, a Poem," readers are urged to discover their moral relatedness to all human beings. In Volume 3 of the Opus Maximum Coleridge discusses the relationship between will and reason. In God, will and reason are identified, therefore "the reason in man is representative of the Will of God. It follows therefore that the conscience is the specific witness respecting the unity, or harmony, of the will with the reason, effected by the self-subordination of the individual Will, as representing the self to the reason, or the representative of the Will to God" (OM, 84). This voluntary submission of the human reason to the will of God subordinates will to reason and conscience, and is in fact constitutive of person. We are not just talking machines or animals; we are experiencing, understanding, reasoning, judging, choosing subjects. And since this fidelity or allegiance to a superior moral being is faith, it follows that "Faith, in all its relations, subsists in the synthesis of the reason and the individual Will, or reconcilement of the reason with the Will by the self-subordination of the Will to the reason" (OM, 94). The fundamental but ultimately secondary importance of the will is no more clearly stated than in his dismissal of a posteriori proofs for God's existence from the sensible world. Coleridge agrees wholeheartedly with Luther that "without that inward revelation by which we 15. That the "energy of attention" required to arrive at moral self-consciousness is seldom applied is borne out by A. H. Maslow's sober assessment that self-actualization is achieved by no more than one percent of the human population. Toward a Psychology ofBeing (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1962), 190.

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know ourselves responsible and thus know what no understanding can reach, the reality of a Will. In vain should we endeavour to make up the notion of a divinity out of any material which the senses can convey, or the world afford" (OM, 102). Further on he says even more emphatically: "To deduce a Deity wholly from Nature is in the result to substitute an Apotheosis ofNature for Deity" (OM, 118). The only cogent argument for the existence of God is a moral one. "All Speculative Disquisition," he continues, "must begin with postulates,~ tfl.e CtHtseieftee that derive their ~ legitimacy, substance, and sanction from the Conscience: and from whichever of the two points the Reason may start, from the things that are seen to the One Invisible, or from the idea of the absolute One to the things that are seen, it will find a Chasm which the Moral Being only, which the Spirit and Religion of man alone can fill up" (OM, 107). Coleridge has thus insisted over and over on the intimate relationship between the intellectual and the moral order. The only bridge between a transcendent moral being and finite moral being is the conscience, the consciousness of which constitutes a person. It is also the only bridge between the I and the Thou-between two subjects in their subjectivity-the ultimate expression of which is love. To love is to recognize the other as person or subject and not as a thing or object, a distinction he calls "sacred." What about the truth claim of such an argument for the existence of God? In an untitled chapter of the Opus Maximum on the origin of the idea of God in the human mind, Coleridge comes to grips with this vexing question. His answer is that there is a capacity in all human beings to recognize and experience freedom and responsibility. Using an analogy similar to the one he had used earlier in Biographia Literaria, he says: "The young Bull butts ere yet its horns are formed, the stag-chafer in its worm state makes its bed-chamber prior to its metarherses , exactly as much longer than itself as is required for the length of the horn which is yet to be produced. Throughout all of Nature there is a manifestation of power pre-existent to the product" (OM, 119).16

16. Coleridge would use the same analogy again to argue that spiritual instincts are as indefectible as natural instincts. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer, vol. 9 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 353.

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What realizes or actualizes this potency? Ultimately it is love, beginning with parental love. Love entails an "other," a Thou; and it ultimately involves a process of self-transcendence that enables the individual person to move beyond a given stage of knowing and being, in progressive steps, until the person possibly arrives at an explicit conception and affirmation of the supreme or absolute Other or the Thou who is God. Describing the role of parents, especially the mother, in teaching the infant love and selfhood, Coleridge observes that "ere yet a conscious self exists, the love begins; and the first love is love of to another" (OM, 121). Actually, the phrase "conscience self" rather than "conscious self" is written in the manuscript, but in an editorial note we learn that it is changed from "conscience" to "conscious" because of a "correction supplied in pencil onf 64v." Further on "conscienceness" appears in the text and is again corrected to "consciousness" for the same reason (OM, 122). Regardless of who made these corrections in the manuscript, the expressions "conscience self" and "conscienceness" sound like felicitous Coleridgean neologisms, like his use of"tautegorical" to yoke together "tautological" and "allegorical" to describe symbol. For example, in an 1807 notebook entry he reflects on "wide fellow-conscienciousness" and ends by saying, "Conceive a Bliss of Self-conscience, combining with a Bliss from increase of Action." 17 Even in the infant, faith is prior to intellection; for, "Faith, implicit Faith, the offspring of unreflecting love, is the antecedent and indispensable condition of all its knowledge: the life is the light thereof" (OM, 121). There is in each human being a connatural potency, oriented toward God, which is activated first by love between parents and child. Returning to his analogy of natural potency or capacity, he asks: "Why have men a Faith in God? There is but one answer: the Man, and Man alone, has a Father and a Mother. All begins in instinct but do all therefore begin alike? Oh no! each hath its own and the instincts of Man must be human, 17. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 50, 5 vols. to date, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955-2012), vol. 3, Series 3156, Entry 12. 71. Cited hereafter as CN. The earlier interchangeability of the two words in English and the fact that "conscience" more often bore the burden of both meanings as late as Thomas More's time might have given that word a certain "thickness" and ambiguity that held on to both meanings. See Edward Engleberg, The Unknown Distance: From Consciousness to Conscience (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972), 1; and Richard Sylvester, "Conscience and Consciousness: Thomas More," in The Author in His Work, ed. L. L. Martz and A. Williams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 165.

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rational instincts-Reason itself mutely here prophesying of its own future advent" (OM, 122).18 Coleridge decried religion reduced to mere ceremonies and magic, which are signs of an inevitable descent into materialism because of undue stress on the visible. Human love is spiritual as well as physical, and, when we substitute the latter for the former, the ills he constantly laments will ensue. "Hence for state policy 'we have statecraft and the mockery of expedience; for the fine arts, a marketable trade; for philosophy, a jargon of materialism; and the study of nature conducted on such principles as place it in doubtful rivalry with the art and theory of cooking" (OM, 126). The true beginning of both philosophy and religion, then, is love, which alone conditions a person to be responsive to what ultimately corresponds to and actualizes the spiritual potential in each of us. "The reverence of the invisible, substantiated by the feeling of love which is the essence and proper definition of religion, is the commencement of the intellectual life, or humanity. If ye love not your earthly parent how can ye love your father in heaven?" (OM, 127). Using a homely and touching example, Coleridge shows how parental presence affects the child's sense of its own subjective reality. One discovers the self in the consciousness of others. Feeling alone and alienated, a child cries out at night. "In such a state of mind has many a parent heard the threeyears child that has awoke during the dark night in the little crib by the mother's bed entreat in piteous tones, 'Touch me, only touch me with your finger.' A child of that age, under the same circumstances, I myself heard using these very words, in answer to the mother's enquiries, half hushing & half chiding: 'I am not here, touch me, Mother, that I may be here!' The witness of its own being had been suspended in the loss of the mother's presence by sight or sound or feeling. The father and 18. In a study that might have pleased Coleridge, given his propensity to see the relatedness of all things (a continuity with distinctions), Alasdair Macintyre suggests that the human capacity for moral life is rooted in our "vulnerability and affliction" and corresponding "dependence" on others, a trait he also sees in higher "intelligent" animals forms, suggesting a similarity of moral potentiality in both higher animals and human beings. He also lauds feminist philosophers for "their emphasis upon the importance of the mother-child relationship as a paradigm for moral relationships." Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1999), 2-3. Martha Nussbaum's most recent book follows a similar line in rooting compassion, for her the foundation of moral oughtness, in our shared vulnerability and interdependence. Upheavals ofThought: The Intelligence ofEmotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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the heavenly father, the form in the shape and the form affirmed for itself are blended into one, and yet convey the earliest lesson of distinction and alterity" (OM, 132). "I am not here, touch me, Mother, that I may be here." Two examples, one quite homely, the other philosophical, bear witness to the profundity of Coleridge's insight expressed here. Numerous recent studies in the United States and around the world have shown that abandoned infants in orphanages, who experience a minimum of human touch and attention, do not develop physically or emotionally as quickly or as well as similar children who develop strong tactile and emotional relationships with their caregivers. The presence of touch and attention allow them to "be here." I think this is confirmed by Maurice Nedoncelle's observation that "this priority of the Thou over the he and its power to bring the he into being are seldom admitted in philosophy: Coleridge, Martin Buber, and perhaps Gabriel Marcel have sketched the theory." 19 It is the loving presence of the Thou, a morally self-conscious individual who cultivates a sense of similar subjectivity in another person, that brings into being a Thou rather than an it, a subject rather than an object. Distinction and alterity, I and Thou, the self and the other-one grows into a sense of one's own individuality and uniqueness through a lifelong interplay between one's self and the other selves who are our fellow human beings. One becomes fully conscious of the self as subject not in knowing objects but in knowing and loving other subjects, other knowers, other lovers, other beings conscious of conscience.20 What we would today call interpersonal or intersubjective relationships are premised, for Coleridge, on the existence of the will. He again reminds his readers that "the original postulate and their concession was that of a responsible Will from which the reality of a Will generally became demonstrable to convince him that if t1: responsible Will ttttd thttt dHs is tts it l:lHSe ttittery is the ground and condition of his Personality" (OM, 164).

19. Maurice Nedoncelle, God's Encounter with Man, trans. A. Manson (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), 39. Emphasis added. 20. See J. Robert Barth, SJ., Coleridge and the Power ifLove (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1988), especially the first two chapters; and Anthony John Harding, Coleridge and the Idea ofLove: Aspects if Relationship in Coleridge's Thought and Writing (London: Cambridge University Press, 197 4 ). Both books are richly illuminating about the importance oflove in Coleridge's life and thought.

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Another aspect of this process of becoming aware of oneself as a "spiritual" being, a being conscious of will or moral responsibility, is manifested in the kinds of reading in which a person engages. Coleridge draws a distinction between what one experiences in reading imaginative literature as opposed to other kinds of reading. He encourages his reader to "try only to reproduce the state of consciousness while we were following Euclid through the 37th proposition, and then the state while we were perusing the pages of Tacitus or contemplating the creations of Milton'' (OM, 168). The difference is that "in all purely scientific exertion of the mind there is no excitement of the sense of our own individuality. The mind acts, ifl may use so bold yet so appropriate a metaphor, as a verb impersonal. There is neither agent nor sympathy with any supposed agent: both agent and act product are lost or contained in the act" (OM, 169). Euclid engages only the reason. I would suggest here, without expanding on the point, that the imagination enters in as the whole person is engaged and asked to respond not merely in a detached or notional way but in an involved and volitional (personal) way. 21 Such reading involves and prods the "conscious will," as Coleridge calls it in Biographia Literaria (I, 103). The personal nature of the imaginative text literally evokes an imaginative "attending" to the text. Since personhood is rooted in the will, the deepest response is moral. Thus we can see why he says about those who demand rational proofs in religious matters that "the wiser plan, as we have had occasion to remark, is to say, or rather to remain silent, and be content to know that the respondent must make himself a better man before he can be a more intelligent one" (OM, 161). Coleridge's lengthy and fragmentary argument for God's existence from conscience boils down to this: the definition of what it is to be a person, a distinct, self-determining individual, and the definition of Christianity are two sides of the same coin. He says, quite simply, "that there and only there, where a Reason and a Will are co-present distinctly but in relations either of union or oppugnancy, a personality is affirmed" (OM, 175). Disciples like Joseph Green, F. D. Maurice, and James Marsh would a generation later echo this view-no conscience (will and responsibility), no person. To be a person is to be a free, morally responsible being. Moral responsibility grounds the very possibility of revealed religion based on

21. For a fuller study of this see my Something ofGreat Constancy: Uses ofthe Imagination (Regina: Campion College Press, 1985).

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the fundamental premise of human sinfulness. "Subjectively, or in relation to the order of conviction," Coleridge concludes, "the responsibility is assumed as the condition and staple ring in the chain of christian faith. This being denied, direcdy or by a previous disbelief of the necessary inference from the fact of moral responsibility-namely the Will, and therefore of a power stricdy spiritual-the concept of a corrupt and fallen nature is impossible, or rather, the words are without meaning, and of course the whole scheme of redemption becomes equally hollow, first as having no object and 2ndlyas having [no] conceivable agent" (OM, 177-78). In the final analysis, Coleridge's conception of humans as animal (sensitive), intellectual, and religious (moral) implies that we are both historically and existentially religious beings-finite free spirits oriented by our nature to an absolute free spirit, God. To deny human freedom renders God unnecessary, indeed impossible to comprehend. To deny God is to rob human beings of any true meaning and dignity, to reduce them back to a sea of materialism. If there is no freedom, there is no true humanity. To be aware of oneself as free, as conscious of conscience, is to be, potentially at least, aware of God. According to theologian Bernard Lonergan, "as the question of God is implicit in all our questioning, so being in love with God is the basic fulfillment of our conscious intentionality."22

IV Newman's "Proof for Theism," written in 1859, would later be the center of his crowning work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar ofAssent, published in 1870. Only twenty-two manuscript pages in length, it stands by itself, unlike Coleridge's treatment, which is part of a larger, more ambitious exploration of human nature and religion. Newman seems to begin with the Kantian argument but points out immediately that "[W. G.] Ward thinks I hold that moral obligation is, because there is a God. But I hold the reverse, viz. There is a God, because there is a moral obligation" (PN, II, 31).23 22. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 105. 23. First published in John Henry Newman, The Argumentfrom Conscience to the Existence ofGod, ed. Adrian K. Boekraad and Henry Tristram (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1961), and later published in The Philosophical Notebook, 2 vols., ed. Edward Sillem, (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1969). All quotations are taken from the 1969 edition and will be referred to hereafter as PN.

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Newman's starting point is phenomenological: "I am conscious of my own existence. That I am involves a great deal more than myself" (PN, II, 31). His analysis of this consciousness reveals a number of"various faculties, which seem to be parts of my own being and to be at least as much facts as that being itself" (PN, II, 31). They consist in such activities as "thinking (cogito ergo sum) or feeling, or remembering, or comparing or exercising discourse" (PN, II, 33). One does not have faith in these activities, nor does one have direct knowledge of being, "Because being is not known directly, but indirectly through these states" (PN, II, 33-34). Thus, Newman is neither a fideist nor an intuitionist-labels applied to him during his lifetime and long afterward by critics of the Grammar ofAssent. He explains further that "sentio ergo sum" like "cogito ergo sum" is neither argumentation nor deduction nor faith. "I do not advance from one proposition to another, when I know my existence from being conscious of my feeling, but one and the same act of consciousness brings home to me that which afterwards at leisure I draw out into two propositions, denoting two out of many aspects of one thing" (PN, II, 35). One can proceed from "sentio ergo sum" to "cogito ergo sum," and the analysis is the same, for "consciousness and reasoning are those portions of the idea of being which are most essentially bound up with it" (PN, II, 37). In denying that one has faith in one's cognitive processes Newman appears to differ from Coleridge; but the difference is merely verbal. Where Coleridge says, "To believe is the rule and to disbelieve an exception-a frequent exception, perhaps, still, however, but an exception" (OM, 51), Newman says that as "there is no faith properly in these exercises of my being, so there is no skepticism about them properly-and it is as absurd to speak ofbeing skeptical of consciousness, reasoning, memory, sensation, as to say I am skeptical whether I am" (PN, II, 37). Newman is simply saying that we implicitly accept the integrity of human consciousness and human cognitive activity. Not bound up in the immediate reality of consciousness, however, is the reality of external objects or reality which "is an object of faith" (PN, II, 37). Pressed hard, this begins to look like idealism or skepticism, both of which charges were leveled against Newman. What may cause some confusion is the fact that Newman does not distinguish between consciousness and experience. In a marginal annotation he says that "what is internal to the mind is an object of consciousness which external things are not. Thus the line is broad and deep between reliance on reason and conscience, and the trustworthiness of the impressions of the senses or the reality or existence

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of matter. Hence the being of God, arising out of what is internal, is an external fact different in evidence or proof from every other external fact" (PN, II, 41). Newman's manner of speaking may suggest he actually takes all reality apart from God and himself on faith. I would suggest that what Newman is really saying is that the relationship between the person and God is fundamental to all other relationships. Setting aside the existence of all other external reality, Newman says "There is just one primary belief I have-not knowledge but beliefit is not in matter or space, or time, or any of this sort of outward thingyet it is an external and outward being, or I should not take it on faithit is beliefin the existence of God" (PN, II, 39). For Newman, God is an intimate part of his epistemology and, to the extent that he has one, his metaphysics. This is strikingly stated in Apologia pro Vita sua, where, speaking of his deepest religious convictions, he mentions his early mistrust of the reality of material phenomena, a fact that made him "rest in the thought of two and two only absolutely and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator" (18). In his "Proof" he says that "when I say that the external fact of the existence of God is an object of faith, and a primary object, I do not mean it is necessarily so in the order of history, but in the order of nature. I mean that it is more intimately connected with the nature of the human mind itself than anything else, and while it is to be received on faith hardly is it so in fact" (PN, II, 43). What is this link between our consciousness and the God who is external to us? 24 Among the data of consciousness already considered-memory, sensation, reasoning-Newman also includes conscience, by which "I mean the discrimination of acts as worthy of praise or blame. Now such praise or blame is a phenomenon of my existence, one of those phenomena thro' which, as I have said, my existence is brought home to me. But the accuracy or truth of the praise or blame in a particular case, is a matter not of faith, but of judgment. Here then are two senses of the word conscience. It either stands for the act of moral judgment, or for the particular judgment formed. In the former case it is the foundation of religion, in the latter of ethics" (PN, II, 47). In both instances, of course, 24. God is, of course, "external" to us in the sense that our being is distinct from God's being; but God can also be "internal" to us in the sense that God's presence or existence is made known to us in the very structure of our cognitive operations, of which God is the absolute horizon.

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reason is involved; but for Newman, as for Coleridge, it is practical rather than speculative reason at work. In analyzing further this "feeling of conscience" Newman finds "it operates under a special sanction" (PN, II, 49). Although persons may conclude differently about what is concretely right or wrong, and while it is impossible to maintain "that there is any idea of moral right or wrong bound up in my primary consciousness of my existence," nevertheless, "the sense of a special sanction remains one and the same in all men" (PN, II, 49). What is the nature of this sanction? Why is it intimately bound up with the very nature of the mind itself, so intimately in fact that it is, like the existence of God, "more intimately connected with the nature of the human mind than anything else" (PN, II, 49)? As with Coleridge, conscience is that which postulates the "Other" in our existence. Qyoting from one of his university sermons, Newman explains that "conscience implies a relation between the soul & a something exterior, & that, moreover, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and a tribunal over which it has no power" (PN, II, 49-50). Newman sees conscience as that essential part ofbeing human that prompts us on in the process of self-transcendence. "This is conscience, and from the very nature of the case, its very existence carried on our minds to a Being exterior to ourselves; for else, whence did it come? And to a being superior to ourselves; else whence its strange, troublesome peremptoriness?" (PN, II, 53). Here even the agnostic George Eliot found herself in agreement with Newman when, finding God "inconceivable" and immortality "unbelievable," she could still insist that duty was "peremptory and absolute."2 5 In his analysis of conscience Newman finds not only the idea of a lawgiver but also the idea of a future judgment. For these are not just laws of taste which are "attended to by no sanction," but rather laws which involve self-transcendence. For it is these feelings experienced in the imperatives of conscience which "carry the mind out of itself & beyond itself, which imply a tribunal in [the] future & reward & punishment which are so special. The notion of a future judgment is thus involved in the feeling of conscience" (PN, II, 59). Furthermore, the feeling that anticipates this "tribunal in [the] future" is personal in nature and has as

25. Qyoted in Gordon Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 464.

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its object a personal God, since persons-free rational agents-could not reasonably feel responsible or accountable to an impersonal reality. Newman compresses this entire argument into an enthymeme. "If then our or my existence is brought to me by my consciousness of thinking, and if thinking includes as one of its modes conscience or the sense of an imperative coercive law, and if such a sense when analyzed, i.e., reflected on, involves an inchoate recognition of a Divine Being, it follows that such recognition comes upon my recognition that I am, and is only not so clear an object as is my own existence" (PN, II, 63). Like Coleridge, Newman sees conscience, that is, moral self-consciousness, as prior in nature to all other forms of human knowing in that it grounds them and orchestrates all cognitive activity. In a passage that clearly anticipates the "illative sense" of the Grammar ofAssent, Newman says, "The being of a God brought home to me, illuminated, as it will be, in its various aspects by reflection, tradition, &c. &c., I have a guiding truth, which gives practical direction to my judgment & faith as regards a variety of other truths or professed truths which encounter me, as the trustworthiness of the senses, our social & person duties, the divinity of Christianity &c. &c. It teaches me how to use evidence which is imperfect, and why I must not be skeptical" (PN, II, 65). Newman, again like Coleridge, here articulates a theory of knowledge diametrically opposed to the rationalism and mechanism of the eighteenth century. Knowing (beyond the level of sensation) is active and not passive, spiritual and not material; and, most importantly, personal and not impersonal. For Newman the whole person experiences, understands, reasons, judges, and freely chooses. The person has, in fact, an innate moral imperative to strive for the truth and in so doing trusts the validity of one's cognitive operations. Implicit in this epistemology is the existence of the will and the corresponding moral responsibility of which Coleridge speaks. The attention Newman gives to the question of reality and the external world attests to his concern about the matter. In an annotation made in 1864 he adds a fourth benefit ofhis "proof" The first three are its universality, its practicality, and its rejection of the "philosophical sin." The fourth is that "it forms the basis for the belief of the senses, for if there be a God, and I am his creature with a mission, He means for me to use the senses-and I accept what they convey as coming from Him whatever be its intellectual & philosophical worth" (PN, II, 66). In asking whether we have faith in our own existence, he firmly rejects the idea. We have faith in the existence of the external world, but we have an intuition

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of self that is prior to this faith. "I have an intuition of three things prior to the knowledge of the fact of myself: 1. In consciousness. 2. in thought. 3. in a certain analysis, which becomes afterwards the principle of reasoning. These are involved in the words 'Cogito ergo sum.' Taking the acts of the mind to bits, therefore, knowledge of my existence is the fourth act; though I call all four one complex act of intuition. Here we have real intuition, but I have faith, not intuition, of the external world" (PN, II, 71). The objectivity, then, of the transcendent Other is discovered in one's own subjectivity. A fuller explanation of this proof would emerge in the Grammar ofAssent, where Newman would develop his concept of the "illative sense," which leads one to make a "real" (or as he originally called it, "imaginative") assent to moral and religious truths.

v Newman does not, like Coleridge, explain in any detail how conscience and consciousness are evoked by early interpersonal relationships between parent and child, but he does suggest how nurture evokes the potential latent in nature. Elsewhere in his writings he does allude to the role parents and others play beyond the early years in the development of moral self-consciousness. In an 1831 sermon he says "I had hitherto considered cultivation of domestic affections as the source of more extended Christian love" (PPS, II, 57). In discussing the moral development of children he says they "cannot learn without the assistance of others the meaning of moral facts" (Ess, II, 250). Discussing private judgment he writes that "our parents and teachers are our first informants concerning the next world; and they elicit and cherish the innate sense of right and wrong which acts as a guide coordinately with them.''26 In speaking of "eliciting" an "innate sense of right and wrong" Newman seems to agree with Coleridge in holding that conscience is instinctive or connatural. In a University Sermon Newman declares that "so alert is the instinctive power of the educated conscience, that by some secret faculty, and without intelligible reasoning process, it seems to detect moral truth where ever it lies hid, and feels a conviction of its own accuracy which bystanders 26. John Henry Newman, The Via Media if the Anglican Church, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895), I, 132. Emphasis added. This referred to hereafter as VM

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cannot account for" (US, 66). Here again, of course, Newman is alluding to his as yet unformulated concept of the "illative sense," a quasiinstinctive reasoning process that arrives at apprehension and assent in areas that defY normal logical reasoning. In an 1810 notebook Coleridge makes a similar observation: "Providence has plac'd for the wisest purposes a religious instinct in our nature, which leads us to be ever credulous where religious feelings (i.e. the stern precepts & sublime hopes & fears of Morality are the declared moral of the miracle)." 27 In another notebook entry he says that religion and morality are secure and will endure "as long as anywhere in the partakers of human Nature there remains that instinctive craving, dim & blind tho' it may be, of the moral being after this unknown Bliss, or Blessedness-known only & anticipated by the Hollowness where it is."28 This "hollowness" or receptiveness echoes the two analogies described earlier, and appears again in Aids to Reflection, where he says that "throughout animated nature of each characteristic organ and faculty there exists a pre-assurance, an instinctive and practical application; and no preassurance common to the whole species does in any instance prove delusive. All other prophecies of nature have their exact fulfillment-in every other ingrafted work of promise, Nature is found true to her word; and is it in her noblest creature that she tells her first lie?" (353). These analogies echo a passage in Biographia Literaria where he says that "only they can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of selfintuition ... who can feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the Chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come" (I, 241-42). But unlike animal instincts and potentialities, the human conscience requires other persons to evoke its activity. And activated it must be if a human being is to become not just an individual organism, a thing, but an individual person. This natural moral instinct is central to the "progressive," or what we would today call the developmental nature of human growth. Since their development is not totally determined by biological structure or environmental influences, human beings grow as persons only by exercising will and reason. The human movement toward increasing individuation is a growth process. In plant and animal life genetic structure and environment control all growth. In human life moral choice 27. CN, III, Series 3894, Entry 18.117. 28. CN, III, Series 3911, Entry 18.134.

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is the distinctive source of growth. Even George Eliot, whose novels and other writings reveal a decidedly deterministic philosophy, has Mordecai tell Daniel Deronda that "the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."29 Persons grow as persons only when they are actively making moral choices. At sixteen Newman took as his life motto the phrase "Growth the only evidence oflife" (Apo, 17). 30 Its influence is dramatically evident in all his major writings, Arians ofthe Fourth Century, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, The Idea of a University, and Grammar ofAssent. Coleridge's own preoccupation with growth and change, like Newman's, had both personal and philosophical dimensions. In 1826 he wrote Daniel Stuart that "within the last two years and more particularly within the last, my mind without sustaining any revolution in faith has yet undergone a change; I trust, a progression-and I am more particularly persuaded, that toward the close of our Lives, if we have been at any time sincere in cultivating the Good within us, events & circumstances are more & more working toward the maturing of that Good, even when they are hardest to bear for the moment" (CL, VI, 576). He observed to Lord Liverpool that "with the Moderns, on the contrary, nothing grows; all is made-Growth itself is but a disguised mode of being made by the superinduction of jam data upon a jam datum. This habit of thinking permeates the whole mass of our principles, and it is in spite of ourselves that we are not like a herd of Americans, a people without a History" (CL, IV, 761). For both of these men human beings are not just made or created by God; they are constantly in the process ofbeing created and madeprompted toward full individuation by the conscience. Coleridge once called God "Creator! (and Evolver!)." 31 The shaping metaphor of Newman's "Lead Kindly Light" implies a constant movement toward God. Human participation in this process of growth and development is predicated on the human capacity to respond to invitation and to accept responsibility for one's choices.

29. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Barbara Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), 598. 30. For just how much this insight controlled Newman's thought, see my" 'Growth the Only Evidence of Life': Development of Doctrine and The Idea of a University," Nineteenth-Century Prose 18 (1991):10-26. 31. CN, II, Series 2546, Entry 17.104.

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VI The enterprise that engaged Coleridge and Newman is not mere ancient history. In the 1940s and 1950s within Roman Catholic theological circles, an issue arose that directly related to their concerns and purposes, as the perennial question of the relationship between grace and nature divided theologians into two camps. By far the largest group, in fact the majority of Catholic theologians, were the "Extrinsicists," who insisted on the radical separation of grace and nature. Since grace is not accessible to human experience apart from God's free overture, there can be no such thing as a "natural desire" for God, because such a natural orientation would obligate God to fulfill that desire. Among the much smaller group of"Intrinsicists," who held that such a desire was possible, the foremost was the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac. While holding the distinction between grace and nature, he also held that from the beginning of creation human beings have had a natural desire for God-and this view was officially condemned by the Church. It was not until the 1960s that a theological position was developed that satisfied both sides of the dispute. Drawing on the phenomenology of Heidegger, German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner suggested the idea of a "supernatural existential," a capacity in human nature that was already supernatural. He argued that human beings are created historically with the supernatural capacity for desiring God that is distinct but not separate from concrete, historical human nature. In true Coleridgean fashion Rahner had conceived a supernatural connatural desire. There is a relationship, both historical and ideological, between the participants in this theological debate that has its roots in two philosophical movements within Roman Catholic circles beginning early in the twentieth century. The personalism of writers like Maurice Blondel and Gabriel Marcel and the Transcendental Thornism,32 beginning with Joseph Marechal, who influenced Karl Rahner and Bernard J. Lonergan, would lead to a paradigm shift in theology from theorizing about human nature as a philosophical abstraction to a consideration of the human person in a concrete historical context. It might be enlightening to look briefly at Lonergan's fundamental approach in terms of our "natural desire" for God, because Coleridge's and Newman's thesis that consciousness of conscience is moral 32. The term "Transcendental Thomism'' distinguishes this movement from the "Neo-Thomism" of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson.

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self-awareness-reflexive awareness of the self as moral being-is also central to Lonergan's transcendental method. At the heart of Lonergan's philosophical method is the thesis that the roots of both metaphysics and morality lie "neither in sentences nor propositions nor in judgments but in the dynamic structure of rational consciousness."33 The concrete, dynamic structure of human knowing, which is discovered in the content of human consciousness, consists of ascending levels of consciousness, each of which transcends the previous level. Aware of the metaphor implicit in "transcendence," Lonergan says "transcendence, then, at the present juncture means a development in man's knowledge relevant to a development in man's being."34 Consciousness actually constitutes one a "person'' both psychologically and ontologically. For example, "Consciousness not merely reveals us as suffering but also makes us capable of suffering; and similarly it pertains to the constitution of the consciously intelligent subject as intelligent, the consciously rational subject of rational acts, the consciously free subject of free acts." 35 When writing his Gregorian University lecture notes in Latin, Lonergan uses the term conscientia in a way that suggests that, like Newman and Coleridge and their Renaissance predecessors, he is linking consciousness and conscience. 36 In language that would have been acceptable to both Coleridge and Newman, Lonergan writes that "Man is not only a knower but a doer; the same intelligent and rational consciousness grounds the doing as well as the knowing; and from that identity of consciousness there springs inevitably an exigency for self-consistency in knowing and doing."37

33. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight: An Essay in Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 604. 34. Lonergan, Insight, 636. 35. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, "Christ as Subject: A Reply," in Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, ed. F. E. Crowe (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 177. On the role of suffering in the development of consciousness, John Coulson's comment about Coleridge is apropos: "Coleridge equates poetry and religion with sickness and sorrow as 'The Extenders of Consciousness,' adding 'The truth is, we stop in the sense of life just when we are not forced to go on-and then adopt a permission of our feelings for a precept of our Reason.'" Religion and Imagination: "In Aid of a Grammar ofAssent" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 152. 36. See his treatise De Constitutione Ontologica et Psychologica Christi (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1958). Even in his major essay Insight, he does separate the two ideas. For example, in an index entry under "conscience" we read: "see self-consciousness, moral" (600). 37. Lonergan, Insight, 600.

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Because, for Lonergan, the somewhat elusive term "transcendence" translates into the idea of"development," theologian Walter Conn finds its foundational validity borne out in the writings of modern developmental psychologists like Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, all of whom speak of human development as a series of progressive stages of self-transcendence. 38 In progressive acts of self-appropriation we arrive at the highest level of consciousness where we are aware of the difference between "is" and "ought" in our decisions to act. We become aware of decisions being made vis-a-vis their subjects. Thus, the culmination of human consciousness, for Lonergan, is the recognition of our relational or interpersonal nature. For Lonergan's "subject," who is essentially a questioner, "since the question of God is implicit in all of our questioning, so being in love with God is the basic fulfilment of our conscious intentionality." He continues with a stunningly compressed vision of the fulfillment such a process of self-transcendence makes possible for the human person: "That fulfilment brings a deep-set joy that can remain despite humiliation, failure, privation, pain, betrayal, desertion. That fulfilment brings a radical peace, the peace that the world cannot give. That fulfilment bears fruit in a love of one's neighbor that strives mightily to bring about the kingdom of God on this earth. On the other hand, the absence of that fulfilment opens the way to the trivialization of human life in the pursuit of fun, to the harshness of human life arising from the ruthless exercise of power, to despair about human welfare springing from the conviction that the world is absurd." 39 One hears the echo of Coleridge and Newman lamenting the condition of a world wounded by original sin. One hears also, of course, the New Testament echo in "the peace the world cannot give," the same echo which is found in one of Coleridge's notebook entries where he speaks of"perfect Obedience to the pure, practical Reason, or Conscience! Then flows in upon and fills the Soul that Peace which passeth Understanding." 40 While the revelation and the grace come "from above," ontologically speaking, the movement toward that revelation and grace is explained "from below," epistemologically speaking, in the convergence of the human activities of will, reason, and 38. Walter Conn, Conscience: Development and Self- Transcendence (Birmingham, Ala.: Religious Education Press, 1981), 79. 39. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 105. 40. CN, III, Series 3911, Entry 18.34.

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conscience-and imagination-that are invited by the gift of faith beyond a person's finite horizon. In retrospect one can see in this ongoing theological reflection-from Coleridge and Newman to Rahner-the beginning of what theologians now call "theological anthropology," an effort to develop a Christian apologetics that explains how the existence of a self-revealing transcendent being must be explained "from below," that is, starting with concrete human experience, and not "from above," starting with the assumed revelation. It must begin with the finite concrete believer living in history and not with the transcendent revealer, existing outside of space and time. This, I believe, is precisely what Coleridge and Newman set out to accomplish. Coleridge's many analogies illustrating the human capacity for knowing God and Newman's nuanced explanation of the "feeling" of conscience both move upward, from below, from human experience to the apprehension of transcendent reality. Like their twentieth-century successors they realized that Christian thinkers could no longer operate on a hermeneutic of assent in which explanation followed belief, and theology was simply fides quaerens intellectum" (faith seeking understanding). Faced with the rigorous demands of radical critical thinking, they sought a common ground for dispute. Beginning with human experience as a methodological starting point, they went on to critique critical reason itselfColeridge by the development of his idea of "Higher Reason" and Newman by the development of his idea of the "Illative Sense." 41 Having seen how the self is the starting point of the journey toward God, we can now turn to three pairs of Coleridge's and Newman's major writings. In Biographia Literaria and Apologia pro Vita sua the journey works itself out in an autobiographical narrative of the developing or growing sel£ In Constitution if Church and State and An Essay on the Development if Christian Doctrine we will see a multitude of developing selves, a community of others, in both sacred and secular society. Finally, in Aids to Reflection in the Formation if a Manly Character and An Essay in Aid if a Grammar ofAssent, we shall see how the developing self can move beyond the limits of reason through the act of Faith, which carries a person to the transcendent Absolute Horizon which is God. 41. The etymology of Newman's phrase shows precisely what he was doing. "Illative" derives from illatus, the past participle of the Latin verb infero, which means to draw or deduce conclusions logically. The Latin word sensus means "feeling" or "sense." In effect it is a kind of concrete reasoning. We will look at this more closely in Chapter 5.

3 The Developing Self: Biographia Literaria and Apologia pro Vita sua Growth the only evidence oflife. The rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production. The Child is Father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. The wide-arched bridge, the scented elder flowers, The wondrous watery rings that died too soon, The echoes of the quarry, the still hours With white robes sweeping on the shadeless noon, Were but my growing self, are part of me, My present Past, my roots of piety. 1

I The purpose of this chapter will be to examine Biographia Literaria and Apologia pro Vita sua to show how each is a journey toward fuller moral self-awareness, toward a consciousness of self as a moral and religious being-the stories of two lives in which conscience is central. Like most of their other publications, these two autobiographical narratives were occasional pieces. In 1858 Newman lamented that "it has been the 1. Apo, 19;BL, II, 84; "My Heart Leaps Up," in William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, revised edition, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 62; George Eliot, The Complete Poems if George Eliot (New York: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1901), 132.

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fortune of the author through life, that the volumes which he has published have grown for the most part out of the duties which lay upon him, or out of the circumstances of the moment. Rarely has he been the master of his own studies."2 These two books were written not only for specific occasions; both were written under genuine duress. Coleridge, in the public eye something of a personal failure and an almost tragically unfulfilled talent, wrote to provide a preface to an edition of his poems. Dictating to Dr. James Gillman from notes, he finished his task in slightly more than three and a half months. Newman, stung by the accusation hurled at him by Charles Kingsley and only beginning to come out from under a cloud of suspicion raised by his conversion nineteen years earlier, wrote at a white-hot pace, finishing his masterpiece of religious autobiography in slightly more than seven weeks. The rapidity of composition, however, while attesting to the staying power of both men, is somewhat misleading. Both had been thinking about their autobiographies for a long time before outside pressures forced them to the autobiographical act. In letters and notebook entries dating from 1803, Coleridge was talking about the project. Newman's diaries, autobiographical notes, and letters, which he meticulously collected and periodically annotated, suggest an autobiography was long in his mind, certainly as early as 1850, when he included short autobiographical sketches in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching. So, personal urgencies aside, it is clear that both men were preparing themselves to answer the two questions that prompt autobiography: "Who am I? And how did I come to be what I am?" 3 In spite of the evident differences between the two autobiographies, there are marked similarities. One could, in a sense, interchange the titles of the two works. The Biographia, for example, is an "apologia." In the opening paragraph Coleridge calls it an "exculpation" of his literary career, which will turn out to be the pursuit of genius (I, 5), which turns out to be characterized by the imagination and the will, which, of course, turn out to be the characteristics of Self, Spirit in its highest form. John Shawcross called Biographia "his religious biography in miniature up to 1818."4

2. John Henry Newman, "Advertisement to University Subjects," Idea, 245. 3. Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value ofthe Individual Self: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 1. 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., ed.John Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), I, cxxxv.

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Kathleen Wheeler suggests that "there are several indications in the Biographia that Coleridge regarded it as his own account of the growth of a poet's mind." 5 Newman's Apologia might well be called a "biographia literaria," for it is in fact a detailed guide through his writings between 1826 and 1845,just as Coleridge's text is a guided tour through his philosophic and religious investigations and writings (which range from poetry, essays, lectures to-as later generations would learn-voluminous notebooks and marginalia that were regularly mined for publishable material). Both lives reveal a pattern of the developing or individuating self, a pattern that would in a sense become a public or prophetic pattern insofar as the style of writings invites the reader to a similar conversion. Coleridge's personal pattern shows how reflection on imaginative genius leads to reflection on imagination itself, which leads to reflection on will, which, of course, is the foundation of selfhood, Spirit. Precisely because it is immaterial, the development of Self, of Spirit, that is, its process of progressive individuation, is not a deterministic evolutionary process but, as we have seen, one directed by moral choice, free will, conscience. Similarly Newman's purpose is to show the consistent pattern of personal moral and religious development which lay beneath the apparent discontinuity, if not disingenuousness, that a large part of the English public perceived in his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. Finally, both are written not only to give the reader a tour of the mind that produced certain writings but also to edifY readers by drawing them into the penetralia of a human spirit on its journey to infinite Spirit. In spite of the differences between these autobiographies, stemming from the differences between two powerful personalities, they both stress the growth and development of the human spirit under the guiding force of conscience and, ultimately, a personal revealing God. In both writers conscience is related to imagination. As early as 1796 Coleridge had written that "what Nature demands, she will supply, asking for it that portion only of Toil, which would otherwise have been necessary Exercise: But Providence, which has distinguished Man from the lower order of Being by the progressiveness of his nature, forbids him to be contented. It has given us the reckless faculty of Imagination" (Watchman, 31). Newman would also give the imagination a central role in the Grammar ofAssent. Writing to Wordsworth about "our progressive nature," 5. Kathleen Wheeler, Sources, Processes, and Method in Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 192, n. 15.

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Coleridge suggested that human beings have moral and religious instincts analogous to those of animals. We have already seen that both Coleridge and Newman held that conscience was connatural or instinctive. I take this, then, to mean that a human being is, in part, indeterminate and undetermined, in the sense that Ray Hart writes about "unfinished man and the imagination." 6 At the biological level of nature we reach a limited, finite point of individuation, a point after which decay and decline inevitably set in. At a higher level, which Coleridge and Newman would call "spiritual," our human individuation is determined in a greater or lesser degree by free choice, as opportunity allows. It is imagination that not only contains potential for change but helps us create or at least recognize endless possibilities; and it is conscience which, seeing the options, prompts us freely to choose. Coleridge and Newman wrote for the similar English audiences described in Chapter 1: educated and increasingly materialistic and mechanistic in their views of the world. Both men were making a case for the validity of concepts crucial to the credibility of any revealed religion: spirit, freedom, conscience. Coleridge's narrative account is more elusive and less satisfactory because his course was so vast and circuitous. Newman's is more direct and polished because it follows a straight chronological line in addressing a specific immediate accusation. In 1818 Coleridge was middle-aged and still searching; in 1864 Newman was growing old, in his own estimation, having long since found his lasting home. Describing his conversion of twenty years earlier he said "it was like coming into port after a rough sea" (Apo, 213). His life would be troubled but not in the fundamental areas of belief and choice of religious communion.

II The commentary and criticism that have focused on Biographia Literaria over the past fifty years, culminating in the Bate and Engell edition in the Collected Coleridge, attest to the perennial interest in what is admittedly one of the central documents in the history of English literary criticism. The consensus has shifted over the years from accusations of total 6. Ray L. Hart, Urifinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric

ofRevelation (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968). See especially 17G-79.

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disarray to expositions of pronounced unity and organization.? In my reading of the text I am clearly drawing on this rich abundance of commentaries; but I will for my own purposes suggest the following pattern of analysis: (1) Biographia Literaria, particularly Volume I, is primarily an autobiographical narrative, in spite of its original purpose as a preface to his poems and in spite of Coleridge's vexingly digressive movement through his life; (2) central to that narrative is concern about the reconciliation between the head and the heart; (3) concern with this reconciliation, in general, moves everything toward a discussion of the imagination; and, in spite of its disappointing brevity, Chapter 13 offers central insights into the imagination, which are presented and intimately linked with his Logosophia or Magnum Opus, for the imagination, like God, is a principle of growth and creativity; and (4) precisely because the imagination is a principle of growth and creativity, "godlike" in its power, it is intimately related not only to literary creativity but also to radical personal creativity, which arises from radical personal freedom and is therefore related to conscience. Thus, art, religion, and morality, though distinct, are often inseparable. In his eighth lecture on Shakespeare, for example, Coleridge says that "it is impossible to pay a higher compliment to Poetry than to consider it in the effects which it has in common with Religion and distinct as far as distinction can be, where there is no division in those qualities which Religion exercises & diffuses over all mankind as far as they are subject to its influence." Helping human beings to transcend their senses, poetry and religion "both have for their object (he knew not whether the English language supplies an appropriate word) the perfecting, the pointing out to us the indefinite improvement of our nature, & fixing our attention upon that." 8 Letters and notebook entries dating from 1803 show that the idea of an autobiography had been taking shape in Coleridge's mind for a long

7. Besides Catherine Miles Wallace's Design ofBiographia Literaria (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983) and Kathleen Wheeler's Sources, Processes, and Method in Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria," I am also indebted to Jerome Christensen's Coleridge's Blessed Machine ofLanguage (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), and to the introduction and commentary by editors Walter Jackson Bate and James Engell in their edition of Biographia Literaria, in vol. 7 of The Collected Works ofSamuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983-). 8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, vol. 5 of The Collected Works, 2 vols., ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), I, 325-26. Cited hereafter as Lect.

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time. 9 Early letters and notebook entries also show the regularity with which Coleridge talked about his Magnum Opus. 10 In Biographia Literaria these intentions converge-the life story and the life work come together with a teasing suggestiveness. We learn more about the former than the latter, but it is clear that Coleridge saw the autobiography as an initial stage of the Magnum Opus. In September 1815 he wrote to John Gutch: "The Autobiography I regard as the main work: tho' the Sybilline Leaves will contain every poem, I have written, except the Christabel which is not finished-both because I think that my Life &c will be more generally interesting, and because it will be a Pioneer to the great work on the Logos, Divine and Human, on which I have set my Heart and hope to ground my ultimate reputation" ( CL, IV, 585). Coleridge frequently reminds his readers of the narrative nature of the book, explicitly asserting that his whole life is a movement toward the great synthesis of omne scibile in his Logosophia or commentary on St. John's Gospel. He wrote Joseph Cottle in March 1815 that "the common end of all narrative, nay, of all, Poems is to convert a series into a whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion-the snake with it's [sic] Tail in its Mouth" (CL, IV, 545). The subtitle modestly describes Biographia as "Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions." His discussion of Schelling, Kant, and mystical writers in Chapter 9 is justified because he would be ungrateful (and perhaps disingenuous) not to acknowledge such powerful influences "in an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions" (BL, I, 152). Parenthetically, this might suggest that the plagiarisms are implicitly acknowledged here. He admits a "genial coincidence" of thought between himself and Schelling because such an attribution is both "appropriate to the narrative nature of this sketch" (BL, I, 161) and supportive of his originality in the light of the "forthcoming" Logosophia. In giving advice to young authors he finds it appropriate to mention his struggles with The Friend "in a biography of my literary life"; yet within a few lines he apologetically calls the biography only a "semi-narrative"

9. Catherine Miles Wallace discusses this point and surveys the bibliography in Design ofBiographia Literaria, 2.

10. See Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 190-255; and Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 342-81.

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(BL, I, 175). These apologies continue. The anecdote about the spy sent to keep an eye on the democratic radicals is entitled to a place "in my literary life" (BL, I, 195). In alluding to the personal pain he has experienced from the "rumour of having dreamt away my life to no purpose," he is confident that such a private matter does have a place "in a sketch of my literary life" (BL, I, 221). He concludes Volume I with an apologetic admission that from a title page which announces "My Literary Life and Opinions" a reader could hardly "have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long treatise on ideal Realism, which holds the same relation in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato" (BL, I, 303). In Volume II, looking back from his "late years," he says "I would fain present myself to the Reader as I was in the first dawn of my literary life" (BL, II, 159). And later as Biographia meanders to a close, Coleridge reflects on the possibly "exemplary" character of his life. Chastened by the "ludicrous effect" of one autobiographer's phrase, "the eventful Life which I am about to record," he will nevertheless continue to reflect and write about his life, will even publish it "if continued reflection should strengthen my present belief, that my history would add its contingent to the enforcement of one important truth, viz. that we must not only love our neighbours as ourselves, but ourselves likewise as our neighbours, and that we can do neither unless we love God above us" (BL, II, 237). Thus the religious motive that underlies the whole of Biographia is seen to be not only informative but hortatory. Cannot, then, Biographia be seen as belonging to the "confessional mode" which Frank McConnell attributes to The Prelude and to the tradition of English spiritual autobiography with which Linda Peterson associates the Apologia ?11 In the concluding paragraph Coleridge writes: "This has been my Object, and this alone can be my Defence-and 0! that with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude! The unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against the temptations of Scorners, by shewing that the Scheme of Christianity, as taught in the Liturgy and Homilies of our Church, though not

11. Frank McConnell, The Corifessionallmagination:A ReadingofWordsworth's Prelude (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Linda H. Peterson, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition ofSelfInterpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 93-119.

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discoverable by human Reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own Horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation; even as the Day softens away into the sweet Twilight, and Twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the Darkness" (BL, II, 247). 12 On the very first page of Biographia, the reader will remember, Coleridge had said that "I used the narration chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work'' (BL, I, 5). And what the reader does in fact encounter is the continuous growth of Coleridge from his rhetorical training as a boy at Christ's Hospital, through his discovery of Wordsworth, on into the years of philosophical exploration, until one is finally aware of the forty-three-year-old man desperately trying to bring everything together in a massive synthesis that explains and justifies Christianity and, of course, his own Christian faith. One of the principal antagonists of the Christian faith, as we saw in Chapter 1, was the separation of thought and affectivity, morality and religion, knowing and doing-in short, the separation of the head and the heart later so poignantly portrayed in novels like Hard Times. One should not be surprised, then, to find the reconciliation of head and heart running thematically throughout Biographia Literaria. His early readings of English poetry convinced him that "our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion, and passionate flow of poetry, to the subtleties of the intellect, and to the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet unbroken and heterogeneous imagery, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery" (BL, I, 24). The true balance appears in Bowles and Cowper, who "were to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the head with the heart" (BL, I, 25). Thus, there also recurs that pronounced preference for the Renaissance over the Enlightenment. When he discovers Wordsworth, it is "the union of deep feeling with profound thought" (BL, I, 80) that catches his attention. That the literary narrative is following the life closely is evident from the recurrence of this theme in his letters. The passage here about 12. Behind a statement like this lies yet another of Coleridge's many polarities. Here it is continuity with the distinctness of parts, a topic admirably treated by Anya Taylor in Coleridge's Defense ifthe Human (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 36-60.

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Wordsworth echoes his letter of 1804 to Richard Sharp: "And I dare affirm that he will hereafter be admitted as the first & greatest Philosophical Poet-the only man who has effected a compleat and constant synthesis of Thought & Feeling, and combined them with Poetic Forms, with the music of pleasurable passion and with Imagination or the modifying Power in the highest sense of the word" ( CL, II, 1034). In 1801 he told Thomas Poole that "My opinion is this-that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation'' ( CL, II, 709). "How infinitely more to be valued is Integrity of Heart than Effulgence oflntellect," he wrote Southey in 1794 ( CL, I, 138). In 1822 he wrote John Murray that Bishop Leighton had "above all, the rare and vital Union of Head and Heart, of Light and Love, in his own character" (CL, V, 198-99). In discussing his obligation to the mystical writers, he says it is their "fullness of heart and intellect" that recommends them for his project, for "they contributed to keep alive the heart in the head" (BL, I, 151-52). Struggling to reconcile "I am" with "it is," "personality with infinity," he says "My head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John'' (BL, I, 201). This association of the heart with St. John is, of course, what underlies his frequent references to the Magnum Opus as his Logosophia, which is usually described appositively as "a detailed Commentary on the Gospel of StJohn" ( CL, IV, 589). Somehow he would one day show that the Logos was a reconciliation of head and heart, objectivity and subjectivity. In his presentation of his thoughts on religion and politics, he asserts the relationship between a good heart and belief (BL, I, 203) and speaks of"that fortunate inconsequence of our nature, which permits the heart to rectify the errors of the understanding" (BL, I, 217). Finally, in his discussion of the Lyrical Ballads, he alludes to the subjects apportioned to Wordsworth, whose "meditative and feeling mind" would "seek after them, or ... notice them, when they present themselves" (BL, II, 6). Wordsworth's poems were, in turn, received "chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds" (BL, II, 9). At this point the reader realizes that Coleridge is moving into the realm of poetic genius, where thought and feeling are fused, head and heart joined in a fruitful creativity. Shakespeare's genius arises from the fact that he "first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge become habitual and intuitive wedded itself to his habitual feelings" (BL, II, 27). Thus, whether the topic is poetry, politics, philosophy, or religion, the principles involved in explaining them are the

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same: there is a reconciliation of thought and feeling. Something must be discovered within the human person, some power that can reconcile all these opposites and ultimately reconcile the human person and the Divine Other-"personeity" and divinity. Where best discover that power but in the person who possesses it to an unusual degree: the genius? Coleridge's encounter with "genius" occurs early in his life through his reading and writing of poetry and through his early struggles with prose composition under the instruction of the meticulously demanding James Boyer. From Boyer he learned "that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes" (BL, I, 9). At the same time Boyer's method of teaching composition impressed on Coleridge the organic relationship of parts and whole by making him justifY "why this or that sentence might not have found an appropriate place under this or that other thesis" (BL, I, 11). What quality is it that good poets or prose writers have that enables them to create thematic unity out of a multitude of ideas, words, and sentences? It is, of course, the quality discovered in Cowper and Bowles, who were the first among contemporary poets "who combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head" (BL, I, 25). Here are the first intimations of what the person of genius, the person of imagination, can do: create unity out of diversity, reconcile opposites. Such a process is not passive or mechanical; it is active, creative, and free. It is a microcosm in the human person of both the divine act of creation and the "progressiveness" of human beings which I discussed in Chapter 2. In a lecture of3 March 1818, Coleridge says that "In the imagination of man exist the seeds of all moral and scientific improvement.... The imagination is the distinguishing characteristic of man as a progressive being; and I repeat that it ought to be carefully guided and strengthened as the indispensable means and instrument of continued amelioration and refinement." 13 We can perhaps now see how profoundly Coleridge's theory of imagination as the "dim analogue of creation" ( CL, II, 1034) permeates his entire body of thought. God creates human beings, creatures who are essentially progressive, evolving and developing, tending toward individuation. Human beings in turn, at least those geniuses gifted

13. Coleridge,Lect., 1809-1819, 193.

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with highly developed imaginations, create, render order and beauty (cosmos) out of the perceived disorder of human experience (chaos). The circuitous sojourn through associationism and German transcendentalism was a search for a philosophical foundation for what was, in fact, a youthful insight, arrived at in his early teens at Christ Hospital. The beginning of this youthful literary odyssey was delayed if not sidetracked by a precocious interest in metaphysics and theological controversy at fifteen years of age. Yet even the metaphysical pursuits were directed by the autobiographical impulse of his central insight into the reconciliation of the head and the heart. He later wrote Southey that "a metaphysical Solution that does not instantly tell for something in the Heart, is grievously to be suspected as apocry[p ]hal" ( CL, II, 961). In the rest of Volume II literary, metaphysical, and religious concerns merge under the common denominator of imagination. Thus it should be no surprise that, as the rest of the life story unfolds, the study of imagination shifts from a literary, to a philosophical, and then to a religious and moral emphasis. Since so much excellent commentary has already demonstrated the order and consistency of Coleridge's manner of proceeding in Biographia Literaria, 14 my sole purpose here is to trace the religious dimension of that process, even though Coleridge's professed primary purpose is to define the imagination in Volume I as a preparation for an evaluation ofWordsworth's poetry in Volume II. In turning to what must be called Coleridge's religious preoccupation, it might be well to reflect in a Coleridgean manner on the question of audience. Few modern readers, I suspect, will be sensitive to Coleridge'sand Newman's-lifelong interest in matters religious. How many fifteenyear-old boys or girls, whether those who lived in the eighteenth century or those living in the twenty-first century, would find themselves, like Coleridge, "bewildered ... in metaphysics, and in theological controversy" (BL, I, 15), or like Newman find themselves fallen "under the influence of a definite Creed, and received into [their] intellect impressions of dogma, which through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured" (Apo, 16)? Contemporary critical thought is, in fact, largely deaf or indifferent to the claims or concerns of religion. Denis Donoghue has aptly observed that "in the received discourse surrounding literature and art it is nearly universally assumed that no intelligent man or woman

14. I refer especially to Wallace's and Wheeler's work.

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can retain a religious belief." 15 It might be well for modern readers to reflect on Basil Willey's advice, offered thirty years ago, that "it is salutary, I think, when reading modern Coleridge critics to whom his religion is 'irrelevant,' or a tiresome extra, to remember that to Coleridge himself it was the raison d'etre of everything else." 16 A brief sketch of the atmosphere in which Coleridge and Newman a generation later were raised might make the modern reader more sensitive, if not more open, to their ideas. Coleridge's father was an ordained minister, as was Mr. Boyer, Coleridge's teacher at Christ Hospital. Religious controversy was in the air, and piety pervaded middle-class domestic life. In school Mr. Boyer not only taught his boys how to write but assigned the topics for their compositions. If the selections of student writing in Boyer's Liber Aureus, a manuscript volume in the British Library, is typical, it is clear that religion and morality were a steady diet for his young charges. Of the seven essays contributed by Coleridge between 1788 and 1791 all would be characterized as "moralizing" by the standards of modern sensibility. One can, for example, hear in the sixteenyear-old writer early intimations of his later claim that purity of heart is necessary for clarity of intellect: "But it is impossible that Reason should dwell in the mind of the Luxurious; over whom passions have absolute Command. For how could it preserve its necessary authority, when the body is debilitated by Disease and unruly appetites inflamed to madness by wine?"1 7 It is not surprising that the writer of such essays was "highly delighted, if any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with me. For I soon found the means of directing it to my favorite subjects Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end in wandering mazes lost" (BL, I, 16). 15. Denis Donoghue, "Speaking to Whom?" in In All Things: Religious Faith and American Culture, ed. Robert E. Daly, S.J. (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1990), 154. John W. O'Malley, S.J., sees a similar attitude in contemporary historical studies of religious institutions and practices, where historians overlook a deeper, more subjective human dimension of religion. O'Malley says such an attitude "is symptomatic of a larger current in academia today that holds suspect-or seems wholly unskilled in dealing with-the sublime, the self-transcending, the wondrous." Trent and All That (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 140. 16. Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 93. 17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Liber Aureus, vol. 3, 1786-1799, BM Ashley Index 3506, folio 4.

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Only the warm acceptance of the Evans family and his discovery of Bowles's sonnets momentarily drew him away from such heady religious and philosophical musings. Thus one should not be unduly perplexed that this literary biography is "still more an introduction to the statement of my principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy," as well as "the applications of the rules deduced from philosophic principles, to poetry and criticism." 18 The Biographia is indeed a narrative summary of Coleridge's major life venture. George Steiner, with typical astuteness, places that venture clearly within the context of the philosophic enterprise of the age. After asking "What season of the mind in European history has been more implosive with philosophic elan than that which follows immediately on Kant's first two Critiques," he concludes that "Coleridge heard these voices prophesying not only war but a fundamental liberation of the spirit and was to make of them the substance ofhis search." 19 Granting all the problems of influences, borrowings, and possible plagiarisms, Biographia is nonetheless an honest record of"the substance of his search," a search that was more far-reaching than the establishment of a literary theory on philosophic principles. The treatment of genius also has strongly religious overtones. The phrase, "the creative, and self-sufficing power of absolute Genius" (BL, I, 31), is echoed in "the sacred power of self-intuition, of the philosophic imagination" (I, 241), in the human imagination as a participation in "the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" (I, 304); and, of course in Wordsworth's "the vision and the faculty divine." 20 The man of genius "lives in the ideal world" (BL, I, 43), and Wordsworth's poetry plumbs "the depth and height of the ideal world" (BL, I, 80). In the same vein, Coleridge's defense of Southey's literary genius becomes an encomium of his moral character: he is a man of conscience. Finally, Wordsworth's poetic genius attracts "a company of almost religious admirers" (BL, I, 75).

18. BL, I, 5. The subtitle of The Friend is A Series ifEssays in three volumes To Aid in the Formation ofFixed Principles in Politics, Morals, and Religion with Literary Amusements Interspersed. In The Friend, 2 vols., ed. Barbara Rooke, vol. 4 of The Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). Cited hereafter as Friend. This title not only anticipates Biographia Literaria but also Aids to Reflection. 19. George Steiner, "The Total Experience," Times Literary Supplement, 4 May 1993,3. 20. William Wordsworth, The Excursion, in Poetical Works, I, 79.

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He might name his first son after Hartley and acknowledge the philosopher's personal loyalty to Christianity, but Coleridge's treatment of associationism stresses the point that its mechanistic basis is inimical to religion. The chapters on associationism are, in fact, a fulfillment of an 1809 notebook entry in which he states that "it will be my business to set forth an orderly proof, that Atheism is the necessary Consequence or Corollary of the Hartleian Theory of the Will conjoined with his Theory of Thought & Action in genere. "21 In like manner Hume's degradation of the notion of cause and effect contributed "to the equal degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology" (BL, I, 121). Coleridge describes the period between his rejection of associationism and all other materialistic philosophies and his discovery of Kant and the German idealists as a time of conversion. ''A more thorough revolution of my philosophic principles, and a deeper insight into my own heart were yet wanting," he confesses, adding that "the difference of my metaphysical notions from those of Unitarians in general contributed to my final re-conversion to the whole truth of Christ." He concludes by comparing his state of mind to that of Augustine when he discovers "certain Platonic philosophers" who saved him from pantheism (BL, I, 205). Thus, like Newman and other autobiographers, he associates his conversion with Augustine, who had in turn associated his conversion with that of Saint Paul. In her study of autobiography and biblical narrative, Heather Henderson points out that Augustine's "autobiography illustrates the way in which the telling of every 'life story' requires a conversion for its climax-otherwise the story has no plot, and the telling of it no point."22 In this "confessional" dimension of Biographia Literaria we thus find a further confirmation of its predominantly narrative character. Coleridge now addresses his "studies to the foundation of religion and morals," because he is convinced that "religion, as both the corner-stone and the key-stone of morality must have a moral origin," and "evidence of its doctrines could not ... be wholly independent of the will" (BL, I, 200). Just as his experience of and reflection on genius pointed to the will as a prerequisite, religion too requires will, radical human freedom. It is, of course, in the German idealists, Schelling in particular, that he finds a foundational philosophy for his 21. CN, III, Series 3587, Entry 43. 22. Heather Henderson, The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 9.

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theory of artistic creativity, radical human freedom, and consequent moral and religious obligation. At this point Coleridge returns to his recurring concern about his readers' ability to stay with him. Some readers will consider this concern, together with the intrusion of the "letter from a friend," as a smoke screen intended to mask his inability or unwillingness to bring the matter of imagination to closure. Others, more sympathetic with the elusive nature of imagination and the fundamental difficulty of speaking about transcendent reality and mystery, might find his concerns more genuine. But his pattern of concern about audience and communication is too persistent to brush off. At the end of Chapter 6, philosophical discussion passes over into religious territory, as Bate and Engell acknowledge (BL, I, 114n.). "Yea," says Coleridge, "in the very nature of a living spirit it may be more possible that heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living chain of causes, to all whose links, conscious or unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute self, is co-extensive and co-present." He concludes abruptly that at this point "it is profanation to speak of these mysteries" (BL, I, 114). The passage from Plotinus that concludes Chapter 6 deserves close attention. Coleridge's translation at one point runs as follows: "To those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is the countenance of justice and wisdom .... For in order to direct the view aright, it behooves the beholder should have made himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld" (BL, I, 115). "Congenerous" translates the Greek suggenes, which means akin, congenital, innate, or, more probably in this context, connatural. This connatural instinct is here associated with imagination. In Chapter 2 we saw that Coleridge and Newman spoke of conscience or moral self-awareness as a connatural instinct, a connatural potential that must be activated by an interpersonal social dynamic. The passage from Plotinus anticipates two passages that appear later. In defending the religious genius of unlettered mystics like Boehme, Coleridge responds that "it requires deeper feeling, and a stronger imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom reasoning and fluent expression have been as a trade learnt since boyhood, to conceive with what might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the perception of a new and vital TRUTH takes possession of an uneducated man of genius. His meditations are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or the everlasting; for' the world is not his friend, nor the world's law"'(BL, I, 150). This distinction between the worldly and the otherworldly man

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appears in a letter, appended to Constitution ofChurch and State, in which Coleridge introduces Demosius the Toutocosmite, the man of sense and understanding, Mystes the Allocosmite, and the man of Reason, a Heterocosmite who lives in a world of fancy ( C&S, 165). Anya Taylor neatly sums up this triadic relationship: "The Toutocosmite believes that this material world is the only one. The Heterocosmite, who is a shadow of the Toutocosmite, lives exclusively and ascetically in the other world. These two represent the extremes. At the mediating point, the Allowsmite lives in the spiritual world without abandoning this world."2 3 I would only add that in terms of another set of Coleridgean distinctions the Toutocosmite lives in a tautological world of the literal. In between, the Allocosmite lives in the tautegorical world of symbol and imagination. At the other extreme are the Heterocosmites, pseudo-mystics or phantasts, who live in a false world of allegory (metaphor) and fancy, the result of an unproductive individuality and inwardness. Only Allocosmites are capable of taking the step from reason to Higher Reason and faith without relinquishing the world of sense and understanding. Those closing words echo a passage, to which I drew attention earlier, about the person who discovers within himself the potentiality which can become "philosophic imagination," and whom worldlings scorn with "contradictory feelings of pity and respect" when they say, "poor man! He is not made for this world" (BL, I, 242). Further on, pointing out that even "our most popular philosophy" would be unintelligible to an Esquimaux or New Zealander because "the sense, the inward organ, for it is not yet born in him," he directly addresses the English reading public: "So is there many a one among us, yes, and some who think themselves philosophers too, to whom the philosophic organ is entirely wanting. To such a man, philosophy is a mere play of words and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf, or like the geometry of light to the blind" (BL, I, 251). The process is coming full circle at this point. Here one must recall what Coleridge said of metaphysics to Southey ("a metaphysical Solution that does not instantly tell upon the heart, is grievously to be suspected as apocryphal") to appreciate what he means by the philosophic imagination and the growing contemporary insensitivity to genuine philosophy. "For as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only," Coleridge contends, "but the science of BEING altogether, its primary ground can

23. Anya Taylor, Coleridge's Defense ofthe Human, 184.

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be neither merely speculative or merely practical, but both in one" (BL, I, 252). Philosophy, like religion and art, must reconcile head and heart; but this we have seen is the work of genius, and genius is characterized by an unusual degree of imagination. Before saying a final word about imagination, I would point out that Coleridge's religious concerns arch across both volumes even though the substance of Volume II is devoted to a critique ofWordsworth's poetry. The "friend's" cautionary epistle warns that publication of the Biographia will remind Coleridge "ofBishop Berkeley's Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar- Water, which beginning with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace" (BL, I, 303). Coleridge is being either hugely ironic or delightfully humorous, for what better describes Biographia, which after its narrative meanderings, philosophical disquisitions, and critique ofWordsworth ends, even as Newman's Essay on Development ends, with a traditional Christian warning that night is drawing near when the devout soul should have her eyes fixed on God alone, THEO MONO DOXA? The clear echo of the I Am who grounds the primary imagination, at the end of Volume I, must be obvious to all readers. In Biographia Literaria the way imagination functions in the religious dimension oflife is subordinated to its function in artistic creativity, but the subsequent chapters will show how imagination is also the essential link between finite and transcendent reality, between human beings and God, and in fact between human beings through the phenomenon of love. When Coleridge turns later to more exclusively religious concerns, "imagination" gives way to "Higher Reason," for the same reasons, I suspect, that Newman eventually substituted the term "real" for "imaginative" when writing about religious apprehension and assent.

III If Biographia Literaria is an "exculpation" of an apparently wasted literary life that reveals to its general readership what they could not knownamely Coleridge's incessant and voracious devouring ofbooks in preparation for his Magnum Opus-by tracing his years of schooling, reading, and reflecting, the Apologia explores Newman's life to explain why his conversion to Rome was a gradual and genuine development and not, as Charles Kingsley and others suspected, a sudden and disingenuous switch of allegiance motivated by personal disappointment and hurt.

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The single point of the Apologia is that Newman followed his conscience throughout the extended process of religious conversion described in his narrative, a process that also depicts a deeper and richer concept of conscience than the word normally denotes. After a brilliant preface, laying out the state of the question, and an equally brilliant opening chapter in which he plants the seeds for each theme that will unfold in the rest of the narrative, Newman guides his readers through his thoughts and writings between 1833 and 1845, showing that with hindsight one could have predicted where he was "tending." That some contemporaries, at least, were, even in the early 1830s, aware of his "catholic tendencies" is abundantly documented, not only in the Apologia but also in other sources. For example, his first book, The Arians rfthe Fourth Century, published in 1833, at the dawn of the Oxford Movement, had originally been commissioned as a volume in a series on the early church; but it was published separately because the editors found it "more favourable to Roman writers" than they "should like to put forward in the Theological Library."24 My reading of the Apologia is based on the second edition of 1865, in which Newman sharpened the rhetorical effect of his narrative by consolidating and relegating to appendices the preliminary controversial correspondence between Kingsley and himself and by referring to Kingsley only as an anonymous "adversary." Newman shapes Kingsley's original, more general and vaguer, charges into the blunter and more specific accusation that he was a liar. 25 "The charge ofUntruthfulness" (mentioned three times) becomes the jarring "he called me a liar' (Apo, 11), and Newman concludes the preface by saying "but I do not like to be called to my face a liar and a knave; nor should I be doing my duty to my faith or my name, ifi were to suffer it" (Apo, 14). Critics, then and now, have claimed Newman was being disingenuous if not deceitful in thus restating the charge;26 but it certainly

24. William Rowe Lyall, one of the editors, writing to Hugh James Rose, in LD, III, 105. See my "Newman and the English Theologians," Faith and Reason 15 (1989), 81. 25. In his original review essay Kingsley had written "Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so" (Apo, 341). 26. G. Egner, Apologia pro Charles Kingsley (London: Sheed and Ward, 1969). This book has always struck me as a cranky, mean-spirited refusal to accept Newman at his word.

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is clear that in doing so he set up a perfect opponen~ne who allows him to defend the integrity of his conscience and the continuity of his religious development over a thirty-three-year period as well as the reasonableness of his decision to switch allegiances from Canterbury to Rome. In telling his life story Newman says he "will be doing my duty to my faith and my name" (Apo, 13). Private conversion takes on prophetic dimensions. Personal duty and public theory of development of doctrine intersect. Newman wastes no words in summarizing the first thirty-three years of his life. Whereas Coleridge's abstract philosophical manner tends to obfuscate the clarity of biographical events, Newman's concrete historical manner dramatizes with dazzling clarity specific telling moments. The Biographia is ultimately about the growth of a mind, but the Apologia explicitly establishes that point at the outset. A brief passage from Newman's conversion novel, written three years after the publication of the Essay on Development, summarizes that document and anticipates the main point of the Apologia. Inside the thoughts of the hero, Charles Reding, the narrator observes that "it was impossible to stop the growth of the mind. Here was Charles with his thoughts turned away from religious controversy for two years, yet with his religious views progressing, unknown to himself, the whole time."27 Chapter 1 has pronounced Wordsworthian echoes. 28 It is Newman's "fair seed time" which contains spots of time that will affect his future life. Incidents, books, and persons left a "deeper impression on my mind" (Apo, 18). Ideas were "planted deep in my mind," or "took root in my mind, or "produced a deep impression on me ... planting in me the seeds 27. John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story ifa Convert (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 202. 28. Newman's familiarity with Wordsworth's poetry is suggested by references to the poet throughout his life. In 1839 he wrote an essay, cited in the Apologia, in which he calls Southey and Wordsworth poets "who have addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings [instilled by Coleridge], and carried forward their readers in the same direction" (Apo, 94). In 1845, speaking of the "conservative action of the past," Newman says that "the bodily structure of man is not merely that of a magnified boy; he differs from what he was in his make and proportions; still manhood is the perfection of boyhood, adding something of its own, yet keeping what it finds" (Dev, 419-20). This is clearly an echo of"My Heart Leaps Up." In 1860, writing about the lives of the saints, he says a real life is "a narrative which impresses the reader with the idea of moral unity, identity, growth, continuity, and personality." Historical Sketches, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), II, 227. Cited hereafter as HS. Finally, in 1872 Newman said that "Wordsworth's Ode ["Intimations oflmmortality"] is one of the most beautiful poems in our language" (LD, XXXVI, 56).

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of an intellectual inconsistency" (Apo, 18-20). The words "influence" and "impression" occur over and over, as they do in the early books of The Prelude, although there is no evidence he ever read that autobiographical poem. Recollections from early childhood recall vague, subtle, unconscious Catholic influences-thoughts of angels, a childhood sketch of what seems to be a rosary, the stray mention of the very few Catholic acquaintances or neighbors during his boyhood. The narrative proceeds quickly to the pivotal conversion of1816, in which he experiences, at fifteen years of age, divine election confirming "me in my mistrust of the reality of material phenomena, and making me rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator" (Apo, 18). Thus the young boy has had a religious experience confirming him in the belief of a transcendent reality, a belief that would never leave him. To this fundamental belief would be added, by a slow process of accretion, still more guiding principles, of which I give here only the highlights. From the evangelical writer Thomas Scott, who "made a deeper impression on my mind than any other," he garnered two maxims which anticipate his insistence on the priority of conscience and his theory of doctrinal development: " 'Holiness rather than peace,' and 'Growth the only evidence oflife'" (Apo, 19). This fundamental spirit of unworldliness, perhaps more positively called otherworldliness, echoes Coleridge's "Allocosmite," the man capable of rising to the philosophic imagination. Next he falls under the influence of Bishop Butler's writings, which taught him the doctrines of analogy and probability. These teachings would lead to the Essay on Development in 1845. Finally there was the personal influence of Dr. Whately, who "not only taught me to think, but to think for myself" (Apo, 24), an intellectual stance that would lead both to the Idea of a University in 1852 and the Grammar ofAssent in 1870. At the height of his success in these youthful years, in 1827, he experienced a Coleridgean crisis caused by the separation of the head and the heart. At the very moment of great academic achievement he confesses: "the truth is, I was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral; I was drifting in the direction of the Liberalism of the day" (Apo, 26). His encounter here at twenty-six with Liberalism anticipates Chapter 5, which is devoted largely to refuting Liberalism. At this time in 1827, while suffering from the shock of"two great blows-illness and bereavement," he says that "by this time I was under the influences

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ofJohn Keble and Hurrell Froude" (Apo, 26), who would over the course of time lead him from his low evangelical leanings to the High Church school and the seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholic writers. The "second intellectual principle" received from Keble complements Bishop Butler's teaching that "probability is the guide oflife" (Apo, 30). This principle ascribes "the firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, not to the probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of faith and love which accepted it." Thus, "it is faith and love which give to probability a force which it has not in itself" (Apo, 30). In expanding on this principle Newman presents a synopsis of the theory developed six years later in Grammar ofAssent that explicitly shapes the head versus heart controversy of Chapter 5. We read six times in one paragraph that the possession of certitude in matters of religion is "a plain duty," "a matter of duty," arrived at "conscientiously, and under a sense of duty" (Apo, 32). Lastly, Newman says, the "remaining sources of my opinions" are the Fathers of the early Church. The recurring presence of the patristic influence in the Apologia is paralleled by a seafaring metaphor that runs throughout the narrative of his middle years. In accepting a commission to write the study of the Council ofNicea (Arians ofthe Fourth Century), Newman says that "it was to launch myself on an ocean with currents innumerable" (Apo, 35). "The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away" (Apo, 36). When the twelve-year journey ended in 1845 with his conversion to Rome, "it was like coming into port after a rough sea" (Apo, 214). In his study of the Council of Nicea, into which he entered with remarkable empathy, he found himself drawn more to the allegorizing of the Alexandrians than to the rationalism of the school of Antioch, confessing that "my preference for the Personal to the Abstract would naturally lead me to this view" (Apo, 38). "This view," of course, flows from the principle that "the argument from Probability, in matters of religion, became an argument from Personality, which in fact is one form of the argument from Authority" (Apo, 30). The "heart" was beginning to regain a balance with the "head." In the final pages of the chapter, compressing and proleptically summarizing what will be examined in detail in the rest of the narrative, Newman describes his discovery of the early Church in the language of revelation and conversion. In the Church's "triumphant zeal on behalf of the Primeval Mystery, to which I had had so great a devotion from my youth, I recognized the movement of a

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Spiritual Mother. 'Incessu patuit Dea'" (Apo, 40). 29 The Virgilian citation, one of several in the narrative, along with the seafaring metaphors, subtly transforms one man's private journey from Canterbury to Rome into an epic tale of a hero, representative of a whole people, following a course which duty and conscience have imposed upon him. 30 This is a man on a mission. 31 Having just described the insight gained from his reading of the early Fathers to be like the Virgilian divine revelation to be faithful to duty, he narrates his preparations to leave for the continent in 1832, after the history of the Arians had gone to press. Personal quest and public service merge: "I naturally was led to think that some inward changes, as well as some large course of action were coming upon me" (Apo, 41). In Rome, prior to his near fatal illness in Sicily, he says "I began to think I had a mission," and at this point literal and metaphoric journeys merge into one. The last paragraph begins: "I was aching to get home; yet for want of a vessel I was kept at Palermo for three weeks" (Apo, 43). The ensuing chapters not only recount in great detail that religious intellectual journey but stress over and over the fact that the man on the journey was driven by a twofold force: conscience or duty, and the gradually evolving theory of doctrinal development that would eventually bear him on a steady current to Rome.

29. In The Aeneid the hero recognizes his disguised mother, Venus, because "her gait alone proved her a goddess." Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. W. F. Jackson Knight (London: Penguin, 1956), 40. 30. It is tempting to suggest that Newman might have quite appropriately used as an epigraph on the title page of the Apologia Aeneas's terse response to Dido's question about why he could not remain in Carthage: "Italiam non sponte sequor" (It is not by my own choice that I voyage onward to Italy''). Aeneid, 108. 31. The classical analysis of the Apologia remains Walter Houghton's The Art of Newman's Apologia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945). The richly metaphoric texture of the narrative has prompted many studies of archetypal patterns, epic and biblical, in the Apologia. These studies tend to be complementary rather than contradictory. See, for example, Martin J. Svaglic, "The Structure of Newman's Apologia," PMLA 66 (1951):138-48; Robert E. Colby, "The Poetic Structure of Newman's Apologia pro Vita sua," journal ofReligions 33 (1953):44-57; Robert E. Colby, "The Structure of Newman's Apologia pro Via sua in Relation to His Theory of Assent," Dublin Review 456 (1953): 140-56; F. X. Connolly, "The Apologia: History, Rhetoric, and Literature," in Newman's Apologia: A Classic Reconsidered, ed. V .F. Blehl and F. X. Connolly (New York: Fordham University Press, 1964), 105-24; Margery S. Durham, "The Spiritual Family in Newman's Apologia," Thought 56 (1981):417-32; Linda H. Peterson, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 93-119; and Heather Henderson, The Victorian Se(f, 21-62.

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Before moving on to subsequent chapters I want to gather up one more thread from the preface and first chapter: Newman's strong sense of individuality which accounts both for his insistence on the integrity of his conscience and for some critics' suspicions of an unhealthy subjectivism. In the Preface he says "I mean to be simply personal and historical: I am not expounding Catholic doctrine, I am doing no more than explaining mysel£" And "it is not at all pleasant for me to be egotistical; nor to be criticized for being so" (Apo, 13). How else can he proceed but by providing the "key to my whole life," in writing the "history of my mind," in "explaining myself" (Apo, 12-13). In Chapter 1 he says "I am not setting myself up as a pattern of good sense or of anything else: but I am giving the history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and honest external means" (Apo, 39). Thus for Newman the Apologia is neither controversy nor argument. That Newman continued to feel this way after its publication is witnessed by the fact that in supervising the republications of his writings between 1868 and 1881, he followed his own order of publication and placed the Apologia first, as a vestibule, as it were, leading to the rest of his voluminous writings. 32 In contrast, he placed the Essay on the Development rf Christian Doctrine further back in a fourth category of major treatises, following specifically controversial works of his postconversion years. 33 Perhaps the starkest statement of his sense of individuality, one often cited by those who accuse him of a subjectivism bordering on solipsism, is the conviction born of his early conversion that made "me rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator" (Apo, 18). The effectiveness of such a selfportrait in dealing with a charge of personal dishonesty is obvious. Its genuineness is borne out by numerous places in his writings where he insists on the primacy and integrity of the individual. Can we fault a person's integrity in following a sincerely formed conscience? The detailed examination of the Tractarian Movement and of Newman's writings in Chapters 2 through 4, while largely analytical and expository, is rhetorically controlled by the language and images employed

32. In this he is not unlike Wordsworth, who said The Prelude stood in relation to his projected poem, The Recluse, "as the ante-chapel has to the body of a gothic church." Preface to The Excursion, in Poetical Works, 589. 33. John Coulson, A.M. Alchin, and Meriol Trevor, eds., Newman: A Portrait Restored (London: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 112.

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in the Preface and Chapter 1. Chapter 2 opens with a declaration that "I have no romantic story to tell," and he writes "only because it is my duty to tell the things as they took place" (Apo, 44). The reason for his early protests against the Church of Rome was that "it was a duty," specifically, "a religious duty" (Apo, 59). He turns to a study of the English theologians because "it was an absolute necessity and a plain duty" (Apo, 66). Stunned by the implications of Augustine's dictum "Securus judicat orbis terrarum," he says "I had to determine its logical value, and its bearing upon my duty" (Apo, 110-11).34 Chapter 4 opens with the plaintive claim: "I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership in the Anglican Church" (Apo, 137). The word "duty" recurs like a musical motif some seventeen times in the chapter. It is a complex and ambiguous duty-loyalty to the Church of England and his fellow Tractarians, obedience to his Bishop, and a gnawing but persistent duty to follow the truth wherever it led him. He holds back others from going over to Rome because it was something "I could not in conscience do myself" (Apo, 138). In the troubled year of 1841 he wrote an intimate friend "I am (I trust) quite clear about my duty to remain where I am" (Apo, 145). In making Littlemore available to men who were turned down for holy orders, some clergymen "unable from conscience to go on with their duties," and some young men eager to join the Catholic Church, he does so both "from fidelity to my clerical engagements, and from duty to my Bishop," and in the case of the latter group because "I was still bound by my duty to their parents and friends" (Apo, 162). At one point the "simple duty" to hold back individuals from Rome conflicts with "a painful duty to keep aloof from all Roman Catholics who came with the intention of opening negotiations for the union of the churches" (Apo, 172-73). By 1843, on the verge of starting the Essay on Development to test the logic and historical evidence of what his heart was calling him to, we see the lonely but peremptory nature of human conscience as Newman says "my only line, my only line of duty, was to keep simply to my own case. I recollected Pascal's words, 'Je mourrai seul'" (Apo, 197). We see here the raw exposure hinted at in the prefatorial announcement that "it is not at all pleasant to be egotistical," and perhaps the autobiographical origin of his forceful assertion in the Grammar 34. Stated simply, the quotation from Augustine concerns the right of the universal church to pass judgment on the individual local churches when it comes to matters of orthodoxy.

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rfAssent that "everyone who reasons, is his own centre; and no expedient for attainting a common measure can reverse this truth" (GA, 345). The pattern persists to the very end. In a series of letters written between November 1844 and April1845 we read such statements as "By one's own sense of duty must one go; but external facts support one in doing so," and, "this I am sure of, that nothing but a simple, direct call of duty is a warrant for any one leaving our Church," and "now I will tell you more than any one knows except to friends. My own convictions are as strong as I suppose they can become: only it is so difficult to know whether it is a call of reason or of conscience" (Apo, 207-11). 35 Finally, in a letter written shortly after he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, he looks back on the twelve-year involvement with the Tractarian Movement and says, "I never, I do trust, aimed at anything else than obedience to my own sense of right, and have been magnified into the leader of a party without my wishing it or acting as such" (Apo, 212). Looking back from January 1846 he confessed to a friend that "it is like going on an open sea" (Apo, 212). Nineteen years later, living in the fraternal atmosphere of his Oratorian community, he could look back and say that moment "was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption'' (Apo, 214). The final point to be made here is that Newman, like Coleridge, and other Romantics for that matter, narrates the life story as one of organic growth and development of the self. This concept underlies the structure of the narrative as I suggested in my treatment of the Preface and Chapter 1. Newman's key insight into the development of doctrine arises from his deep personal awareness of himself as an individual "tending" or developing, through progressive stages, toward fuller individuation. Any change that occurred in Newman's religious life and opinions was continuous, and any appearance of discontinuity is careful explained. If one accepts his integrity in the writing of the autobiography, one can see clearly a microcosm of the theory of development. 36 35. The availability of all the letters cited in the Apologia, now gathered in the thirtyone volumes of the Letters and Diaries, should satisfy anyone suspecting Newman of "staging" his conversion. 36. The first significant writer on Newman's theory of development in the twentieth century was J. H. Walgrave, who moved from Newman's own personal psychology of development to a social psychology of development in the Essay on Development. Newman the Theologian: The Nature ofBeliefand Doctrine as Exemplified in His Life and Works, trans. A. V. Littledale (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1960).

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In applying the "mystical or sacramental principle" to the movement of history, he considers that "the process of change had been slow; it had been done not rashly, but by rule and measure" (Apo, 37) and later adds that "in 1837 I made a further development of this doctrine" (Apo, 38). In studying the Monophysite controversy he "underwent a change of opinion"; but the rubbing away of the boyish "stain upon my imagination," about the Pope as Antichrist, was not, he recalls, sudden or abrupt, for "we cannot unmake ourselves or change our habit in a moment. Though my reason was convinced, I did not throw it off, for some time after,-1 could not have thrown it off,-the unreasoning prejudice and suspicion, which I cherished about her at least by fits and starts, in spite of this conviction of my reason. I cannot prove this, but I believe it to have been the case from what I recollect of myself" (Apo, 115). If, again, we accept the reliability of the narrative, we see an autobiographical source for his aphoristic statement in the Essay on Development: "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often" (Dev, 40). To be perfect, of course, is to realize all one's potential, to rise to the highest level of individuation, to be a unique individual. Finally, the theory of development is applied isomorphically to development of doctrine and to the way the human mind develops and grows. Citing the maxim of Saint Ambrose, "Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum," which he would put on the title page of the Grammar ofAssent, Newman asserts that "it is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I .find my mind in a new place; how? The whole man moves; paper logic is but a record of it.... Great acts take time" (Apo, 155-56). 37 Here one recalls the words of Loss and Gain quoted earlier, with which I began this chapter: "It is impossible to stop the growth of the mind." One might object that Newman has used the paradigm of doctrinal development to shape the life story rather than find that theory arising from the life experience. This is certainly possible when one considers that all autobiographies are an editing, selecting, and shaping of the raw material of life, which has no design prior to the writer looking back and imposing order on it. But many of the examples cited here are from letters written during the period from 1833 to 1845, and even during

37. Ambrose's dictum in English reads: "It did not please God to save his people through logic." Translation mine.

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that period Newman writes as though he was consciously aware of the "growth of the mind." In 1843, for example, he wrote that "I trust that He, who has kept me in the slow course of change hitherto, will keep me still from hasty acts, or resolves with a doubtful conscience" (Apo, 200-201). Having "developed" from an Anglo-Catholic into a Roman Catholic through his gradual recognition of the historical development of Christian doctrine, Newman is in a position to continue the fight against the Liberalism that initially prompted his efforts to reform the Church of England through his activities and writings during the Tractarian Movement. Writing about the period from 1841 to 1845 from the vantage point of 1864, he claims that "there are but two alternatives, the way to Rome, and the way to Atheism: Anglicanism is the half-way house on the one side, and Liberalism is the half-way house on the other" (Apo, 185). This itself is an evolution of Newman's doctrine of the "Via Media" which at one point saw the Church of England standing midway between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Catholic Churches; but now that the Roman Catholic Church was his terminus, it stands in the middle ground between the Orthodox churches and the Church of England. Looking out at the world around him, Newman is filled "with unspeakable distress" at what he sees, a sight that contradicts the possibility of a living, all-loving creator. He looks into "this living busy world" and sees "no reflexion of its Creator." So he is forced to confess that "were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist when I looked into the world" (Apo, 216). Newman envisions the battle between Christianity and Liberalism in the form of a Coleridgean split between the head and the heart. Here we should recall why Newman was grateful to the older generation of Romantic writers. For the current bad situation was the result of"the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the literature of the last generation, or century" and of"the need which was felt by both the hearts and the intellects of the nation for a deeper philosophy."Toward the fulfillment of this need Coleridge, in spite of his "liberty of speculation, which no Christian can tolerate ... installed a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept" (Apo, 93-94). This necessary fusion of head and heart will in the Grammar ifAssent involve imagination and become the "illative sense." In the Idea if a University the intellect, through the use of repetition, adjectives, and metaphors, is personified into an uncontrollable giant, ambiguous or at least ambivalent in achievements. For it must be

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nourished and trained; but once trained it often bites the hand that feeds it. In the Apologia, faced with the scandal of original sin, the effects of which are the fallen world he has just described, Newman sees as one of its worst effects the unleashing of the human intellect from the control of the moral part of one's nature. In warlike terms he asks, "what must be the face-to-face antagonism, by which to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the all-corroding, all dissolving scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries?" (Apo, 218). "The wild living intellect of man," "the energy of human scepticism," and the mind's "suicidal tendencies" require something "for smiting hard and throwing back the immense energy of the aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy intellect" (Apo, 220). "The resdess intellect of our common humanity," "the energy of the human intellect," and "that awful, never dying duel" between "human intellects with wild passion"-all of which is summed up as a "vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions" (Apo, 225-26)-require some sort of"moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes" (Apo, 226). One can hear echoes of Biographia Literaria, where Coleridge, speaking of the philosophic imagination, says, "the organs of spirit ... exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being." Then reflecting on the incredulity of worldlings who say "Poor man! He is not made for this world," adds, "Oh! herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfilment; for man must either rise or sink'' (BL, I, 242). Newman concludes this discussion by stating that Liberalism "is nothing else than that deep, plausible scepticism of which I spoke above, as being the development of human reason, as practically exercised by the natural man" (Apo, 234). The intellect is torn loose from its connatural moral mooring-the conscience, moral self-awareness, love, heart. Human individuality in an act of moral suicide denies its roots in human society and in human history. For when the proper balance is struck, nothing can be more fruitful for civil or ecclesiastical growth than the presence of powerful minds within the community. Speaking of the relationship between authority and "the reason of individuals" in the Church, Newman notes that "it is individuals, and not the Holy See, that have taken the initiative, and given the lead to the Catholic mind, in theological inquiry" (Apo, 237). As a result, a precarious balancing act must be maintained between gifted theologians and the acknowledged presence of infallible authority in mat-

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ters of faith. In 1864, of course, the formal definition of papal infallibility was six years in the offing; but a letter Newman wrote in 1863 suggests that he was suffering under the restraints of oppressive central authority. "This age of the Church is peculiar," he wrote to Miss Bowles; for "in former times, primitive and medieval, there was not the extreme centralization which now is in use. If a private theologian said anything free, another answered him. If the controversy grew, then it went to a Bishop, a theological faculty, or to some foreign University. The Holy See was but the court of ultimate appeal. Now, ifl, as a private priest, put any thing into print, Propaganda answers me at once. How can I fight with such a chain on my arm? It is like the Persians driven on to fight under the lash. There was true private judgement in the primitive and medieval schools-there are no schools now, no private judgement (in the religious sense of the phrase), no freedom that is, of opinion. That is, no exercise of the intellect" (LD, II, 447). Newman's prescient comment is an early manifestation of the growing awareness of the unprecedented centralization of the Catholic Church from the early nineteenth century to the present day. In 1864, however, Newman could still imagine the early Church where that "great luminary" Augustine, the "strong-minded and heterodox Tertullian," the "free thought ofOrigen," the "independent mind ofJerome," the "scarcely orthodox Eusebius" could pursue theological truth as individuals while living within the larger community of fellowship and faith which is the Church. For then, authority was guided in its decisions by the "commanding genius of individuals." Then "in that process of inquiry and deliberation, which ended in an infallible enunciation, individual reason was paramount" (Apo, 237-38). So Newman, who in 1845 transferred the duty of conscience from his local Anglican Bishop to the Bishop of Rome, in no way sacrificed his individuality or the integrity ofhis conscience. He had in his own eyes passed through continuous developmental stages from childhood to 1845 and continued to grow in individuality up to the writing of the Apologia.

IV There are significant similarities and differences between the two narratives. Both are autobiographies of men seeking philosophical foundations for their faith experience and the theological expression of it. Coleridge's

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story is that of a lonely, isolated, individual genius. At forty-three he had lectured much and published a great number ofjournalistic essays but had produced no single major work. He was at the center of no specific religious community. Newman at sixty-three wrote only about the first forty-four years of his life, a period full of excitement and dramatic changes for him. He was well published and sitting in the eye of an ecclesiastical storm. Though he sought solitude, he had a wide circle of friends and colleagues and was constantly in demand. Far from being isolated, his talents were constantly at the service of a movement to renew the ecclesiastical community. But the twenty intervening years had been a mixture of successes and frustrations. At the time he wrote the Apologia he was only beginning to move from under a cloud of suspicion which had reached the general English public and manifested itself in Charles Kingsley's attack. The Apologia was addressed as much to the vague suspicions of the English public as it was to Kingsley's charges. And it would result in a joyous rebirth of his reputation. By the time Newman wrote his life story he had published most of his forty volumes of writings. Only the Grammar ofAssent remained to be written. In contrast, Biographia Literaria was Coleridge's first major book. Only the publication of the Collected Coleridge and the editions of letters, notebooks, and marginalia in the second half of the twentieth century has provided a true sense of the intellectual activity and energy that characterized the years preceding the life story. Essay by essay, lecture by lecture, notebook entry by notebook entry, and even through the marginalia, he struggled to organize and put on paper the vast comprehensive system which John Stuart Mill saw embedded in his disparate writings. In terms of Coleridge's life pattern, Biographia Literaria was a "preview of coming attractions." Finally, each narrative reveals in differing degrees the contours of the writer's mind. The Biographia does show, however digressively, how Coleridge's great insights into organic wholeness, the polar character of reality, and the imagination grew out of things ever so ordinary as his schooling in rhetoric and poetry. In contrast, Newman, treating as he does the first thirty-three years of his life in twenty-five pages, really tells us little of how his insight into "development" came about. He provides only a hint in stating the importance of the aphorism "Growth the only evidence oflife."There is, however, ample evidence in his early letters and autobiographical notes that he was singularly equipped to see all of human experience in terms of development. This was a tempera-

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mental disposition encouraged by both his early and persistent efforts at composition and his lifelong tendency toward self-reflection. 38 Coleridge and Newman were men of intense self-reflection and individuality, constantly and consciously immersed in the process of their own intellectual and moral development. And yet both saw the need for others, for the community, in that process of development. The next chapter will consider the developing self in the company of other developing selves.

38. See my" 'Growth the Only Evidence of Life': De·velopment ifDoctrine and The o/a University," Nineteeth-Century Prose 18 (1991):10-26.

Idea

4

Developing Individuals in Developing Societies: On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each and An Essay on the De'Velopment of Christian Doctrine That we are better and happier than others is indeed no reason for our not becoming still better; especially as with states, as well as with individuals, not to be progressive is to be retrograde. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. Not in vain the distant beacons. Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change. Progress is the watch-word of philosophy,-of general science,-or the speculative and practical spirit, alike, in the present day. PROGRESS-DEVELOPMENT,Is the idol of all who go along with the Spirit of the Age. 1

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friend, I, 253; John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development q[Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), 40; Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Locksley Hall," lines 181-82, in Tennyson's Poetry, 2d edition, ed. Robert W. Hill Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); and William Palmer, The Doctrine of Development and Conscience Considered in Relation to the Evidence of Christianity and o/ the Catholic System (London: France and John, 1846), vii.

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I To say that England underwent profound social change in the first half of the nineteenth century is to utter a truism. Modern social scientists might prefer the term "transformation," indicating qualitative, discontinuous shifts that have pervasive effects on all phases of a social system; but change in • many r. l~L " revo1utlon, • ""refcorm," tts mrms was spoke nof everywhere. 'JU vvords llKe "d eve1opment,""evo1utton, . ""process," and"progress " occur firequent1y m . the literature of the age; and the concept of change or development is, as we have seen, central to the thought ofboth Coleridge and Newman. Coleridge's deep sense of the developing self provides empirical verification for his assertion in The Friend that "with states, as well as with individuals, not to be progressive is to be retrograde." 2 This idea underlies his later insight in the essay on Church and State that "the two antagonist powers or opposite interests of the state, under which all other state interests are comprised, are those ofPERMANENCE and PROGRESSION" (C&S, 24). As John Colmer, the editor of On the Constitution ofthe Church and State, observes, "what appears so startlingly modern in Coleridge's political thought is his idea of the open dynamic society. He sees the continuous but ever-changing tensions in society as necessary to its freely developing life, not to be arbitrarily controlled or suppressed, but held in petpetual adjustment" ( C&S, lxxviii). Newman, too, bases his idea of Church on a developmental model derived from his own youthful appropriation of the idea that change is universal. The guiding insight of1816, "Growth the only evidence of life," would, in 1845, become the categorical and foundational statement for the Essay on Development: "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often'' (Dev, 40). That Newman's essay and his thesis about Christian doctrine "growing" or developing were startling, even heterodox, to many of his contemporaries, is borne out by the prompt response of a theologian like William Palmer, who classified Newman indiscriminately with Rationalists, Utilitarians, Strauss, Feuerbach, and others as an advocate of the view that "religion is progressive, and that it is continually developing."3 What Coleridge and Newman were in fact doing, even as they did with their proofs for the existence of God from conscience, was to rethink 2. Friend, I, 253. Recall, too, Coleridge's dictum in Biographia Literaria: "for man must either rise or sink'' (BL, I, 242). 3. Palmer, The Doctrine ifDevelopment and Conscience, 44-45.

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the nature and role of the Church, and in Coleridge's case the State too, in the light of the enormous social, philosophical, and political transformations that were affecting English society. Two major reforms, one ecclesiastical, one civil, occurred between 1829 and 1832, the Catholic Emancipation Act and the First Reform Bill. The former marked another step in the progressive secularization of English society, the latter a step toward the increased democratization of the State. What is interesting from the viewpoint of this study is that the events surrounding the Catholic Emancipation Act were the context in which writings ofboth Coleridge and Newman entered the politico-religious arena. Both were opposed in principle to the Act, yet neither was anti-Catholic in terms of religious freedom and practice. What John Morrow points out about Coleridge's essay applies equally to Newman's writings during this period and after: "This work was located within the debate over Catholic Emancipation, but that was part of a more extensive and inconclusive discussion about the nature, role, and justification of the Church."4 In 1829 Coleridge published On the Constitution ofthe Church and State, his last major work. In 1833 Newman published TheArians ofthe Fourth Century, his first major work, and one that would lead directly, twelve years later, to the publication of An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Coleridge's book was a distillation of some thirty years of political thought and writing. Newman's was the first stage in an intellectual and, in one sense, politicoreligious journey that would culminate in his theory of doctrinal development and his departure from the Church of England. Even this historical study of patristic and conciliar thought had a political dimension sparked by the State-Church controversy going on during the period ofNewman's research and writing. 5 For Newman, the liberals or latitudinarians within the Church of England who espoused the Emancipation Act were simply old foes with new faces, prefigured in the rationalistic school of Antioch in the fourth century. Read in this light,Arians is a cautionary tale as well as a preliminary but brilliant analysis of the history of doctrinal development. Coleridge's essay deals more explicitly and fully with both the State and the Church; but while Newman's essay is narrowly focused on one 4. John Morrow, Coleridge's Political Thought: Property, Morality, and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 130. 5. Stephen Thomas has convincingly argued this in Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See especially pages 2o-49.

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aspect of Church life, the implicit theory of the state it presumes is quite similar to Coleridge's. In the Essay on Development, under his preliminary discussions of kinds of development, Newman devotes three pages to discussing political developments as examples of"the growth of ideas" (Dev, 43). This similarity prompts Terrence Kenney to observe that "a resemblance between Coleridge and Newman has very often been discerned, and this resemblance is nowhere closer than on the subject of politics; yet even here there was no direct influence, and it is curious to observe that it was not until his own thought was quite mature that Newman even read Coleridge's work." 6 Curious, indeed, for it is hard to imagine that a young man of twenty-eight, so opposed to the Emancipation Act and so caught up in the intellectual and political furor it generated, would not read a book supporting his position by one of the most famous thinkers alive, an author he so lavishly praised in his essay in the British Critic ten years later (Apo, 93-94). But what is clear, and it is of course the thesis of this study, is that both men predicate their theories of Church and State on their fundamental concepts of the developmental character of human beings as self-transcending, morally conscious beingsbeings in whom the presence of conscience, as we have described it earlier, implies that human beings are fundamentally religious, that is, immortal, free, and responsible not only to their fellow human beings but also to a personal transcendent reality who is the goal of their ever more fully realizable potential and individuation. Those familiar with Coleridge only as a poet and critic, or even as a religious thinker, may be surprised to discover how absorbed he was in political and social issues throughout most of his life. Beginning with the lectures on politics and religion in 1795,7 The Watchman, published in 1816, 8 the wide range of newspaper essays he wrote, 9 The Friend,

6. Terrence Kenny, The Political Thought offohn Henry Newman (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1957), 26-27. I think my discussion of Coleridge's influence on Newman in Chapter 1 somewhat qualifies Kenney's closing reflection. 7. Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, vol. 1 of The Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn, (London and Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 1971). 8. Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton, vol. 2 of The Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). 9. Coleridge, Essays on His Times, ed. David Erdman, vol. 3 of The Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London and Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 1978).

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published in 1809-10 and republished in 1818, 10 and the Lay Sermons, written after he moved to Gillman's in 1816, 11 Coleridge compiled a sizable body of writings on politics and religion. The relative brevity of On the Constitution ofthe Church and State, amplified in typical Coleridgean fashion with digressions, letters, and appendices, belies the enormous amount of political and ecclesiastical thought compressed into its some 180 pages. Commentators are uniform in their assessment of its influence. Basil Willey puts it in the same class with Hooker's Laws ofEcclesiastical Polity." 12 John Colmer says that Coleridge "could not be expected to be able to foresee that his last political work would .... leave a permanent mark on the thought of the nineteenth century, that slowly and working in an unobtrusive fashion it would lead men to re-examine the function of the established Church in the light of its historical development and would reawaken a sense of social responsibility in the Whig and Tory Parties." 13 Anya Taylor points out how personal was Coleridge's political and social thought in contrast to the growing ranks of abstract political and economic theories and social engineers spawned by Utilitarianism.14 Newman, on the other hand, seems austerely remote in his view of the human predicament, yet various statements in his writing suggest how immediate and realistic his vision was of the political dimension of life. And though he wrote no sustained treatise on the nature of the State, his views echo in the background of a number of his other writings. Both Coleridge and Newman rooted their political thought in a theological anthropology that considered the Christian doctrine of original sin as the undeniable given in any discussion of human nature and activity. 15 In 1802 Coleridge wrote his brother George that "my faith is

10. Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 4, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, in The Collected Works, ed., Coburn, (2 vols.). 11. Coleridge, The Lay Sermons, ed. R.]. White, vol. 6 of The Collected Works, ed. Coburn. 12. Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 237. 13. John Colmer, Coleridge: Critic of Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 165. Bernard M.G. Reardon traces Coleridge's influence in great detail in From Coleridge to Gore: A Century ofReligious Thought in Britain (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1971). 14. Coleridge's DeftnseoftheHuman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), especially Chapter 1, "The Dehumanization and Mechanization of Persons," 9-34. 15. The standard treatment of Coleridge's views on original sin remains]. Robert Barth's Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), Chapter 5, "Creation and Sinful Man," 105-26.

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simply this-that there is an original corruption in our nature, from which & from the consequences of which, we may be redeemed by Christnot as the Socinians says, by his pure morals or excellent Example merelybut in a mysterious manner as an effect of his Crucifixion-and this I believe-not because I understand it; but because I feel, that it is not only suitable to, but needful for, my nature and because I find it clearly revealed" (CL, II, 807). In 1815, responding to Wordsworth's request for comment on The Excursion, he continues to prod his friend toward writing the great philosophic poem in which Wordsworth "would take the Human Race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope's Essay on Man, [Erasmus] Darwin, and all the coundess Believers-even (strange to say) among Xtians of Man's having progressed from an Ouran Outang stateso contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay to all Possibility-to have affirmed a Fall in some sense, as a fact, the possibility of which cannot be understood from the nature of the Will, but the reality of which is attested by Experience & Conscience-Fallen men contemplated in the different ages of the world" (CL, IV, 574-75). In Aids to Reflection Coleridge writes that "without just and distinct views respecting the Article of Original Sin, it is impossible to understand aright any one of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity," and in fact "the two great moments of the Christian Religion are, Original Sin and Redemption; that the ground, this the Superstructure of our faith" (Aids, 271, 305). Finally, in a conversation of1830 he makes a statement that anticipates Newman's point in Chapter 5 of the Apologia that the tragic state of humanity is inexplicable without predicating "a Fall of some sort or other-the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute. Without this hypothesis man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight." 16 While Coleridge's statement is compressed to almost gnostic terseness, Newman's version is showcased in one of his dazzling orchestrations of periodic sentences where he considers "the world in its length and breadth," and asks what can be the answer to "this heartpiercing, reason-bewildering fact" of human chaos, confusion, and pain. He concludes that there must be some mystery connected with human history and sums up his argument in an enthymeme: "And so I argue about the world:-ifthere be a God, since there is a God, the human race 16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, vol. 14 (2 vols.) of The Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), II, 79. Hereafter cited as TT.

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is implicated in some terrible original calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God" (Apo, 216-18). Coleridge and Newman envisioned the history of humanity every bit as bleakly as Hobbes, without his pessimism; and they imagined the possible future of humanity as hopefully as Shaftesbury, without his facile optimism. When Coleridge and Newman turn to human individuals, living and working, governing and being governed, in human societies both sacred and secular, it is with the clear conviction that human beings are free, reasonable, capable of good, but radically wounded in their humanity. Apparently this explicitly religious basis for Coleridge's political theorizing has not made him less attractive over the years to either literary critics, political scientists, or economists. 17 Understandably, less attention has been paid to Newman's thoughts on political theory simply because it was not among his major interests and did not exert the same influence that Coleridge's writings did, but there has been a slow, steady stream of commentary on his political thought. 18 One last comment before turning to the principal texts. Both Coleridge and Newman were aware that the audience for their ideas would be small. In his initial discussion of an "Idea," Coleridge concedes that "it is the privilege of a few to possess an idea: of the generality of men, it might be more truly affirmed, that they are possessed by it" ( C&S, 13). 17. See, for example, David P. Calleo, Coleridge and the Idea ofthe Modern State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966); Deirdre Coleman, Coleridge and "The Friend" (1809-181 0) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); John Colmer, Coleridge: Critic ofSociety; William F. Kennedy, Humanist Versus Economist: The Economic Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Berkeley: University of California Publications in Economics, vol. 17, 1958); Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and John Morrow, Coleridge's Political Thought. 18. See, for example, John R. Griffin, "The Radical Phase of the Oxford Movement," journal ofEcclesiastical History 27 (1976 ):47-56, and "The Anglican Politics of Newman," Anglican Theological Review 1 (1973):434-43;J. Derek Holmes, "Factors in the Development of Newman's Political Attitudes," in Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays, ed. James T. Bastable (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1978), 57-88; Hugh A. MacDougall, The Acton-Newman Relations: The Dilemma of Christian Liberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962); David Nicholls, "Newman and the Politics of Pluralism," in Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays, ed. James T. Bas table (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1978), 27-38; Alvan R. Ryan, "The Development of Newman's Political Thought," Review ofPolitics 7 (1945):210-40.

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Newman points out that "the great multitude of Protestants believe in the divinity of Scripture precisely on the ground on which the Roman Catholics take their stand in behalf of their own system of doctrine, viz. because they have been taught it" (VM, I, 34). Few indeed there are who develop the "philosophic imagination," who through self-appropriation can "feel within themselves a something ineffably greater than their own individual nature" (Friend, I, 54). These words echo the language of Biographia Literaria, where Coleridge speaks of those "who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar" (I, 242-43). In a notebook entry Coleridge observes that "the reality of Virtue is manifestly in the Creed of all men, few as there may be who bring it forward into the light of distinct consciousness." 19 This sensitivity to the spiritual "tone deafness" of the many becomes in Newman almost crotchety. Throughout his sermons, lectures, and essays we read over and over about the "fickle multitude," "the mass of . " man ki nd ,""t h e great mass of men, ""t h e many,""t he mass ofCh.nst1ans, the greater part of humanity whose religion is "ever vulgar and abnormal," who "are fickle," given to their "carnal tastes," lacking in "a deep and consistent devotion," and who, "walk[ing] without aim or object ... live irreligiously, or in lukewarmness, yet have nothing to say in their defense."20 Newman seems temperamentally Augustinian or Platonic in writing of the bulk ofhumanity as a "massa damnata"-a condemned multitude. Coleridge and Newman echo, of course, the religious and philosophic posture of the ages, from Plato and John the Baptist to the present-that of the lonely prophetic voice crying out in the wilderness. "To whom do we owe our ameliorated condition?" Coleridge asks and answers: "to the successive Few in every age (more indeed in one generation than in another, but relatively to the mass of mankind always few) who by the intensity and permanence of their action have compensated for the limited sphere, within which it is at any one time intelligible" 19. CN, III, series 3591, entry 25.74. 20. The last quotation is from PPS, VI, 209. The others were culled from PPS, I, 161, 188,284,284, 319; II, 76; V, 254; VI, 36; VII, 23; US, 42, 92, 225; from Dev, 111, 158-59, 353; HS, I, 347; Arians, 110; VM, I, 34, 104, 158, 174; and from John Henry Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), II, 8o-81, cited hereafter as Diff; and, John Henry Newman, Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (London: Longman~, Green, and Co., 1897), 84, 89, 139-40, 94. Cited hereafter as DMC.

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(Friend, I, 61-62). In an early sermon Newman claims that "it is plain every great change is effected by the few, not by the many; by the resolute, undaunted zealous few" (PPS, I, 287-88). And yet their bleak assessment of humanity cannot be labeled unduly pessimistic if one accepts Abraham Maslow's estimate that only a very small percentage of people achieve genuine self-realization. 21 This very fact is what prompted Coleridge and Newman to write, respectively, Aids to Reflection and An Essay in Aid ofa Grammar ofAssent, to deal with precisely the problem of how not only trained theologians but ordinary men and women can achieve genuine faith and how reasonably intelligent believers can deepen their belief-concerns that led them both to stress the importance of both Church and State in promoting education. Operative in both the essays we are about to consider is the word "idea." Coleridge will examine Church and State "according to the idea of each." Newman consults history for "the true idea of Christianity" and titles his first chapter, significantly, "The Development ofldeas." He would later title his two series oflectures on higher education The Idea ofa University. We can then first ask, what does each writer mean by an idea in this context and is there any similarity between them? In spite of the elaborate and provocative discussion about ideas in The Friend and The Statesman's Manual, Coleridge here seems to be using a rather straightforward understanding of"idea." In Chapter 1 he writes that "[b]y an idea, I mean, (in this instance) that conception of a thing, which is not abstracted from any particular state, form, or mode, in which the thing may happen to exist at this or at that time; nor yet generalized from any number or succession of such forms or modes; but which is given by the knowledge of its ultimate aim" ( C&S, 12). This can only mean that Church and State must be understood according to their finality or purpose in being. The finality of the Church and State, as we shall see, will be determined in the light of the finality of concrete individual human persons. Thus the term does not seem to carry any of the richer or more complex meanings found elsewhere in his writings. One point, however, is worth noting. "Idea" as used here is the result of neither abstraction nor generalization. It is rather the concrete intelligibility of a living reality.

21. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology ofBeing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962),190.

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Newman, too, speaks of"real" ideas, not abstractions or generalizations. "The idea," he writes, "which represents an object or supposed object is commensurate with the sum total of its possible aspects, however they may vary in the separate consciousness of individuals; and in proportion to the variety of aspects under which it presents itself to various minds is its force and depth, and the argument for its reality" (Dev, 34). Precisely because no single aspect of a real idea, one living in a human mind, can exhaust its intelligibility, the process called development occurs. Newman concludes that"[ w]hen an idea, whether real or not, is of a nature to arrest and possess the mind, it may be said to have life, that is, to live in the mind which is its recipient." This seemingly simple point undercuts centuries of understanding revelation as a static communication of concepts, for "ideas are in the writer and reader of revelation, not the inspired text itself," and the slow, progressive understanding of them is for Newman the development of doctrine (Dev, 56). I would, finally, suggest that since both Coleridge and Newman are talking about moral and religious matters, they are considering ideas as they relate to the practical reason, that both are talking about "real" as opposed to "notional" knowledge. In going through each work my focus will be on the functions of Church and State, the role of authority, the conscience of the individual citizen or believer, and the nature and purpose of education as a major concern for both societies.

II Presenting with unwonted directness the philosophic premises of his discussion of Church and State, Coleridge immediately shows how correct political theory is based ultimately on his familiar distinction between person and thing. He explains how any valid concept of a social contract must be rooted not in some abstract, hypothetical, historical contract, but in concrete duties that exist "anterior to the formation of the contract, because they arise out of the very constitution of humanity, which supposes the social state" (C&S, 15). Thus humans are by nature social beings, individuals endowed with conscience, which naturally relates them to their fellow beings. Any concrete form of the social contract is subsequent to this fact. The distinction between person and thing also provides the principle for distinguishing the proper roles of the State and the Church. In The Friend Coleridge had said that "it were absurd to suppose, that

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individuals should be under a law of moral obligation, and yet that a million of the same individuals acting collectively or through representatives, should be exempt from all law: for morality is no accident of human nature, but its essential characteristic. A being absolutely without morality is either a beast or a fiend, according as we conceive this want of conscience to be natural or self-produced" {I, 289). Conscience, as we have seen, makes one a "person''; and we now see how "the idea of an ever-originating social contract ... constitutes the whole ground and difference between subject and serf, between a commonwealth and a slave plantation." It is "evolved out of the yet higher idea ofperson, in contradistinction from thing-all social law and justice being grounded on the principle, that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a thing, or without grievous wrong be treated as such: and the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used altogether and merely as means to an end; but a person must always be included in the end: his interest must form part of the object, a means to which, he, by consent, i.e., by his own act, makes himself" {C&S, 15). This crucial distinction leads then to the concept of a "Constitution," for "such an idea, or ultimate aim ... as a principle" exists "in the only way a principle can exist-in the minds and consciences of the persons, whose duties it prescribes and whose rights it determines"{ C&S, 19). This is the very position, as we have just seen, that Newman holds in the Essay on Development. Ideas live in human minds, and there is an analogy between individual ideas and social ideas. Some critics feel that Coleridge's explanation of"the two antagonist powers or opposite interests in the state, under which all other state interests are comprised ... PERMANENCE AND PROGRESSION" (C&S, 24) and his founding of the state on the concept of property are merely a rationalization of the status quo. While this is an arguable issue, I would exclude it here as irrelevant to my own line of inquiry. What is important here is that the concepts ofPropriety and Nationalty {C&S, 35), which are essential to the Idea of the State, are grounded in the sacred distinction between the person and thing. Again, the concept of person is central, "for the abiding interests, the estates, and ostensible tangible properties, not the persons as persons, are the proper subjects of the state in this sense" (C&S, 40). In 1814 Coleridge wrote to Daniel Stuart that "human jurisprudence knows nothing of Persons other than as Proprietors, Officiaries, Subjects" (CL, III, 537). Thus while the State, as Propriety, must not treat persons as things, neither is its role to deal with them as persons. That function falls to the State as N ationalty.

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This Nationalty or National Church, "the third great venerable estate of the realm" ( C&S, 42), finds its meaning in the dual interests of the State, which are permanence and progression. For as the first estate (property) provides permanence and the second estate (business interests) provides progress, the third estate (the National Church) provides "the necessary antecedent condition, of both the former. Now these depend on a continuing and progressive civilization. But civilization is itself but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the bloom of health, and a nation so distinguished more fitly to be called a varnished than a polished people; whereas this civilization is not grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity. We must be men in order to be citizens" (C&S, 42-43). Here Coleridge anticipates what Newman would say some twenty years later in The Idea ofa University: a truly liberal education makes one "civilized," that is, a "gentleman," and that is a worthwhile function of education. But the heart of education is making one a complete human being. Thus Coleridge emphasizes the idea of cultivating our humanity. Education should, in fact, serve a double function. By leading people to fuller personhood, by raising them to a higher level of self-reflection, education will normally make them better citizens. Coleridge, of course, is aiming higher than this. "In all ages," he observes, "individuals who have directed their meditation and their studies to the nobler characters of our nature, to the cultivation of those powers and instincts which constitute the man, at least separate him from the animal, and distinguish the nobler from the animal part of his own being, will be led by the supernatural in themselves to the contemplation of a power which is likewise super-human; that science, and especially moral science, will lead to religion, and remain blended with it-this, I say, will in all ages be the course of things" ( C&S, 44). 22 The insertion of the supernatural into this discussion of the secular State is not inappropriate, for "to the abiding essential interest of the individual as a person, and not as a citizen, neighbour or subject, religion may be an indispensable ally, but this is not the essential constitutive end of that national institute, which is unfortunately, at least 22. In a late notebook entry he wrote: "My greatest aim and object is to assert the Superhuman in order to diffuse more & more widely the faith in the Supernatural." Cited in C&S, 44, n. 2.

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improperly, styled a church-a name which, in its best sense is exclusively appropriate to the church of Christ" ( C&S, 45). Coleridge's word-minting propensity enters at this point as we are introduced to a group that constitutes this National Church. They are not clerics or merely teachers; they are the "clerisy" ( C&S, 49), those who would pass along the stored cultural values and learning. 23 The task of the clerisy is to communicate the liberal arts and sciences, "the possession and application of which constitute the civilization of a country" ( C&S, 46), but more importantly to lead people to philosophy, "the doctrine and discipline of ideas," and to theology, which "was the root and trunk of the knowledge that civilized man, because it gave unity and the circulating sap of life to all other sciences, by virtue of which alone they could be contemplated as forming collectively, the living tree of knowledge" (C&S, 47). Coleridge is not being unrealistic here. At the beginning of his essay he said that "it is the privilege of the few to possess an idea." Now he says: "Of especial importance is it to the objects here contemplated, that only by the vital warmth diffused by these truths throughout the MANY, and by the guiding light from philosophy, which is the basis of divinity, possessed by the FEW, can either the community or its rulers fully comprehend, or rightly appreciate, the permanent distinction, and occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization'' ( C&S, 48). Thus the purpose of education is to educe "the latent man" ( C&S, 48), first to a higher level of civilization, and then possibly to a recognition of one's "divine" potential. Here we see the influence of his concept of a "connatural" potential for the divine. This function of education can be supplemented by religion, "for it is duty and wisdom to aim at making as many as possible soberly and steadily religious;-inasmuch as the morality which the state requires in its citizens for its own well being and ideal immortality, and without reference to their spiritual interest as individuals, can only exist for people in the form of religion'' ( C&S, 69). Such a position will surely be repugnant to the postmodern secular mind. But there have been few, if any, examples of states that have flourished living solely under the rationalism of the "Enlightenment heritage." 23. This is a concept which in our time critics like William Empson, and more recendy his disciple Jonathan Culler, would, as defenders of the "Enlightenment heritage," so vituperously attack as a "priesthood of culture." See Jonathan Culler, "A Critic Against Christians," Times Literary Supplement, 23 November 1985,1328, and "Comparative Literature and the Pieties," Profession 86 (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1986), 3Q-32.

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While Coleridge does appear to accept unquestioningly the his torically conditioned political and social structures of his age, when political power and wealth were largely in the hands of the landed aristocracy, there is a clearly democratic dimension to his political and ecclesiastical theory, one that cannot be attributed simply to the Romantic Zeitgeist. In a notebook entry of 1826 he expresses his belief that the Protestant religion is best suited for a democratic system of government. 24 This Protestant spirit of democracy and the integrity of the individual conscience is no more evident than when, in discussing the Christian Church, Coleridge rejects the concept of an infallible papal authority that is central to Roman Catholic belie£ In 1830, in Table Talk, he says ''A State, in Idea is the opposite of a Church. A State regards Classes and not Individuals, and it estimates Classes not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, &.£. But a Church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual personsallowing no gradation of ranks, but such as greater or less holiness and wisdom necessarily confer. A church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy-The Church, so considered and the State, exclusively of the Church, constitute together the Idea of a State in its largest sense" (TT, I, 189). He must have continued to think about this matter, because even after Constitution o/Church and State was published, he wrote in his notebooks: "The proper object of the State is Things ... while the proper Object of the Church is Persons, and no other than personal difference, intellectual and moral." He continues by defining "the aim of a Church to utterly do away with even those personal differences, which it acknowledges and of which it makes use-the comparatively wise to equalize Wisdom, the comparatively good to diffuse the Good."2 5 He thus finds nothing convincing in the Roman Catholic claim that "there must be one visible head of the church universal, the successor and vicar of Christ,.for the slaking o/controversies, for the determination of disputed points!" ( C&S, 126). In the "Letter to a Friend" on the Catholic Bill, Coleridge writes that Roman Catholicism is rightly perceived by his religious confreres "as equally hostile to liberty, and the sacred rights of conscience generally" ( C&S, 150). We will see, shortly, how Newman in moving from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic communion coped

24. CN, IV, series 5374, entry 26.11. 25. CN, V, series 6411, entry 44.59.

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with the tensions between individual conscience and ecclesiastical authority, both at the local and international levels. There is throughout Coleridge's treatment of Church and State a consistency based on his unflagging insistence on the primacy of the individual. Other than the ordinary obligations of civil law which generally bind the subject in conscience, the State has nothing to do with the individual as a person except to provide the education which educes personhood, a process that contributes to the mutual benefit of the State and the individual. The individual Christian operating in the Church is free of any personal infallible authority. But J. Robert Barth points out: ''At the same time, however, despite Coleridge's very Protestant stand against Tradition, we find him Anglican rather than Protestant in his insistence on the need for the Church in the understanding of Scripture."26 Thus his rejection of papal infallibility can in no way be equated with a denial of the infallibility of the Church as a living community ofbelievers. A notebook entry of1812 asks, "Where then is the Judge & Criterion of the Interpretations [of Scripture]!-Answerin the Councils regularly called & confirmed-for God will not suffer necessary means to be wanting to a necessary End-& we may therefore be assured, that in following the decisions of the Council we are infallibly right relative to our Salvation." 27 Newman, of course, would from the time of The Arians ofthe Fourth Century lean more and more not only toward Tradition but also toward a visible, infallible interpreter, the Pope.

III When Newman finally came to address in detail the question of doctrinal development, it was at the end of a thirteen-year journey that resolved, step by step, the difficulties he had with Rome. The papacy itself was not the primary focus of his research, and his Anglican writings do not bear a strongly antipapist tone. His initial efforts were focused on reforming the Church present in the light of the Church past; and, in a sense, if we are to take him at face value, he simply found himself

26. Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine, 81. 27. CN, III, series 4143, entry 2.

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gradually moving closer to the Roman Catholic Church. 28 On the other hand there is a sense in which he was "tending" to Rome all along. Newman's recurrent use throughout his writings of the words "tend" and "tendency" seems at times to be an almost metaphoric expression of how, in Coleridge's words, all living things have "a tendency to individuation," and how, like Coleridge, Newman was prone to see reality in terms of polarities. He was looking for an explanation of Christian doctrine that allowed it to be rooted in the past and yet unfolding in the present, at once unchanged and changing. The tension in Newman's thought and writings is frequently between the individual intellect, which he so consistently respects even while wary of its suicidal drive toward autonomy, and the claims of ecclesiastical and civil authority. The ecclesiastical struggle was not between reason and faith but between individual intellects engaged in a "warfare" of ideas, a metaphor he frequently used. Just as Newman seems to have held a darker view of humanity than Coleridge did, so his sensitivity to the pressures of authority seemed greater. This is a point worth dwelling on because Newman introduces the problem so early in the Essay on Development and because the practical consequences plagued him in both his Anglican and Roman Catholic life. In the introductory chapter he states that "if the resistance of St. Cyprian and Firmilian to the Church of Rome, in the question of the baptism of heretics, be urged as an argument against her primitive authority, or the earlier resistance ofPolycrates of Ephesus, let it be considered first whether all authority does not necessarily lead to resistance" (Dev, 26). This is no merely rhetorical question; it expresses a deep conviction. In 1854, discussing the origins of government, he observes: "Taking Influence and Law to be the two great principles of Government, it is plain that, historically speaking, Influence comes first, and then Law. Thus Orpheus preceded Lycurgus and Solon .... First we have the 'virum pietate gravem,' whose word 'rules the spirits and soothes the breast' of the multitude;-or the warrior;-or the mythologist and the bard;-then follow at length the dynasty and constitution. Such is the history of society: it begins in the poet, and ends in the policeman." Shortly thereafter, in the same essay, he says: "In this world no one rules by mere love; if you are but amiable, you are no hero; to be powerful, you must be strong, and 28. This seems borne out by the volumes of the Letters and Diaries covering these years. Correspondence and private notes confirm the fact that the Apologia narrates this gradual process accurately and is not a fabrication after the fact.

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to have dominion you must have a genius for organization."29 He once observed, with almost Machiavellian worldly wisdom, that "[t]hose who have to command, should either give no reason for their movements, or reasons which cannot be successfully gainsayed" (VM, I, 111). The duality of human nature is poignantly expressed in an observation, made in 1840, that "the truth is, poor human nature cannot support itself without objects of honour and deference. Man is born to obey quite as much as to command. Remove the true objects, and you do not get rid of a natural propensity: he will make idols instead; remove heaven and he will put up with earth, rather than honour nothing at all. The principle of respect is as much a part of us as the principle of religion." 30 But how does one reconcile Newman's acquiescence in the predominance of the "herd mentality'' with what he had written earlier to his friend Blanco White: "I agree with you too in feeling the incommensurability (so to speak) of the human mind-we cannot gauge and measure by any common rule the varieties of thought and opinion. We look at things with our own eyes--and invest the whole face of nature with colours of our own.Each mind pursues its own course and is actuated in that course by ten thousand indescribable incommunicable feelings and imaginings." Turning to the implication of this reality for religious matters, he concludes that "necessary as it is, that we should all hold the same truths (as we would be saved) still each of us holds them in his own way; and differs from his nearest and most loved friends either in the relative importance he gives them, or in the connected view he takes of them, or in his perception of the particular consequences resulting from them'' (LD, II, 60). This conviction uttered in 1828 is given prominent position in 1845, when he begins his treatment of the phenomenon of development by asserting that "it is the characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgment on things which come before us." This is a personal, gradual process by which "an idea under one or other of its aspects grows in the mind by remaining there," a process which is "carried on silently and spontaneously"; and is "higher and choicer than that which is logical; for the latter being scientific is common property, and can be taken and made use of by minds who are personally strangers in any true sense, both to the ideas in question and to their development" (Dev, 33, 190).

29. John Henry Newman, "Universities," in HS, III, 77, 85. 30. "Selina, the Countess of Huntingdon," Ess, I, 391.

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Later, in The Idea ofa University, speaking of the mind in general and by way of warning against solipsism, he will say that "knowledge, viewed as knowledge, exerts a subtle influence in throwing us back on ourselves, and making us our own centre, and our minds the measure of all things" (Idea, 217). In the Grammar ofAssent he asserts that "every one who reasons, is his own centre; and no expedient for attaining a common measure of minds can reverse this truth" (GA, 345). Finally, at the age of seventy-four, writing "what is likely to be my last publication," he addressed the Duke of Norfolk on the question of individual conscience and the differing claims of civil and religious duty. Responding to Gladstone's inaccurate charge that the Pope could command 'Absolute Obedience,' Newman insists that "if either the Pope or the Qyeen demanded of me ''Absolute Obedience," he or she would be transgressing the laws of human society. I give an absolute obedience to neither." Then, imagining the supreme unlikelihood of such a divided allegiance arising, he says, "I should decide according to the particular case, which is beyond all rule, and must be decided on its own merits. I should look to see what theology could do for me, what the Bishop and the clergy around me, what my confessor; what friends whom I revered: and if, after all, I could not take their view of the matter, then I must rule myself by my own judgment and my own conscience. But all this is hypothetical and unreal." 31 Given the remarkable personal responsibility by which people think and decide, how can human beings arrive at any consensus? What are true developments of revealed truths? How can there be unity, be it ecclesiastical or civil, amid such potent diversity-diversity rooted in the very nature of the human mind? In a series of writings between 1852 and 1856, Newman addresses explicitly the nature of society and the state. Because he says so little about the state in the Essay on Development, I think it will be helpful at this point to summarize these ideas before returning to the same questions as related to doctrinal development and Church authority, that is, the reconciliation of the individual mind and conscience with other minds and consciences if a religious society is to be an efficacious, enduring, and unified social reality. In The Idea of a University Newman insists that "cultivation of mind" is a good in itself, one that needs no more justification than does

31. A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke ofNoifolk on the Occasion ofMr. Gladstone's Recent Expostulation, in Dijf, II, 243.

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physical exercise and training for the body" (Idea, xvi). However, the risks inherent in education is that the trained mind thinks and questions; and once set on its journey there is no stemming the curiosity of the "imperial intellect" {Idea, 46). The purpose of education is primarily to form individuals; career and citizenship are worthwhile but secondary considerations. A fully realized individual is not only the civilized person, a "gendeman," but a person of heightened moral self-consciousness. 32 But what are the limits to our individuality? How can the human person be at once individual and social? Does not, ultimately, one pole have to yield to the other? Does not, as Newman has said, the human will have to obey some external authority? Does not the individual human intellect have to reach some concord or agreement with other human intellects? These are precisely the kinds of questions that lie behind both the Essay on Development and certain later writings where Newman does discuss more fully the nature of the State. My interest here is focused exclusively on the first two chapters of the Essay. The rest of the chapters in Part 1 are simply an application of the theory to the antecedent probability of development; and Part 2 is a detailed series of studies applying the notes of true development-seven notes which are in fact somewhat arbitrary and which Newman applies with decreasing degrees of thoroughness ranging from one hundred pages on the first note to seven on the last. Clearly the choice and arrangement of doctrines treated served autobiographical as well as objective theological needs. But the heart of the Essay is the discussion in Chapters 1 and 2 on the way the human mind works. The first thing we read is that "it is the characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgment on the things that come before us. No sooner do we apprehend than we judge; we allow nothing to stand by itself; we compare, contrast, abstract, generalize, connect, adjust, classify; and we view all our knowledge in the associations with which these processes have invested it" (Dev, 33). It is tempting here to ask, is this the beginning of a treatise on doctrinal history, or on educational theory,

32. Newman's dictum that knowledge is an end itself must be qualified by the historical context in which he was speaking. In Dublin he was defending liberal as opposed to useful education. During his years as a tutor at Oriel College he advocated the tutorial over the lecture method precisely because the educational process was for him personal, even "pastoral." See my "'Growth the Only Evidence of Life': Development ofDoctrine and The Idea ofa University," Nineteenth-Century Prose 18 (1991):1Q-26.

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or on the epistemology of belief, or even simply a history of one's own religious opinions? In all these areas the starting point for Newman is the concrete human knower in the act of knowing. His method in these two chapters is to move from the nature of ideas growing in the individual mind to the nature of teaching and learning. Newman is not imagining some sort of transcendent, ahistorical self, receiving divine truths in their completeness direcdy from a transcendent deity. However unquestioned the reality of the human spirit and the reality of God, the human spirit is firmly embedded in history, in space and time, with all the limitation such a predicament implies; and the transcendent God, operating however mysteriously, reveals through, not in spite of, the space-time continuum of human experience. Thus an idea "which represents an object or supposed object is commensurate with the sum total of its possible aspects, however they may vary in the separate consciousness of individuals," and "there is no one aspect deep enough to exhaust the content of a real idea, no one term or proposition which will serve to define it" (Dev, 34-35). "When an idea," he says, "whether real or not, is of a nature to arrest and possess the mind, it may be said to have life, that is to live in the mind which is its recipient" (Dev, 36). Once such an idea is possessed by the mind of many individuals, its growth is slow and complex. This process Newman calls "its development, being the germination and maturation of some truth or apparent truth on a large mental field" (Dev, 38). He explicidy rejects a logical or deterministic model of knowing when he says that this "development of an idea is not like an investigation worked out on paper, in which each successive advance is a pure evolution from a foregoing, but it is carried on through and by means of communities of men and their leaders and guides; and it employs the minds as its instruments, and depends upon them while it uses them'' (Dev, 38). Then, foreshadowing both his argument for infallibility in Chapter 2 and his later awareness of the risk involved for a religious society in sponsoring "cultivation of intellect," he says that "this it is that imparts to the history of both states and religions its specially turbulent and polemical character. Such is the explanation of wrangling, whether of scholars or parliaments. It is the warfare of ideas under their various aspects striving for the mastery, each of them enterprising, engrossing, imperious, more or less incompatible with the rest, and rallying followers, or rousing foes, according as it acts upon the faith, the prejudice, or the interests of parties or classes" (Dev, 39). I~eas develop in minds, consciously or unconsciously, peacefully or contentiously, ordinarily over long

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periods of time, even at the end of which the complexity of a real idea is not fully exhausted or developed. Newman, like Coleridge before him, takes pleasure in pointing out that "with all our intimate knowledge of animal life and of the structure of particular animals, we have not arrived at a true definition of any one of them, but are forced to enumerate properties and accidents by way of description'' (Dev, 35). The analogy to teaching and learning is drawn explicitly in the opening paragraph of Chapter 2, which, with typical rhetorical brilliance, summarizes the previous chapter. After describing how the historical fact of Christianity impresses a real idea on the mind and how that idea then expands "into a multitude of ideas, and aspects of ideas, connected and harmonious with one another," he says this occurs because "it is characteristic of our minds that they cannot take an object in which is submitted to them simply and integrally. We conceive by means of definition or description; whole objects do not create in the intellect whole ideas, but are, to use a mathematical phrase, thrown into a series, into a number of statements, strengthening, interpreting, correcting each other, and with more or less exactness approximating, as they accumulate to a perfect image. There is no other way of learning or teaching. We cannot teach except by aspects or views which are not identical with the thing itself which we are teaching. Two persons may each convey the same truth to a third, yet by methods and representations altogether different. The same person will treat the same argument differently in an essay or speech, according to the accident of the day of writing, or of the audience, yet will be substantially the same" (Dev, 55). Thus Newman's "classroom'' is one where individual minds struggle to communicate with equally individual minds amid constantly changing times and circumstances. It is not the classroom of Dickens's Mr. McChoakumchild, where one sees students sitting "like an inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were all full to the brim." 33 Newman's method of teaching, of course, becomes the method of examining the historical process of unfolding divine revelation. Someone might object that in the process of revelation, which is in fact a sort of teaching/learning situation, at least the textbook, the Scriptures, speaks for itself, determines "the limits of the mission without 33. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1961), 12.

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further trouble." To this Newman replies, as we have seen, that "ideas are in the writer and reader of the revelation, not in the inspired text itself" (Dev, 56). For the problem is still the same: "the question is whether those ideas which the letter conveys from the writer to the reader, reach the reader at once in their completeness and accuracy on his first perception of them, or whether they open out in his intellect and grow to perfection in the course of time" (Dev, 56). Apart from the role of faith in assenting to the authenticity of revelation, there is nothing any different from the normal human learning process in understanding it. The force of this argument within the context of the Essay leads to an argument from antecedent probability for the development of doctrine through time; and this in turn leads to an argument from antecedent probability of an infallible guide of that process (which is not deterministic as physical evolution would be). The aspect of this process that concerns us here is that just as conscience for Newman is the governor and regulator of individual growth, so the multiplicity of opinions inevitably engendered over time by the conscious and unconscious exercise of intellect must somehow be brought into harmony if revealed truth is to be salvific and unifying. Infallibility for Newman is, to borrow Coleridge's words about Church Councils cited above, a "necessary means" for "a necessary end." Describing what results when "reason, as it is called, is the standard of truth and right," Newman concludes that individuals will tolerate no "common measure." The solution is again described in terms of teaching and learning; for it is precisely education, as he stresses in The Idea ofa University, which causes this diversity. "There can," he insists, "be no combination on the basis of truth without an organ of truth. As cultivation brings out the colours of flowers and domestication changes the character of animals, so does education of necessity develop differences of opinion; and while it is impossible to lay down first principles in which all will unite, it is utterly unreasonable to expect that this man should yield to that, or all to one." Thus, "the only general persuasive in matters of conduct is authority" (Dev, 90). The rest of the Essay grows out of this insight into the process of human understanding, interpretation, and communication. The revelation, or, more precisely, the act of revealing, is divine and transcendent; but the medium and recipients are very finite and immersed in space and time. The process of development is very human; but the process is divinely guided to its necessary end. Development of doctrine, like teaching and learning, is a very subtle, often frustrating, but ultimately enriching experience.

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It goes without saying that the truth Newman speaks about is moral truth that addresses the meaning and goals of human choice. Revelation is not merely, as its etymology suggests, an "unveiling" or illumination; but it is, more importantly, an invitation, a call. And of what value is an invitation if the recipient does not understand it or lacks the means of responding to it?34 What Newman has done, to his satisfaction, is to explain continuity within historical change, and show how one determines what changes are consistent with the essential idea or identity of the Church and which are, as he calls them, "corruptions" destructive of that identity. Rising from the pages of The Arians ofthe Fourth Century, the Essay on Development and certain other historical writings are a vividly imagined picture of the historical reality that is a community of faith moving through space and time but possessed of an essential unity which paradoxically but inevitably embraces diversity simply because it is human. Only the moral commitment of its members (realized in conscience) and the moral commitment of God (realized in the will of God and expressed humanly in the charism of infallibility, which prevents social division) keep the unity from fragmenting into endless theological skirmishes and occasional heterodoxy. Newman would learn in the years after his conversion, to his great vexation, that if the diversity of opinion tolerated in the Church of England was robbing it, so he thought, of its essential Christian identity, the infallibility of the Roman Catholic Church could often ride roughshod over individual minds in imposing a "common measure" on them. Newman's image of the Church is not altogether different from that of the State-diverse individuals trying to hammer out an acceptable unity that binds them into a community or society. While he says almost nothing about the State in the Essay, two important sources for understanding his political ideas are the lectures on the history of the Turks delivered in 1853 and the letter "Who's to Blame" written to The Catholic Standard in 1855, both occasioned by events taking place in the Crimea. In tracing the history of the Turks from "their intimate resemblance or relationship to the Tartar tribes" to a people who have progressively "gained those qualities of mind, which alone enables a nation to wield and to consolidate imperial power,"35 Newman provides an extended 34. This is precisely the point Roger Haight makes in asserting that soteriology is theologically prior to christology. That is, one cannot understand who Jesus is until one understands what Jesus does for us. See jesus Symbol if God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orb is Books, 1999), 181.

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example of"political developments" which are only briefly sketched in the Essay on Development. The Turks are seen "passing from barbarism," and its old ways "coming to an end." Those tribes "which have changed their original character and have a place in the history of the world" have done so "by a process," a word Newman uses three times in six lines. It is a "process of education and change" (HS, I, 51). In analyzing this process Newman spells out the nature of civilization, State, and constitution. A State is "in its very idea a society and a society is a collection of many individuals made one by their participation in some common possession, and to the extent of that common possession, the presence of that possession held in common constitutes the life, and the loss of it constitutes the dissolution of a state" (HS, I, 161). By "common possession" Newman means a cluster of shared values that identifY a national character. For example, he says that in their move into a warmer climate the Tartar tribes may have been influenced "by the idea of property, when once recognized and accepted, by the desire of possession and by the love of home, and by the sentiment of patriotism which arises in the mind, especially with the occupation of a rich and beautiful country" (HS, I, 67). In a later lecture he says ''At present, I suppose our own political life, as a nation, lies in the supremacy oflaw; and that again is resolvable into internal peace, and protection of life and property, and freedom of the individual, which are its results" (HS, I, 170). These common possessions are "objects of sense" which replace "objects of imagination." States are either "barbarous" or "civilized" depending on whether "their common possession, or life, is some object either of sense or of imagination; and their bane and destruction is either 'external' or 'internal."' (HS, I, 162). We now see the sense of Newman's somber observation that society begins with the poet and ends with the policeman. For "ratiocination and its kindred processes, which are the necessary instruments of political progress, are, taking things as we find them, hostile to imagination and auxiliary to sense" (HS, I, 170). But as we saw in both the Essay on Development and The Idea of a University, the highly trained reason resists authority and tends to fall back on its own judgment, thus running the risk of destroying the political unity requisite for growth and even mere survival. Furthermore, as sense replaces imagination, obedience is hard to require or command because, as Newman so astutely said in "The

35. "The Turks," HS, I, 48.

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Tamworth Reading Room" letters, "the heart is commonly reached, not through reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion." 36 The barbarous state, not reliant on reason, submerges individuality in a tradition that assures stability; the civilized state must encourage reason and its consequent effect of heightened individuation, both of which threaten stability. When reason steps to the fore, "the sentiment of sacredness in institutions fades away, and the measure of truth or expediency is the private judgment of the individual" (HS, I, 173), which results in the internal destruction to which a civilized state is open. And yet the drive toward civilization, as Newman understands it here, is innate to the human race. The development of a people or a nation into a state is rooted in the developmental nature of the human person, for "man comes into the world with capabilities, rather than the means and appliances, oflife. He begins with a small capital, which one admits of indefinite improvement. He is, in his very idea, a creature of progress. He starts, the inferior of the brute animals, but he surpasses them in the long run; he subjects them to himself, and he goes forward on a career, which at least hitherto has not found its limits" (HS, I, 164). Here we see the personal process of self-transcendence, characteristic of the individual, transposed to the political order; as a single human being tends toward everincreasing individuation or definition, so does a human society: "Civilization is the state to which man's nature points and tends; it is the systematic use, improvement, and combination of those faculties which are his characteristic; and viewed in its idea, it is the perfection, the happiness of our mortal state. It is the development of art out of nature, and of self-government out of passion, and certainty out of opinion, and of faith out of reason" (HS, I, 165). This progressive development which culminates in the arising of"faith out of reason" is strikingly similar to Coleridge's process whereby reason passes over into "Higher Reason" as faith carries the reason beyond its finite cognitive 37 word s sue h as "ten d s, '"'systematiC, . . " an d "d eve1opment " use d h onzon. 36. Newman, "The Tamworth Reading Room," Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1891), 293. Hereafter cited as DA. 37. See Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine, 15-16.

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in this context may be echoing the influence of Coleridge's plan for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana and his "Preliminary Treatise on Method," both of which Newman had read and admired. 38 In contrast, "barbarism has no individuality, it has no history; quarrels between neighbouring tribes, grudges, blood-shedding, exhaustion, raids, success, defeat, the same thing over and over again, this not the action of a society, nor the subject matter of narrative; it neither interests the curiosity, nor leaves any impression on the memory" (HS, I, 167). This progress toward individuality which characterizes civilization cannot be achieved without an educational process. The "barbarous" culture as described by Newman is in fact the kind of oral society described by Walter J. Ong. 39 It is a society characterized by oral transmission and reverence for the past. In Newman's words, "Barbarian minds remain in a circle of ideas which sufficed for their fathers; the opinions, principles, and habits which they inherited, they transmit. They have the pmtige of antiquity and the strength of conservatism; but where thought is encouraged, too many will think, and will think too much" (HS, I, 173). Only the trained mind can cope with change; the mind mired rather than healthily rooted in tradition and the past is threatened by change. But typically, for Newman, the virtue contains the seeds of its corresponding vice. Uneducated, the mind grows stale; educated, it may and often does bite the hand that feeds it. The polarity of progress and permanence that characterizes society for Coleridge is mirrored in Newman's ideas about educational institutions. In the Preface to The Idea ofa University he observes that the University "is a place of teaching universal knowledge. This implies that its object is, on the one hand, intellectual, not moral; and, on the other, that it is the diffusion of knowledge rather than the advancement" (Idea, ix). Thus the University disseminates received knowledge. Here he contrasts the University to the Academy where the role of the former is to teach, of the latter to discover new knowledge. This distinction is made more fully two years later in his lectures titled "Universities." Summarizing his views on "the relation of a University to its Colleges," he points

38. See A. Dwight Culler, The Imperial Intellect: A Study ofNewman's Educational Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 176-78. 39. Walter J. Ong, S.J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing if the Word (London and New York: Metheun, 1982). See especially Chapter 3, "Some Psychodynamics of Orality," 31-75.

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out that "the difference between the two institutions is very clear. AU niversity embodies the principle of progress, and College that of stability; the one is the sail, and the other the ballast; each is insufficient in itself for the pursuit, extension, and inculcation of knowledge; each is useful to the other."40 In these lectures, then, Newman shows how a people or Nation develops into a State and how a State tends to develop from a barbarous community into a civilized political entity. In the letters titled "Who's to Blame," suggesting the futility of waging war in the Crimea, Newman spells out the nature of a Constitution and the nature and role of Government. These letters are dramatic manifestations of Newman's views on human liberty and individuality in the political arena, views that are reconciled somewhat tenuously in his theological writings with the demands of infallible authority in an ecclesiastical society. The views expressed here make it clear that, like Coleridge, he accepts the fundamental assumption of private property and individual civil liberty. The discussion begins with the tensions between individual freedom and human interdependence. "First of all," he says, "it is plain that every one has a power of his own to act this way or that, as he pleases." Yet, society, "which is necessary for the well being of human nature," results from the giving up of some personal freedom "in order to secure more freedom on the whole" for everyone. "The result aimed at and effected by these mutual arrangements is called a State or standing" (DA, 312). Government, which is "the living guardian of the law," maintains and enforces the laws and is "involved in the very nature of society. Let the Government be suspended, and at once the state is threatened with dissolution, which at best is only a matter of time" (DA, 312). The analogy to individual development persists. "As individuals have characters of their own, so have races," Newman says, "and this being the case, when a given race has that polity which is intended for it by nature, it is the same state of repose and contentment which an individual enjoys who has the food, or the comforts, the stimulants, the sedatives, or restoratives, which are suited to his diathesis and his need. This then is the Constitution of the State, securing as it does, the national unity by at once strengthening and controlling its governing power" (DA, 315). Like Coleridge, Newman conceives the State as a dynamic entity. The

40. Newman, "Rise and Progress of Universities," HS, III, 228.

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"common possessions" of primitive societies are here "first principles, expressions of some or other sentiments," and are the "creative and conservative influences of society; they erect nations into States, and invest States with Constitutions" (DA, 316). Newman clearly is approaching the State from the side of individual freedom, for "every State has in some sense a Constitution, that is, a set of traditions, depending not on formal enactment, but on national acceptance, in one way or other restrictive of the ruler's powers" (DA, 320). The "two antagonist powers" for Coleridge are "PERMANENCE AND PROGRESSION." For Newman they are "a Rule and a Constitution." Several times throughout the letters he refers to the fable of the horse, which, to gain protection from the horns of the marauding stag, submits itself to the spurs of the human rider who, in being allowed to mount the horse, promises to protect it by driving off the stag. The State "promises two great and contrary advantages, Protection and Liberty,-such protection as shall not interfere with liberty, and such liberty as shall not interfere with protection'' (DA, 339). He nearly sums up the dilemma facing every society, saying "a State or polity implies two things, Power on the one hand, Liberty on the other; a Rule and a Constitution. Power, when freely developed, results in centralization; Liberty in self-government. The two principles are in antagonism from their very nature; so far forth as you have rule, you have not liberty; so far forth as you have liberty, you have not rule. If a People gives up nothing at all, it remains a mere People, and does not rise to be a State. If it gives up everything, it could not be worse off, though it gave up nothing. Accordingly, it must always give up something; it never can give up every thing; and in every case the problem to be decided is, what is the most advisable compromise. What points to the maximum of at once protection and independence" (DA, 325). The point Newman makes throughout these letters is that the British Constitution and Government are by their essential constitution better suited at protecting individual rights and encouraging private initiative than they are at exercising an "imperial" style required to mobilize a nation successfully for foreign war. Clearly the absolute inviolability of human conscience and freedom are central in his political thought. Newman, like Coleridge, holds out for the primacy of the spiritual in human life and for the absolute need of religion. But, also like Coleridge, he suggests that even from an entirely secular point of view religion can play an ancillary role in the growth and stability of the State. While he speaks condescendingly about "the imposter Mohamet," he admits

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that "as Islamism has changed the demeanour of the Turks, so doubtless it has in other ways materially innovated on their Tartar nature. It has given an aim to their military efforts, a political principle and a social bond" (HS, I, 69, 73). What religion may do concretely, beyond cultivating a sense of moral responsibility in citizens, a benefit Newman points out, might be to cultivate the imagination, which is replaced by reason as a State moves from barbarous to civilized. For recall, the "common possession'' of a barbarous state is some object of the imagination. "By objects of the imagination," Newman says, "I mean such as religion, true or false (for there are not only false imaginations but true), divine mission of a sovereign or a dynasty, and historical fame; and by objects of sense, such as secular interests, country, home, protection of person and property" (HS, I, 162). This leads to a question which cannot be pursued here but which deserves serious consideration by leaders both political and religious: How important a role do imagination and "objects of imagination'' play in shaping and preserving any society, be it secular or religious? Can a society based only on law and reason survive? As a nation of people move further and further away in history from its primitive or founding, one might say charismatic, leadership and symbols that brought them together, can the national life of later generations be motivated merely by the codified version, a written or oral constitution, of what was for their forebears more an object of imagination?41 The question I wish to return to now, however, is how do human freedom and conscience fare in a religious society, the Church? Even Coleridge, as we saw, put limits on private judgment, accepting like most Anglicans the superiority of the judgment of the Church Councils, that is, the Church as a whole. But in 1870 the Roman Catholic Church officially declared that the charism of infallibility is invested in a single human being, the Pope. 42 How does the individual, critical, and reflexive mind function in a Church that is perceived by many outsiders as intellectually and spiritually totalitarian? While the doctrine of papal infallibility 41. Such a thought struck me forcefully the first time I visited the National Archives in Washington and saw the Declaration oflndependence and the Constitution "enshrined" in an altarlike setting, suggesting an almost sacred power embodied in these tersely written documents. One comes not to read, but to pay one's respects. 42. The Pope exercises this power only under set conditions: when the subject of a pronouncement is a matter of"fides et mores"; when he speaks "ex cathedra" and not as a private individual; and, normally, when he is speaking along with his fellow Bishops throughout the world.

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was not the principal focus of the Essay on Development, it was the last major stumbling block for Newman in a series of changes in the history of Christianity that he had to deem either corruptions or genuine developments of divinely revealed truth. As Newman began his thoughts on the nature of the State and its progressive development with the reality of individual freedom, so in considering the long slow historical progress of doctrinal development he begins with the nature of the individual human mind. His fundamental assumption, one he acknowledges is held by "several distinguished writers of the continent," is that "the increase and expansion of the Christian Creed and ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion; that from the very nature ofthe human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas; and that the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as being received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media that were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation" (Dev, 27-30, emphasis added). This idea becomes a motif running through the introduction and early chapters of the Essay on Development with such phrases as "the characteristic of our minds," "habitual to the mind," "expansion within the mind in its seasons," "according to the state of mind of each," to point out only a few examples. 43 What happens, then, when many individual minds, each delicately nuanced by the coloring of one's personal influences, education, and temperament, begin to reflect on and try actively and consciously to understand, that is, to elaborate an idea? Considered in the abstract this process might seem serene enough, but when it takes concrete historical shape, this many-sided and often tumultuous exchange "imparts to the history ofboth states and religions its specially turbulent and polemical character. Such is the explanation of wranglings, whether of schools or of parliaments. It is the warfare of ideas under their various aspects striving for the mastery, each of them enterprising, engrossing, imperious, more or less incompatible with the rest, and rallying followers or rousing foes, 43. Dev, 33, 36, 55, 59, 73, 82.

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according as it acts upon faith, the prejudices, or the interest of parties or classes" (Dev, 39). Notice again the bellicose imagery, which is surprisingly common in Newman's prose. 44 In 1863, eighteen years after his conversion, complaining to Emily Bowles about the "extreme centralization which is now in use" in the Roman Catholic Church, Newman asks, "how can I fight with such a chain on my arm? Gone are the days when theological disputes were matter for the schools and Rome was a court only oflast appeal" (LD, XX, 447). One might almost suggest that the Church, like the State, begins with the poet and ends with the policeman. The struggle affected Newman deeply, even in his Anglican days when he professed complete obedience to his own local bishop. The reaction of the bishops, especially his own, to his "infamous" Tract 90 was a major factor in his decision to withdraw from the Tractarian Movement he had so tirelessly supported for almost twelve years. In matters of secular learning reason was supreme, but for Newman "the essence of all religion is authority and obedience," and "the distinction between natural religion and revealed lies in this, that the one has a subjective authority and the other an objective. Revelation consists in the manifestation of the Invisible Divine Power, or in the substitution of the voice of the Lawgiver for the voice of the conscience" (Dev, 86). But the objective authority of Revelation exercises no practical force on an individual until the subjective authority of conscience, informed by faith, prompts a person to recognize and follow that authority. Newman, it must be recalled, addresses himself to those who accept the fact of divine revelation, not to so-called unbelievers. His argument moves toward an acceptance of papal infallibility. Thus, when he states that "what conscience is in the system of nature, such is the voice of Scripture, or the Church, or of the Holy See," he is summarizing the Lutheran, Anglican, and Roman Catholic positions respectively on the voice of ultimate authority (Dev, 86). A post-Vatican II position would hold that the Roman Catholic Church synthesizes all three sources. There is a cogency in what Newman says. For if revelation is intended for the salvation of all human beings, and if the human spirit will not and cannot be intellectually coerced, then at some point the head must bow to the heart. The promise of revelation is made not to each individual privately but to humanity as a whole through a chosen community. 44. This point is forcefully made by Francis L. Fennell in his review of Sheridan Gilley's Newman and His Age (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1990) in America (26 September 1992), 191.

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Thus there must be in the Church something akin to that moment in the secular state when differences must be set aside lest a political union dissolve. Just as "everyone who reasons, is his own centre; and no expedient for attaining a common measure of minds can reverse this truth" {GA, 345), so "there can be no combination on the basis of truth without an organ of truth"-a point which Newman spells out in language now quite irenic: ''As cultivation brings out the colours of flowers, and domestication changes the character of animals, so does education of necessity develop differences of opinion; and while it is impossible to lay down first principles in which all will unite, it is utterly unreasonable to expect that this man should yield to that, or all to one. I do not say there are no eternal truths, such as the poet proclaims, which all acknowledge in private, but there are none sufficiently commanding to be the basis of public union and action. The only general persuasive in matters of conduct is authority; that is {when truth is in question) a judgment which we feel to be superior to our own. If Christianity is both social and dogmatic, intended for all ages, it must humanly speaking have an infallible expounder" (Dev, 90). Later, when examining the "state of the evidence," Newman points out that "a Pope would not arise but in the proportion as the Church was consolidated" (Dev, 119). Considering the papal supremacy in some detail, he says "it is the absolute need of a monarchical power in the Church which is our ground for anticipating it" (Dev, 154). Newman's argument for papal authority parallels his argument, presented above, for the need of government in any human society: to preserve unity in the face of the potential divisiveness of human individuality. Echoing what he wrote in the essays on the Turks, he says that "in barbarous times the will is reached through the senses; but in an age in which reason, as it is called, is the standard of truth and right, it is abundantly evident to any one, who mixes ever so little with the world, that, if things are left to themselves, every individual will have his own view of them, and take his own course; that two or three will agree to-day to part company tomorrow; that Scripture will be read in contrary ways, and history, according to the apologue, will have to different comers its silver shield and its golden; that philosophy, taste, prejudice, passion, party, caprice, will find no common measure, unless there be some supreme power to control the mind to compel agreement" (Dev, 89-90). This is a mode of securing religious unity which the Protestant Coleridge would have roundly rejected and which Newman in the Roman Catholic days would come to criticize.

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Newman was, however, unmistakably drawn to the idea that the desire for external authority lies deep in the human person; and he speaks of this desire, interestingly enough, in terms of imagination. As we saw, barbarian peoples are bound together by "objects of imagination." Newman asserts that "Catholicism appeals to the imagination" (PPS, II, 224); and while "the national religion has many attractions, it does not impress on the imagination" (DMC, 102). "Human nature is so constituted," he says, that it needs such figures as bishops "as resting places for the eyes and the heart" (VM, II, 65). Writing of infallibility in his Anglican days, he says that "men act, not because they are convinced, but because they feel; the doctrine in question appeals to their imagination, not to their intellect. The mind requires an external guide; Protestantism, in its socalled orthodox forms, furnishes one indeed, but is afraid to avow it. Romanism avows it, and that in the most significant and imposing matter It uses the doctrine of infallibility as a sort of symbol or strong maxim, to bring home to the mind the fact that the Church is the divinely appointed keeper and teacher of the truth" (VM, I, 116). When Newman considers some of the truths that emerge, throughout the historical process of development, from the central doctrine of the Incarnation, he implicitly relies on his teaching on conscience. For example, "involved in this death of the natural man is necessarily a revelation of the malignity ofsin, in corroboration of the forebodings of conscience" (Dev, 326 ). Because conscience "knows" what reason cannot comprehend, it follows "that belief in Christianity is in itselfbetter than unbelief; that faith, though an intellectual action, is ethical in its origin; that it is safer to believe; that we must begin with believing; that as for the reasons ofbelieving, they are for the most part implicit, and need be but slightly recognized by the mind that is under their influence; that they consist moreover rather of presumptions and ventures after truth than of accurate and complete proofs; and that probable arguments, under the scrutiny and sanction of a prudent judgment, are sufficient for conclusions which we even embrace as most certain, and turn to the most important uses" (Dev, 327). What begins to surface here, but will not be spelled out for another twenty-five years, is Newman's idea of the illative sense. While the Essay on Development is directed primarily to his own Anglican confreres, it contains intimations of the argument for God's existence from conscience and that peculiar and uniquely personal capacity for examining evidence in the pursuit of moral truth that constitutes the subject matter of the

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Grammar oj"Assent, which, paradoxically, contains some of Newman's strongest statements on the integrity and independence of the human intellect. In the Grammar he quite candidly admits that in the examination of the "Evidences of Religion," as in inquiries into metaphysics or ethics, "egotism is true modesty" ( GA, 384).

IV In looking back on these parallel readings of Constitution of the Church and State and the Essay on Development, we can draw two conclusions. First of all, Newman and Coleridge based their political and ecclesiastical ideas on the developmental nature of the concrete human person. A State or a Church, like its constituents, is an historical entity and must grow and develop or cease to be-"Growth the only evidence oflife," or "Not to be progressive is to be retrograde." Second, radical human freedom demands that the State treat persons as individuals, protecting life and property while putting minimal necessary restraint on human freedom. The Church, too, even for Newman, must respect the sincerely formed conscience. In his letter to the Duke of Norfolk he declared "if either the Pope or the Qyeen demanded of men an 'Absolute Obedience,' he or she would be transgressing the laws of human society." Or, as he more famously put it in the same letter, "I shall drink-to the Pope, if you please,-still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards" (DA, II, 243, 261). What he says, in effect, is that the Pope in his exercise of infallibility is subject to the naturallaw, 45 as well as, one would naturally assume, to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We turn now to the heart of Coleridge and Newman's thinking about what it is to be human. What is the "inner life" called spirit and how can it pursue and discover the object of its quest-God? Is it rational to say that reason must ultimately surrender to mystery? Is such a process a denial or fulfillment of one's humanity? Much modern thought would suggest we mature by developing away from mystery and faith. Coleridge and Newman will insist that we develop by moving toward mystery and faith, a process in which reason willingly, and reasonably, gives way to faith. 45. Some contemporary Roman Catholic theologians are beginning to adopt Newman's position. See, for example, Peter Granfield, The Limits ofthe Papacy: Authority and Autonomy in the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1987), especially 52-76.

5

Development and Belief: Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character and An Essay in Aid· of a Grammar of Assent Granting that the whole science of metaphysics is esoteric, as some German philosophers now say, & that treatises on it should always be written in the first person singular, still it may be true that a continuous meditation may bring out to a particular mind a truth in the way of intuition, I mean as something perceived without reason or middle-term-as eyes long accustomed to gaze upon darkness see objects for which others would require more light. READER!-You have been bred in a land abounding with men, able in arts, learning, and knowledges manifold, this man in one, this another, few in many, none in all. But there is one art, of which every man should be master, the art of REFLECTION. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all? In like manner, there is one knowledge, which it is every man's interest and duty to acquire, namely, SELFKNOWLEDGE; or to what end was man alone, of all animals, endued by the Creator with the faculty of se!fconsciousness? Ah! well for us, if even we, Even for a moment, can get free Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd; For that which seals them hath been deep ordain'd! Fate, which foresaw How frivolous a baby man would beBy what distractions he would be possess'd, How he would pour himself in every strife, And well-nigh change his own identity-

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That it might keep from his capricious play His genuine self, and force him to obey Even in his own despite his being's law, Bade through the deep recesses of our breast The unregarded river of our life Pursue with indiscernible flow its way; And that we should not see The buried stream, and seem to be Eddying at large in blind uncertainty, Though driving on with it eternally. 1

I Chapter 3 focused on two narrative accounts of the developing self: a process in which the undifferentiated consciousness of a single human being moves through a process of self-consciousness and self-transcendence toward individuation, personhood-something bordering on the unique. In Chapter 4 we considered how groups of developing individuals function together in a developing society, be it secular or sacred, State or Church. Like individuals, societies move toward increasing individuation, rising from "barbaric" to "civilized" social entities. In Chapter 5 we again turn our focus on the developing individual to look at, from within as it were, the religious experience that finds its outward, social expression in religious community, be it synagogue, church, mosque, or other public place where people gather in common expression of religious belie£ When approaching religion from the viewpoint of"Church," a socially organized body of individual believers, one necessarily prescinds from what is in fact the most important aspect of religion, the relationship between the individual believer and the object of that belief-God. No aspect of human life is more private and intimate, none less easily detectable by or communicable to others than one's inner religious experience. Both Coleridge and Newman realized this in addressing the intimate nature ofbelief, but Newman seems more insistent on bringing this experience to light. As I suggested above, when discussing the progressive nature of the human person, our physical, cultural, and intellectual 1. Newman, PN, II, 27-29; Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 10; and Matthew Arnold, "The Buried Life," Poetical Works, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 245-46.

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capital can accumulate; the moral cannot. In a sermon of 1830 Newman says that "the case is different in matters oflearning and science. There others can and do labour for us; we can make use of their labours; we begin where they ended; thus things progress, and each successive age knows more than the preceding. But in religious matters each must begin, go on, and end, for himsel£ The religious history of each individual is solitary and complete as the history of the world" (PPS, VII, 248). The isomorphism between the individual and the community is borne out by his statement in the Essay on Development that "the instance of Conscience, which has already served us in illustration, may assist us here. What Conscience is in the history of the individual mind, such was the dogmatic principle in the history of Christianity" (361). Two excerpts from sermons delivered in 1841 repeat this point and possibly echo his own growing estrangement from the Tractarians. "Surely," he says, "as the only true religion is that which is seated within us, a matter, not of words, but of things, so the only satisfactory test of religion is something within us. If religion be a personal matter, its reasons should also be personal."2 In another sermon, he says, "I mean that religion is personal, private and individual matter, that it consists in a communion between God and the soul, and that its true evidences belong to the soul that believes, are its property, and not something common to it and the whole world. God vouchsafes to speak to us one by one, to manifest himself to us one by one, to lead us forward one by one; he gives us something to rely upon which others do not experience, which we cannot convey to others, which we can but use for ourselves" (SSD, 325). Years later, in 1857, in some theological jottings, he notes that "egotism is modesty in metaphysical discussion-for in so obscure a matter all one can do is to give one's experience, without claiming to say one has found out truths which will approve themselves to all" (TP, 48). This conviction would set the tone for the final chapter in the Grammar rfAssent, on inference and assent in matters of religion. There Newman says, "I begin here with expressing a sentiment, which is habitually in my thoughts, whenever they are turned to the subject of mental or moral science, and which I am as willing to apply here to the Evidences of Religion as it properly applies to Metaphysics or Ethics, viz. that in these provinces of inquiry each of us can only speak for himself, and for himself he has a right to 2. John Henry Newman, Sermons on Subjects if the Day (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1891), 345. Cited hereafter as SSD.

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speak" (385-86). Coleridge says that "unless a man understands his own heart, it is impossible that he should have insight into the Hearts of other men. And how should he understand his own Heart who is afraid or ashamed to look into it, yea even to look at it?"3 How, then, can one write and talk to others about that which is most personal in each, both writer and reader? This is only part of the problem Coleridge and Newman faced in writing about belie£ Another problem is the apparently general disinclination of human nature to respond to the call of revelation, in spite of the presence of a connatural instinct in each person to rise toward a transcendent personal reality. In 1830 Newman says that "the very notion ofbeing religious implies self-denial, because by nature we do not love religion'' (PPS, VII, 86). In 1837 he expresses this in darker terms in two of hissermons. In the first he says that "it is religion itself which we all by nature dislike, not the excess merely. Nature tends toward the earth, and God is in heaven" (PPS, IV, 14). In the second he says, "left to itself, human nature tends to death and utter apostasy from God, however plausible it may look externally" (SSD, 108). Coleridge, speaking from the other side of this apparent contradiction in our nature, says that "our maker has distinguished man from the brute that perishes, by making hope first an instinct of his nature; and secondly, an indispensable condition of his moral and intellectual progression'' ( C&S, 73). A notebook entry observes that "man may rather be defined a religious than a rational Creature: in regard that in other Creatures there may be something of Reason, but there is nothing ofReligion."4 How can a writer-or preacher-draw such recalcitrant humanity to reflect inward, to become aware of its religious orientation? In Aids to Reflection, well into his commentary on spiritual religion, Coleridge asks, "how comes it that the philosophic mind should, in all ages, be the privilege of a few?" (Aids, 236-37)-a question that echoes the observation in Biographia Literaria that they "who can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition" (I, 241-42) are few and far between and are usually regarded as "not made for this world" by their more mundane fellow creatures. 5 How can one invite a person to enter into the process of self-reflection, of self-appropriation, to discover the very appetite for the transcendent, without which any prior claim to supernatural revelation would be meaningless? As Coleridge says, 3. CN, V, series 6692, entry 51.7. 4. CN, II, series 2223, entry 22.16. 5. Aids, 236-37; BL, I, 241-42.

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unless one feels the need for religion, why accept it? How can someone be made aware of conscience and what it entails? There remains one more'problem, the one I described in my first chapter. The cultural climate was increasingly insensitive to the claims of revealed religion not only because of growing secularization and secularism, but also because a growing empirical positivism and an enshrined model of mathematical certitude tended to reduce all other claims to certitude to varying degrees of probability. Michael J. Buckley has shown in great detail what happened when the task of Christian apologetics was passed from theologians to philosophers and scientists in the seventeenth century. The person who stands both in fact and in symbol at the head of this "revolution in theism" is Descartes. 6 Mathematical method and its promise of absolute certainty undercut all other methods and discourses. Both Coleridge and Newman lamented this; and they were not alone. In the conversion novel of]. A. Froude-brother of Newman's High Church colleague Hurrell Froude and brother-in-law of Newman's Broad Church antagonist Charles Kingsley-the hero asserts that "to dry mathematicizing reason, the Catholic, the Anglo-Catholic, the Lutheran, the Calvinist, the Socinian, will be equally unacceptable; and the philosopher will somewhat contemptuously decline giving either of them intellectual advantage. But sin is of faith, not of mathematics."7 In 1849 Newman told an audience that the world "believes what it experiences, it disbelieves what it cannot demonstrate" (DMC, 7). Three years after writing the Grammar Newman describes the "Infidelity of the Future," which asserts that "there is no revelation from above. There is no exercise of faith. Seeing and proving is the only ground for believing. They go on to say, that since proof admits of degrees, a demonstration can hardly be had except in mathematics; we can never have simple knowledge; truths are only probable as such."8 How, in a world leaving little or no room for proofs other than the probabilities of empiricism and the certitudes of mathematics, could writers like Coleridge and Newman hope to present Christianity as reasonable and the certitude offaith as possible? M.Jamie Ferreira suggests that some current approaches to the philosophy of religion may be more sympathetic than those of their contemporaries were to the turn that 6. Michael}. Buckley, S.J.,At the Origins ofModern Atheism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 97. 7. James Anthony Froude, The Nemesis ofFaith (London: Chapman, 1849), 177. 8. John Henry Newman, Faith and Prejudice and Other Unpublished Sermons (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 124.

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Newman (and Coleridge, I would add) took in approaching the phenomenology of religious experience. 9 If there is a moral order distinct from the physical, and if that order in turn implies a spiritual or transcendent order distinct from the moral, both of which points Coleridge and Newman accepted as foundational, then there must be a valid methodology for exploring these orders of human experience and for speaking and writing about them. Coleridge, like Newman, was keenly aware of the difficulty in communicating such truth. A grammatically incomplete notebook entry reads: "Man but an half animal without drawing-but yet he is not meant to be able to communicate all the greater part of his being must [be] solitary-even of his Consciousness-." 10 The approach Coleridge and Newman take is at once personal, psychological, and, I might say, invitational or inviting. Since religion is intensely intimate and personal, about whose religious experience can one realistically speak with any real authority? Only one's own, of course, because it is the only one a person can experience. Since the focus is on how a person believes, both Coleridge and Newman present implicitly a psychological study of their own mind, not an abstract epistemology or metaphysics, however much these can be derived from the former. Yet I agree with Ferreira that Newman (and I would again add Coleridge) is providing a foundational epistemology of belief in that he provides the process by which others can examine and reflect on their own cognitive processes (64, n. 29). At this point the transcendental method of Bernard Lonergan may be illuminating. Lonergan's seminal work, Insight: A Study ifHuman Understanding, grounds its ontology and epistemology in an analysis of the concrete structure of knowing. The verification of this analysis is found in each individual's act of self-appropriation. In that act one becomes thematically, or reflexively, conscious of one's own dynamic process of knowing. Because that process also reveals an isomorphism between knowing and being, it simultaneously grounds one's ontology. In a very real sense Russell Brain's assertion that "a philosophy is an abstraction from an autobiography" is true. 11 Lonergan was, in fact, strongly influenced by the Grammar ifAssent in thinking through his own approach to the transcendental method of

9. M. Jamie Ferreira, Doubt and Religious Commitment: The Role qfthe Will in Newman's Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 52-70. 10. CN, I, series 524, entry 5.32. 11. Russell Brain, The Nature ofExperience (Lo~don: Oxford University Press, 1958), 2.

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self-appropriation, an indebtedness he repeatedly acknowledged. 12 It was, as I pointed out in my Preface, this connection between Lonergan and Newman that prompted this attempt to read both Coleridge and Newman through the lens of the Catholic transcendental method as it was developed by Lonergan. That Coleridge's concept of philosophy follows much the same lines is easily demonstrated. Contrasting the Cartesian scientific view with that of the transcendental philosophers, he says that "every other science pre-supposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity" (BL, I, 297). Newman made no forays into metaphysics, but for Coleridge, a born metaphysician, there is also an isomorphism between epistemology and ontology. In Church & State he defines philosophy as the doctrine and the discipline of ideas," typically expanding his point in a note worth quoting here: That is, of knowledge immediate, yet real and herein distinguished in kind from logical and mathematical truths, which express not realities, but only the necessary forms ofconceiving and perceiving, and are therefore named the formal, or abstract sciences. Ideas, on the other hand, or the truths of philosophy, properly so called, correspond to substantial beings, to objects whose actual subsistence is implied in their idea, though only by the idea revealable. To adopt the language of the great philosophic apostle, they are ''spiritual realities that can only spiritually be discerned, " and the inherent aptitude and moral preconfiguration to which constitutes what we mean by ideas, and by the presence of ideal truth, and of ideal power, in the human being. They, in fact, constitute his humanity. For try to conceive a man without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth, of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite. An animal endowed with a memory of appearances and of facts might remain. But the man will have vanished, and you have instead a creature "more subtle than any beast of the field, but likewise cursed above every beast of the field; upon the belly it must go and dust must it eat all the days of its life." (C&S, 47) 12. See, for example, Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, ed. F. E. Crowe (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), ix, xi, 1, 2, 6; Bernard]. F. Longergan, S.J., A Second Collection by BernardJF. Lonergan, S.J, ed. William F. J. Ryan and Bernard Tyrell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), 38, 97, 141-42, 148, 185,227,236,263, 276; Bernard]. F. Lonergan, S.J.,AThird Collection: Papers by Bernard] F. Lonergan, S.J, ed. Frederick E. Crowe (New York and London: Paulist Press/G. Chapman, 1985), 52, 64, 185,195,221,223,236, 242; and Bernard]. F. Lonergan, S.J., Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 169, 223, 251, 261.

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Such an isomorphism between the intelligibility of knowing and being is neither subjectivism nor psychologizing. It is rather the basing of one's ontology on one's consciously appropriated, concrete, cognitive activity. These are not abstract ideas arrived at by the activity of pure reason but rather real ideas arrived at by the activity of practical reason. These are ideas that "correspond to substantial beings" which constitute the reality of a human being and can be known by the reflection Coleridge and Newman each recommends to his readers. Coleridge and Newman analyze their own processes of knowing and believing and present them as paradigms readers can use in analyzing and rendering thematic or explicit their own cognitive activities. Is Christianity needed? Coleridge invites his readers to ask, "How can I comprehend this: How is this to be proved? To the first question I should answer that Christianity is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but a life;-not a Philosophy of Life, but a Life and a living process. To the second: TRY IT" (Aids, 202). But exploring the inner reality of the self and describing it in ways meaningful to others is not an easy task. Here one enters the realm of moral and spiritual being and truth. Even moral being and truth are not just matters oflaw and rights and duties but primarily of will and spirit, from which such realities flow. This level of human reality eludes not only the physical sciences but even the behavioral sciences. "Moral truth," Newman wrote his mother in 1829, "is gained by patient study, by calm reflection, silently as the dew falls, unless miraculously given, and, when gained, it is transmitted by faith and by'prejudice"' (LD, II, 131). In the final analysis both writers can only invite readers to enter into the very process of self-reflectionof becoming conscious of oneself as a questioner and a knower-that they are themselves going through as they write about it. That intense, honest, and personal self-appropriation, which is the result of reflection, is the methodological aim of both of these books is made dramatically clear from a passage in the Grammar ofAssent where Newman quotes Coleridge commenting on Archbishop Leighton in the Aids to Reflection. Coleridge infers from Leighton's text "that in all finite quantity, there is an infinite, in all measures of time an eternal; that the latter are the basis, the substance of the former; and that, as we truly are only as far as God is with us, so neither can we truly possess, that is, enjoy our being or any other real good, but by living in the sense of His holy presence." Because it states so clearly Coleridge's purpose and method in the Aids to Reflection, Newman's own reflection bears quoting: "What is this

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an argument for? how few readers will enter into either premise or conclusion! and of those who understand what it means, will not at least some confess that they understand it by fits and starts, not at all times? Can we ascertain its force by mood and figures? Is there any royal road by which we may indolently be carried along into the acceptance of it? Does not the author [that is, Coleridge] rightly number it among his 'aids' for our 'reflection,' not instruments for compulsion? It is plain fact that, if the passage is worth anything, we must secure that worth for our own use by the personal action of our own minds, or else we shall be only professing and asserting its doctrine, without having any ground or right to assert it. And our preparation and understanding and making use of it will be the general state of our mental discipline and cultivation, our own experiences, our appreciation of religious ideas, the perspicacity and steadiness of our intellectual vision'' {GA, 305-6 ). What the reader does, more often than not, is, in the language of the Grammar, to settle for notional rather than real apprehension. Because these writings are personal and psychological, they are far more autobiographical than their format and rhetoric initially suggest. They reflect the inner dimension of the lives described in the public autobiographies and carry them beyond influences and interactions with others to the private, almost ineffable, center of the human spirit. While much has been written about the styles of Biographia Literaria and Apologia pro Vita sua, little or nothing has been written about the rhetoric or structure of the Aids to Reflection and the Grammar ofAssent. In looking at both books, therefore, I will return to my approach in Chapter 3 of trying to focus on thematic threads woven into the rich rhetorical fabric that is as subtly narrative as it is expository and didactic. In dealing with each text I will consider (1) the autobiographical dimensions, (2) the genre and audience, (3) the structure and method, (4) the foundational role of conscience, and (5) some further comparisons not previously made along the way.

II What Coleridge in fact did when he began composing the Aids to Reflection was to move from his longstanding private dialogue with Archbishop Robert Leighton into a public forum, where readers interested in cultivating the art of reflection could watch a master at work. George

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Walley traces the genesis of the Aids from Coleridge's first jottings of 1814 through 1819, when he had collected a significant number ofhis marginalia, to the final version of 1824. 13 One really must pore over the thick volumes of the Marginalia and the companion volumes of notes to get some sense of how this self-proclaimed "library cormorant" read a book. So lengthy and so substantial were his marginal comments that friends often loaned him books that they hoped he would return filled with Coleridgean insights. 14 Readers who sit passively poring over a text merely for information would probably have little sense of what is going on in these marginalia or in the Aids to Reflection. More accustomed to highlighting or underlining words rather than struggling to understand them, a process not unlike taking notes in class, they may, in Coleridge's words, "attend" but they do not "think." "He only thinks who reflects," Coleridge advises his prospective reader (Aids, 14). The Aids is a "didactic" work "for as many in all classes as wish for aid in disciplining their minds to habits of reflection," especially for the "studious young" but also for a group who sound very much like the "clerisy" of Constitution of Church and State--persons "who have dedicated their future lives to the cultivation of their Race, as Pastors, Preachers, Missionaries or Instructors ofYouth" (Aids, 6). Given an audience of people pledged "to the cultivation of their race," I would like to suggest that the Aids to Reflection belongs in the tradition of books preparing young people for public life or service, works such as The Courtier, The Prince, and The Book of the Govern our. The purpose of the Aids, however, is to develop a "manly," that is, a virtuous as opposed to a worldly-wise character. I will suggest something similar when considering Newman's choice of the word "grammar" to characterize his book. There is a double structure in the Aids. The primary structure with its tripartite division moves the reader through progressively ascending stages by a consideration of the true meaning of Prudence, Religious Morality, and Spiritual Religion. This is what I would call the inviting or invitational structure, for its purpose is to draw the reader toward selftranscendence through experiencing the gradually ascending levels of human consciousness. The secondary structure is composed of the four major points that Coleridge needs to make in leading the reader to this heightened self-reflection. They are: (1) the "value of the Science of words" 13. CM, I, ci, cxx. 14. CM, I, xxxiv--cii.

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which are "the Wheels of the intellect"; (2) "the distinct characters of Prudence, Morality, and Religion''; (3) "the distinction between REASON and Understanding"; and (4) the exhibition of a "full and consistent Scheme of the Christian dispensation" (Aids, 6-8). This is a work that is both formative and informative, the latter playing maidservant to the former. This is an important point-the precise point Newman makes in his comment on the passage from the Aids cited above. Coleridge is not primarily concerned with informing the mind (although it is a necessary component of his plan) but rather with moving the heart. Mining the book for Coleridgean ore is a predictable process in critical studies; but it is often done, ironically, at the expense of ignoring or being unconscious of his primary purpose in writing. At the end of the preface Coleridge grounds his whole project on the defining characteristic of our humanity, the duty of acquiring self-knowledge, "or to what end was man alone, of all the animals, endued by the Creator with the faculty of se!fconsciousness" (Aids, 10). If the reader, who pores over the aphorisms and commentaries that constitute Aids, has not achieved "the habit of self-reflection," that person has understood, in Newman's words, notionally but not really what the book is all about. Written in the full vigor ofhis Highgate period, the Aids picks up on ideas introduced in Biographia Literaria which initiated this new period in his life, confirming again what John Stuart Mill intuited, the coherent structure of the Coleridgean system in spite ofits fragmented appearance in individual writings. The first several introductory aphorisms read like a philosophical application of the critical theory. The Wordsworthian capacity to strip away "the film of familiarity" and to stir up "a meditative and feeling mind" (BL, II, 6-7) is echoed in these aphorisms. What the creative mind does in poetry, the reflecting mind can do in philosophy and religion. "In philosophy, equally as in poetry, it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impression of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission." It is through reflection that one gives "freshness and importance to the most common-place maxims" (Aids, 11). Even the Wordsworthian child seems to appear in the text. Reflecting on the wonder with which philosophy begins and ends, Coleridge asks, ''As in respect of the first Wonder we are all on the same Level, how comes it that the philosophic mind should, in all ages, be the privilege of a Few?" (Aids, 236-37). The "philosophic mind" has been replaced by the "philosophic imagination

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of Biographia Literaria, and the cause of its rarity is twofold. First, "the Wonder takes place before the period of Reflection," in childhood one assumes, and then surprise "is worn away, if not precluded, by Custom and familiarity." Second, "the great fundamental Truths and Doctrines of religion" are impressed so early and so concretely "on our infant minds, that the words ever after represent sensations, feelings, vital assurances, sense of reality-rather than thoughts or any distinct conception" (Aids, 237). Some dimension of what is lost in childhood must be recovered if one is to rise to the highest level of religion. One aphorism on spiritual religions states: "There is a small chance of Truth at the goal where there is not a child-like Humility at the Starting-post" (Aids, 192). Children must begin with belief in all areas oflife in order to find reasons for their belie£ So, too, adults, in religious matters, must be humble and docile; the human reason must obey the will of God, which expresses the highest reason. But Coleridge is not advocating any sort of blind fideism, for he wrote to John Anster in 1824 that the Aids was intended for "serious young men of ordinary education who are sincerely searching after moral and religious Truth but are perplexed by the common prejudice, that Faith in the peculiar Tenets of Christianity demands a sacrifice of the Reason and is at enmity with Common-Sense" (CL, V, 336-37). His point is precisely that the act of submission involved in faith is most reasonable, even though the content of that belief may exceed human reason. I will return to this when discussing the role of conscience in theological investigation. What Wordsworth did for poetry Coleridge is about to do for the truths of Christianity-remove the film of familiarity from "the fundamental truths and doctrines of religion" and guide the reader in contemplating them anew with wonder and mature insight. Seen in this light, the supposed waning of his poetic powers might better be considered a shifting of his creativity not to philosophy and theology as we understand these disciplines today but to the construction of a Christian humanist's ars bene beateque vivendi that entails not only intellectual and social but moral and spiritual good living. The three stages through which the reader is led can be simply summarized. First, there can be prudence without morality, but no morality without prudence. Prudence is an intellectual instinct that guides a human being in making effective choices toward a determined goal. Of itself it has nothing to do with morality or reason and is in fact a sort

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of self-serving type of self-sacrifice (Aids, 58-60). A maniac can be "clever and inventive," but he has lost his reason (Aids, 271). But a person cannot be moral, that is, act in a moral manner, without prudence because it is the concrete way of translating principles into action. Second, true morality is fundamentally religious. A sincerely moral person, one who is self-reflective, is conscious of a spiritual or supernatural dimension to his motives and actions-namely, the presence of the wi11. 15 One can practice a religious morality, which I interpret as meaning, for Coleridge, natural as distinct from revealed religion. It rejects Hobbesian necessitarianism and Shaftesbury's Platonized rationalism, but it is not spiritual religion because it is limited to the resources and powers of human will and reason. Third, spiritual religion, theism, and particularly Christianity, for Coleridge, crown and complete our humanity, allowing it, through faith, to reach a self-transcendence beyond its innate power. Thus, each stage, religious morality and spiritual religion, subsumes and transforms the previous one, lifting it into a higher level of selfconsciousness and self-transcendence. The first act of transcendence can be achieved, unaided, by the individual; the second requires divine assistance. For in spite of the fact that morality using prudence as its instrument "has, considered abstractly, not only a value but a worth of itself," the crucial question "which every man must answer for himself" is, "From what you know of yourself; of your own Heart and Strength; and from what History and personal Experience have led you to conclude of mankind generally; dare you trust to it? Dare you trust to it? To it, and it alone?" (Aids, 198). The answer, of course, is no. As beautiful and powerful as our human faculties are, they need divine help as their complement. The opening pages ofAids, of course, announces this when Coleridge asserts that the "CHRISTIAN FAITH IS THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE" (Aids, 6). The exposition of the three points that provide the intellectual foundation for a process of reflection leading to action weaves in and out of this pattern both in the commentary and, typical of Coleridge, in long running footnotes. The function of the comments is to initiate reflection by showing the author in his own act of reflecting on the aphorisms.

15. Coleridge is insistent, however, that this consciousness is not some kind of intuitionism. Whether it be the will or the Spirit, one is conscious only of one's actions from which one infers will and Spirit. See the Aids, 72-73, 153.

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The foundational role of conscience in the Aids to Reflection is abundandy evident, nowhere more strikingly than in the relationship between conscience and consciousness. Coleridge begins with the conviction that self-knowledge is "every man's interest and duty to acquire ... or to what end was man alone, of all the animals, endued by the Creator with the faculty of self-consciousness?" (Aids, 10). Further on we learn that conscience is "the ground and antecedent ofhuman (or self-) consciousness, and not any modification of the latter.... For Conscience is no synonime of Consciousness, nor any mere expression of the same as modified by a particular object. On the contrary, a consciousness properly human (that is self-consciousness), with the sense of moral responsibility presupposes the Conscience, as its antecedent Condition and Ground" (Aids, 125). We see stated here the idea from the Opus Maximum that consciousness of conscience is the radical act of self-appropriation of the conscious dynamism that constitutes a person, an act in which one renders thematic or explicit one's performative or implicit ontological orientation to others and to the Other. As we will see next with Newman, the existence of moral self-awareness of will and conscience-is for Coleridge a foundational or undeniable assumption. As we have seen abundantly, so far, human beings are progressive by nature. "Every State," Coleridge says, "and consequently that which we have described as the State of Religious Morality, which is not progressive, is dead or retrograde" (Aids, 103). But human progressiveness is not automatic or deterministic; it requires moral effort on the part of the individual. Because a person is endowed with free will, conscience impels one to achieve self-knowledge through self-reflection. But what of the person who denies free will? Where is the proof that it grounds morality? To this question Coleridge responds, "This then is the distinction ofMoral Philosophy-not that I begin with one or more Assumptions; for this is common to all science; but-that I assume a something, the proof of which no man can give another, yet every man finds it for himsel£ ... If, on the other hand, he will not find it, he excommunicates himself. He forfeits his personal Rights, and becomes a Thing: i.e. one who may rightly be employed, or used as means to an end, against his will, and without regard to his interest" (Aids, 136-37). So again we find the oft-repeated "sacred distinction'' between person and thing. The drive toward progressive transcendence is analogous to natural instinct in animals. Using an analogy similar to the one he used in Biographia Literaria, speaking of the "philosophic imagination," and

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in Opus Maximum, describing a potency to be realized, he says that the human instinct for immortality is a sign of its future fulfillment: "The Bull-calf butts with smooth and unarmed brow. Throughout animated Nature, of each characteristic Organ and Faculty there exists a preassurance, an instinctive and practical Anticipation; and no Pre-assurance common to the whole species does in an instance prove delusive. All other prophecies of Nature have their exact fulftlment-in every other 'ingrafted word' of Promise, Nature is found true to her Word, and is it in her noblest Creature that she tells her first Lie?" (Aids, 353). Doesn't the world around us give the lie to such hopes and progressiveness? To those who do accept an intelligibility in the physical order of the universe, Coleridge had earlier asked why one did not assume an intelligibility in the moral order (Aids, 76-77). There is an antecedent principle of unity effecting the harmony of the physical universe, which is perceived in scientific "law" and is an ineluctable process. There is also an antecedent principle of unity effecting the harmony of the moral universe by affecting the human will, and this harmony can be frustrated. The restoration of moral harmony requires a power beyond human effort, however morally good it may be. It cannot be imposed on humanity, because free will cannot be coerced. It can be achieved only through human cooperation with divine help. Conscience is the basis of all religion. It is that which initiates human activity in transcending merely prudent behavior and reaching genuine religious morality. It is one of the three "ultimate facts" on which belief in Christianity is founded: "namely, the Reality of the LAW OF CONSCIENCE; the existence of a RESPONSIBLE WILL, as the subject of that law; and lastly, the existence of EVIL-of Evil essentially such, not by accident of outward circumstances, not derived from its physical consequences, nor from any cause out of itself. The first is a Fact of Consciousness; the second a Fact of Reason necessarily concluded from the first; and the third a Fact of History interpreted by both" (Aids, 138-39). Finally, conscience plays a central role in theological method. Coleridge and Newman implicitly accepted the ancient dictum which declares theology to be fides quaerens inte/lectum (faith in search of understanding). In contemporary critical discourse this would be called a hermeneutic of assent, that is, believing precedes understanding. If, as Coleridge urged, one is to assume a posture of humility in approaching the level of spiritual religion, how is one to reflect rationally on the revealed truths

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or dogmas of that religion? This discussion of"religious inquiries" constitutes one of Coleridge's longest digressions, apart from the space devoted to the distinction between understanding and reason. It is clearly directed against those who would approach religious truth only with their "heads." He lays out his guiding principle quite clearly: "The following may, I think, be taken as a safe and useful Rule in religious inquiries. Ideas, that derive their origin and substance from the Mora/Being, and to the reception of which as true objectively (i.e., as corresponding to a reality out of the human mind) we are determined by a practical interest exclusively, may not, like theoretical or speculative positions, be pressed onward into all their logical consequences. The Law of Conscience, and not the Canons of discursive Reasoning must decide in such cases. At least, the latter have no validity, which the single Veto of the former is not sufficient to nullifY. The most pious conclusion is here the most legitimate" (Aids, 166-67). As strongly as he rejects rationalistic theology, he affirms the value of reason: "Do I then utterly exclude the speculative Reason from Theology? No! It is the office and rightful privilege to determine on the negative truth of whatever we are required to believe" (Aids, 188). I suspect that, like Newman, he mistrusted the cool, emotionally detached rationality of Scholasticism that supplanted the more affective and homiletic Patristic mode of theology, reintroduced into Christian thought by Erasmus and other humanists. Clearly echoing his own oftennoticed concern over the separation of head and heart, he says, "too soon did the Doctors of the Church forget that the Heart, the Moral Nature, was the beginning and the end: and that Truth, Knowledge, and Insight were comprehended in its expansion. This was the true and first apostasy-when in Council and Synod the divine humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculative Systems, and Religion became a Science of shadows under the name ofTheology, or at best a bare Skeleton ofTruth, without life or interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians." He ends this scolding by pointing out that "the Christian world was for centuries divided into the Many, that did not think at all, and the Few who did nothing but think-both alike unreflecting, the one from defect of the Act, the other from the absence of an object" (Aids, 192). Notice that the fault of these theologians was a lack of reflection. In like manner, Coleridge wants his young readers, future leaders of the people and mostly clergy, not only to deepen their own religious experience but to develop sound and practical the