Long established as a major poet and critic of the Romantic era, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is now becoming recognized as one of the first and most original modern religious thinkers. In 1815 he wrote the Biographia Literaria, and from that time on there was in his writings a noticeable shift to nonliterary subjects, especially religion. Using all available sources in the U.S., Canada, and England, J. Robert Barth, S.J., has found Coleridge's religious speculations in his notebooks, in such works as Aids to Reflection and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, in letters, in the unpublished manuscript of his "Opus Maximum," in marginalia, and in conversations recorded by his nephew in Table Talk. Father Barth has synthesized these theological ideas and shaped Coleridge's scattered and constantly developing religious thoughts into a coherent pattern.

"Best known as a romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge also mounted a strong challenge to the skepticism and relativism we inherit from the Enlightenment. Ronald C. Wendling shows Coleridge, modern in his critical spirit and chronic anxiety, nevertheless progressing toward a total head-and-heart acceptance of Church of England orthodoxy. The tension between Coleridge's poetic feeling for the divinity of the sensible world and his reverential sense of God's personality and transcendence stimulated this development." "Adopting a personalist approach to the study of Coleridge's thought, Wendling explains how the circumstances contributing to his addictive personality helped shape his spiritual and intellectual life."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Few figures who were active in the English Romantic Movement are as fascinating as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Aside from his own visionary verse, Coleridge is famous for his colourful friendships with fellow-poets Wordsworth and Southey, and above all for his well documented drug-taking and creative use of opium. But it is less widely appreciated that he was also a key figure in Anglican thought, whose writings are continually referred to by modern Anglican theologians. Coleridge's journey from the Unitarianism of his father towards a later commitment to Anglican Trinitarianism of a type he had rejected in his youth involved a rigorous philosophical process of imaginative liberal thinking. Over the last 200 years, that thinking has provided Anglicanism with many valedictory tools as well as a measure of robust self-belief. Offering a major contribution both to religious history and the history of ideas, Graham Neville here charts the particular liberal tradition in British religious thought which stems directly from Coleridge. He shows why Coleridge's thought remains so significant, and traces the ways in which his subject's theological ideas profoundly influenced later British writers and scholars like F.D. Maurice, F.J.A. Hort, F.W. Robertson, B.F. Westcott, John Oman and Thomas Erskine (once called the 'Scottish Coleridge'). Dr Neville further relates the pioneering ideas of Coleridge to current developments in theology and scientific method.

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and concretely embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical 'likenesses' connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Human reason and the principle of rationality realised objectively in Nature were both regarded as finite effects of God's seminal Word. Although Coleridge intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a 'mirror' of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were 'mirrors' of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own sceptical doubts. Coleridge and Scepticism examines the nature of these sceptical doubts, as well as offering a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. Ben Brice situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first, a tradition of epistemological 'piety' or 'modesty', informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second, a tradition of theological voluntarism, emphasises the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. Brice argues that Coleridge's detailed familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions, ultimately served to undermine his confidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature.

Never was there a book less entitled than the "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit" to the honour of effecting a revolution in theology, or becoming the manifesto of any school of inquirers accustomed to habits of sound and accurate reasoning. With not a little to remind us of the reach and originality of thought which distinguish the other writings of Coleridge, it is marked to a most vicious excess with looseness and inaccuracy of conception; it betrays a painful ignorance of the main facts and fundamental principles involved in the question at issue; and, by the confident, but impotent attempt which he makes to marry a mystical philosophy to an unsound theology, he only shows that he has strayed into a province of speculation with whose guiding landmarks he was completely unacquainted. Nor is this failure to grasp, and inability to deal with, the necessary conditions of the problem to be solved, so conspicuous in Coleridge's discussion of the doctrine of inspiration, altogether due to his limited and defective preparation for dealing with the subject; it is in no small measure to be attributed to the exigencies of his position and argument.