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Two Modes of Apprehending Nature: A Gloss on the Coleridgean Symbol

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Douglas Brownlow Wilson
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Abstract

Coleridge maintains a lifelong ambivalence toward nature. As early as the 1795 version of “The Eolian Harp,” he toys with incompatible speculations upon nature and, for the moment, retreats from the pantheistic implications of a bold metaphor. After long worrying about the problem of nature, he arrives at a more stable resolution of his dilemma : in The Stateman's Manual (1816) and in his “Essays on Method” (1817), he employs a traditional distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans. Regarded in this latter aspect, nature becomes a source of sacramental symbols: Coleridge holds that the imagination is peculiarly fitted to create symbols and, hence, to apprehend natura naturans. In 1817, twenty-one years after its original publication, he adds to “The Eolian Harp” a key phrase, “the one Life within us and abroad.” This addition, Coleridge's poetic equivalent of natura naturans, reconciles the poem to his Christian Platonism. Despite a growing dualistic aversion to nature in later life, Coleridge, as witnessed by dated footnotes added to his works in the 1820's, continues sporadically to reassert his sacramental faith in nature. Coleridge's adaptation of natura naturans, though it does not resolve all ambiguities, binds through common assumption a considerable body of his mature writings.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 87 , Issue 1 , January 1972 , pp. 42 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972

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References

1 For two opinions that Coleridge does not draw the full implications from his theory of symbol and that he does not measure up to the German organicists in using the term in his critical theory and practice, see René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, ii (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), 174–75; and Patricia A. Ward, “Coleridge's Critical Theory of the Symbol,” Texas Studies in Literature: Ajournai of the Humanities, 7 (1966), 15–32.

2 Coleridge as a Religious Thinker (New Haven, Conn. : Yale Univ. Press, 1961).

3 “The Eolian Harp,” The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), i, 102, ll. 44–48. Subsequent quotations of Coleridge's poetry are from this edition.

4 Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta F. Brinkley (Durham, N. C: Duke Univ. Press, 1955), pp. 381–82.

5 Anima Poetae, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London : Heineman, 1895), pp. 35–36; also The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon, 1957–61), i, 1616.

6 Anima Poetae, pp. 28–29.

7 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford : Clarendon, 1956–59), ii, 865–66.

8 Collected Letters, ii, 864.

9 The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. With an Introductory Essay upon his Philosophical and Theological Opinions, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York: Harper, 1853), ii, Friend, p. 424, n. Hereafter cited as Works.

10 In the Christian Platonism of Coleridge, his concept of “law” is integral to his sacramentalism: every object in nature, for Coleridge, exists potentially as an idea in the divine mind before it actually exists ; once that idea becomes realized in time and space as an object, that object exists according to a law; everything in the natural world, then, exists according to the laws of nature.

11 Works, i, Aids to Reflection, p. 263. Hereafter cited as AR.

12 Works, i, Statesman's Manual, p. 465. Hereafter cited as SM. This passage presents Coleridge's real meaning of his enigmatic phrase defining the primary imagination “as a repetition in the finite mind of the infinite I am.” In his mature thought I think he would include this process as a part of self-consciousness, of man's life in reason, rather than as a function of the primary imagination. This process is the existential ground from whence perception proceeds, rather than the act of perception itself ; it is the relation of human individuality to the divine permanence; it is what our minds bring to our experience. See Works, n, Friend, p. 469, for confirmation of this footnote.

13 Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), ii, 120.

14 Notebooks, ii, 2664.

15 Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor (London: Constable, 1936), pp. 28–33.

16 See David Ferry, The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth's Major Poems (Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 36–39, for a provocative use of Coleridge's symbolic theory of nature. Ferry gives currency to the word “sacramental” as applied to nature: nature is consubstantial with the divine spirit and is, therefore, a source of spiritual symbols.

17 Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 209, n. 1 : Raysor gives the reference to Spinoza's Ethics (i, xxix, n.).

18 Notebooks, I, 1369 and 1369, n. As Kathleen Coburn points out, Coleridge was reading Erigena's De Divisione Naturae from February to July 1803. She adds Coleridge's remark in a letter to Robert Southey, 2 July 1803; “I have received great delight & instruction from Scotus Erigena.” In Notebooks, I, 1382 and 1382, n., Coleridge noted Erigena's explanation of creation “as only a manifestation of the unity of God in forms—et fit et facit, et creat et creatur.” Coleridge thought so highly of this passage that he adapted it as the culmination for his “Seventh Essay on Method.” The influence of Erigena, therefore, began early and suggested to Coleridge a mode of arriving at his own philosophic differentiation of nature.

19 S. T. Coleridge: The Philosophical Lectures, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1949), p. 371. In his thirteenth lecture of this series, 22 March 1819, Coleridge quotes his questionable verses on the “organic harps” to illustrate the idealist view that natura naturans represents God's creative relationship to “the bodily world.” This use of the quotation reinforces my conclusion that this controversial image, which once seemed pantheistic to him, has now been reconciled to his Christian Platonism.

20 Biographia Literaria, i, lix–lx.