Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement: Selected Religious Writings

By Robin Schofield

‘Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement’ presents Sara Coleridge’s religious writings to modern readers for the first time. It includes extracts from her important religious works which have remained unpublished since the 1840s. These writings present a forthright and eloquent challenge to the patriarchal hegemonies of Victorian religion and society. They represent a bold intervention by a woman writer in the public spheres of academia and the Church, in the genre of religious writing which was a masculine preserve (as opposed to the genres of religious fiction and poetry). The religious writings published by Sara Coleridge in the 1840s present the most original and systematic critique of the Tractarian theology developed by John Henry Newman, Edward Pusey, John Keble and their colleagues. Sara Coleridge advances against a theology which she regards as repressive, authoritarian and conceptually flawed, a radical Protestant religion of inward experience and reason, underpinned by a Kantian epistemology. The passages reveal Sara Coleridge’s concerns with the language of religious discourse, which drove her later developments in religious prose.

‘Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement’ also consists of passages selected from Sara Coleridge’s unpublished masterpiece ‘Dialogues on Regeneration’ (the equivalent of her father’s ‘Opus Maximum’), written in the last two years of her life. This collection of Socratic dialogues is quite remarkable, the most original and innovative religious work of the Tractarian era. Sara Coleridge recognized that the form and language of religious discourse was an essential consideration in determining the character of religious culture. In the period from 1833 to 1850, the monologic forms of treatise, sermon, tract and essay had fostered dogmatic and immoderate styles of expression, which had created conflict and division. Sara Coleridge therefore adopted and developed a form in which opposing views could be heard as well as stated, and which could facilitate dialectical progression towards new understanding: a medium in which division could be resolved. Sara Coleridge’s innovative use of Socratic dialogue is associated with a new ambiguity in her approach to Tractarianism. Through one of her women characters, she presents the devotional and aesthetic ethos of Tractarianism, and its practical, pastoral concerns, with sympathetic sensitivity. The passages from ‘Dialogues on Regeneration’ reveal Sara Coleridge to be a religious writer and thinker of unique originality and range, profoundly sensitive to the pressing needs of her times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785272417

Book preview

Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement

Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement

Selected Religious Writings

Edited by

Robin Schofield

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© 2020 Robin Schofield editorial matter and selection.

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955627

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-239-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-239-X (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Simon Kövesi

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: Liberty of Conscience and the Light of Reason: Sara Coleridge and the Contexts of Religious Division

Part One: Selections from Religious Writings, 1843–48

Section 1: On Rationalism

Section 2: Introduction to Biographia 1847

Section 3: Extracts from a New Treatise on Regeneration (1848)

Part Two: Selections from Dialogues on Regeneration , 1850–51

Section 1: Introductory Dialogues

Section 2: Dialogues on the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Relation to Time

Section 3: Scriptural Dialogues

Section 4: Dialogues on the Idea of Personality in Reference to the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

Sara Coleridge’s religious writings are significant interventions in the controversies of her times and the major achievement of her authorial career. Yet, they are virtually unknown and unread. When Peter Swaab compiled his selection of Sara Coleridge’s literary criticism, he took a ‘pragmatic decision to omit’ extracts from her ‘theological works’, which, he maintained, require specialist treatment and ‘deserve a separate volume of their own’ (Criticism, xxxi). Lost from view for more than 160 years, Sara Coleridge’s religious writings constitute a remarkable body of work. In restoring a selection of them to light, this volume seeks to fill a notable gap in our knowledge of nineteenth-century theological literature.

Names and Authorial Status: ‘Coleridge’ and ‘STC’

In presenting this selection of Sara Coleridge’s religious writings, I refer to her as Coleridge and to her father as STC. It would be belittling to Sara Coleridge, and contrary to my intention to show her as a major religious writer of the period of the Oxford Movement, if I were to use her first name in a book devoted to her theological work. I am aware of the potential for confusion in referring, in the same work, to the Romantic poet and metaphysician Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and to the Victorian religious philosopher Sara Coleridge. I have taken precautions to avoid moments of ambiguity, therefore, while upholding Sara Coleridge’s status as an author and theologian in her own right.

Organization of This Book

The extracts from Coleridge’s religious writings are presented in the order in which the works from which they are taken were produced. I have adopted this chronological structure in order to show Coleridge’s literary and intellectual development in response to her politico-religious times of rapid change and deepening division. The Socratic form of her Dialogues on Regeneration, viewed in the light of ‘On Rationalism’, reflects at once Coleridge’s literary development and her progression as a religious thinker.

I contextualize each passage by means of a short introduction in italics; in some cases, I summarize briefly how an argument develops from the point at which an extract ends. I seek to convey the scope and development of ideas in each work in Part One. Similarly, in Part Two, my editorial interventions aim to indicate the full compass of the dialogue from which a passage has been taken, as well as to suggest the significance of that dialogue in the series as a whole.

Textual Notes

The passages from Coleridge’s religious writings in Part One are from her published works, none of which has been republished since the 1840s. The selection begins with ‘On Rationalism’, first published in 1843 and again, with some revisions, in 1848. Coleridge organizes the 1848 text into ten separate chapters, whereas there had been no chapter divisions in the 1843 edition. She adds a header to each page in 1848 which gives its topic. She also cuts and abbreviates some notes. Coleridge also makes significant additions at three points in the 1848 text, which serve to clarify and amplify her themes.

At the end of what is the first chapter in the 1848 version, she adds three paragraphs which summarize her intentions and the direction of her argument. Just short of three-quarters of the way through the essay, Coleridge adds six and a half pages which, with material from the 1843 text, make a sixth chapter comprising ten pages in total, entitled ‘Language of Bishop Taylor and of Hooker on Regeneration’. There is a further addition, which builds towards the essay’s conclusion. In the 1843 version, a passage of 12 pages is devoted to a critique of the Oxford theologians’ investment of authority for their baptismal doctrine in the Church Fathers. In the meantime, Coleridge had conducted further research on the teachings of the ancient church, and rewrote and expanded this passage, so that in 1848 it becomes the essay’s penultimate chapter, consisting of 25 pages. It is entitled ‘Examination of Waterland’s Theory of Baptismal Regeneration. Harmony of Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s doctrine of Baptism and Confirmation’.

The text of ‘On Rationalism’ presented in this selection is that of 1843, with some additional passages taken from the 1848 version, the inclusion of which I indicate in the notes. I have also included the chapter titles from the 1848 text in this selection but have not reproduced the page headings from the later version, because this would have required me to follow the original pagination, which would not have been feasible.

Selections from Coleridge’s ‘Introduction’ to her edition of Biographia Literaria (1847) follow the passages from ‘On Rationalism’, while selections from ‘Extracts from a New Treatise on Regeneration’ (1848) conclude Part One. The texts of the passages in Part One are given exactly as they appear in the published works from which they have been taken. Where I make an omission from a passage or sentence, I use three dots, enclosed by square brackets, with a space before and after.

Coleridge uses footnotes extensively in both versions of ‘On Rationalism’ but trims them somewhat in the 1848 text. This slightly more restrained approach is evident also in the ‘Introduction’ to Biographia 1847, while in ‘Extracts from a New Treatise on Regeneration’ she uses notes sparingly. Where I have included Coleridge’s footnotes, I have placed them in my series of endnotes, preceded by the tag [SC]. However, I have approached her footnotes selectively. Where a longer note is (in my opinion) of key importance, I have reproduced it in full in my endnotes. I have omitted some notes on grounds of space and have summarized or quoted from others. I have retained short notes by Coleridge which give references to works she cites. Where Coleridge has not provided a reference for a citation from a work by a Church Father, or a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century theologian, I have cited a nineteenth-century edition such as she is likely to have consulted. Occasionally, she specifies the contemporary edition she has used: for example, Henry Alford’s edition of The Works of John Donne in six volumes, published in 1839.

The selections in Part Two are from Sara Coleridge’s major work, Dialogues on Regeneration (1850–51), which has never been published before; nor have selections from it been published. The manuscripts of the Dialogues are held in the archive of the Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Manuscripts intended for the ‘New Treatise on Regeneration’, earlier extracts of which were published in 1848, are also held at the Ransom Center. The Dialogues and the Treatise are discrete works, which represent quite distinct literary approaches to contemporary religious and cultural division, as I argue in the Introduction.

Many of the Dialogues on Regeneration manuscripts are in, or approaching, finished form, particularly those in the first (‘Introductory’) series, the series entitled ‘On the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Relation to Time’, and the final series (written from September to November 1851) ‘On the Idea of Personality in Reference to the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ’. The dialogues in the series which examine ‘Scriptural’ evidence regarding baptismal regeneration would have required further work to bring them to publication, and some of the later manuscripts in this series appear to be in draft form. This is why I have included only one passage from this series in the selection. Nonetheless, the majority of the manuscripts were either ready, or almost ready, for publication at the time of Sara Coleridge’s death.

Markright, the leading protagonist, is named ‘Markwell’ in some dialogues, and in some parts of individual dialogues, while in drafts which accompany the ‘Scriptural’ dialogues the character bears the name ‘Pensimer’. This occasional inconsistency would have been resolved in a final process of editing and revision. ‘Markright’ is the most frequently employed name and is used in the ‘Introductory’ series of dialogues, and in the final series, the ‘Dialogues on Personality’. Therefore, I have kept to the name ‘Markright’ throughout this selection in the interests of clarity and consistency.

Much of Coleridge’s handwriting in the Dialogues on Regeneration manuscripts is clear and readily legible. Where I am unsure of a word, I have enclosed it in square brackets followed by a question mark. If a word seems to have been omitted from a sentence in the manuscript, I have enclosed a word which I have supplied conjecturally in square brackets unaccompanied by a question mark. I have also used square brackets to denote editorial additions or changes to punctuation. A difficulty posed by Coleridge’s punctuation is her use of dashes of varying length. Where a dash occurs when a speaker seems to be taking a breath, I have used a longer dash, ‘—’. When a dash appears where a full stop might equally have been used, or at the beginning or end of a speech, I have also used this version. In other instances, for example where a dash is employed in place of a comma, I have used a shorter dash with a gap on either side, ‘–’. Coleridge’s characters in the Dialogues make frequent use of emphases; I present these in italics. I treat Coleridge’s footnotes in the Dialogues in the same way as I treat those from her published works in Part One.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to pay tribute to the brilliant and inspiring scholarship of those who have preceded me in studying various aspects of Sara Coleridge’s life and work: Katherine Jones, Dennis Low, Bradford Keyes Mudge, Peter Swaab, Alan Vardy, Katie Waldegrave and, in particular, Jeffrey W. Barbeau, who was the first scholar this century to draw serious and sympathetic attention to Sara Coleridge’s religious thought. Peter Swaab’s invaluable, pioneering editions of Sara Coleridge’s Collected Poems and Selected Literary Criticism have been particular inspirations for the present volume.

I am warmly grateful to James Vigus for his meticulous attention to a draft version of this book, and I am indebted to him for his invaluable help with Sara Coleridge’s references to Kant. I wish to thank him, in particular, for his exceptional scholarly generosity in making available to me, prior to publication, transcriptions of Sara Coleridge’s important unpublished correspondence with Henry Crabb Robinson.

I wish to thank Rick B. Watson, Head of Reference and Research Services, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. I am most grateful, also, to Mrs Priscilla Coleridge Cassam for permission (and kind encouragement) to publish extracts from Sara Coleridge’s manuscripts. My thanks to Megan Greiving at Anthem Press for her support in bringing this project to publication.

Finally, I wish to express my warm gratitude to Simon Kövesi, the best of teachers, for his invaluable encouragement and guidance; this volume is dedicated to him.

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE AND THE LIGHT OF REASON: SARA COLERIDGE AND THE CONTEXTS OF RELIGIOUS DIVISION

‘Unity of Faith amid Diversity of Opinion’: A Religious Dialogue

Writing to Sara Coleridge on 18 July 1843, the prominent theologian and future Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice paid tribute to ‘the deep thought and wisdom’ of her essay ‘On Rationalism’, published earlier that year. He regards her essay as a significant achievement, despite his disagreement with some of its essential tenets. Maurice takes divergence of view as an opportunity for creative dialogue: ‘I am’, he tells her, ‘more thankful for the difference than I should have been for great agreement’.¹ Coleridge reciprocates and embraces the occasion for productive interchange:

Nothing pleases me more than to have my notions taken up and discussed, whether for confirmation or objection, and I do as I would be done by in stating the difficulties which occur to me in the theories of others.²

Over the next year, she and Maurice would engage in an impassioned and searching correspondence on the pressing and disputed religious issues of their day: in particular, baptismal regeneration; the status of the self in relation to the church; the relationship of doctrine and faith; and the characteristics of English religion. Their correspondence during 1843–44 reveals their profound mutual respect as they explore and negotiate differences in religious doctrine and faith.

On 21 November 1843, Coleridge replied to a letter in which Maurice had critiqued her ideas of baptism and the Church. Her robust yet cordial refutation of his views drew from him an immediate response: Maurice’s letter of 23 November, 63 pages in length, was written, as Coleridge observes, ‘currente calens’, in a heat of intensity (SC to FDM, 27 November 1843, HRC). The urgency and substance of Maurice’s response testifies to Coleridge’s stature as a theologian. She replied just four days later, on 27 November. In fact, she wrote two letters to Maurice that day, the second a postscript to the first in which she seeks to clarify her definition of spiritual regeneration. This intensive exchange of letters is a remarkable moment in early Victorian religion, showing two deeply and fervently committed Anglicans, from differing but overlapping intellectual perspectives, striving towards a revitalized theology for their divided Church. Coleridge affirms her ‘strong desire to find unity of faith amid diversity of opinion’, an aspiration which Maurice shares (SC to FDM, 27 November 1843, HRC). One participant in this dialogue would at length be counted among the most influential religious figures of the nineteenth century; the other, whose death at the age of 49 was tragically premature, fell into obscurity. This selection of Sara Coleridge’s religious writings seeks to bring to light her remarkable achievement.

Sara Coleridge, Religious Author: The Formative Years

Sara Coleridge, born on 23 December 1802, was the daughter of poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (STC). She had two elder brothers: Derwent, born in 1800, and Hartley, born in 1796. Of the three siblings, it was Sara Coleridge who inherited her father’s brilliance in metaphysics. Hartley was pre-eminently the poet, though his voice was quite distinct from that of his father; Derwent, meanwhile, became a cleric and educationalist. Sara Coleridge was born in the Lake District town of Keswick at Greta Hall, the home which her family shared with future Poet Laureate Robert Southey and his family. STC was absent for most of his daughter’s early childhood, including two years when he was abroad, and largely out of contact, in Malta, Sicily and Italy. He left the Lake District, never to return, in 1812, and his daughter did not see him again until January 1823, when she visited London with her mother. In adulthood, she told a correspondent that Robert Southey and William Wordsworth had been the paternal influences of her childhood and youth: Southey had provided a strong moral influence and example, while Wordsworth had been decisive in the formation of her intellect.³ It was only in later life, as her father’s editor and a religious author in her own right, using his metaphysics as source material, that she became familiar with the characteristics of his mind. The story of Sara Coleridge’s life has been well documented, and some informative and insightful biographical studies have appeared over the past 30 years.⁴ Therefore, the present account confines itself to those aspects of Sara Coleridge’s life which are helpful in understanding her religious writings and their contexts.

When Sara Coleridge visited London during the winter of 1822–23, she made the acquaintance of her cousins, Henry Nelson Coleridge and John Taylor Coleridge. By the time of her return to Keswick, she and Henry were engaged, but their marriage was long delayed for several reasons: the disapproval of Henry’s father, Henry’s ill-health and the necessity that he should qualify and establish himself as a lawyer in order to be in a financial position to marry. The couple married eventually in 1829, after which they lived in London, first at Downshire Hill in Hampstead, moving subsequently to Chester Place in Regent’s Park, where Sara Coleridge would live for the remainder of her life. Henry greatly revered his wife’s father and had embarked upon recording and collecting his sayings in conversation. This project would result in the publication of STC’s Table Talk in 1835.⁵ The extent to which Sara Coleridge might have contributed to the production of Table Talk is not known. Given her intensive engagement with editions of her father’s work from the mid-1830s onwards, and her taking charge of editorial policy as early as the summer of 1834, it is reasonable to suppose that she might have collaborated quite extensively with Henry in preparing Table Talk.

Sara Coleridge suffered from debilitating ill-health in the years following the birth of her children, Herbert in 1830 and Edith in 1832.⁶ In 1836, she would experience a psychological breakdown at Ilchester while returning with Henry and the children from a visit to the Coleridge family at Ottery St Mary. It might be supposed that ill health would have prevented her from undertaking literary work or theological study. However, the contrary was the case: while incapacitated at Ilchester, she put the finishing touches to a novel and worked on what would become the fourth edition of STC’s Aids to Reflection (1839). It appears that episodes of physical and nervous incapacity gave her the space for uninterrupted study and writing. The practical help and support in the household of her mother, Sara Fricker Coleridge, was invaluable in enabling Coleridge to pursue her literary interests and career. She had published Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children, a book of children’s poems, in 1834, and went on to produce the fairy-tale novel Phantasmion, notable for its striking descriptions of landscape and intricate plot, which was published in 1837. Henry supported his wife in these projects, providing editorial comments and acting as her literary agent. The couple’s literary collaboration ranged from the reconstruction and mediation of STC’s metaphysical writings to the publication of children’s literature, which had its origins in the family circle.

The religious writings in this volume reveal Sara Coleridge’s range and depth as a theologian and her resourceful originality as a writer of religious prose. As a woman, she was barred from university education and ecclesiastical office, yet her theological and literary expertise enabled her to engage on equal terms with the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Her literary, theological and philosophical learning and spectacular mastery of languages – including Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German – are attributable ultimately to the extraordinary education she received at Greta Hall from her uncle, Robert Southey, assisted by her mother and aunts. His extensive library of 14,000 volumes was available for her use and furnished her with a wealth of resources for private study. Furthermore, the support of Uncle Southey enabled Coleridge to embark upon her literary career. Under his mentorship, she produced two translations, published anonymously: the first, A History of the Abipones (1822), translated from the seventeenth-century Latin of Jesuit priest and missionary to Paraguay Martin Dobrizhoffer; the second, a History of the Chevalier Bayard (1825) from Medieval French. Southey arranged for both translations to be published by John Murray. In 1825, Coleridge mentions that she has been reading her father’s Aids to Reflection,before the Greta Hall copy was passed on to Wordsworth. A decade later, she would exploit STC’s Christian philosophy and its sources to formulate the conceptual foundation of her mature religious writings. Of his published metaphysical books, Aids to Reflection would be the most significant for her first religious work, ‘On Rationalism’ (1843). Her encounter with Aids to Reflection in 1825 may have encouraged her to embark on a course of reading in philosophy and theology. However, Herbert and Edith would destroy the letters their parents exchanged during their protracted engagement. Sadly, what might have been a valuable source of information on Sara Coleridge’s reading, and the development of her religious and philosophical interests in the mid-to-late 1820s, has been lost.

Literary Remains: Editorship towards Authorship

Soon after her father’s death in July 1834, Sara Coleridge was formulating a strategy for the publication of his metaphysical writings, including the large quantity which remained in manuscript. She told Henry that STC’s writings must be published with due regard to their context in the whole structure of his thought; this would require meticulous reconstruction and judicious mediation. If individual works were issued in isolation, she maintained, they would create a misleading impression of her father’s religious philosophy. Henry accepted his wife’s directions and deferred to her expertise and judgement in editorial decisions of all kinds. STC had named Joseph Henry Green, an eminent surgeon who had been his amanuensis during his later years, as his literary executor. Soon after STC’s death, Green asked Julius Hare and John Sterling to take on the task of publishing the metaphysical writings, and to begin straight away. Sara Coleridge blocked Green’s plan and took charge herself of the reconstruction and publication of STC’s philosophical and religious work. She determined to publish the more accessible writings first, aiming to introduce readers to her father’s metaphysics gradually, preparing the way for more difficult or contentious writings. These were liable to be misunderstood as rationalistic and atheistic, if they were not presented to the public with careful contextualization.

In accordance with the legal terms of the will, Green remained in nominal control of STC’s literary legacy, while Sara and Henry Coleridge got on with the task of editing and publishing her father’s work. At this time, while they were embarking on the major project of editing STC’s metaphysical writings, the Oxford Movement was gaining rapid momentum and becoming increasingly influential as a politico-religious presence. Sara Coleridge took an immediate and keen interest in the writings of the Oxford theologians (known as Tractarians), and from 1837 she and her husband attended a newly built parish church which became a leading centre of Tractarian religion in London.⁷ She was moved by the fervour of Tractarian devotion and drawn to its religious aesthetics. Yet, engaged in ongoing study of her father’s religious philosophy and its sources, she felt that Tractarian doctrine lacked cogent conceptual grounds. Most significantly, its central theological tenets would undermine the principles of the Reformation and destroy individual freedom of conscience. Of John Henry Newman she observed, ‘I never was so deeply interested in any writer with whom I disagreed on so many particulars’ (Criticism, 144).

By late 1837, Sara Coleridge had formulated a methodology with which to critique the Oxford theology. Concurrently, she was working on the fourth edition of Aids to Reflection, and on Volumes III and IV of her father’s Literary Remains (1836–39), which consist of selections from his unpublished religious writings. Significantly, the majority of the selected texts can readily be enlisted in critiquing the doctrines of the Oxford Movement. In her final religious work, the Dialogues on Regeneration (1850–51), Coleridge alludes to the third and fourth volumes of Literary Remains more frequently than to any other work of her father’s. I have argued elsewhere that Coleridge is likely to have edited these volumes single-handedly, and that she is the author of the ‘Preface’ to Volume III.⁸

However, in all volumes of STC’s work re-published, or newly assembled and published for the first time between 1835 and 1843, Henry Nelson Coleridge is named as sole editor on the title page. Sara Coleridge reconstructed her father’s oeuvre behind a veil of anonymity. In doing so, she follows the example of Tractarian poet John Keble, whose practice in literary matters was governed by his ethic of religious reserve and self-effacement. Under cover of her husband’s name, she was able to engage in groundbreaking editorial work, without incurring distracting publicity by conspicuously flouting conventions of gender. Her original religious writings grew from these collaborative editorial endeavours, in which she chose to be anonymous. When she publishes ‘On Rationalism’ in her own name, she explains that she has done so only to obey her late husband’s wishes.⁹ Despite her ostensible preference for anonymity, Coleridge the religious author opted for the most popular genre of her age: according to R. K. Webb, ‘of the roughly 45,000 books published in England between 1816 and 1851, well over 10,000 were religious works, far outdistancing the next largest category – history and geography – with 4,900, and fiction with 3,500. There was also an immense circulation of religious periodicals and tracts.’¹⁰ Clearly, Coleridge’s chosen genre was one in which she might reasonably expect to gain attention.

Nonetheless, Coleridge might have decided to present her religious ideas in poems and fiction. After all, she was a poet and novelist before she became a theological writer and, like the Tractarians, she was aware of the potential of literature as ‘a means of disseminating ideology’.¹¹ She maintained, however, that religious topics imposed the strictest conditions on literary language; conditions from which even Milton and Dante sometimes fell short.¹² Of all genres, she contends, religious verse is ‘the hardest to write worthily’, and she fears that in attempting to write devotional poetry, she might ‘vulgarize and trivialize and desecrate’ holy themes – as she thought Elizabeth Barrett Browning had done in her poem ‘The Seraphim’. Furthermore, Coleridge eschewed didactic fiction, reflected in the design of Phantasmion, which lacks an ‘ostensible moral’ (Criticism, 22, 146–47, 10).

‘On Rationalism’: Liberty of Conscience versus Clerical Authority

Sara Coleridge’s essay ‘On Rationalism’ was published in 1843 as Appendix C to the fifth edition of STC’s Aids to Reflection; the essay is 220 pages in length and occupies almost the whole of the second volume. Wordsworth’s publisher, Edward Moxon, had advised that the inclusion of ‘On Rationalism’ would help to boost the sales of the two-volume edition, because rationalism was a current topic of great interest. A revised version of the essay, 235 pages in length, was published in the sixth edition of Aids to Reflection. It was never republished. On Sara Coleridge’s death in 1852, her brother Derwent took charge of their father’s literary legacy and in 1854 published a seventh edition of Aids to Reflection. In his prefatory ‘Advertisement’, Derwent maintains that previous editions had included too much ‘extraneous matter’, including ‘On Rationalism’, which he has duly excised.¹³ He has also withdrawn a ‘Preliminary Essay’ by James Marsh, STC’s first American editor, because he regards it as no longer relevant.

Derwent justifies his omissions on the pragmatic grounds of reducing ‘the size and cost’ of the book and goes on to suggest that ‘On Rationalism’ might be republished sometime in the future: ‘the Essay on Rationalism, by the late Mrs. Henry Nelson Coleridge, will, it is hoped, be reproduced as an independent treatise with the other literary remains of the lamented writer.’ In view of his coolly non-committal ‘it is hoped’, it is unsurprising that Derwent neither republished ‘On Rationalism’ nor published any of Sara Coleridge’s varied and extensive ‘literary remains’. The ‘advantage’ of removing ‘On Rationalism’, and the other ‘extraneous matter’, Derwent explains, is that ‘the Author [of Aids to Reflection] is now left to speak for himself’.¹⁴ Derwent’s language exposes a repressive ideological agenda: in effect, he is ‘policing the border between authorship and writing in the hierarchical terms which have traditionally placed women writers in the second and devalued category’.¹⁵ He silences the voice of Sara Coleridge the ‘writer’, in order to amplify that of the patriarchal ‘Author’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.¹⁶ As Nancy K. Miller observes, the ‘(canonical) presence’ of ‘the author anthologised and institutionalised […] excludes the less-known works of women and other minority writers and […] by his authority justifies this exclusion’.¹⁷ Derwent seeks to dissociate his father’s religious work from his sister’s radical critique of High Tory, Tractarian ecclesiology and doctrine. He seeks thereby to assert his father’s orthodox canonical authority and to occlude his sister’s radically liberal theology.

Tractarianism began as a political protest by Oxford High Churchmen against the reforming initiatives of the Whig government which had been elected in 1830 and had passed the Great Reform Act in 1832. Before losing power in 1830, a weak and divided Tory administration, unable to withstand popular pressures for reform on the one hand, threatened by potentially catastrophic instability in Ireland on the other, had passed two measures that provoked alarm in the Church of England. As a consequence of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828, and the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, both dissenters and Roman Catholics could be elected to Parliament: ‘the very parliament which held authority over the Church of England’.¹⁸ In September 1833, Newman reminded his fellow clerics of the changed relationship of Church and State: ‘no one can say that the British Legislature is in our communion, or that its members are even Christians.’¹⁹

Samuel Francis Wood, a friend of Newman’s and fellow Tractarian, recalled in 1840 the political situation that had roused Newman and his colleagues into action:

In the Autumn of 1830 the Liberal Government came into office, and the passion for reforming the civil institutions of the country which had placed them in power, soon extended itself to Ecclesiastical matters. The payment of tithes and Church rates was resisted, the Bishops were exposed to popular contumely, and their seats in the Legislature were proposed to be taken away, alterations of the Liturgy and of the internal discipline of the Church were vehemently advocated at public meetings. [In 1833] the Legislature passed an Act suppressing ten Irish Bishoprics, and otherwise naturally affecting the independence of that Church.²⁰

Newman, in his first two Tracts, warned his fellow clergy not to stand aloof from politics when the future of the Church was at stake, and called them to strenuous resistance against state interference in its business. He proclaimed that the clergy’s authority derived from the ancient doctrine of apostolic succession and was therefore beyond the reach of the civil power.

Newman’s appeal to apostolic succession in his campaign against the Whig government anticipates the increasing focus on doctrine in the polemics of the Oxford theologians from 1834 onwards. As Peter B. Nockles observes, ‘once other political props of the establishment had been removed in 1828–33, dogma assumed a greater importance’; Newman and his colleagues raised in a ‘provocative way theological issues that had remained dormant’.²¹ Of central significance in the Tract writers’ dogmatic armoury was the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. In turn, this rested on the most fundamental of their principles: the authority of the Church Fathers. Antiquity became the Tractarians’ definitive tribunal and absolute criterion for religious teaching. Edward Bouverie Pusey established the antiquarian basis of Tractarian baptismal doctrine in a series of three Tracts entitled Scriptural Views of Holy Baptism (1835).²² Samuel Wood in 1840 described Scriptural Views as ‘a detailed exposition of the antient [sic] doctrine of the Sacraments being the instruments of Divine grace, as opposed to the modern notion of grace being obtained by faith – by the active energizing of the mind for itself’.²³

Through the whole course of her religious writings, Coleridge undertook a sustained and systematic critique of the Oxford theologians’ idea of baptismal regeneration, which postulated a passive subject. She rejected, also, their investment of authority in the Church Fathers, to whose teaching they demanded unconditional allegiance. She vehemently denounces the notion that the Fathers’ writings on baptism represent authentic apostolic teaching: ‘Why are we bound to their guesses? Why must we accept their commentaries on Scripture? Why may we not rather judge, as they did, according to the best of our ability, by the Bible?’ (OR 1848, 219; SC’s emphasis). For Coleridge, the requirement to accept ancient authority without question was a gross affront to the free exercise of reason and conscience.

Newman reinforced Pusey’s assertion of patristic baptismal theology by attacking contemporary liberalism. In Tract 73, The Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Religion, published early in 1836, Newman critiques the modern tendency to ‘ask for reasons out of place’ and to submit religious truth to ‘private judgment’. He condemns Hume’s denial of ‘the indefinite range of God’s operations beyond our means of apprehending them’.²⁴ The term ‘rationalism’ had been mobilized in religious discourse by Newman’s friend Hurrell Froude in 1834, in order to attack Protestantism and contemporary Evangelical religion.²⁵ Newman and his colleagues had used ‘rationalism’ and ‘rationalist’ as terms of disparagement in campaigning against the appointment, by Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne, of the liberal theologian Dr Renn Dickson Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1836. The Tractarians condemned Hampden’s religious liberalism as rationalistic which, they argued combatively, disqualified him from the appointment. His teaching would encourage the exercise of private judgement, they held, and would undermine the necessary reverent submission of the intellect to authority. Rationalism remained a highly charged term throughout Coleridge’s career of religious authorship. Her title ‘On Rationalism’, which alludes, with pointed irony, to Hurrell Froude’s Essay on Rationalism (1834), signals a provocative intervention in politico-religious controversy, a bold incursion into the patriarchal realms of academia and the Church.²⁶ In the opening pages of her essay, Coleridge interrogates the semantics of the contested term and corrects her opponents by giving a philosophical definition of Reason. She seeks to establish, on a firm base of Kantian epistemology, her tenet that the mind and the will are active in the reception of divine grace.

Coleridge’s intellectual originality as an opponent of Tractarian theology, and the systematic cohesion of her critique, derives from its epistemological grounds. In delineating the conceptual foundation of her theology in the opening section of ‘On Rationalism’, she cites and discusses passages from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which she uses as source material. Coleridge’s Kantian methodology makes her critique of Tractarianism uniquely cogent. Theological historian Peter Toon has described the unsystematic character of writings critical of Tractarianism. Religious writers tended to respond polemically to the pressure of particular events as they occurred, which narrowed the perspectives even of those whose approach was scholarly. Furthermore, much of the criticism of Tractarianism was conducted in periodicals. As Toon explains: ‘in the pages of the Christian Observer it is perhaps possible to find materials for constructing a systematic response to Tractarianism but since the review articles are from different hands one does not always find coherence on all matters.’²⁷ The most substantial and cohesive body of work in opposition to Tractarianism was produced by William Goode, an Evangelical. Goode’s scholarly critiques of Tractarianism employ methods of historical theology, ecclesiastical history and law, and are therefore entirely different in character from Coleridge’s religious works, with their underlying philosophical rationale.

For Coleridge, Kantian epistemology upholds the Scriptural religion of the heart and conscience, whereas the Tractarian construction of doctrine, based on patristic authority, is unscriptural. In particular, she rejects the tenet that baptism is the primary instrument of salvation, preceding faith, on the grounds that it would limit the scope of God’s grace. According to the Oxford theology, grace is conveyed in the moment of baptism, in the instant at which the priest applies water; a spiritual transformation takes place in the soul at the font, while the moral being is not affected. Coleridge argues that the practical consequences of this doctrine are potentially disastrous. On the one hand, a lax, nominal Christian might delay repentance and reformation of life, because she believes that, having been baptized, she is sure of salvation; furthermore, Tractarian doctrine implies the reassuring provision of purgatory to secure the sinner’s ultimate admission to heaven. A