Ben Brice, Coleridge and ScepticismColeridge and Scepticism. Ben Brice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. x+229.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBen Brice, Coleridge and Scepticism Coleridge and Scepticism. Ben Brice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. x+229.David P. HaneyDavid P. HaneyAppalachian State University Search for more articles by this author Appalachian State UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis book joins the distinguished company of studies that contextualize within the history of ideas Coleridge's spectacular failure in his lifelong project to unite theology and philosophy. Brice's particular focus is Coleridge's skepticism about his own faith in the mechanism of the symbol and the imagination to act as legitimate intermediaries between the human and the divine, given the ultimate unknowability of the divine and the constitutive fallibility of human forms of expression. Coleridge's problems are discussed against the background of two complementary critiques of natural religion active from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries with which Coleridge would have been familiar: “epistemological piety” and “theological voluntarism.” Epistemological piety follows Calvin in asserting that postlapsarian humans are incapable of reading God's handwriting in nature without the assistance of biblical faith and divine election. Theological voluntarism, exemplified in Locke, Boyle, and Newton, posits “an entirely arbitrary and contingent relationship between God and His creation” (4). Because, contra Aquinas, God is not bound by any principles known to humans, including the principle of noncontradiction, we have no means of reasoning from the effects of his creation, which we can see, back to the divine causes, which we cannot see. These traditions undercut Coleridge's efforts to establish the symbol and the imagination as “tautegorical” principles that link human and divine creative impulses.The first half of the book thoroughly traces the Protestant critiques of natural reason from Calvin to Kant. For Calvin, even in an unfallen state humans knew God only through his works, and after the fall “objects in the natural world are just so many dead letters” (17); only those enlightened by scripture are able to make inferences about the divine from natural evidence. Thus a gulf is established between faith and natural reason that supports both the assertion of faith and skepticism about natural reason. Calvin is also a theological voluntarist in his absolute elevation of divine morality over human morality and his insistence on the inaccessibility of the former to the latter. Robert Boyle, drawing on both Catholic and Protestant sources, maintained an unbridgeable difference between hypothetical explanations of natural laws and the unknowable causes of those laws, suggesting that God could change the laws of physics if he wanted to. Nevertheless, Boyle engages in natural theology by reading the divine in the natural, with the caveat that nature's legibility is a function of God's accommodation to human frailty rather than any human ability to penetrate the essence of the divine. Although Locke rejects the Calvinist doctrine of individual inheritance of original sin, his empiricism still partakes in an epistemological piety in that “our minds have no access to the world behind our ideas of the world” (50).The argument moves back to Coleridge via a chapter on Hume and Kant. Brice argues plausibly that “Humean philosophical skepticism was profoundly threatening to Coleridge, in fact, because it reminded him of sound Christian reasons for denying his own ability to read the divine handwriting of God in nature” (53). Arguing that Hume's skepticism is informed by Calvinism, Brice reads the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as presenting a “fork” between an unsatisfactory anthropomorphism that brings God down to the human and an equally unsatisfactory mysticism that leaves faith without an object by denying any divine resemblance to the human. A brief excursus into Kant finds that Kant deals with the Humean fork by choosing agnosticism over anthropomorphism “through a refusal to countenance any objective analogy between supersensible Ideas and sensible objects” (87). This is a problematic reading of Kant, especially in relation to Coleridge, since Kant's explicit response to Hume in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was to rescue the a priori from the clutches of empirical skepticism. It is true that he rejects explicit analogies between the phenomenal and the noumenal, but he does not give up on the possibility of a useful relational verification of the existence of the noumenal. Later Brice refers to the “Humean and Kantian impasse of agnosticism.…If the “Spirit” cannot ‘in the proper sense of the word’ be ‘conceived’ then Coleridge will be incapable of even indicating its existence” (191). Even Kant gives a fair amount of authority to the regulative principles that allow us to admit of divine existence. There is a middle ground, important even to Kant, and more important to Schelling and Coleridge, between the anthropomorphic objectification of our representations via divine/human analogies (anthropomorphism) and the absence of knowledge about what lies beyond those representations (agnosticism) to which Brice fails to give justice.The second half of the book treats Coleridge's writing from 1795 to 1805 and 1815 to 1825, basically the period of his early poetic achievements and the period of his mature theology, though Brice does not tell us much about how Coleridge's skepticism evolves between these stages of his career. In poetry and notebook entries, Coleridge evinces an involuntary skepticism toward experience itself as he by turns enters an analogical relationship between self and world and then recognizes “the potential disanalogies dividing natural objects from his own poetic psyche” (99). This combination of immanence and self-consciousness is a commonplace of Romantic thought and its critical history, and without a more specific linkage to the skeptical traditions discussed in previous chapters it is unclear why this is presented as a new interpretation. More useful is the insight that Coleridge is not only ambivalent but also explicitly using in support of revelation a method of reasoning (in this case Newton's) that was specifically invoked by Newton to deny the possibility of a rational approach to the divine.Extended readings of “Religious Musings,” “Fears in Solitude,” “France: An Ode,” and “Frost at Midnight” develop the familiar theme that Coleridge does not trust his own pronouncements. Faith in the patriotic Elect in “Religious Musings” leads to Coleridge's conviction that he is not “privy to the divine plan” (135); in “France: An Ode” political life is firmly but problematically grounded in home and family; and “Frost at Midnight” invites the reader to share the poet's consciousness while reminding us that this is a written artifact. There is little in these readings that was not explicated more fully by Harold Bloom, M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey Hartman, and others during the heyday of phenomenological, psychological, and early deconstructive criticism; this section would have been better served by more specific ties to the theological traditions treated in the first section of the book. We return to the book's argument at the end of this section with a less than satisfactorily substantiated link between Coleridge's difficulty distinguishing self-projection from natural sympathy and his fears of misreading the language of God in nature.The final chapter treats the famous passages on imagination and on imitation versus copy in the Biographia Literaria (1817), the distinction between allegory and symbol in The Statesman's Manual (1816), and the discussion of “symbol” in Aids to Reflection (1825). The reading of Coleridge's theory of imagination is by now predictable: faith in the analogy between mind and nature is contravened by “an ontological gulf between reason and sensibility” (154) as Coleridge is caught between Kant and Schelling. This chapter also turns to the psychological: Hume becomes a “scapegoat…for all that was unacceptable in Coleridge's own thought” (172), and Coleridge struggles to prevent the “imaginative homeostasis” of impression and expression from “collapsing symbolic apprehension into another subtle form of madness” (159), a madness linked to Luther's hallucinations.The ultimate conclusion about the symbol/allegory split reached by Brice is that a “symbol or symbolical expression, it now seems, is no more or less than a metaphor one has faith in” (200). This reflects a very useful insight that for Coleridge faith, not reason, must be the glue that connects the human and divine, given the pull of skepticism not only in the usual suspects—Hume and the generally condemned crowd of mechanistic philosophers—but also in the very theological traditions that he turns to for support. Thus the main value of this study is to deepen our understanding of the skepticism that Coleridge must overcome in order to achieve the desired synthesis that nearly all commentators (including Coleridge himself at his low points) agree never happened. It would have been a much more valuable study, however, if the author had (1) connected the two sections of the book more thoroughly with more specific links between Coleridge's struggles with skepticism and the specific strands of theological skepticism treated in the first sections and (2) given us a more subtle sense of Coleridge's attempts to define various middle grounds between skepticism and knowledge. Too often impression and expression, divine and human, and symbol and allegory are treated as binaries whose deconstruction is too easy. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 109, Number 2November 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/661636 Views: 8Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.