Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit

by Douglas Hedley

• ISBN13: 9780521770354
• ISBN10: 0521770351
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-07-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Coleridge’s relation to his German contemporaries constitutes the toughest problem in assessing his standing as a thinker. For the last half-century this relationship has been described, ultimately, as parasitic. As a result, Coleridge’s contribution to religious thought has been seen primarily in terms of his poetic genius. This book revives and deepens the evaluation of Coleridge as a philosophical theologian in his own right. Coleridge had a critical and creative relation to, and kinship with, German thought. Moreover, the principal impulse behind his engagement with that philosophy is traced to the more immediate context of the English Unitarian-Trinitarian controversy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book re-establishes Coleridge as a philosopher of religion and as a vital source for contemporary theological reflection.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
List of abbreviations	xi
Notes on the text	xiii
Prologue: explaining Coleridge's explanation	1	(17)
The true philosopher is the lover of God	18	(70)
A spiritual philosophy	21	(8)
The revival of natural theology	29	(4)
Platonism	33	(3)
The Platonic Trinity	36	(4)
German Idealism and the Platonic Tradition	40	(5)
Paley, Locke and Socinianism	45	(4)
Priestley, Unitarianism and Platonic idealism	49	(10)
Identity and difference: henology or ontology?	59	(6)
Supreme being and self-consciousness	65	(10)
`I am Who I am'	75	(13)
Inner word: reflection as meditation	88	(64)
Aphorism	89	(4)
Meditation and awakening: spiritual exercises	93	(9)
Reflection, recollection and restlessness	102	(7)
The soul as the mirror of the divine	109	(7)
The ascent of the mind and the inner word	116	(11)
The communication of truth and biblical symbols	127	(9)
The philosophic and the beloved apostle	136	(9)
Reflection and rational discrimination	145	(7)
The image of God: reflection as imitating the divine spirit	152	(40)
Prudence	154	(3)
Sensibility	157	(4)
The two worlds	161	(7)
`Know Thyself!'	168	(12)
Spiritual aids	180	(8)
Autonomy and the Euthyphro dilemma	188	(4)
God is truth: the faculty of reflection or human Understanding in relation to the divine Reason	192	(36)
The faith of science	202	(12)
Reason and reflection	214	(8)
Notional speculation	222	(6)
The great instauration: reflection as the renewal of the soul	228	(37)
Robert Leighton and dying to self	243	(4)
Original sin	247	(15)
Baptism and spiritual renewal	262	(3)
The vision of God: reflection culture, and the seed of a deiform nature	265	(21)
Hume, Gibbon and the basis of `Enlightenment'	266	(13)
Coleridge's philosophical mysticism	279	(7)
Epilogue: the candle of the Lord and Coleridge's legacy	286	(15)
Coleridge and Anglo-Saxon Victorian idealism	286	(5)
Coleridge and twentieth-century religious thought	291	(10)
Bibliography	301	(27)
Index	328