17

EXISTENCE BEFORE SUBSTANCE

The Idea of “Person” in Humanistic Inquiry

Few terms call more urgently for a deep-historical archeology and for patient “desynonymization” (to use Coleridge’s term of art) from “subject,” self,” or “individual” than that of “person.” To embark on tracing the term’s genesis and progressive clarification is to encounter a vivid example of what John Henry Newman would subsequently conceptualize as the “development” of an idea—a process of progressive reflection and clarification that, taken as a whole, reveals the vitality of an intellectual tradition and through its many hermeneutic turns impresses on us the “antecedent probability” that the original idea had contained not merely potential meanings but a positive truth.1 The idea of personhood, or “Personëity,” constitutes the fulcrum of the later Coleridge’s at times obsessive rumination of the human being’s unique constitution. To be human, he insists, is to recognize oneself as an embodied being with a “responsible Will,” capable of reflection and providentially alerted to its vertical rapport with the divine logos by the unique phenomenology of “conscience.” Well before he had immersed himself in the scholarship that would enable him to argue the term’s centrality with the requisite detail, Coleridge already insists on the indispensability of “person” to moral philosophy, a discipline whose fortunes in the age of William Paley he understood to be acutely imperiled:

The Contra-distinction of PERSON from THING being the Ground and Condition of all Morality, a system like . . . Hobbes’s, which begins by confounding them, needs no confutation to a moral Being. A Slave is a Person perverted into a Thing: Slavery, therefore, is not so properly a deviation from Justice, as an absolute subversion of all Morality.2

As so often, it is the failure to maintain a distinction—not only that between person and thing but, just as importantly, that between a contingent “deviation” from and an “absolute subversion of” justice—which serves as Coleridge’s point of departure. Conversely, he is just as concerned about the usurpation of person by forms of animated life that do, in fact, not meet the relevant criteria: “Every Man is born with the faculty of Reason: and whatever is without it, be the Shape what it may, is not a Man or PERSON, but a THING” (CF, 2:125). If terminological carelessness is evidence of an ethical lapse, Coleridge’s own temporary blindness to the way in which this pronouncement strips animals of all ethical standing arguably disconcerts. The apparent restriction of nonhuman life forms to the status of mere things, while obviously troubling in its own right, also hints at one of the more problematic aspects of Coleridge’s in many respects impressive theology. For his contention that “trees and animals are things” (CCS, 15) highlights a lingering anthropomorphism in his thinking whereby what is divine and transcendent remains forever indexed and restricted to the phenomenology of human interiority, and in particular the potentially erratic operations of conscience. Still, as late as 1825, Coleridge reiterates his contention that “Morality commences with, and begins in, the sacred distinction between Thing and Person: on this distinction all law human and divine is grounded: consequently, the Law of Justice” (AR, 327). Here again, Coleridge implies that our ethical being, our capacity for “justice” and for transcending the limits of a merely computational understanding toward the logos (reason) of which we are imperfect images, pivots on our ability to keep hold of distinctions without either flattening them into outright sameness or exaggerating them to the point that what is distinguished appears wholly unrelated.

As it happens, it is just that challenge of thinking as the practice of enduring and articulate conceptual differentiation that characterizes the historical evolution of the term “person” and, closely related to it, that of Trinitarian theology. The late Coleridge’s observation that “in the Trinity there is, 1. Ipsëity, 2. Alterity, 3. Community” (TT, 2:65) succinctly identifies the three concepts that between the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) and Scholastic theology of the late thirteenth century would gradually emerge as integral to the idea of person—divine and human—and that had to be grasped as jointly present and non-contradictory features of fully realized personhood. In recovering the theological and philosophical traditions that had gradually refined the idea of person as relational, participatory, and internally differentiated, Coleridge places himself in stark opposition to modernity’s hermetic and instrumental notion of a “punctual self” (Charles Taylor)—viz., an autonomous individual on the order of René Descartes’s cogito or Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Tathandlung whose specificity and dignity are appraised almost exclusively in epistemological terms. Time and again, Coleridge rejects or, rather, exposes as intrinsically flawed the proposition “that ‘I’ refers to a purely mental res cogitans, or to a bare existent without a nature, which must, as it were, first realize itself ex nihilo as some thing with some nature.” Even more pervasive today than in Coleridge’s time, such reductionist accounts fail because they do not acknowledge, let alone engage, the human person’s complex a priori relatedness to the world and, especially, to other persons. Nor do they recognize that intentionality is never simply consummated by its “objects” but shows the embodied human mind to stand in a relation of alterity or transcendence vis-à-vis its own representations. To be a person means to “put distance between him- or herself as subject and the whole content of his or her consciousness.”3

While a fuller phenomenological exploration of this issue will have to wait, an initial juxtaposition helps capture the salient point here. Thus, whereas our awareness of chickens in the barnyard or neighborhood traffic patterns refers to facts that have reality independent of our awareness, it is a different matter with our manifest “awareness of psychological states. Our knowledge of these is part of the states themselves.”4 As we shall see, Coleridge’s strategic concern with the “notices” of conscience—in contrast to the (supposed) value-neutrality of representations of fact—had adumbrated precisely this isomorphism of reflexive awareness with human life itself. As Robert Spaemann puts it, our

dawning awareness of hunger is hunger. Hunger is not found out about, like some object in the world; it is something that I have. The having of hunger is actualized in the dawning awareness of it . . . Awareness of life is the irreducible paradigm for life and experience. Intentionality does not attend to non-intentional experience as an object “out there,” indifferent to our awareness of it. Intentionality is simply the most intense mode of experiencing.5

For Heidegger who, to be sure, reaches very different conclusions from Spaemann, this framing, holistic awareness, or “attunement” (Stimmung, Befindlichkeit) is most consummately experienced as “anxiety” (Angst) and “care” (Sorge). Either mood shows that our concrete intentionalities are framed by our embeddedness in the world (in-der-Welt-Sein) and only so can be properly experienced as ours. Consequently, our affective and cognitive intentionalities do not unilaterally constitute or “produce” the subjectivity of our person but, in fact, presuppose and depend on its antecedent reality. For that reason, too, modernity’s longstanding preoccupation with establishing stable criteria that account for “personal identity”—or, for that matter, skeptical critiques of that very endeavor as pioneered by Descartes and radicalized by Hume, Nietzsche, and a great deal of twentieth-century existentialist and deconstructionist thought—miss the salient point altogether. For such approaches peremptorily de-contextualize and isolate the person as a “denuded self” (Iris Murdoch), a putatively self-evident methodological decision that effectively creates the explanatory burden that such thinkers take themselves to have discovered. For all the lingering “subjectivism” with which Being and Time was charged upon its publication in 1927, and from which Heidegger so strenuously sought to distance himself in later years, its argument avoids the dead-end of attempting to grasp person by means of ordinary, criterial definition. Thus, the constitutively engaged and affective nature of “anxiety” or “care” in Heidegger’s account adumbrates a person’s fundamentally evaluative, intentional stance vis-à-vis the world—with “world” here understood not merely as a sum-total of facts either previously ascertained or presently at hand, but also including the future perfect of as yet unimagined and unconsummated realities.

As Coleridge’s urgent strictures against the widespread and ever-increasing conflation of persons with things make clear, to invoke the term “person” at all is to confront a pervasive ethical miscarriage of modernity—and to do so precisely by remembering a term whose complex history and normative authority the modern era had forgotten at its own peril. Just as Coleridge’s account of the will in Aids to Reflection and Opus Maximum amounts to a logically and historically rigorous critique of modern voluntarism and its secular descendants (materialism, mechanism, utilitarianism, liberalism), so his closely related inquiry into the idea of personhood rejects modernity’s conceptually weak, a-historical, and reductionist approach to philosophical explanation as but a self-fulfilling prophecy. For in legitimating itself as a unique epochē, a break not only with specific traditions but with the very idea of tradition as the indispensable framework for responsible knowledge, the modern project at once authorizes itself but, at the same time, sows the seeds of its own progressive intellectual impoverishment. It cannot remember the history of concepts and, thus, cannot orient itself within specific traditions of inquiry whose rehabilitation has more recently been urged again by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Louis Dupré, and Charles Taylor, among others.6

For several reasons, then, a (highly compressed) history of person and its terminological ancestry is in order. First, such a review helps illustrate Coleridge’s richly informed and subtle navigation of a tradition that in his time had largely been occluded by two centuries of mechanist and materialist inquiry and their prevailing mono-causal and deterministic forms of scientific explanation. Second, even a brief survey of the word’s history already intimates the striking richness and complexity of the idea of human personhood, particularly if juxtaposed to Enlightenment ideals such as self-possession, autonomy, or an exclusively rights-based (legalistic and procedural) model of social relations and community. Third and most important, it turns out that there is no alternative to such a historical retrieval unless, of course, one is a priori committed to the modern project and thus only ever prepared to take a passing archival or encyclopedic interest in ideas like free choice, conscience, person, teleology, or judgment. In that case, the mere suggestion that ideas—and, for that matter, art—might have a distinct and surpassing reality will be rejected as both quaint and indemonstrable, and their cognitive value restricted to ancillary, “historical information” about a past that, however alluring, is by definition precluded from having any significant bearing on our own intellectual condition. As should be clear by now, that is certainly not the spirit of the present argument. Rather than approaching intellectual history as the distillation of plausible facts from ideas, beliefs, and problems variously deemed arcane, metaphysical, or otherwise “premodern,” the present account posits that to understand personhood we must take an active, interpretive, and urgent interest in the idea itself. Though it should always aim to transcend the realm of ephemeral, idiosyncratic, and private opinion, genuine humanistic inquiry must indeed commit to and embrace the idea of “personal knowledge”—with “personal” here speaking both to our responsibility for the knowledge in question and our recognition of its transformative impact on ourselves as ethical beings. Indeed, precisely because the reality of personhood was so widely and acutely felt to have become atrophied by modern inquiry—to the point that its loss effectively structures the plot of many canonical nineteenth-century novels—personhood emerges as an idea whose marginalization, displacement, and threatened oblivion we should view with great concern and distrust. Thus the following, selective retrieval of the idea of person as it had taken shape in uncommonly self-conscious and explicit ways in the tradition of philosophical theology from the second through the fourteenth centuries honors Newman’s typically concise and lucid remark that “the present is a text, and the past its interpretation.”7

On the face of it, a plausible alternative strategy to the historical hermeneutic sketched above might be to undertake a paradigmatic survey of different conceptual and historical strategies of thinking about the concept of person. For an example one might consider a long chapter in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty’s Mind in Action, which opens with a catalogue of different strategies of conceptualization (27–42) and, as far as it goes, certainly a concise classificatory scheme. Yet such an approach is by its very nature destined to fail, if for no other reason than that, in axiomatically liberal-pluralistic fashion, it treats the various approaches to person as implicitly equivalent. To do so means to have forgone from the very outset the possibility that person might not be a concept at all but, conceivably, an ontological and normative value. While Rorty fleetingly acknowledges such a scenario, she just as quickly absorbs the ontological argument as merely another conceptual variant into her survey of different intellectual “approaches.” Tellingly, she vacillates between speaking of person as a “concept” or as an “idea,” thereby revealing that for her no categorical difference exists between the ontology of person and any number of (invariably modern) discursive models of the “subject,” the “self,” or the “individual” as alternately defined by its rights, autonomy, skeptical inwardness, propensity to mystical self-transcendence, performative enactment, etc.

If, however, one were to acknowledge the distinction between Person as a normative (ontological) idea and persons as variously defined and accented “subjects” (or, more rebarbatively, “subject-positions”), it would soon emerge that doing so means eo ipso to commit oneself to a specific (and normative) position or, conversely, to reject the very idea of normativity itself. Either way, it would signify an explicit and consequential choice and so lift one above what Charles Taylor has called the modern “ethic of inarticulacy,” which embraces a pluralist and non-evaluative way of being in the world without ever being able to name the sources that should compel us to adopt such a “view from nowhere.” Pointed and perhaps even polemical though it may be, the point to be made here is, simply, that to take up the question of person is not simply to single out another “theme” or “topic.” In fact, the idea of person is anathema to the pathos of distance, impartiality, and the value-neutral proceduralism that inexorably migrated from seventeenth-century science into adjacent fields, including philosophy. Instead, person belongs to the order of what Ernst Cassirer in some of his posthumous writings was to call Basisphänomene, that is, “conditions that we must posit in order to gain some kind of access to ‘reality’ and in which everything that we call ‘reality’ is primordially opened up and made accessible . . . Each one is a manner or modality of mediation itself [die Weisen, die Modi der Vermittlung selbst].”8

To her credit, Rorty concedes that attempts at defining person in strictly analytic terms, however supple and adaptive, ultimately “seem unsatisfactory.” Yet her proposed remedy—viz., to produce “an account of the many different reasons we have wanted, and perhaps needed, the notion of a person”—hardly seems a viable alternative.9 For one thing, such an approach assumes from the outset that an intellectual endeavor, such as a coherent account of the idea of person, will ultimately always be outflanked by motives not transparent, certainly not in timely fashion, to those pursuing such an inquiry. Yet to hold that assumption is itself tantamount to denying what we shall find integral to personhood—not as a demonstrable fact, to be sure, but as an ever-present and non-falsifiable possibility: viz., the ontological reality of person as a free, rational, and incommunicable agent. Yet even if the skeptic’s pre-judgment to the contrary could be resolved, another problem remains. For, to undertake an archeology or meta-history designed to scrutinize the motives and interests shaping various accounts of person is in the end tantamount to writing a history of the term. Yet in so doing, one is then bound to come up against an idea whose capacity for eliciting sustained intellectual engagement for nearly 2,500 years, and for undergoing significant development in the course of that period, furnishes prima facie evidence of its truth-value. For neither the admittedly shifting and variable meanings of person, nor the motives said to have underwritten the gradual elaboration of these meanings could themselves ever be quarantined from this history. Clearly, though, Rorty, like any good modern-liberal intellectual, exhibits visceral discomfort with all forms of normativity, as well as with the sheer possibility of having to acknowledge the categorical difference between historically contingent meanings and an ontology of truth.

Specifically as regards the idea of the person, to make sense of the term at all we must begin by acknowledging that we ourselves are fundamentally implicated in the larger ethical and religious conceptions of which the term is a seminal manifestation. There simply cannot be any such thing as a disinterested and noncommittal inquiry into it, whether systematic, analytic, and/or historical. Moreover, to decline rethinking the term’s history, or simply being oblivious of it, also will not indemnify us against the claim’s normativity. Instead, such a stance merely deprives us of bona fide intellectual agency. By contrast, to accept our own implication in the evolving conception of personhood is to recognize, minimally, that “who we are is not simply interchangeable with what we are,” and that, consequently, unlike dog, table, or even human being, “‘person’ is not a classificatory term . . . [It is] distinguished by not being a predicate of any other thing but identifying things that may be the subject of predicates.”10 If only in passing, it ought to be pointed out that if person is not a category or species designation, then its prevailing modern usage as a merely “legal” entity or bearer of “rights” proves deeply and dangerously incoherent; and here it matters little whether the particular “right” at issue happens to be that of unconstrained economic self-interest, freedom from taxation, or a whole garden variety of economic “rights” promoted with evangelical fervor by today’s libertarians; or, more equivocally perhaps, the “right” not to be offended by someone else’s exercise of the right of free speech or, perhaps, the right not to be discriminated against on account of one’s sexual, religious, or ethnic identity. For in each case, the “person” staking a political or ethical claim of some such kind only exists as an abstraction and legal fiction that takes no account of the “incommunicable” (nontransferable) nature of the individual person invoking the specific right in question. With good reason, Amélie Rorty calls this “legal concept of a person . . . a retrospective function, defined by the conditions for presumptive agency.”11 For to define person as the bearer of certain rights and, less eagerly, of responsibilities depends for its uptake and acknowledgment as a claim on an antecedent idea of person. In other words, simply to introduce some ensemble of “rights” as the principal criterion of personhood is never just a definition but, inevitably, amounts to a normative claim—viz., that this is how personhood ought to be understood. And yet, it is precisely this antecedent reality of the individual as person that such an approach elides in favor of pleading group-specific and historically mutable interests. Arguably, then, for as long as the concept of “right” is mobilized strictly for the purpose of asserting a specific “interest,” public and legal debate will fail to grasp the underlying ethical or (in Coleridge’s parlance) “spiritual” dimension of the issue at hand. With good reason, Spaemann thus notes that it is

a great mistake to think we must suppress observations of human differences if we are to do justice to human dignity. The dignity of the person is not touched by such observations, for the dignity of human beings as persons is not an object of cognition but of recognition [kein Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, sondern der Anerkennung] . . . If we say that someone is a person, we are saying that he or she is someone, a unique Individual; and this cannot be understood as the chance implication of one predicate, or even of an ensemble of predicates. What he or she may be besides does not settle who he or she is. The what we can observe and comprehend; the who is accessible to us only as we recognize something ultimately inaccessible.12

“Recognition,” a crucial Hegelian term, here obviously demarcates an ethical relation between individuals qua “persons”—which is to say, something ontologically given by employing the very term “person” in the first place, rather than something compelled by positive law or established by the other person’s “role” or “office” (both pre-Christian meanings of persona). Precisely this anterior, communal dimension of human personhood, its relational nature, is what Hegel’s master and servant discover anew whenever they attempt to construe their independence or autonomy in positive, legal terms. The foil to Hegel’s analysis is, arguably, Rousseau’s deeply problematic legacy of construing all inter-subjective relations as instances of de facto “dependency,” and interpreting the latter as the straight path toward inauthenticity, amour propre, and general moral turpitude. Whereas Herder, Kant, and their contemporaries still operate largely within the Rousseauvian paradigm, Hegel is the first to broach the all-important question: “Why can’t there be other-dependence in conditions of equality?” In classical dialectical fashion, his Phenomenology demonstrates how a solution to the paradox of radical self-determination can only be produced by showing the Enlightenment’s obverse contention (viz., that relationality necessarily equates dependence, and dependence in turn leads to inequality, inauthenticity, etc.) to fail on its own terms. For our autonomy and (self-)mastery pivots on its recognition by the subaltern other, thus leaving the lord unable to account for “the need that sends people after recognition in the first place.” As a result, even those individuals who have seemingly achieved lordship over the other remain “more subtly frustrated, because they win recognition from the losers, whose acknowledgment is, by hypothesis, not really valuable, since they are no longer free, self-supporting subjects on the same level with the winners.”13 The structure of Hegel’s famous discussion of lordship and bondage thus turns out to be one of unrelenting irony, and the ultimate target of that irony is modernity’s utopian model of human agency as hermetic, self-grounding, and self-possessed. Robert Pippin’s conclusion that “virtually everything at stake in Hegel’s practical philosophy . . . comes down finally to his own theory of recognition and its objective realization over time and in modern ethical life” offers valuable insight into Hegel’s understanding of the “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit).14

Yet Hegel’s intrinsically relational and social understanding of reason—which “treats having reasons as a matter of participation in a social practice under certain conditions”—does not address what, beginning with Adam Smith, had established itself as the dominant conception of sociality. Characteristic of that conception is a gradual weakening of the individual’s commitment to conceiving, articulating, and realizing meanings and values in a social space that, for Platonic and Christian thought, had always been defined by the reality of other persons and one’s progressive initiation into received, complex traditions of rationality. Instead, post-Enlightenment liberalism accepts, and often actively promotes, a laissez-faire ideal of pluralism and freedom that renders individuals and communities increasingly disinclined to give any reasons whatsoever for their practices, values, and commitments. Here, one begins to glimpse the costs of Hegel’s having substantially voided the practical reason of Platonic and Christian practices of introspection such as had situated persons not only in a “horizontal comradeship” of the nation as an “imagined community” (to recall Benedict Anderson’s account) but, concurrently, orienting them vertically toward a hyper-good. In the Phaedrus, Socrates flags this dual orientation of rational human agents, positing that “within each one of us there are two sorts of ruling or guiding principle that we follow. One is an innate desire for pleasure, the other an acquired judgment that aims at what is best” (237d). Plato’s soul can only understand itself as a dynamic, narrative principle “passing from a plurality of perceptions to a unity gathered together by reasoning,” and in pointing to the deep connection between knowledge and “remembering” (anamnēsis) Plato suggests that discrete perceptions can acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as they are indexed to an antecedent, divine archetype. There can be no lateral knowledge without the knower being vertically oriented toward the transcendent: “Wherefore if a man makes right use of such means of remembrance, and ever approaches to the full vision of the perfect mysteries, he and he alone becomes perfect” (249c).

While the Platonic motif of anamnēsis is still powerfully at work in Hegel, its narrative and transcendent implications have all but disappeared from the modern liberal community with the founding of which Hegel is often credited.15 Thus, in a society of proliferating subdivisions, interest-groups, and strictly preference-based notions of value and meaning, the instantaneity of mimetic (and inherently non-cognitive) impulses—whereby the self either “identifies with” or professes itself “disaffected from” a particular model of sociality—has effectively vanquished Platonism’s emphatically narrative conception of knowledge as a form of ascent; and once the relatedness to other persons is deemed merely volitional and elective (as in modern, social-contract theory), the individual no longer takes herself or himself to have any vertical orientation. Now, too, one can see why Rousseau and his heirs should have (mis)construed relationality as sheer heteronomy, to be anathemized as a symptom of narcissistic and inauthentic sentiment. In stark contrast with the modern ideal of autonomy (and the individual’s consequent quest for hedonistic self-fulfillment), Plato’s Phaedrus contends that “soul not only moves itself and soulless things . . . [but] can also be moved or affected by the motions of other souls.” Motion here is not some mindless tropism, no Lucretian “swerve” confined to the present moment, nor indeed is it something externally caused or the result of some random inner compulsion. Rather, because “our souls wish to ‘see,’” both knowledge and love (ēros) always involves “several different kinds of motion—vertical, cyclical, and horizontal.” To know is, above all, a moment of vision, of “perceiving the image of the eternal beings in a beautiful face . . . regard[ed] as an image of a god.”16 What renders our relation to the “face” (prosōpon) of the other meaningful (and human beauty so irresistible) is the fact that the good and the true converge in a single intuition. It is the phenomenology of love, rather than the algorithm of epistemological correctness, that teaches us the inseparable bond between lateral cognition (epistēmē) and our vertical orientation toward the divine (ēros). To participate in the Platonic logos means to aspire—notably, through dialogue with others—to a deeper and necessarily supra-individual grasp of the good, the beautiful, and the true. No matter how far he was to push his Trinitarian speculations, Coleridge never lost sight of these Platonic elements in Christian Trinitarian theology.

To return to Hegel’s account of sociality once more, Pippin is right to link the “noble nineteenth-century idea that my own freedom depends on the freedom of others” to the Hegelian “notion that the quality of the reasons available to me in understanding and justifying my deeds is not in the deepest sense ‘up to me.’” Yet to conclude, as it were by default, that in fact such reason-giving remains “inextricable from the nature of the social practices . . . at a time” already presupposes (but does not, in fact, argue the point) that rational agency is constitutively inclined to undertake this work of reason-giving in the first place, regardless of the conceptual sources on which such self-legitimation might draw. In fact, the condition of relatedness—and, consequently, a deep-seated obligation to articulate the meanings and ends for the sake of which we act—must already be accepted as the very essence of human personhood, quite independent of its historically specific sociality. As the case of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments makes clear, absent some transcendent and normative obligation to make oneself intelligible to (and be recognized by) others as a rational, practical agent, it seems entirely possible that moral “practice” might end up merely replicating some established or prevailing type of “behavior,” with the result that action is supplanted by mimetic reflexes, and that the cultivation of practical reason is short-circuited by the unthinking emulation of and compliance with prevailing customs, manners, and fashions.

The same predicament of denuding the practical of all vertical, transcendent sources of meaning also complicates Pippin’s arguments about “objective reasons” in Hegel’s practical philosophy. Though entirely cogent and persuasive as a statement of Hegel’s position, Pippin’s account again passes over the consequences of a model of Sittlichkeit preemptively stripped of any transcendent (and normative) sources and commitments. As Pippin notes, Hegel certainly allows for (intrinsically Aristotelian) forms of argument wherein reasons are presented as commitments buttressed by the agent’s quasi-institutional authority: viz., “‘because there is a contract,’ ‘because I am a father,’ or ‘because I am a citizen,’” etc.17 In such cases, Hegel rightly believes that he need not “add on ‘given that I want to be a good father,’ etc. or ‘given that I value the role of father as a good in itself’” since doing otherwise “would imply a separation between a subject and his roles that Hegel wants to deny without also collapsing such a subject into such roles, as if thoughtlessly and automatically acting out such roles.” And yet, it is just this Platonic idea of the good (as in “good father,” etc.) which must evidently be presupposed as the telos of all our striving, including the striving to legitimate our actions and practices for others. For only on that premise does it make sense to appeal to the role of father (and our fulfillment of it) as a reason capable of legitimating the specific actions currently being taken or contemplated. Our very quest for (historically specific) forms of self-legitimation as practical, rational agents pivots on a notion of the good transcendent to the practices associated with either Hegel’s historically constituted “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) or its discursive legitimation. As Iris Murdoch puts it, “Good, not will, is transcendent,” a point bound to be overlooked by thinkers like Hegel who “prefer to talk of reasons rather than of experiences.”18

In this context it also bears remembering that Western theology’s gradual clarification of the very idea of the human person presupposed that the term could not be assimilated to the standard matrix of individual and universal, which to this day undergirds most acts of (discursive) predication and cognition. For person is not a concept, certainly not of the ordinary kind, not a quality to be predicatively applied to some set of objects or even a species; neither is it a transcendental (Kantian) category. Rather, in a far more elemental and inescapable sense, its reality is that of a (normative) idea. Hence, in inveighing against slavery as the conversion of a person into a thing, Coleridge intuits that to accept the term “person” at all means eo ipso to have acknowledged the antecedent reality of an unconditional good and our inescapable, ethical implication in it. A “value concept” such as that of person, Murdoch insists, cannot be understood “in terms of switching on to some given impersonal network,” that is, cannot be captured by some extrinsic, descriptive, or classificatory scheme. In fact, in the realm of the normative “words may mislead us . . . since words are often stable where concepts alter.” For Murdoch, there is a certain probability that in time a “deepening process” takes place whereby a value concept is more fully grasped than when the word primarily associated with it first entered the scene.19 In other words, value concepts only disclose their meaning and significance within a historical hermeneutic of the kind outlined by Hans-Georg Gadamer and, somewhat differently, Alasdair MacIntyre—viz., as a sustained and reflexive process of understanding that gradually coalesces into the objectivity of a “tradition.” The knowledge here sought is by definition inaccessible to a historicist methodology, for it is not the knowledge of a specific object or referent “out there” and ostensibly separate from us. Rather, “to employ the term ‘person’ is to acknowledge definite obligations to those we so designate.” Being evidently not a descriptive- or species-term, the meaning of the word “person” cannot be realized by telling the story of its putative “referent.” Instead, “with terms that have a normative content, . . . to make their meaning understood we must again tell a story, but this time it is not the story of the referent, but of the term itself”—and so we begin.20

First, of course, there is the etymological aspect, which in the case of “person” was to be greatly complicated by the vexed question of how to translate manifestly related terms (prosōpon, hypostasis, ousia, substantia, etc.)—all of which would prove indispensable for grasping the divine personae in early Christian theology. Both the Greek prosōpon and the Latin persona have been traced back to the Etruscan φersu, a word written across the face of a masked figure vanquishing an opponent on a fresco found in a tomb north of Rome and dated ca. 550 B.C.21 The original etymological association of persona, persistent throughout the pre-Christian period in Rome, is thus with the mask worn for theatrical performances and featuring a convex opening at the mouth so as to amplify the speaker’s voice, which thus could “sound through” (personare). By the time of Terence, and culminating in the writings of Cicero, the association of persona widens and shifts—moving from a “role” played on stage by a masked actor to a character’s functioning in official life, especially in politics and the law: “How many persons/roles (Quot personae) are there in a trial?” asks a Carolingian author, likely quoting an ancient Roman source, and answering “four: the accused, the lawyer, the judge, and the plaintiff.” Already, a tension opens up between an understanding of persona as the sheer performance of a political role (officium) and, hence, as something ostensibly impersonal and, on the other hand, a concomitant awareness that it takes the right temperament and character to meet the requirements of such a role. Yet if, particularly in Roman culture, person is strongly tied to the performance of social roles and political offices, it just as crucially denotes an actor’s underlying and inalienable way of being, such as may enhance or interfere with the performance of a specific role or office. We thus find Cicero characterizing his political opponent, Piso, as incapable of filling the office of consul, “a role of great seriousness and severity” (tantam personam, tam gravem, tam severam).22 The frequent suggestion in contemporary theory that performativity is unrelated to personhood, or indeed that personal identity is but an effect or “construct” of a given performance, ultimately fails on its own terms.23 For it does not take into account that not every individual may inhabit every role with equal aptitude and success. In fact, the compelling performance of a role presupposes personhood as an incommunicable substratum and, by its various degrees of success or failure, intimates the actor’s awareness (or lack thereof) of his or her nature and aptitudes.

Two further implications of consequence also begin to fade into view here: first, there is a strong association between persona and “action” (agere, actio, actor), such that the nature of a specific person is inseparable from his or her distinctive way of acting, albeit not simply as a performer of random roles or duties but as a being whose very nature can only be realized qua action. Second, there is the fact that the meaning of persona can only be realized within an ensemble of other persons likewise engaged in the active realization of specific roles and duties. This second meaning of person, still current now, first emerges in the formal analyses of Alexandrine grammarians of the third and second centuries B.C. in whose writings the word πρόσωπον (prosōpon) becomes a central category. Cued by the threefold aspect of personhood on the Greek stage—the person speaking, spoken to, and spoken about, respectively—these grammarians were among the first to institute a tripartite logic of personhood that in due course was to become the focal point of early Trinitarian thought. That is, even in its most abstract and as it were impersonal sense, the grammatical concept of “person” (prosōpon), which in time would be taken over by Roman grammarians as the persona of the speaker, can only signify if it is understood to operate within an ensemble of relations.24 In sharp contrast with the heuristic fiction of the modern autonomous self, or cogito, personhood is incommensurable with or, rather, antecedent to any type of solipsism: “The idea of a single person existing in the world cannot be thought, for although the identity of any one person is unique, personhood as such arises only in plurality.”25 That relatedness is an ontological feature of human personhood—rather than a secondary, merely empirical transaction or subjective choice—is prima facie borne out by the basic structure of grammar, at least as regards the Indo-European language-system; for the very nature of articulate speech (logos) demands an addressee. As we shall see, Coleridge in his time was almost alone in pointing to the essential relatedness of human life and personhood, a point forcefully taken up and variously developed in the twentieth century by Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Lacan.

Formal-grammatical considerations first prompted Tertullian and other church fathers to suppose that God’s first-person-plural declaration in Genesis 1:26—“And he said, let us make man to our image and likeness” (Lat. et ait faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostrum; Grk. καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός ποιήσωμεν ἄνθρωπον κατ’ εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν)—presupposed at least one addressee, widely surmised to be Christ, or indeed both Christ and the Holy Spirit.26 Employing a grammatical or “prosopographic” method of exegesis that proceeds by establishing who speaks to whom and about whom (or what), the early church fathers (Tertullian, Irenaeus, Justinus, and Origen in particular) all emphasize the fact that God qua reason (λόγος) implies a relation of different persons.27 It is thus above all the Greek word prosōpon that shapes the early Christian understanding of the divine being and its enigmatic triplicity. In the Septuagint, prosōpon serves to render the Hebrew word panim, which signifies the human face or, as an intensifier, those traits that most clearly establish the identity of a person or thing. Inevitably, much theological controversy extending from the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) well into the modern era revolves around the elusive question of how to conceive the relationship between the three persons of the deity. Neo-Platonic subordinationism, which posits the superior dignity of God the Father within the Trinity; Appolinarianism, which grants Christ both body and soul but disputes his human rationality, whose place it claims is taken by the divine logos; Praxean “monarchism,” which views Son and Spirit merely as different names for God’s singular being; monophysitism, which postulates a single nature for the deity (thereby denying Christ’s humanity); Nestorian dophysitism, which insists on the twofold nature of Christ as both human and divine and, from there, reasons to the duality of his person—they all struggle with the fundamental question, most vividly raised by Christ’s divinity, of how to imagine the relationship between the being (ousia, natura) and personhood (hypostasis, substantia) of the Trinity.

This is not the place to reiterate these debates in great detail. Rather, so as to situate Coleridge’s long and scrupulous reflection on Trinitarian theology and the concept of person, only a few stages of this exceedingly intricate philosophical and theological debate will be considered. In each case, the objective is to highlight those particular features in the evolving conception of the divine and human person that, in due course, would come to play a crucial role in Coleridge’s own recovery of personhood as a cornerstone of his overall critique of materialism and its encroachment on the very idea of life. With the Alexandrian, grammatical provenance of persona (prosōpon) having faded into oblivion by the time of the church fathers, and given the absence of direct scriptural guidance as regards the relationship of the three divine persons, the challenge of conceptualizing the idea of the divine person(s) was only growing more urgent as time went on. Inevitably, whatever answers might prevail in the long run would play a crucial role in consolidating and legitimizing Catholic Christianity as an institutional and intellectual formation that involved a coherent body of theological propositions above and beyond the ongoing exegetical guardianship of revealed scripture. A momentous conceptual advance was made by the Cappadocian fathers of the fourth century. In the particularly rich Eastern theological language, the all-encompassing divine principle was rendered as ουσία (being), whereas the “distinctive aspect of each member of the Trinity” was designated as ὑπόστασις (hypostasis), thus germinating “our later term person . . . in the differentiation from nature or essence.”28 Among the most coherent statements is Epistle 38 of St. Basil of Caesarea (ca. A.D. 330–379). Distinguishing between general nouns “predicated of subjects plural and numerically various . . . as for instance man” and the individual person of Peter or John, Basil not only clarifies how the term hypostasis functions (i.e., by designating “that which is spoken of in a special and peculiar manner”) but how abstract concepts can only signify predicatively on the basis of this unique quality or “under/standing” (hypo/stasis); it is the latter “which by means of the expressed peculiarities gives standing and circumscription to the general and uncircumscribed.” Crucially, the Cappadocians hold that what rendered each hypostasis distinctive is its relation to the other two, even as Basil struggles to articulate the Trinity to his brother; all three divine persons “are, in a certain sense, ineffable and inconceivable, the continuity of nature being never rent asunder by the distinction of the hypostases, nor the notes of proper distinction confounded in the community of essence.” Against neo-Platonic subordinationism, they insist on the equal dignity of each aspect of the divine being, while also opposing any reductionist attempt to construe each hypostasis or “person” as the mere default of its nature.29

The Cappadocian position was consolidated by Augustine who, in the wake of the Arian controversy that had only been partially resolved at the Council of Nicaea, focuses especially on the question of Christ’s person. In De Trinitate (5.6–8), Augustine stresses how the very person of the “Father” presupposes that of the “Son,” and vice versa, and how the Spirit is at once that of Father and Son. At the same time, he safeguards the identity and dignity of each person against being epiphenomenally derived from (or deemed contingent on) the relation it bears to the others: “it cannot be what [the Son] is called with reference to the Father that makes the Son equal to the Father. It remains that what makes him the equal must be what he is called with reference to himself.”30 In so insisting on the distinct nature of the person—at once in relation (relative) and “substance-wise” (secundam substantiam)—Augustine is still responding to the Sabellian (or “modalist”) heresy, a position that had already been opposed by Tertullian. Yet in Adversus Praxean (A.D. 213), Tertullian had not been concerned with the equality of the divine persons but had only sought to argue their “consubstantiality” (a term introduced soon after Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean was written). A century later, however, the Arian controversy that was to dominate the Council of Nicaea and continued to linger on for centuries thereafter had decisively altered the stakes of Trinitarian thinking. As he builds his case against Arian’s denial of Christ’s divinity, Augustine argues for an understanding of the Trinity in which the relation of the divine persons does not in any sense modify their substance. “Substance-wise,” he insists, the identity of the individual person in the Trinity is not altered by the relation, even as the relation is constitutive of the Trinity and must not be thought of as a secondary attribute or trait of originally separate entities. This position, while effective in his debate with several heresies (modalism, Arianism, monarchism) comes at a price, however, for it commits Augustine to a monolithic conception of substance as unalterable: “Anything that changes does not keep its being [Quod enim mutatur, non servat ipsum esse], and anything that can change even though it does not, is able not to be what it was; and thus only that which not only does not but also absolutely cannot change deserves without qualification to be said really and truly to be” (ADT, 5.3). Compared to the remarkably fluid and inventive conception of life as the ceaseless self-transformation of animate matter set forth by Ovid’s Metamorphoses some four centuries earlier, Augustine’s retention of a rigid and inert concept of substantia as one descriptor of person seems rather problematic.

Without doubt the most cogent and forceful construction of Trinitarianism to be found in the first millennium of Christian thought, De Trinitate (written between A.D. 400 and 420) seeks to think explicitly what in scripture is only obliquely articulated—viz., that “Father and Son and Holy Spirit in the inseparable equality of one substance present a divine unity; and therefore there are not three gods but one God [quod Pater et Filius et Spiritus sanctus, unius ejusdemque substantiae inseparabili aequalitate divinam insinuent unitatem; ideoque non sint tres dii, sed unus Deus].”31 Augustine’s emphasis on the inseparable nature of the three persons is meant to guard against a tendency, still observable in Tertullian, to compartmentalize their agency and, thus, to interpret person still in the loosely pagan sense of “role” (officium). Yet if “the Father does some things, the Son others and the Holy Spirit yet others; . . . the trinity is no longer inseparable” (jam non inseparabilis est Trinitas [ADT. 1.8]). Augustine’s main objective here is to establish a subtle conception of “relation”—such that the relation is not merely an aggregate of otherwise discrete and separate identities, nor is misconstrued as positively producing the identities of the divine personae; the latter, quasi-structuralist hypothesis is rejected indignantly: “it is ridiculous that substance should be predicated by way of relationship” (Absurdum est autem ut substantia relative dicatur [ADT, 7.9]). Specifically this remark has occasioned considerable dispute among theologians, for it appears to isolate the divine persons from relation, even as the second half of De Trinitate (Books 8–15) seeks to grasp the human person as an image of the Trinity. None less than Joseph Ratzinger here sees Augustine committing “a decisive mistake” inasmuch as “he projected the divine persons into the interior life of the human person and affirmed that intra-psychic processes correspond to these persons.” The result, he argues, was a gradual split between increasingly esoteric Trinitarian speculation and the exoteric realities of human personhood. Hamstrung by his retention of a substantialist model of person, and consistently privileging that model—however enlivened by complex accounts of its “interiority”—over the relational model, Augustine (and following him the Scholastic tradition up to and including Aquinas) gave rise to a conception that, in the modern era, would take the form of social-contract theory, viz., by treating relations as strictly secondary, rational-choice type of arrangements. As Ratzinger concludes:

the anthropological turn in Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity . . . was one of the most momentous developments of the Western Church. In fundamental ways it influenced both the concept of the Church and the understanding of the person which was now pushed off into the individualistically narrowed “I and Thou” that finally loses the “you” in this narrowing. It was indeed a result of Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity that the persons of God were closed wholly into God’s interior. Toward the outside, God became a simple “I,” and the whole dimension of “we” lost its place in theology.32

Struggling to navigate between a substantialist model and a relational model, Augustine succeeds only partially in his attempt to think of the Trinity as a unique ontology manifesting itself as an ensemble of functional differences. The growing divide between the Trinitarian ontology and the ectypal realm of human, embodied, and inward personhood also explains Augustine’s difficulty with connecting the first and the second half of De Trinitate. Even so, the work largely succeeds in articulating the necessity of thinking of God as a relation between three distinct persons in a way that avoids separating or disaggregating the divine personae. One of the principal sources feeding Coleridge’s lifelong investment in organicist models of life and meaning is precisely this “unity of the three, incorporeal and unchanging, a nature consubstantial and co-eternal with itself” (unitas Trinitatis incorporea et incommutabilis et sibimet consubstantialis et co-aeterna natura [ADT, 1.15]).

Once it is clear that the very concept of “relation” equally precludes the total indifference and the utter disparity of its constitutive members, it also emerges that “every being that is called something by way of relationship is also something besides the relationship” (quia omnis essentia quae relative dicitur, est etiam aliquid excepto relativo [ADT, 7.2]); or, as W. Norris Clarke notes, “a related is not simply identical with its relation, reducible to it without remainder; it is distinct from it though not separable from it.”33 Simply put, “person” and “relation” are corollaries and, as regards their meaning, mutually conditioning terms. At the same time, relation is not to be conceived in any mimetic or imitative sense; the Son “does not do other things likewise, like a painter copying pictures he has seen painted by someone else” (Neque enim alia similiter, sicut pictor alias tabulas pingit, quemadmodum alias ab alio pictas videt [ADT, 2.3]). What was to prove central some eight hundred years later in Richard of St. Victor’s account of relationality and personhood, and what would also preoccupy the late Coleridge, is here first attempted: viz., Augustine seeks to envision the Trinity as the archetype of the ideal, organic community wherein the identity of the persons comprising that unity is inseparable from their relations, even as it is neither transferentially projected upon nor mimetically derived from the other persons in that community. The persons or hypostases that comprise this formation are at once distinct, related, and inseparable. As Peter Burnell sums up Augustine’s delicate balancing of a substantialist conception and a relational conception of the human being, “both words [“substance” and “person”] denote the determination of a rational nature as an existent being, but whereas ‘substance’ denotes that determination in reference to the nature itself, ‘person’ denotes in reference to relation with other beings.”34

Quoting John 5:19 (“the Son cannot do anything of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doth, these the Son also doth in like manner” (Vulg. non potest Filius a se facere quicquam nisi quod viderit Patrem facientem quaecumque enim ille fecerit haec et Filius similiter facit), Augustine pushes the limits of intelligibility here by redeploying the same adverb (“likewise”), albeit this time in a positive sense. The challenge posed by the Trinity to finite human beings involves finding ways to grasp or imagine an isomorphism of being and action (ὁμοίως/similiter) without positing a merely derivative, mimetic, and/or narcissistic relation between the persons involved. Put differently, we are to conceive of relation as ontology, and not as a psychological constellation of discrete anthropomorphic agents. The Trinitarian community is not to be imagined as an empirical, secondary construct, and it will elude comprehension altogether as long as it is being construed as but another concept or category, such as substance or accident.35 There is another, no less crucial reason for why De Trinitate takes such pains to delimit the semantic reach of “resemblance” or “similarity” (ὁμοίως/similiter) as regards the personae of the Trinity. For unlike the neo-Platonists, who tend to treat the imago dei conception as an ontological given, Augustine contends that “the divine beauty in us has been largely (of course not completely) lost, . . . and [that] we are so extensively damaged that the similarity [with God] is not quite restored as long as we are in this world.”36 Understanding the magnitude of the task, in both its intellectual and rhetorical dimensions, Augustine repeatedly hints that to articulate the idea of the Trinity is not to indulge in remote intellectual speculation but to map a path toward understanding man as the imago dei and, thus, to draw closer to the ultimate mystical experience of a visio beatifica. With both Pauline and Platonic overtones, he thus notes how in engaging the Trinity “I forget what lies behind and stretch out to what lies ahead, and press on intently to the palm of the supernal vocation” (et secundum intentionem sequor ad palmam supernae vocationis).

Augustine’s phrasing here subtly underscores his emphasis on a complex and dynamic model of inwardness; for in transliterating the Greek κατὰ σκοπὸν (Philippians 3:14) as secundum intentionem, rather than following the Vulgate’s ad destinatum, Augustine characterizes this quest for understanding as intensely personal. At the same time, with a characteristic rhetorical flourish, the self’s subaltern position vis-à-vis the idea of the Trinity is acknowledged in a chiasmic construction that concedes the ineffable nature of the Trinitarian ontology even as it finds profound compensation in the gift of human speech: “I have undertaken, not so much to discuss with authority what I have already learned, as to learn by discussing it with modest piety” (non tam cognita cum auctoritate disserere, quam ea cum pietate disserendo cognoscere [ADT, 1.8]). Precisely this ubiquitous linguistic constraint—viz., the ultimate inaccessibility of the threefold God to human speech—also accounts for why we habitually speak and think of the three persons not only as distinct but (with seeming inevitability) proceed to misconstrue them as separate: “in my words Father and Son and Holy Spirit are separated and cannot be said together.” Augustine’s choice of illustration is telling, for it affirms human personhood as an instance of the same organic, relational model as the Trinity and, hence, as no less difficult to fathom: “when I name my memory, understanding, and will, each name refers to a single thing, and yet each of these single names is the product of all three” (quemadmodum cum memoriam meam et intellectum et voluntatem nomino, singula quidem nomina ad res singulas referuntur, sed tamen ab omnibus tribus singula facta sunt [ADT, 4.30]).

Quite literally, then, engaging the idea of the Trinity confronts us with a notion that, in due course, would emerge as central to the understanding of both divine and human personhood. Viz., as persons we are truly, indeed essentially incommunicable. The idea of person, its ontology, hints at something forever inaccessible to human, conceptual mastery—though nonetheless distinctly manifest or revealed, as remains to be seen in the juxtaposition of Coleridge’s account of “conscience” and the I-Thou relation with similar models found in Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion. Augustine thus remarks how, in engaging the Trinity, we come up against “things which cannot be expressed as they are thought and cannot be thought as they are” (Quamobrem ut jam etiam de iis quae nec dicuntur ut cogitantur, nec cogitantur ut sunt).37 To acknowledge this conceptual impasse does not, however, imply the premature end or outright failure of his inquiry. On the contrary, in a profound sense this acknowledgment of the limits of conceptual language and representation both highlights Augustine’s deep commitment to apophatic theology and establishes the ineffability of the Trinitarian God (and, consequently, of the idea of person) as the permanent condition circumscribing all theological and spiritual reasoning and inquiry.

In rendering the three hypostases of the Cappadocians as tres substantiae vel personae, Augustine reveals a certain hesitation “as to what ‘person’ (persona) could actually signify among Father, Son, and Spirit.” His affirmation (ADT, 5.3) that “there is at least no doubt that God is substance” (sine dubitatione substantia) almost immediately begins to fray and unwork itself: “or perhaps a better word would be being; at any rate what the Greeks call ousia” (vel, si melius hoc appellatur, essentia, quam Graeci οὐσίαν vocant); and as late as Book 7 we find him still sifting the implications of terms whose historical origins at least in part elude him. Precisely here, in his attempt to establish the exact meaning of “person” within Trinitarian thought, Augustine’s argument appears notably unsure of itself. As is his wont, he opens Book 7 exegetically, in this case by parsing possible interpretations of 1 Corinthians 1:24, followed by other passages of scripture. Yet the exegetical approach offers only very limited safeguards against the dangers of outright error and forbidden predication, quite simply because scripture itself remains all but silent on the issue of the Trinity. To the essential question—“So three what, then? If three persons, then what is meant by person is common to all three?”—it offers no answers. Neither does it clarify what is meant by “person” on those rare occasions where the term is being used in scripture: “So this is either their specific or their generic name.”38 Likewise, to the constantly looming, tri-theist heresy (“Why not three Gods?”) scripture offers no decisive refutation: “neither do we find scripture talking anywhere about three persons” (ADT, 7.7–8). Augustine thus is faced with the vexing task of sifting a theological question of essential importance without being able to rely on exegesis.

Having recognized early on how “the desire to express the inexpressible” (cum ineffabilia fari cupimus [ADT, 7.2]) tends to lead one into paradoxical and highly questionable speculations, he confines himself to two related arguments. The first is to distinguish sharply between terms denoting a genus and those denoting a species; the second is to correlate that distinction with the two alternative constructions of person in terms of relation and substance, respectively. As regards the first task, Augustine cautiously edges away from the Greek hypostasis, the substratum of all accidents and predation (all but transliterated as substantia, that which “stands under”): “Perhaps then it is more correct to say three persons than three substances [Quanquam et illi, si vellent, sicut dicunt tres substantias, tres hypostases, possent dicere tres personas tria prosopa]. But we must inquire further into this, in case it looks like special pleading for our own usage against that of the Greeks” (ADT, 7.11). The objective, however tentatively broached, is to disaggregate the Latin persona from the Greek hypostasis, so as to allow for a construction of person that recognizes both its substantive identity and its relatedness as distinct but inseparable aspects of full personhood. Proceeding in a cautious, at times hesitant manner, Augustine arrives at the crucial insight that, in the case of person, we are presented with an idea that cannot be conceptualized in standard, predicative fashion at all. Whereas a horse is sensibly conceptualized as a species of the genus animal, “the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three species of one being.” Rather, in the case of person (divine and human), the reality of the presence so designated is not established by an act of predicative cognition but by an act of recognition that is intrinsically evaluative:

But if you say that the name substance or person does not signify species but something singular and individual, so that the substance or person is not predicated like man, which is common to all men [Quod si dicunt substantiae vel personae nomine non speciem significari, sed aliquid singulare atque individuum; ut substantia vel persona non ita dicatur sicut dicitur homo]. (ADT, 7.11)

In passing, Augustine notes that being and substance (ousia and hypostasis) are of fairly recent origin, and that “those who spoke Latin before they had these terms . . . used to talk about nature instead,” thus recalling the older notion of individual existence as the manifestation of a distinct “nature.”39 Augustine’s closing example of three statues of gold at least partially clinches the main point, viz., that the gold does not relate to the eventual statues as genus to species. Though its applications are limited, the simile at least helps clarify that to assert the Trinitarian model of “three men said to be of one nature” is not to deny their distinctiveness as persons, nor to suggest their separate existence. The point was hard-won for Augustine, whose earlier writings tend to treat body and soul (anima) in rather disjunctive, even antagonistic fashion that faintly echoes his youthful Manichean indiscretions. Only in his later writings was he to emphasize “the unity of the human being . . . as ‘a rational soul which has a body’” and to affirm that “the soul which has a body does not make two persons, but one human being.”40

Provided we acknowledge that in the case of the Trinity “it is quite impossible for any other person at all to emerge out of the same being” (nullo modo alia quaelibet persona ex eadem essentia potest existere [ADT, 7.11]), Augustine’s simile helps illustrate a point of great consequence for later theology and, eventually, for Coleridge’s reliance on Trinitarian thought as a key component in his lifelong critique of modernity. Inasmuch as person signifies “something singular and individual” (aliquid singulare atque individuum), it proves distinct from a common nature and also lies beyond the reach of ordinary qualia and praedicabilia. That a person belongs to a particular species and, furthermore, that it shares with other persons an underlying essence or natura does not as such capture the meaning of person. Philip Rolnick makes the salient point very well: “As person is developed through the centuries, it is consistently differentiated from nature, for a person is an agent who can initiate action in accord with the nature possessed.”41 It is a distinction pointedly reinforced in the momentous question opening Book 9 of Augustine’s Confessions: “Who am I and what am I” (quis ego et qualis ego?). A particularly consequential implication of Cappadocian and Augustinian theology, then, is to have identified the human person as the unique instance where the identity of a being is not simply the default of its material substratum or, for that matter, of our concept of such a substratum. As the later Coleridge will insist time and again, personhood implies “alterity,” that is, an unbridgeable gap between the individual, “incommunicable” agent and his or her nature, species, or substance. Because a person has by definition what Coleridge calls “a responsible Will,” it is in a unique, albeit bounded sense free.

Ever the rhetorician in search of vivid analogies to present intricate and elusive subjects more effectively, Augustine arguably found the greatest challenge in thinking through the connection between the persons of the Trinity and the meaning of human personhood. Having embarked on an unprecedented exploration of the singularity and evolving nature of the human individual in his Confessions, Augustine’s pedagogical role as bishop of Hippo frequently called upon him to find new ways to convey how divine and human personhood might be related.42 It is beyond the scope of this reading, however, to detail how the later books of De Trinitate establish a delicate analogy between the transcendent relation of the divine persons and the gradual cultivation of the human soul as imago dei. For now, what needs to be kept in mind is the concern (altogether central to Christological and Trinitarian discourse of the fourth and fifth centuries) with the relation between ousia and hypostasis, terms whose rendition as substantia and persona, respectively, had done much to confuse the issue. Even so, in the course of these debates, which were only partially resolved at the Council of Chaldecon (A.D. 451), the term perceived to be most urgently in need of further clarification was “nature” (physis, natura). To be sure, the formula of Christ as possessing “two natures [physeis] and one person [hypostasis],” which had won the day at Chaldecon, while leaving the meaning of “nature” rather obscure, had consolidated an aspect of personhood whose centrality has been acknowledged ever since: person is integrative. It “unifies” and, in so doing, allows us “to glimpse the ontological and axiological priority of person over nature.”43

The late Coleridge thus categorically states that person, or “the spiritual” dimension of the human being, differs from nature in kind and, hence, is not reducible to an epiphenomenon of somatic, neural, or otherwise materially conditioned processes: “by spiritual I do not pretend to determine what the Will is but what it is not—namely, that it is not nature.”44 Whereas a morality anchored in self-interest (“Prudence”) “is at least an offspring of the Understanding, “ one anchored in non-cognitive sentiments or “Sensibility” is doomed to failure because of its “passive nature” and its utter contingency on “a quality of the nerves, and . . . individual bodily temperament.”45 The point can also be made in terms familiar from Platonic dialectics: “nature itself, as soon as we apply reason to its contemplation, forces us back to a something higher than nature as that on which it depends” (OM, 140). Nature (physis), the ontological substratum of the person, can never be set aside when thinking about personhood, quite simply because there cannot be any hypothetical persons but only the real person whom we encounter and acknowledge as such. As Spaemann puts it, “life as such cannot equally well be or not be, for life is what it is to be.”46 To be a person, then, means to stand in a unique relationship to—indeed, to have a singular, “incommunicable” perspective on—that underlying nature. A key trait of personhood (not to be confused with the contingent psychological notion of “personality”) is thus that of transcendence, that is, an awareness that nature and person are neither homologous nor related in linear fashion as cause and effect.

The human individual qua person is not causally conditioned by nature, even as it attains its reality only on the basis of it. Unlike non-personal entities such as plants and animals, whose identity is fully circumscribed by their nature, a person “is a being that relates itself to its existence [verhalten sich zu ihrem Sosein], i.e. to its attributes. Precisely the constellation of attributes is experienced as contingent. But neither is a person the Being, expressing itself in finite ways of being. Persons are not the Absolute, since they only have being in the first place through having a kind of being [Wesen], a finite set of attributes, a nature . . . Personality hovers at a point between being and kind, between absolute and finite. This point of indifference we call freedom.”47 A momentary glance ahead shows the later Coleridge to have grasped this crucial point very clearly, such as when noting that “in irrational Agents the Law constitutes the Will. In moral and rational agents the Will constitutes, or ought to constitute, the Law.”48 At times, Coleridge’s insistence on this categorical divide between the uniqueness of the human being as possessed of reason and the sentient, even clever nature of other animated life forms is underwritten by a deepening investment in neo-Platonic thought. A long note early in Aids to Reflection finds Coleridge enthusiastically remarking on the felicitous Greek original of James 1:25: “But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed” (ὁ δὲ παρακύψας εἰς νόμον τέλειον τὸν τῆς ἐλευθερίας):

The Greek word, parakupsas, signifies the incurvation or being of the body in the act of looking down into; as, for instance, in the endeavour to see the reflected image of a star in the water at the bottom of a well. A more happy or forcible word could not have been chosen to express the nature and ultimate object of reflection, and to enforce the necessity of it, in order to discover the living fountain and spring-head of the evidence of the Christian faith in the believer himself, and at the same time to point out the seat and region, where alone it is to be found. Quantum sumus, scimus. That which we find within ourselves, which is more than ourselves, and yet the ground of whatever is good and permanent therein, is the substance and life of all other knowledge. (30n)

The key word here, παρακύψας, denotes precisely the elemental form of internal perspective, transcendence, or (as Coleridge calls it) “alterity” that defines the person’s relation to the reality and nature of its own existence. Anterior to all empirically acquired information, knowledge is indelibly woven into the reality of our being, our personhood: “Inasmuch as we have being, we come to know” (Quantum sumus, scimus).49 As the Platonizing concluding sentence (“That which we find within ourselves”) makes clear, human consciousness is distinguished by its active participation in, rather than passive determinacy by, that which it knows. A fuller account of Coleridge’s phenomenology of “conscience” (below) shall demonstrate in some detail that this participatory and relational quality of human awareness also reveals a profound connection between Coleridge’s neo-Platonic philosophical theology and the emergent field of phenomenology, especially in Newman’s late Grammar of Assent (1870) and Franz Brentano’s nearly contemporaneous Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874). In the above passage, then, Coleridge draws attention to how the pursuit of seemingly “mundane” object-knowledge lets us glimpse something about the very nature of what it means to know, and how that process is wholly enmeshed with our unique mode of being. However contingent and ostensibly foreign-determined, human knowledge always “curves in on” and “looks down into” the noumenal realm in which it participates and to which (however unwittingly) its discrete epistemological pursuits orient it qua person.50 One is reminded of Levinas’s gnomic observation that “to know or to be conscious is to have time to avoid and forestall the instant of inhumanity.”51

Late in Aids to Reflection, Coleridge offers a quasi-phenomenological account of different levels of human awareness and, in so doing, homes in on the intrinsic “alterity” or transcendence of the human individual qua person vis-à-vis the world. Glossing an aphorism by Jeremy Taylor that ponders how the moral consciousness is awakened by a “perplexing disparity of success and desert,” Coleridge notes that it is precisely the institution of slavery—viz., the conversion of persons into things grasped with our hands, viz. “Mancipia = things” (CM, 1:35)—which triggers an indelible, indeed primal awareness of sin.52 In so “forcing the Soul in upon herself,” this sinful practice reveals a palpable disequilibrium between material reality and moral conception. Echoing Augustine’s much-criticized view of sin as the necessary impetus whereby human beings transformed from a primitive imago dei into bona fide searchers for perfection, Coleridge finds slavery (and, metaphorically, his own enslavement to opium) to precipitate an (ultimately fortuitous) sense of inner estrangement, self-scrutiny, and moral self-awareness.53 Ever so slowly, he suggests, there ensues

a steadier and more distinct consciousness of a Something in man different in kind, and which not merely distinguishes but contra-distinguishes, him from animals—at the same time that it has brought into closer view an enigma of yet harder solution—the fact, I mean, of a Contradiction in the Human Being, of which no traces are observable elsewhere, in animated or inanimate Nature! A struggle of jarring impulses; a mysterious diversity between the injunctions of the mind and the elections of the will; and (last but not least) the utter incommensurateness and the unsatisfying qualities of the things around us, that yet are the only objects which our senses discover or our appetites require us to pursue.54

As so often in Coleridge, the acuity of his reasoning is bound up with his delicately woven, metonymic characterization of mental life as a gradated progression; “jarring impulses” give rise to a cognitive dissonance that appears veritably constitutive of the inner life: “a mysterious diversity between the injunction of the mind and the elections of the will.” All perceptual or object knowledge thus involuntarily pries open a window on self-knowledge, which is to say, on the rationality that lies beyond mere understanding and, as such, delineates the true and unique nature of the human person as an imago dei. As Jacques Maritain puts it, “the resemblance to God is less in the practical than in the speculative intellect.”55 At the same time, Coleridge opposes the naturalist hypothesis that construes the human being strictly in terms of a utilitarian and instrumental “understanding”—that is, as a particularly advanced and efficient computational machine whose capacity for highly sophisticated, second-order reflections (e.g., gaming hypothetical scenarios; preparing for impending or even distant disasters, etc.) merely moves farther out the goal-posts of interestedness. For it neither implies nor even acknowledges the ontological fact of the person’s self-transcendence—that is, its capacity at all times to shift from a naturalist to a phenomenological stance whereby the immediacy of our intentional commerce with the world is rendered subject to formal scrutiny.56 Invariably, this “‘Necessitarian Scheme’ of ‘Modern (or Pseudo-) Calvinism’ erodes an agent’s capacity for differentiated and articulate self-awareness: With such a system not the Wit of Man nor all the Theodices [sic!] ever framed by human ingenuity . . . can reconcile the Sense of Responsibility, nor the fact of the difference in kind between REGRET AND REMORSE” (AR, 159). Against this purely calculative and inherently reactive model, Coleridge maintains that there is no such thing as reflection without transcendence, or vice versa. To be a person means to inhabit a “perspective” that, however absorbing and compelling, can never unilaterally determine, let alone exhaust the rational scope of the person. For at all times, we understand—either intuitively or, less frequently perhaps, explicitly—that perspective to be ours and, hence, relate to it as a “responsible Will.” The late Coleridge’s scrupulous rumination of Trinitarian theology and its bearing on our understanding of human will, conscience, and personhood stems from this (neo-Platonic) insight into the “original unity of being and thought.” It is this unity which, even as “it is what we are not, [constitutes] the presupposition of what, as subjects, we are.”57

1. See Newman, Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), 33–40 (1878 ed.); in preparing for his “assertion of religion,” Coleridge remarks how an event’s “anterior probability . . . is part of its historic evidence and constitutes proof presumptive or evidence à priori” (OM, 16; italics mine).

2. Essays on his Times, 3:235n; among Coleridge’s more forthright statements to the same effect is the following passage from The Friend: “The sacred principle, recognized by all Laws, human and divine, the principle indeed, which is the ground-work of all law and justice, that a person can never become a thing, nor be treated as such without wrong. But the distinction between person and thing consists herein, that the latter may rightfully be used altogether and merely, as a means; but the former must always be included in the end, and form a part of the final cause” (CF, 1:190; see also, CF, 1:191). Notably, Coleridge’s distinction reappears in the writings of Simone Weil, who notes “that a human being should be a thing is, from the point of view of logic, a contradiction; but when the impossible has become a reality, the contradiction is as a rent in the soul . . . One cannot lose more than the slave loses, he loses all inner life” (“The Iliad, Poem of Might,” in Simone Weil Reader, 158–159).

3. Spaemann, Persons, 68; W. Norris Clarke sees “relationality [as] a primordial dimension of every real being, inseparable from its substantiality, just as action is from existence” (Person & Being, 13f.).

4. Spaemann, Persons, 55.

5. Ibid., 55–56, and, for a perceptive discussion of Husserl’s argument with Brentano about the nature and scope of human intentionality, 48–61.

6. On the concept of tradition, see Gadamer, Truth and Method, esp. 267–306; MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, esp. 170–215; and Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts.”

7. “Reformation of the Eleventh Century,” first published in British Critic, 1841, as reprinted in Essays Critical and Historical, 2:250. A distant echo of Augustine’s Confessions (3.7.13), Newman’s point is repeated by Ratzinger, who notes that “although this thought [on the idea of Person] has distanced itself far from its origin and developed beyond it, it nevertheless lives, in a hidden way, from its origin” (“Retrieving the Tradition,” 439).

8. Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, 131–132 (trans. mine).

9. Mind in Action, 44.

10. Spaemann, Persons, 11, 6–7; to be sure, we may ascribe “personality” to a dog, though doing so involves a metaphoric transfer from the realm of the human, which stands out for its unique embodiment of personhood by the face; see Aristotle’s remark on how humans and animals differ in that only the former have a “face” (prosōpon), Historia Animalium, 491^b9–11.

11. Rorty, Mind in Action, 32; as Rorty goes on to point out, “neither the Kantian regulative principle of respect nor the Christian idea of the immortal soul have any necessary connection with the legal function of the idea of person. Respect for the person doesn’t entail any particular legal rights; nor does the assurance of legal personhood assure social or moral respect” (33).

12. Persons, 39; trans. modified; for Coleridge, who as Pamela Edwards notes, habitually “emphasized the term ‘personal’ in his consideration of rights and duties”; the idea of ‘personal rights’ was grounded in a moral vision that the ‘personal will’ must be able to accomplish its duties to the ‘civic’ Commonwealth as a prerequisite of any rights. The Coleridgean concept of a ‘personal right’ tied social entitlement to a more tangible set of ‘personal’ relationships than a necessarily vaguer ‘natural right’ or ‘right of man’ could . . . [and it] forged the link between Coleridge’s doctrine of the will and his doctrine of rights” (Statesman’s Science, 114).

13. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 45, 50. See also Pinkard, who remarks how “the relation to the other is . . . double-edged in that the other both affirms and undermines the subject’s sense of himself” and, in so doing, notably confine the reality of the other to “an abstract idea” (Hegel’s Phenomenology, 54–55).

14. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, 29, 24.

15. The point cannot be developed further here; for a discussion of Hegel’s theory of the modern state as a “moral” (sittliche) community, see C. Taylor (Hegel, 428–461) and Pippin (Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, 210–238). For a brief treatment of Hegel’s debt to Plato, see Taylor (ibid., 512–516).

16. Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers, 313–314, 319. “Sight is the keenest mode of perception vouchsafed us through the body; wisdom, indeed, we cannot see thereby—how passionate had been our desire for her, if she had granted us so clear an image of herself to gaze upon” (ὄψις γὰρ ἡμῖν ὀξυτάτη τῶν διὰ τοῦ σώματος ἔρχεται αἰσθήσεων [250^d]).

17. Ibid., 27.

18. Murdoch, Sovereignty, 68, 82.

19. Ibid., 28.

20. Spaemann, Persons, 17; what follows draws on a number of seminal accounts of person, with Spaemann’s being one of the most compelling. See also Clarke, Person & Being; Maritain, Person and the Common Good; for attempts to think person non-normatively, see Rorty, Mind in Action, 27–98; Johnson, Persons and Things, 3–26 and 179–187. For an analytic account, see Chisholm, Person and Object; for a major statement starkly different from the argument developed here, see Parfit, Reasons and Persons, esp. 199–350; for an exchange of different perspectives, see Cockburn, ed., Human Beings, esp. the essays by Cora Diamond and E. J. Lowe.

21. If our grasp of the idea of person hinges on a number of peripheral terms (substance, being, nature, existence, etc.), this project is greatly complicated by problems of translation that arose as Western theology began to switch from Greek to Latin during the third century. For seminal studies of the historical development of the concept “person,” see Nédoncelle, “Prosopon et person” and the entry on “Person” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie 7:270–337; Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God, 10–60; and Spaemann, Persons, 16–33.

22. Cicero, In Pisonem, 24. In a programmatic statement in De Officiis, Cicero states that “we are invested by Nature with two characters, as it were [duabus quasi nos a natura indutos esse personis]; one of these is universal, arising from the fact of our being all alike endowed with reason . . . The other character is the one that is assigned to individuals in particular [altera autem, quae proprie singulis est tribute]” (Book 1.30).

23. On the role of “personification” or prosōpoeia as licensing a constructionist or performative understanding of person, see the above discussion of Hobbes’s “artificial persons” in Chapter 8.

24. E.g., Varro, De Lingua Latina, 8.20.

25. Spaemann, Persons, 40.

26. Tertullian, Adversus Praxean, 12.3 takes the latter view; earlier exegeses pointing strictly to Christ as the addressee in Genesis 1:26 include those offered by Justinus Martyr, Theophilos of Antioch, and Irenaeus of Lyons. Among the best accounts of the complex theological debates of third- and fourth-century Western and Cappadocian theology is Ayres’s Nicea and its Legacy, which briefly recapitulates Tertullian’s early personalist theology (73–75) and discusses the impact of the Nicean resolution on subsequent Trinitarian thought (esp. 278–288), including in Augustine’s later writings (esp. 372–381).

27. For a detailed account of “prosopographic” exegesis in relation to the emerging concept of person, see Andresen, “Zur Entstehung und Geschichte,” esp. 9–14.

28. Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God, 18.

29. St. Basil, Letter 38 (www.newadvent.org/fathers/3202038.htm). A more detailed argument would have to take into account the peculiarities of translation, which frequently led an overlapping or outright confusion of the Eastern theological concept of “being” (ουσία) with the Western, Latin term substantia—literally, that which “underlies” or “sub-tends” something else—which in turn is awkwardly close in meaning to the Greek hypostasis. Similar problems bedevil the relationship between natura and essentia; for a concise account, see Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God, 19f. and 26f.

30. The text (ADT, 5.7) continues: “But whatever he is called with reference to himself he is called substance-wise. So it follows that he is equal substance-wise” (Quia vero Filius non ad Filium relative dicitur, sed ad Patrem; non secundum hoc quod ad Patrem dicitur, aequalis est Filius Patri: restat ut secundum id aequalis sit, quod ad se dicitur. Quidquid autem ad se dicitur, secundum substantiam dicitur: restat ergo ut secundum substantiam sit aequalis).

31. ADT, 1.7. Latin quotes follow the edition in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, vol. 42.

32. Ratzinger, “Retrieving the Tradition,” 447, 454. From a different (Aristotelian) perspective, A. C. Lloyd and J. Mader had critiqued Augustine’s understanding of person as supposedly blurring the categories of substance and relation; for a concise summary and refutation of those critiques, see Burnell, Augustinian Person, 67–70. Against Ratzinger’s critique of Augustinian interiority, see Mary T. Clark, “Augustine on Person,” who values Augustine’s “insight into interiority as essential to human personhood” and sees it as “a valuable gift from Plotinus.” On this debate, see Rolnick (Person, Grace, and God, 31–32); Clark’s neo-Platonist appraisal of Augustine’s model of person echoes Charles Taylor’s influential reading of the Confessions, which credits Augustine with “introduce[ing] the inwardness of radical reflexivity.” As regards Augustine’s “proto-Cartesian move,” Taylor remains curiously ambivalent. Thus he sometimes deems this step a “fateful one, because we have certainly made a big thing of the first-person standpoint. The modern epistemological tradition from Descartes, and all that has flowed from it in modern culture, has made this standpoint fundamental—to the point of aberration, one might think.” On other occasions, he stresses “the crucial importance of the language of inwardness . . . [which] represents a radically new doctrine of moral resources, one where the route to the higher passes within” (Sources, 131–132, 139). For critiques of Taylor, stressing the institutional, communal, and participatory nature of the self, see Aers (Salvation and Sin, 1–24) and Hanby (Augustine and Modernity, 5–10).

33. Person & Being, 16; likewise, Rolnick cautions that “personality cannot be reduced to its relationships, even though its life is unthinkable without them” (Person, Grace, and God, 209).

34. Augustinian Person, 187–188.

35. Though relatively unfamiliar with much of Aristotle’s writings, the relevant Aristotelian text for Augustine’s argument here, the Categories, was well known to him; see Confessions, 4.16.28–29.

36. Burnell, Augustinian Person, 174; Burnell references De Perfectionae Iustitiae Hominis, 11.28 here.

37. ADT, 5.4; speaking of Augustine’s frequent acknowledgment “that the divine reality cannot be put into language,” Mary T. Clark also notes that “he never forgot that God is ineffable. He is a cataphatic [affirmative] theologian with respect to the mysterious Trinity only because Arianism and Sabellianism required the use of basic ontological language” (“Augustine on Person,” 110).

38. At 7.8, Augustine cites 2 Corinthians 2:10: “For, what I have pardoned, if I have pardoned any thing, for your sakes have I done it in the person of Christ” (Vul. nam et ego quod donavi si quid donavi propter vos in persona Christi. – Grk. καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼ ὃ κεχάρισμαι, εἴ τι κεχάρισμαι δι’ ὑμᾶς ἐν προσώπῳ Χριστοῦ).

39. quia et veteres qui latine locuti sunt, antequam haberent ista nomina, quae non diu est ut in usum venerunt, id est essentiam vel substantiam, pro his naturam dicebant (ADT, 7.11). Natura will again occupy a central role in Boethius, whose definition of person was to prevail through Aquinas; for a concise account of Aquinas’s implicit critique of Augustine’s use of the genus/species opposition, see Edmund Hill’s commentary (ADT, 234n36).

40. In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus 19.15, quoted in Teske, “Augustine’s Theory of Soul,” 116.

41. Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God, 28.

42. A well-known instance is that of the fugitive monk Leporius of Gaul, excommunicated for his heretical, radically disjunctive (Nestorian) view of Christ’s divinity and humanity. Having fled to Africa, Leporius received instruction from Augustine who, as his disciple’s eventual recantation in the Libellus Emendationis shows, had led him to realize “that the Incarnation conjoins human nature with the divine Person, not with the divine nature” (Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God, 23); for a detailed account of Leporius’s case, see also Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 464–467.

43. Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God, 34.

44. Inquiring Spirit, 132.

45. “Are not Reason, Discrimination, Law, and deliberate Choice the distinguishing Characters of Humanity? Can aught, then, worthy of a human Being, proceed from a Habit of Soul, which would exclude all these . . . Can any thing manly, I say, proceed from those, who for Law and Light would substitute shapeless feelings, sentiments, [and] impulses?” (AR, 58, 63).

46. Persons, 71. Commenting on a discourse by Joseph Hughes in 1831, Coleridge, by then deeply committed to a (neo-Platonic-inspired) Trinitarian position, yet insists on the absolute interdependency of physis and pneuma: “I find nothing in Reason to authorize me, nothing in Scripture that requires me, to believe an actuality, or full existency, of the Soul separate from the Body—even as I am utterly incapable of conceiving a Body without a Soul. A carcase is not a Body—any more than a Dendrite is a Plant—tho’ it bears the imprint of a Plant . . . —But the Man by necessity of his finite nature at once potential and Actual exists, as Soul and Body” (CM, 2:1185).

47. Spaemann, Persons, 73; trans. modified.

48. AR, 300n; for a fuller discussion of this point, see also AR, 247.

49. In a late notebook entry, Coleridge further scrutinizes the interdependency of personhood as a mode of being and the human being’s distinctive mode of knowledge—which is not merely informational or computational but relational: “Never shall we [be] able to comprehend ourselves <better than we now do>, but we may learn what is of far more worth and importance, to know ourselves better. Sis ut scias! [Be that you may know!]. Scire et esse <Sciendi et essendi> eadem est norma / the more we become normal in this respect, the clearer & more distinct is the Image of God in [? Us] of him who eternally becomes affirmeth” (CN, 5, no. 6720); for a discussion of this passage, see Hedley, Coleridge, 160–161.

50. There is a marked Platonic, at times even mystical undercurrent in modern phenomenology, even as some versions of phenomenology, Husserl’s in particular, appear anxious to contain such implications; the conjunction between phenomenology and Thomistic theology is especially strong in the work of Franz Brentano, Étienne Gilson, and Jacques Maritain—though substantial connections to Judaic thought can also be found in Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. On the former link, see Sokolowski, who remarks that phenomenology “in a way complements . . . the Thomistic approach,” viz., by approaching philosophy from “within the natural attitude and [then] distinguish[ing] the philosophical from it” (Introduction to Phenomenology, 208); on the relation between modern, proto-phenomenological conceptions of form qua “appearance” and Thomism, see Pfau, “All is Leaf.”

51. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 35.

52. See Coleridge’s marginalia on the “report of a Committee of the House of Commons on the Extinction of Slavery” (1833), which has him muse on “how unhappy a state of mind must that of a humane and religious Planter’s be.” In explaining the use of the word “mancipia,” George Whalley notes how Coleridge here and elsewhere echoes almost verbatim Jeremy Taylor’s Polemicall Discourses (1674), which had insisted on the “sacred distinction between Person and Thing, which is the Light and the Life of all Law, human and divine” (quoted in CM, 1:35 n7²).

53. See Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis, where he speaks of the human being as “the spiritual creature that . . . is consummated in its relationship with God only by having been brought to the edge of eternal damnation” (quoted in Burnell, Augustinian Person, 177).

54. AR, 349; the editor, John Beer, references Plotinus, Enneads, 3.2.8 as a likely source for Coleridge’s argument here. On Coleridge’s growing neo-Platonist orientation in the later work, see Hedley, Coleridge, esp. 33–65; for a different reading that seeks to de-emphasize Coleridge’s Platonism and to disaggregate his theological and philosophical speculations, see Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, esp. 141–204; still a good introduction to Coleridge’s complex intellectual bearings and concerns is Muir, Coleridge as Philosopher.

55. Person and the Common Good, 25; see also Maritain’s later contention “that the deepest layer of the human person’s dignity consists in its property of resembling God—not in a general way after the manner of all creatures, but in a proper way. It is the image of God” (ibid., 42). That point, of course, is altogether central to Coleridge’s notion of the symbol; see Halmi, Genealogy, esp. 99–132; McKusick, “Symbol”; Perkins, on symbol in relation to logos, in Coleridge’s Philosophy, 25–90; and Brice, Coleridge and Scepticism, 94–102.

56. On this basic phenomenological operation of epochē or “phenomenological reduction,” see Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, 42–51; following Husserl, Sokolowski notes that this procedure—Coleridge’s parakupsas—is also at times characterized as a “transcendental attitude” (42).

57. Spaemann, Persons, 95; similarly, and very much in the spirit of Coleridge, Rolnick notes that “although self-awareness is a sine qua non of the divine gift of personality, several problems emerge in the modernist self-understanding. First, to the degree that the self is abstracted as a starting point, it forgets what it has received, and this omission is already decisive” (Person, Grace, and God, 214).