THE MORAL and progressive independence of the clerisy was one of the most “radical” components of Coleridge’s Church and State. Their role was antithetical to the promulgation of doctrine. If the foundation of political virtue in the republic was to be secured by landed independence, Coleridge reasoned, the possibility of moral virtue could only be founded in the equally substantial and enduring spiritual property of intellectual capital. The clerisy, unlike the clergy, were avatars of moral freedom rather than keepers of the sacred flame of any particular, and necessarily exclusive, creed.
In this respect, Coleridge could not have been more unlike the classical “Tory” Anglican theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who saw the priest as the representative and natural ally of the lord of the manor and the squirearch in upholding tradition, order, and stability. Coleridge regarded the “person” of the parish—the member, whether ordained or lay, of his clerisy—as an engine for change in society, the representative of the “civilising instinct” and the Addisonian Christian gentility which he located in the commercial, “progressive” segment of society. The clerisy in Coleridge’s scheme would not act to keep the people in their place and make them content with their humble lot, as the priests in normative Tory theory did.1 The clerisy would instead act to rouse the people from their torpor, to “teach the [people] their duties” so as to “render them susceptible” of higher stations and responsibilities. Ancien régime Tory political theory saw the priest as a rein to hold back the wickedness and tumultuous natures of an unruly people. In contrast, Coleridge saw the cleric as a spur that would employ the traits of initiative and enterprise of the bourgeois (“the zeal of the Methodist”) in the service of the learning and rapid influx of new ideas (“the doctrines of the philosopher”) that were characteristic of lively and growing societies. It is true that Coleridge disliked the idea that technical learning and new science made traditional ethical “fixed principles” obsolete. But he also abhorred the High Church idea that the Church of England had no other purpose than the narrowly sectarian one of promulgating Athanasian formularies of the Trinity, Arminian soteriology, and Laudian sacramentalism. He desired a “church” that would combine the attention to transcendent Ideas of the priest (which he saw lacking in the Malthusian scientist) with the energy and curiosity toward new learning of the humanist (which he saw lacking in the Tory rector).
This idea, that the “person” of a parish was the representative of enterprise, change, novelty, learning, advancement, and progression rather than stability, stasis, tradition, fixed confessional doctrine, holding of the line, and permanence was, in the end, what made Coleridge’s theory of the clerisy most distinctive. He did not envision his clerisy as comprising dons breathing the rarified air of the cloister where they scrutinized beauty and verity away from the noise of the general public’s ignoble strife. Instead, he saw them as veritable evangelists of learning, who were not only to make the people holy and wise but were also to provide them with the general store of learning and wisdom of which their civilization was capable. Where the ancient Romans had renewed and refreshed their national pool of ideas and knowledge both technical and moral by warfare and conquest, and the Europeans had kept the light of learning aflame in a dark age through the “clerks” who preserved reading and writing, Coleridge intended that the nineteenth-century English employ the nationality to fund a clerisy that would cast the net of learning, both moral and technical, but disperse the resultant bounty freely to the people at large.
Like his hero Bacon, Coleridge saw his project for the advancement of learning as a sort of “Great Instauration” that would increase the wisdom and moral sense of the realm as well as its proficiency in the arts and sciences. The Coleridgean church, because it stressed the “fixed principles” of a Christian morality that anchored study and action in ethics, was more “religious” than the Baconian instauration, despite Bacon’s well-closeted “Platonism.” The Coleridgean Church, because it did not see itself as dedicated to a single confessional definition of Christianity, was less “religious” than the Laudian High Church, or even the Methodists or Dissenters. The failure to recognize the “true” or “real” Idea of the English church had led to lost opportunities, broken bones, and blessed accidents. But for Coleridge, the failure of the English church and clergy also produced the promise of the national church and clerisy.
Coleridge believed that the corruptions of the English church could be traced back to “Henry’s Harvest” in the 1530s and 1540s. His conception of the English Reformation was unusual in that he did not see Henry VIII as the great despoiler and ravager of the English church; rather, he regarded Henry as a king who would have been remembered “with a splendour” that “would outshine that of Alfred [the Great] … if he had retained the will and possessed the power of effecting, what in part, he promised to do.”2 Coleridge argued that the king had failed to protect the nationality, those “heritable lands and revenues” that had been “Wrongfully alienated” and “Sacreligiously alienated,”3 not only from the church but from the constituent membership of that “Unitas Fraterum,” “the potential divinity in every man, which is the ground and condition of his civil existence.”4 The Henrician Reformation was, in Coleridge’s estimation, the great, lost opportunity of the English church and the British state.
This opportunity was almost retrieved by Elizabeth who “saw and therefore withstood the advise of her nobles who would fain have played the Scottish Thanes with the Church, & feasted on the gleanings of Henry’s harvest.”5 Elizabeth, by denying the greed of the aristocrats and gentry who desired further despoliation of church lands, avoided the utter pauperization of the church that had taken place in the neighboring kingdom of Scotland under the influence of Moray and Knox. This preservation of the dignity and estate of the English church was only a brief interlude, however, argued Coleridge. The Anglican Church had first been riven by the schism between Laudian High Churchmen and Puritans and then utterly brought down by the mistakes of that “very weak king” Charles I with “a bigot for his Prime Minister [Laud].”6 Coleridge’s reconstruction of this church history revealed much about his conception of constitutional theory and indeed his understanding of the cultural and moral role of the national church. It is essential that Coleridge’s distinction between the national church and the Christian church be kept in mind. His national church was “the third great estate of the realm” (or “state” in his broader use of the term). The fact that the national church of England was a confessionally Christian church was, as he pointed out, a “blessed accident.”7
For Coleridge as for Warburton, it was theoretically possible that England might have had a successful Moslem or Jewish religion established with beneficial results. Coleridge saw England’s confessional Christianity, like its Protestantism, as a superior moral system to its rivals, but as peripheral to the shape and nature of the national church. This distinction was made with even greater clarity in Coleridge’s observation that, since Charles’s time, “we have had no Church in England,” only “Religion, which is a noun of multitude.”8 The government, in its attempts to “suppress bigotries and negative persecution,” had created the “multitude and varieties of Religions.”9 Elizabeth’s fragile via media had been shattered by Laud’s rejection of a Broad Church based upon comprehension and irenicism and by a movement toward persecution and schism between Anglicans and Dissenters. Two disasters had resulted from this parting of the ways. First, from 1640 to 1660 the Puritan “Samson” had blindly and willfully “pulled down” the entire edifice of Episcopacy and persecuted Laudian practices. Second, from 1660 onward, the Anglicans in revenge had persecuted the Puritans, and set them outside the boundaries of the national church by creating in the 1660s the distinction between “Anglicans” and “Dissenters.” This rejection of the idea of a comprehensive national church created, from the 1660s through the 1690s, the segregative system of Tests, conformities, and tolerations. In this manner, Coleridge argued, the Church of England was “reduced to a [sectarian Anglican] religion, in genre [was] consequently separated from the church, and made a subject of parliamentary determination.”10
Coleridge contended that the reduction (and hence destruction) of the Church of All England to the mere sect of Anglican religion accompanied the fall of “the Samson of Puritanism.” He remarked that while it was true in the case of English church history (as opposed to the Book of Judges) that “both Samson and the Philistines were … dragged up alive out of the ruins [of the Philistine Temple of Dagon], … the compound fractures were never thoroughly reknit” after 1660.11 Coleridge, unlike most “Tories,” considered the division between Protestant Anglicans and Protestant Dissenters to have been unfortunate and unnecessary. This implies that he saw the proper affiliation of “Old” Puritan Trinitarian Dissenters—as well as the more controversial “New” Unitarian Dissenters such as Coleridge’s quondam allies Jebb and Disney—as within the true national church. The Samson of Puritanism was to be readmitted into a broadened national church, in recognition of his great moral power. (It is notable that in his recounting of the agon of the schism of the English church, the Trinitarian and “Tory” Coleridge cast the Dissenters in the role of Samson and the Laudians in the guise of the Philistine idolaters).
Religion was not the only splinter that Coleridge saw in the broken bones of the Anglican Church. Beyond the High Church–versus–Low Church variances “expressing the aggregate of all the different groups of notions and ceremonies connected with the invisible and supernatural,” Coleridge believed that the moral, cultural, and social functions of the church had been alienated.12 His first concern, as it had always been, was the moral, social, and political importance of the amelioration of poverty. How would it be possible to “teach them their duties … to render them susceptible of their rights”13 if “the poor [were] withdrawn from the discipline of the church”?14 Indeed, the entire possibility of teaching, of the “illumination of the multitude”15 was jeopardized, he argued, if “the education of the people [was] detached from the ministry of the church.”16 It was the government’s intention (in its misguided belief that it was suppressing religious bigotry by secularizing schools) that “National Education [was] to be finally sundered from all religion, but speedily and decisively emancipated from the National Clergy.”17
Coleridge believed that a moral education, as opposed to a religious one, was the principle purpose of a national church. Because he considered the church to represent far more than the deeds of those clergy ordained “in orders” and to encompass more activities than those that happened within the walls of consecrated buildings, he coined the term the “national clerisy.” In the same sense that Coleridge’s 1795 lectures on politics had insisted that parliamentary reform must be grounded in, or bottom on, certain fundamental truths, or “fixed principles,” rather than simply being a set of new rules for governance, he argued in 1830 that education must be more than mere instruction in reading, writing, mathematics, and sciences. To avoid the severance of technical instruction from moral education, Coleridge suggested that “a permanent, nationalized, learned order, a national clerisy or church” be maintained. Indeed, he insisted that it was “an essential element of a rightly constituted nation.”18 He saw the national church and its clerisy as sustaining and protecting both the permanence and the progression of the nation. He concluded that the educational alternatives offered by the Anglicans and the utilitarians were equally unsatisfactory. It was clear, Coleridge argued, that “neither [Evangelical and Methodist] tract societies nor [Dissenting] conventicles, nor Lancastrian schools, nor mechanic’s institutions, nor lecture-bazaars under the absurd names of universities [such as the University of London], nor all these collectively can substitute” for true education.19 In other words neither secular nor sectarian education could serve as a substitute for moral education as moral science. Arguing as he had done in his earliest writings on politics and society, when he had enjoined the reformer to “go preach the gospel to the poor,”20 Coleridge preserved in his vision of the clerisy the idea that the patricians should lead the way in moral education. This was apparent in his sarcastic dissection of utilitarian plans for “general illumination” by use of mechanics’ institutes and other non–morally grounded technical programs. In 1795, he observed “that general illumination should precede the revolution is a truth so obvious as that a vessel should be thoroughly cleaned before receiving a pure liquor.”21 His view on education in Church and State some thirty-five years later was similarly expressed as a challenge to reformers: “So you wish for general illumination,” he taunted, “you would spur-arm the toes of society: you would enlighten the higher ranks per ascensum ab imis,” by ascension from the lowest depths.22 Coleridge thought the instigation of a perverse and unnatural “trickle-up effect” to be absurdly misguided and ill conceived. With a possible gibe at the dismal scientists, Coleridge considered the effects of such piecemeal and ungrounded learning, statistics divorced from any moral or sociological framework. He charged these “parliamentary leaders of the Liberalists and Utilitarians” of an “attempt to popularise science,” but he concluded that they (the Malthusians and Ricardians) “will only effect its plebification.”23
Coleridge believed, as he had in 1795, that “religion was the only means universally efficient,”24 and he argued in Church and State that “the morality which the state requires of its citizens … can only exist for the people in the form of religion.”25 He did not believe that all the people could be philosophers or statesmen, but he did believe that “the idea of true philosophy, or the power or habit of contemplating particulars in the unity and fontal mirror of the idea” was “indispensable” in the “rulers and teachers of a nation” for the development of “a sound state of religion in all classes.”26 The purpose of the national wealth and the national church was to provide “in proportionate channels” (my italics) the maintenance “of universities, and the great schools of liberal learning.” (Note that Coleridge vehemently distinguished between these and “lecture bazaars under the absurd name universities.”) These institutions were also charged with maintaining “a pastor, presbyter, or parson* (persona exemplaris) in every parish.”27 Note that Coleridge did not favor any particular religious affiliation for this person but stressed etymologically the nature of the parson as the “representative and exemplar of the personal character of the community or parish; of their duties or rights, of their hopes, privileges and requisites, as moral persons and not merely living things.”28 He emphasized the personal nature of the clerisy and contrasted it to the pastoral clergy, whom he believed to be but “imperfectly” suited to their task as exemplars because their religious ordination separated them from the concerns of the community. As a result, he argued, the pastoral clergy “cannot be that which it is the paramount end and object of their establishment and distribution throughout the country that they should be.”29 For Coleridge, the “paramount end” of that establishment was that the Church should be the “sphere and gem of progressive civilization.”30 If this was not a sufficiently clear pronouncement of the church’s moral, social and political mission, he continued, “the proper object and end of the National Church is civilization with freedom.”31 The role of the clerisy was to “communicate that degree and kind of knowledge to all, the possession of which is necessary for all in order to their CIVILITY.”32 Coleridge had associated civility and liberty with commercial society and the principle of progression in his criticism of the Italian history. In the context of the national church he again defined civility as “all the qualities essential to the citizen.”33 The specific role of the church in this regard was to “diffuse throughout the people legality,” which Coleridge here defined as “a well calculated self-interest, under the conditions of a common interest determined by the common laws.”34 The national church was the vessel through which the vital forces, the “lifeblood” of liberty, might be diffused. The nation-state integrated both national church and political government in a balanced system.
Coleridge believed that like “permanence” and “progression,” “cultivation” and “civilization” were forces that must exist in balance and equipoise. Although he warned that “a nation can never be too cultivated, but may easily become an over-civilized race,” Coleridge was not privileging landed society.35 Rather, he emphasized the importance of wisdom over technical knowledge. His concern that technical expertise might outstrip the moral development of mankind was not dissimilar to Einstein’s later and famous dictum. Coleridge believed that the “overbalance of the landed interest” was an equally disastrous constitutional corruption to an excessive burgess representation in the House of Commons.36
Coleridge considered the need to balance permanence and progression, cultivation and civilization, wisdom and knowledge, in terms of the “organismus” of the body politic. It is very important to understand this medical imagery. Coleridge made it quite clear that an overbalance of one of his two principles was more than a lamentable corruption of the body politic; it was in fact a potentially terminal disease that could result in the death of that body. “The first condition, then required,” he argued, “in order to a sound constitution of the Body Politic, is a due proportion of the free and permeative life and energy of the Nation to the organizing powers brought within containing channels.”37 Coleridge’s first priority, his first condition of a “sound constitution,” was the regulation of the nation’s blood pressure, its “lifeblood” of liberty.
The significant difference between the body politic and the body natural, Coleridge argued, was that in the body politic the “permeative species of force (progression)” may be “converted into the latter [the containing or permanent].”38 In this manner, Coleridge argued, the lifeblood of liberty became “organized and rendered a part of the vascular system, by attaching a measured and determinate political right, or privilege thereto.”39 Coleridge’s permanence and progression were not counterbalanced and antithetical forces on opposing ends of a seesaw. They were, rather, essentially fluid and interdependent forces, liberty being the rushing water of a river, which, bearing silt through its active flow, builds its own delta, shapes its own banks, determines its own course. Coleridge had used the river image repeatedly in his discussions of law and liberty, as in his discussion of opinion and the law—throwing a “dam across the river” of “our intellectual commerce”—with regard to censorship.40 His metaphors for political, social, and economic action frequently involved images of fluids, water or blood, which required channeling or regulation but could not be stopped up, dammed, clotted, or constricted unnaturally. Like proper systolic function, the regulation of blood flow or irrigation should be self-shaping, without hemorrhaging or flooding. The river, like the circulation of blood and the expansion of capillary function in the body, became both the source and the product. It was both the active and potential force, its own containment and rushing vitality.41
Returning to his medicophilosophical analysis of the state, Coleridge compared the equally catastrophic consequences of imbalances that favored either aristocratic or popular constitutions. Arguing that “the ancient Greek democracies, the hot-beds of Art, Science, Genius, and Civilization fell into dissolution from the excess of” progression, Coleridge emphasized the organic systemic imbalance which resulted from this sociopolitical “hypertension.”42 “The permeative power” from the pulse and flow of the permeative fluid, or “expanding liberty,” “derang[ed] the functions, and by explosions shatter[ed] the organic structures they should have enlivened.”43 By contrast, aristocratic societies, weighted down by too much permanence, were equally doomed and thus, Coleridge argued, “the Republic of Venice fell by the contrary extremes.”44 “All political power [in Venice] was confined to the determinate vessels, and these becoming more and more rigid even to ossification of the arteries, the State, in which the people were nothing, lost all power of resistance ad extra.”45 Both arterial sclerosis and cerebral aneurysm were, in Coleridge’s view, equally fatal conditions, whether for the body politic or the body natural. The Athenian strategy of innovation and novelty at any price was lethal, but it was equally lethal to pursue in reaction to this danger the Venetian strategy of stability and hierarchy at any price. Wise states would profit from their example and avoid either extreme, revivifying their permanence through an influx of progression and regulating their progression by the restraints of permanence.
Having considered at some length the dysfunction attended by the corruption and overbalancing of the landed interest, Coleridge next made the case for the necessity of commercial vitality in sustaining a vibrant polity through the principle of civilized “liberality.” In his account of the Venetian oligarchy, Coleridge had compared the death of liberty to the hardening of the arteries. Passive obedience and nonresistance, old bulwarks of Tory social and political theory, were dangerous doctrines. They promoted rigid and unreflexive conventions that could not accommodate growth and change in a living system. Coleridge’s late views on obedience and resistance were similar to his earliest defenses, in 1795, of the people’s civil right to resist extreme tyranny as a defining component of the balanced constitution. Such a measured resistance, he argued, expressed itself through the liberty of the press, “a sovereignty resident in the people.”46 But this sovereignty must be mediated. An unrestrained popular power was, potentially, as injurious to the life of the body politic as the stultifying constraint of magnate oligarchy.
Three kinds of corruption, or “malformation[s]” are suggested by Coleridge’s emphasis on the difficult but critical problem of rapid progression.47 His first objection was to the distribution of “direct political power to the personal force and influence” of the people or “monied interest … without those fixed or tangible possessions, freehold, copyhold, or leasehold, in land, house or stock.”48 Coleridge provided his citizen the means by which the permeative force may be “organized and rendered part of the vascular system” in two ways. On a large scale, this was done by “moving into land,” as he had opined in his second chapter, for “to found a family and convert his wealth into land are the twin thoughts … of the opulent merchant.”49 But, Coleridge suggested, even the more modest representatives of the “Commercial, Manufacturing, Distributive, and Professional classes of the community” could be integrated into the total interests of the nation through their attachment to some fixed interest; whether “freehold, copyhold or leasehold,” in “land, house, or stock.” It is not clear precisely what Coleridge meant by stock, but it was likely intended to denote an endowment, trust, capital investment, or estate that produced a steady income that made its owner secure and independent. The fixed interest need not be landed, Coleridge implied, but it had to elevate the owner above the pressures of economic dependency and clientage. For dependency and clientage—situations in which one tended another’s stock rather than one’s own—made the expression of independent political views different from those of one’s employer or patron nearly impossible.
Coleridge’s interest in protecting the liberty and civility of commercial society while regulating its more licentious practices (as in the case of the Factory Acts) were not traditional Country Party/civic-humanist condemnations of city-based vice and luxury as opposed to landed virtue and simplicity. They can be distinguished from authentic Country Party polemic because Coleridge’s sword cut both ways: it slashed the “corruption” engendered by philistine landed men of the country as well as that generated by effete and luxurious city dwellers. Therefore, any attempt to analyze Coleridge’s critique of commercial society must be considered in light of his corresponding reservations and harsh criticisms of the “over-balance of the landed interest.” It is worth noting that these objections frequently occur on the same pages as his “civic-humanist” critiques of moneyed men. As an example, Coleridge pointed to the thuggish and ignorant insularity of the landed interest as evidenced by “its obdurate adherence to the jail crowding Game Laws,” its narrow-minded allegiance to “the Corn Laws, [which result in] the exclusion of the produce of our own colonies from our distillereries, &c.,” and its “virtuous” adherence to medieval “Statutes against Usury.”50 Coleridge saw these idiocies of the landed interest as substantial demonstrations of the strained virtue of landed trusteeship, as easily corrupted as the townsman’s. Whereas the city’s corruptions led the burgess to luxury, indulgence, and bribery, the squire’s corruption expressed itself in pigheadedness, selfishness, and short-sightedness. The corrupt squire’s slavish devotion to tradition not only damaged his own advancement, it also undermined the principles of liberty and progression in the nation at large. Furthermore, the squirearchy’s defense of the old regime of laws, made by and for their pleasure, was doubly corrupting, for, Coleridge argued, it caused a “deranged … equilibrium of the Landed and the Monied Interests.” Having weakened the state by retaining corrupt, rotten, and bad law for the sake of tradition, the landed interests’ adherence to self-serving, anticivic laws also engendered a further derangement of “the balance between the two unequal divisions of the Landed Interest itself, viz., the Major Barons, or great landowners with or without title and the great body of the Agricultural community.”51 In other words, the professedly “patriotic” and “virtuous” defense of “tradition” (in the shape of the Game Laws, Corn Laws, and Usury Laws) by the landed interest was effectively a screen for the pauperization of the smallholders and tenant farmers and colonial agriculturists.
Even as the squirearchy professed to honor and protect the “country” interest, it retained laws that obstructed or even damaged the well-being of the bulk of those who actually made their livings in agriculture. Without the reviving and diversifying infusion of liberal, civil, commercial vitality, the landed interest turned in upon itself, and began to devour its own tail. The mindless ultra defense of tradition and permanence for their own sakes and the veneration of even the worst laws on the sheer merit of their age were unthinkable to Coleridge. Equally unthinkable was the idea that the landowners were so narrow-minded and unpatriotic that they would rather see their own petty, particular enterprises succeed than the nation advance as a whole. According to Coleridge, the landed great as well as the moneyed great had allowed profit and selfishness to blind them to the good of the nation. The danger of the corrupt landed great as opposed to the corrupt moneyed great, Coleridge pointed out, was that the landed great not only were selfish and corrupt but also made a virtue out of mulish adherence to custom. The landed interest, in order to maintain its hegemony over the market, suppressed or eliminated all new technical innovation that could surpass their antiquated, inefficient habits and customs. In this manner, Coleridge implied, the landed interest smothered agricultural and technical innovations with alarming regularity. In doing so, the national subsidy to the sense of the tradition and honor of the squire implicit in legislation such as the Corn Laws cost the nation increasing amounts of wealth and efficiency. Coleridge gave a mordant example of corrupt landed influence in a description of the land-man’s brutal suppression of the new trade in Terra Japonica, an acacia-wood astringent from the Far East.52 The importation of this astringent in large quantities by the East India Company would have been of particular profit and advantage to the English tanners, since it would have made the major tool of their trade, tanning solution for their vats, far cheaper than it had been when they had depended on pricey English-grown barks. However, Coleridge recounted, “a very intelligible hint” had been spread amongst “persons of known influence in Leadenhall-street,” that “in the case of any such importation being allowed” by the House of Commons, “the East-India Company must not expect any support from the Landed Interest in parliament, at the next renewal or motion for renewal of their Charter.”53 The company, fearful for reduction of its near-dictatorial powers in India, quietly conceded the issue and stopped plans for the importation. In essence, the landowners hectored and bullied the East India men into withdrawing a product from the English market that both groups knew would make tanning cheaper and thus reduce the cost to British consumers of essential leather goods such as shoes. Coleridge objected that the tariff walls that sheltered British produce such as astringent barks and wheat were sustained not so much in the national interest, but for the pleasure and profit of the landed. The “protected” profits of the landed were paid for through each extra penny spent by the general public—often laborers on landed estates—on leather or bread that cost more than it needed to. While Coleridge suggested that some rival monopoly, that is, “the Free Merchant of good Tea” would likely retaliate against this humiliating bullying of the East India Company, his objection was raised against monopolies in general whether they be commercial or landed.54
Coleridge’s objection to monopolists and to the overbalance of landed influence was strikingly similar to the free-market arguments that had been advanced by the Scottish economists such as Adam Smith. While Coleridge had rejected the mechanism that he believed was implicit in the works of those men “thoroughly Adam Smithed and MacIntoshed,” he viewed their fundamentally cohesive, interactive, and dynamic conception of the market mechanism and its social and moral significance to be essentially sound.55 He paid considerable homage in Church and State to the procommercial works of Dr. Thomas Crawfurd.56 Crawfurd’s views on trade and the significance of that trade for the moral and political development of various peoples were influenced heavily by the writings of Smith and Hume. Crawford’s History of the Indian Archipelago recounted the despotic consequences of the singularly agrarian society of Bali, which squelched any nascent commerce in order to maintain the hegemony of landed aristocrats. Coleridge made much the same point regarding Italy in The Friend, in an essay that antedated Crawford’s arguments by some eleven years. There, Coleridge had pointed out that the success of the Italian peasant farms and the diminution of the “corrupting” cities, instead of bringing a rise in agrarian virtue and liberty, had instead brought about tyranny and despotism.
Machiavelli had been wrong: it was not the corrupt and effete cities that had destroyed libertá, but rather the hardy and virtuous farms of Tuscany. For Coleridge and Crawfurd alike, cities made rather than decayed the course of liberty. Coleridge called The History of the Indian Archipelago “the work of a wise as well as of an able and well informed man,” concluding that “it was no ordinary gratification to find, that in respect of certain prominent positions, maintained in this volume [Church and State] I had unconsciously been fighting behind the shield of one whom I deem it an honour to follow.”57 Coleridge quoted specifically the “prominent position” on which they agree—that “wherever Agriculture is the principle pursuit …, people will be found living under an absolute government.”58 Coleridge and Crawfurd agreed that an exclusively rural and landed “feudal” economy was resistant to the idea of the liberty of the subject and also resistant to innovation in technology and science. In an exclusively “feudal” society there was very little independence of mind because there was very little independence of any sort. Pure feudal society, Coleridge argued, was a sink of slavishness and tyranny rather than of nobility and virtue. The feudal world, because it “predestined every native of the realm to be lord or vassal,” left little room for freedom or its handmaiden learning to breathe.59 The characteristic intellectual supineness and lack of curiosity and initiative among feudal/rural people was, Crawfurd and Coleridge concurred, the result of “a people rendering themselves more tame” in order to acclimate to the narrow intellectual boundaries in which they found themselves.60 Because it closed up most of the spaces (Coleridge actually used the very term “breathing hole[s] of hope”) by which new ideas and concepts would normally enter society, Coleridge argued that pure “Spartan” feudalism strangled liberty.61
Coleridge’s arguments for the “expanding liberty” of commercial, personal, “progressive” civilization cannot be viewed as exclusive political. They were fundamentally moral concerns for the spirit of a people, a spirit that must be fostered and not tamed. This spirit, understood as life force or moral agency, was essentially grounded in the progressive principle of liberty as a condition of moral development and spiritual growth. Coleridge did not believe that such spiritual growth was possible, as an exclusively liberal principle, without the aid of the national church and the clerisy. But without liberty, both as a ground and as a dynamic principle, as a force both active and potential in the individual moral agent, this growth was not possible at all. The clerisy would integrate this national spirit, as it “comprehended the learned of all denominations,” the best not merely of all religions, but of “the sages and professors of the law and jurisprudence; of medicine and physiology; of music; of military and civil architecture; of the physical sciences; with the mathematical as the common organ of the preceding.” “In short,” Coleridge concluded, it would comprise “all the so called liberal arts and sciences.”62
The subjects of a liberal education and the scholars who taught them and advanced them were to be drawn from the world of abstract and practical ideas; they comprised the faculties of reason and understanding as well as knowledge and experience of permanence and progression. This clerisy was to be drawn together through “PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas” and to educate the people as citizens and moral agents “in application to the rights and duties of men in all their various relations, social and civil.”63 Through this fostering lead, the clerisy would aid the development of “the ideal power, in the human being,” expressed in ideas that “constitute his humanity.” Coleridge argued that “a man without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth, of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite” was only “an animal endowed with a memory of facts and appearances.”64
The idea of liberty and the “progressive” spirit of humanity were the ultimate goals of civilization in Coleridge’s theory of the state. The commercial class had from its “bud” in “the earliest stages of the constitution … conspir[ed] to the interests of the improvement and general freedom of the country.”65 During the infancy “or what we might call the minority of the burgess order [in the Middle Ages], the National Church was the substitute for the most important national benefits resulting from the same [the commercial class]” (my italics). Coleridge juxtaposed the interests of the church with the interests of land, arguing that the “National Church presented the only breathing hole of hope,” that “the church alone relaxed the iron fate by which feudal dependency, primogeniture, and entail would otherwise have predestined every native of the realm to be lord or vassal.”66 Coleridge believed that the national church had been an ally and protector of the moneyed interests and, that while it embodied a “permanently progressive” order to preserve the “benefits of existing knowledge” and provide “the means of future civilization” it had “foster[ed] … the class of free citizens and burghers” and given them their first political voice in the nation.67 In doing so, the national church embodied the actual and potential forces of permanence and progression, as it opposed (not as a contrary force) and synthesized (or reconstituted) the past, the present, and the future. Thus, to Coleridge the ancient constitution of England and the tradition of liberty that supported it was gained not so much by the swords of the Barons at Runnymede, but by the centuries of quiet and patient works of the priests, monks, and burghers in their cloisters and nascent towns.
Finally, Coleridge’s conception of the moral and urbane citizen was most fully articulated in his description of a living person, his lifelong friend Thomas Poole. Poole stands well as an example of a learned and humane man sensible to the changing imperatives of the commercial world while retaining the sympathy, honor, and obligation that marked an attachment to country life. Coleridge could simultaneously envision Poole “in his harvest field” or in the throng of “the market … now in a committee-room, with the Rickmans and Ricardos of the age.” Equally, Coleridge could see Pool amongst the men of science and manufacture, with “Davey, Wooleston, and the Wedgewoods” or as he often had seen him in the company of poets such as “Wordsworth, Southey, and other friends not unheard of in the republic of letters.” He considered that such a man would be at home “in the drawing rooms of the rich and the noble” no less than at “the annual dinner of a village benefit society.”68 The qualities that Coleridge identified with Tom Poole were those very qualities he believed the clerisy would cultivate in the citizenry. The quality that Coleridge identified with Poole and looked for in the moral citizen was integrity, by which Coleridge expressly meant the “entirety of its being,” its “integrum et sine cera vas.”69
Coleridge honored his lifelong commitment to integrity and independence in Church and State. Remaining until his death in 1834 “ever a man without a party,” he chose neither ossified permanence nor a licentious progression; he favored neither land nor commerce. He privileged neither aristocracy nor people, prescribing neither the deadly sclerosis of oligarchic Venice nor the explosive aneurysm of democratic Athens as panacea for the body politic. This “double vision” has made him an elusive subject for those who study his political thought. If his ideas are studied in isolation from one another, then the “dynamic” relations of dyads and triads that are the heart of all his theories will be missed. In Church and State (“according to the Idea of Each”) he attempted one final time to create a unified theory of state and society in which various institutions would be examined and criticized—not in isolation, but in their relation to all other components in the system. He also attempted to demonstrate in a more articulated form how metaphysical Ideas shaped the “real”/“moral” world of politics. In this regard, as in all others, his solution to the problem of church and state was innovative and visionary.
Coleridge’s final work of political and social thought discredited the Tory dream of the clergy as the watchdogs of the landed interest. Instead, he portrayed his “clerisy” as the guardians of curiosity, initiative, intellectual freedom, and progress. As scholars they shared these values, civil and scientific, with the burgesses, the professionals, and the artisans. Coleridge thus removed his moral guardians from their older traditional role as defenders of stability, hierarchy, and precedence. Instead, he made his clerisy bold apostles of the freedom of the mind, critical investigators charged with the slow, gradual education of the peasant into the citizen. He also stood the Spartan/civic-humanist paradigm of liberty on its head, showing that cities were the cradles rather than the graves of liberty. His clerisy were not to be the defenders of an old landed virtu, but instead the bringers of a truer, more “liberal” vision of liberty. This more liberal liberty meant the unceasing actualization of expanding freedom for a people, rather than incessant sacrifice by them.
