CHAPTER 8
The Spark of Intuitive Reason: Coleridge's 'On the Prometheus of Aeschylus'
1

James Vigus

This chapter is an invitation to read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s neglected essay ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’.2 Prometheus, the Titan who brought fire to mankind and suffered the wrath of the upstart tyrant, Zeus, for bestowing this supernatural gift on a wretched race, was an attractive figure for many Romantic writers. Some, including Shelley, identified with Prometheus as a gesture of resistance to authority, whether in its religious or political manifestations. Coleridge, on the other hand, who presented ‘On the Prometheus’ as a lecture to the Royal Society of Literature in 1825,3 had no such anti-authoritarian purpose. He identified with the Greek Titan in a different, increasingly rueful way. Nearly thirty years previously he had exclaimed in a letter: ‘I have [...] made up my mind that I am a mere apparition — a naked Spirit!’4 Now, as Coleridge found himself oppressed by corporeal afflictions and addictions, what remained was a wistful longing: ‘O! might Life cease, and selfless Mind / Whose Being is Act, alone remain behind!’5 In this mood, he would ironically emphasize the spirit’s imprisonment in the recalcitrant matter of the body: ‘For in this bleak World of Mutabilities, & where what is not changed, is chilled, and in this winter-time of my own Being,’ he confessed, ‘I resemble a Bottle of Brandy in Spitzbergen — a Dram of alcoholic Fire in the center of a Cake of Ice.’6 It was natural for Coleridge, thus troubled by the relationship between mind and body,7 to meditate on Prometheus, the divine spirit punished by being chained to a rock. This chapter examines the extreme extent to which Coleridge thought his way into a version of the Promethean role.

‘On the Prometheus’ provides a haunting distillation of the philosophical and religious concerns that exercised Coleridge in his later years. As such, the subject matter is as complex as the style is knotty: much of the essay consists of philosophical postulates, at times in the form of notes rather than continuous prose, and interspersed with Greek and Latin tags that visibly obstruct the flow of reading. Coleridge courted this esoteric mode of expression partly on grounds of social conservatism: as befits a disquisition on Greek religion, he speaks to those who have ears to hear, to (potential) initiates. For he had come to believe that to openly and publically present arguments that could appear to problematize the foundations of religious belief was — in an ironically Promethean fashion — to ‘arm fools with fire’.8 Its wilful textual obscurity is no doubt the main reason why ‘On the Prometheus’ has suffered even greater neglect than most of Coleridge’s post-1817 works. Yet despite the difficulties it presents to the interpreter, it is — so I will argue — valuable for its insights into the very nature of interpretation itself. Through an introductory exposition of ‘On the Prometheus’, this chapter makes the claim that it is a uniquely complete instance of Coleridge’s ‘practical criticism’. The latter term was coined by Coleridge but distorted in the twentieth century to denote an anti-theoretical mode of reading, as free as possible from contextual presumptions. In the process, it has often been forgotten that what Coleridge had originally attempted was ‘the application of [philosophical] principles to purposes of practical criticism’.9 In Coleridge’s own work, indeed, practice flows inseparably from a — boldly presumption-filled — theory. Following a brief contextual introduction, ‘On the Prometheus’ accordingly proceeds with methodical strictness in two parts: first, Coleridge outlines a metaphysical system, which he labels (for convenience) ‘Greek’; and second, he maps this system onto Aeschylus’s play, showing which concepts each character in turn symbolizes.10

For according to Coleridge’s fundamental intuition, Prometheus Bound is a ‘philosop heme’, or a work of mythology that bodies forth a philosophical idea.11 (He foregoes discussion of the poetic dimension of Aeschylus’s play, in contrast to his treatment a few years previously of another ‘philosophic poet’ and tragedian, Shakespeare.) In this context Coleridge defines an ‘idea’ as ‘the presence of the Whole under the paramouncy of some one of its eternal and infinite Modes.’12 The idea in question regards the genesis of the human mind, or, to use the Greek term, nous. This Greek word is congenial to Coleridge’s purpose since it connotes, without being limited to, ‘Reason’.13 This genesis of nous is best conceived, in Coleridge’s view, as a struggle. For Reason, the completing factor and highest aspect of the mind, is unable tranquilly to fulfil its function of producing principles: embodied, it finds itself subject to the painful intrusions of other forces. In this sense, Coleridge sums up his whole view of the play with the pithy phrase nous agonistes.14 As I will elaborate below, Coleridge interprets the fire that Prometheus brings and for which he suffers as a symbol of that which is distinctive about humanity, namely nous, which includes the powers of both Reason and conscience.

Coleridge also applies another favourite term to describe Prometheus Bound, when he calls it ‘a philosopheme and a tautegorikon’.15 The latter coinage signals that Coleridge brings to his reading the controversial symbol-theory of F. W. J. Schelling,16 which in part developed through dialogue with another contemporary German mythographer, Friedrich Creuzer. I will argue that the concept of tautegory appropriately reflects the bold method of interpretation with which Coleridge approaches Aeschylus’s work. The term ‘tautegory’ underlines the distinctive quality of symbolic as opposed to allegorical presentation and modes of thought. According to this conception, an allegory, consisting of a set of images designed to convey a meaning quite different from those images, is characterized by contingency, or arbitrariness: the images chosen are in principle replaceable by others which could convey an identical meaning. A tautegorical symbol, by contrast, conveys a meaning which is co-extensive with itself. It is characterized by necessity: the network of thoughts it provides is supposedly impossible to convey in any other way. Such a theory clearly rests on a universalizing view of human nature, for it assumes that a core meaning remains constant (albeit with possibilities of development and pro gression) over the centuries. In this particular case, Coleridge will interpret Promethean fire as truly integral to the human mind, with regard to its powers both of reasoning and moral self-legislation.

Even from this brief introduction it is clear that the mode of practical criticism Coleridge applies to Prometheus Bound — the abstract system first, followed by the discovery of traces of that same system in the text — is deeply appropriative. In other words, Coleridge imports his own philosophical concerns into his reading, investigating historical questions not with any attempt at objective neutrality, but with an explicit ‘Moral Interest’.17 How he justifies this method — and to what extent it still deserves sympathetic attention from modern readers — is the topic of the first of the five sections in which this chapter now proceeds. Here I will outline the link that Coleridge posits between Aeschylus’s conception and the Greek mystery religions, especially the Eleusinian and Samothracian Mysteries, as he goes about a speculative (re)construction of the quintessentially ‘Greek’ system of metaphysics. In the second part, I offer a brief account of the metaphysical section of Coleridge’s essay, explicating the sense in which he sees (Greek) philosophizing as the search for first principles. Third, I consider the contrast Coleridge draws between the Greek myth’s status as ‘symbol’ and the ‘allegory’ of the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. This lays the foundation for the fourth section, in which I analyse the symbolism Coleridge identifies in Prometheus Bound, character by character. Finally, I consider the ways in which the symbolism of fire resonates with the process of interpretation. While defending the work’s coherence as practical criticism, then, I aim to show the centrality of Coleridge’s moral intuitionism to his whole approach.

Overleaping the Hermeneutic Gap: Coleridge on the Greek Mysteries

Coleridge intended his exposition of the philosophical meaning of Prometheus Bound to form part of a larger project (never completed) that would unveil the connections between Greek drama and the Mystery religions. He announces as his guiding ‘hypothesis’ the following: ‘that it was the office of the tragic poet, under a disguise of the sacerdotal religion, mixed with the legendary or popular belief, to reveal as much of the mysteries interpreted by philosophy, as would counteract the demoralizing effects of the state religion, without compromising the tranquility of the state itself’.18 The immediate occasion for this remarkable suggestion is the ancient story, recently reported anew by Creuzer, that Aeschylus was prosecuted for illegally divulging elements of the Eleusinian Mysteries.19 Coleridge’s hypothesis is further based on the intuition that, whereas Athenian state religion promulgated an unrefined polytheism, which from a Christian no less than a Platonic perspective must be regarded as immoral, the Mysteries preserved the key elements of the patriarchal monotheistic law. Coleridge thus proposes a hermetic narrative according to which fundamental doctrines of Genesis were transmitted (via the ‘corrupt channel’ of the seafaring Phoenicians) and reappear later in fragmentary form in Greek texts.20

The next section of this chapter will enter into more detail regarding these doctrines, at the centre of which was the teaching of monotheism, the one God. At this point, even though the experiences of the initiates of the Mysteries are not explicitly thematized in ‘On the Prometheus’, two questions arise. Why was Coleridge committed to this speculative interpretation of the spiritual background and content of the Greek mysteries? And to what extent can the modern reader still bring sympathetic attention to Coleridge’s thought experiment?21

What is at stake in Coleridge’s project is the continuity of religious principles. For reasons to be considered presently, he considers (triune) monotheism to be the vehicle of the universally binding moral law, whereas any alternative scheme, whether pantheism or polytheism, conduces immorality. The unspoken anxiety behind his work is this: if so crucial a doctrine as the One God had evolved, rather than having being revealed at the very dawn of human life, it would forfeit that status of absolute truth that Christianity required of it. This may be regarded as a modern version of the ‘virtuous pagan’ dilemma that especially engaged medieval Christian thinkers: were morally admirable ancient pagans necessarily damned owing to their ignorance of Christ and their worship of multiple divinities? The happiest solution would be to posit, in the tradition of the ‘Ancient Theology’, an unbroken line of revelatory insight that went underground but was never lost until the time when Christ brought religious principles into a universally comprehensible, exoteric form. The project of producing such a history was further stimulated by the cultural pressure of its rival. As Coleridge complains at the beginning of ‘On the Prometheus’, certain French authors (in the wake of Hume’s Natural History of Religion) had claimed that monotheistic religion gradually emerged from the relatively unsophisticated polytheism of Egypt. Such explanations were freshly topical following Jean-François Champollion’s announcement of the discovery of hieroglyphics in 1822.22 To counter this narrative, Coleridge tacitly avails himself of Creuzer’s theory that monotheism actually preceded the (in Coleridge’s view) ‘corrupt’ phase of Egyptian sensuous polytheism.23 Since he finds no proof to the contrary in the Bible, Coleridge can then propose what he considers the most morally acceptable early genealogy of religious faith: ‘viz. that the sacerdotal religion of Egypt had, during the interval from Abimelech to Moses, degenerated from the patriarchal or arkite monotheism into a pantheism, cosmotheism, or worship of the world as God.’24

A recipient of the pure tradition of original monotheism, Aeschylus was one of the ‘mythic poets’ who, writes Coleridge, ‘adapted the secret doctrines of the mysteries as the (not always safely disguised) antidote to the debasing influence of the religion of the state.’25 A reader could well object that the above-mentioned story of Aeschylus divulging elements of the Mysteries is insufficient ground for making secret doctrines central to a reading of the dramatist’s work. Any such judgment, however, involves wider questions of hermeneutics. Modern scholars are in no better position than Coleridge and his contemporaries to deduce the concealed doctrines of the Mysteries: even though archaeology has revealed much about material aspects of the rituals at Eleusis and Samothrace, the deeper meanings known only to the initiates remain impenetrable. Why were these mystes said to experience a profound sense of calm in the face of death; what were the significations of the sacred objects the hierophants showed them; and what form did their encounter with a procession of gods take? The names of the six gods or ‘Cabiri’ worshipped at Samothrace are known to have constituted a vital part of the secrets of the Mysteries, but information about them has barely advanced since the Romantic period.26 Then as now, the available evidence about the Mysteries’ symbolism is fragmentary and often untrustworthy.27

This means that the Mysteries confront us in an extreme form with the hermeneutic gap that notoriously divides (modern) interpreters from (ancient) texts or experiences. It is possible to take various different attitudes to that gap. Friedrich Schleiermacher, often regarded as the founder of the modern discipline of hermeneutics, considered the interpreter to be in a position of so-called ‘radical dependence’, reliant on faith where knowledge was lacking.28 The historicism of more recent times, on the other hand, prefers to reconstruct the relevant context as neutrally as possible, abstaining from further speculation for fear of betraying an ideologically motivated standpoint.

Coleridge follows another way, rooted in the speculative mythography in which he had steeped himself in the 1790s and now fortified by his reading of Schelling and Creuzer.29 Coleridge optimistically proposes to sweep away the hermeneutic gap that divides us from the Mysteries:

The difficulty of comprehending any scheme of opinion is proportionate to its greater or lesser unlikeness to the principles and modes of reasoning in which our own minds have been formed. [...] This difficulty the author anticipates as an obstacle to the ready comprehension of the first principles of the eldest philosophy, and the esoteric doctrines of the Mysteries; but to the necessity of overcoming this the only obstacle, the thoughtful inquirer must resign himself, as the condition under which alone he may expect to solve a series of problems the most interesting of all that the records of ancient history propose or suggest.30

The willingness to bridge the acknowledged gap is, in Coleridge’s view, nothing less than a pre-condition for grasping ‘the esoteric doctrines of the Mysteries’. It is a condition that scholars ever since the Romantic period have rejected as a headlong plunge into ideology. Nevertheless, Coleridge will propose a ‘key’ that will open a view on the whole conceptual complex.31 The notion that such a key is possible follows from the assumption — admittedly unpalatable to more conventional methodologies — that we, as modern readers, can intuit these ancient ‘principles’. As will appear shortly, Promethean fire in the sense of a spark of illumination thus becomes a symbol not just for nous considered abstractly, but also for the interpretative process itself. It is precisely this self-reflexive suggestion that can still prove fruitful for modern readers. By way of preparatory initiation, however, Coleridge first requires that we follow him in an excursion into ‘the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics’. Even if this section of his essay must inevitably (in Coleridge’s own words) ‘seem strange and obscure at first reading — perhaps fantastic’, it sustains a strong level of systematic coherence.32

The Holy Jungle of Transcendental Metaphysics

Pursuing the impulse of the mythological criticism of his age to trace all myths back to some one, single source, Coleridge declares that Greek philosophy consisted of an investigation ‘ta peri arkon’, ‘concerning the first principles’. The nature of this investigation was introspective, for philosophy in the strictest sense began when ‘[g]reat minds’ reflected on the very distinctiveness of mind itself, in which consists the ‘diversity between Man and beast’. To this definition of original philosophy Coleridge adds: ‘as far as man proposes to discover the same in and by the pure reason alone’.

The term ‘pure reason’, appearing at this crucial moment, signals a Kantian subtext that is rarely absent from Coleridge’s prose. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason had in fact shown that reason, considered as the faculty that strives a priori after principles, cannot discover answers to the great questions of metaphysics, but becomes trapped in antinomies. Kant, however, had then turned to a different aspect of reason — ‘practical reason’, or conscience — to provide the desired certainty. Kantian ‘moral faith’ appealed to a transcendental mode of argument: if the moral law is as binding as our conscience informs us that it is, then certain necessary conditions must be in place, including the existence of God (to guarantee appropriate rewards and punishments). Coleridge was one of those post-Kantians who followed and extended this line of argument, casting aside Kant’s caution and looking to the conscience as the single foundational principle that would at once unite the diverse endeavours of the three Critiques and provide a ground for metaphysical knowledge. Coleridge, however, rejected what he perceived as Kant’s excessively rigid separation between the aspects of reason. In treating Prometheus Bound as a ‘philosopheme’, Coleridge proposes to discover in it a symbolically expressed outline of the faculties of the human mind, distinguishing the various powers, but avoiding absolute divisions. When Coleridge describes the genesis of mind or nous (how helpfully f lexible was the Greek word!), he thus programmatically alternates between the Kantian terms: ‘pure reason’, ‘practical reason’, or sometimes both together.33 This terminological flexibility reflects Coleridge’s own scheme of transcendental psychology. He retains the three mental categories of sense, Understanding (Verstand) and Reason (Vernunft), as well as the Kantian notion of a conflict between the latter two: ‘even the human understanding in its height of place seeks vainly to appropriate the IDEAS of the pure reason, which it can only represent by IDOLA.’34 At the same time, however, he regards the role of Reason (when not usurped) as that of ‘irradiating’ and improving the Understanding. In Greece, when ‘Great minds turned inward on the fact of the diversity between Man and beast’, investigating the structure and function of that hierarchy, it was discovered that ‘the mere understanding, considered as the power of adapting means to immediate purposes, differs indeed from the intelligence displayed by animals, and not in degree only; but yet does not differ by any excellence which it derives from itself, or by any inherent diversity, but solely in consequence of a combination with far higher powers of a diverse kind in one and the same subject.’35

Further, in constructing a philosophical system, Coleridge pursues the Kantian method of transcendental argument to an extreme:36 he enquires what conditions must be presupposed in order for conscience, or the consciousness of a binding moral law, to be operative. Thus the introspective discovery of a fundamental principle implies a metaphysical enquiry beyond Kantian bounds into the nature of the creation — or rather of the ‘producent power — the productivity’ (p. 1266). In this way the Greek philosophical endeavour, in Coleridge’s eyes, regains its currency in the modern age. The project of the Opus Maximum, composed roughly contemporaneously with Coleridge’s work on ‘On the Prometheus’, is to establish a logical (i.e. non-temporal) sequence to account for the emergence of diverse forms from the Godhead — above all to account for the emergence of evil, which is itself a necessary condition of the moral law.37

In thinking of evil as constituted by a will that diverges from the divine will, Coleridge insists on the actuality of a multiplicity of powers, thus firmly rejecting pantheism. A complete conflation of God (or the creative force) with the creation would mean that there could be no will other than original creative force, no possibility that a finite will could choose positive evil. The sense of the binding force of the moral law instead provides Coleridge, as just noted, with the basis for belief in God — specifically in a God who remains transcendent of as well as immanent within his creation. In ‘On the Prometheus’ Coleridge expresses this antithesis in a simple equation in which ‘W’ stands for ‘world’ and ‘G’ for ‘God’. Both theist and pantheist maintain that the world without God is inconceivable, i.e.:

W — G = 0

But the pantheist adds the converse:

G — W = 0

for which the theist substitutes

G — W = G 38

Coleridge refers to basic pantheism, or the teaching that God is perfectly immanent in the world (i.e. G — W = 0), as ‘the Phoenician scheme’. The polar opposite of pantheism is theism, which asserts God’s transcendence: in Coleridge’s terminology it is ‘the Hebrew scheme’. This latter, he repeatedly avers, is the ‘true’ scheme, since it is taught by biblical authority. Yet the so-called ‘Greek scheme’ he constructs in ‘On the Prometheus’ significantly turns out to constitute a medium between those two extremes.

Greek Symbol versus Hebrew Allegory: A via media Cosmology

In order to contextualize the myth of Prometheus Bound, Coleridge compares it with the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. Both provide a mythological account of the problem (just outlined) of the origin of the will-to-evil, but they do so with enormous differences in style: ‘The most venerable, and perhaps the most ancient, of Grecian mythi, is a philosopheme, the very same in subject-matter with the earliest record of the Hebrews, but most characteristically different in tone and conception’.39 Coleridge’s deepest study of Genesis would be made in the safe privacy of his notebooks in the coming years,40 but at this time he has already formed one strong conjecture: that the story of the ‘forbidden fruit and serpent’ originated as a relatively simple narrative, probably in the form of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions.41 It is, he claims, an ‘allegory’ — a term Coleridge associates with ‘picture-language’ and with a relatively undeveloped level of understanding.42 Not, of course, that this myth can be anything other than ‘profound truth — a truth that is indeed the grand and indispensable condition of all moral responsibility’; yet its presentation involves ‘an accommodation to the then childhood of the human race’.43 In this way, Coleridge implies that the apple and serpent are replaceable rather than essential or constitutive images. Coleridge’s investigation suggestively parallels Hegel’s remark that it is ridiculous to insist on the importance of consuming an apple. For Coleridge, as for Hegel, the Hebrew narrative takes a naïve form – a simple picture of eating the forbidden fruit.44

The Greeks, who according to Coleridge’s hermetic scheme had preserved the essence of the same (ultimately Egyptian-derived) wisdom in the Mystery doctrines, were no longer children, but ‘approaching manhood’. This means that they can express the same intuition regarding the moral basis of humanity in a more complex form. Indeed, Coleridge considers that the use of symbol, as opposed to allegory, was a relatively late cultural development, introduced by the Greeks.45 Here, the implication is that the myth of Prometheus bringing the gift of fire conveys unique connotations that could not be expressed in any other way. Coleridge sums up the contrast as follows: ‘The Prometheus is a philosopheme and tautegorikon: the tree of knowledge of good and evil, an allegory (ieropaideuma), though the noblest and most pregnant of its kind.’ This comparison to some extent reflects a shift in Coleridge’s own sensibility over the years. He had always admired the sublimity of the Hebrew scriptures, but whereas he had once contrasted this robust imagery with the ‘poor Stuff’ of Greek myth, he now even ventures to detect an aspect of superiority in Aeschylus over Moses.46

In Coleridge’s view, the presentational contrast significantly reflects differences in the respective ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Greek’ accounts of creation. Coleridge describes the difference in foundational cosmogony in the following way. Genesis describes an abrupt creatio ex nihilo: ‘The Hebrew wisdom imperatively asserts an unbeginning creative One who neither became the world; nor is the world eternally; nor made the world out of himself by emanation or evolution; but who willed it, and it was!’47 By contrast, the ‘Greek’ scheme describes a procession of divinities, such as the initiates in the Mysteries presumably saw represented. Coleridge’s reconstruction of this scheme accrues even further complexity because he is tacitly disagreeing with the text on which he relied for his general approach, Schelling’s ‘Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake’.48 Schelling posited a chain of gods, revealed by the hierophants in the Mystery rites, in which the humblest deity came first, the greatest last. Since a dependency of the greatest on the lowest would amount, in Coleridge’s view, to pantheism, he is anxious to reinterpret the lowest deities in exclusively ‘psychological’ terms.49

All material things, then, according to Coleridge’s representation of the ‘Greek scheme’, have to be contemplated as emerging from ‘the Indistinguishable’, or the primal chaos. Coleridge describes chaos as ‘the essentially unintelligible, yet necessarily presumed basis or sub-position of all positions.’50 In contrast to Schelling, Coleridge does not include it in the Mystery pantheon, nor does he assert it as an empirically demonstrable reality. He accords it rather the status of a necessary assumption, ‘an indispensable idea for the human mind’. Coleridge adds that ‘As an idea, it must be interpreted as a striving of the mind to distinguish being from existence, or potential being, the ground of being containing the possibility of existence, from being actualised.’51 This emphasis on potential is important to Coleridge. He guards against a vision of the primal chaos as an ‘omnium gatherum’ swarm of phenomena,52 for this would amount once again to a pantheism that fails to explain diversification from the One and would consequently imply denial of the reality of evil. In order to explain the genesis of nous Coleridge needs a description of how the potentiality of this chaos became actuality, how the ‘ground’ gave rise to specific forms. At this point he finds a richer mythological frame in ‘the language of the Mysteries’ than in the brief description of the ‘darkness’ in Genesis — though he once again syncretically insists upon a link between the two: ‘[I]t was the Esurience, the pothos, or desiderium, the unfueled fire, the Ceres, the ever-seeking maternal goddess, the origin and interpretation of whose name is found in the Hebrew root signifying hunger, and thence capacity.’53 Of these various terms and images, it is that of fire that Coleridge will pick up again when he turns specifically to Prometheus. It is significant for Coleridge’s method that fire here takes its place among a number of other figures: a tautegorical symbol should precisely resonate with such various possibilities that all intimate the same mystery of longing. Emphasizing this mystery, Coleridge’s does not allow us to forget that this metaphysical stage is still to be thought of as pre-human: he thus resists taking up the sexual dimension prominent in most of the myths as they have been transmitted to us.54

Thus far, chaos has merely the status of an absolute ‘identity’, a potential ground of all being.55 To explain how the potential became actuality, or in simpler terms, why there is something rather than nothing, Coleridge’s hypothetical Greek thinkers must make one more assumption: that of a mysterious ‘XYZ’ prior even to the chaos, which is ‘supersensuous and divine’.56 This ‘antecedent ground of corporeal matter’ is neither transcendent, nor operative as a cause, but rather best described as the ‘still continuing substance’ of the physical world. To recur to the terms of the philosophy contemporary with Coleridge, he is reviving the controversial Kantian concept of the Ding an sich [thing in itself], or ‘noumenon’, in a modified form. He does so by positing a kind of spiritual energy behind all things. This energy has an intimate connection with the nous whose generation in human beings ‘On the Prometheus’ is designed to explain.

Nous agonistes

The tension within the primal identity, or, to use Coleridge’s more specific expression, the ‘polarization into thesis and antithesis’, arose from the mysterious ‘desiderium’ just mentioned. In more clearly mythological terms, the explosive beginning of differentiation within the One may be represented as a ‘schism in the to theion57 — a war of the gods. Coleridge now introduces two new terms to describe this primal polarity: the ‘thesis’ (or supersensuous, divine ground) and ‘antithesis’ (initially chaotic material) equate respectively to ‘nomos’ (law) and ‘idea’. As we will see shortly, ‘nomos’ is symbolized in Coleridge’s interpretation by Zeus, while Prometheus himself stands for ‘idea’. Rather than see the relationship between these gods as purely one of authority versus insurrection, Coleridge emphasizes the extent to which they intertwine. Nomos is the antecedent unity just discussed, in this context manifested as the ‘principle’ effectively ensuring that a particular phenomenon — especially a plant, animal or man, in that order of complexity — develops in one particular way rather than another. Nomos ‘strives to become idea’. Importantly, it engages in constant polar interplay with idea: whereas Nomos connotes necessity, idea connotes freedom. Idea is the overflowing productive energy; but the activity of producing results in a product, which, being relatively static, must again submit to Nomos. At this point, however, Coleridge’s Kantian inspiration once again comes to the fore: in channelling itself into the pinnacle of creation, the human being, Idea becomes not just Nomos but a ‘nomos autonomos’, ‘autonomous law’ — the ultimate combination of necessity and freedom in the form of self-legislation. At this advanced stage the ‘product’ formed from this process is no longer merely body, but the ‘self-consciousness’ that we know by immediate intuition to be integral to human being. Thus Coleridge concludes that ‘Idea’ is both Will (the desire, as it were, to flow out and form products) and Reason (the highest level of law, a shaping principle): these terms coincide in the Greek word ‘Nous’. Encompassing the cogitative and moral faculties, Nous thus equates, depending on one’s emphasis, to ‘the rational will, [or] the practical reason’.58

Coleridge has now returned to his philosophical starting-point. We know intuitively — as the basic fact of consciousness — that we have a responsible will (or in Kantian terms a capacity of self-legislation), because our conscience persistently informs us that we fail to fulfil the moral law. The resulting sense of remorse, Coleridge tells us, is symbolized in the vulture that gnaws Prometheus.59 The cosmology I have just summarized is a construction designed to answer a question like this: what preconditions must be thought in order to guarantee the moral law’s coherence? Coleridge has posited a cosmic fall, symbolically represented by warring gods, which can in turn explain how the human will has the potential to stray, i.e. to will evil — indeed that the finite will has, by definition, always already strayed. It has not been necessary, in Coleridge’s view, to look exclusively to the Bible for such an account: for in Greek mythology ‘the fact of a moral corruption connatural with the human race was again recognized. In the assertion of ORIGINAL SIN the Greek Mythology rose and set.’60

When Coleridge now comes to explain that Zeus stands for ‘nomos’, his symbolic method enables him to trace a fourfold significance. Zeus represents, firstly, nomos ‘as opposed to Idea or Nous’; second, law in the sense of ruling; third, nomos damnetes, i.e. coercing law,61 and — most importantly — the curiously named ‘nomos politikos’, further defined as ‘law in the Pauline sense’. This latter addition seems to suggest that the ‘nomos’ incorporated by Zeus is a law felt by the individual as being imposed from outside. To the extent that we feel that our transgressions will be punished by an external authority, we are under the sway of Zeus. In this way, Zeus (or Jove: Coleridge now begins to use the Latinate form of the god’s name) is as important a character as Prometheus in Coleridge’s account of the faculties that constitute humanity: for human being is unthinkable without a moral law which from a certain perspective appears to be threateningly imposed from without.

The significances of Prometheus form an approximately dialectical opposition to those of Zeus. Firstly, Prometheus represents ‘Idea pronomos’, idea prior to law:62 for in the ‘Greek’ cosmological scheme law could not take effect until idea had begun to strive against it. Secondly, Prometheus is ‘Idea philonomos’, in the capacity of Zeus’s ‘friend and counsellor’. Thirdly, he is ‘logos philanthropos’,63 the ‘divine humanity’, who stole a spark ‘from the living spirit of law’ and gave it to mankind. This gift, ‘by which we are to understand reason, theoretic and practical’,64 is to be regarded as an addition bestowed on ‘an elect, a favoured animal’, beyond what was necessary for the constitution of a living creature. Animals have understanding, whereby under-standing literally implies a sub-stance of their being, but the universalizing, self-legislating reason is in the Greco-Coleridgean mythology a bonus attribute, unique to humanity. Earlier in the essay Coleridge had noted as one of the significances of the story of Prometheus giving stolen fire to man: ‘The generation of the Nous, or pure reason in man. 1st, Superadded or infused, a supra, to mark that it was no mere evolution of the animal basis — that it could not have grown out of the other faculties of man, his life, sense, understanding, as the flower grows out of the stem, having pre-existed potentially in the seed.’65 It is striking that Coleridge allows the possibility that a principle of ‘evolution’ could explain any feature of animal life, yet cannot explain Reason itself, which we must think of as beginning and sustaining the whole process.

Fourth, Prometheus is ‘both the gift and the giver’. This double function makes the figure of Prometheus a perfect example of a ‘tautegory’, though Coleridge does not repeat the term here. In the myth, Prometheus is ‘the gift, whence the soul received REASON; and reason is her being, says our Milton.’66 Whereas law has power, idea has ‘Prophecy, Foresight’: here Coleridge exploits the root meaning of the Greek word ‘prometheus’, as forethought. The secret that Zeus tries to wrest from Prometheus is that of ‘the transitoriness inherent in all antithesis; for the Identity or the Absolute is alone eternal’. (Zeus is unable to do so, of course: in the play, Prometheus proclaims with heroic stubbornness that ‘There is no torture, no ingenuity, by which / Zeus can persuade me to reveal my secret, till / The injury of these bonds is loosed from me.’)67 At this point the terminology Coleridge employs is Schellingian, and the mode of insight to which Coleridge is appealing is akin to Schelling’s ‘intellectual intuition’. Yet the terms ‘identity’ and ‘absolute’ are enlisted in the broadly anti-Schellingian project of indicating the rational basis of the universe. Coleridge is suggesting that Reason, the power that is inexplicable by the process of evolution, gives us insight into the absolute identity by virtue of continuing to participate in it. A correlative point is that, as noted earlier, Coleridge underlines Prometheus’s chronological seniority to Zeus: for Nous is ‘anterior to the schism’.68 Thus Prometheus is kindred, yet lonely; and fastened to a rock, to signify the non-productivity of nous once its product is fixed: ‘The Nous is bound to a rock, the immovable firmness of which is indissolubly connected with its barrenness, its non-productivity. Were it productive it would be Nomos; but it is Nous, because it is not Nomos.’69 Most importantly, the fact that a vulture lacerates Prometheus signifies the pangs of remorse ‘incident to and only possible in consequence of the Nous, as the rational, self-conscious, and therefore responsible will’.70

The Hermes in Hermeneutics

That Nous be personified as a god, and in particular a fire-bringing god, is a point central not only to Coleridge’s ‘Greek’ cosmology, but also to his method of interpretation. It is at the same time the point at which those two elements coincide. He emphasizes that the heavenly provenance of the ‘gift’ marks its difference in kind from all the faculties that human beings share with animals.71 The idea of a ‘spark’ symbolizes, in Coleridge’s reading, an agency that transforms what it acts upon (in this case the ordinary, animal faculties of the human being) without undergoing a change in its own nature: for fire continues to burn even as it ‘converts’ whatever it comes into contact with. The notion of Reason as a divine ‘spark’ also appeals to Coleridge because it suggests sudden, instantaneous illumination, of the kind that occurs in the biblical myth when the Word makes nature out of chaos with the declaration ‘let there be light’. In Coleridge’s account, Reason provides us with flashes of intuitive insight, energizing the lower power of the Understanding, which by itself can do no more than process and classify the data supplied by sense experience. In other texts, Coleridge describes Reason as being its ‘own evidence’.72

This conception once again reflects a complex engagement with the German texts that broach similar topics. Whereas Schelling looks to Greek mythology for evidence that the divine principle provides incremental revelation, gradually unfolding itself in a process of cosmic evolution, Coleridge regards the primary content of this revelation as occurring instantaneously.73 Further, Coleridge takes up and characteristically modifies the ideas of Creuzer. In Creuzer’s view, the disturbing and awakening properties characteristic of the symbol in ancient mythology are associated with brevity (‘Kürze’). A symbol, writes Creuzer, ‘ist wie ein plötzlich erscheinender Geist, oder wie ein Blitzstrahl, der auf Einmal die dunkele Nacht erleuchtet’ [is like a spirit suddenly appearing, or like a flash of lightening that in a moment illuminates the dark night].74 In another formulation: ‘Es ist ein Moment, der unser ganzes Wesen in Anspruch nimmt, ein Blick in eine schranklose Ferne, aus der unser Geist bereichert zurückkehrt’ [It is a moment that occupies our whole being, a glimpse into a boundless distance, from which our spirit returns enriched]. In this way, the interpreter-initiate envisaged by Creuzer resembles the poet of Shelley’s ‘Alastor’, who ‘gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind / Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw / The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.’75 For such Romantic writers the image of pitch darkness lit up in a sudden flash assisted in assimilating the Mystery initiates’ experience of illumination to the task of interpretation in the modern age.

Creuzer’s evocation of the sublime in the form of endless night and boundless distance, occasionally illuminated by a lightning flash, would have stimulated Coleridge’s reflections but would not have satisfied him. Despite his various differences with Schelling’s position, Creuzer still clings (in Coleridge’s view) to a version of pantheism that fails to assert the primacy of Reason and its difference in kind from the subordinate powers.76 In drawing out the connotations of Promethean fire, then, Coleridge emphasizes not only the irrevocable, instantaneous quality of its operation, but also its permanent and ever-deepening effects. Like the story of Adam and Eve, the story of Prometheus tells of the defining moment in the genesis of the human mind, and in both cases this moment colours all that follows. But the fire of Prometheus is a tautegorical symbol, one especially rich in implication: fire connotes danger (in the form of the newly descending moral law, whose breach brings punishment in the form of hell-fire);77 yet it is also the condition of the possibility of practical skills such as tool-making, supposedly impossible to animals and only possible to humans because our Reason illuminates our Understanding.

This is the kind of conclusion toward which Coleridge’s practical criticism is working in ‘On the Prometheus’. Insight into the ‘key’ that will unlock the whole ‘cypher’ of Aeschylus’s mythology may occur in a flash of intuition, but its effects will linger, colouring all our thoughts thereafter. An equally vital notion is that Reason is continually engaged in a struggle, by virtue of its condition as (so to speak) a misfit in the world. This aspect emerges forcefully in a passage of self-reflexive commentary close to the end of the essay. Coleridge observes that Prometheus as Nous is both ‘solitary’ and ‘kindred’: solitary to the extent that Nous was (as a potential) the antecedent ground under-lying the primal chaos and so predates all other powers, but kindred because he is now part of a pantheon, an array of divinities that emerged from the absolute identity. So it is that in Aeschylus’s play ‘The kindred deities come to him, some to soothe, to condole; others to give weak, yet friendly counsels of submission; others to tempt, or insult.’78

Coleridge focuses on the role of Hermes in the latter respect. Hermes is primarily ‘the symbol of INTEREST’. As the ‘GO-BETWEEN’ who carries messages from Zeus and torments Prometheus with prudent advice, Hermes represents moral heteronomy: in Coleridge’s words, ‘interests or motives intervening between the reason and its immediate self-determinations’.79 As the personification of mediacy, that is, Hermes militates against intuition, whose operation is immediate. Hermes opposes ‘nomos autonomos’, or self-legislation in the sense of the pure will to follow the dictate of conscience for its own sake. Even more than this: ‘The HERMES impersonates the eloquence of cupidity, the cajolement of power regnant; and, in a larger sense, custom, the irrational in language [...] the fluent [...] the rhetorical in opposition to logoi, ta noeta.’80 For in the play, Hermes counsels the ‘self control and prudence’ that Prometheus has hitherto spectacularly lacked. He tells the chorus that Prometheus is clearly mad. Although he seems to admit that his rhetoric is ineffectual, he then gathers himself for a final verbal assault, describing the tortures that Zeus will inevitably inflict if Prometheus remains stubborn.

It is significant that Coleridge identifies this worldly figure with both ‘custom’ and ‘the rhetorical’. His suggestion is that in our fallen, embodied state, we cannot maintain Promethean purity. In particular, words do not only function to communicate truth, but also obstruct the enquiring mind. In applying a radical hermeneutic method to Aeschylus’s play, Coleridge struggles with Hermes — with the problem, that is, of mediating the fundamental ‘idea’ of this philosopheme. His use of awkward Greek and Latin terms and conspicuously non-fluent style throughout the essay seem designed to take a stand against ‘custom’, understood as the easy familiarity of everyday notions. In more philosophical terms, when Nous turns inward to discover its own situation and powers (the original ‘Greek’ project), it cannot succeed without the mediation of language; but the inevitable dependence of language upon positive images makes it difficult for Nous to reconnect to the purely potential, or ‘negative’ ground. Whilst the tautegorical symbol of Aeschylus’s Prometheus provides (for Coleridge) the richest expression of the genesis of Nous, symbolism is itself a function of Hermes. The hermeneutic imagination can be enlightened by tautegorical symbols, but it needs them because it finds itself in a state of mystification: Greek symbolism manifests, as Coleridge’s discussion implies, a rich yet not entirely healthy cultural development from the allegory of Genesis.

Conclusion

‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ is an example of Coleridgean ‘practical criticism’ in the original sense of that term. Far from being anti-theoretical, it imports a pre-conceived theory into a reading of a text. It does so to a radical extent, since the philosophical prologue is nothing less than a speculation on ‘first things’, on the necessary conditions of human Reason, both theoretical and moral. In this way, the essay compresses much of Coleridge’s systematic moral philosophy into a small compass. To elaborate his conception, Coleridge then finds the most fitting language in ancient mythology.

Such a procedure is provocative, and invites various objections, including that Coleridge has made no real contribution to classical scholarship. Further, Coleridge’s firm denial that Reason could have emerged from a process of ‘evolution’ appears to raise a fundamental question about his philosophical endeavour. Did the impending Darwinian theory render Coleridge’s thought obsolete at its very root? My chapter has implied the beginning of an answer: Coleridge’s postulation of a Nous necessarily underlying any conceivable process of evolution at least cannot be dismissed by means of evolutionary discourse itself. George Eliot’s prescient remark about Darwin implicitly puts the case for Coleridge: ‘to me the Development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes.’81 Coleridge is concerned precisely with this higher-order investigation of ‘the mystery that lies under the processes’: in this sense ‘On the Prometheus’ tenaciously resumes Coleridge’s longstanding effort to ‘solve the process of Life & Consciousness’.82 The true achievement of ‘On the Prometheus’, thereby, is that it holds a mirror up to the enquiring mind. On first reading, the essay appears to bear little relation to Aeschylus, yet it draws the reader into an introspective approach to the myth. Once grasped in an act of intuition that may occur after much reflection on the narrative, the philosopheme of the Coleridgean Aeschylus is likely to flash upon the inward eye again and again.

Notes to Chapter 8

1. The research for this chapter began several years ago, as work for a graduate reading group organized by Douglas Hedley in Cambridge — a group that included Jeffrey Einboden and Cecilia Muratori, both contributors to the present volume. It would not have been possible without discussions with these scholars. Related work was fruitfully discussed at Klaus Vieweg’s Colloquium for German Idealism at Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena, in 2008. Graham Davidson kindly provided feedback on a draft.

2. All references are to ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series 75, 16 vols in 34 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971–2002), XI: Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. by H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols (1995), II, 1251–1301. I am indebted to the editors’ fine introduction and notes; I will not repeat the information they provide about the genesis of the work around 1821 and its relation to the draft notes included in this edition. Especially given the relative inaccessibility of the critical edition, however, I also cite here the original publication (now available online): S. T. Coleridge, ‘On the Prometheus of Æschylus; an Essay, preparatory to a series of Disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connection with the Sacerdotal Theology, and in contrast with the Mysteries of ancient Greece’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom (London: John Murray, 1834), II, 384–404.

3. Since the question of the attribution of Prometheus Bound to Aeschylus had at this time not yet been raised, I do not consider it in this chapter.

4. Coleridge to John Thelwall, 31 December 1796: The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71), I, 295.

5. Album Verses: ‘Dewdrops are the Gems of Morning’, The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (vol. xvi of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as in note 2), ed. by J. C. C. Mays, 3 vols in 6 (2001), I.2, 1015 (poem 593), dated 1832–33.

6. S. T. Coleridge to Mrs Charles Aders, 3 January 1826, in Letters, vi, 532. For a full list of Coleridge’s references to Prometheus, see the editor’s note in Aids to Reflection [1825] (vol. ix of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), ed. by John Beer (1993), p. 561.

7. For the most recent and substantial treatment of this topic see Susanne E. Webster, Body and Soul in Coleridge’s Notebooks, 1827–1834 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), but Webster deals almost exclusively with material written after ‘On the Prometheus’.

8. Plato, says Coleridge, had ‘a sense of high responsibility not to do mischief and arm fools with fire under the pretence of conveying truth’: Lectures 1818–1819 on the History of Philosophy (vol. viii of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), ed. by J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols (2000), i, 185. For more on the Platonic context of Coleridge’s distinction between the esoteric and exoteric see James Vigus, Platonic Coleridge (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), esp. pp. 93–96 and pp. 104–06. Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 147–209, interprets Coleridge’s detection in ancient Greek drama and philosophy of the practice of simultaneously concealing and selectively revealing speculative tenets — the distinction, that is, between esoteric and exoteric presentations — as an expression of Coleridge’s ‘authoritarian cultural politics’, informing his own vision of how the contemporary learned class, the ‘clerisy’, ought to operate in a time of deep political and cultural anxiety. Leask’s work remains one of the few accounts to recognize the centrality of ‘On the Prometheus’ to the vision of providential history Coleridge developed from around 1817.

9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions [1817] (vol. VII of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), ed. by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (1983), ii, 19.

10. Thus ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ falls approximately into the following sections: first, contextual introduction (pp. 1258–63); second, philosophical system (pp. 1264–78); third, mapping the system on to Prometheus Bound (pp. 1278–86).

11. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1267; cf. p. 1271, and p. 1273: ‘this most profound and pregnant philosopheme’. The definition, I suggest, seems appropriate to the context, though the term ‘philosopheme’ generally referred to a philosophical statement, system or axiom: cf. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia (vol. XII of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), ed. by George Whalley and H. J. Jackson, 6 vols (1980–2001), II, 389n. Coleridge probably gained some impetus for his use of this term from Creuzer, who uses it in his 1810 preface (p. X) and proceeds to distinguish various types of myth, including the theological and the natural, the highest being the ‘Philosopheme’, which incorporates genuine thought and ancient wisdom (p. 105). Coleridge referred to both the first and the substantially revised second edition of Creuzer’s magnum opus. Quotations in this chapter are from Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, 4 vols (Leipzig and Darmstadt: Karl Wilhelm Leske, 1810–12).

12. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, Merton Christensen and Anthony John Harding, 5 vols in 10 (New York, London, and Princeton, NJ: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–2002), IV, 4839 (dated 1821–22 by the editors).

13. See ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1267. I have referred to H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek–English Lexicon [1843] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). For the sake of clarity (rather than implying any specific interpretation) I capitalize some of the terms Coleridge uses in a special sense, such as Reason.

14. ‘Prometheus, or Nous Agonistes’ was the title Coleridge suggested that his son Hartley should use for an original work (quoted in Aids to Reflection, p. 563). Compare a similar recommendation of the title ‘Nous Agonistes: An Orphic Mystery’: Shorter Works and Fragments, II, 1298.

15. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1268; cf. p. 1288. Here and in the following I have transliterated Greek words used by Coleridge for ease of reading. On tautegory, see also Jeffrey Einboden’s contribution to this volume, p. 165.

16. For more on this reception and the controversy surrounding Coleridge’s symbol-theory, see the introduction to this volume. As Jackson and Jackson note, the question of the relation of ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ to Coleridge’s German sources (above all Böhme, Creuzer and Schelling) ‘cannot be considered closed’ (p. 1255, n. 1) — though plagiarism was not involved. Especially important is F. W. J. Schelling, Ueber die Gottheiten von Samothrake. Vorgelesen in der öffentlichen Sitzung der Baier’schen Akademie der Wissenschaften am Namenstage des Königs den 12. Oct. 1815. Beylage zu den Weltaltern (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1815; facsimile reprint Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1968). In the following, I also cite this text in the following abridged translation: Robert F. Brown, Schelling’s Treatise on ‘The Deities of Samothrace’ [1974] (Missoula, MT: Scholar’s Press, 1977). The connection between the essays of Schelling and Coleridge was first noted in William K. Pfeiler, ‘Coleridge and Schelling’s Treatise on the Samothracian Deities’, Modern Language Notes, 52.3 (March 1937), 162–65.

17. Marginalia, ii, 183.

18. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1264.

19. Aeschylus is Coleridge’s only example at this point, but several years later he also mentions ‘Sophocles the purest Emanation from the Mysteries, the only Antidote to the corruptive influence of the popular or established Religion’: Notebooks, V, 6646 (11 September 1830).

20. Such syncretizing narratives may be unfashionable, but they have by no means disappeared, a distinguished instance being Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies of Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York: Allworth Press, 2002). McEvilley, however, employs a less nuanced concept of ‘pantheism’ than Coleridge (see below): for instance, he describes Aeschylus’s Zeus as ‘both immanent and transcendent’ (p. 27), and then as ‘pantheistic’ (p. 61).

21. In developing a ‘sympathetic’ reading of Coleridge’s speculations I have drawn inspiration from Tim Milnes, The Truth about Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). I thus take a different approach from that of Anthony John Harding in The Reception of Myth in British Romanticism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), for whom ‘Coleridge’s reinterpretations of myth serve an ideology that requires historicist analysis’ (p. 13).

22. For Coleridge’s peremptory dismissal of the significance of Champollion’s deciphering work, see Notebooks, IV, 5219. For an introduction to the cultural context, see Stefanie Fricke, ‘ “Pleasant riddles of futurity”: Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Romantic Age’, in Romantic Explorations: Selected Papers from the Koblenz Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism, ed. by Michael Meyer (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011), pp. 173–84.

23. On the original monotheism that ‘must have existed previously to the great apostasy of the pantheists’, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Opus Maximum (vol. XV of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as in note 2), ed. by Thomas McFarland with the assistance of Nicholas Halmi (2002), p. 263.

24. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1261. ‘Abimelech’ here is not, pace the editorial note, ‘a slip for Abraham’. In Abraham’s time, Abimelech was the Philistine King of Gerar (Genesis 26. 1): just as Abraham had dealings with Abimelech, so Moses with Pharaoh. I have referred to The Bible: The Authorized King James Version, ed. by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

25. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1277. Aeschylus is Coleridge’s only example at this point, but several years later he also remarks that ‘Sophocles [was] the purest Emanation from the Mysteries, the only Antidote to the corruptive influence of the popular or established Religion’: Notebooks, v, 6646, 11 September 1830. Coleridge tacitly takes issue with Schelling, who writes that such explanations based on systematic priestly deception merely reflect the corrupt spirit of modern times and are alien to the ancients: ‘Undenkbar wäre schon an sich ein solcher Widerspruch zwischen dem öffentlichen Götterdienst und der Geheimlehre’ [Such a contradiction between the public cult of the gods and the secret doctrine plainly would be unthinkable]. Ueber die Gottheiten von Samothrake, p. 28; Deities of Samothrace, pp. 24–25; and cf. Ueber die Gottheiten von Samothrake, p. 86, note 87; Deities of Samothrace, p. 37.

26. As Susan Guettel Cole notes, ‘little new light has been shed on their identity by the excavations’: The Samothracian Mysteries and the Samothracian Gods: Initiates, ‘Theoroi’, and Worshippers (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1975), p. 6.

27. Much of the evidence comes from the Church Fathers, who in general had polemical motives for disparaging pagan rites. Coleridge, however, explained the situation in this way: ‘The corruption and debasement of the Eleusinian, and, in a somewhat less degrees, of the Cabiric mysteries, must have followed with rapid steps on the loss of liberty in Greece, and probably commenced with its abuse, and with the consequent licentiousness in principles and practice that ended in the destruction of its forms and safeguards. Making due allowance for the misconceptions and exaggerations incident to all accounts received at second-hand, I see no reason to doubt the general accuracy of the statements given by the fathers of the first four centuries, respecting the mysteries as they existed in their times. Varro had already endeavoured to check the degeneracy of the more independent and cosmopolite Graeco-Phoenician mysteries of Samothrace, and to decipher for its priests the original principles of their theology, or rather cosmogony.’ Shorter Works and Fragments, II, 1017.

28. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, ed. and trans. by Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. XVII.

29. The continuities and contrasts between Coleridge’s research into biblical and mythological history in the 1790s and the 1820s deserve further investigation; in a sense he was constantly engaged in the ‘new kind of pleasure’ memorably described by Edward B. Hungerford in Shores of Darkness (Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1963 [1941]), p. 18: ‘The thing was to take the most daring liberties with the received notion of well-known myths and yet not really depart from the authority of ancient texts.’ I borrow the term ‘speculative mythographer’ from Hungerford.

30. ‘Summary of an Essay on The Fundamental Position of the Mysteries in Relation to Greek Tragedy’, in Notes and Lectures Upon Shakespeare and some of the Old Poets and Dramatists with Other Literary Remains of S. T. Coleridge, ed. by Mrs H. N. Coleridge, 2 vols (1849), II, 218–22, p. 221. This admirably clear text is written in the third person (‘Mr Coleridge supposes...’) and may perhaps have been composed by Sara Coleridge, Coleridge’s daughter and the editor of these volumes.

31. ‘key to the whole cypher’, Shorter Works and Fragments, II, 1291. The notion of a key reminds the modern reader of George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch (1871–72), who pursues a ‘key to all mythologies’. Coleridge’s most recent authority for such a search was Creuzer: see e.g. Symbolik und Mythologie, 1810 edition, p. XII, and, respecting later interpretations of oracles, p. 80 (§34): ‘Man hatte den Schlüssel verloren, den man im Unterricht der Mysterien empfing’ [the key was lost that was received in the lessons of the mysteries].

32. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, pp. 1277, 1272.

33. Thus Coleridge writes of ‘Nous, or pure reason’ (‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1268) and of ‘This gift (by which we are to understand reason, theoretic and practical)’ (p. 1281). Compare Coleridge’s quotation from Plato’s Phaedrus (pp. 1276–77), cited here in translation: ‘do you think it possible to understand the nature of soul satisfactorily without taking it as a whole?’

34. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1285.

35. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, pp. 1266–67.

36. In this characterization of Coleridge’s method I draw on Tim Milnes’s fine chapter ‘Coleridge’s Logic’, in Handbook of the History of Logic, ed. by John Woods and Dov M. Gabbay (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008), IV: British Logic in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 33–74.

37. For a fuller account, see James Vigus, ‘The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by William Mander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013).

38. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1263.

39. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus, p. 1267; cf. p. 1287.

40. On Coleridge’s notes on Genesis, largely made in 1829, see Jeffrey W. Barbeau, Coleridge, The Bible, and Religion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 49–55.

41. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1287.

42. Cf. the introduction to this volume, above p. 9.

43. ‘On the Prometheus’, p. 1267.

44. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen. Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983–), IIIV: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. by Walter Jaeschke, V, 40.

45. Notebooks, IV, 4839.

46. The dismissal of Greek ‘poor stuff’ appears in a letter to William Sotheby, 10 Sept 1802: Letters, II, 865. John Beer has written helpfully on the interplay between Hebrew and Hellenic motifs in Coleridge’s thought, most recently in Coleridge’s Play of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 88. Coleridge took pride in ‘the independence of my System on any preconceptions of mine derived from Moses’: Notebooks, IV, 4562, dated June 1819.

47. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1271.

48. Coleridge’s avoidance of the term ‘emanation’ in his positive description of the ‘Greek scheme’ probably reflects the fact that Schelling criticized Creuzer for imposing the later, Neoplatonic theory of emanation on ancient thought (Deities of Samothrace, pp. 34–35; n. 74). It was indeed to be this very tendency that would bring Creuzer’s work into widespread disrepute. Coleridge shared Schelling’s cautious interest with respect to Neoplatonism, preferring where possible to pursue Neoplatonic hints ad fontes to the work of Plato himself.

49. In marginalia to George Stanley Faber, A Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri [...], 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1803), Coleridge explains his view further: ‘The ancient Mystae were so far Pantheists, that they made the lowest first, the highest posterior [...]. If we however take the whole in the order of manifestation not of Power & Being, the system is then susceptible of a safe and orthodox interpretation — The 3 first Cabiri are psychological Deities, Gods of Chaos — then comes the caller forth, the Word, Hermes, Mercury — then appear the supreme Triad, in which the Hermes appears again as Apollo, or Minerva — & lastly, the mysterious 8th, in which is again to appear, as the infant Bacchus, the Son of a most high of a mortal Mother.’ Marginalia, II, 576. These convolutions are explained by the fact that ‘The Samo-thracian Mysteries contained the Patriarchal Faith & Expectations disfigured by their forced combination with Pantheism or the Worship of Nature.’ Ibid., II, 582–83; cf. Notebooks, IV, 4839.

50. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1269.

51. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1269.

52. Coleridge underlines this in Lectures 1818–1819 on the History of Philosophy, I, 27. Here Jackson’s note compares Coleridge’s marginalia on Jakob Böhme (Marginalia, I, 604), a vital connection previously made by Richard Haven, ‘Coleridge and the Greek Mysteries’, Modern Language Notes, 70.6 (June 1955), 405–07. A detailed study of Coleridge’s marginalia to Böhme is outside the scope of this chapter, but would assist in understanding the fire-symbolism I discuss here. There are significant parallels between the figure of Prometheus in Coleridge and the figure of Lucifer in Böhme; for new research on the latter, see Cecilia Muratori, ‘Il figlio caduto e l’origine del male. Una lettura del §568 dell’ Enciclopedia’, in L’assoluto e il divino. La teologia cristiana di Hegel, ed. by Tommaso Pierini et al. (Pisa and Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2011), pp. 107–18.

53. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, pp. 1269–70. The moral dimension of this thought of Coleridge’s becomes clear in a subsequent notebook passage in which he again uses the term ‘esurience’. He believes that the result of this ‘desiderium’ is, translated into the terms of another mythology, the fall of Lucifer: ‘The Desiderium of Proserpine charmed up the dark King into the sunny flower-field of Enna: that he <sunk down again to the Region of Hollowness and endless Burnings> & carried her down with him — the fiery Esurience, was the Fall.’ Notebooks, V, 5794, dated March 1828.

54. Compare Kevin Clinton, ‘Stages of Initiation in the Eleusinian and Samothracian Mysteries’, in Greek Mysteries: The Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults, ed. by Michael B. Cosmopoulos (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 50–78 (p. 68).

55. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1273.

56. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1271.

57. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1273.

58. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1277.

59. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1285.

60. Aids to Reflection, p. 284, in the context of the myth of Cupid and Psyche: the fact that Coleridge can discern this pattern in multiple myths strengthens in his view the probability of his thesis. This remark appears at the decisive moment in Aids to Reflection in which Coleridge challenges readers to discover by simple introspection whether we have a responsible will.

61. Not, pace the editors’ translation (p. 1279, n. 4), ‘law subjugating law’.

62. Not, pace the editors’ translation (p. 1280, n. 4), ‘idea of things prior to law’ (emphasis mine).

63. Coleridge persistently linked the term nous to logos, as used at the beginning of the Gospel of John: see the editor’s note in Aids to Reflection, pp. 551–52.

64. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1281.

65. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1268.

66. Coleridge liked to quote thus from John Milton, Paradise Lost (V 486–87 var.) at crucial moments: compare Biographia Literaria, I, 295 (chapter 13).

67. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1282. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound; The Suppliants; Seven Against Thebes; The Persians, trans. by Philip Vellacott (London: Penguin, 1961), p. 50.

68. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1282.

69. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1282.

70. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1285.

71. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1268.

72. See e.g. Biographia Literaria, i, 243.

73. Cf. Douglas Hedley, Living Forms of the Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2008), p. 122.

74. Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie, I, 69 (§31).

75. P. B. Shelley, Alastor, lines 126–28. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Freistat [1977] (New York and London: Norton, 2002), p. 77.

76. Coleridge asserts that Creuzer, notwithstanding his theory of ‘Urmonotheismus’, retains ‘an undue estimation of pantheism’, treating it as a ‘congener’ with rather than as a degeneration from monotheism. It is in this sense that Creuzer is too close an adherent of the ‘Schellingian scheme’: Notebooks, IV, 4839 (f121). For further critique of Creuzer, see Lectures 1818–1819 on the History of Philosophy, I, 87.

77. The connection with hell-fire appears vividly in Notebooks, iv, 5077.

78. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1283.

79. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1283.

80. ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, p. 1283.

81. George Eliot to Barbara Bodichon, 5 December 1859, quoted in Beer, Coleridge’s Play of Mind, p. 240.

82. Coleridge to Thomas Poole, 16 March 1801, in Letters, II, 706.