The 'Wild-minded Disciple of Socrates'
Coleridge's Platonic self-fashioning began early, if rather tentatively, with expressions of affection towards the ancient philosopher. Defining 'Life' in a letter to John Thelwall of 1796, he writes: 'Plato says, it is Harmony — he might as well have said, a fiddle stick's end — but I love Plato — his dear gorgeous nonsense!'1 This might not have surprised Thelwall, for only a couple of months previously Coleridge had told him: 'Metaphysics, & Poetry, & "Facts of mind" — (i.e. Accounts of all the strange phantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers from Tauth, the Egyptian to Taylor, the English Pagan,) are my darling Studies'.2 This latter comment prefaces Coleridge's sonnet reflecting on the birth of his son Hartley, which includes the line 'and Some have said | We liv'd ere yet this fleshly robe we wore' accompanied by the note: 'Alluding to Plato's doc[trine] of Pre-existence'; so is clear that Plato figures prominently among Coleridge's 'philosophy-dreamers'. Taken together, these comments seem to reflect a considerable though as yet barely developed interest in Plato. Coleridge's tone is noteworthy: at once playful and unmistakably defensive. While confessing with apparent self-deprecation his irrational affection for a philosopher and a philosophy nonsensical and dreamy, he cautiously distances himself with scientific credentials: really he is only investigating psychological curiosities, 'facts of mind'.
To some extent this tone is typical of Coleridge's correspondence with Thelwall in particular. It reflects, that is, a combination of discomfort with the latter's atheism, desire to retain the respect of the fiercely rational thinker, and enjoyment of'sparring' on contentious topics.'3 But it also accords with the fact that Coleridge's budding sympathy for Plato was culturally eccentric. The eighteenth century had been a relatively barren period for Platonic studies. By around 1796 there seems to have been very little study of Plato in Britain, while what interest there was tended to exist among Dissenters, generally hostile to what they perceived as the mystificatory effects of Platonism.
That is not to deny the existence of a rich tradition of what might be termed 'indirect' Platonism in the eighteenth century, which had considerable impact on Coleridge. To the prominent names of Shaftesbury, Berkeley in his later work, Gray, and Akenside, can be added James Harris, Lord Monboddo, and Richard Price as (in various ways) promoters of Platonism known to Coleridge.4 However, my concern here is with direct Platonism, since (as I will show) in Coleridge's time there was a new impulse to return ad fontes, to distinguish Plato's works from the subsequent Neoplatonic tradition. Not that Plato's works themselves were entirely neglected in the eighteenth century. Floyer Sydenham's labours as a translator of Plato (ignored in his day) were advanced and completed in Coleridge's time by Thomas Taylor, an important figure whom I discuss below. Moreover, Plato scholarship developed in the form of several new editions.5
There is firm evidence, nevertheless, that universities and readers in general paid Plato very little attention.6 As late as 1834, John Stuart Mill published a series of abstracts of some of Plato's dialogues, asserting this to be necessary because 'of all the great writers of antiquity, there is scarcely one who, in this country at least, is not merely so little understood, but so little read'. Mill complains bitterly of the neglect of Plato at Oxford and Cambridge, concluding: 'there are, probably, in this kingdom, not so many as a hundred persons who have read Plato, and not so many as twenty who ever do'.7 Mill himself was exceptional in having begun to read Plato at the age of seven, under the tuition of his father who, as a student of theology in Edinburgh in 1795, had undertaken a determined and solitary struggle through an almost unreadably cramped edition of Plato in Greek.8 Thomas Love Peacock adds his testimony to this academic neglect: '[I]n our Universities,' declares Dr. Folliot in Crotchet Castle (1818),
Plato is held to be little better than a misleader of youth, and they have shown their contempt for him, not only by never reading him (a mode of contempt in which they deal very largely), but even by never publishing a complete edition of him.9
Indeed, in Cambridge during the undergraduate years of Coleridge (1791—94) and Wordsworth (1787—91) and beyond, with Newton's Principia and Locke's Essay two of the most important texts, there was little enthusiasm for Platonic pursuits. In his book Wordsworth's Cambridge Education, Ben Ross Schneider notes that the names of Plato, Plotinus, the Cambridge Platonists, and so on are 'conspicuously absent from materials dealing with Wordsworth's Cambridge'.10 George Dyer could not recall any lectures on Plato during his time at Cambridge (he took his BA in 1778);11 while Coleridge reported about 'Classical Lectures' in general that 'They are seldom given, and when given, very thinly attended'.12 Plato seems never to have been set reading. Thomas Taylor's translations of Plato (1793 onwards) gained anything but a warm reception from academics.13 A reminiscence of Charles Le Grice notes Coleridge's reading of Plato in Greek at Cambridge, but by way of suggesting that this was an unusual activity: 'What evenings have I spent in [Coleridge's] rooms! [. . .] when Æschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons, &c. to discuss the pamphlets of the day'.14
For comparison, there was only a little more Platonic activity at Oxford: there were no lectures on Plato until the 1820s, and he did not appear in the set papers of the Literae Humaniores of Oxford Honours Schools until 1847; although Forster's edition of five dialogues of Plato (Oxford, 1745) appears as part of the term reading for students at Magdalen College at the end of the eighteenth century.15 It is striking that Shelley, the future translator of Symposium and Ion, was limited at Oxford to autodidactic reading of a most unreliable translation. As T. J. Hogg, his Plato-reading companion, related: 'It seems laughable, but it is true, that our knowledge of Plato was derived solely from Dacier's translation of a few of the dialogues, and from an English version of that French translation; we had never attempted a single sentence in the Greek'.16 In 1821 Hogg, who presents himself as having continued to influence Shelley's study of Plato, attributed the universities' indifference to a kind of intellectual corruption. He wrote to Shelley recommending him to read Gorgias, which
ought to be translated and published with notes; [. . .] Plato is unfortunately little read, even by scholars, which is much to be regretted [. . .] That he should be shunned at Universities is natural enough, for reasons which he himself gives in the dialogue in question. I know no book more adapted to kindle a light in the minds of young persons incompatible with the darkness that now overshadows the earth.17
This hints at a certain radical potential in Plato's texts, which probably also appealed to Coleridge. The young firebrand Southey, shortly before meeting Coleridge and planning Pantisocracy, had written excitedly about 'Platonopolis', the plan of Plotinus to set up a city as close as possible to the Republic.l8 Plato was so far from institutional centrality that, for reformist thinkers, his work may even have held the attraction of the forbidden.
However, when Peacock mentions the opinion in the Universities that Plato is a 'misleader of youth', he alludes to the Symposium and therefore to a cultural problem which affected even the most open-minded readers of Plato in the nineteenth century: homosexuality, especially in the form of pederasty.19 When Shelley translated the Symposium he did not initially plan to publish it, since he refused to edit the sections that would be sure to offend English readers. Perceiving that contemporary attitudes to homosexuality obstructed sympathetic understanding of the Greeks, Shelley boldly prepared a 'Discourse on the Manners of the Ancients Relative to the Subject of Love'. Ironically, the eventual publisher of the translation in 1840 obliged Mary Shelley to make precisely those changes Shelley had resisted;20 and even Shelley himself softened the more explicit Greek phrases, to imply profound friendship rather than sex.21 The strength of this cultural taboo indicates not only one reason why Plato was marginalized in general, but also quite possibly why Coleridge did not eagerly seize upon those dialogues which might have been most interesting for his theory of Imagination: especially Symposium and Phaedrus.22 Coleridge firmly denied that Shakespeare's sonnets might express homosexual desire: for so incomparable a poet must have been 'in his heart's heart chaste'.23 Coleridge's command of Greek was such that he could not have explained away the problem in Plato as he did in Shakespeare.24 Only in the privacy of his notebook did he allude to Aristophanes' speech in Symposium, when he wrote (in longing for a beloved),
every generous mind not already filled by some one of these [meaner] passions feels its Halfness — it cannot think without a symbol — neither can it live Without something that is to be at once its Symbol, & its Other half.25
Likewise the Symposium was probably a source for Coleridge's frequent assertion of the androgyny of the poet's mind; but distaste for the Greek 'vice' may have deterred him from direct discussion of such works.
Meanwhile, influential francophone writing on Plato in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tended to be hostile. Coleridge's reference to Plato's nonsense and dreaming echoes, whether consciously or not, the language of the French encyclopaedists. 'Plato was a great dreamer', smiled Voltaire: 'Dreams were at that time in great repute'; and Diderot complained of Plato's obscurity: 'These dialogues so admired by the ancients are today insupportable'.26 Such judgements accorded with the English tradition of Lockean rationalism, too. Those who supported Locke's demand for clear and distinct ideas in philosophy could have little sympathy with Ideas of the Platonic brand. A reader who turned to the famous Cyclopaedia edited by the Presbyterian divine Abraham Rees would have found, under 'PLATONISM', a tirade against Plato's obscurity, distilled from William Enfield's abridgement of the compendious history of philosophy by Johann Jakob Brucker.27 This article states that Plato deviated from the 'path of common sense' of his master Socrates, into 'errors which he adopted from foreign philosophy' (i.e. Pythagoras), not least that of concealing his real opinion. Plato's metaphysics are summarized as follows:
Raising man above his condition and nature, Plato unites him to certain imaginary divine principles, leads him through various orders of emanation and forms of intelligence to the Supreme Being, and represents these fictions of fancy as the first principles of wisdom.
The continuation seems to anticipate from the reader a kind of reverential stupor towards Plato, which ought to be dispelled: 'In such a wondrous maze of words does Plato involve his notions, that none of his disciples, not even the sagacious Stagirite, could unfold them; and yet we receive them as sacred mysteries'. A far more temperate appraisal appears in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but this writer too finds 'mystery, confusion and apparent absurdity' in Plato's cosmology.28
Connected with this charge of obscurity, Plato's thought was increasingly regarded as the source of supposed corruption of Christian doctrine, and it was precisely this version of Plato — the proponent of a mysterious and mystifying theology — that initially impinged on Coleridge. Thus when Gibbon ironized the Trinitarian controversy during the reign of Constantine, he laid much of the blame for the intolerance and persecution of that time on the mystifications enabled by Plato's theology. It all began, according to Gibbon, when Plato asked himself how the divinity, who is incorporeal, could produce the world, which is corporeal. By way of answer he dreamed up the obscure doctrine of the Trinity:
The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties, which must ever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might29 induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold modification; of the first cause, the reason, or Logos, and the soul or spirit of the universe. His poetical imagination sometimes fixed and animated these metaphysical abstractions; the three archical or original principles were represented in the Platonic system as three Gods, united with each other by a mysterious and ineffable generation; and the Logos was particularly considered under the more accessible character of the Son of an Eternal Father, and the Creator and Governor of the world.30
This might surprise a modern reader as an assessment of the leading spirit of Plato's thought; but Gibbon was accurate in documenting the genealogy of these Platonic hints through Philo Judaeus into the Church Fathers, who identified the logos of John's gospel with Plato's logos. Thus began the doctrine of the Trinity as enshrined in the Athanasian Creed, although its full ramifications, according to Gibbon, were not developed until long afterwards. As for Plato's afterlife in this development, Gibbon notes ironically:
The respectable name of Plato was used by the orthodox, and abused by the heretics, as the common support of truth and error: the authority of his skilful commentators, and the science of dialectics, were employed to justify the remote consequences of his opinions; and to supply the discreet silence of the inspired writers.31
Gibbon thus insinuates that the Platonic Trinity is so abstruse as to make it a perfect basis for the self-proclaimed orthodox to attack those they deemed heretics (such as Arius): whatever version of the Trinity the minority opinion professed could simply be declared heretical, by means of some intractable refinement of argument.
A comparable historical argument was advanced by Joseph Priestley. Priestley's lengthy fulminations against Gibbon's irreligion32 cannot disguise the two writers' common ground:33 for Priestley too portrays the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystificatory embellishment of Plato's concepts. He does so with the Unitarian agenda of denying that the Trinity was a part of Christianity in its original, pure form. Unitarianism denied the divinity of Christ: a politically fraught position, since the universities still demanded subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, the first of which is the doctrine of the Trinity. How serious this was for the young, Unitarian Coleridge is clear from the fate of his tutor at Jesus College, William Frend, a collaborator with Priestley. Influenced by George Dyer's Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles (1789), Frend proclaimed his opposition to the Articles, and was dismissed from the job of tutor for his religious unorthodoxy. When he subsequently published a pamphlet advocating peace with France, he was tried and banished from Cambridge University. Coleridge supported him at his trial in 1793 and only just escaped trouble himself.34 Urgent rather than antiquarian, then, was Priestley's attempt to expose the 'corruptions of Christianity' from which the doctrine of the Trinity derived. He argues that the early Church found the Crucifixion a stumbling-block in making converts, until the Fathers adopted the convenient Platonic notion, mediated through Philo, of logos as an emanation from the Father. In this way Christ was removed from the realm of suffering humanity, and deified, making a more palatable spectacle for potential converts. A misinterpretation of St John cemented this process:
The Christian philosophers having once got the idea [from Plato and Philo] that the Logos might be interpreted of Christ, proceeded to explain what John Says of the Logos in the introduction of his gospel, to mean the same person, in direct opposition to what he really meant, which was that the Logos by which all things were made was not a being distinct from God, but God himself, being his attribute, his wisdom and power, dwelling in Christ, speaking and acting by him.35
Original Christianity, that is, including John, simply did not make this Platonic assertion of a personified logos.
An History of the Corruptions of Christianity was intended as a popular work. Shortly afterwards Priestley published a book aimed at scholars (but maintaining the same plain, demystifying prose style): An History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ, Compiled from Original Writers; Proving that the Early Church mis at first Unitarian. Here he evinces a fresh approach to Plato. Rather than relying primarily, as Gibbon had, on Ralph Cudworth's vast repository of Neoplatonic and Patristic learning,36 Priestley examines Plato's works directly — a rare undertaking at that time. He repeats that the personification of logos or divine intellect was introduced by the Platonists and eagerly adopted by the Church Fathers, but he expresses doubt whether Plato himself professed any such doctrine: 'it appears to me, from a pretty careful examination of the writings of Plato, that this was not done by himself, though the confusion of his ideas gave occasion to it, or something like it, in his followers'.37 He argues that the Demiurge in Timaeus is not a 'second God', but an aspect of the one supreme Being. Logos, for Plato, meant 'speech' or 'reason': it was an attribute of God, not a distinct entity or emanation.
Much has been said concerning the Platonic Logos; but if by this be meant a person distinct from the being whose logos it is, we must not look for it in the writings of Plato himself, but in those of his followers.38
Priestley observes that Cudworth rests his assertion of Plato's Trinity partly on the Second Letter, but that Cudworth's conclusions are not 'properly supported', since in this letter Plato himself professes to be writing so obscurely that only the recipient (Dionysius) should be able to divine the meaning.39
Priestley was distinctive in paying such attention to the contexts of Plato's writing. Yet his condescension towards ancient philosophy spoils this achievement. His emphasis on Plato's obscurity and confusion certainly has its polemical purpose; it is also not surprising that Priestley, a carefully plain prose writer, should condemn 'the affected mysterious way of expressing himself, which [Plato] frequently adopted'.40 But he goes further, dismissing ancient thought entirely, not least with regard to the doctrine of Ideas. He cites Aristotle as explaining that this doctrine was advanced by those who believed that since all sensible things are always in flux, and real knowledge requires a fixed object, there must exist fixed, non-corporeal entities. Priestley comments simply: 'Such were the wretched metaphysics, undeserving of any confutation at this day, on which this sublime doctrine of ideas was founded'.41 This sounds like an attempt at Gibbon's devastating manner, but without Gibbon's wit. The philosophical point, however, is that Priestley believed Locke and Hume's empirical definition of'idea' to have cancelled an ancient error.
A similar tendency, though a more judicious tone, appears in Caesar Morgan's work on the Platonic trinity and its influences. Morgan too challenges Cudworth's account by returning to the source: the writings of Plato himself. He states that from a meticulous reading of Plato he 'cannot find any thing, which sufficiently proves him to have had even an obscure knowledge of the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity'.42 Morgan, more in fact than Priestley, attends to context; he too denies that the Second Letter teaches a Trinity, and offers the ingenious interpretation that Plato was merely trying to inculcate moderation in the recipient, the tyrant Dionysius.43 Likewise with the Timaeus, Morgan asserts that 'it is impossible to discover in this dialogue the doctrine of the Holy Trinity'.44 But in the course of this argument he travesties Timaeus' description of the pattern according to which the Demiurge made the world, dismissing any possibility that Plato's speaker intended to signify a self-subsistent realm of Ideas:
If due allowance be made for the peculiar language of the Pythagorean and Platonic schools; nothing can be more plain, than that the pattern signifies no more than the abstract idea, according to which the universe was formed, with parts in the one answering to parts in the other.45
Thus Morgan separates the form from the content of the dialogue: stripping away the 'peculiar language' supposedly shows that Plato had a perfectly Lockean notion of'abstract idea'. Although the careful readings of Priestley and Morgan had begun to disentangle Plato from the later Trinitarian trappings, then, their basic antipathy to his 'peculiar language' precluded any substantial appreciation of the dialogues.
The eighteenth-century ad fontes disentanglement of Plato from later traditions also had a second aspect. This was the Dissenters' frequent treatment of Socrates as a distinct figure rather than as a mere mouthpiece for Plato, the point usually being to claim that Socrates maintained a view of divine unity, which Plato then either wilfully distorted or allowed to become obscure. This claim led to vigorous discussion of the implications of Socrates' life for the Christian religion. John Gilbert Cooper's Life of Socrates, a very popular biography that ran to several editions after its first publication in 1749, argues that Socrates taught Plato and his other disciples the following irreproachably deistic doctrine: that God
was ONE eternal, uncreated, immutable, immaterial, incomprehensible Being; that he was omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely good and wise; that he created and continued to govern by his unerring Wisdom all Things in universal Harmony; that he regarded Mankind with a particular Affection, and indued them with Reason, that Ray of divine Light, to guide their Steps in this probationary State to temporal, and afterwards eternal Happiness, thro' the Paths of Virtue.46
Cooper's polemic is directed against priestcraft of all kinds and in all ages: in his view, the virtue both of Socrates's principles and of his conduct demonstrate that there is nothing peculiar to Christian revelation that pagans could not discover by the light of reason. Reason itself, not the Bible or the interpretations of the Church, is the 'Ray of divine Light' that illuminates the human mind, and this is the principle for which Socrates laid down his life.47 For efforts such as Cooper's to displace the Christian religion by elevating Socratic reason, Socrates' famous maxim in Euthyphro provided effective ammunition: the good is not good because God wills it, but God wills it because it is good.48 It was owing to his non-Christian but exemplary rationality that Socrates was made the main protagonist of Moses Mendelssohn's work on the immortality of the soul, a book which Cooper's own translation made well-known in England; and Kant, too, differentiated Plato sharply from Socrates, identifying his own call to the individual exercise of reason with Socrates'.49
Ever since the Italian Renaissance, those who elevated Socrates' moral character in this way had looked for sources not just to Plato, but to an even greater extent to the very different Xenophon, whom Cooper reverently names 'the philosophic Historian'. Sarah Fielding's translation of Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates went through several editions in the late eighteenth century. It is partly because Xenophon's Socrates does not indulge in riddling irony — or indeed pederasty — that Plato was often thought to have distorted his master's pure teaching (as in the above-cited entry in Rees's Cyclopaedia). Xenophon's memoirs also contain valuable evidence about Socrates' daemon: whereas in Plato, the daemon only makes itself known to prevent him from doing something he had intended, in Xenophon it is a form of divination, which gives positive advice. J. J. Zimmermann had argued early in the eighteenth century that Socrates' daemon was an example of a miracle, at least as well attested as those of Christ; and the more theologians such as Paley relied on miracles as 'evidences of Christianity', the more pressing the problem of Socrates' daemon became. Sarah Fielding interprets it as comfortably as she can for Christian readers: the daemon was probably 'nothing more than an uncommon Strength of Judgment, and Justness of Thinking', Socrates' 'unclouded' mind affording him insight into the future on the basis of past experience.50
Priestley might have sympathized with Cooper's deployment of the example of Socrates against priestcraft. However, Priestley could not countenance the implication that the claims of Christianity to uniqueness are false, and in Socrates and Jesus Compared he allows Socrates just 'an honourable sentiment concerning the divine power and providence', but no more than that.51 Lacking revelation, Socrates simply could not have attained the moral sublimity of Christ, and Priestley attempts to demonstrate this by a point-for-point comparison between their respective lives, showing at every stage 'the great advantage of revealed religion'. As for Socrates' daemon, Priestley suggests: 'These intimations, in whatever manner they were communicated, are now, I believe, generally thought to have been a mere illusion, when nothing really supernatural took place'52 Yet even Priestley, usually breezily rationalistic, has to confess that the topic is not closed, since 'enthusiasm' was not generally a feature of Socrates' character.
Coleridge was eventually to discuss Socrates and his daemon in the Philosophical Lectures of 1819, by which time he had absorbed a good deal of new German Scholarship on the matter as well as having reflected on Socrates' portrayal of divine inspiration in Platonic dialogues such as the Ion. In the mid-i790s, however, the influence of Priestley on him was marked, and particularly so in the Lectures on Revealed Religion of 1795.53 In Lecture Three, Coleridge refers to a moral decline in the ancient world from 'The simple Doctrines of the pure Socratic School' to Stoic pride and Epicurean sensuality.54 In Lecture Five, he traces a comparable decline in Christendom from initial purity to subsequent corruption. He regards the doctrine of the Trinity as the vehicle for the imposture of priests, who gained power for themselves by clouding the plain truth of the gospel. Plato enabled this, but was not entirely guilty — 'Plato, the wild-minded Disciple of Socrates who hid Truth in a dazzle of fantastic allegory, and is dark with excess of Brightness'.55 It was in the light of the eighteenth-century engagement with Socrates just described that Coleridge describes Plato primarily as the 'Disciple' of the former, and the notion that Plato 'hid' truth is consonant with the familiar imputation that something of Socratic purity is attenuated in the Platonic dialogues. However, this is clearly far from a hostile description of Plato. The epithet 'wild-minded' is double-edged rather than condemnatory, 'wild' usually denoting a quality of fascination in Coleridge's verse. Further, in alluding to Milton's words, 'Dark with excessive bright', Coleridge begins a longstanding personal association of Plato with Milton.
Coleridge states that Plato discerned three principles in the world, which he believed must be in God in an infinite degree: 'Life or Power, which Plato calls the Spirit'; above this, é Aèyoc; — the same word which St John uses'; and above this, 'the principle of Benevolence', which he called 'The one and the good'. Coleridge summarizes: 'These three Principles are equally God, and God is one — a mysterious way of telling a plain Truth, namely that God is a living Spirit, infinitely powerful, wise and benevolent'.56 The really dangerous corruption occurred subsequently to Plato: 'From the Gnostics the Christians had learnt the trick of personifying abstract Qualities, and from Plato they learned their Trinity in Unity'.57 Coleridge employs the same vocabulary in describing the Gnostics as he does for Plato: their
opinions were wild and fanciful yet peculiarly fascinating to the taste of a vitiated age, in which intellectual Brilliance received the honours due only to patient investigation, and the Philosopher invading the province of the Poet endeavoured to strike and dazzle by bold Fiction, and allegoric Personification.58
Here is an early sign of Coleridge's sensitivity to the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy: an anxiety about the possible inadequacy to philosophical truth of wild platonic 'dazzle'.
Even while taking an essentially Priestleyan line, however, Coleridge finds far more of value in Plato than the Unitarian polemicist ever did:
But though Plato dressed Truth in the garb of Nonsense, still it was Truth, and they who would take the Trouble of unveiling her, might discover and distinguish all the Features, but this would not answer the ends of the Priest.59
If Plato wrote nonsense, that is to say, it was dear gorgeous nonsense, worth the unravelling. Coleridge continued to use this formulation around 1810, puzzling over an obscure part of the Timaeus: 'I can not believe, but there must be sense at least under all the Passages, however nonsensical in appearance, of a work written by one and the same mind' as wrote the more obviously excellent passages.60 With this desire to detect the truth hidden by the dazzle of Plato's texts begins another of Coleridge's longstanding preoccupations: the attempt to lift the veil, to tease out that part of Plato which seems hidden or esoteric.
One early way this preoccupation manifested itself was in Coleridge's characterization of Plato as a mystic. The polarity of nonsense and truth, 'dark with excessive bright', is reflected in the following image, which was so adhesive in Coleridge's mind that he uses identical expressions in Notebook entries separated by at least six years:
The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato —
The sunny mist, the luminous Gloom, of Plato. — 61
In each case this sentence is followed by almost identical descriptions of a waterfall; I quote only the first:
Mist as from volcano —
Waterfall rolled after long looking like a segment of a Wheel
— the rock gleaming thro' it —
Amid the roar of noise as of innumerable grasshoppers or of spinning wheels.62
This image is barely developed, but does the 'rock', gleaming through mist generated by the turbulence of Plato's mind, represent the esoteric kernel of truth, to be discovered behind the veil? Coleridge's description of Jakob BÖhme invites comparison: he imagines BÖhme as an unlearned version of Plato,63 and associates both philosophers with the sublime in nature.
[B]eing a poor unlearned Man [BÖhme] contemplated Truth and the forms of Nature thro' a luminous Mist, the vaporous darkness rising from his Ignorance and accidental peculiarities of fancy and sensation, but the Light streaming into it from his inmost Soul. What wonder then, if in some places the Mist condenses into a thick smoke with a few wandering rays darting across it & sometimes overpowers the eye with a confused Dazzle?64
The polarity of darkness and Light, mist and 'dazzle' is both reminiscent of the 'fair luminous mist' of'Dejection: An Ode' and recalls some of Böhme's own imagery, but this is also precisely the vocabulary Coleridge uses of Plato. The reader can glimpse the 'forms of Nature' gleaming through the mist of inarticulate thought like the rock in the waterfall image. It may be that, since Coleridge read BÖhme at school, his knowledge of the 'teutonic theosopher' directly coloured his first opinions of Plato. At any rate the association stuck. As Coleridge's direct knowledge of Plato increased, he ceased to associate Plato in general with ignorance or wild, undisciplined mysticism; but rather than discard this notion he revised it to apply only to an early stage of Plato's compositional process (see Chapter 4). Meanwhile, detecting the esoteric in Plato was to become a more scholarly project — yet the impetus for the investigation is traceable to these earliest comments. The popular and disapproving association of Plato with mysticism even presents an opportunity for Coleridge's Platonic self-fashioning: when he complains of being 'gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics, and worse than all to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary flights of Plato, and even to the jargon of the mystics, than to the established tenets of Locke', he is (as Perry remarks) delighting in his otherworldly reputation.65
Coleridge's willingness to discover Truth behind Plato's 'nonsense' reflects the fact that despite much initial agreement with Priestley, Coleridge never shared Priestley's contempt for ancient philosophy. He was to deplore the arrogance of Priestley and assertors of philosophical progress generally: 'Plato, and Aristotle were great & astonishing Geniuses, and yet there is not a Presbyterian Candidate for a Conventicle but believes that they were mere children in Knowledge compared with himself & Drs Priestley & Rees, &c — ,.66 It is typical that at the same time as he read Priestley, he was deep in Cudworth. I have suggested that Plato was unfashionable around 1795: the universities ignored him; the encyclopaedists dismissed him as a dreamer; the Dissenters blamed him as a source of Trinitarianism. Yet Coleridge was himself 'wild-minded', a dreamer,67 and a successful Grecian; and moreover the doctrine of the Trinity made theoretical sense to him even when he most strongly opposed it. Before long, of course, he became a Trinitarian whilst openly professing allegiance to Plato (and Kant). But the earlier, Unitarian phase was not merely outgrown and left behind. What remained was the imperative to penetrate to origins — to discover Socrates behind Plato, and Plato behind the Neoplatonists, and to speculate on the inception and evolution of Plato's genius. This mingled with the hope of discovering the esoteric, the true doctrine behind the surface uncertainty or concealment. In his time, Coleridge was uniquely placed to develop this interest, since it required sensitivity to philosophy and poetry together, which Priestley and Morgan with their strictly unpoetic concept of'idea' lacked. And yet, as just noted, the tension of the Ancient Quarrel between poetry and philosophy appears even in the 1790s. Responding to the sonnet of Coleridge I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Thelwall objected to the notion of pre-existence as (appropriately enough) 'mystical'. Coleridge replied: 'Now that the thinking part of Man, i.e. the Soul, existed previously to it's appearance in it's present body, may be very wild philosophy; but it is very intelligible poetry, inasmuch as Soul is an orthodox word in all our poets'.68 Whether intelligible poetry justifies wild philosophy will become an important question touching on the concept of inspiration. Coleridge's earliest, mostly indirect encounters with Plato were thus full of anticipations of his future views and appropriations of him.
Denn, hätte ich nicht die Welt durch Antizipation bereits in mir getragen, ich wäre mit sehenden Augen blind geblieben, und alle Erforschung und Erfahrung wäre nichts gewesen als ein totes, vergebliches Bemühen.
[For if I had not already carried the world within me through anticipation, with seeing eyes I would have remained blind, and all exploration and experience would have been nothing but a dead, futile struggle]
(Goethe in conversation with Eckermann, 24 February 1824)
Coleridge's early sympathy with Plato developed rapidly; and eventually, in what Perry has aptly termed Coleridge's 'critical mythology',69 Plato attains the highest status as the consummate poetic philosopher, an idealized type of Coleridge himself. While Shakespeare is deified ('the one Proteus of the fire and the flood'), 'the divine Plato' enters the pantheon alongside him: 'From Shakespeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the poetic philosopher, the transition is easy'.70 It is, however, precisely this Coleridgean mythology that makes it difficult to determine how or how well Coleridge knew Plato at any particular stage. Critics are divided according to their sympathies between extreme claims: that he was totally familiar with Plato in Greek; or that he had nothing more than scraps of secondary knowledge. His own laconic retrospective comment on his reading of Plato, though, may be quite revealing: 'I have read several71 of the works of Plato several times with profound attention, but not all his writings. I soon found that I had read Plato by anticipation. He was a consummate genius'.72 The expression 'by anticipation' seems at first sight eccentric enough to suggest table talk-ese on the part of the editor. It might be thought that Coleridge is expressing no more than a sense of congeniality with Plato, praising Plato much as he praises the Bible by saying 'in the Bible there is more, that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together'.73 Yet the word anticipation — which in fact features often in Coleridge's later prose — seems to me particularly rich in this context, and I will use it as a way into the puzzle of Coleridge's acquaintance with Plato — in both a literal and a metaphorical sense.
Literally, then, the word 'anticipation' echoes Coleridge's semi-mythological portrayal of his own intellectual development, recorded most fully in chapter nine of Biographia Literaria. The substance of this self-portrayal is that as a precocious youngster Coleridge imbibed complex Platonic texts, which prepared his mind for the reception of Kant and other German philosophers. An essay by Charles Lamb sonorously recollects Coleridge at Christ's Hospital School as 'the inspired charity-boy!' unfolding, 'in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus'.74 Coleridge mentions in a letter that Lamb compiled the essay chiefly from his — Coleridge's — recollections, so that this testimony to Coleridge's early reading taste might well be in fact another self-commentary.75 Certainly Coleridge wanted to emphasize the chronological priority of the Neoplatonists in his development as proof that he had anticipated the most important concepts of German transcendentalism. About thirty-five years ago critical opinion polarized over this anticipatory claim of Coleridge's. On the one hand McFarland endorsed it to defend Coleridge against the charge of plagiarism from German writers. On the other, Fruman, adapting an excellent essay by Richard Haven, argued that there is insufficient evidence of Coleridge's youthful knowledge of Neoplatonism, and accused Coleridge of dishonest self-dramatisation.76
Since then, to my knowledge, there has been very little substantial discussion of Coleridge's earlier Platonic studies. This is partly because the debate stuck in fruitless attacks and defences of plagiarism.77 Another reason, however, is probably that it is difficult, and not always desirable, to separate Coleridge's views on Plato from his views on a large number of Platonists, which renders futile the attempt to map Platonic influences on Coleridge. As Perry says: 'Coleridge was attracted as much by the broader Platonic tradition as by Plato himself: in fact the two seem to have been hard to disentangle in the eighteenth century'.78 However, the two did begin to be disentangled in the nineteenth century; and I have shown above the initial steps in the work of Priestley and Morgan. Looking beyond the question of influence, we can see that Coleridge's writings mark the first substantial advances in this direction: in theory, albeit not usually in practice, he insists on reading Plato in his own right, differentiated from subsequent interpreters. Coleridge's explanation on this subject reveals a further literal dimension of his notion of reading Plato 'by anticipation'. Strikingly he suggests, in the following proposed training-scheme for young clergymen, that one should read Plato after reading the Neoplatonists:
To state the reasons why it is recommended to Clergymen who propose to themselves & have means & leisure to acquire all the knowledge that more especially bears on thy high & aweful Calling, assuredly the primacy of human occupations, that they should study the Platonic Philosophy — to them we would point out according to our best judgment & experience the best preparation for & the best mode of acquiring of it — First, then, procathartically, the study of the true transcendental Logic [. . .] — with this amulet armed the student should begin with Sallustπ iu ερι s θεων/then to Plotinus — after this to Proclus's Platonic Theology & Elements of Theology — then to read his Timæus—After this, proceed to Plato’s Works, using indeed the Bipont Edition with Tiedemann’s Prolegemenon [sic] & the Dialogues; but still studying carefully Ficinus’s Notes — & even collating his Translation with the sense attributed by the Bipontine edition — And to each of these premise an introductory statement of the characteristics of each Author — as of Sallust — how far acted on by Christianity — of Plotinus, as the middle stage, how far he had carried the impersonating, entifying spirit of Platonism beyond the allowed Limits of just transcendental Logic — then Proclus, as the extreme of this — and having thus formed a complete notion of what Platonism became, then to come to the Source — & there learn, how far the germs are contained in the writings of Plato, Timæus Locrus, & Ocellus Lucanus/how far they have tortured the innocent text by the same processes, as the Theologians have the Text of the Bible, especially, Solomon’s Song & the Psalms — & how far they have improved, how far corrupted the original Platonic Doctrines//79
Of Coleridge's various breathless schemes in what De Quincey called his 'spirit of universal research',80 this is one of the more feasible. It also had practical consequences, in that it was probably just such a scheme that Coleridge pursued later with his Thursday evening class in Highgate.81 Two points emerge from this passage. First, that Coleridge was sufficiently acquainted with Plato scholarship to know the best texts. The Bipont Edition was the best available, more legible and probably more accurate than previous editions.82 The Greek is printed at the top of the page, conveniently accompanied by Ficino's Latin translation below, which was still considered superior to Serranus' later Latin version. Coleridge mentions Tiedemann's extensive Dialogorum Platonis argumenta exposita et illustrate (Bipont, 1786) separately, since it is a companion volume, not incorporated in the main work. Coleridge adds 'but still studying carefully Ficinus' notes', for these are not included in the Bipont edition: it would be necessary to find them in the Lyons 1557/1556 edition.83 The work of 'collating' would be required because Ficino's translation was based on inferior Greek texts from that of Henricus Stephanus which is used in the Bipont,84 The text now regarded as a forgery, 'Timaeus Locrus de Anima Mundi', appears in the list because it immediately follows the Timaeus in volume X of the Bipont edition,85 When Coleridge writes of 'the impersonating, entifying spirit of Platonism' he refers in the Christian context to the doctrine of the Logos as a Person, in some sense distinct from the Father, as developed by the platonizing Church Fathers; while the notion that the endlessly multiplying hypostases of (above all) Proclus might transgress the 'Limits of just transcendental Logic' reflects his application of Kantian thought to Platonism. Although Coleridge's reading scheme may sound archaic or esoteric today, then, it incorporates the most important contemporary advances in scholarship.
The second point regards Coleridge's striking order of priorities. Only after a course of logic and Neoplatonism is the student to proceed to Plato's works, the 'Source' of all these later writings. Coleridge, having learnt from Cudworth and Priestley, presents the history of Platonic exegesis as both parallel to and involved in that of biblical exegesis, albeit with the difference that whereas the Bible cannot be improved, Plato can. Nevertheless this parallel dignifies Plato, as does the strength of feeling implied in the suggestion that interpreters torture Plato's texts. To read Plato by anticipation means to read chronologically backwards: switching metaphors, the aim is finally to perceive the rock lying behind the mist thrown up by the waterfall of obscurities and interpretations in the Platonic tradition, the mist nevertheless remaining an intrinsic part of the whole scene. This might not be as eccentric as it seems: the idea that certain writers have been appropriated so extensively that they cannot be perceived apart from their 'afterlife' is, after all, gaining ever more critical currency in the twenty-first century. Coleridge's model, though, of 'anticipation' rather than 'afterlife', contains a suggestion of saving the best until last.
It is likely that Coleridge's recommendation sprang from his own practice. He claims to base his study plan not only on his judgement but also on his 'experience'. This may be a clue that his own studies had proceeded broadly in the order outlined, Neoplatonists first (albeit initially without 'transcendental Logic'), Plato second. The account in the Biographia implies this too.86 This conclusion is moreover supported by a consideration of which texts the young Coleridge actually read. Although Coleridge's interest in biblical Greek and facility for the language are undoubted (his Platonic reading scheme of 1810 coincided with plans for compiling a Greek lexicon87), I am not aware of any clear evidence that he studied Greek philosophy in depth in the original at least before 1817;88 whereas it is certain that he read some of Thomas Taylor's translations. He listed 'Taylor the Platonist' among his 'darling studies' in 1796.89 When Coleridge told Sotheby in autumn 1802 that he had been reading Parmenides and Timaeus 'with great care' the preceding winter he was probably using Taylor's translation;90 and in 1810 he seems to have returned to Taylor again.91 In 1787 Taylor had published a paraphrase of Plotinus' Ennead 'Concerning the Beautiful' (1:6) and of the Hymns of Orpheus,92 and in 1788 a translation of Proclus' commentaries on Euclid. Coleridge might have read these works at school, and even if not, it is likely that he read them before reading Taylor's first translation of Plato, which appeared in 1793 towards the end of Coleridge's time at Cambridge. Coleridge acquired this latter translation, of The Cratylus, Phaedo, Parmenides and Timaeus, probably before 1801. Wordsworth later borrowed Coleridge's copy,93 now in the library of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. Coleridge annotated it only minimally, but it looks fairly well thumbed, whether by Coleridge, Wordsworth, or both.
One marginale scribbled in the margin to this translation of Taylor — reproduced on the front cover of this book — indicates that Coleridge treated the reading of Plato as a spiritual exercise. Coleridge highlights the passage in Timaeus us in which Timaeus prays with Socrates that their difficult discourse about the universe, 'the image of that which is immutable', may be enlightened and self-consistent: for to discover 'the artificer and father of the universe is indeed difficult'. Coleridge comments:
This seems to be a most beautiful mode of Prayer. — Ist to give the mind certain definite objects of Thought by utterance of words; & then leaving the mind in silence to attach to those Thoughts, undisturbed by an <exertion> of the will in the motion of the organs, or by impressions on the bodily senses, a feeling of Devotion & Dependence.94
This suggests that Coleridge saw in the Timaeus neither the kind of crude design argument for the existence of God against which he himself reacted in later works, nor simply a vague piety; but rather an effort to bridge the distance between the finite and the infinite by allowing words to dissolve into a religious sense of wonder. Indeed, Coleridge deeply approved of Plato's detection of traces of the divine in the visible universe: his comment on the following sentence — 'For the divinity being willing to assimilate this universe in the most exquisite degree, to that which is the most beautiful and every way perfect of intelligible objects, he composed it one visible animal, containing within itself all such animals as are allied to its nature' — consists of one word only: 'admirable'.
Another notebook entry of 1810 casts further light (and darkness, of course) on Coleridge's reading of Taylor. Here he discusses his early enthusiasm for 'the Doctrine of Plato, or of the Plotino-platonic Philosophy'. After insisting that Platonism 'rouses [the mind] to acts and energies of creative Thought, & Recognition — of conscious re-production of states of Being', he continues:
I was not originally led to the study of this Philosophy by Taylor's Translations; but in consequence of early, hall-accidental prepossession in favor of it sent in early manhood for Taylor's Translations & Commentaries — & this, I will say, that no man worthy of the name of man can read the many extracts from Proclus, Porphyry, Plotinus, &c, those I mean, <those> chiefly, that relate to the moral claims of our Nature, without an ahndung, an inward omening, of a system congruous with his nature, & thence attracting it — /The boast therefore of the modern Philosophy is to me the decisive proof if its being an Anti-philosophy, or at best a psilosophy, that it calls the mere understanding into exertion without exciting or wakening any interest, any tremulous feeling of the heart, as if it heard or began to glimpse something which had once belonged to it, its Lord or its Beloved — even as a man recovering gradually from an alienation of the Senses or the Judgments on beginning to recollect the countenances of his Wife, Mother, Children, or Betrothed — /95
This entry further confirms that Coleridge read the other 'Ps' before Plato himself. It leaves frustratingly undisclosed what this vague-sounding 'half-accidental prepossession' in favour of Platonism was. However, the notion of a prepossession of some sort accords elegantly with the Coleridgean mythology. This, then, is the metaphorical sense in which Coleridge read Plato by anticipation: he claims a prior mental fitness to learn from Plato. In studying Platonic philosophy he begins to glimpse something which he then realizes belonged to his nature all along, despite the supposed corrupting influence of the contemporary empiricist bias.
On the basis of this concept of reciprocity between the seeking reader and the answering text, Coleridge criticizes Taylor's work severely:
Taylor could not have understood the System, he teaches — for had he done so, he must have understood the difficulties that oppose its reception, the objections which immediately occur to men formed under notions so alien from it — Whereas he no where prepares the mind, no where shows himself in a state of Sympathy with the hesitating Examiner — .96
The statement that Taylor 'no where prepares the mind' gets to the heart of Coleridge's concern: Taylor's failure to comprehend that a major component of Platonic philosophy is mental preparation, or anticipation of future growth in consciousness, betrays his ignorance. It has been claimed that Coleridge's criticisms of Taylor must reflect a detailed knowledge of the Greek texts.97 Although it is true that Coleridge does sometimes refer to particular Greek words, and in 1810 complains of not having Proclus' Greek commentary to the Timaeus to hand,98 no specialist study, however, is needed to recognize that Taylor shows more interest in preaching to the converted than encouraging intellectual seekers.99 For example the paraphrase of Plotinus on Beauty, which admittedly did impress Coleridge, concludes with this denunciation of the vanity of empiricism:
Impetuous ignorance is thundering at the bulwarks of philosophy, and her sacred retreats are in danger of being demolished, through our feeble resistance. Rise, then, my friends, and the victory will be ours. The foe is indeed numerous, but, at the same time, feeble: and the weapons of truth, in the hands of vigorous union, descend with irresistible force, and are fatal wherever they fall.100
This crusading rhetoric could hardly be farther removed from Coleridge's intuition of the soul gradually recovering from an alienation of the judgement and, like the Ancient Mariner, coming home. Kathleen Raine was right to emphasize Taylor's influence on several of the canonical Romantics early in their careers;101 but Taylor's unattractive invocation of a militant band of pagan Truth-lovers tends to indicate why Coleridge, Blake, and others subsequently lost whatever enthusiasm they might initially have felt for him.
It does not quite explain, however, the degree to which Taylor's work was reviled even by those who persevered through it. Coleridge scribbled impatiently in a margin: 'Southey very happily called Taylor a Pagan Methodist! He is indeed a thorough blind Bigot, ignorant of all with which he is intoxicated — rather, with the slang of which he is bewitched'.102 But this is mild by comparison with Taylor's reviewers, of whom James Mill is both the best informed and most damning: 'He has not translated Plato; he has travestied him, in the most cruel and abominable manner'.103 Mill's most damaging attack regards the quality of the translation: he asserts that Taylor often translates from Ficino's Latin rather than Plato's Greek, making errors identical with Ficino's.104 But when Mill complains that 'He has not elucidated, but covered [Plato] over with impenetrable darkness', he is referring not so much to Taylor's alleged grammatical mistakes as to his attachment to the Neoplatonists, especially Proclus. Mill objects both to the fact that Taylor's commentary, rather than offering substantial explanation, consists of a mass of translations from the Neoplatonic commentators on Plato; and that Taylor's own language has been influenced by these sources: it is 'stiff, awkward and uncouth', in 'the base jargon of the latter Platonists'105 — precisely the 'slang' and 'strange English' that Coleridge laments.106 Mill is remarkably violent against the Neoplatonists themselves, whom he calls 'the charlatans of ancient philosophy', purveyors of an 'absurd and disgusting jargon'.107
James Mill, then, manifests much more extremely than Coleridge the new tendency to strip Plato of Neoplatonic accretion. Taylor's inelegant prose has the virtue, as we might now see it, of intimating the sheer remoteness of Plato in time and culture — of never allowing us to feel we are reading a modern English writer. But this non-English feel is exactly what Mill, Coleridge, and others repudiated. Mary Shelley accurately sums up readers' feelings: Taylor's translation is 'so harsh and un-English in its style, as universally to repel'.108
The rejection of Taylor arguably reflects a wider phenomenon in the early nineteenth-century reception of Greek culture. Wallace assesses the general situation in this way:
Neither completely novel and marginal, as in the eighteenth century, nor institutionalised and central as in the later nineteenth century, Greece at the turn of the century challenged readers and writers to determine the degree of its closeness to their culture.109
If a Greek writer such as Plato is to be reabsorbed into British culture, he must be made to speak in an intelligible idiom, far from the alienating foreignness of Proclus. Anecdotally, the English desire to absorb Plato into a comfortable self-image is expressed in Emerson's report of a conversation with Wordsworth in 1848. Astonished that Taylor's translations of Plato were hardly known in England (whereas they were popular in America), Emerson wondered whether, if Plato's Republic were published in England as a new book today, it would find any readers. Wordsworth agreed it would not. ' "And yet," he added after a pause, with that complacency which never deserts a true-born Englishman, "and yet we have embodied it all."'110 The translation of Benjamin Jowett (first published in 1871) is of course more accurate than Taylor's, but another reason for its success was that it at last gave readers what they wanted: a Plato with a contemporary English relevance and vocabulary. It was the boast of Jowett's biographers on his behalf that 'Plato was now an English book'.111 The vast gap between Taylor's anachronism and Jowett's modernity reflects the change in attitudes to Plato beginning in Coleridge's time, and which Coleridge probably helped to instrument.
In declaring a sense of homecoming when he reads Plato (the sonnet alluding to the doctrine of pre-existence was 'Composed on a Journey Homeward'), the metaphorical sense of reading 'by anticipation', Coleridge too is beginning to claim him as part of an English culture, a father figure for 'spiritual platonic old England'.112 In this sense Pater was strictly accurate when he said that Coleridge claimed Plato 'as the first of his spiritual ancestors'.113 However, if there was a kind of patriotism in his assimilation of Plato into his critical mythology, it was not easily achieved: Plato 'wanted a patron' at the start of the century (as Peacock said), and Coleridge's moulding of Platonic concepts was wider-ranging than that of his contemporaries, in that it spanned poetry and philosophy, and the tension between them. By way of conclusion to this chapter I want to suggest further that to read 'by anticipation' is a critical concept which itself reflects intuitive closeness to Plato.
It involves, that is, a 'recognition' when one encounters the Platonic text: the mind of a sympathetic reader anticipates the text, and the text reciprocally anticipates the mind — there is movement in both directions. The anticipatory response is non-disinterested, a process not of discovery, but 'recognition': a Latinate word, but Coleridge later attributes it to Plato himself.114 A later English Platonist, Iris Murdoch, made the very similar observation that
much pleasure in art is a pleasure of recognition of what we vaguely knew was there but never saw before. Art is mimesis and good art is, to use another Platonic term, anamnesis, 'memory' of what we did not know we knew.115
Indeed, when Coleridge uses terms such as 'anticipation' and 'recognition' he echoes Plato's doctrine of anamnesis, or recollection. According to a recurring Platonic myth, which Socrates expounds in a state of inspiration in Phaedrus, the human soul beholds the life-giving Ideas, Beauty being the most splendid, prior to its incarnation on earth. When incarnated, it tends to forget its heavenly vision, but then it beholds specific beautiful things (young men) on earth, which prompt it to recollect the absolute vision of the Ideas. This myth is consonant with the suggestion in Meno and Republic (which Coleridge employs in the concept of Method in The Friend) that all education is a process of coaxing the mind into recalling or unfolding what is already within. The concept of anamnesis reached Coleridge not only directly, from these dialogues, but also via a long tradition: Augustine discusses memoria in the tenth book of his Confessions, and most crucially, Plotinus employs it in his aforementioned Ennead on the beautiful (1.6). However, by the time Coleridge came to write about this concept in its Plotinian form, he had also absorbed Kant's concept of the a priori, and the aesthetic theory of his Critique of the Power of Judgment. It is to Kant that we now turn.
1. CL I, 295. The reference may be to the Myth of Er (Republic 617b—d): the shafts of the Spindle of Necessity combine to form one harmony. Plato's Spindle of Necessity would probably have appealed to Coleridge in his necessitarian phase. On harmony, cf. Timaeus 47c—d.
2. CL 1, 260.
3. See David Fairer, '"A little sparring about Poetry": Coleridge and Thelwall, 1796—8', Coleridge Bulletin, 21 (Spring 2003), 20—33.
4. On Shaftesbury see e.g. Andrea Gatti, 'Et in Britannia Plato': Studi sull'estetica del platonismo inglese (Bologna: CLUEB, 2001); on Berkeley's Siris, see BL 1, 303; on Coleridge's use of Gray on Plato, see Phil. Lects. 1, 186; on Akenside, see Nicholas Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol: Or The Ascertaining Vision (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 83—101; Harris, Hermes: or, a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar, 4th edn (London: Nourse, 1786); Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics: Or, the Science of Universals, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1779—99); Martha K. Zebrowski, 'Richard Price: British Platonist of the Eighteenth Century', Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994), 17—35. M. Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), argues that a revival of the Platonic dialogue form occurred in eighteenth-century England.
5. See Frank B. Evans III, 'Platonic Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century England', Modern Philology, 41.2 (November 1943), 103—10. For extant editions, translations, and commentaries on Plato with critical assessments, see Joseph William Moss, A Manual of Classical Bibliography, 2 vols (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1825), 11, 423—55. Kathleen Wheeler describes the revival of Greek poets in the eighteenth century, and presents a very positive view of contemporaneous Plato scholarship: 'Blake, Coleridge, and Eighteenth-Century Greek Scholarship', The Wordsworth Circle, 30.2 (Spring 1999), 89—94.
6. M. L. Clarke argues this in his survey of'Greek Philosophy', in Greek Studies in England l7oo-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), pp. 112—22.
7. 'Notes on Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato', Monthly Repository, n.s. 8 (1834), 89.
8. The Basel folio edition of 1556: Platonis omnia opera, ed. by A. Arlenius. See M. Burnyeat, 'Plato', Proceedings of the British Academy, 111 (2001), 1—32.
9. Nightmare Abbey/Crotchet Castle, ed. by Raymond Wright (London: Penguin, 1969, 1986), p. 187.
10. Wordsworth's Cambridge Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 23on. Schneider notes that a typical textbook on Newton (by Colin McLaurin, 1748) attacks the 'mystical and unintelligible notions' of the Platonists (Schneider, p. 93). Thomas Gray is said to have lost all patience when he talked of the neglect of his favourite author, Plato, at the Universities (Clarke, p. 112).
11. The Privileges of the University of Cambridge, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1824), 2nd supplement, pp. 223—24n. Coleridge owned a copy: see Coleridge's Library: A Bibliography of Books Owned or Read by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Ralph J. Coffman (Boston, Mass.: Hall, 1987), p. 68.
12. CL 1, 16.
13. See Kathleen Raine, 'Thomas Taylor in England', in Thomas Taylor the Platonist, ed. by Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 19—23. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (p. 30), speaks of a 'revival' of Platonic studies in Cambridge occasioned by Taylor's translations, but offers no evidence for this.
14. 'College Reminiscences of Mr. Coleridge', Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 605—07 (p. 606); reprinted in Coleridge: Interviews, p. 11.
15. See James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1949), p. 31 — henceforth: Notopoulos.
16. Quoted in Notopoulos, p. 32. The Works of Plato, abridg'd, [. . .] by M. Dacier. Translated from the French, 2 vols (London: Bell, 1701).
17. Quoted in Notopoulos, p. 68.
18. William Haller, The Early Life of Robert Southey 1774—1803 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1917), pp. 120—21. Plato's guardians have no private property (Republic 416d), which was also to be one of the Pantisocrats' principles.
19. See Stefano Evangelista, 'Against Misinterpretation: Benjamin Jowett's Translations of Plato and the Ethics of Modern Homosexuality', Recherches anglaises et nord-americaines, 36.3 (2003), 13—25.
20. See Notopoulos, pp. 384—88.
21. See Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), P. 106.
22. Cf. brief quotations of Phaedrus in CN 1, 1002, 1004.
23. CM 1, 43 (notes made for Hartley in 1803, despite the boy's tender age).
24. Despite a tradition which did exactly that: the English expression 'platonic' love derives from Ficino's 'amor platonicus' which he used as synonymous with 'amor socraticus', terms that ascribed to Socrates a purely spiritual interest in young men (OED: 'Platonic', 2a.). Thus Thomas Taylor denied that 'Socratic love' had anything to do with 'that unnatural vice which was so fashionable among the Greeks' (TTS xI, 333, 347).
25. CN 111, 3325.
26. Quotations from Notopoulos, pp. 137—38.
27. Abraham Rees and others, The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, 39 vols (London, 1819), vol. xxvII. (Coleridge attacks the patronizing style of Rees' Cyclopaedia in CL III, 3953.) The article takes much material verbatim from the section on Plato in William Enfield, The History of Philosophy, from the earliest times to the beginning of the present century, drawn up from Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiae, 2 vols (London: Baynes and Priestley, 1819), 1, 206—42; reprinted from the 1791 and 1792 editions. The original was Johann Jakob Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, 6 vols (Leipzig, 1742).
28. Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature, 4th edn, 20 vols (Edinburgh, 1810), xvI, 630—38. This article too relies on Enfield.
29. Attacking Gibbon's prose style, Coleridge notes 'the truly ridiculous repetition of the conditional tense — might — ' (CN III, 3823): a means of generating irony that was anathema to Coleridge.
30. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols (1777—88; facsimile edition London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997), 11, 238. Coleridge criticizes Gibbon's account of the Platonic Trinity (CN III, 3814) and his anecdotal method (TT I, 418—19). See further Charles De Paolo, Coleridge: Historian of Ideas (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria Press, 1992), pp. 29—36, and pp. 104—05, n. 2 — henceforth: De Paolo.
31. Gibbon, Decline, 11, 242.
32. An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, 2 vols (Birmingham, 1782), 11, 444—66; esp. p. 462.
33. Cf. Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, pp. 270—71.
34. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), pp. 47—49.
35. Corruptions, p. 31.
36. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: the first part; wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted, and its impossibility demonstrated [. . .], 2nd edn, ed. by Thomas Birch, 2 vols (London: Walthoe, 1743) — henceforth: Cudworth.
37. Early Opinions, p. 321.
38. Early Opinions, p. 325.
39. Early Opinions, pp. 349—50. See Cudworth, 1, 427. Thomas Taylor translates this passage: For you say [. . .] that I have not sufficiently demonstrated to you the particulars respecting the first nature. I must speak to you therefore in enigmas, that in case the letter should be intercepted either by land or sea, he who reads it may not understand this part of its contents:All things are situated about the king of all things; and all things subsist for his sake, and he is the cause of all beautiful things. But second things are situated about that which is second; and such as are third in gradation about that which is third. The human soul therefore extends itself in order to learn the quality of these things, and looks to such particulars as are allied to itself, none of which are sufficient for the purpose. But about the king himself, and the natures of which I have spoken, there is nothing of this kind: but the soul speaks of that which is posterior to this. Indeed, O Son of Dionysius and Doris, this your inquiry [about the first nature] is as of that which is endued with a certain quality, and such an inquiry is the cause of all evils. Or rather it is a parturition respecting this ingenerated in the soul; from which he who is not liberated will never in reality acquire truth. (TTS XIII, 619—20) For Coleridge's use of this passage, see Chapter 5.
40. Early Opinions, p. 335.
41. Early Opinions, p. 329.
42. Morgan, An Investigation of the Trinity of Plato and of Philo Judaeus, and of the Effects, which an Attachment to their Writings had upon the Principles and Reasonings of the Fathers of the Christian Church (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1795), p. 162.
43. Morgan, pp. 47-49
44. Morgan, p. 64.
45. Morgan, p. 57.
46. The Life of Socrates, collected from the Memorabilia of Xenophon and the Dialogues of Plato [. . .] 2nd edn (London: Dodsley, 1750), pp. vi—vii. One scholarly basis for Cooper's assertion of Socrates' Deism was Charles Rollin's work on ancient history, though whereas Rollin maintained that Socrates never fully escaped pagan idolatry, Cooper insists that he only pragmatically pretended to worship the Athenian gods (Cooper, pp. 28—30).
47. Benno Böhm, Sokrates im achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Studien zum Werdegange des modernen Persön-lichkeitsbewusstseins (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, 1966), pp. 79—84.
48. Bohm, p. 99; Euthyphro, IoD.
49. Phædon: or, the Death of Socrates. By Moses Mendelssohn, a Jew, late of Berlin. Translated from the German by J. Cooper (London: privately printed, 1789). On Kant, see Chapter 2, below.
50. Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates, 3rd edn (London: T. Cadell, 1786) p. 3(n.): the daemon is described in section 1.1.4. In Plato, see esp. Apology 31c—d.
51. Socrates and Jesus Compared (London: J. Johnson, 1803), p. 6.
52. Socrates and Jesus Compared, p. 28.
53. See Lects. 1795, pp. lxi—lxii.
54. Lects. 1795, p. 156.
55. Lects. 1795, p. 208.
56. Lects. 1795, p. 208.
57. Lects. 1795, pp. 208—09.
58. Lects 1795, pp. 196-97.
59. Lects. 1795, p. 209.
60. CM IV, 140—41. Cf. BL I, 233.
61. CN I, 528 (1796-97); CN I, 1558 (October 1803).
62. CN I, 529.
63. See CM I, 575; Phil. Lects. II, 484.
64. CM I, 558.
65. BL II, 240; Perry, Division, p. 44.
66. CL II, 675.
67. For his self-diagnosis, see CL I, 67.
68. CL I, 278.
69. Perry, Division, p. 210.
70. BL II, 27; Friend, I, 472.
71. In writing this passage up for the published edition of Table Talk, H. N. Coleridge changed the word 'several' to 'most' — a considerable difference. Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2nd edn (London: John Murray, 1836), p. 56.
72. Table Talk, I, 98—99 (31 March 1830).
73. SWF II, 1123 (in 'Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit').
74. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903), 11, 21.
75. Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 117. John Beer responded that Lamb was not so pliable as that, but that nevertheless 'we should not be totally certain about Iamblichus and Plotinus': 'Ice and Spring: Coleridge's Imaginative Education', in Coleridge's Variety, ed. by John Beer (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 54—80 (p. 59).
76. Fruman, pp. 118—20; Haven, 'Coleridge, Hartley, and the Mystics', Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 477-94.
77. Walter Jackson Bate's concise discussion of the plagiarism is outstanding: Coleridge (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 131—38.
78. Perry, Division, p. 44.
79. CN III, 3934.
80. De Quincey, Works, III, 115.
81. Following Coburn's suggestion in CN III, 3934n.
82. I take some of the following information from Coburn's note.
83. See CN III, 3861 and n. for Coleridge's admiration of Ficino and use of this work.
84. The Bipont editors made some improvements to this text, but still came in for criticism: see Moss, p. 427.
85. Coleridge would have discovered later that the authenticity of Timaeus Locrus and Ocellus Lucanus had been decisively questioned: see Tennemann, I, 76—77.
86. BL I, 15—16, 144—46.
87. CN III, 3778, 3780.
88. I guess this date on the basis of CN III4337, discussed on p. 66, below.
89. CL 1,I260, quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
90. CL11 II866. Three critics make this surmise: Ronald C. Wendling, 'Coleridge's Critical Sympathy with Plato', Coleridge Bulletin, 16 (Winter 2000), 115—22 (p. 117m)n. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth's Reading 1800—1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 167; George Whalley, 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Library Cormorant' (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 1950) — cited by Wu. Further, according to Coburn, Coleridge owned the Opera Omnia (Paris, 1578) with Stephanus' Greek text and Serranus' Latin: CN 1,I204m,n.937l.n.
91. CM ivIV139.
92. Both reprinted in Thomas Taylor the Platonist, from which I take the details of Taylor's publications.
93. Sometime prior to 1810, according to Wu (p. 167).
94. CM ivIV140.
95. CN hiIII3935.
96. CN hiIII3935.
97. Arthur H. Nethercot, The Road to Tryermaine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), p. 105, cites a letter to Lady Beaumont (CL III, 279) which refers to Taylor's translation of the Platonic Theology of Proclus, 'so translated that difficult Greek is translated into incomprehensible English'. Nethercot says: 'The obvious conclusion is that Coleridge owned or had access to his own copies of the works in fifth-century Greek and that he was comparing them with Taylor's renderings as they were published'. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley make a similar assumption (CM IV, 4744) without citing evidence. This is really unprovable one way or the other.
98. CM IV, 141; he would later receive a copy of Proclus from J. H. Green: see Chapter 5, below.
99. Haven makes the distinction: 'Certainly [Coleridge] was not like Thomas Taylor merely repeating to a rationalist age the words of visionary philosophers of the past': Patterns of Consciousness: An Essay on Coleridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969), p. 110.
100. Thomas Taylor the Platonist, p. 160.
101. Kathleen Raine, 'Thomas Taylor, Platonism and the English Romantics', British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 99—123. Blake caricatures Taylor as Sipsop the Pythagorean in An Island in the Moon. How much use Shelley made of Taylor is uncertain, but for a good guess see Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 75—76.
102. CM IV, 160.
103. Edinburgh Review, 14 (April 1809), 187—211, p. 190. The attribution to James Mill is noted in Thomas Taylor the Platonist, p. 535.
104. Peter Russell calls this 'a patent lie': 'Shelley, Plato and Thomas Taylor', in Shelley 1792—1992, ed. by James Hogg (Salzburg: Mellen, 1993), pp. 148—69 (p. 163).
105. Edinburgh Review, 14, p. 201.
106. CM IV, 156.
107. Edinburgh Review, 14, p. 193.
108. In Notopoulos, p. 378.
109. Wallace, p. 13.
110. Thomas Taylor the Platonist, pp. 54—55.
111.Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A., 2 vols (John Murray: London, 1897), II, 7. On the Victorian anglicizing of Plato see R. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 247—48.
112. CN II, 2598.
113. 'Coleridge', p. 69. Cf. Ronald C. Wendling, 'Pater, Coleridge, and the Return of the Platonic', Wordsworth Circle, 30.2 (Spring 1999), 94—99.
114. Opus, p. 196.
115. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter Conradi (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 12; cf. p. 388.