CHAPTER 5
Restoring Plato's 'System'

The Friend and the Opus Maximum

There is a reticence about Coleridge's published works, which one discovers from his private conversations, that is very painful, as causing mistrust and a constant doubt whether he does not mean much more than he says.

F. D. MAURICE1

Closely related to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy are the historical sections of the 'Essays on the Principles of Method' in the 1818 Friend. The Essays on Method propose a Platonic method for science and philosophy by which investigation proceeds from an 'initiative IDEA', in opposition to the modern materialistic procedure from empirical observation. To establish his position Coleridge looks back to Plato and rejects the 'pretended originality' of modern empirically based philosophy, arguing that Plato had already confuted the latter with his arguments against the Sophists. Rather than press this point fully, Coleridge advertises his philosophical Lectures in a footnote: the final lecture projected by the advertisement would be on the pre-anticipated nature of modern philosophy, 'the successive reappearance of the different [ancient] sects from the restoration of literature to our own times'.2 As I discussed above, this conviction in fact animates the whole lecture series. The third major member of this cluster of works (chronologically after the Biographic Literaria of 1817 and Aids to Reflection of 1825) is the Opus Maximum.3 Unlike The Friend and the philosophical Lectures, the Opus Maximum is not a historical work, but it is clearly part of the same overarching endeavour: as McFarland says, 'Philosophical Lectures establishes much the same position in reflecting upon philosophical history that the Opus Maximum attempts to do by formal argument'.4 A common feature of all three texts is the appeal to Plato as Coleridge's most authoritative predecessor. In this chapter, while keeping in mind the close relationship the philosophical Lectures bear to the Opus Maximum and Friend, I wish to discuss the latter two texts as a pair parallel to the pairing of philosophical Lectures and Tennemann marginalia discussed in my previous chapter. In the esoteric marginalia Coleridge develops his treatment of themes he could only touch on in the exoteric lectures. Similarly the esoteric Opus Maximum, which was written for the eyes of a few Coleridgean initiates, develops the exoteric Essays on Method and comes close to fulfilling the ideals of philosophical writing articulated in The Friend as a whole. I argue that in The Friend, the two Sets of essays 'On the Communication of Truth' and 'Method' taken together indicate an ideal of perfectly connected philosophical discourse which would result in a 'system' — precisely in Plato's lost esoteric system — and exclude poetry. But Coleridge's anxiety of reception meant that he could not seriously pursue this ideal in The Friend: writing for a relatively popular audience he could not dispense with 'the sweet Baits of literature'. Instead it is in the Opus Maximum that philosophy very nearly triumphs finally over poetry. There, free from the anxiety of reception, Coleridge at last writes in long chains of logical argument, producing the most conceptually and syntactically difficult of all his formal works. As in the Essays on Method, but more convincingly, his aim is to discover a Ground, the ultimate initiative Idea: this is Will, which forms the basis of Coleridge's Trinitarianism. Yet a special kind of language is required to communicate an Idea; a non-demonstrative language, since Coleridge insists that by definition what is first cannot be referred back to something prior. The sublime realization that Ideas are indemonstrable is communicable only through art. The Opus Maximum is puritanical in its literary taste; but just as in the lecture on Plato the esoteric philosophy turns out to be best represented by the most sublime of the fine arts rather than by a hypothetical system, so the Opus employs a sublime, rhetorically intense discourse in place of a full network of propositions — and looks to Milton as a model for a Platonic poet.

The Friend: The Ideal of Methodical Writing

The lengthy political section of The Friend is framed by two series of essays, 'On the Communication of Truth' and 'On the Principles of Method'. The Essays on Method seek the Ground, or Initiative Idea, of scientific inquiry as pursued by Plato and Bacon, and claim to find it in the 'I AM IN THAT I AM' of Exodus 3:14. But the peculiar manner in which Coleridge explains this idea is conditioned by his general notions about how truth should be communicated, and so it is useful first to consider the earlier group of essays.

The anxiety of reception is manifest from the very beginning of The Friend, when the Fable of the Maddening Rain articulates, in Jerome Christensen's words, 'the overt doubt that the proper means can be found by which to communicate that which is not accommodated to the understanding of an audience — that for which it has no images and no remembered sensations'.5 Coleridge intends to counter the prevalent despotism of the eye with true religion, which he later defines as 'the act and habit of reverencing THE INVISIBLE'6 — yet he openly questions readers' willingness and capacity to follow him in these investigations. This was not merely a rhetorical introduction to the work: in private too Coleridge later continued to reflect that 'Great indeed are the difficulties of a true philosophy, not merely those of attaining truth or the intellectual vision [. . .] but the difficulties of communicating the truth when attained'.7 This is a further instance of Coleridge's fear of substituting paper promises for gold and silver.

Coleridge's principle for the communication of truth is that a writer or speaker must intend to communicate 'an adequate notion of the thing spoken of, when this is practicable', and when not practicable, 'at all events a right notion, or none at all'.8 This is a Platonic distinction: Socrates, before investigating justice in Republic (331c), tells Cephalus:

Every one would somehow own, that if a man should receive arms from his friend who was of a sound mind, it would not be proper to restore such things if he should demand them when mad; nor would the receiver be just: nor again would he be just, who, to a man in such a condition, should willingly tell all the truth.

In Coleridge's view, it may be impracticable to convey an adequate notion because 'unfit auditors', those not habituated to the reception of truth, necessarily misunderstand truth nakedly presented. Worse, mere verbal truth (a notion that evokes the biblical opposition between letter and spirit) can therefore produce an effect of 'dangerous falsehood' when addressed to the wrong audience.9 Most contemporary writing, Coleridge believes, is addressed to the wrong audience, that is to the abstract 'reading public'.10 Coleridge regards this anonymous public as a lowest common denominator: periodicals which aim to amuse the 'public' actually have the effect of ever further reducing readers' capacity for thinking. The fashionable periodical style, claims Coleridge, is inadequate to the communication of truth. This popular style is French (a prejudice Coleridge always retained), epigrammatic, 'asthmatic' because of its short sentences. Its 'brisk and breathless periods' offer momentary entertainment and flattery to the consumer, but enervate the soul. By opposition, Coleridge defines his own style: it is modelled on seventeenth-century English writers such as Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Taylor, whose 'stately' architectural prose with its 'difficult evolutions' demands a thoughtful, attentive response.11 The contrast here resembles that drawn in Gorgins, in which Socrates compares true justice with medicine, and vulgar rhetoric with cookery — the latter being designed only to flatter the body, not to cure it.12

Coleridge's argument is a prime example of the 'anxiety of reception' — an anxiety of which he was conscious.13 He despises and fears the undiscriminating reading public, and feels morally obliged to 'guard against the herd of promiscuous readers'.14 This defensiveness informs the peculiar twofold function of The Friend's foundational essays. On the one hand, Coleridge attempts to encourage fit readers though few to trust in his sincerity as an intellectual guide. On the other, he tries actively to deter unfit readers from going on. This balancing-act results in a browbeating tone: Coleridge demands 'thought and attention' from the reader, refutes the charge of arrogance that might be made against him, and repeatedly protests his own sincerity.15 The concept of sincerity, indeed, is involved in Coleridge's ideal of a connected prose style: he told a correspondent, 'I must write to you in sincerity — i.e. sine cerâ, without wax, entire, unrivetted'.16 However, according to his own principle, Coleridge cannot write an exoteric work such as The Friend entire, unrivetted, connectedly: to do so would not in fact be sincere, given the author's awareness that the truths thus communicated would be dangerously misunderstood by the majority. Hence Coleridge modifies his praise of the seyenteenth-century style, admitting that it is not really suitable for a modern periodical.17

Coleridge goes on to translate from Simon Grynaeus's preface to Ficino's translation of Plato:

In very truth, it grieveth me that men, those especially who profess themselves to be Christians, should be so taken with the sweet Baits of Literature that they can endure to read nothing but what gives them immediate gratification, no matter how low or sensual it may be. Consequently, the more austere and disciplinary branches of philosophy are almost wholly neglected, even by the learned.18

Coleridge cites this as part of his 'bill of fare' — a phrase that reflects an anxious awareness that his work will be (or worse, may not be) bought and consumed. The implication is that The Friend, pursuing a scholarly, connected discourse, will abstain from the 'sweet Baits of literature' (a phrase that derives ultimately from Timaeus).19 Certainly Coleridge assiduously avoids 'low and sensual' topics. And yet the elegant and curious quotation of Grynaeus itself embodies Coleridge's real policy throughout The Friend, which is to make as much use of the sweet baits of literature as possible. Not that this is exactly contradictory: as Coleridge goes on to say, 'my very system compels me to make every fair appeal to the feelings, the imagination and even the fancy. If these are to be withheld from the service of truth, virtue, and happiness, to what purpose were they given?'20 However, it does reflect the limits of an exoteric work, written under the anxiety of reception. To state the contrast plainly: in 'On the Communication of Truth' Coleridge advertises a severe, logically connected and philosophically difficult work. Yet The Friend has very few passages of dense argument and is everywhere punctuated by elegant quotations, and 'Landing-Places' designed to instruct whilst amusing. Linked with the declared policy of quoting extensively is Coleridge's tendency to quote 'authorities' in lieu of the lengthy reasoning which would be required to prove a particular point. Coleridge later explicitly defends this policy — appropriately enough by quoting (from an unidentified 'Stapylton'): ' "A great authority may be a poor proof, but it is an excellent presumption"', whilst anxiously acknowledging that it is reprehensible 'to offer or receive names in lieu of sound arguments'.21

This sustained reliance on quotation and authority is consistent with Coleridge's anxiety about the communication of truth to an unknown and undisciplined audience, and it results in some bravura essays and finely chosen quotations. But in some cases it also results in confusion: in particular, it makes the Essays on Method — brilliant and innovative though they are in places — eccentrically unmethodical. Stirling's sneer at Coleridge's eclectic opportunism in his philosophical writing was clearly made with The Friend in mind: 'One could read in Plato and Bacon, and all the rest of them; and one could quote passages from them that spoke for themselves'.22 Cheaply dismissive though this is, the mixture of historical background, a priori argument, and quotation of 'authorities' in the Essays on Method is not entirely happy. In the following review of the Essays on Method I argue that (i) Coleridge's reliance on Plato as an 'authority', though conceptually appropriate, enables him to avoid developing ideas about Will on the basis that they are esoteric; (ii) without these esoteric ideas, Coleridge's investigation of the 'ground' lacks argumentative clarity, but there is (so to speak) compensation in his poetic articulation of the Platonic notion of anamnesis; (iii) Coleridge's final essay is uneven: poetically, he develops the notion of anamnesis, but philosophically his dogmatic assertions that the 'ground of all being' lies in the 'I AM IN THAT I AM' have little to do with 'method'. I then compare Coleridge's much more convincing parallel account in the Opus Maximum.23

The Authority of Plato in the Essays on Method

By his painstaking analysis of how truth should be communicated to a particular audience, and disavowal of financial motives for writing, Coleridge distances himself vehemently from what he labels 'sophistry': the use of language in the service of monetary gain rather than Truth. Coleridge looks to the authority of Plato for his anti-sophistic project, and throughout Section Two (i.e. mainly the 'Essays on the Principles of Method') identifies himself as a modern Plato struggling with conditions comparable to those that confronted his predecessor, whilst attempting to mediate the same timeless Truth. The claiming of Plato's authority is most explicit in the epigraph to the Essays on Method. This is a quotation from Plato's Second Letter, to the effect that the recipient should trust whichever philosophy and whichever teacher he thinks best — but that if Plato's philosophy is the most satisfying, he should honour Plato above all other teachers.24 The use of this quotation signals the centrality of Plato to the principles of Coleridgean Method, and ambitiously claims, by implication, the same level of conditional deference from his reader as Plato claims from his correspondent: Coleridge is boldly identifying himself as a contemporary Plato.

Coleridge is justified in taking Plato for his model in the sense that 'Method' does have an impeccably Platonic provenance. In his preliminary definition of method as literally (by its Greek etymology) 'a way, or path of Transit', implying a 'progressive transition', Coleridge mentions Socrates' discourse with the slave in Meno.25 Though this reference is only an aside, it is apt, given that Plato was the first to use the word |a.e068oc; as a technical term,26 and the concept pervades his dialogues, from Meno to the mathematical discussion in the Republic, and the praise of method as 'the gift of some Prometheus' in Pliilebus.27 The locus classicus for later discussions was the discussion of rhetoric in Phaedrus, where Socrates uses the example of Hippocrates who learned and could teach the pre-eminently useful art of medicine because he followed an appropriate method.28 Gilbert comments that:

This passage contains the germ of the idea which later was to prove so pervasive, namely, that there is a method in the acquiring of a useful art which can be applied to all of the useful arts because it sets up criteria to govern the activities of the investigator who wishes to establish an art.29

This notion survives into Coleridge's polymathic presentation. One of Coleridge's claims, indeed, is that a single 'Method' unites great thinkers as diverse as Plato and Bacon.

The three essays preceding the Essays on Method make a historical argument by anticipation (so to speak) against sophistry ancient and modern, and thus set up the ethical imperative behind Coleridge's concept of Method. Essay II attacks the 'spirit of Epicureanism in the higher ranks' of early nineteenth-century (English) society; Epicureanism expressing for Coleridge the morality of prudent self-love as opposed to 'the true speculative philosophy' for which the good Will is the only unconditional good. The rise of Epicureanism goes hand in hand with sensuality — the love of the visible, and neglect of religion which is 'a reverencing of THE INVISIBLE'. This process was anticipated by the rise of the sophists in Greece, who (as Coleridge claims in Essay III) likewise all too successfully separated ethics from faith in the invisible,30 and were eventually exposed by Socrates and Plato. Coleridge is influenced in this view by Plato himself, since the account of the Sophists by Tennemann from which he derives his material staunchly repeats Plato's condemnations of the Sophists.31 Here again, Coleridge identifies himself as a contemporary Plato. He paraphrases at length, for its contemporary relevance, Callicles' speech in Gorgies on natural right.32 Coleridge uses this to demonstrate that the morality of enlightened self-love results, not in altruism, but rather, pressed to its extreme, in the directing of the Will to seek power at the expense of others. Callicles states that according to natural right, the stronger always has the right to control the weaker. Coleridge notes sharply that with 'the prevalence of this sophistry', 'the pure will is ranked among the means to an alien end' — implying that that end is, simply, power. Coleridge's writing has its own remarkable 'anticipatory' quality: he here recognizes — and shows as already recognized by Plato — that the polar opposite of the Christian-Kantian doctrine of the categorical imperative and good Will is not in fact the prudential ethics of Paley, but the notion of will to power that would later be developed by Nietzsche. Of Callicles' speech Coleridge exclaims: 'It would have been well for mankind, if such had always been the language of sophistry!' Coleridge's meaning is that the Paleyan doctrine of enlightened self-love is a wolf in sheep's clothing, masking Callicles' principles in more insidious terms.33

The hint is thus already in place that 'The Grounds of Morality and Religion' which this section of The Friend is designed to investigate will be found in Will. But Will is, of course, a complex metaphysical topic, territory which for Coleridge is firmly esoteric. His convictions about the 'communication of truth' thus lead him to postpone this investigation to the Opus Maximum. 'To demonstrate the hollowness of the present system' of prudential ethics and random empiricism, Coleridge writes, 'is not possible for me without a previous agreement as to the principles of reasoning in general' — but the attempt to establish such agreement is unsuited to the readers of a periodical.34 A second reason Coleridge gives for curtailing the discussion springs from this anxious concern about readers' reception of the work. To make his point, Coleridge again turns to the authority of Plato — this time as authority for restricting an exoteric presentation. He translates from the Second Letter:

But what a question is this, which you propose, Oh son of Dionysius and Doris! — what is the origin and cause of all evil? But rather is the darkness and travail concerning this, that thorn in the soul which unless a man shall have had removed, never can he partake of truth that is verily and indeed trull).35

The point of this quotation is that the investigation of Will involves the investigation of Original Sin, defined as that corruption of the will with which evil originated; and Coleridge believes that his readers will lack the prior moral and intellectual discipline necessary to the contemplation of 'an Evil Being, or the Being of Evil, the last and darkest mystery' (as he was to express it in Aids).36 In fact, however, Coleridge's just-quoted translation is dubious, since the word 'kcucoc;' in Plato's text refers not to a metaphysical principle of evil, but rather to the difficulties a philosopher experiences in search for the characteristics of the One.37 This slide in meaning is the more striking given that this quotation comes from the passage which Cudworth and other later Christian interpreters read as an anticipation of the doctrine of the Trinity, and which was therefore very familiar to Coleridge. Probably the motivation for Coleridge's translation 'the origin [. . .] of all evil' is to be found in Tennemann's comment:

Aus dem zweiten Briefe erhellet, daB eine Untersuchung iiber die @V(Jic; tov npiOTOV einen Theil seiner geheimen Philosophie ausmachte. Dieses Erste ist nichts anders, als das Wesen der Wesen, welches er in dem sechsten Buche der Republik das t'ollkommenste Wesen (to ayaQov) nennt. Da er sogleich die Untersuchung iiber den Grand des Bosen in der Welt anschlieBt, so kann man daraus nicht ohne Grund schlieBen, daB er iiber das Verhaltnis der Gottheit zur Welt, und eine Art von Theodicee in seiner geheimen Philosophie vortrug. An einem andern Orte nennt er als Gegenstand derselben die Untersuchung iiber die letzten und hochsten Principien der Natur (xa aicpa rr|c; Ouaewc;). Also wohl ohne Zweifel der erste Versuch einer Metaphysik des Uebersinnlichen.38

[It is evident from the Second Letter that an investigation of the 'nature of the first' constituted a part of his secret philosophy. This first is nothing other than the essence of essences, which in the sixth book of the Republic he names the most perfect essence (the good). Since he connects as well the investigation of the ground of evil in the world, one can conclude from this that he spoke about the relationship of divinity to the world, and a kind of theodicy in his secret philosophy. Elsewhere he names as the object of this philosophy the investigation of the final and highest principles of nature (the first things of nature). Therefore then without doubt the first attempt at a metaphysic of the supersensuous.]

Tennemann, that is, identifies Plato's First with the Good, and hence makes the connection between an investigation of the First and an investigation of the principle of evil. These investigations are avoided in The Friend, but undertaken in the Opus Maximum; the link provided by Tennemann suggests that Coleridge might have considered his own esoteric work on these subjects to be contributing to a restoration of Plato's own missing esoterica.

Coleridge's ostentatious avoidance of the topic of the origin of evil is a typical esoteric gesture within an exoteric work, deliberately creating a frustrating sense of mystery and withholding. Rather than discourse on evil, Coleridge takes a step back:

Yet that I may fulfil the original scope of the Friend, I shall attempt to provide the preparatory steps for such an investigation in the following Essays on the Principles of Method common to all investigations: which I here present, as the basis of my future philosophical and theological writings, and as the necessary introduction to the same.39

This appears a forecast of the Opus Maximum, and Coleridge retained his sense of the centrality of the Essays on Method to his philosophy; so there is good reason to regard the Opus Maximum as a closely linked endeavour.

The authority of Plato as the proponent of an esoteric system is also key to the next stage of Coleridge's argument. Having stated that to think methodically it is necessary to contemplate the 'relations' of objects, Coleridge explains the two possible kinds of relation. Essay V deals with the relation of 'LAW' — Plato's territory, where the mind dictates how objects must behave, as in mathematics; and Essay VI with the relation of 'THEORY' — Bacon's territory, where the mind abstracts from empirical observations, as in the natural sciences. On 'LAW', Coleridge writes:

in whatever science the relation of the parts to each other and to the whole is predetermined by a truth originating in the Mini, and not abstracted or generalized from observation of the parts, there we affirm the presence of a law.

The only perfect form of law, however, exists in the Supreme Being, 'inseparable from the idea of God'.40 Coleridge asserts further: 'from the contemplation of law in this, its only perfect form, must be derived all true insight into all other grounds and principles necessary to Method, as the science common to all sciences'.41 Only by this activity, which Coleridge wonders whether to call 'intuition' or 'steadfast faith', can we produce a 'scientific system'. Coleridge now cites Plato as his main authority for this position. Again, it is a typical manoeuvre of Coleridge's exoteric writing that rather than 'enter into the proof of this assertion' he cites 'authorities' for it (whereas in the Opus Maximum he all but dispenses with shorthand authorities in favour of arguing fully, as I explain below).42 He does so by paraphrasing a lengthy passage of Tennemann on the subject of Plato's esoteric doctrine. The essence of Coleridge's claim is that, to judge by the testimonies of Aristocles and Aristotle and a cryptic hint from Plato himself, Plato's esoteric doctrine avowed an 'intellectual vision' of'things divine' to be necessary prior to insight into humanity and the objects of nature.

In adapting Tennemann's account to pursue this point, Coleridge now distorts Plato again. Tennemann writes in typically Kantian terms:

Aristoteles sagt in seiner Ethik: Plato habe das Problem aufgestellt, ob man in der Philosophic von Principien ausgehen oder auf Principien fort gehen müBe, oder mit andern Worten, ob die atialytisclie oder synthetische Methode zu wählen sey? Da sich davon in Platons Schriften nichts findet, so muB Aristoteles dieses entweder aus Platons miindlichem Vortrage, oder aus seinem Leitfaden dazu, (welches eben jene αγραψα δογματα waren) geschöpft haben.43

Coleridge renders this almost exactly, including the ascription to Plato of the anachronistic distinction between synthetic and analytic method:

Aristotle [states] in his Ethics, that Plato had discussed the problem, whether in order to scientific ends we must set out from principles, or ascend towards them: in other words, whether the synthetic or analytic be the right method. But as no such question is directly discussed in the published works of the great master, Aristotle must either have received it orally from Plato himself, or have found it in the aypacpa 56y|iaTa, the private text books or manuals constructed by his select disciples, and intelligible to these only who like themselves had been entrusted with the esoteric (interior or unveiled) doctrines of Platonism.44

This is the prelude to Coleridge's apparently outrageous statement:

The grand problem, the solution of which forms, according to Plato, the final object and distinctive character of philosophy, is this: for all that exists conditionally (i.e. the existence of which is inconceivable except under the condition of its dependency on some other as its antecedent) to find a ground that is unconditional and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system.45

In fact this is Kantian, not Platonic, language — although it is hard and not really necessary to pinpoint an exact source in Kant.46 Kant himself did provide a precedent for this anachronism, when he asserted that Plato (albeit confusedly) confronted the question 'how are synthetic propositions a priori possible?'47 It is possible, however, to draw out some further implications. First, Coleridge was aware that extensive references to Kant would alienate the English readership of that time. Second, the wrong ascription is further evidence that, to Coleridge's mind, Plato and Kant were effectively identical up to a certain point, including in the aspiration to 'system'. Third, more negatively, in his eagerness for 'authorities', Coleridge was using Tennemann too unquestioningly in this section, despite his recognition of the German historian's excessive 'Kantéanism'. Fourth, Coleridge forces his 'authorities' into unanimity. Kant is critical of Reason's natural drive to seek the unconditioned,48 whereas by ascribing this thought to Plato, Coleridge removes the criticism.

Searching for the 'Ground': Anamnesis

The 'ground that is unconditional and absolute' is clearly a key concept for 'Method', since such a 'ground' must be the basis for each methodical investigation. But Coleridge never very clearly answers the question of what this 'ground' is — because, I suggest, the answer is involved in his theories of Will and the origin of evil, which form part of his Platonic esoterica not to be explored in a published work. However, the conclusion to Essay V does hint at two compressed answers to this question. The compression — or vagueness — feels unmethodical enough to warrant Coleridge's ironic self-reproach (in the Biographia) that he has omitted 'so many links, from the necessity of compression' as to be confusing;49 but, more positively, it enables Coleridge to play poetically with the concept of anamnesis, as he does in discussing the concept of the a priori.50 Once again Coleridge presents Plato as licensing his rhetorical equivocation over a philosophical demonstration.

First, then, Coleridge seems to identify the 'unconditional ground' with 'scientific principles (or laws)'. These are by definition 'permanent and always the same', as opposed to the physical world itself which is in constant flux. Thus these principles, in Coleridge's unclear phrase, 'were appropriated to the pure reason, either as its products or as implanted in it'.51 The agent and source of this appropriation are left mysterious. Coleridge appends a footnote on Plato, which may indicate that Coleridge is suggesting that Plato's theory appropriates the principles to reason; but the footnote is far from clarificatory:

Which of these two doctrines was Plato's own opinion, it is hard to say. In many passages of his works, the latter (i.e. the doctrine of innate, or rather of connate, ideas) seems to be it; but from the character and avowed purpose of these works, as addressed to a promiscuous public, and therefore preparatory and for the discipline of the mind rather than directly doctrinal, it is not improbable that Plato chose it as the more popular representation, and as belonging to the poetic drapery of his Philosophemata.52

In this way Coleridge insinuates Plato's real, esoteric opinion to be that Reason actively produces scientific principles — but he does not state this directly. In attributing Plato's reticence to his pol icy of concealment from the public, Coleridge is preparing his own self-defence via Plato in Essay VII, in which he justifies the 'labyrinthine' progress of Plato's dialogues (and by implication Coleridge's own work) on the basis of Plato's maintaining esoteric doctrines:

For of Plato's works, the larger and more valuable portion have all one common end, which comprehends and shines through the particular purpose of each several dialogue; and this is to establish the sources, to evolve the principles, and exemplify the art of METHOD. This is the clue, without which it would be difficult to exculpate the noblest productions of the divine philosopher from the charge of being tortuous and labyrinthine in their progress, and unsatisfactory in their ostensible results.53

Coleridge adds that the purpose of Plato's writings was always the education of the intellect by removing obstacles that preclude truth: not the conveying of specific information into the mind.

Essay VII opens with the comparison with Shakespeare: 'From Shakespeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the poetic philosopher, the transition is easy, and the road is crowded with illustrations of our present subject'.54 Perhaps this is intended to recall Coleridge's use of Hamlet as an exemplar of Method in Essay IV: Hamlet's intellect (according to the latter essay) is in fact labyrinthine and pursues methodical connections to excess, but behind the character stands the perfectly methodical author, Shakespeare.55 Plato, by comparison, might be said methodically to animate his apparently labyrinthine dialogues; and Coleridge himself would hope to extend this thought to his own 'exoteric' Friend. Coleridge certainly presents his Essays on Method as essentially pedagogical, eschewing the most difficult metaphysical topics, but providing a guiding light as to thinking in general. Here he mentions again Plato's campaign against the Sophists, who would 'mechanise' and 'paint over' the mind (an elegant characterization of the false 'method' which produces more obviously neat results, but denies intellectual truth): so also we are invited to think that Coleridge's progress through these essays is so erratic because of his essentially polemical purpose. This insistence in Essay VII on the harmony of poetry and philosophy helps to explain a further point of interest in the footnote on innate ideas just quoted. Coleridge, that is, asserts the doctrine of innate (or connate) ideas to be part of Plato's 'poetic drapery'.56 This is not an inappropriate expression to use of (say) the myth of anamnesis in Phaedrus. But here too Coleridge probably has his own procedure in mind as he discusses Plato: The Friend has its own poetic drapery, its 'sweet Baits of literature', designed to convey partial but not total, naked Truth. The veiling quality of Plato's 'poetic drapery', then, becomes a justifying reason for Coleridge's equivocation — his obscure setting out of the choice between the Ideas of Reason as self-produced or as innate. The problem seems to be that to claim the Ideas of Reason are self-produced it is necessary to elaborate the concept of Will, but that this is exactly the esoteric discussion Coleridge postpones until the Opus Maximum.

The second answer to the question of what is the 'unconditional ground' appears to be 'God'. This would make sense given Coleridge's assertion that relations of law (or principle) occur in perfect form only in the divine mind. Again, however, Coleridge prefers to hint rather than state this, and once more the hint is made via Plato. Coleridge exclaims at the 'remarkable fact [. . .] that the material world is found to obey the same laws as had been deduced independently from the reason',57 and that corporeal mass acts by some 'force' beyond its mere component parts. There exists, that is, a mysterious but constantly experienced link between the two (Kantian) worlds, that of Reason and that of matter. Coleridge attributes to Plato the insistence that neither the pure rationalism of Zeno nor the atomism of Democritus suffice to answer the question 'what is the ground of the coincidence between reason and experience? Or between the laws of matter and the ideas of the pure intellect?'58 However, Coleridge again truncates the discussion through an elliptical and unspecific citation of Plato:

The only answer which Plato deemed the question capable of receiving, compels the reason to pass out of itself and seek the ground of this agreement in a supersensual essence, which being at once the ideal of reason and the cause of the material world, is the pre-establisher of the harmony in and between both.59

Coleridge does not explain what this 'supersensual essence' is: this remains another esoteric mystery and (like the ambiguously explained 'unconditioned') a kind of preparation for the peroration on God as the 'I AM IN THAT I AM' in Essay XI. When Coleridge repeats this formulation almost verbatim in the Opus Maximum, however, he both deletes the authority-figure (Plato) and completes the thought:

The only answer is that both have their ultimate ground, and are ultimately identified in, a supersensual essence, the principle of existence in all essences and of the essences in all existence, or the Supreme Reason that constitutes the objects which it contemplates and <then> by the powers thus constituted, viz. the divine Ideas, gives being to the whole phaenomenal universe.60

But Coleridge would regard the divine Ideas as an esoteric topic, and so truncates what he writes in the exoteric Friend.

Coleridge continues to hold poetry and philosophy in tandem as he pursues his self-defence via Plato — and Bacon — in Essay VIII. His strategy for reconciling these two writers (which he had planned to do as early as 180361) is to insist on the one hand on Plato's rigour of philosophical thought, and on the other on Bacon's poetic sensitivity to the truth of the priority of mind in all investigations, embodied in the notion of anamnesis. Beginning the essay by attacking eighteenth-century accusations of Plato's writings as 'estranging the mind from sober experience and substantial matter-of-fact, and of debauching it by fictions and generalities', Coleridge exclaims: 'Plato, whose method is inductive throughout, who argues on all subjects not only from, but in and by, inductions of facts!'62 Indeed, so concrete is Plato's thought that he 'with such unmitigated hostility, pursues the assumptions, abstractions, generalities, and verbal legerdemain of the sophists!'63 The reader is, as before, tacitly invited to compare Coleridge's own painstaking 'communication of truth' and combative repudiation of those who write with more overtly commercial motives. Coleridge associates sophistry with mechanical empiricism, and true philosophy with Platonic method based on the 'initiative IDEA'; so he undertakes to strengthen his position by reclaiming for Platonism a figure conventionally upheld as an apostle of mechanism, Bacon. At first sight the alignment of Bacon with Plato seems eccentric. However, as Coleridge implies, Bacon's 'idols' owe much to Plato: especially the idols of the tribe and of the cave for which Bacon considered Republic VII's Simile of the Cave to be 'that most beautiful emblem'.64 Indeed Bacon, despite his often quotably caustic remarks on Plato, considered Plato of 'sublime wit', commending precisely those two elements Coleridge emphasizes: Plato's inductive method and his theory of Ideas.65 Bacon even refers, like Coleridge, to the slave-boy episode of the Meno to introduce a comment on anamnesis:

For a faculty of wise interrogating is half a knowledge. For as Plato saith: 'Whosoever seeketh, knoweth that which he seeketh for in a general notion; else how shall he know it when he hath found it.' And therefore the larger your anticipation is, the more direct and compendious is your search.66

The recommendation of 'large anticipation' would have struck a chord with Coleridge, who paraphrases precisely this passage.67

Recollecting the 'Ground' in Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode'

'From Shakespeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the poetic philosopher, the transition is easy, and the road is crowded with illustrations of our present subject', Coleridge announced robustly to open Essay VII68 I have been suggesting that, on the contrary, the transition between poetry and philosophy in these essays is tense, 'poetic drapery' often functioning to abbreviate demonstration. Further, it is true that the 'road' is 'crowded with illustrations', sometimes so crowded that the illustrations threaten to swallow up Coleridge's thesis.69 That there might be rhetorical loss as well as gain in such a procedure Coleridge seems to acknowledge when he remarks in a revealing parenthesis in the final Essay: '(for the facts hitherto adduced have been rather for illustration than for evidence, to make our position distinctly understood rather than to enforce the conviction of its truth)'.70 Any conviction in the reader's mind must derive not from logical 'enforcement' but rather from two extrinsic sources: first, Coleridge's promise that he is making a sincere, thoroughly audience-conscious attempt to communicate truth adequately, or failing that, 'rightly' (this includes his candid admission that he has not actually proved anything); and second, his citations of brilliant 'authorities', especially Plato. These are the two criteria by which Coleridge insistently differentiates his rhetoric from that of the Sophists, ancient and modern. The concluding Essay on Method, however, faces the difficult problem of tying up all the disparate threads begun in the preceding ten essays, and I agree with Murray J. Evans in finding it 'puzzling' and its rhetoric less 'satisfactory' than a parallel section of the Opus Maximum.71 I wish in this section to pursue this contrast with the Opus Maximum. And yet, some of the most compelling of Coleridge's poetic prose often occurs when the argument itself is not obviously coherent: it is no accident that Emerson, whose concept of Reason was thoroughly poeticized, was so excited by Essay XI on Method.

I shall begin, then, with the first section of the essay, which seems to me the most convincing. Without attempting sequential argument, Coleridge here subtly proposes anamnesis as offering a solution to the problem raised earlier: what is the 'ground' common to man and to the world which enables them to interact? When man begins 'an earnest seeking after, some ground common to the world and to man, therein to find the one principle of permanence and identity, the rock of strength and refuge, to which the soul may cling amid the fleeting surge-like objects of the senses',72 then he 'sallies forth into nature — in nature, as in the shadows and reflections of a clear river, to discover the originals of the forms presented to him in his own intellect'.73 These intellectual forms are clearly Platonic. Initially misled, the Coleridgean seeker hangs delighted over the 'shadows' his senses perceive, like Narcissus (later, in the austerer Opus Maximum, Coleridge identifies the pantheistic imagination as a 'Mad Narcissus' indulging a 'Vain Pride of Intellect'74). The seeker's conscience tells him that he has 'free agency' — but he cannot find a ground or 'representative' (or objective correlative?) for this freedom anywhere in external nature, presumably because unlike the internal world, the physical world is subject to necessity. Eventually there dawns an awareness of anamnesis: 'he learns at last that what he seeks he has left behind'.75 Nature — objective reality — proves after all 'a modification of his own being': hence the narcissism intrinsic to the contemplation of nature. Coleridge sums this up in one unobtrusively key sentence: 'In order therefore to the recognition of himself in nature man must first learn to comprehend nature in himself, and its laws in the ground of his own existence'.76 Before this Neoplatonic vision of nature as a modification of consciousness, however, Coleridge inserts a long quotation from Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode'.77 He appends no commentary except another footnoted esoteric gesture, to the effect that only elite minds will be capable of appreciating the sublimity of the Ode, as he had similarly argued in Biographia.78 Nevertheless, the bare quotation is rich in implication:

(i) For readers who know the earlier poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, it places the discussion in the context of their 'dejection debate' in the early 1800s. Wordsworth had at that time explored the Narcissus-theme in poems such as 'Lines Written Upon the Seat of a Yew Tree'. It is likely that the second part of the 'Immortality Ode' was itself written partly in response to Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode': both poets lamented the loss of the 'gleam' they had once perceived in nature, and admitted that it had been a projection of their own consciousness, but both sought a way to recuperate the former 'joy'. The Platonic anamnesis in the 'Immortality Ode' (which Wordsworth later cautiously said he employed not as doctrine but for its poetic propriety) was probably prompted by conversations with Coleridge, who was enthusiastically reading Proclus at the time.79 Coleridge's quotation of Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode' could be seen as his final contribution to this poetic conversation: the quotation implies an interpretation of the poem that is both Platonic and optimistic.

(ii) The quotation of the Ode sets up reverberations with other passages of The Friend. Thus the rhetorically vigorous conclusion to Essay IX on Method condemns materialists as 'blind to the master-light' of human being: 'master light' being a quotation from the 'Immortality Ode'.80 The metaphor of consciousness as a master-light was also evoked in the essays 'On the Communication of Truth'. Unlike those who 'exist in fragments', writes Coleridge, people of methodical, sincere, connected consciousness are so by virtue of looking back with affection on 'their former selves':81 and to express this he quotes 'The Rainbow' ('The Child is Father of the Man'), which was the epigraph for the 'Immortality Ode'. (This emphasis on the formativeness of very early childhood experience and our subsequent response to it is theorized in the Opus Maximum, as I discuss below.)

(iii) The context of anamnesis in Coleridge's essay throws emphasis on Wordsworth's mysterious celebration of

. . .those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;82

where the moral basis of anamnesis that might be implied by first affections fits Coleridge's purposes. Further, Wordsworth stresses the existence of the affections and recollections ('be [. . .] Are [. . .] Are'): they 'are yet the fountain light' in the sense that their simple existence is more important than their particular content ('be they what they may', it hardly matters), and also in the sense that they 'are yet', i.e. continue even now to animate our experience. This is consonant with Coleridge's emphasis in this essay on 'BEING, BEING, [. . .] BEING'.83 Finally, Wordsworth's lines convey the paradox that the light which enables 'our seeing' (rhymed, significantly from a Coleridgean perspective, with 'being') issues from shadowy recollections: the kind of reversal which might constitute 'obstinate questionings | Of sense and outward things'. Coleridge too, much more overtly than Wordsworth, encourages his reader to question outward things — to 'see' them, in fact, in a new way, as really inward things. Coleridge comes very close to Wordsworth's paradox of light emerging from darkness when he reflects that Method should, out of the 'unsubstantial shows of existence' which we normally take for reality but which actually 'are but negations of sight', bring 'that singleness of eye, with which ''the whole body shall be full of light" '.84 This notion of the negation of sight, suggestively glanced at here, will become vital in the Opus Maximum.

Although Coleridge does not use the word anamnesis, the concept is in play: Method is portrayed poetically as a process of remembering the ground of our being by contemplating and analysing natural phenomena, (re)discovering through Scientific laws that these natural phenomena are in truth modifications of our being. Essay XI becomes arguably less convincing, however, when Coleridge begins to dogmatize about that 'being', or 'ground', or 'ground of being'.85 As Evans argues, this 'discourse is more lyrical than persuasive in a number of ways'.86 First, there is often little coherence between one paragraph and the next, a culmination of the generally labyrinthine progress of the Method essays; Coleridge acknowledged this in his note on one paragraph in particular, regretting the 'loose, oozy' connection with the preceding material,87 and his many notes to revise subsequent pages reflect his dissatisfaction with the whole section. Related to this problem, many statements are unsubstantiated and abrupt: an example is the assertion that 'all true reality has both its ground and its evidence in the will',88 which seems crucial, but inadequately prepared. There are also rhetorical questions whose answers are not inevitable ('By what name then canst thou call a truth so manifested? Is it not REVELATION?'89); and further, the terminology for Method wavers confusingly: 'the principle of religion, not 'a sort of knowledge' but 'a form of BEING'.90 Coleridge is attempting to convey a Schellingian 'intuition of absolute existence', 'an opening of the inward eye to the glorious vision of that existence which admits of no question out of itself, acknowledges no predicate but the I AM IN THAT I AM!'91 But he alternates between what Evans calls a 'vague lyricism' and a strained register of sublimity: 'And the manifesting power, the source and the correlative of the ideas thus manifested — is it not GOD? [. . .] GOD [. . .] GOD'.92 This insistent exclaiming resembles the declamation of Coleridge's poem 'Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny': 'GOD! let the Torrents, like a Shout of Nations | Answer! and let the Ice-plains echo, GOD!'93

The comparison with the Chamouny Hymn highlights, I think, the tension that undermines this essay. On the one hand, Coleridge is introducing his discourse of 'Idea', which is self-sufficient and cannot be derived from sense-objects. The Idea 'manifests itself'; again, man 'in his idea' is 'subsumed in the divine humanity'. Most importantly, we must contemplate the 'divine idea' as 'the final cause of all creation'.94 On the other hand, just as in the Hymn Coleridge tries to deduce 'GOD!' from observation of the sublime in nature, so in the essay he relies for evidence of the divine Idea on the argument from design. The reader is instructed to behold in all nature the adaptation of means to ends and to meditate on the nature of the Creator who ordained it so and made the world 'for the sake of man'.95 ' In both works — poem and essay — Coleridge strains for a sublime register because he is not really convinced by Paley's argument from design that had briefly attracted him during his Unitarian phase.96 But in clinging to it, he does not give full articulation to his theory of 'Ideas'.

In contrast to this hectic discourse is, as Evans argues, Coleridge's lengthy and patient treatment of the idea of God in the concluding section of the Opus Maximum fragment 'On the Divine Ideas'. Here Coleridge's position is refreshingly clear. He states that the idea of God is indemonstrable, since it is the ground of all demonstrations. To put it another way, no 'science of God' is possible. This assertion does not undermine faith, but rather provides a new opportunity for faith — the Idea of God, like all Ideas, must arise within, and cannot be evolved from external 'evidences'. Unlike in Essay XI on Method, however, Coleridge does not rely on rhetorical exclamations to communicate his position. Instead he undertakes to refute every possible argument for the existence of God: only in this slow but sure way can the indemonstrability be demonstrated. Although Coleridge's review of the arguments is far from complete, it is coherent, as Evans's reconstruction outlines. In particular Coleridge unsentimentally reveals the inadequacy of the design argument.97 His counter-argument (briefly summarized) is that in order to discern what we believe to be proofs of a divine order in the world, we must have a prior Idea of the divine. Much more firmly than in the Essays on Method, then, Coleridge insists on a Platonic notion of Ideas, including the Idea of God: that they can only be known 'by their own light' and that their necessity can only be demonstrated negatively.

The Opus Maximum: Aims and Status of the Text

The level of detail, strictness of definition, and (for those within the Church of England mainstream) potentially shocking conclusion — that we cannot prove the existence of God — clearly differentiate the fragment 'On the Divine Ideas' from the related discussions in The Friend. This is typical of a general contrast between the two works. The Friend argues the need for a 'system' articulated in complex prose with long chains of logical argument; but it actually proceeds in fragments, with quotations of 'authority', assertions, and rhetorical exclamations. The Opus Maximum on the other hand, whilst offering no direct comments on style, approaches the ideal sketched in The Friend: the so-called 'fragments' that constitute it represent Coleridge's work at its densest and most conceptually complex, unfolding in a connected fashion the most challenging theological topics.

For that reason it is unlikely to be much read by those who look exclusively for 'literary" interest in Coleridge.98 Yet I want to suggest that although the prose of the Opus Maximum is convoluted and lacks the elegance of The Friend or Biographia, it is also refreshingly free. This apparent paradox is explicable by the absence of the anxiety of reception surrounding the Opus Maximum. Exceptionally in his career, Coleridge now had the sense of an ideal audience. When he dictated the manuscript, he was no longer constrained by the financial necessity of publication, which, though intended, was indefinitely deferred. Rather than declaim to the anonymous hydra-headed reading public, he was able to speak as it were privately to amanuenses. Chief among these was 'my friend and enlightened Pupil, Mr. Green',99 who was also the privileged recipient of the Tennemann marginalia; Green not only took dictation, but also procured, for instance, a copy of Proclus in Greek — exactly what Coleridge had wished for when reading Taylor's translation many years previously.100 As H. J. Jackson notes, without Green's collaboration the Opus Maximum would never have come into existence at all.101 It is doubtless owing to this friendly audience that the Opus Maximum, attractively, lacks the reader-baiting casuistry of The Friend. Instead, authorial addresses to the reader are respectful and non-disruptive: the reader is quietly presumed to be a 'professed enquirer'; an 'earnest enquirer' aware of reading a difficult work addressed to 'the speculative intellect'. Appealing to 'the inward experience of our readers' the author awaits rather than demands a congenial response. Again, at a difficult point the reader is counselled 'not to be impatient with himself or us' if he (the masculine pronoun is Coleridge's) does not at once understand.102

Addressed to this kind of ideally receptive reader, and confronting the topics of Will, the origin of evil, and the Divine Ideas which the exoteric Friend had deferred, the Opus Maximum comes closest of any text to a full exposition of Coleridge's esoterica. Or rather, of the esoterica of Coleridge's Plato, as Coleridge seemed to be suggesting when he proposed the following quotation from Proclus as part of 'a motto for my Work, Assert, of Religion':

But it is necessary that I should unfold the mode of the proposed doctrine, what it is requisite to expect it will be, and define the preparatives which a hearer of it ought to possess; that being properly adapted, he may approach, not to our discourses, but to the intellectually elevated and deific philosophy of Plato. For it is proper that convenient aptitudes of auditors should be proposed according to the forms of discourses, just as in the mysteries, those who are skilful in concerns of this kind, previously prepare receptacles for the Gods.103

By 'Assert, of Religion' Coleridge means the Opus Maximum, although he then suggests that the motto would in fact 'better suit the Logical Prologomena' than the Opus itself.104 This is intelligible in the light of his declaration in the Opus Maximum that the Logic 'was in fact written as the Prologomena, προπαιδεντικα, of the present work'.105 The reference to the mysteries in the proposed motto accurately evokes the esoteric quality of the Opus Maximum: only those readers who have undergone a certain prior discipline are fit to receive it. Further, it suggests that 'the deific philosophy of Plato' is central to the esoteric content of the Opus Maximum.

Coleridge moreover wanted the Opus Maximum (taken as a sequel to the Logic) to embody his system. Yet the difficulty of his completing a system is everywhere evident, for example in the fact that the supposedly exhaustive review of arguments for the existence of God is so incomplete. It is symptomatic that Fragment One begins with the words: 'Chapter III', as though there were perpetually some new piece of argumentative architecture to be built in. But the sublime sense of something ever more about to be seemed to be essential to Coleridge's pursuing the work at all.106 To Sterling Coleridge wrote:

Many a fond dream have I amused myself with of your residing near me or in the same house, and preparing with you & Mr. Green's assistance, my whole system for the Press, as far as it exists in writing, in any systematic form.107

The fondness of this dream is indicated by Coleridge's explicit admission that his 'system' is not really 'systematic'at all, and the hint that (as John Simon later said) 'there was a tradition of his oral teachings'.108 It is as though Coleridge was living out the principle that Friedrich Schlegel expressed as follows in the Athenaeum fragments: 'Es ist gleich todlich fur den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben. Er wird sich also wohl entschlieBen miissen, beides zu verbinden' [It is equally deadly for the spirit to have a system, and to have no system. It must indeed decide to have both].109 So the fragments of the Opus Maximum achieve no closure, and it was left to Green to try to systematize the Coleridgean esoterica.

This was inevitably an impossible task since the esoteric, in Coleridge's implicit conception, can never be written out in complete prepositional form. The solid material bulk of the Collected Coleridge edition is in this sense potentially misleading, in conveying the sense of a fixed edifice. Indeed McFarland, as editor, has effectively resumed Green's labours in supplying learned footnotes which threaten to overwhelm the text, and 240 pages of 'Prologomena' which supply enough context in terms of Coleridge's personal development and the history of ideas to heave Coleridge's project closer to completion. This is a prime example of what David Simpson calls 'the editorial sublime'; McFarland's prose, too, replete with such adjectives as 'vast' and 'urgent', strives for a sublime register.110 The attempt to complete Coleridge's endeavour necessarily involves McFarland in certain inconsistencies. First, as to 'system': McFarland insists thunderously on Coleridge's 'total commitment to system', declaring 'we must guard against mistaking the fragmentary nature of the magnum opus as in any way implying doubt about the necessity of system'.111 In a later section, though, McFarland recuperates the work's fragmentariness as first an 'irrelevance' and then fully a virtue judged from modern perspectives which reject the aspiration to system, 'analytic philosophy and philosophy of existence'. McFarland now compares Pascal's Pensees and avers that 'to systematise the fragments' is to 'do violence to the inner truth of the work' — a curious commentary on his own editorial procedure.112 A second inconsistency lies in McFarland's two arguments, on the one hand that Coleridge's project is essentially polemical (against Epicureanism, the French Enlightenment, and Paley), and on the other that it (in Coleridge's words) 'opposes no other system', being completely inclusive and in tone 'irenic'.113

McFarland's antinomies actually reveal something about Coleridge's own double-mindedness: chiefly his need to project a system, and equal need constantly to defer its completion. Yet they do result in questionable editorial emphases. For instance the enormous footnotes take over the task of including all past systems; whereas Coleridge himself claims repeatedly to be presenting arguments a priori, and despite his congenital digressiveness, keeps his own footnotes and quotations to a minimum. Without disputing that the intellectual background to the Opus Maximum is as extensive as McFarland's notes indicate (and I cite below a number of parallel passages in the fourth Notebook, and further allusions to Plato and to Milton not picked up by McFarland), my argument is that the uniquely 'esoteric' quality of this work causes it to differ from Coleridge's other prose works in citing 'authorities' deliberately rarely. Coleridge attempts to demonstrate the moral law by necessary argument, and likewise to establish a priori the possibility of the Christian Trinity, whose actuality may thereafter — but not beforehand — be confirmed by recourse to tradition.114

This is reflected in a different use of Plato in the Opus Maximum as compared with The Friend. In The Friend Plato functions as an 'authority' to justify Coleridge's views in the absence of full arguments. In the Opus Maximum Plato is cited relatively little, and yet is constantly in the background. Coleridge cites Kant, on the other hand, rather more frequently (since he need not fear a prejudice against 'German metaphysics' from readers of the Opus Maximum), but also attempts to correct Kant from a Platonic viewpoint. In developing this view I am contesting McFarland's argument in a section entitled 'THE CONSERVATISM OF THE MAGNUM OPUS: ITS MEANING WITH RESPECT TO THE PAST'. McFarland rightly locates the conservatism of Coleridge's project as attempting 'to hold in philosophical place the certainties of the Christian religion that had already been damagingly compromised by the anti-religious efforts of the French Enlightenment':115 the Opus Maximum is in this sense backward-looking, reacting to the fact that the old truths were being rapidly dislodged, especially in the form of incipient evolutionary theory. But McFarland continues:

To protect against this destructive flood, Coleridge summoned Plato and Kant to provide girders of thought to reinforce the dam he sought to erect. That act of reinforcement, indeed, is the whole function of those two great thinkers in Coleridge's sense of his own intellectual priorities.116

Coleridge was helped, according to McFarland, by 'an essential similarity' in the 'total meaning' of Plato and Kant; especially since 'both philosophies agreed with his in marking out a realm of timeless permanence, symbolised in Plato by the realm of ideas, in Kant by the thing-in-itself, and in Coleridge by the conception of God'. Further: 'Plato in all his attitudes was conservative, and his thought is a citadel that repels growth and change'.117 This argument seems to spring from McFarland's questionable emphasis on Coleridge's desire to include all earlier systems within his own. To begin with the last point: Coleridge was cautious —and his caution was often more appropriate than the confidence of modern scholars — in identifying the 'attitudes' of Plato from his dialogues. Moreover, the notion that Plato 'repels growth and change' is highly selective, ruling out the dynamic view of Platonism maintained by Coleridge. (A central argument of Church and State was to be that two polar forces are equally necessary to society, 'permanence and progression'.) Likewise, the whole magtium opus is designed to promote growth, not stasis, in readers' minds; it was on the contrary the accommodating neo-Epicureanism of Paley which Coleridge identified as the contemporary agent of intellectual stagnation. Kant and Plato, therefore, were more than merely girders of 'reinforcement' in Coleridge's mind. Nor did he summon them unproblematically 'together', since Coleridge regarded them as differing on 'the highest problem of philosophy', the question whether Ideas are regulative or constitutive. Finally, Plato and Kant are not entirely straightforward allies for upholding the truth of Christianity; I want now to explore how Coleridge does co-opt Plato to the Christian cause, but also to highlight where he parts company from Kant. To facilitate this, I briefly summarize the key arguments in the Opus Maximum.

The Idea of Will, the Trinity, and the Origin of Evil

In the Essays on Method Coleridge had defined the grand problem of philosophy as 'for all that exists conditionally [i.e. in time and space] [. . .] to find aground that is unconditional and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system', but he was less than clear about the nature of this 'ground'.118 In the Opus Maximum this search is both more fully developed and more explicit: the 'ground' is Will. Coleridge's opening assumption is that as human beings we have a responsible Will, defined as 'the power of originating a state'. Citing Kant, Coleridge asserts that the good Will is the only unconditional good, and further that we are conscious of a peremptory inner 'injunction' to obey the moral law, i.e. the categorical imperative.119 Since the existence of the conscience and free will cannot be logically demonstrated, it is possible for an individual to deny them. Yet such a denial is itself a moral act, directing the Will to love of self rather than of God, and this self-love is the opposite of good, i.e. evil. So fundamental is the conscience to humanity that it is in fact logically prior to consciousness,120

This assertion can be seen from two points of view, one human, the other metaphysical. In human terms, an infant becomes conscious of the being of an other, i.e. the mother, before it becomes conscious of its own being: no 'I' is possible without a preceding 'thou'.121 Thus alterity is necessary to human identity, and it immediately constructs the primal human relationship in terms of the Categorical Imperative, since our self-consciousness through consciousness of the other means that we are obliged to treat the other as we would be treated — in fact, as fully equal to our self. In an extremely dense passage, Coleridge makes some further 'subtle' steps in this argument: 'the consciousness expressed in the term "Thou" is only possible by an equation in which "I" is taken as equal to but yet not the same as "Thou"', and this in turn is only possible by treating the I and Thou 'in logical antithesis, [. . .] as correspondent harmonies or correlatives'. And for this to be possible, we must be affirming something in thinking 'I' that we negative in thinking 'Thou' — otherwise I and Thou would be 'Sames and indistinguishable'.122 Coleridge claims that this 'something' that we think in the 'I' but do not think in the 'Thou' 'can only be the Will'. He concludes this section of the argument with a characteristically helter-skelter chain of reasoning:

Now this equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act <by> which <we> negative the sameness in order to establish the equality — this, I say, is the true definition of Conscience, But as the plural presupposes the singular, as without a Thou there can be no Ye, and without these no They, whether These or Those, and as all these conjointly constitute the materials and subjects of consciousness, and these again the conditions of experience, it is evident [that this] is the root of all human consciousness, and a fortiori the pre-condition of all experience; and therefore that the conscience in its first revelation cannot have been deduced from experience. Q. E. D.123

Of interest is both the conclusion drawn in this passage — that conscience is the ground of personhood, and that the consciousness of Will is the defining difference between our concept of self and that of an equal other — and the presentation. Coleridge is attempting far greater argumentative rigour than anywhere in The Friend: he dispenses with authorities and with the sweet baits of literature in order to allow Reason to present itself connectedly, uninterruptedly, and conclusively: 'Q. E. D'. He is enabled to do this because he is making a free investigation of Will, unfettered by the anxiety of reception.

This argument has its metaphysical application in Coleridge's attempt to prove the possibility of the Christian Trinity. Again, Coleridge's prose is demonstrative and eschews authorities, since the argument is one of speculative Reason: if the possibility of the Trinity is established by Reason a priori, testimonies of revelation and tradition will be so much the more powerful confirmations that this possibility is also an actuality. The first Person of the Trinity is God the Father, but in line with the reasoning just presented, he cannot be said to exist until he has willed the existence of another, i.e. the Son. Like human parent and child, Father and Son are bound in a relation of love, by the third Person, the Holy Ghost.124 Again, the first Person is identified with Will, and Will is logically prior to Being, identified with the second Person.125 Coleridge expresses this by the (dubious) suggestion that the name of Jehovah given in Exodus 3. 14, 'I am in that I am' (as he quoted it in The Friend) can be 'literally' translated 'That which I will to be I shall be'.126

This assertion of the primacy of Will enables Coleridge to explore what he had deferred as (Plato's) esoterica in The Friend: the origin of evil. To begin this time at the metaphysical level: there exist 'distinct beings [. . .] in the plenitude of the Supreme Mind, whose essence is Will and whose actuality consists in their Will being one with the Will of God'.127 There must, however, be a potential Will which does not coincide with the Will of God: otherwise there would be no meaning in the Idea of a Will distinct from, yet one with, God's Will.128 It is possible, in other words, for a Will to will its actuality in Self rather than in God. To will against God is to will the contrary of good, i.e. evil. And 'in Will alone causation inheres. To will Evil, therefore, is to originate Evil'.129 In a fall which occurred prior (logically rather than temporally) to the fall of man, this potential to will evil was actualized, i.e. 'a self became, which was not God, nor One with God'. Since all actuality inheres in God, however, this was not a true actualization, but 'by a strange yet appropriate contradiction' remained 'potential'.130 The self which thus became was a false self, paradoxically self-begotten, the Father of Lies.

The human application of this metaphysical doctrine is that our Will is finite, and by virtue of its finitude not at one with the infinite Will of God: it is therefore radically evil. In this sense, not in the 'monstrous' sense of hereditary guilt derived from historical figures named Adam and Eve, Coleridge asserts the doctrine of original sin.131 Our conscience is a barometer telling us how and to what extent our Will is sinful, i.e. straying from the divine Will. Coleridge lays particular stress on childhood as a formative time for the moral being. A moral relation, a relation of love between two free beings, mother and infant, constitutes the dawn of human life.132 Hence the role of the mother is crucial in the infant's development: she faces the momentous choice between encouraging the infant to direct its attention either to herself, a moral being who can reciprocate love, or to the fixed and dead world of external objects. In the latter case, the child finds his moral sensibility unreciprocated, and this encourages the development of a false ego. In this way Coleridge theorizes the poetic insights of Wordsworth he had quoted in The Friend: that 'The Child is Father of the Man', and that our 'first affections' determine much of the later development of the person.

How is Plato used in these arguments? First, the centrality of the 'I am in that I am' of Exodus 3. 14, rendered by Coleridge 'that which I will to be I shall be', is a pillar of Christian Platonist tradition. As we have seen, Coleridge was reading Proclus' Platonic Theology at the time of composing the Opus, so he would have been reminded of the relevant passage in Timaeus.133 Second, Christian Platonist tradition also maintained that the origin of sin is self-will, using Plato's statement in the Laws that

it is proper that he who is destined to be a great man should neither love himself, nor the things pertaining to himself, but that he should love just actions, whether they are accomplished by himself or by another. In consequence of this error, every man's ignorance appears to himself to be wisdom.134

Third, Coleridge declares it probable that Plato had esoterically taught the doctrine of the Trinity in its true form.135 As part of his attempt at exhaustive, systematic analysis of the possible alternatives to his own beliefs, Coleridge reviews non- (or pseudo-)Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the most historically powerful of which is the Neoplatonic Trinity of Plotinus and his successors. Coleridge condemns the latter, however, because it is (in Coleridge's view) invariably subordinationist: it rests on the doctrine of emanation from the One (identified with the Good), which implies that the second and third hypostases (nous and dianoui) are diminishments from the pure Source. Coleridge's Christian Trinity, on the other hand, is based on a principle of equality between the three Persons. Whilst admitting that he cannot offer evidence from Plato's texts, since Plato would not commit such reflections to writing, he proposes that Plato maintained this doctrine in its pure form, which was corrupted by the Neoplatonists.136 Concomitantly, Coleridge extols Plato's conception of the Supreme Being.137 This praise echoes what Coleridge had said in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

Plato had taught men that after going through all the highest exertions of the faculties which nature had given them, cultivating their senses, their understandings, their reason, and their moral powers, yet still there was a ground wanting, a something that could not be found within the sphere of their knowledge. Yet knowledge led men to ask for that ground, and this he placed in the Supreme Being as the final result of all human effort and human reasoning.138

Despite the paucity of direct references to Plato in the Opus as compared with The Friend, many more parallels and derivations could be noted. I wish to focus, however, on one example of Coleridge's use of a Platonic notion to contest Kantian ethics in Fragment One. In arguing that the Good Will is the sole unconditional moral good Coleridge cites

Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, with whom I accord only so far as it [sic] is opposed to the modern Epicurean [. . .] The points in which I disagree with [Kant] — those, namely, in which he differs from the Christian code — and the philosophical grounds of my disagreement will appear in its own place in another part of this work.139

There is (as ever) no such full explanation elsewhere, but a few pages later there appears another note criticizing Kant's ethics in terms of some Greek categories: as in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Coleridge critiques contemporary German thought via Ancient Greek anticipations. The note distinguishes three types of happiness. 'The first is that testifying state of the Good Will' named jaaKapiorrjc; or bliss: 'the Spiritual in our nature'. The second 'belongs in like manner to the intellectual'. Coleridge complains that the debasement of language has deprived us of a word for this, and so coins 'eunoya' or 'eunoy'. 'The third is "Pleasure", the "r|8ovrj" of the Greeks, i.e. the aggregate of the sensations arising from the co-incidence, conformed in kind and degree with the stimulability of the sentient individual'.140 Coleridge presents the hierarchy emphatically:

The first is alone unconditionally good; the second good when employed in the service of the first, and innocent except when employed to its difference; the third (i.e. Considered in relation to a moral and rational being in a probationary state) innocent only when made assistant to the second and first. [. . .] The first is the master working at the head of his labourers; the second is the free servant, the unhired tenant, who offers the first fruits to his Lord, and on what remains receives a blessing of increase; the third is the harnessed buffalo that is unmuzzled only while it treads out the corn, and is fed when it must be and because it must be and as little as it can be, and is tolerated only as far as it is serviceable to the second and compatible with the first.141

This is reminiscent of Plato in three ways. First, in Timaeus, the appetitive part of the soul is described as like a beast, untamed but necessary to be maintained: it is stationed in a low part of the body so that, always feeding at its stall, it remains as far as possible from the seat of council .142 Second, notwithstanding Coleridge's fervent restriction of bodily pleasure, he is here attempting to reclaim intellectuai pleasure (eunoya) from Kantian disapproval. Third, Coleridge's triad is strongly reminiscent of the charioteer and two horses in Plato's Phaedms: it is typical that Coleridge should challenge Kantian dualism via a Platonic triad.

A note to this passage suggests that Kant and Fichte

have erred and verged towards enthusiasm in their confusion of the second with the third, the eunoya with the Hedone, the desirable of the intellect with the desirable of the body, and the exclusion of both indifferently from the permanent objects of the rational Will.

Indeed, Kant argues in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Verminfi [Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason] that one aspect of the radical evil of human nature is its inability to consider the law alone as an all-sufficient incentive, and its need for further incentives.143 In Coleridge's opinion, 'Eunoya' is not spiritual, but can contribute to the spiritual. It should not be excluded from a state of spiritual bliss any more than physical pleasure should be always excluded from the intellectual: 'still it may be to the spirit as the body to the soul'. The note concludes quite abruptly:

There is a body terrestrial, and this we leave behind when it is worn out or its purposes fulfilled; but there is a body celestial, which is imperishable and reproduced by the spirit for ever, abides as its Logos, its Word and express image (elklov) [sic: είώψ], through which and with which it energizes.144

This is enigmatic, but a comparable discussion in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy helps to unravel Coleridge's thread. In Lecture Three Coleridge detects a 'confusion' in Socrates 'and even in a number of the [dialogues] of Plato himself' over the word 'happiness'. This time he differentiates four rather than three 'perfectly distinct states': (i) bodily, i.e. pleasure, voluptas, ηδονή; (ii) 'a certain joyousness [laetitia,, as where Pythagoras discovered the proposition that made him cry out "Eureka!"': this seems to correspond to 'eunoya' in the Opus note; (iii) the happiness arising from consideration of one's good fortune in outward circumstances, felicitas, £uru)(ia, eu8ai|a.ovia: this is omitted in the Opus note; (iv) 'the peace of God', corresponding to spiritual bliss in the Opus note.145 'Now Socrates was continually vacillating', asserts Coleridge. Sometimes Socrates suggested that the good lay in mere utility, which is tantamount to the quantity of agreeable sensations; sometimes he favoured an intellectual harmony; sometimes indeed 'the true piety of blessedness', but then he 'again relapses and considers this but another mode of pleasure'. In Coleridge's view, the consequence of the failure to desynonymize these alternatives was that Socrates' followers split according to temperament. On the one hand, the morose Cynic Antisthenes understood that happiness consisted in being free from the anxious pursuit of pleasure, and 'became a mendicant friar', despising others' pleasures and living a selfish life under pretence of morality. On the other, the Cyrenaic Aristippus sought as much pleasure as possible, of any kind, not differentiating between the pleasures of poetry and the pleasures of the table.146 From the Cyrenaic sect arose Epicureanism, which effectively reduces all happiness to the physical level — an indirect result of Socrates' vacillation.147 Contemporaneously with Epicurus, 'and as if where the poison grew there the antidote was to grow', Zeno established Stoicism, with some debt to the Cynics but transcending their selfishness.148 While Epicureanism placed the good in the realm of senses, Stoicism, its polar opposite, claimed that the mind is its own place, self-sufficient and detached from the senses. Yet although Stoic morality is, for Coleridge, infinitely preferable to the Epicurean, it lays an insupportable burden on humanity by enjoining perfection without allowing for the inescapable weakness of sinful flesh. Christianity was the divine medium, since Christ retained Zeno's insistence on perfection, yet provided the necessary scheme of redemption without which despair must ensue. 149 Christianity, through the Incarnation, acknowledges that 'a finite being has a body and must have a body', thus banishing 'metaphysical discussions between the soul and the body as two distinct or two heterogeneous things'.150 Our immortality necessarily involves a continuation of our consciousness, and thus of our conscience, which means 'truly the resurrection of our body'.151 This is the 'body celestial' with which Coleridge concludes the Opus note. Coleridge's criticism of Kant's ethics using the Greek terminology, then, aligns Kant with Stoicism.152 Coleridge states that he accords with Kant insofar as the latter combats the 'modern Epicureanism' implicit in mainstream contemporary thought, just as he approves of Stoicism insofar as it opposed the original Epicureanism. In both cases, though, he disputes on Christian grounds the sealing off of spiritual bliss from intellectual pleasure — having admitted which, it is necessary for him further to admit the role of physical pleasure for the sclwne Seek (beautiful soul). Nevertheless, the image of sensual pleasure as a harnessed buffalo is starkly representative of the general tenor of the Opus Maximum.I53

The Indemonstratbility of the Idea: Negation

The great moral importance of negative Knowledge and Belief in Religion. In this way only can the process of unsensualizing the Soul and purifying the temple of the mind from Idols in order to prepare for the Epiphany of the Ideas [sic]. [. . .] But generally speaking, the Negative, the insight into the not-truth, the not possible of A. B. C. D. and so on S.T.W. is all that the ablest and most gifted Reasoners can help others to. The Positive, the X Y Z they must find for themselves, or meet in themselves. All Ideas are Felicities. The most that can be done by Volition of Thinking, is but like bringing out Stars from the blue sky or in the rifts between sombring Clouds, on a Summer Evening.154

Most of the conceptual content of the Opus Maximum I have just summarized is expressed in language which approaches the ideal outlined, but not achieved in, The Friend: severely logical, in long demonstrative chains, unbroken by appeals to authority or quotations of poetry. In the terms I used in Chapter 3, it might be said that philosophy is at last triumphing in its quarrel with poetry in this late stage of Coleridge's career — and this might seem to reinforce the traditional view that Coleridge is no longer an interesting 'literary' writer post-1818. Certainly Coleridge associates esoteric material with the aspiration to system, in the sense of an all-encompassing network of propositions, and system in turn with an ascetic attitude to the world of the senses and to art, including poetic language. Thus he introduces his single substantial reference to Shakespeare with an apologetic appeal not to delight but to edification: 'If in the present work we may without impropriety refer to the work of an author, next to Holy Writ, the most instructive'.155 Coleridge makes a similar apology with regard to Milton, as I discuss below. This kind of askesis — avoiding heteronomy in a work of pure reason — I have labelled Kantian, in view of Kant's protestation that 'philosophy is fundamentally prosaic'; it is aptly symbolized by the image of the harnessed buffalo. And yet, Coleridge is keen to differentiate himself from Stoicism, even of the Kantian type, and there was a hint even in that austere note on happiness that art plays a part in Coleridge's moral scheme, if only as an expression of'intellectual happiness'. In fact, although the Opus is ambivalent on the point, I want to claim that a particular kind of poetic language remains necessary to Coleridge — poetic language, that is, which negates rather than celebrates the sensual world. In the Philosophical Lectures, Coleridge referred to this kind of language as symbolic. The vocabulary of symbol barely appears in the Opus Maximum, but I hope to show that the concept remains. To forecast the argument I am now developing: despite the emphasis on demonstration, and corresponding strictly logical prose, the Opus Maximum is frequently punctuated by rhetorical evocations of the sublime, comparable to those of Essay XI on Method, but arguably better-earned. This is because the Ideas, especially Will, being the ground of all demonstration, cannot themselves be demonstrated. Ideas can be apprehended only negatively, by emptying the mind from sense-perceptions. But Coleridge regards this emptying process as like walking along a precipice; a sublime kind of language which effaces sensual associations may easily be in danger of allowing them to rush back into the mind, of unharnessing the buffalo. I show below how Coleridge turns to Milton as a poet who offers the requ ired sort of Idea-laden language— albeit with the ambivalence typical of the 'ancient quarrel'.

Underlying Coleridge's logical demonstrations, then, is the 'indemonstrable'. He asserts this in the final Essay on Method: 'For that the very ground, saith Aristotle, is groundless or self-grounded, is an identical proposition. From the indemonstrable flows the sap, that circulates through every branch and spray of the demonstration'.156 In the Opus Maximum he repeats these words almost exactly,157 and enforces the concept fully and repeatedly. In arguing that no science of God is possible, for example, he acknowledges the shock a devout reader might feel at learning that the Supreme Being is indemonstrable, but promises a new source of faith thereby, since 'to demonstrate a thing is to establish its antecedent, and thus to construct the thing anew; [. . .what is] first can have no antecedent, and what is absolutely One [. . .] no construction': thus belief in God is placed squarely in the realm of faith.I58 Likewise, refuting attempted 'demonstrations' of the existence of God, Coleridge highlights 'the strict and proper as well as etymological sense of the word "demonstrate"', in the sense of showing something to be ultimately something else.159 He continues that there are 'ideas or truths known by their own light' which are therefore 'above demonstration'.160 This notion is fundamental to the Opus, the very first sentence in the book being this: 'In every science something is assumed the proof of which is prior to the science itself'. This helps (verbally, at least) to clarify the problem of the 'initiative Idea' of Coleridgean method, which the Essays on Method left obscure. Before a chain of demonstrations can begin, the philosopher must apprehend an Idea which cannot be demonstrated; at the beginning of the Opus, this is the Idea of Will. Coleridge had noted years earlier that 'The Trinity, as Bishop Leighton has well remarked, is "a doctrine of faith, not of demonstration", except in a moral sense'161 — implying that any demonstrative reasoning about the Trinity must stem from the Idea of Will which lies at the root of the moral law. Coleridge insists that an 'Idea is not simply knowledge or perception as distinguished from the thing perceived: it is a realizing knowledge, a knowledge causative of its own reality'.162 This is Coleridge's concept of a 'constitutive' Idea: Ideas are intelligible to us insofar as they actively constitute our mind. It is natural to ask whether it is possible to talk about Ideas if one defines them in this way, and if so, how. As Vallins says, the interest in Coleridge's approach to such 'philosophically insoluble problems' lies

primarily in the circular procedure by which [. . .] Coleridge strives to express an intuition which itself arises primarily from that quest for expression. [. . .] Coleridge's ideas of God and the processes of the human intellect are consistently characterized by an emphasis on their inexpressibleness which can only arise from a continual confrontation with the limits of language.163

That that liminal confrontation is continual is important: Coleridge's use of repetition, of what McFarland calls a 'circumvolving argument', is crucial to the power of the Opus.164 At a stylistic level this accounts for the obvious difference in the experience of reading the Opus from that of reading Kant. Despite long chains of frequently Kantian argument, Coleridge requires a different register to assert those foundational Ideas which lie beyond the reach of logical argument. A modern defence for this method is made by Ernesto Grassi, who like Coleridge argues from the etymology of the word 'demonstrate': 'To prove [iipo-deiknumi] means to show something to be something, on the basis of something. [. . .] Apodictic, demonstrative speech [. . .] establishes the definition of a phenomenon by tracing it back to ultimate principles, or mmtf. The archai, or bases, themselves cannot be the object of logical, demonstrative speech, continues Grassi — otherwise they would no longer be the first assertions. Archai 'cannot have an apodictic, demonstrative character and structure but are thoroughly indicative'. They 'cannot have a rational but only a rhetorical character'; rhetoric is not, on this definition, 'the technique of an exterior persuasion; it is rather the speech which is the basis of rational thought'.165 The Opus, which begins and ends with the indemonstrable and therefore the unsayable, relies on rhetoric in Grassi's sense.

Admittedly the term "rhetoric" would not satisfy Coleridge, who so anxiously distances himself from the manipulative art of the Sophists, and prefers to identify his own method with the dialectic of Plato. Coleridge himself writes of employing 'the formal algebra of dialectic, or tentative logic', a vague formula — but hardly more vague than a modern definition of Plato's dialectic as 'a kind of non-formal logic, i.e. a logic which reveals the structure of reality'.166 Coleridge, with his commitment to the Idea of the Logos, liked to play with the word 'logic' in this way, and probably considered 'dialectic' the appropriate term for his procedure. He would have read Tennemann's argument that dialectical 'method' was as vital to Plato as his practical and theoretical philosophy.167 And he associates all these ideas explicitly in the Opus when he writes that the Platonists purified the mind from its idols by

the discipline of the discursive faculty by the common logic, in order that the pupil, by a precise and intimate acquaintance with the proper powers and forms of the finite, or individual, understanding, might be prepared for the dialectic so highly and mysteriously extolled by Plato as the very wings of philosophy by which we ascend from the conditional to the absolute.168

Indeed, Socrates advocates dialectic as the means of apprehending the Idea of the Good, by which reason soars beyond hypotheses

to that which is unhypothetical, viz, the principle of the universe, and coming into contact with it, again adhering to those things which adhere to the principle, it may thus descend to the end; using no where any thing which is sensible, but forms themselves, proceeding; through some to others, and at length in forms terminating its progression.169

Coleridge, then, strongly emphasizes the negative aspect of dialectic as outlined by Socrates: its function of freeing the mind from the tyranny of objects of sense-perception, what Coleridge calls in Biographic 'the despotism of the eye' and more theologically in the Opus 'THE LUST OF THE EYE'.170

The difficulty for Coleridgean dialectic is that language is bound to temporal and spatial reference, whereas a discourse of Ideas must grapple with that which is not presentable under the relations of time and space. Thus the philosopher must try to choose 'words the least likely to bewilder the judgment of his auditor by the intrusive associations of habitual fancy'.171 This is another manifestation of the problem of 'the communication of truth', but at a higher level than in The Friend: whereas readers of The Friend were presumed to be struggling chiefly with their own ignorance, readers of the Opus are confronting the absolute limits of language. Coleridge cites the Pythagoreans' numerical language, and the musical and geometrical terms of Plato and the Platonists as responses to this linguistic difficulty. For the same reason these philosophers enjoined geometry as 'the <first> purification of the mind, the first step towards its emancipation from the despotism and disturbing forces of the senses'.172

Coleridge further describes the negative method of Platonic dialectic in the terms familiar from the Philosophies! Lectures, The discipline of common logic which provided the preparatory steps for dialectic proceeded, asserts Coleridge, by taking two premises, each undeniable on the level of the understanding, and making faultless deductions from each to reach two inevitable conclusions; yet the conclusions 'are in direct and exclusive contradiction to each other'.173 Coleridge mentions the Parmenides in particular: this is an apt example for his present theme, as it is the most perplexing of Plato's writings on the theory of Ideas, reaching the apparently sceptical conclusion: 'whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be'. Coleridge states that

The inference is evident, though Plato commonly leaves it to his reader's own reflexion: namely, either that all reasoning is a mere illusion, and that the simplest noticing and recording of phaenomena, with the art of arranging the same for the purposes of more easy recollection. Constitutes the whole of human knowledge and the sole legitimate object: of the human intellect, or [that] there must exist a class of truths to which the measures of time and space and the forms of quantity, quality, and contingent relation are not applicable.174

There is considerable similarity between this passage and the beginning of Biographia chapter nine — which raises the posibility that this thought on the significance of Plato's negative methodology had struck Coleridge as early as 1801. In Biogmphia Coleridge relates that having put Berkeley, Leibniz, and Hartley behind him, he began to enquire whether a system of philosophy, 'as distinct from mere history and historic classification' is possible at all. He initially felt that 'the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect, and to classify'.175 This could have been around 1802, when Coleridge wrote, 'last winter I read the Parmenides & the Timaeus with great care',176 contemporaneously with his first study of Kant. If the narrative of the Biogmphia is trustworthy, Coleridge's Plato had long represented a path beyond the Kantian Antinomies.

From this preamble on Plato's dialectical method, Coleridge moves to a discussion of 'eternity' as the 'ground' of time, comparable to the discussion in Timiieus. Coleridge's purpose is to establish the priority in order of thought of Will over Being, i.e. of the Father over the Son, which is a non-temporal distinction we struggle in vain to find adequate words for: 'We are compelled by the constitution of our own conscious understanding [. . .] to attribute relations of cause and effect improperly, and to a transcendent subject'.177 In explaining how to apprehend the Idea of 'Alterity', i.e. how an 'other' (the Son) can proceed from the One (the Father), Coleridge is led into a reflection on Platonic Ideas in general, and from there to one of the most self-consciously sublime passages in the whole work.

The Idea of Alterity, consequent upon that of Will, is constitutive, i.e. we cannot approach it by analogy or deduce it by logic, but rather it is 'every where bearing evidence of its own reality according to the reality of the <particular> idea',178 As if sensing that this circular proposition requires a gloss, Coleridge appends a footnote asterisked at the word 'idea'. Although it does not clarify, it adds a thought on how Plato considered the ideas accessible by anamnesis:

The idea of a circle, for instance, compared with the idea of God. Reality is contained in both, though in the first the reality is subjective and mental exclusively while the second affirms an absolute reality. If the expressions of Plato are more than mythical, and if the passages I have in view are not merely a part of the poetic drapery <with> which he clouded a philosophy too lustrous for the unprepared eye of his contemporaries, it must have been inattention to this truth — viz. that realities may be different without ceasing to be reality — which led him to the fiction of prototype circles, substantial and living diagrams in some pre-existent state, our present mathematical figures being the reflexes of these in the troubled mirror which the <rational> souls were privileged to carry with them in their fall, and the looking on which constitutes scientific knowledges — which therefore, in consistency with this scheme, the divine philosopher entitles 'recognitions'.179

This note reflects Coleridge's typical caution about Plato based on the fact that, as he says in the philosophical Lectures, we do not well know what Platonism was. The suggestion that the remarkable literary style of the Timaeus in particular may be mere 'drapery', moreover, reflects the puritanical attitude to poetry throughout the Opus Maximum,180 while the sense of Plato as dazzling, yet self-veiling, which Coleridge had long maintained, evidently supports a belief in his esoterica. Among the 'passages' of Plato to which Coleridge refers, the primary must be Timaeus 36c-d, in which the Demiurge forms two circles, making them revolve uniformly on one axis, one of the circles interior, the other exterior. 'The exterior motion he named the motion of the same, the interior that of the Other'. To which 'truth' Coleridge thinks Plato may have been inattentive is not obvious; but one point may be that the idea of a circle is regulative (as merely subjective), while that of God is constitutive (as objective, living), and that the circle is therefore not an adequate symbol for God. Coleridge is anyway right to discern a notion in the Timaeus at least closely resembling the doctrine of anamnesis of Phaedo and Plutedms. When Timaeus relates that the laws of the universe were declared to the soul (in the mixing bowl) before it became differentiated into individual souls, this sounds very similar to the myth that the soul beheld the Ideas in a pre-existent state.181

Poetry in the Opus Maximum: Milton as Sublime Exemplar

Whereas in The Friend Coleridge had endorsed the concept of mamnesis by quoting extensively from the 'Immortality Ode', in the passage of the Opus just discussed he intimates ambivalence about it. Is it merely part of Plato's poetic drapery? Does it reflect inattention to some vital truth, which ought to be rigorously enforced in the Opus? Coleridge exculpates Plato from inconsistency, as before, on the basis that he had two sets of teachings, exoteric and esoteric; but his impatience with 'poetic drapery' significantly reflects the ascetic perspective of the Opus. In pursuing the esoteric subject-matter of the Idea of Will and deductions therefrom, Coleridge prefers strictly functional language instead of the mixture of rhetorical exclamation and poetic quotation he had allowed himself in The Friend. Insofar as this is the case, he shows himself more in sympathy with Plato the banisher of poets than with Plato the poetic philosopher. The Opus suggests that, in apprehending an Idea, the mind must rid itself all those sensuous associations which poetry might encourage.

However, at a few points in the Opus Coleridge turns to one particular poet as an 'authority' — a use he does not make even of the Bible. Fragment Two opens by appealing to 'Milton's authority' to use the word 'Arbitrement' to designate Will as the principal of personality and free agency (Raphael tells Adam, 'to stand or fall | Free in thine own arbitrement it lies').182 Coleridge emphasizes this elsewhere in his readings of Paradise Lost, stating that in opposition to Calvinism, 'Milton asserted the will, but declared for the enslavement of the will out of an act of the will itself'.183 Coleridge was evidently conscious that his Opus shared a fundamental topic with Milton's Paradise Lost: the Will.

The authority of Milton becomes useful later in the same Fragment. Embarking on the sublime passage on the apprehension of the Idea, Coleridge at last departs from his logical, deductive discourse into something else: an attempt to ascend from 'common logic' (on the level of Understanding) to 'higher logic' (on the level of Reason). To achieve this ascent, he suddenly turns to an authority — not the Bible, Plato, or Kant, but the poet, Milton. Milton's poetry is invoked to banish the despotism of the eye.

Coleridge states that, in contemplating the Idea, 'the idea itself alone' must suffice, without help from 'the eye', without analogy or example, which would be (so to speak) heteronomous.184 The sublime register of Coleridgean 'higher logic' asserts itself in a silence-formula which blends the atmosphere of an ancient mystery religion with that of Christian piety: 'The silence and the solitude which the last-born of ancient philosophy adjured over all nature and all spirits must be obtained in the mind before this still small voice can be heard by the soul'. The last-born of ancient philosophy is Proclus, and Coleridge is in fact referring back to the silence-formula of Proclus he quoted earlier, where the purpose was likewise to warn of the difficulty and danger of investigating truths 'which a Plato deemed scarcely discoverable [. . .] and assuredly not communicable but after a long and earnest discipline or [sic] silence and inward stillness'.185 As in his description (at the end of Lecture Four on Plato) of a Renaissance painting as representative of the influence of Plato's thought, Coleridge portrays his sublime in black-and-white: 'From no twilight, and amid no heraldry of multiform and many-coloured clouds, can this divine light be born for us'. 'It' — the Idea, the divine light, now synonymous —

must divide itself from the darkness, on which a spirit higher than the individual soul hath descended and made pregnant; and as a birth, and the first day of a new creation, doth the soul contemplate it that doth indeed contemplate it.186

The echo is of the opening of Paradise Lost: 'Thou from the first j Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread | Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss | And mad'st it pregnant'.187 As Milton's addressee is the Holy Spirit, Coleridge's allusion confirms that the impregnation of the Abyss is made by the Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity. Milton probably provides the only acceptable form of poetry for Coleridge at this point: since Paradise Lost, like the Opus, responds to (even exploits) the impossibility of describing that which is indescribable because it 'surmounts the reach | Of human sense'.l88 Blind Milton is enlisted as an ally against the despotism of the eye. For what T. S. Eliot disliked in Milton, that his 'images do not give [the] sense of particularity [...]. I find, in reading Paradise Lost, that I am happiest where there is least to visualize', Coleridge considered a virtue: in a lecture, Coleridge described Milton's technique as the substitution of 'a grand feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image'.189 Coleridge had previously used an unusual word to describe this quality of Milton's verse: 'Ideality', which connotes (as Perry says) Coleridge's celebration of 'an inward creativity free from any dependence on external things or outward sense'.190 This describes as nearly as possible what Coleridge wanted for his Idea-grasping dialectic in the Opus.

Coleridge continues with a further quotation adapted from Milton:

These words, though authorized and sanctioned by the greatest, wisest, and best of the human race, will, I am but too well aware, appear to many 'the flights of a poet soaring in the high season of his fancies, with his garland and his singing robes about him, yet even for those that consent to sit below in the cool element of prose amongst readers of no empyreal conceit', it must appear evident on the least actual reflection that if ideas differ in kind from images, abstractions and generalizations, and are diverse and more than these, nothing less can be declared of them.191

McFarland thinks it most likely that by the greatest, wisest, and best of the human race Coleridge means Milton, but notes that it could be Plato:192 an exemplary confusion, in a sense, and the grammar does allow for either. The section in inverted commas, however, is definitely Milton (unidentified by the editor). In The Reason of Church Government Milton writes:

For although a Poet soaring in the high region of his fancies with his garland and singing robes about him might without apology speak more of himself than I mean to do, yet for me sitting here below in the cool element of prose, a mortall thing among many readers of no Empyreall conceit, to venture and divulge unusual things of my selfe, I shall petition to the gentler sort, it may not be envy to me.193

The context of Coleridge's sentence reflects his ambivalence towards poetry in the Opus. In keeping with the predominantly 'unliterary' nature of his work, Coleridge alters the substance of the quotation. Whereas Milton elevates poetry as the highest form of writing, Coleridge's meaning is that only the vulgar would regard his argument as the mere flights of a poet. This downgrading of poetry may be reflected in the alteration of a word. In The Friend Coleridge had misquoted the same passage (again unidentified by the editor), but with the word: 'the high reason of his fancies'.194 To change this in the Opus to 'season' might suggest a desire to avoid linking reason with poetic fancy. It might also suggest something transient in poetic achievement; Coleridge himself, after all, liked to represent himself as having had a brief season as a poet. If Coleridge was dictating from memory, he could easily have made a slip — but it is striking that these different words occurred to him in different contexts. Significantly, the quotation of this passage in The Friend occurs in an essay in 'On the Communication of Truth', in the context of the anxiety about readers (discussed above). Coleridge associated Milton with the esoteric cultivation of'fit audience [. . .] though few',195 which was precisely the enterprise of the Opus Maximum's address to the 'speculative intellect'.

Even as he is explicitly downgrading poetry, then, Coleridge is ambitiously identifying himself with Milton, taking up the mantle of that sublime discourse of which Milton is a great exemplar. This self-identification with Milton also repeats, to some extent, a pattern more strongly evident in Biographia, where this gave him a platform from which to criticize a certain aspect of Wordsworth.196 In the Opus, Coleridge very stringently quotes Wordsworth's 'sense sublime j of something far more deeply interfused, | Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns' as an example of the delusive pantheism to which piously intentioned poets can succumb:197 even though the quotation is not obviously visual, it represents in seductive form the despotism of the eye, since it reflects (in Coleridge's view) misplaced reverence for the visible world. There is some continuity here with Coleridge's enumeration in Biographia of several characteristic faults of Wordsworth's poetry, two of which involve over-enthusiastic engagement with objects in nature. First, Coleridge attacks Wordsworth's 'wotter-of-fact-mss', one aspect of which is his tendency to describe objects with 'laborious minuteness'.198 Second, he reproves Wordsworth for 'thoughts and images too great for the subject', or 'mental bombast'. Illustrating the latter criticism, Coleridge objects to Wordsworth's lines in 'Daffodils', 'They flash upon that inward eye, | Which is the bliss of solitude!', on the ground that the imi'tird eye ought to have a worthier occupation than to behold images of flowers; otherwise, 'in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed "the bliss of solitude"?'199 In contrast to Wordsworth's occasional confusion of inward with corporeal eye, Coleridge cites Milton, who speaks to the Imagination instead of to the Fancy, presenting ideals rather than representing particulars, 'creation rather than painting'.200 ('Painting' seems here to carry a negative connotation of passive mimesis, similar to that in the Republic.) It is appropriate to Coleridge's vocabulary in the Opus that Milton's paradise was a place of 'enormous bliss':201 bliss being what Coleridge asserts as higher than — though legitimately linked to — intellectual kinds of happiness.202

The 'true sublime' of Milton, which in a lecture Coleridge had opposed to the 'false sublime' of Erasmus Darwin,203becomes in the Opus a weapon against the pantheism not only of Wordsworth, but also of non-Christian religions. Coleridge takes the Bhagavad-Gita as an example (the work was relatively popular in England as a result of Charles Wilkins's translation of 1785). He stigmatizes the Hindu poem by reversing the praise of Milton just quoted: like 'all Indian poetry' it attempts to 'image the unimageable, not by symbols but by a jumble of Images helped out by words of number — a delirious fancy excludes all unifying Imagination'.204 The Bhagavad-Gita conveys a false sublime, based not on the evocation of infinity but rather the unfortunately concrete evocation of a large number of large things. The translator's comparison of the work to Milton draws Coleridge's retort:

Milton!! [. . .] if there be one character of genius predominant in Milton it is this, that he never passes off bigness for greatness. Children never can make things big enough, and exactly so it is with the poets of India.205

Coleridge even links 'Brahman Theology' to atheism by quoting from Milton's Samson Agonistes on the absurdity of atheists: he would have expected that regarding Brahman sensual pantheism, 'of such doctrine never was there school, | But the heart of the fool', were it not that such a religion does actually exist.206 Coleridge's censorious attitude to the Sanskrit poem has an interesting parallel in Hegel, who contrasts the 'affirmative sublime', pantheistic and to be found in Indian poetry, with the 'negative sublime', an apprehension of the Absolute in which 'the appearance falls short of the content'. The 'negative sublime' is negative with regard to particulars, and is to be found in Hebrew poetry:

While therefore we found in the imagination of substantiality and its pantheism an infinite enlargement, here we have to marvel at the force of elevation of the mind which abandons everything in order to declare the exclusive power of God.207

This applies nicely to Coleridge's contrast between the Bhagavad-Gita and Milton, and in general to the negative method of Coleridgean dialectic.

I have already suggested that behind Coleridge's invocations of Milton's 'authority' lay a sense that his Opus was in some sense a similar endeavour to Milton's epic. In a note about Paradise Lost made around 1818 or 1819, Coleridge seems to be reflecting on his own situation as much as Milton's: notwithstanding 'an apparently unhappy choice in marriage', he writes, Milton's poetry shows him truly 'susceptible of domestic enjoyments'. Milton

was, as every truly great poet has been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal.208

This account of the genesis of Paradise Lost could pass for a flattering view of the Opus. There are certainly similarities between the two works: both have free will as a central theme; both were composed by dictation; both are written in a style of extreme and unconventional complexity designed to defy the progress and regress of social language; both record a vision of hope in the face of overwhelming disappointment. The parallels should not be laboured, of course, given the obvious formal difference: Paradise Lost is poetry, the Opus Maximum prose, and a prose mostly resistant to the sweet baits of literature. Yet the general similarities between Coleridge and Milton did strike a contemporary: De Quincey comments that like Milton, 'Coleridge, also, is a poet; Coleridge, also, was mixed up with the fervent politics of his age — an age how memorably reflecting the revolutionary agitations of Milton's age; Coleridge, also, was an extensive and brilliant scholar'.209 And when Coleridge expressed his hope that the Opus Maximum would bring him 'Fame in the noblest sense of the word', he invoked Milton again — this time the passage on fame in Lytidas.210 Since in this passage the noblest kind of fame is said to be 'fame in heaven', Coleridge's allusion discloses the truly epic or Miltonic scale of his ambition. Finally, it is relevant that Coleridge saw Milton as enriching the world by 'avenging himself' on it through Paradise Lost, given the weight of polemic in the Opus against 'the prejudices of a rude and barbarous age': the phrase 'barbarous age' again echoing Milton.211

I have lingered on Coleridge's brief and paradoxically apologetic moments of Miltonic self-fashioning in the Opus, since they reflect the fact that philosophy never fully banishes poetry from Coleridge's writing. Coleridge implies that he is investigating Plato's esoteric doctrines in the Opus — a deeper approach to Plato than that in The Friend where the 'divine philosopher' functions above all as a useful authority for Coleridgean esoteric concealment and postponement. Just as Plato would not commit his whole system to writing, however, so Coleridge's 'dialectic' invokes Ideas not by exhaustive propositions, but by means of the sublime poetic discourse that takes over when prepositional language is exhausted. This is admittedly a limited readmission of poetic language to the quest for the Good. But did Socrates not say that although reason had banished the poets, he would readily accept any convincing defence made on behalf of poetry, and allow it to retake its place in the ideal republic, or soul?212 However ambivalently, the Opus plays out Coleridge's earlier intuition that Plato and Milton belong together: 'How little the Commentators of Milton have availed themselves of the writings of Plato | Milton's Darling! [. . .] They thought little of Milton's platonizing Spirit — who wrote nothing without an interior meaning'.213 Coleridge would have hoped that posterity would see in the purely 'interior' discourse of the Opus both an unfolding of the esoteric doctrines of Plato beginning from the Idea of Will, and the sublime flight of Milton above the reach of human sense.

Notes to Chapter 5

1. 1833, quoted in Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church, p. 190.

2. Friend, 1, 462—63 n.

3. Assuming McFarland's conjectural dating, which indicates that Coleridge dictated the majority of the Opus Maximum between 1820 and 1823 (see pp. 5, 80, 214, 291).

4. Opus, p. cxcvii.

5. Jerome Christensen, Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 190.

6. Friend, 1, 440.

7. CN iv, 4774 (1820—21). Cf. Friend, 1, 427: 'lest in uttering truth I should convey falsehood'.

8. Friend, 1, 43.

9. As Coleridge emphasized in a letter: CL iv, 713.

10. Friend, 1, 21. Cf. BL, 1, 59.

11. Friend, 1, 20; cf. Christensen, pp. 205 f.

12. Gorgias 465b—466a; 'cookery is to medicine, as rhetoric to justice' (465c).

13. Newlyn criticizes these essays in Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception, esp. p. 58, noting the 'explicitly gendered tenor' of Coleridge's distinction between his own 'masculine' style and the feeble popular style. A further context for Coleridge's strictures on style is his nostalgia for the prestigious university context of academic debate in the seventeenth century, which had gradually given way to the salon-culture of the eighteenth century: see Hedley, pp. 272—79.

14. Friend, 1, 51.

15. Friend, 1, 19, 31, 39, 45.

16. CL iv, 546.

17. Friend, 1, 20. The Friend, began as a weekly periodical in 1809.

18. Friend, 1, 23.

19. Timaeus 69d: 'pleasure [. . .] is the greatest bait [fisXeap] to evil'.

20. Friend, 1, 35; cf. LS, p. 131.

21. Friend, 1, 488.

22. James Hutchison Stirling, 'De Quincey and Coleridge upon Kant', in Jerrold, Tennyson and Macaulay with Other Critical Essays (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1868), pp. 172—224 (p. 194).

23. My account focuses on Coleridge's use of Plato. For an even-handed exposition of the Method essays and their centrality to Coleridge's criticism, see J. R. de J. Jackson, Method and Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). On the literary critical background, see Paul K. Alkon, 'Critical and Logical Concepts of Method from Addison to Coleridge', Eighteenth Century Studies, 5.1 (1971), 97—121.

24. Friend, 1, 448. The letter is addressed not (as Coleridge says) to Dion, but to Dionysius, and is now considered inauthentic.

25. Friend, I, 457; Meno 82b—85b.

26. L. Oening-Hanhoff, 'Methode', in Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophic, ed. by Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Griinder, and Gottfried Gabriel, 13 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell-schaft, 1971—2004), v, 1304—05.

27. Philebus 16c.

28. Phaedrus 265d277c.

29. Neal W. Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, i960), P.4.

30. Friend, 1, 441. Cf. Tennemann 1, 399.

31. Esp. Tennemann 1, 354—57, much of which Coleridge paraphrased; Tennemann admits Plato's bias (p. 351) but considers that his dialogues differentiate the personalities of the Sophists sufficiently to be convincing portrayals (p. 353).

32. Friend, 1, 443, based on Tennemann's extensive paraphrase (I, 400—01).

33. Friend, 1, 443. McFarland emphasizes Coleridge's opposition to Epicurean ethics ancient and modern (Opus, pp. xliv—liii).

34. Friend, 1, 445. The 1809 Friend had been published as a periodical.

35. Ibid.

36. Aids, p. 92. Cf. the passages on Will, time, and evil, which Lovejoy collects from Aids: 'Coleridge and Kant's Two Worlds', pp. 266—67.

37. The salient Greek passage in the Bipont Edition reads: âxxa tcolov ti |ir|V tout' £OTiv, d) Ttal Alovuolou Kai Aa)pi6oc;, to spioTrjfia, o rcavtiov ahiov £Otl KaKtiv; fiaXXov 6s rj rcspl toutou d)6u; (xi, 69). Coleridge probably read it here, since the passage is not quoted by Tennemann. Modern editions replace the question mark (;) after 'KCiKarv' with a comma (,), which clarifies the meaning; but Coleridge would also have seen Ficino's translation on the same page, '[...]& quae malorum omnium causa?' For Taylor's translation of this passage, see p. 32 n. 39 above.

38. Tennemann 11, 217.

39. Friend, 1, 445—46.

40. Friend, 1, 459.

41. Friend, 1, 459—60.

42. Friend, 1, 460.

43. Tennemann 11, 220.

44. Friend, 1, 461.

45. Friend, 1, 461.

46. Joseph Warren Beach (The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966; first published 1936), pp. 320—21) thinks Coleridge's formula 'almost literally' renders the following words of Kant: 'so siehet man wol, der eigenthümliche Grundsatz der Vernunft iiberhaupt (im logischen Gebrauche) sey: zu dem bedingten Erkenntnisse des Verstandes das Unbedingte zu finden, womit die Einheit desselben vollendet wird' ('we see very well that the proper principle of reason in general (in its logical use) is to find the unconditioned for conditioned cognitions of the understanding, with which its unity will be completed'), Critique of Pure Reason, B364. Orsini (p. 52) endorses this source. However, there are many references to the unconditioned in Kant's 'Transcendental Dialectic', e.g. B436 which could equally well count as a 'source'. Another plausible passage on the unconditioned is Critique of the Power of Judgment, §76, a passage very popular with the post-Kantians, who employed the notion of the 'unconditioned' much more than did Kant himself. This is an example of how precise source-hunting is an ever-tempting but sometimes unhelpful approach to Coleridge: Beach's certainty springs from his assumption of'Coleridge's inaccuracy and his extreme want of candor in giving credit for his ideas' (p. 321). I agree that Coleridge's esoteric method is sometimes inaccurate, and uncandid in the sense of (often ostentatiously) concealing ideas and sources; but in this case the abundance of plausible sources suggests instead a composite memory of several passages, perhaps prompted by the Tennemann passage I quoted above.

47. Cf. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, p. 37.

48. See e.g. Critique of Pure Reason, B241.

49. BL 1, 303.

50. Cf. Chapter 2, above.

51. Friend, 1, 462.

52. Friend, I, 462 (n.).

53. Friend, 1, 472. As Gregory says, 'By identifying Plato's project with his own, Coleridge is doing more than stealing a little ancient authority for himself, he is laying claim to a continuous and unifying philosophical project' (Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination, p. 92).

54. Friend, 1, 472.

55. Friend, 1, 454.

56. Coleridge refers again to Plato's 'poetic drapery' in Opus, p. 196.

57. Friend, 1, 462. Beach remarks the close similarity of Schelling's phrase, 'die Uebereinstimmung der Natur mit den Maximen unserer reflectierenden Vernunft' [the correspondence (or coincidence) of nature with the maxims of our reflective reason], noting the reliance of the 'Essays on Method' on concepts from the Naturphilosophie of Schelling and Steffens:

The notion of the relations of objects as 'pre-determined by a truth originating in the mind,' is inherent in the whole of Schelling's 'Naturphilosophie,' and derives from the central, the radical place in his transcendental system, of self-consciousness (Selbstbewusstseyn) from which, as a starting point, he proceeds to deduce, a priori, his 'construction of matter.'

Further similarities are seen in Schelling's belief in the value of system, antipathy to mere hypothesis, and faith in speculative physics (Beach, p. 323; see further pp. 332—33 and nn.).

58. Friend, 1, 463. Talking of the ancients, Coleridge is probably thinking of the moderns again: cf. Phil. Lects. 11, 469:

During the whole of the Middle Ages and almost down to the time of the Restoration of Charles II we discover everywhere metaphysics, always acute and frequently profound, but throughout estranged from, not merely experimental physics generally, but from its most intimate connective, experimental psychology; while from the Restoration we have the opposite extreme, namely experimental physics and a truly enlightened though empirical [and mechanical] psychology, estranged from and in utter contempt of all metaphysics.

59. Friend, 1, 463.

60. Opus, p. 164.

61. CL 11, 947.

62. Friend, 1, 482.

63. Friend, 1, 482.

64. Quoted in Emil Wolff, Francis Bacon und seine Quellen (Berlin: Ferber, 1910), p. 81. For Coleridge on idols, see p. 42, above.

65. Albeit with the major reservation that Plato divorced the Ideas from physical reality: see Wolff, esp. pp. 129—47. In Bacon's Novum Organum there is a possible allusion to Phaedrus 263d, the locus classicus for Platonic method (Wolff, pp. 144—45). Wolff reviews Bacon's extensive debt to Plato and, whilst noting the basic difference between Bacon's 'Forms' as dependent on sense-experience and Plato's Ideas as independent (p. 139), states in strikingly Coleridgean terms: 'Die Methode Bacons ist so keine andere als die platonische [. . .] Zusammenfassung des Gemeinsamen und Aussonderung des Verschiedenen: das sind die Grundprinzipien platonischer und baconischer Methode' [Bacon's method is none other than the Platonic [. . .] bringing together of the common and picking out of the different: these are the basic principles of Platonic and Baconic method] (p. 143). Nevertheless Bacon differs fundamentally from Plato in seeking mastery ('Beherrschung') of the object of knowledge where Plato seeks intuition ('Anschauung'), and Bacon was far from penetrating the mathematical and metaphysical depths of Plato (pp. 157—58). See also F. H. Anderson, 'Bacon on Platonism', University of Toronto Quarterly, 11 (1941—42), 154—66.

66. Quoted in Wolff, p. 8. Cf. Bacon's approving reference to 'Plato's opinion, that all knowledge is but remembrance' (Wolff, p. 1).

67. Friend, 1, 491; also Phil. Lects 11, 486. Cf. Phil. Lects. 11, 488:

This therefore is the true Baconic philosophy. It consists in this, a profound meditation on those laws which the pure reason in man reveals to him, with the confident anticipation and faith that to this will be found to correspond certain laws in nature.

68. Friend, I, 472.

69. Cf. CN, 11, 2372.

70. Friend, 1, 513.

71. 'The Divine Ideas in Coleridge's Opus Maximum: The Rhetoric of the Indemonstrable', Coleridge Bulletin, 22 (Winter 2003), 39—47 (p. 39).

72. Friend, 1, 508.

73. Friend, 1, 509.

74. Opus, p. 104.

75. Friend, 1, 509. Cf. 'On Poesy or Art', discussed on p. 73 above.

76. Friend, 1, 511.

77. Friend, 1, 509—10, lines 77—84, 131—70 of the poem as printed in Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems, ed. by Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 269—77.

78. Friend, 1, 510; BL 11, 147, discussed on p. 41 above.

79. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. by Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), P- 61; John D. Rea, 'Coleridge's Intimations of Immortality from Proclus', Modern Philology, 26 (November 1928), 201—13.

80. Friend, 1, 495; 'Ode', line 155.

81. Line 40; Friend, 1, 40.

82. Lines 151—55.

83. Friend, 1, 514.

84. Friend, 1, 512. The quotation is from Matthew 6. 22.

85. Friend, 1, 514.

86. Evans, 'Divine Ideas', p. 41.

87. Friend, 1, 511, n. 3.

88. Friend, 1, 519—20.

89. Friend, 1, 516.

90. Friend, 1, 523—24.

91. Friend, 1, 519.

92. Friend, 1, 516.

93. Lines 58—59

94. Friend, 1, 514—16.

95. Friend, 1, 516.

96. Coleridge's theoretical objection to the design argument is most concisely expressed in Table Talk (I, 462—63):

Assume the existence of God — and then the harmony and fitness of the physical creation may be shown to correspond with and support such an assumption; but to set about proving the existence of a God by such means is a mere circle — a delusion.

Ben Brice, Coleridge and Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) probes the intellectual background to Coleridge's responses to the design argument.

97. Opus, p. 103.

98. Cf. Richard Tomlinson, 'Pivotal Points in Coleridge's Opus Maximum', Charles Lamb Bulletin 130 (April 2005), 43-55 (p. 55).

99. CL v, 28.

100. CN, iv, 4744 (November 1820) records this gift. Coburn's note identifies the work as Procli Successors Platonici in Platonis theologiam libri sex, ed. with Latin tr. by Aemilius Portus. With Marinus's life of Proclus, Pico della Mirandola's Conclusiones LV secundum Proclum and Proclus's Institutio theologica (Hamburg, 1618).

101. H.J.Jackson, 'Coleridge's Collaborator, Joseph Henry Green', Studies in Romanticism 21.2 (1982), 161—79 (p. 167). Jackson notes that Green was also perhaps Coleridge's main source of German books, as the Sotheby catalogue of the sale of Green's library in 1880 suggests (p. 173).

102. Opus, pp. 22, 241, 222.

103. CN, iv, 4744. Coleridge gives Proclus's Greek; I quote Taylor's translation, TTS viii, 53.

104. CN, iv, 4744.

105. Opus, p. 47n. Plato uses the word rt porta iSsia (Republic 53 6d).

106. Cf. Coleridge's reference to 'a That which is not but which is for ever only about to be': Opus, p. 217.

107. CL vi, 966—67, quoted in Opus, p. cxlvi.

108. Introduction to J. H. Green, Spiritual Philosophy: Founded on the Teaching of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1865), 1, p. xxxviii; quoted in Opus, p. clvi.

109. 'Athenäumsfragment' no. 53, quoted and discussed in Franziska Schmitt, Method in the Fragments: Fragmentarische Strategien in der englischen und deutschen Romantik (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005), pp. 44—45, who offers a valuable treatment of Coleridge in the same light (pp. 125-70).

110. David Simpson, 'Transcendental Philosophy and Romantic Criticism', in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, v: Romanticism, ed. by Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 72—91 (p. 89 n. 30). As a more modestly presented reading text, there is much to be said for Richard S. Tomlinson's edition of the Opus Maximum (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2003).

111. Opus, pp. lxxviii, lxxix.

112. Opus, pp. clviii, clix.

113. Opus, pp. clxxxii, cxcv.

114. Coleridge explicitly avoids quoting Scripture as 'authority' (Opus, pp. 88; 200—01). The reason is clear from Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1822): he fears that this would imply the popular but disastrous notion that the Bible was dictated by a 'superhuman [. . .] Ventriloquist' (SWF, 11, mi—71, pp. 1136, 1149).

115. Opus, p. clxiv. Elinor Shaffer points outMcFarland's neoconservative agenda in editing the Opus Maximum: 'Biblical Criticism and "Darwinism" in Coleridge's Opus Maximum', in A View in the Rear-Mirror: Romantic Aesthetics, Culture and Science Seen from Today, ed. by Walter Pape (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006), pp. 161—74.

116. Opus, p. clxvi; and cf. the similar discussion in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, pp. 366—77. Perhaps McFarland is revising his view from Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. There he states plausibly that one may 'differentiate the role of Plato from that of Kant by saying that, though both served as prolegomena to the true system, Plato served the heart and Kant the head' (p. 212).

117. Opus, p. clxvi.

118. Friend, 1, 461.

119. Opus, pp. 42, 58. On the development of Coleridge's view of the Kantian moral law, cf. pp. 46—47, above.

120. Opus, p. 74.

121. Opus, p. 75.

122. Opus, pp. 75-76.

123. Opus, p. 76.

124. Opus, pp. 232—33. Cf. Coleridge's definition of the Spirit as 'the act in which the Father and the Son are One [. . .] the Copula by which both are one and the Copula one with them' (pp. 209—10).

125. For a clear account of the Trinity in (especially) the Opus see James D. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 127—42. Boulger, however, downplays an esoteric point, that Coleridge asserts a 'ground [. . .] that is not to be called God' beyond the Trinity: 'the abysmal depth' which 'begetteth not' — related to Bohme's concept of Ungrund (Opus, pp. 232, 195 and n. 335). For a fuller discussion than mine of Coleridge's Platonism as preparation for his Trinitarianism, see McFarland, 'The Trinitarian Resolution', chapter 4 of Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (pp. 191—255).

126. Opus, p. 189.

127. Opus, p. 236.

128. Opus, p. 237.

129. Opus, p. 238. For a critical account see Laurence S. Lockridge, 'The Abyss of Will', in his Coleridge the Moralist (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 53—77.

130. Opus, p. 247.

131. Opus, p. 241. Cf. Hedley, pp. 248—63, and Lovejoy, 'Coleridge and Kant's Two Worlds', pp. 268—69. On the very personal belief in original sin as the 'ground of Coleridge's religious sensibility', see McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, pp. 224, 233—34.

132. Opus, pp. 119—27. McFarland regards this as the 'philosophical fulcrum' of the Opus, comparing the 'Infant Babe' sequence of the Prelude (pp. cxxxv—cxlii).

133. Timaeus 27d5—28ai. It was Augustine who linked Plato's affinity to Christianity to the name of God at Exodus 3. 14, writing: '"HE WHO IS" implies that in comparison with him who really is, because he is unchangeable, the things created changeable have no real existence. This truth Plato vigorously maintained and diligently taught'. Thus arose a patristic tradition, which Cudworth was following when he derived the Platonic idea of being from Exodus 3. 14 and proved this with Timaeus 27d5—28ai (Hedley, p. 77; Cudworth, 1, 572). For references to Coleridge's other discussions of Exodus 3.14, see CN iv, 4644m Perkins sees this passage as central to Coleridge's theory of the Logos (Coleridge's Philosophy, pp. 45—46).

134. Laws 732a (also cited by Hedley, pp. 258—59).

135. Opus, pp. 248—51; cf. 261—62.

136. Opus, p. 252. The one citation of Plato that Coleridge does give in support of this interpretation is his 'positive assertion of a distinctness of the Good as well as of the Intelligent from the Absolute Source'. This sounds like a reference to Republic 509b, where Socrates states that the Good is beyond Being in dignity; Coleridge may have rediscovered it in Proclus, Platonic Theology (TTS vin, 145), where Proclus maintains the strict transcendence of Plato's One/Good. This probably connects with Coleridge's insistence on an impersonal 'Ground' logically prior to God the Father, which he regards as necessary to the possibility of a Trinity of equal relations. The Neoplatonists, on the other hand, 'established their first principle, their absolutum primum, in the idea of the Good', and asserted the emanation of nous and psyche therefrom (Opus, pp. 252—53). Coleridge knew Cudworth's belief that Plato's Trinity was corrupted by the later Platonists (Cudworth, 1, 557), and his account of their subordinationism (1, 580—90).

137. Opus, p. 190.

138. Phil. Lects. 1, 320—21.

139. Opus, pp. 39—40. Kant explicitly argues that a basic opposition exists between Epicureanism and Platonism: both claim too much on the basis of speculative reason, though Platonism is superior in providing excellent practical (i.e. moral) principles (Critique of Pure Reason, B500).

140. Opus, pp. 46-47.

141. Opus, pp. 47-48.

142. Timaeus 7oe.

143. See Hedley, pp. 248—63. On Coleridge's subtle Auseinandersetzung with this work in Aids, see Elinor Shaffer, 'Metaphysics of Culture: Kant and Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31.2 (1970), 199—218. Shaffer has recently updated this article to take account of the recently published fifth volume of Coleridge's Notebooks: 'Coleridge and Kant's "Giant Hand"', in Anglo-German Affinities and Antipathies, ed. by Riidiger Gorner (Munich: Iudicium, 2004), pp. 39-56.

144. Opus, p. 47.

145. Phil. Lects. I, 146-48.

146. Phil. Lects. 1, 148.

147. Phil. Lects. 1, 149; 265—77 (Lecture 6). In another note in the Opus Coleridge suggests that a further result of Socrates' 'unsteadiness' was that Plotinus retained a heteronomous sense of 'the Useful or Advantageous' in his concept of the Good (Opus, pp. 255—56 and n.). Coleridge states that 'this great, good man' did try to 'rise into a purer idea' of the Good: Coleridge is clearly referring here to Socrates, not (contra McFarland) Plotinus.

148. Phil. Lects. 1, 277.

149. Phil. Lects. 1, 283.

150. Phil. Lects. 1, 285.

151. Phil. Lects. 1, 285.

152. He presses the point in his letter to Green, CN IV, 791—92.

153. Graham Davidson explores this tension in 'Duty and Power: Conflicts of the Will in Coleridge's Creation of the Self', in Coleridge's Assertion of Religion: Essays on the 'Opus Maximum', ed. by Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 121—44.

154. CN iv, 5215 (1825).

155. Opus, pp. 33—34. Elinor Shaffer discusses this passage in detail in 'Iago's Malignity Motivated: Coleridge's Unpublished "Opus Maximum"', Shakespeare Quarterly, 19 (1968), 195—203.

156. Friend, 1, 523.

157. Opus, pp. 103—04.

158. Opus, p. 103.

159. Opus, p. 264.

160. Opus, p. 265.

161. CL hi, 481 (April 1814).

162. Opus, p. 123.

163. Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism, p. 142.

164. Opus, p. 291 (n. 1). For a discussion of rhetorical tradition in relation to this point, see Wayne C. Anderson, ' "Perpetual Affirmations, Unexplained": The Rhetoric of Reiteration in Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson', Quarterly Journal of Speech, 71 (1985), 37—51.

165. Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 1980), pp. 18—21.

166. Opus, p. 196; Philip Merlan, 'The Old Academy', in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. by A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, reprinted 1995), p. 37. Cf. A. Miiller, 'Dialektik', in Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie, III, 164-75.

167. 'Dialectic [. . .] is the method of philosophizing. It is certainly undeniable that Plato bestows a high worth on it, because he treats it not as a canon, but as the organ of reason' ('Dialektik [. . .] ist die Methode des Philosophirens. Es ist zwar nicht zu läugenn, daβ ihr Plato einen hohen Werth beilegt, weil er sie nicht als einen Kanon, sondern als Organon der Vernunft betrachtet'): Tennemann 11, 276.

168. Opus, p. 184.

169. Republic 511b—c.

170. BL 1, 107; Opus, p. 85.

171. Opus, p. 183.

172. Opus, pp. 183—84. The same terminology appears in BL 1, 107.

173. Opus, p. 184.

174. Opus, p. 185; cf. p. 19: without the Idea of Will 'as the ground or inceptive position, a system of Philosophy [. . .] as distinct from mere history and empirical classification, would be impossible'.

175. BL 1, 141.

176. CL II 866, 10 Sept 1802. To link these dialogues was traditional: Proclus cites Iamblichus as saying that 'the whole theory of Plato' is comprised in these dialogues, of'sensibles' in Timaeus and 'intelligibles' in Parmenides (Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato, TTS XV, 22; cf. 85).

177. Cf. Timaeus 38a—b:

the terms it was and it will be, which express the species of generated time, are transferred by us to an eternal essence, through oblivion of the truth [. . .] according to truth the term it is is alone accommodated to its nature.

178. Opus, p. 196.

179. Opus, p. 196.

180. Though a later nineteenth-century commentator felt similarly to Coleridge: 'in Plato's highly poetical and allegorical exposition a logical analysis is represented as a process taking place in time, and to reach his true meaning we must strip off the veil of imagery' (The Timaeus of Plato, ed. by R. D. Archer-Hind (London: Macmillan, 1888), p. 86 (n.14)).

181. Timaeus 4id.

182. Opus, p. 80; Paradise Lost, book VIII, lines 640—41. I quote from Paradise Lost, ed. by Alastair Fowler (Essex: Longman 1998).

183. LL 11, 426.

184. Opus, p. 197.

185. Opus, pp. 96—97. In CN iv, 4746, Coleridge notes a similar passage of Proclus on the ascent to Theology, 'beginning with purity as the absence of evil'. He intends to use this for the Opus, but is sceptical of Proclus' 'peculiar doctrines [. . .] fantastic and grotesque, in subjects within ordinary comprehension'.

186. Opus, p. 197.

187. Paradise Lost, Book 1, lines 19—22.

188. Paradise Lost, Book v, lines 571—72.

189. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), pp. 40, 143; Coleridge, LL 1, 311.

190. LL 1, 145. Perry, Division, p. 215.

191. Opus, pp. 197-98.

192. Opus, p. 197 (n. 348).

193. The Prose of John Milton, ed. by J. Max Patrick and others (New York: Doubleday), pp. 107—08.

194. Friend, 1, 44 (italics added). However, in two manuscripts of The Friend, the word is 'region' (ibid., n. 2) — as indeed appears in Thomas Birch's edition of Milton's prose (1738), which Coleridge annotated in 1808.

195. Paradise Lost, Book VII, line 31; BL 11, 147; cf. CN 111, 3678.

196. See Raimonda Modiano, 'Coleridge and Milton: The Case against Wordsworth in the Biographia Literaria', in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria': Text and Meaning, ed. by Frederick Burwick (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), pp. 150—70, though Modiano's view that the Biographia uses Milton to mount a 'vicious attack' on Wordsworth is overstated.

197. Opus, p. 113, quoting 'Tintern Abbey', lines 93—94. Coleridge comments further on pantheism in Opus, pp. 206—07.

198. BL 11, 126.

199. BL 11, 136—37, quoting 'I wandered lonely [. . .]', lines 21—22.

200. BL 11, 128.

201. Paradise Lost, Book v, line 297.

202. Opus, p. 47, in the note on Kant (discussed above, pp. 146—48).

203. LL 1, 401.

204. Opus, p. 394.

205. Opus, p. 281.

206. Opus, p. 276, quoting Samson Agonistes, lines 297—99, which draw in turn on Psalm 14. 1.

207. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans, by T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),I, 375, quoted in Stephen By grave, Coleridge and the Self: Romantic Egotism (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 59.

208. Coleridge's Writings, v: On the Sublime, ed. by David Vallins (New York: Palgrave, 2003), p. 96.

209. De Quincey, Works, XV, 106.

210. CL v, 28 (30 March 1820), referring to Lycidas, lines 64—84.

211. Opus, p. 115 (and n.135): in his prefatory note on 'THE VERSE', Milton calls rhyme 'the invention of a barbarous age'.

212. Republic 60yd.

213. CL, II, 459 (10 September 1802). See further Elizabeth T. McLaughlin, 'Coleridge and Milton', Studies in Philology, 61 (1964), 545—72 (p. 552).