The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iii Part 13

[Footnote 5:

... whence the soul Reason receives, and reason is her being, Discursive or intuitive.

'P. L.' v. 426.--Ed.]

[Footnote 6: The reader of the 'Aids to Reflection' will recognize in this note the rough original of the pa.s.sages p. 313, &c. of the 3d edition of that work.--Ed.]

[Footnote 7: See 'Table Talk', 2d edit. p. 283. Melancthon's words to Calvin are:

'Tuo judicio prorsus a.s.sentior. Affirmu etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse, quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, interfecerunt.'

14th Oct. 1554.--Ed.

[Footnote 8:

"But to circle the earth, 'as the heavenly bodies do',' &c. 'So we may see that the opinion of Copernicus touching the rotation of the earth, which astronomy itself cannot correct, because it is not repugnant to any of the 'phaenomena', yet 'natural history may correct'."

'Advancement of Learning', B. II.--Ed.]

[Footnote 9: That Christ had a twofold being, natural and sacramental; that the Jews destroyed and sacrificed his natural being, and that Christian priests destroy and sacrifice in the Ma.s.s his sacramental being.--Ed.]

[Footnote 10:

'Fides catholica', says Bellarmine, 'docet omnem virtutem esse bonam, omne vitium esse malum. Si autem erraret Papa praecipiendo vitia vel prohibendo virtutes, teneretur Ecclesia credere vitia esse bona et virtutes malas, nisi vellet contra conscientiam peccare.'

'De Pont. Roman'. IV. 5.--Ed.]

[Footnote 11: The ordinary Greek text is:

[Greek: ho deuteros anthropos, ho Kyrios ex ouranou].

The Vulgate is:

'primus h.o.m.o de terra, terrenus; secundus h.o.m.o de coelis, coelestis.'--Ed.]

NOTES ON DONNE. [1]

There have been many, and those ill.u.s.trious, divines in our Church from Elizabeth to the present day, who, overvaluing the accident of antiquity, and arbitrarily determining the appropriation of the words 'ancient,' 'primitive,' and the like to a certain date, as for example, to all before the fourth, fifth, or sixth century, were resolute protesters against the corruptions and tyranny of the Romish hierarch, and yet lagged behind Luther and the Reformers of the first generation.

Hence I have long seen the necessity or expedience of a threefold division of divines. There are many, whom G.o.d forbid that I should call Papistic, or, like Laud, Montague, Heylyn, and others, longing for a Pope at Lambeth, whom yet I dare not name Apostolic. Therefore I divide our theologians into,

1. Apostolic or Pauline: 2. Patristic: 3. Papal.

Even in Donne, and still more in Bishops Andrews and Hackett, there is a strong Patristic leaven. In Jeremy Taylor this taste for the Fathers and all the Saints and Schoolmen before the Reformation amounted to a dislike of the divines of the continental Protestant Churches, Lutheran or Calvinistic. But this must, in part at least, be attributed to Taylor's keen feelings as a Carlist, and a sufferer by the Puritan anti-prelatic party.

I would thus cla.s.s the pentad of operative Christianity:--

'Prothesis'

Christ, the Word

'Thesis' 'Mesothesis' 'Ant.i.thesis'

The Scriptures The Holy Spirit The Church

'Synthesis'

The Preacher

The Papacy elevated the Church to the virtual exclusion or suppression of the Scriptures: the modern Church of England, since Chillingworth, has so raised up the Scriptures as to annul the Church; both alike have quenched the Holy Spirit, as the 'mesothesis' of the two, and subst.i.tuted an alien compound for the genuine Preacher, who should be the 'synthesis' of the Scriptures and the Church, and the sensible voice of the Holy Spirit.

Serm. I. Coloss. i. 19, 20. p. 1.

Ib. E.

What could G.o.d pay for me? What could G.o.d suffer? G.o.d himself could not; and therefore G.o.d hath taken a body that could.

G.o.d forgive me,--or those who first set abroad this strange [Greek: metabasis eis allo genos], this debtor and creditor scheme of expounding the mystery of Redemption, or both! But I never can read the words, 'G.o.d himself could not; and therefore took a body that could'--without being reminded of the monkey that took the cat's paw to take the chestnuts out of the fire, and claimed the merit of puss's sufferings. I am sure, however, that the ludicrous images, under which this gloss of the Calvinists embodies itself to my fancy, never disturb my recollections of the adorable mystery itself. It is clear that a body, remaining a body, can only suffer as a body: for no faith can enable us to believe that the same thing can be at once A. and not A. Now that the body of our Lord was not transelemented or transnatured by the 'pleroma'

indwelling, we are positively a.s.sured by Scripture. Therefore it would follow from this most unscriptural doctrine, that the divine justice had satisfaction made to it by the suffering of a body which had been brought into existence for this special purpose, in lieu of the debt of eternal misery due from, and leviable on, the bodies and souls of all mankind! It is to this gross perversion of the sublime idea of the Redemption by the cross, that we must attribute the rejection of the doctrine of redemption by the Unitarian, and of the Gospel 'in toto' by the more consequent Deist.

Ib. p. 2. C.

And yet, even this dwelling fullness, even in this person Christ Jesus, by no t.i.tle of merit in himself, but only 'quia complacuit', because it pleased the Father it should be so.

This, in the intention of the preacher, may have been sound, but was it safe, divinity? In order to the latter, methinks, a less equivocal word than 'person' ought to have been adopted; as 'the body and soul of the man Jesus, considered abstractedly from the divine Logos, who in it took up humanity into deity, and was Christ Jesus.' Dare we say that there was no self-subsistent, though we admit no self-originated, merit in the Christ? It seems plain to me, that in this and sundry other pa.s.sages of St. Paul, 'the Father' means the total triune G.o.dhead.

It appears to me, that dividing the Church of England into two aeras--the first from Ridley to Field, or from Edward VI. to the commencement of the latter third of the reign of James I, and the second ending with Bull and Stillingfleet, we might characterize their comparative excellences thus: That the divines of the first aera had a deeper, more genial, and a more practical insight into the mystery of Redemption, in the relation of man toward both the act and the author, namely, in all the inchoative states, the regeneration and the operations of saving grace generally;--while those of the second aera possessed clearer and distincter views concerning the nature and necessity of Redemption, in the relation of G.o.d toward man, and concerning the connection of Redemption with the article of Tri-unity; and above all, that they surpa.s.sed their predecessors in a more safe and determinate scheme of the divine economy of the three persons in the one undivided G.o.dhead.

This indeed, was mainly owing to Bishop Bull's masterly work 'De Fide Nicaena', [2] which in the next generation Waterland so admirably maintained, on the one hand, against the philosophy of the Arians,--the combat ending in the death and burial of Arianism, and its descent and 'metempsychosis' into Socinianism, and thence again into modern Unitarianism,--and on the other extreme, against the oscillatory creed of Sherlock, now swinging to Tritheism in the recoil from Sabellianism, and again to Sabellianism in the recoil from Tritheism.

Ib.

First, we are to consider this fullness to have been in Christ, and then, from this fullness arose his merits; we can consider no merit in Christ himself before, whereby he should merit this fullness; for this fullness was in him before he merited any thing; and but for this fullness he had not so merited. 'Ille h.o.m.o, ut in unitatem filii Dei a.s.sumeretur, unde meruit'? How did that man (says St. Augustine, speaking of Christ, as of the son of man), how did that man merit to be united in one person with the eternal Son of G.o.d? 'Quid egit ante?

Quid credidit'? What had he done? Nay, what had he believed? Had he either faith or works before that union of both natures?

Dr. Donne and St. Augustine said this without offence; but I much question whether the same would be endured now. That it is, however, in the spirit of Paul and of the Gospel, I doubt not to affirm, and that this great truth is obscured by what in my judgment is the post-Apostolic 'Christopaedia', I am inclined to think.