The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iii Part 21

'Audacter dicam', says St. Hierome, 'c.u.m omnia posset Deus, suscitare virginem post ruinam non potest.'

One instance among hundreds of the wantonness of phrase and fancy in the Fathers. What did Jerome mean? 'quod Deus membranam hymenis luniformem reproducere nequit?' No; that were too absurd. What then?--that G.o.d cannot make what has been not to have been? Well then, why not say that, since that is all you can mean?

Serm. XIX. Rev. xx. 6. p. 183.

The exposition of the text in this sermon is a lively instance how much excellent good sense a wise man, like Donne, can bring forth on a pa.s.sage which he does not understand. For to say that it may mean either X, or Y, or Z, is to confess he knows not what it means; but that if it be X. then, &c.; if Y. then, &c.; and lastly if it be Z. then, &c.; that is to say, that he understands X, Y, and Z; but does not understand the text itself.

Ib. p. 185. B.

Seas of blood and yet but brooks, tuns of blood and yet but basons, compared with the sacrifices, the sacrifices of the blood of men, in the persecutions of the primitive Church. For every ox of the Jew, the Christian spent a man; and for every sheep and lamb, a mother and her child, &c.

Whoo! Had the other nine so called persecutions been equal to the tenth, that of Diocletian, Donne's a.s.sertion here would be extravagant.

Serra. x.x.xIV. Rom. viii. 16. p. 332.

Ib. p. 335. A.

But by what manner comes He from them? By proceeding.

If this mystery be considered as words, or rather sounds vibrating on some certain ears, to which the belief of the hearers a.s.signed a supernatural cause, well and good! What else can be said? Such were the sounds: what their meaning is, we know not; but such sounds not being in the ordinary course of nature, we of course attribute them to something extra-natural.

But if G.o.d made man in his own image, therein as in a mirror, misty no doubt at best, and now cracked by peculiar and in-herited defects--yet still our only mirror--to contemplate all we can of G.o.d, this word 'proceeding' may admit of an easy sense.

For if a man first used it to express as well as he could a notion found in himself as man 'in genere', we have to look into ourselves, and there we shall find that two facts of vital intelligence may be conceived; the first, a necessary and eternal outgoing of intelligence ([Greek: nous]) from being ([Greek:t on]), with the will as an accompaniment, but not from it as a cause,--in order, though not necessarily in time, precedent. This is true filiation.

The second is an act of the will and the reason, in their purity strict ident.i.ties, and therefore not begotten or filiated, but proceeding from intelligent essence and essential intelligence combining in the act, necessarily and coeternally.

For the coexistence of absolute spontaneity with absolute necessity is involved in the very idea of G.o.d, one of whose intellectual definitions is, the 'synthesis, generative ad extra, et annihilative, etsi inclusive, quoad se,' of all conceivable 'ant.i.theses;' even as the best moral definition--(and, O! how much more G.o.dlike to us in this state of ant.i.thetic intellect is the moral beyond the intellectual!)--is, G.o.d is love.

This is to us the high prerogative of the moral, that all its dictates immediately reveal the truths of intelligence, whereas the strictly intellectual only by more distant and cold deductions carries us towards the moral.

For what is love? Union with the desire of union. G.o.d therefore is the cohesion and the oneness of all things; and dark and dim is that system of ethics, which does not take oneness as the root of all virtue.

Being, Mind, Love in action, are ideas distinguishable though not divisible; but Will is incapable of distinction or division: it is equally implied in vital action, in essential intelligence, and in effluent love or holy action.

Now will is the true principle of ident.i.ty, of selfness, even in our common language. The will, therefore, being indistinguishably one, but the possessive powers triply distinguishable, do perforce involve the notion expressed by a Trinity of three Persons and one G.o.d.

There are three Persons eternally coexisting, in whom the one Will is totally all in each; the truth of which mystery we may know in our own minds, but can understand by no a.n.a.logy.

For "the wind ministrant to divers at the same moment"--thence, to aid the fancy--borrows or rather steals from the mind the idea of 'total 'in omni parte',' which alone furnishes the a.n.a.logy; but that both it and by it a myriad of other material images do enwrap themselves 'in hac veste non sua,' and would be even no objects of conception if they did not; yea, that even the very words, 'conception,' 'comprehension,' and all in all languages that answer to them, suppose this trans-impression from the mind, is an argument better than all a.n.a.logy.

Serm. x.x.xV. Mat. xii. 31. p. 341.

Ib. p. 342. B.

First then, for the first term, 'sin,' we use to ask in the school, whether any action of man's can have 'rationem demeriti;'

whether it can be said to offend G.o.d, or to deserve ill of G.o.d? for whatsoever does so, must have some proportion with G.o.d.

This appears to me to furnish an interesting example of the bad consequences in reasoning, as well as in morals, of the 'cui bono? cui malo?' system of ethics,--that system which places the good and evil of actions in their painful or pleasurable effects on the sensuous or pa.s.sive nature of sentient beings, not in the will, the pure act itself.

For, according to this system, G.o.d must be either a pa.s.sible and dependent being,--that is, not G.o.d,--or else he must have no interest, arid therefore no motive or impulse, to reward virtue or punish vice.

The veil which the Epicureans threw over their atheism was itself an implicit atheism. Nay, the world itself could not have existed; and as it does exist, the origin of evil (for if evil means no more than pain 'in genere', evil has a true being in the order of things) is not only a difficulty of impossible solution, but is a fact necessarily implying the non-existence of an omnipotent and infinite goodness,--that is, of G.o.d.

For to say that I believe in a G.o.d, but not that he is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good, is as mere a contradiction in terms as to say, I believe in a circle, but not that all the rays from its centre to its circ.u.mference are equal.

I cannot read the profound truth so clearly expressed by Donne in the next paragraph--"it does not only want that rect.i.tude, but it should have that rect.i.tude, and therefore hath a sinful want"--without an uneasy wonder at its incongruity with the preceding dogmas.

Serm. LXXI. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 717.

Ib. p.725. A.

But still consider, that they did but leave their nets, they did not burn them. And consider, too, that they left but nets, those things which might entangle them, and r.e.t.a.r.d them in their following of Christ, &c.

An excellent paragraph grounded on a mere pun. Such was the taste of the age; and it is an awful joy to observe, that not great learning, great wit, great talent, not even (as far as without great virtue that can be) great genius, were effectual to preserve the man from the contagion, but only the deep and wise enthusiasm of moral feeling. Compare in this light Donne's theological prose even with that of the honest Knox; and, above all, compare Cowley with Milton.

Serm. LXXII. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 726.

Ib. p.727. A.-E.

It is amusing to see the use which the Christian divines make of the very facts in favour of their own religion, with which they triumphantly battered that of the heathens; namely, the gross and sinful anthropomorphitism of their representations of the Deity; and yet the heathen philosophers and priests--Plutarch for instance--tell us as plainly as Donne or Aquinas can do, that these are only accommodations to human modes of conception,--the divine nature being in itself impa.s.sible;--how otherwise could it be the prime agent?

Paganism needs a true philosophical judge. Condemned it will be, perhaps, more heavily than by the present judges, but not from the same statutes, nor on the same evidence.

'In fine.'

If our old divines, in their homiletic expositions of Scripture, wire-drew their text, in the anxiety to evolve out of the words the fulness of the meaning expressed, implied, or suggested, our modern preachers have erred more dangerously in the opposite extreme, by making their text a mere theme, or 'motto', for their discourse. Both err in degree; the old divines, especially the Puritans, by excess, the modern by defect. But there is this difference to the disfavor of the latter, that the defect in degree alters the kind. It was on G.o.d's holy word that our Hookers, Donnes, Andrewses preached; it was Scripture bread that they divided, according to the needs and seasons. The preacher of our days expounds, or appears to expound, his own sentiments and conclusions, and thinks himself evangelic enough if he can make the Scripture seem in conformity with them.

Above all, there is something to my mind at once elevating and soothing in the idea of an order of learned men reading the many works of the wise and great, in many languages, for the purpose of making one book contain the life and virtue of all others, for their brethren's use who have but that one to read. What, then, if that one book be such, that the increase of learning is shown by more and more enabling the mind to find them all in it! But such, according to my experience--hard as I am on threescore--the Bible is, as far as all moral, spiritual, and prudential,--all private, domestic, yea, even political, truths arid interests are concerned. The astronomer, chemist, mineralogist, must go elsewhere; but the Bible is the book for the man.

[Footnote 1: The Lx.x.x Sermons, fol. 1640.--Ed.]

[Footnote 2:

"Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin 'Defensio Fidei Nicoenoe', using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the Church of England, and in good humour with the Church of Rome."

'Table Talk,' 2d edit. p. 41.--Ed.]

[Footnote 3: Rom. vi. 3, 4, 5.--Ed.]