The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iii Part 42

Ib. p. 367.

And they who are born eunuchs should be less infected by Adam's pollution, by having less of concupiscence in the great instance of desires.

The fact happens to be false: and then the vulgarity, most unworthy of our dear Jeremy Taylor, of taking the mode of the manifestation of the disobedience of the will to the reason, for the disobedience itself. St.

James would have taught him that he who offendeth against one, offendeth against all; and that there is some truth in the Stoic paradox that all crimes are equal. Equal is indeed a false phrase; and therein consists the paradox, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is the same as the falsehood. The truth is they are all the same in kind; but unequal in degree. They are all alike, though not equally, against the conscience.

Ib. p. 369.

So that there is no necessity of a third place; but it concludes only that in the state of separation from G.o.d's presence there is great variety of degrees and kinds of evil, and every one is not the extreme.

What is this? If h.e.l.l be a state, and not a mere place, and a particular state, its meaning must in common sense be a state of the worst sort. If then there be a mere 'paena d.a.m.ni', that is, the not being so blest as some others may be; this is a different state 'in genere' from the 'paena sensus': 'ergo', not h.e.l.l; 'ergo' rather a third state; or else heaven.

For every angel must be in it, than whom another angel is happier; that is negatively d.a.m.ned, though positively very happy.

Ib. p. 370-1.

Just so it is in infants: h.e.l.l was not made for man, but for devils; and therefore it must be something besides mere nature that can bear any man thither: mere nature goes neither to heaven or h.e.l.l.

And how came the devils there? If it be hard to explain how Adam fell; how much more hard to solve how purely spiritual beings could fall? And nature! What? so much of nature, and no kind of attempt at a definition of the word? Pray what is nature?

Ib. p. 371.

I do not say that we, by that sin (original) deserved that death, neither can death be properly a punishment of us, till we superadd some evil of our own; yet Adam's sin deserved it, so that it was justly left to fall upon us, we, as a consequent and punishment of his sin, being reduced to our natural portion.

How? What is this but flying to the old Supra-lapsarian blasphemy of a right of property in G.o.d over all his creatures, and destroying that sacred distinction between person and thing which is the light and the life of all law human and divine? Mercy on us! Is not agony, is not the stone, is not blindness, is not ignorance, are not headstrong, inherent, innate, and connate, pa.s.sions driving us to sin when reason is least able to withhold us,--are not all these punishments, grievous punishments, and are they not inflicted on the innocent babe? Is not this the result infused into the 'milk not mingled' of St. Peter; [15]

spotting the immaculate begotten, souring and curdling the innocence 'without sin or malice'? [16] And if this be just, and compatible with G.o.d's goodness, why all this outcry against St. Austin and the Calvinists and the Lutherans, whose whole addition is a lame attempt to believe guilt, where they cannot find it, in order to justify a punishment which they do find?

Ib. p. 379.

But then for the evil of punishment, that may pa.s.s further than the action. If it pa.s.ses upon the innocent, it is not a punishment to them, but an evil inflicted by right of dominion; but yet by reason of the relation of the afflicted to him that sinned, to him it is a punishment.

Here the snake peeps out, and now takes its tail into its mouth. Right of dominion! Nonsense! Things are not objects of right or wrong. Power of dominion I understand, and right of judgment I understand; but right of dominion can have no immediate, but only a relative, sense. I have a right of dominion over this estate, that is, relatively to all other persons. But if there be a 'jus dominandi' over rational and free agents, then why blame Calvin? For all attributes are then merged in blind power: and G.o.d and fate are the same:

[Greek: Zeus ka Moira ka aeerophoitis Erinnus]

Strange Trinity! G.o.d, Necessity, and the Devil. But Taylor's scheme has far worse consequences than Calvin's: for it makes the whole scheme of Redemption a theatrical scenery. Just restore our bodies and corporeal pa.s.sions to a perfect 'equilibrium' and fortunate instinct, and, there being no guilt or defect in the soul, the Son of G.o.d, the Logos, and Supreme Reason, might have remained unincarnate, uncrucified. In short, Socinianism is as inevitable a deduction from Taylor's scheme as Deism or Atheism is from Socinianism.

'In fine'.

The whole of Taylor's confusion originated in this;--first, that he and his adversaries confound original with hereditary sin; but chiefly that neither he nor his adversaries had considered that guilt must be a 'noumenon'; but that our images, remembrances, and consciousnesses of our actions are 'phaenomena'. Now the 'phaenomenon' is in time, and an effect: but the 'noumenon' is not in time any more than it is in s.p.a.ce.

The guilt has been before we are even conscious of the action; therefore an original sin (that is, a sin universal and essential to man as man, and yet guilt, and yet choice, and yet amenable to punishment), may be at once true and yet in direct contradiction to all our reasonings derived from 'phaenomena', that is, facts of time and s.p.a.ce. But we ought not to apply the categories of appearance to the [Greek: ontos onta] of the intelligible or causative world. This (I should say of Original Sin) is mystery! We do not so properly believe it, as we know it. What is actual must be possible. But if we will confound actuals with reals, and apply the rules of the latter to cases of the former, we must blame ourselves for the clouds and darkness and storms of opposing winds, which the error will not fail to raise. By the same process an Atheist may demonstrate the contradictory nature of eternity, of a being at once infinite and of resistless causality, and yet intelligent. Jeremy Taylor additionally puzzled himself with Adam, instead of looking into the fact in himself.

How came it that Taylor did not apply the same process to the congeneric question of the freedom of the will? In half a dozen syllogisms he must have gyved and hand-cuffed himself into blank necessity and mechanic motions. All hangs together. Deny Original Sin, and you will soon deny free will;--then virtue and vice;--and G.o.d becomes 'Abracadabra'; a sound, nothing else.

SECOND LETTER TO THE BISHOP OF ROCHESTER.

Ib. p. 390-1.

To this it is answered as you see, there is a double guilt; a guilt of person, and of nature. That is taken away, this is not: for sacraments are given to persons, not to natures.

I need no other pa.s.sage but this to convince me that Jeremy Taylor, the angle in which the two 'apices' of logic and rhetoric meet, consummate in both, was yet no metaphysician. Learning, fancy, discursive intellect, 'tria juncta in uno', and of each enough to have alone immortalized a man, he had; but yet [Greek: ouden meta physin]. Images, conceptions, notions, such as leave him but one rival, Shakspeare, there were; but no ideas. Taylor was a Ga.s.sendist. O! that he had but meditated in the silence of his spirit on the mystery of an 'I AM'! He would have seen that a person, 'quoad' person, can have nothing common or generic; and that where this finds place, the person is corrupted by introsusception of a nature, which becomes evil thereby, and on this relation only is an evil nature. The nature itself, like all other works of G.o.d, is good, and so is the person in a yet higher sense of the word, good, like all offsprings of the Most High.

But the combination is evil, and this not the work of G.o.d; and one of the main ends and results of the doctrine of Original Sin is to silence and confute the blasphemy that makes G.o.d the author of sin, without avoiding it by fleeing to the almost equal blasphemy against the conscience, that sin in the sense of guilt does not exist.

THE REAL PRESENCE AND SPIRITUAL OF CHRIST IN THE BLESSED SACRAMENT, PROVED AGAINST THE DOCTRINE OF TRANSUBSTANTIATION.

Perhaps the most wonderful of all Taylor's works. He seems, if I may so say, to have transubstantiated his vast imagination and fancy into subtlety not to be evaded, acuteness to which nothing remains unpierceable, and indefatigable agility of argumentation. Add to these an exhaustive erudition, and that all these are employed in the service of reason and common sense; whereas in some of his Tracts he seems to wield all sorts of wisdom and wit in defence of all sorts of folly and stupidity. But these were 'ad popellum', and by virtue of the 'falsitas dispensativa', which he allowed himself.

Epist. dedicatory.

The question of transubstantiation.

I have no doubt that if the Pythagorean bond had successfully established itself, and become a powerful secular hierarchy, there would have been no lack of furious partizans to a.s.sert, yea, and to d.a.m.n and burn such as dared deny, that one was the same as two; two being two in the same sense as one is one; that consequently 2+2=2 and 1+1=4. But I should most vehemently doubt that this was the intention of Pythagoras, or the sense in which the mysterious dogma was understood by the thinking part of his disciples, who nevertheless were its professed believers. I should be prepared to find that the true import and purport of the article was no more than this;--that the one in order to its manifestation must appear in and as two; that the act of re-union was simultaneous with that of the self-production, (in the geometrical use of the word 'produce,' as when a point produces, or evolves, itself on each side into a bipolar line), and that the Triad is therefore the necessary form of the Monad.

Even so is the dispute concerning Transubstantiation. I can easily believe that a thousand monks and friars would pretend, as Taylor says, to 'disbelieve their eyes and ears, and defy their own reason,' and to receive the dogma in the sense, or rather in the nonsense, here ascribed to it by him, namely, that the phenomenal bread and wine were the phenomenal flesh and blood. But I likewise know that the respectable Roman Catholic theologians state the article free from a contradiction in terms at least; namely, that in the consecrated elements the 'noumena' of the phenomenal bread and wine are the same with that which was the 'noumenon' of the phenomenal flesh and blood of Christ when on earth.

Let M represent a slab or plane of mahogany, and m its ordinary supporter or under-prop; and let S represent a slab or plane of silver, and s its supporter.

Now to affirm that M = S is a contradiction, or that m = s;

but it is no contradiction to say, that on certain occasions (S having been removed) s is subst.i.tuted for m, and that what was M/m, is by the command of the common master changed into M/s.

It may be false in fact, but it is not a self-contradiction in the terms.

The mode in which s subsists in M/s may be inconceivable, but not more so than the mode in which m subsists in M/m, or that in which s subsisted in S/s.

I honestly confess that I should confine my grounds of opposition to the article thus stated to its unnecessariness, to the want of sufficient proofs from Scripture that I am bound to believe or trouble my head with it. I am sure that Bishop Bull, who really did believe the Trinity, without either Tritheism or Sabellianism, could not consistently have used the argument of Taylor or of Tillotson in proof of the absurdity of Transubstantiation.

Ib. p. ccccxvi.

But for our dear afflicted mother, she is under the portion of a child in the state of discipline, her government indeed hindered, but her wors.h.i.+ppings the same, the articles as true, and those of the church of Rome as false as ever.

O how much there is in these few words,--the sweet and comely sophistry, not of Taylor, but of human nature. Mother! child! state of discipline! government hindered! that is to say, in how many instances, scourgings hindered, dungeoning in dens foul as those of h.e.l.l, mutilation of ears and noses, and flattering the King mad with a.s.sertions of his divine right to govern without a Parliament, hindered.

The best apology for Laud, Sheldon, and their fellows will ever be that those whom they persecuted were as great persecutors as themselves, and much less excusable.