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The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
To the dispensations of the twilight dawn, to the first messengers of the redeeming word, the yet lisping utterers of light and life, a strength and a power were given because of the enemies, greater and of more immediate influence, than to the seers and proclaimers of a clearer day: – even as the first re-appearing crescent of the eclipsed moon shines for men with a keener brilliance, than the following larger segments, previously to its total emersion.
Ib.v. 5.
Thou madest him lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship.
Power + idea = angel.
Idea – power = man, or Prometheus.
Psalm LXVIII
v. 34.
Ascribe ye the power to God over Israel: his worship and strength is in the clouds.
The 'clouds' in the symbolical language of the Scriptures mean the events and course of things, seemingly effects of human will or chance, but overruled by Providence.
Psalm LXXII
This Psalm admits no other interpretation but of Christ, as the Jehovah incarnate. In any other sense, it would be a specimen of more than Persian or Moghul hyperbole and bombast, of which there is no other instance in Scripture, and which no Christian would dare to attribute to an inspired writer. We know, too, that the elder Jewish Church ranked it among the Messianic Psalms. N.B. The Word in St. John, and the Name of the Most High in the Psalms, are equivalent terms.
v. 1.
Give the king thy judgments, O God; and thy righteousness unto the king's son.
God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, the only begotten, the Son of God and God, King of Kings, and the Son of the King of Kings!
Psalm LXXIV
v. 2.
O think upon thy congregation, whom thou hast purchased and redeemed of old.
The Lamb sacrificed from the beginning of the world, the God-Man, the Judge, the self-promised Redeemer to Adam in the garden!
v. 15.
Thou smotest the heads of Leviathan in pieces; and gavest him to be meat for the people in the wilderness.
Does this allude to any real tradition?3 The Psalm appears to have been composed shortly before the captivity of Judah.
Psalm LXXXII vv. 6-7
The reference which our Lord made to these mysterious verses, gives them an especial interest. The first apostasy, the fall of the angels, is, perhaps, intimated.
Psalm LXXXVII
I would fain understand this Psalm; but first I must collate it word by word with the original Hebrew. It seems clearly Messianic.
Psalm LXXXVIII
vv. 10 – 12.
Dost than shew wonders among the dead, or shall the dead rise up again and praise thee? &c.
Compare Ezekiel xxxvii.
Psalm CIV
I think the Bible version might with advantage be substituted for this, which in some parts is scarcely intelligible.
v. 6.
the waters stand in the hills.
No; stood above the mountains. The reference is to the Deluge.
Psalm CV
v. 3.
Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord.
If even to seek the Lord be joy, what will it be to find him? Seek me, O Lord, that I may be found by thee!
Psalm CX
v. 2.
The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Sion; (saying) Rule, &c.
v. 3. Understand:
'Thy people shall offer themselves willingly in the day of conflict in holy clothing, in their best array, in their best arms and accoutrements. As the dew from the womb of the morning, in number and brightness like dew-drops; so shall be thy youth, or the youth of thee, the young volunteer warriors.'
v. 5.
'He shall shake,'
concuss, concutiet reges die iræ suæ,
v. 6. For
'smite in sunder, or wound, the heads;'
some word answering to the Latin conquassare.
v. 7. For 'therefore,' translate 'then shall he lift up his head again;' that is, as a man languid and sinking from thirst and fatigue after refreshment.
N.B. I see no poetic discrepancy between vv. 1 and 5.
Psalm CXVIII
To be interpreted of Christ's church.
Psalm CXXVI
v. 5.
As the rivers in the south.
Does this allude to the periodical rains?4
As a transparency on some night of public rejoicing, seen by common day, with the lamps from within removed – even such would the Psalms be to me uninterpreted by the Gospel. O honored Mr. Hurwitz! Could I but make you feel what grandeur, what magnificence, what an everlasting significance and import Christianity gives to every fact of your national history – to every page of your sacred records!
Articles of Religion: XX
It is mournful to think how many recent writers have criminated our Church in consequence of their own ignorance and inadvertence in not knowing, or not noticing, the contra-distinction here meant between power and authority. Rites and ceremonies the Church may ordain jure proprio: on matters of faith her judgment is to be received with reverence, and not gainsaid but after repeated inquiries, and on weighty grounds.
Articles of Religion: XXXVII
It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the magistrate, to wear weapons, and to serve in the wars.
This is a very good instance of an unseemly matter neatly wrapped up. The good men recoiled from the plain words:
'It is lawful for Christian men at the command of a king to slaughter as many Christians as they can!'
Well! I could most sincerely subscribe to all these articles.
September, 1831.
Notes on Hooker 5
Life Of Hooker by Walton
p. 67.
Mr. Travers excepted against Mr. Hooker, for that in one of his sermons he declared, 'That the assurance of what we believe by the word of God, is not to us so certain as that which we perceive by sense.' And Mr. Hooker confesseth he said so, and endeavours to justify it by the reasons following.
There is, I confess, a shade of doubt on my mind as to this position of Hooker's. Yet I do not deny that it expresses a truth. The question in my mind is, only, whether it adequately expresses the whole truth. The ground of my doubt lies in my inability to compare two things that differ in kind. It is impossible that any conviction of the reason, even where no act of the will advenes as a co-efficient, should possess the vividness of an immediate object of the senses; for the vividness is given by sensation. Equally impossible is it that any truth of the super-sensuous reason should possess the evidence of the pure sense. Even the mathematician does not find the same evidence in the results of transcendental algebra as in the demonstrations of simple geometry. But has he less assurance? In answer to Hooker's argument I say, – that God refers to our sensible experience to aid our will by the vividness of sensible impressions, and also to aid our understanding of the truths revealed, – not to increase the conviction of their certainty where they have been understood.
Walton's Appendix
Ib. p. 116.
It is a strange blind story this of the last three books, and of Hooker's live relict, the Beast without Beauty. But Saravia? – If honest Isaac's account of the tender, confidential, even confessional, friendship of Hooker and Saravia be accurate, how chanced it that Hooker did not entrust the manuscripts to his friend who stood beside him in his last moments? At all events, Saravia must have known whether they had or had not received the author's last hand. Why were not Mr. Charke and the other Canterbury parson called to account, or questioned at least as to the truth of Mrs. Joan's story? Verily, I cannot help suspecting that the doubt cast on the authenticity of the latter books by the high church party originated in their dislike of portions of the contents. – In short, it is a blind story, a true Canterbury tale, dear Isaac!6
Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
Pref. c. iii. 7. p. 182.
The next thing hereunto is, to impute all faults and corruptions, wherewith the world aboundeth, unto the kind of ecclesiastical government established.
How readily would this, and indeed all the disputes respecting the powers and constitution of Church government have been settled, or perhaps prevented, had there been an insight into the distinct nature and origin of the National Church and the Church under Christ!7 To the ignorance of this, all the fierce contentions between the Puritans and the Episcopalians under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, all the errors and exorbitant pretensions of the Church of Scotland, and the heats and antipathies of our present Dissenters, may be demonstrably traced.
Ib. 9. p. 183.
Pythagoras, by bringing up his scholars in the speculative knowledge of numbers, made their conceits therein so strong, that when they came to the contemplation of things natural, they imagined that in every particular thing they even beheld as it were with their eyes, how the elements of number gave essence and being to the works of nature: a thing in reason impossible; which notwithstanding, through their mis-fashioned pre-conceit, appeared unto them no less certain, than if nature had written it in the very foreheads of all the creatures of God.
I am not so conversant with the volumes of Duns Scotus as to be able to pronounce positively whether he is an exception, but I can think of no other instance of high metaphysical genius in an Englishman. Judgment, solid sense, invention in specialties, fortunate anticipations and instructive foretact of truth, – in these we can shew giants. It is evident from this example from the Pythagorean school that not even our incomparable Hooker could raise himself to the idea, so rich in truth, which is contained in the words
numero, pondere, et mensura generantur cœli et terra.
O, that Hooker had ever asked himself concerning will, absolute will,
numerus omues numeros ponens, nunquam positus! 8
Ib. p. 183.
When they of the 'Family of Love' have it once in their heads, that Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality whereof many are partakers, &c.
If the Familists thought of Christ as a quality, it was a grievous error indeed. But I have my doubts whether this was not rather an inference drawn by their persecutors.
Ib. 15. p. 191.
When instruction doth them no good, let them feel but the least degree of most mercifully-tempered severity, they fasten on the head of the Lord's vicegerents here on earth, whatsoever they any where find uttered against the cruelty of blood-thirsty men, and to themselves they draw all the sentences which Scripture hath in favor of innocency persecuted for the truth.
How great the influence of the age on the strongest minds, when so eminently wise a man as Richard Hooker could overlook the obvious impolicy of inflicting punishments which the sufferer himself will regard as merits, and all who have any need to be deterred will extol as martyrdom! Even where the necessity could be plausibly pretended, it is war, not punitive law; – and then Augustine's argument for Sarah!
Ib. c. iv. 1. p. 194.
We require you to find out but one church upon the face of the whole earth, that hath been ordered by your discipline, or hath not been ordered by ours, that is to say, by episcopal regiment, sithence the time that the blessed apostles were here conversant.
Hooker was so good a man that it would be wicked to suspect him of knowingly playing the sophist. And yet strange it is, that he should not have been aware that it was prelacy, not primitive episcopacy, the thing, not the name, that the reformers contended against, and, if the Catholic Church and the national Clerisy were (as both parties unhappily took for granted) one and the same, contended against with good reason. Knox's ecclesiastical polity (worthy of Lycurgus), adopted bishops under a different name, or rather under a translation instead of corruption of the name
Ib. c. v. 2. p. 204.
A law is the deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge yourselves to be any part, then is the law even your deed also.
This is a fiction of law for the purpose of giving to that, which is necessarily empirical, the form and consequence of a science, to the reality of which a code of laws can only approximate by compressing all liberty and individuality into a despotism. As Justinian to Alfred, and Constantinople, the Consuls and Senate of Rome to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council of London; so is the imperial Roman code to the common and statute law of England. The advocates of the discipline would, according to our present notions of civil rights, have been justified in putting fact against fiction, and might have challenged Hooker to shew, first, that the constitution of the Church in Christ was a congruous subject of parliamentary legislation; that the legislators were bona fide determined by spiritual views, and that the jealousy and arbitrary principles of the Queen, aided by motives of worldly state policy, – for example, the desire of conciliating the Roman Catholic potentates by retaining all she could of the exterior of the Romish Church, its hierarchy, its ornaments, and its ceremonies, – were not the substitutes for the Holy Spirit in influencing the majorities in the two Houses of Parliament. It is my own belief that the Puritans and the Prelatists divided the truth between them; and, as half-truths are whole errors, were both equally in the wrong; – the Prelatists in contending for that as incident to the Church in Christ, that is, the collective number
It is difficult to say, which most shines through this whole passage, the spirit of wisdom or the spirit of meekness. The fatal error of the Romish Church did not consist in the inappellability of the Councils, or that an acquiescence in their decisions and decree was a duty binding on the conscience of the dissentients, – not I say in contending for a practical infallibility of Council or Pope; but in laying claim to an actual and absolute immunity from error, and consequently for the unrepealability of their decisions by any succeeding Council or Pope. Hence, even wise decisions – wise under the particular circumstances and times – degenerated into mischievous follies, by having the privilege of immortality without any exemption from the dotage of superannuation. Hence errors became like glaciers, or ice-bergs in the frozen ocean, unthawed by summer, and growing from the fresh deposits of each returning winter.
Ib.6. p. 212.
An argument necessary and demonstrative is such, as being proposed unto any man, and understood, the mind cannot choose but inwardly assent. Any one such reason dischargeth, I grant, the conscience, and setteth it at full liberty.
I would not concede even so much as this. It may well chance that even an argument demonstrative, if understood, may be adducible against some one sentence of a whole liturgy; and yet the means of removing it without a palpable overbalance of evil may not exist for a time; and either there is no command against schism, or we are bound in such small matters to offer the sacrifice of willing silence to the public peace of the Church. This would not, however, prevent a minister from pointing out the defect in his character as a doctor or learned theologian.
Ib.c. viii. 1. p. 2-20.
For adventuring to erect the discipline of Christ without the leave of the Christian magistrate, haply ye may condemn us as fools, in that we hazard thereby our estates and persons further than you which are that way more wise think necessary: but of any offence or sin therein committed against God, with what conscience can you accuse us, when your own positions are, that the things we observe should every of them be dearer unto us than ten thousand lives; that they are the peremptory commandments of God; that no mortal man can dispense with them, and that the magistrate grievously sinneth in not constraining thereunto?
Hoc argumentum ad invidiam nimis sycophanticum est quam ut mihi placeat a tanto viro. Besides, it contradicts Hooker's own very judicious rule, that to discuss and represent is the office of the learned, as individuals, because the truth may be entire in any one mind; but to do belongs to the supreme power as the will of the whole body politic, and in effective action individuals are mere fractions without any legitimate referee to add them together. Hooker's objection from the nobility and gentry of the realm is unanswerable and within half a century afterwards proved insurmountable. Imagine a sun containing within its proper atmosphere a multitude of transparent satellites, lost in the glory, or all joining to form the visible phasis or disk; and then beyond the precincts of this sun a number of opake bodies at various distances, and having a common center of their own round which they revolve, and each more or less according to the lesser or greater distance partaking of the light and natural warmth of the sun, which I have been supposing; but not sharing in its peculiar influences, or in the solar life sustainable only by the vital air of the solar atmosphere. The opake bodies constitute the national churches, the sun the churches spiritual.
The defect of the simile, arising necessarily out of the incompossibility of spiritual prerogatives with material bodies under the proprieties and necessities of space, is, that it does not, as no concrete or visual image can, represent the possible duplicity of the individuals, the aggregate of whom constitutes the national church, so that any one individual, or any number of such individuals, may at the same time be, by an act of their own, members of the church spiritual, and in every congregation may form an ecclesia or Christian community; and how to facilitate and favor this without any schism from the enclesia, and without any disturbance of the body politic, was the problem which Grindal and the bishops of the first generation of the Reformed Church sought to solve, and it is the problem which every earnest Christian endued with competent gifts, and who is at the same time a patriot and a philanthropist, ought to propose to himself, as the ingens desiderium proborum.
8th Sept, 1826.
Ib. c. viii. 7. p. 232.
Baptizing of infants, although confessed by themselves, to have been continued ever sithence the very apostles' own times, yet they altogether condemned.
Quære. I cannot say what the fanatic Anabaptists, of whom Hooker is speaking, may have admitted; but the more sober and learned Antipaedobaptists, who differed in this point only from the reformed churches, have all, I believe, denied the practice of infant baptism during the first century.
B.J. c. ii. 1. p. 249.
That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the same we term a law.
See the essays on method, in the Friend10. Hooker's words literally and grammatically interpreted seem to assert the antecedence of the thing to its kind, that is, to its essential characters; – and to its force together with its form and measure of working, that is, to its specific and distinctive characters; in short, the words assert the pre-existence of the thing to all its constituent powers, qualities, and properties. Now this is either – first, equivalent to the assertion of a prima et nuda materia, so happily ridiculed by the author of Hudibras11, and which under any scheme of cosmogony is a mere phantom, having its whole and sole substance in an impotent effort of the imagination or sensuous fancy, but which is utterly precluded by the doctrine of creation which it in like manner negatives: – or secondly, the words assert a self-destroying absurdity, namely, the antecedence of a thing to itself; as if having asserted that water consisted of hydrogen = 77, and oxygen = 23, I should talk of water as existing before the creation of hydrogen and oxygen. All laws, indeed, are constitutive; and it would require a longer train of argument than a note can contain, to shew what a thing is; but this at least is quite certain, that in the order of thought it must be posterior to the law that constitutes it. But such in fact was Hooker's meaning, and the word, thing, is used proleptice in favour of the imagination, as appears from the sentences that follow, in which the creative idea is declared to be the law of the things thereby created. A productive idea, manifesting itself and its reality in the product is a law; and when the product is phænomenal, (that is, an object of the outward senses) it is a law of nature. The law is res noumenon; the thing is res phenomenon12 A physical law, in the right sense of the term, is the sufficient cause of the appearance, – causa sub-faciens.
P.S. What a deeply interesting volume might be written on the symbolic import of the primary relations and dimensions of space – long, broad, deep, or depth; surface; upper, under, above and below, right, left, horizontal, perpendicular, oblique: – and then the order of causation, or that which gives intelligibility, and the reverse order of effects, or that which gives the conditions of actual existence! Without the higher the lower would want its intelligibility: without the lower the higher could not have existed. The infant is a riddle of which the man is the solution; but the man could not exist but with the infant as his antecedent.
Ib. 2. p. 250.
In which essential Unity of God, a Trinity personal nevertheless subsisteth, after a manner far exceeding the possibility of man's conceit.
If 'conceit' here means conception, the remark is most true; for the Trinity is an idea, and no idea can be rendered by a conception. An idea is essentially inconceivable. But if it be meant that the Trinity is otherwise inconceivable than as the divine eternity and every attribute of God is and must be, then neither the commonness of the language here used, nor the high authority of the user, can deter me from denouncing it as untrue and dangerous. So far is it from being true, that on the contrary, the Trinity is the only form in which an idea of God is possible, unless indeed it be a Spinosistic or World-God.
Ib. c. iv. 1. p. 264.
But now that we may lift up our eyes (as it were) from the footstool to the throne of God, and leaving these natural, consider a little the state of heavenly and divine, creatures: touching angels which are spirits immaterial and intellectual, &c.
All this disquisition on the angels confirms my remark that our admirable Hooker was a giant of the race Aristotle versus Plato. Hooker was truly judicious, – the consummate synthesis of understanding and sense. An ample and most ordonnant conceptionist, to the tranquil empyrean of ideas he had not ascended. Of the passages cited from Scripture how few would bear a strict scrutiny; being either,
1. divine appearances, Jehovah in human form; or
2. the imagery of visions and all symbolic; or
3. names of honor given to prophets, apostles, or bishops; or lastly,
