Politics and Religion

uh, I'm Sheamus Perry, and I teach English at the University of Oxford,

and I'm going to say a few things today about Coleridge and especially about

the intellectual and historical background to college's

greatest poems of the 17 nineties.

Um,

the place I want to start is politics.

The most important event in the young college's life was something

that happened in France when he was still a young man,

which was the revolution.

It is the event that defines his generation.

Really, Um, and his attitude towards it is complicated,

and it's important to realise what it was.

Uh, it was broadly one of sympathy.

He certainly approved of the overthrowing of tyranny

and the and the removal of a despotic monarch. Um,

but the complexity enters when you look at exactly the grounds for his enthusiasm.

And there, interestingly,

different from the grounds for enthusiasm that were

typically enunciated by supporters of the French Revolution.

That is to say,

the philosophical heroes of the French Revolution were the heroes of secular

enlightenment in the 18th century that placed a

great value upon upon reason and rationalism.

Uh, and Coleridge. His position is subtly and importantly, different

and comes from a from a different area of human experience.

It comes really from his religious

instincts and, uh, sensibilities.

Um uh, Coleridge, when he's at Cambridge as a as A as a brilliant,

feckless student falls under the sway of a group of young thinkers and academics,

um,

that lead him towards a kind of

extremely idiosyncratic Christianity called Unitarian is,

um, uh, Unitarian ism set itself against almost all the main

dogmas and beliefs of traditional Christianity.

It didn't believe in the divinity of Jesus. It didn't believe in the fall of man.

It didn't believe in the virgin birth and

all sorts of things that typically are held to be

the central beliefs, uh,

central props in the belief system of normal Christianity.

What Unitarian is, um, did

insist upon emphatically was that all of the

created universe was held within a single unity.

That's where the unity of Unitarian ism comes from,

and that unity was the encompassing and single life of God.

Uh, so it's a kind of a pan theism in a way,

and most people at the time and I suppose most

people since wouldn't necessarily recognise it as Christianity at all.

The call was very insistent that it was

a very pure and primitive kind of Christianity

that he was advocating.

What then,

are the political consequences of this belief in the encompassing one life of God,

the encompassing one life of creativity that includes all of created nature?

Well, the way that Coleridge and some of his associates interpreted it, Um,

what it does is to create, uh, of the natural world,

one immense fraternity in a funny kind of way.

It kind of equalises all of creation by making

them all equal participants in this one diffuse,

energising animating life,

which is the fundamental sustaining life of the universe.

So the French revolutionary principle of equality

and even more importantly,

the French revolutionary principle of fraternity are

both guaranteed within this Unitarian worldview.

But in a different way,

they are now sustained by

the participation of all the elements of the natural of the natural world.

Within this energising animating, all pervasive life, this vitality,

this ubiquitous vitality, which is the way that God is present within the universe.

And Coleridge pushes this idea of fraternity really quite hard,

Um, and in some ways, in directions, which made him a laughingstock.

So, for example,

one of the poems he writes when he's still at Cambridge as

an undergraduate is addressed to a young donkey addressed to a young ass

that's tethered

and looking rather forlorn. Uh, kept away from its mum,

Uh,

and and Coleridge writes a poem of sort of semi parodic but not entirely periodic um,

fusion, addressed to the ass in which he addresses the donkey as his brother.

Um,

this is partly a political point is partly because the donkey is

a sort of a symbol or a metaphor for the downtrodden.

But it's also a more serious point, which is that the donkey

and the poet are in some obscure but important

way equally participants in this one inclusive life,

which is the sustaining life of creation, the sustaining divine life of creation.

Two young ass is an insignificant poem is not an important one,

but the idea that we are all bound together by a kind of fraternal bond which

constitutes at once our identity but also the

kinds of responsibility that we have one another,

a set of bonds that exist not just within the

human world but within the much broader natural world.

This does create a very important

kind of spiritualised ecological consciousness,

which you'll find in many, many of colleges, most important poems.

And, of course, perhaps most uh, most significantly of all,

although it's a complicated poem,

but perhaps most significantly of all in the ancient Mariner,

where you could see the shooting of the albatross as, amongst other things,

an act of, uh, fratricide, that is to say, the killing

of a brother within the within the immense and, uh, endlessly proliferating family

of, uh, of nature.