Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge Samuel Taylor
are to be found in Arabic. Indeed, you may take a very pregnant and useful distinction between words and mere arbitrary names of things.
May 15. 1830
The Trinity is, 1. the Will; 2. the Reason, or Word; 3. the Love, or Life. As we distinguish these three, so we must unite them in one God. The union must be as transcendant as the distinction.
Mr. Irving's notion is tritheism,—nay, rather in terms, tri-daemonism. His opinion about the sinfulness of the humanity of our Lord is absurd, if considered in one point of view; for body is not carcass. How can there be a sinful carcass? But what he says is capable of a sounder interpretation. Irving caught many things from me; but he would never attend to any thing which he thought he could not use in the pulpit. I told him the certain consequence would be, that he would fall into grievous errors. Sometimes he has five or six pages together of the purest eloquence, and then an outbreak of almost madman's babble.50
May 16. 1830
How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure, if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God; in other respects, he takes fire, like an Arah sheikh, at the injuries suffered by Lot, and goes to war with the combined kinglings immediately.
Isaac is, as it were, a faint shadow of his father Abraham. Born in possession of the power and wealth which his father had acquired, he is always peaceful and meditative; and it is curious to observe his timid and almost childish imitation of Abraham's stratagem about his wife.51 Isaac does it before-hand, and without any apparent necessity.
Jacob is a regular Jew, and practises all sorts of tricks and wiles, which, according to our modern notions of honour, we cannot approve. But you will observe that all these tricks are confined to matters of prudential arrangement, to worldly success and prosperity (for such, in fact, was the essence of the birthright); and I think we must not exact from men of an imperfectly civilized age the same conduct as to mere temporal and bodily abstinence which we have a right to demand from Christians. Jacob is always careful not to commit any violence; he shudders at bloodshed. See his demeanour after the vengeance taken on the Schechemites.52 He is the exact compound of the timidity and gentleness of Isaac, and of the underhand craftiness of his mother Rebecca. No man could be a bad man who loved as he loved Rachel. I dare say Laban thought none the worse of Jacob for his plan of making the ewes bring forth ring-streaked lambs.
May 17. 1830
If a man's conduct cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, what is there left for us to refer to it, but the fiendish? Passion without any appetite is fiendish.
The best way to bring a clever young man, who has become sceptical and unsettled, to reason, is to make him feel something in any way. Love, if sincere and unworldly, will, in nine instances out of ten, bring him to a sense and assurance of something real and actual; and that sense alone will make him think to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is thinking.
"Never marry but for love," says William Penn in his Reflexions and Maxims; "but see that thou lovest what is lovely."
May 18. 1830
Lord Eldon's doctrine, that grammar schools, in the sense of the reign of Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth, must necessarily mean schools for teaching Latin and Greek, is, I think, founded on an insufficient knowledge of the history and literature of the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson uses the term "grammar" without any reference to the learned languages.
It is intolerable when men, who have no other knowledge, have not even a competent understanding of that world in which they are always living, and to which they refer every thing.
Although contemporary events obscure past events in a living man's life, yet as soon as he is dead, and his whole life is a matter of history, one action stands out as conspicuously as another.
A democracy, according to the prescript of pure reason, would, in fact, be a church. There would he focal points in it, but no superior.
May 20. 1830
No doubt, Chrysostom, and the other rhetorical fathers, contributed a good deal, by their rash use of figurative language, to advance the superstitious notion of the eucharist; but the beginning had been much earlier.53 [1] In Clement, indeed, the mystery is treated as it was treated by Saint John and Saint Paul; but in Hermas we see the seeds of the error, and more clearly in Irenaeus; and so it went on till the idea was changed into an idol.
The errors of the Sacramentaries, on the one hand, and of the Romanists on the other, are equally great. The first have volatilized the eucharist into a metaphor; the last have condensed it into an idol.
Jeremy Taylor, in his zeal against transubstantiation, contends that the latter part of the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel has no reference to the eucharist. If so, St. John wholly passes over this sacred mystery; for he does not include it in his notice of the last supper. Would not a total silence of this great apostle and evangelist upon this mystery be strange? A mystery, I say; for it is a mystery; it is the only mystery in our religious worship. When many of the disciples left our Lord, and apparently on the very ground that this saying was hard, he does not attempt to detain them by any explanation, but simply adds the comment, that his words were spirit. If he had really meant that the eucharist should he a mere commemorative celebration of his death, is it conceivable that he would let these disciples go away from him upon such a gross misunderstanding? Would he not have said, "You need not make a difficulty; I only mean so and so?"
Arnauld, and the other learned Romanists, are irresistible against the low sacramentary doctrine.
The sacrament of baptism applies itself, and has reference to the faith or conviction, and is, therefore, only to be performed once;—it is the light of man. The sacrament of the eucharist is a symbol of all our religion;– it is the life of man. It is commensurate with our will, and we must, therefore, want it continually.
The meaning of the expression, [Greek: ei m_e _en soi didomenon an_othen], "except it were given thee from above," in the 19th chapter of St. John, ver. 11., seems to me to have been generally and grossly mistaken. It is commonly understood as importing that Pilate could have no power to deliver Jesus to the Jews, unless it had been given him by God, which, no doubt, is true; but if that is the meaning, where is the force or connection of the following clause, [Greek: dia touto], "therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin?" In what respect were the Jews more sinful in delivering Jesus up, because Pilate could do nothing except by God's leave? The explanation of Erasmus and Clarke, and some others, is very dry- footed. I conceive the meaning of our Lord to have been simply this, that Pilate would have had no power or jurisdiction—[Greek: exousian]—over him, if it had not been given by the Sanhedrin, the [Greek: an_o boul_e], and therefore it was that the Jews had the greater sin. There was also this further peculiar baseness and malignity in the conduct of the Jews. The mere assumption of Messiahship, as such, was no crime in the eyes of the Jews; they hated Jesus, because he would not be their sort of Messiah: on the other hand, the Romans cared not for his declaration that he was the Son of God; the crime in their eyes was his assuming to be a king. Now, here were the Jews accusing Jesus before the Roman governor of that
The admiration and sympathy which Mr. Coleridge felt and expressed towards the late Mr. Irving, at his first appearance in London, were great and sincere; and his grief at the deplorable change which followed was in proportion. But, long after the tongues shall have failed and been forgotten, Irving's name will live in the splendid eulogies of his friend. See
Gen. xxvi. 6.
Gen. xxxiv.
Mr. Coleridge made these remarks upon my quoting Selden's well-known saying (Table Talk), "that transubstantiation was nothing but rhetoric turned into logic."—ED.