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The Contribution of Ralph Cudworth to the Neoplatonic Background of S.T THE CONTRIBUTION OF RALPH CUDWORTH TO THE NEOPLATONIC BACKGROUND OF S.T. COLERIDGE’S “RELIGIOUS MUSINGS” CRISTINA FLORES MORENO Universidad de La Rioja “Religious Musings” is a poem that has not received much scholarly attention, although its importance to Coleridge, especially as an expression of his Neo-Platonic ideas, deserves to be acknowledged. The poem depicts Coleridge’s initial steps toward his mature literary theory, particularly involv- ing the concepts of symbol and imagination. “Religious Musings” signals the Romantic poet’s turn toward idealist positions, leaving the Hartley’s associ- ationism behind. Against the widely-accepted proposition that the source of Coleridge’s concept of symbol is to be found in German Idealism, it is our contention here that he was initially influenced by a group of British Neoplatonic philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists, who provided Coleridge with the bases upon which he would build his symbolic poetics. This paper exam- ines Coleridge’s readings in the years 1795–6 of Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System (pub. 1678; 1995) and how the ideas in this work con- tributed to the ideological background of “Religious Musings” (1794–1796). In order to find the Neoplatonic sources of Coleridge’s concept of sym- bol and the related concept of imagination, we must then turn to an early period in his life and career, the 1790s. This is a period previous to his study of German thinkers, (1801–2, in the case of Kant, and around 1805, in the case of Schelling). About Schelling’s works the romantic poet claimed that in them he “first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do” (1983: I.92). Coleridge’s entries in his notebooks, and his literary production of the period 1794–1798: First Lecture on Revealed Religion, The Destiny of Nations, and the Conversation Poems, show the initial impact of Cudworth’s philosophy in Coleridge’s thought. In the period 1790–1800 Coleridge did not produce many explicit com- mentaries on the nature of poetry, but his poetry “is crowded and sweats B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006 180 beneath a heavy burthen of Ideas” (Coleridge 1971: 137). Coleridge’s poems in that decade present his attempt to get an insight into the unity of Nature and further identification of man and Nature, and they also depict his inter- est in the mental processes involved in the poetic creative act. A letter he wrote to Thelwall in October 1797 sheds light on Coleridge’s concept of nature: I can at times feel strongly the beauties, you describe, in themselves, and for themselves — but more frequently all things appear little — all the knowledge, that can be acquired, child’s play — the universe itself — what but an immense heap of little things? — I can contemplate nothing but parts, and parts are all little — ! — My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great — something one and indivisible — and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! — But in this faith all things counter- feit infinity! (1971: 349) Nature seems to Coleridge a great unity. Because “all things counter- feit infinity”, phenomena are different parts of this complex whole that allows humans to reach, through contemplation, this unity of Nature. In this sense, then, elements in nature are symbolic: “For all that meets the bodily sense I deem / Symbolical, one mighty alphabet” (1994: 132). Symbol and referent participate in a common nature by virtue of the “Plastick Life” of nature. This is the foundation of Coleridge’s “symbolic knowledge” (Appleyard 1965:50). His mature philosophy of literature is based on this symbolic knowledge: In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking […] I seem rather to be seeking […] a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists. (Coleridge 1973: 2546) In these speculations we can see the source of his mature idea of sym- bol as he defines it in his latest works, especially The Stateman’s Manual (1816; 1993a) and Aids to Reflection (1825; 1993b): [B]y symbol I mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents. (1993a: 79) A Symbol is a sign included in the Idea, which it represents: ex.gr. an actu- al part chosen to represent the whole … (1993b: 363–4) 181 JOURNEYS INTO SILENCE Coleridge’s most-discussed concept of Imagination appears as the intellectual faculty in charge of recognising symbols, and through them con- ducting the poet to the knowledge of the Whole, the Greatest Being of Nature. In March 1798, in a letter to his brother George, Coleridge already presents himself as inspired by “fields & woods & mountains with almost a visionary fondness” and seeking to “elevate the imagination & set the affec- tions in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated, as with a liv- ing soul, by the presence of Life” (1971: 397). This “living soul”, “the presence of Life”, which the poet should recog- nize in the symbolic phenomenon through imagination, seems to be the result of his attraction to Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System and his concept of “plastic life”. Coleridge’s attraction to the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition, which started to fascinate him during his attendance at Christ’s Hospital, was fur- ther strengthened in Cambridge and continued to hold his interest during his stay in Bristol where he undertook a study of the Cambridge Platonists. These were a group of Anglican philosophers led by Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) and Henry More (1614–1687) who, in the seventeenth century, emerged against the materialist philosophy of the time with the aid of Plato’s and, chiefly, Plotinus’s concepts. The main purpose of the group was to defend the concept of the existence of God, and in order to do so they proposed the spiritual constitution of nature and defended a universal syn- thesis. Nature is, to them, plastic rather than mechanical. They work “[to] show how the one original vital force governing nature is infinitely exempli- fied, yet not lost, in these exemplifications” (Cassirer 1953: 51). The link between the original vital force and nature phenomena is “plastic nature”. In his masterwork, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678; 1995), Cudworth challenges the empiricism of the age by claiming that the natural world was symbolic of a transcendent reality beyond appearances, thanks to the “spermatic reason or plastic nature” that allowed the interre- lation between the corporeal and the incorporeal. Though Cudworth distin- guishes between two principles of being: a corporeal (quantity) and an incorporeal substance (energy), intrinsically different and incommensu- rable, he admits a reciprocal influence of one substance upon the other in the intermediary sphere of the lower energies of the soul. This intermediary sphere is the imagination, corresponding to Plastic Nature as the link B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006 182 between both substances, the forming principle from within, the medium employed by God to shape the universe: [....] there is a Plastick Nature under him [God], which as an Inferior and Subordinate Instrument doth drudgingly execute that Part of his Providence which consists in the Regular and Orderly Motion of Matter. (Cudworth 1995: 147) Coleridge became acquainted with Cudworth’s Intellectual System during 1795 and 1796. According to the Registers of the Bristol Library Society (Whalley 1949), Coleridge borrowed Cudworth’s book twice, in the periods going from 15 May to 1 June 1795 and again from 9 November to 13 December 1796. Nevertheless some evidence suggests that he had already become acquainted with the Cambridge Platonists’ thought some time ear- lier. In his “Sonnets on Eminent Characters: To The Rev. W.L. Bowles” (the first version of which was printed in the Morning Chronicle in December 26 1794), we find Coleridge’s first reference to the concept of “plastic spirit”: While shadowy Pleasure with mysterious wings Brooded the wavy and tumultuous Mind, Like that great Spirit, who with plastic Sweep Mov’d on the darkness of the formless Deep! (Coleridge 1994: 84) Coleridge’s first reference to “Religious Musings” is found in a letter to Robert Southey dated 29 December 1794: “I am writing a poem which when finished you shall see — and wished him to describe the Characters & Doctrines of Jesus Christ for me — but his low Spirits prevented him — The Poem is in blank Verse on the Nativity”. (1971: 147) He was still working on it a few weeks before it appeared in Poems in Various Subjects, on 16 April 1796 (1971: 187). He took the poem very seriously, writing to Cottle in October 1795 “it has cost me much labour in polishing, more than any poem I ever wrote — and I believe, deserves it more” (1971: 162). In this let- ter he states that the poem was “not quite three hundred lines”, but the 1796 version contains four hundred and nineteen lines; he had some remaining work to do to reach the (definitive) 1796 version. Thus, at the time the poet began the long process of writing “Religious Musings” he had already had some knowledge of Cudworth’s philosophy. Moreover, the composition of the poem coincides in time with Coleridge’s serious study of The True Intellectual System of the Universe. 183 JOURNEYS INTO SILENCE Ashton describes “Religious Musings” as “a kind of poetical miscellany, mirroring Coleridge’s preoccupations in religion and politics over the fifteen months of its fragmented composition” (1996: 84).
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