The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Religion
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
On this ground only can it be made comprehensible, how any honest and
commonly intelligent man can withstand the proofs and sound logic of
Bull and Waterland, that they failed in the first place to present the
idea itself of the great doctrine which they so ably advocated. Take my
self, S.T.C. as a humble instance. I was never so befooled as to think
that the author of the fourth Gospel, or that St. Paul, ever taught the
Priestleyan Psilanthropism, or that Unitarianisn (presumptuously, nay,
absurdly so called), was the doctrine of the New Testament generally.
But during the sixteen months of my aberration from the Catholic Faith,
I presumed that the tenets of the divinity of Christ, the Redemption,
and the like, were irrational, and that what was contradictory to reason
could not have been revealed by the Supreme Reason. As soon as I
discovered that these doctrines were not only consistent with reason,
but themselves very reason, I returned at once to the literal
interpretation of the Scriptures, and to the Faith.
As to Dr. Samuel Clarke, the fact is, every generation has its one or
more over-rated men. Clarke was such in the reign of George I.; Dr.
Johnson eminently so in that of George III.; Lord Byron being the star
now in the ascendant.
In every religious and moral use of the word, God, taken absolutely,
that is, not as a God, or the God, but as God, a relativity, a
distinction in kind 'ab omni quod non est Deus', is so essentially
implied, that it is a matter of perfect indifference, whether we assert
a world without God, or make God the world. The one is as truly Atheism
as the other. In fact, for all moral and practical purposes they are the
same position differently expressed; for whether I say, God is the
world, or the world is God, the inevitable conclusion, the sense and
import is, that there is no other God than the world, that is, there is
no other meaning to the term God. Whatever you may mean by, or choose to
believe of, the world, that and that alone you mean by, and believe of,
God. Now I very much question whether in any other sense Atheism, that
is, speculative Atheism, is possible. For even in the Lucretian, the
coarsest and crudest scheme of the Epicurean doctrine, a hylozism, a
potential life, is clearly implied, as also in the celebrated 'lene
clinamen' becoming actual. Desperadoes articulating breath into a
blasphemy of nonsense, to which they themselves attach no connected
meaning, and the wickedness of which is alone intelligible, there may
be; but a La Place, or a La Grand, would, and with justice, resent and
repel the imputation of a belief in chance, or of a denial of law,
order, and self-balancing life and power in the world. Their error is,
that they make them the proper and underived attributes of the world. It
follows then, that Pantheism is equivalent to Atheism, and that there is
no other Atheism actually existing, or speculatively conceivable, but
Pantheism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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