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
In these five paragraphs I have enumerated and explained the several
powers or forces belonging or incidental to human nature, which in all
matters of reason the man is bound either to subjugate or subordinate to
reason. The application to Faith follows of its own accord. The first or
most indefinite sense of faith is fidelity: then fidelity under previous
contract or particular moral obligation. In this sense faith is fealty
to a rightful superior: faith is the duty of a faithful subject to a
rightful governor. Then it is allegiance in active service; fidelity to
the liege lord under circumstances, and amid the temptations, of
usurpation, rebellion, and intestine discord. Next we seek for that
rightful superior on our duties to whom all our duties to all other
superiors, on our faithfulness to whom all our bounden relations to all
other objects of fidelity, are founded. We must inquire after that duty
in which all others find their several degrees and dignities, and from
which they derive their obligative force. We are to find a superior,
whose rights, including our duties, are presented to the mind in the
very idea of that Supreme Being, whose sovereign prerogatives are
predicates implied in the subjects, as the essential properties of a
circle are co-assumed in the first assumption of a circle, consequently
underived, unconditional, and as rationally insusceptible, so probably
prohibitive, of all further question. In this sense then faith is
fidelity, fealty, allegiance of the moral nature to God, in opposition
to all usurpation, and in resistance to all temptation to the placing
any other claim above or equal with our fidelity to God.
The will of God is the last ground and final aim of all our duties, and
to that the whole man is to be harmonized by subordination, subjugation,
or suppression alike in commission and omission. But the will of God,
which is one with the supreme intelligence, is revealed to man through
the conscience. But the conscience, which consists in an inappellable
bearing-witness to the truth and reality of our reason, may legitimately
be construed with the term reason, so far as the conscience is
prescriptive; while as approving or condemning, it is the consciousness
of the subordination or insubordination, the harmony or discord, of the
personal will of man to and with the representative of the will of God.
This brings me to the last and fullest sense of Faith, that is, as the
obedience of the individual will to the reason, in the lust of the flesh
as opposed to the supersensual; in the lust of the eye as opposed to the
supersensuous; in the pride of the understanding as opposed to the
infinite, in the [Greek: phronaema sarkos] in contrariety to the
spiritual truth; in the lust of the personal will as opposed to the
absolute and universal; and in the love of the creature, as far as it is
opposed to the love which is one with the reason, namely, the love of
God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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