Opus maximum: The Clare College
Conference 2003
INTRODUCTION
Camille Wingo
Through Lent
and Easter terms (2003), in the Faculty of Divinity at the
The
closing workshop, which met on
Friday, June 20, 2003 in the Thirkill Room, brought to plain view
themes which, for me at least, had lurked throughout the seminar. John Beer showed us that editing Coleridge is
hard, meticulous work; we are very grateful to editors for blazing this trail. Graham Davidson asked us to consider the
whole person: should we disdain the seamy side of Coleridge or romanticize it
as the swelling of an un-encumbered spirit, in so doing we are likely to miss
the Christian grappling with profound conundrums. Luke Wright paralleled the dating and
ordering of fragments from the Opus
Maximum with the archaeological reconstruction of a pot from shards, a
parallel which illustrates that we must remain open-minded to a) new ways of reading a text and b) the possibility that the shards do not, in
fact, all belong to the same, cohesive pot.
Dan Hardy's characterization—‘implicateness’, folded-ness—for
Coleridge's work captured well its particular subtlety; but also described how
the seminar proceeded, not so much by each of us interpreting as by each of us
unfolding the text before us. Like a
road map, it never folded or unfolded the same way twice, and therein lies the intrigue 'implicateness' so well captures. A Coleridge scholar's deepest appreciation of
implicateness, however, as Jeff Barbeau demonstrated on Fragment 2, only
follows upon careful explication, an achievement complementary to the
editor's: the editor blazed the trail; Jeff drew us the map.
Coleridge’s
Magnum Opus and his Opus Maximum
John Beer
I have long known the manuscripts that
form the contents of the newly published volume and consulted them in various
forms and on various occasions, but I have always found them puzzling, the main
enigma being that there is so little evidence in them of their overall
organization and that Coleridge never gives an account within them of his main
purpose in creation—though of course he often indicates his current topic in
individual manuscripts, and they are quite evidently meant to be associated
with some of the major projects of his later years—particularly with what he
calls ‘The Assertion of Religion’. We do not even know the order in which he
expected his sections to appear and it seems quite possible that he was not
finally sure. It seems to me that there is also a difficulty for the general reader
in the ‘Prolegomena’, which arises from an ambiguity involved in the concept of
the edition itself: that is, the roles of the ‘magnum opus’ and of the ‘opus
maximum’ and the editor’s apparent acceptance of the fact that the second is
not to be identified with the first. The most prominent idea in the editor’s
original Prolegomena was associated with Coleridge’s desire to complete a
magnum opus, the roots of this idea as a concept in Western culture and his
fascination with it as a concept. Yet to an intelligent reader of the texts
themselves it soon becomes clear that what is presented here is not his magnum
opus but a series of manuscripts associated with that dream. McFarland of
course, shows himself thoroughly alive to the issues involved, which is not
surprising, since one of his most important books was a series of studies
entitled Romanticism and the Forms of
Ruin in which a constant theme was the difficulty for the Romantic writer
in achieving a great and fully satisfying whole, so that the most characteristic
Romantic form becomes the fragment; and of course what we have in the volume
are labeled precisely as ‘Fragments’; but I think that in his treatment as a
whole he has still allowed some of the ambiguities to be left unresolved.
Fragment
One
Duty and
Power: Conflicts of the Will in Coleridge’s Creation of the Self
Graham Davidson
The
Will as the foundation of human individuality is an idea that permeates
Coleridge’s thinking and takes center stage as the premise of the Opus Maximum.
There are two principal orders of the Will in the Opus: the first is materialist, serving
our appetites and desires, which Coleridge associated with the animal part of
our nature and which if given primacy creates a phantom self; the second is
rational, of Reason, the law of conscience, the moral moving towards the
spiritual in us, and which identifies self as other. Behind both is a third, what Coleridge calls
“the Absolute will”, which transcends finite existence.
Coleridge more or less opposes the rational and the animal, which become the prime sources of Duty and Power. To those who justify their appetites and
desires by comparing them with those of beasts, Coleridge declares, “[b]ut you
are not a beast, for beasts are not capable of reasoning; and you are not a
man, for you disown the principles of reason.” Coleridge believes that the
truths of Reason are the truths of our distinct humanity, and to reject moral
truths constitutes a dereliction of one’s humanity.
What I intended to show was that the theoretical
opposition he posited in the realization of the adult self is not consistent
with what he says about the development of the self through the relations
between mother and child, his principal example of how we create a self based
on the principles of reason.
In preparation for this argument he denied that we
use Reason exclusively to discover the truths of reason, and he develops the
metaphor of priming a pump to illustrate his point. This metaphor permits the child’s relationship
with the mother to begin in sense, in appetite.
His language in describing that relationship is the language of love and
dalliance: ‘… the little creature has slept out its sleep and stilled its
hunger at the mother’s bosom/ that very hunger a mode of Love, all made up of
Kisses—and coos and wantons with pleasure, and laughs and plays bob cherry with
the Mother, that is all, all to it…’
In the second part of the paper I traced how this
kind of kind of language empowers Coleridge’s later poetry, how the love
language Coleridge ascribes to the child devoted to the mother is the love
language of his poems – which often begin with his sense of devotion, perhaps
subliminally mixed with appetite, to a muse or mother-like figure. However Coleridge’s firm belief in his moral
and philosophical principles finally caused him to reject this both as a poetic
method and as a mode of behaviour. This
caused him profound internal conflict, which may be witnessed in certain poems
– ‘Duty Surviving Self-love’ for example – but which called him more and more
towards a desire to realize ‘the full Idea of the Reality of the Absolute
Will’. His final hope was expressed in a
couplet – ‘O! might Life cease, and selfless Mind,/
Whose Being is Act, alone remain
behind!’ – whether a triumphant or a tragic declaration
I cannot determine.
Fragment
Two
Coleridge’s
Natural Theology and Atheism: The demonstration of God in Fragment 2 of the Opus Maximum
Jeffrey W. Barbeau
My introduction to fragment 2 explained
how Coleridge attempts to clear away false demonstrations of the doctrine of
God in the Opus in order to prepare
his readers for an adequate conception of how only the revelation in Reason and
Faith is capable of rightly beholding the Divine. The first section of the paper developed, on
biographical and historical grounds, the course of Coleridge’s own shifting
views of God. Coleridge was raised under
the orthodox tutelage of his father, Rev. John Coleridge, who was not only the
vicar at Ottery St. Mary but a biblical scholar. Later, after his father’s death, Coleridge
came under the influence of William Frend and Unitarianism at
The second section of the
paper takes up this intellectual and spiritual shift and places it in contact
with the Opus. With particular attention
to the Trinitarian theology of Aids to
Reflection, Barbeau turns to Coleridge’s approach to the demonstration of
God in the Opus. After appropriating the
manuscript fragment known as the “Essay on Faith,” Coleridge presents a section
entitled “On the existential reality of the Idea of the Supreme Being, i.e. of
God” (96). In this section, Coleridge
argues against the ontological argument of English divines and the evidentiary
theology used not only by Paley but by Unitarians such as Thomas Belsham
invoking the authority of fulfilled prophecies and miracles in Scripture. Coleridge suggests that the belief that the
existence of God may be demonstrated [from nature] is so widespread that it
seems to be the only rational approach to the problem. On the contrary, Coleridge maintains that
“the most dangerous of all weakness is a false presumption of strength.” In particular, Coleridge opposes the
consequent reasoning of a natural theology that attempts to discern the
existence of the Creator on the basis of the wonders of creation; theologians
risk equating Nature with the Divine.
According to Coleridge, the depersonalization of the Divine, common to
pantheism and Unitarianism, ultimately leads to Atheism. Rather than the basis of theistic proofs,
Coleridge proposes that natural theology is no more than “an efficient ally”
(110).
Fragment
Three
The
Divine Ideas and the Absolute Will
Luke Wright
Fragment three
of the Opus Maximum is titled ‘On the
Divine Ideas’. The central project of
this attempt to begin the work again (and that it is an attempt to begin the work again is clear from the fact that
it commences with an introduction to the project as a whole,) is to see the
world through the hermeneutic of understanding God as the Absolute Will. Using this hermeneutic Coleridge attempted to
demonstrate that when the idea of the Divine was considered rationally from the
perspective of Absolute Will: the Trinity is the only
form in which the divine could
exist—because of the fact that the will must manifest itself, i.e. in an
incarnation, to be actual. His second
project within the first chapter of Fragment Three was to attempt to
demonstrate that employing the hermeneutic of Absolute Will solves the problem
of evil—though this theodicy is inclusive and unsatisfying.
The
second chapter of the work attempts to treat the subject through an a posteriori approach. Coleridge first discussed the futility of
scientific attempts to demonstrate the existence of God, reiterating that an a-priori
approach using the hermeneutic of Absolute Will is the only potentially
productive avenue. In the second half of
the second chapter Coleridge undertook a piece of Comparative Religion which
took a second, a posteriori line
of attack to demonstrate that the Trinity is the only rationally consistent
form of the Divine (and though his History of Religion methodology is crude by
today’s standards, for the time it was not anthropologically
unperceptive).
The focus of fragment three can be seen in
other areas throughout the work, such as the fact that the very first page of
fragment one discusses both the assumptions of Science and the concept of the
Will. This is equally true of Fragment
two: where the first paragraph begins a discussion of the individual will and
individual consciousness. It is equally
discernible later in the fragment when Coleridge writes that ‘The Will of God
is the last and final claim of all our duties… But the supreme Will, which is
one with the supreme Intelligence, is revealed to man through the conscience; (Opus Maximum, p. 93). Fragment three should be seen as an attempt
formally to clarify a work in progress.
Fragment Four
The
Implicateness of the Opus Maximum
Dan Hardy, by Camille Wingo
The last of our
workshop presenters, Dan Hardy, proffered the word ‘implicate’ as key to
understanding Opus Maximum, and the
characterization has appeal. As a compound
of the Latin in ('in') and plicare ('to fold'), its etymological
connotations evoke various, suggestive images.
We may think of the in-folding of wadded up paper, of a road map or of a an origami sculpture; we may contemplate as implicate
either Coleridge's literary style or the metaphysical reality which he
explicates. What fascinates, however, is
not that all of these in-foldings are alike, nor that they are analogous, nor
even that they are identical; but — and this is the thrust of Fragment 4 — that
in-folding is the metaphysical principle which undergirds all holistic
complexity, and life in particular.
The
universe, according to Coleridge, is what it is by virtue of ‘compound powers’:
a single power compounded of two powers which do not merely co-exist, but exist
in an ‘interchange of being’, are ‘inter-agents’ and, in some cases, mutually
antecedent. There is a relation between
the two along a particular but ephemeral issue like relation of two faces along
a fold, yet one face folded. To be more
precise, ‘...the law of polarity...by means of two contrary powers united in
the same subject, and manifesting the unity by opposition. ’ (p. 298)
One
power may be antecedent to the other.
Quality, for instance, is antecedent to quantity in a certain proportion;
quantity — which we, I think, would call complexity — follows from
quality. A stone is abundantly stony
(quality), but in its very stoniness simpler (of lower quantity); whereas
organisms, although abundantly mineral-y (carbon-based), being more complex
than a stone, have a higher proportion of quantity to quality. Everything is in some proportion qualitative
and quantitative. Where the two facets
meet, that is at their just their being stuff, like the infinitely yet
locatable line that is a fold, is ineffably simple.
The
powers comprising the compound may, however, be reciprocally antecedent. Following Aristotle, Coleridge cites the
relation between whole and parts. It is
not merely epistemologically that a whole should imply parts, and parts a
whole, an accident of language; but that wholes and parts exist ontologically
and are ontologically prior to each other.
Something would not be a part were there no whole; neither would there
be any whole without there being already its parts. Thus wholes and parts are symmetrical facets
along a fold.
‘Implicate’
also nicely describes Coleridge's literary style. His writings are adventurous: we follow as he
folds. Like a master
of origami, seemingly suddenly, presents to us a sculpture; a sculpture, never
a road map, but, on occasion and by his own admission, a wad of paper. Regarding a particular paragraph point he
writes, ‘The truth I seem to myself to have mastered, but I shrink from the
difficulty of explication.’ (p.24)
Thus
the whole of reality is implicate, comprised in such
in-folding. It is in the nature of
folds, however, to fold into another dimension; hence the origami universe in
which, as Dan Hardy pointed out for us, it is possible following the folds to
get from anywhere to anywhere in our uni-verse.
* * * *
The conference met on Friday, June 20, 2003; 9:00
a.m. – 5:00 p.m.; Thirkill Room; Old Court, Clare College; University of
Cambridge.
The working title of the book is The Harmony of All Knowledge: Variations and
Themes in the 'Great Work' of S. T. Coleridge.
Contributors: Jeffrey W. Barbeau, Murray J. Evans,
Luke Wright, Graham Davidson, James Vigus, Alan P. R. Gregory, Douglas Hedley,
Karen McLean, Scott Masson, Nick Reid, Dan Hardy, and John Beer.
The publication of Coleridge’s unfinished Opus
Maximum is a landmark in modern thought.
These essays are the first collection of scholarship on the fragments
that form Coleridge’s lifelong dream of writing a ‘great work’ that would
demonstrate the philosophical vitality of true religion. Left to J. H. Green at Coleridge’s death, the
fragmentary remains of the Opus were the source of considerable speculation
during the nineteenth century. In the
twentieth century, renewed interest in the unpublished remains of the Opus led
to the collection of the fragments by several libraries. Yet, the fragments remained inaccessible to
all but those few scholars willing and able to examine the Opus in
manuscript. The complete publication of
the Collected Coleridge has now made these fragments accessible to all. Still, Coleridge’s wide-ranging interest in
philosophical and theological traditions, along with a sophisticated if
fragmented philosophical rhetoric, leave even specialists of Coleridge
bewildered at the task of understanding the Opus. The essayists in this volume, all scholars
engaged in the study of Coleridge, bring together a range and depth of insight
that will open the fragments to critical appreciation for the first time. Thus, The
Harmony of All Knowledge will long remain a standard resource for any
subsequent appreciation of Coleridge’s lifelong work