A Book I Value by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge [Coleridge, Samuel Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400825622
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Emanuel Swedenborg, De coelo et ejus mirabilibus, et de inferno, ex auditis et visis [Concerning Heaven and its Wonders, and Hell, from Things Heard and Seen], London, 1758.

Like William Blake, who was also a friend of Tulk’s, Coleridge took a serious interest in the visions and doctrine of Swedenborg, without becoming a convert to his system. He annotated at least eight of his works, several of them gifts from Tulk, and considered publishing on Swedenborg. Among the topics proposed were an intellectual biography, a dictionary of “correspondences,” and a companion to True Christian Religion.

“Trinitarians and Solifidians” represent different and in some ways conflicting aspects of Protestantism, Solifidians adhering to the belief that faith alone is sufficient for salvation, and Trinitarians emphasizing the role of Christ as Redeemer. “Reigning love” is Coleridge’s literal translation of amor regnans in Swedenborg: Swedenborg suggests that human beings are defined as spiritual beings according to the thing they love most in life.

[# 144]

{Now let us turn to experience. That angels are human forms or men has been seen by me a thousand times. I have talked with them as man with man, sometimes with one, sometimes with several together, and I have seen nothing whatever in their form different from that of man. . . . Indeed, I have quite often told them that men in the Christian world are in such blind ignorance about angels and spirits as to believe them to be minds without form, even pure thoughts, of which they have no idea except as something ethereal in which there is some vitality.}

I have met (in books at least) with some tho’ few, who have doubted like myself whether Scripture teaches us, as an article of Faith, the existence of any other rational Creatures but men either such as they are in the present or such as they become in the spiritual World. But I never met with any who, believing in Angels as originally super-human, supposed them to be without Form & personal Characteristics, tho’ invisible to our bodily Sense. The Common Man throughout Christendom represents them to himself as sexless Men, beautiful luminous and with Wings.

One of my scruples respecting the reality of Swedenborg’s Experiences (N.b. not respecting his veracity, which God forbid!) is grounded on this: that the notions, & doctrines, which he attributes to others, seem always like the opinions which one Man forms of another Man’s Belief whom he supposes to differ from himself, and not like what the Man’s own statement of his own conceptions would be. This is especially striking in the confessions of Faith put in the mouths of Trinitarians and Solifidians by Swedenborg—which no learned Trinitarian or Calvinist would acknowlege for his own.

[# 145] If these marginal notes should fall under any other eyes but my own, I would wish to premise to the remark below that I am almost persuaded that the errors objected to are mainly in the use of undefined terms—and that the Author actually meant every where the form

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