Published in: Frederick Burwick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 345–58 (chapter 18). Paperback edition, 2012. Digital edition on Oxford Scholarship Online. Please cite the published version. COLERIDGE ON ALLEGORY AND SYMBOL Nicholas Halmi Desynonymization As befits a thinker who identified social progress with linguistic precision, Coleridge was preoccupied with questions of definition and distinction in philosophical and critical terminology. Because words are not only ‘the instruments of communication’ but ‘the only signs that a finite being can have of its own thoughts’, he explained in his philosophical lecture of 8 January 1819, their signification becomes more specific as human thought becomes more complex, ‘in proportion as what was conceived as one and identical becomes several’ (Lects Phil, i. 212). Although this process occurs naturally, ‘new relations’ in thought necessitating ‘new distinctions’ in language, it gains in accuracy and clarity when it is performed actively and self-reflexively, which is to say philosophically. To ‘desynonymize’ words is therefore nothing less than the philosopher’s social responsibility (Lects Phil, ii. 553–4). It was a responsibility that Coleridge himself took seriously, formulating and defending distinctions between (to name only the better known examples) imagination and fancy, primary and secondary imagination, reason and understanding, intuitive and discursive reason, fancy and wit, genius and talent, imitation and copy, organic and mechanic form, illusion and delusion, abstraction and generalization, and not least symbol and allegory. But while these distinctions were supposed to be purely instrumental, improving the functioning of language ‘as an organ and a vehicle of thought’ (Lects Phil, ii. 553), they in fact became objects of interpretation and debate in themselves, and indeed may be said to constitute a large part of Coleridge’s critical legacy. When he facetiously asked Coleridge the public intellectual to ‘explain his Explanation’ (Don Juan, dedication), Lord Byron could scarcely have imagined that critics of the following century would earnestly take it upon themselves to perform exactly that service. Criticisms of Coleridge’s desynonymizing fall under three broad categories: the empirical, the conceptual, and the ethical. The famous distinction between imagination and fancy, for example, has been discredited as an irrelevance to the explication of poetry (Hardy 1951), dismissed as an idiosyncratic juxtaposition of German idealist with British associationist terminology (both of which in any event belong to a superseded faculty psychology), and distrusted as an ‘attempt to keep empirical and associationist thought undisturbed in a subordinate position below an idealist system’ (Wellek 1955–92: ii. 164–5). Similar complaints of empirical unverifiability, conceptual confusion, and the ethically dubious promotion of a hierarchy under the guise of an opposition have been levelled—and not unjustly—against the Coleridgean distinction most contested in recent decades, that between the symbol, as a non-discursive and synecdochical form of representation, and allegory, as the discursive representation of abstractions through unrelated images of no inherent significance. The handful of instances, all dating to the decade between 1816 and 1825, in which Coleridge contrasted allegory unfavourably with the symbol reflect neither the full range of his comments on allegory, for they were often sympathetic, nor his own willingness to resort 2 to the mode (see Gatta 1977). He thought well enough of his ‘Allegoric Vision’ (1795), a satirical narrative involving personified abstractions, to reprint it no fewer than three times between 1811 and 1829 (the last in his Poetical Works), revising it as he did so in order to accommodate his changed political and religious views (Lects 1795, 89–93; EOT, ii. 262–70; LS, 131–7; PW, i. 197–203). But his subordination of allegory to the symbol has received a disproportionate amount of attention because of its conformity to a theoretical disposition that, having found its earliest expression among certain of Coleridge’s German contemporaries, notably Goethe and Schelling, persisted among artists and critics well into the twentieth century. Indeed W. B. Yeats not only affirmed this disposition but assimilated to it, as had Coleridge himself in The Statesman’s Manual (1816), the distinction between imagination and fancy: ‘A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination’ (Yeats 1903: 116; see also Halmi 2007b: 2–3). When Paul de Man, in his influential essay ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, criticized Coleridge for obfuscating the painful truth, supposedly enacted in Romantic allegory as a self-conscious ‘distance in relation to its own origin’, that a sign can never coincide temporally with its referent, the broader target of his critique was nothing less than ‘wide areas of European literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’—the self-styled symbolist movement—as well as the correlative criticism that accepted unquestioningly the superiority of the symbol to allegory (de Man 1969: 191). Coleridge was simply the foremost anglophone representative of this particular form of ‘tenacious self-mystification’. That more is at stake in the distinction between symbol and allegory than Coleridge’s perspicacity is acknowledged equally, if less explicitly, in the vehemence with which critics sympathetic to him have responded to de Man’s provocation—chiefly by declaring the concept of the symbol theological in essence or provenance (or both) and therefore of no proper concern to literary critics (e.g., Abrams 1974; Barth 1977; McFarland 1990), a gesture no more effective in the event than Tosca’s urging Cavaradossi to flee after what was supposed to have been his mock execution. To defend Coleridge’s concept of the symbol is to affirm the vision, or at least the hope, of a world endowed with an inherent numinousness (cf. Barth 1977: 163–4). Coleridge’s early symbolist theory Coleridge’s originality having been impugned repeatedly almost from the beginning of the nineteenth century, much scholarship has been devoted to identifying, with varying degrees of plausibility, the sources of and influences on his thought. But while the parallels to Coleridge’s concept of the symbol among his German contemporaries have often been noted (e.g., by Wellek 1955–92: ii. 174–5; Ward 1966; McFarland 1981: 26–34; Halmi 2007b: ch. 1), surprisingly little attention has been given to possible sources of his distinction between symbol and allegory, despite its relatively late appearance in his writings. It is likely that this desynonymization of two terms he had not previously treated as synonyms was intended to bring into sharper relief what he had come, by 1816, to consider the defining characteristic of the symbol: the grounding of its representational function in a relation of ontological participation. For only when he began to assert that the symbol is a part of what it represents did he also begin to differentiate it from allegory. That this distinctively Romantic concept of the symbol evidently required a foil, and that the concept of allegory was available to serve as such, may be attributed to a burdensome inheritance from Enlightenment semiotics, a general anxiety about representation. An unmistakable manifestation of this anxiety, present equally in the eighteenth-century 3 theorization of allegory and the Romantic theorization of the symbol, was the view of the relationship between sign and meaning as necessarily problematic because it straddled the ontological barrier between the realm outside the human mind and the realm inside it. The corollary of that assumption, no less compelling for its paradoxicality, was that signification could be successful only where it seemed not to occur at all—that is, where a sign became completely transparent to its meaning. Such transparency was ascribed to so-called natural signs because their signifying power, being based on causal or mimetic relations, was thought to inhere in them rather than, as in the case of artificial or conventional signs, to require a human act of institution. Natural signs were therefore, in theory, intuitively and universally recognizable. Artificial signs—a class to which eighteenth-century critics invariably assigned allegorical images—were, by contrast, culturally specific and therefore at risk of being ambiguous, incomprehensible, or simply unrecognizable. But while the concept of the natural sign defined the ideal against which all signs were to be judged, it could not simply be invoked in reaction against the disenchantment of the world, by which I mean the loss, felt as a loss, of the sense that the natural world possesses an inherent numinousness or divinely ordained significance accessible to humanity. For natural signs revealed no more than the source of their communicative function: smoke was a sign merely of fire, a symptom a sign merely of a disease, a baby’s cry a sign merely of the baby’s distress. What the philosopher George Berkeley called the ‘visual language’ of natural signs may have been divinely ordained, in that it was grounded in the nature of things, but it possessed no metaphysical content.1 Already in the 1790s Coleridge began to confront the difficulty of theorizing the numinousness of nature, which is to say of reconceiving the natural sign as a natural symbol. He may have had Berkeley in mind when he declared, in a note of c. 1795, ‘We see our God everywhere—the Universe in the most literal Sense is his written Language’ (Lects 1795, 339)—a declaration in which precisely the words literal, written, and Language cannot be taken literally—but this early conception of a universal symbolism was indebted primarily to Mark Akenside’s didactic poem The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), which, elaborating the analogy between the human artist and the divine creator, identified the appreciation of God’s handiwork with the powers of imagination. Indeed in his first ‘Lecture on Revealed Religion’, delivered in May 1795—the same lecture in which his ‘Allegoric Vision’ made its first appearance as an attack on atheism and Anglicanism—Coleridge followed Akenside almost verbatim: ‘The Omnipotent has unfolded to us the Volume of the World, that there we may read the Transcript of himself. In Earth or Air the meadow’s purple stores, the Moons mild radiance, or the Virgins form Blooming with rosy smiles, we see pourtrayed the bright Impressions of the eternal Mind’ (Lects 1795, 94; cf. p. 158).2 In poems of the 1790s, too, Coleridge emphasized the morally educative effects of recognizing the representation of Providence in nature. The lines he contributed to book 2 of Robert Southey’s Joan of Arc (1795) and later republished in his own poem ‘The Destiny of Nations’ (1817) stated this theme forthrightly: For all that meets the bodily sense I deem Symbolical, one mighty alphabet For infant minds; and we in this low world Placed with our backs to bright Reality, That we may learn with young unwounded ken Things from their shadows. . . . (2.19–24; PW, i. 210; cf. p. 282) And three years later, in ‘Frost at Midnight’, he promised his infant son Hartley, so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God 4 Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. (lines 63–7; Coleridge 2003: 121) The force of this promise lay in the experience, as claimed in propria persona in ‘Fears in Solitude’ (also of 1798), of having himself learned morality from the English landscape: from thy lakes and mountains-hills, Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas, Have drunk in all my intellectual life, All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, All adoration of the God in Nature, All lovely and all honourable things. . . . (lines 181–6; Coleridge 2003: 114–15) Yet a secondhand natural theology resting uneasily on Shaftesburian Neoplatonism, analogizing Christian apologetics, and the eighteenth-century cult of artistic genius would not suffice permanently. In 1802, criticizing the poet William Lisle Bowles (whose sonnets he had earlier admired) for an inability ‘to see or describe any interesting appearances in nature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world’, Coleridge insisted that ‘A Poet’s Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great Appearances in Nature—& not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies’ (CL, ii. 864; cf. Wilson 1972: 44). But the poet could express this unity—‘we are all one Life’—only so long as he was convinced of its truth, and by 1805, as a remarkable notebook entry indicates, Coleridge’s conviction was evidently wavering. The language of nature had become an object of earnest hope and uncertain apprehension: In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dimglimmering tho’ the dewy window, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phænomenon were the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature/It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is Λογος, the Creator! <and the Evolver!>. (CN, ii. 2546) Because Akenside for his part had assumed a pre-established harmony between mind and nature as the basis of the analogy between God and artist, he regarded the natural world as significant only in so far as it stimulated the imagination to form its own world, in effect an alternative to nature. Precisely that assumption of a pre-established harmony was now in question for Coleridge, however, and in need of empirical confirmation—in nature itself and prior to any imaginative act by the observer. In the Biographia Literaria he would argue, following Schelling, that the original identity of subject and object must be assumed as the basis of knowledge (BL, i. 252–3, 271, 279, 285), but he nonetheless hoped (as Schelling too did) that it might also be realized in the sensible world. Thus the symbolic language Coleridge demanded had to be at once objectively real and subjectively meaningful, nondiscursive yet expressive of something greater than itself. Such a language obviously could not consist in artificial signs, but nor could it consist in natural signs, at least as defined in Enlightenment semiotics. A decade was to pass before Coleridge arrived at a provisional solution to the problem of conceptualizing the natural symbol, and that solution involved two categorial conflations: one of the relations part/whole and identity/difference, the other of linguistic and nonlinguistic representation. The first conflation was intimated in a notebook entry of 1811 or earlier in which Coleridge struggled to decide whether ‘thoughts’ or ‘symbols’—he used the two terms synonymously in this instance—were parts of, substitutes for, or coterminous with things (CN, iii. 4058). The second conflation was intimated in another notebook entry, this 5 time of 1815, in which he defined the symbol by reference to a quotation from Phineas Fletcher’s allegorical poem The Purple Island (1633): ‘Symbols = “the whole, yet of the whole a part”’ (CN, iii. 4253).3 Wellek, who understood the symbol to be a figure of substitution, and hence metaphorical, noted exasperatedly that Coleridge ‘seems to confuse symbol and synecdoche’, the latter ‘a figure of continuity from which symbol cannot even develop’ (1955–92: ii. 174). Once Coleridge had settled on this basic synecdochical definition of the symbol, he tended to treat all instances of the general semiotic phenomenon (that is, whatever he labelled symbolic) as functionally equivalent, regardless of context and despite the difference in kind between linguistic and non-linguistic representation. In one of the few examples he offered of a ‘symbolical Expression’, ‘Here comes a Sail—that is, a Ship’ (CN, iii. 4503; Lects 1808– 19, ii. 418), only the referents of the words sail and ship are ontologically related, while the words themselves are artificial signs with no inherent connection to one another—a fact Coleridge ignored. On the other hand, when ‘a single tree or flower’ is perceived to be ‘a natural symbol of that higher life of reason’ (LS, 72), the signifying function derives from the ontological connection of the visible object itself to the invisible force directing its development. Yet Coleridge’s de facto dissolution of distinctions among types of semiotic operations, not to mention ontological realms (human texts, natural objects), was entirely characteristic of Romantic symbolist theory—he was no greater an offender of logic in this respect than Schelling—and reflective of an inclination to extend the symbol’s domain to the whole of reality (see Halmi 2007b: 17–19). For naturalizing the symbol as a potentially ubiquitous mode of representation was the theoretical prerequisite to affirming nature as symbolic. Symbol vs. allegory As if in agreement with Yeats’s assertion that ‘[o]nly one symbol exists, though the reflecting mirrors make many appear and all different’ (1937: 240), Coleridge did not distinguish types of symbolism when, in The Statesman’s Manual, he sought to inform the English ‘higher classes’ that the correct understanding of both nature and scripture required ‘the study of the science and language of symbols’ (LS, 79). But he did take trouble—for the first time—to distinguish symbols from the ‘phantom proxies’ of allegorical imagery: ‘by a symbol I mean, not a metaphor of 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’ (LS, 30, 79). In other words, whereas allegories merely substitute fictional images for abstract ideas, symbols convey something beyond or greater than themselves precisely because of what they are in themselves. That Coleridge introduced this distinction in order to clarify, in the first instance, the peculiarity of imagery in the Hebrew Bible has been interpreted as evidence of his indebtedness to the eighteenth-century bishop Robert Lowth for the concept of the symbol (Engell 1989: 95; Engell 1999: 135–9). In his Oxford lectures On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753), the original Latin edition of which Coleridge borrowed from the Bristol Library in September 1796 (Whalley 1949: 123), Lowth had defined ‘mystical allegory’, in contradistinction to those forms of allegory in which the literal meaning serves solely as the medium of the figurative meaning, as referring equally to historical realities and sacred truths (1753: 97). For his part Coleridge maintained that the symbolism of the Old Testament possesses ‘a two-fold significance, a past and a future, a temporary and a perpetual, a particular and a universal’ (LS, 30; cf. p. 49). But if Lowth indeed influenced Coleridge, the extent of that influence is difficult to assess for several reasons. 6 First, Coleridge’s claims for the symbol were more expansive, with respect to both their contexts and (as will be examined below) their constitution, than Lowth’s for mystical allegory. Symbols, after all, were supposed to be observable not only in scripture but in nature and in secular art and literature. To be sure, Coleridge was reluctant to designate the symbol an aesthetic product. When, in The Statesman’s Manual, he attributed their creation to the faculty of imagination, he was referring specifically to the divinely inspired prophets (LS, 29); and in a literary lecture of March 1819, as if to avoid impugning their objectivity, he questioned whether they could be created fully consciously: ‘it is very possible that the general truth represented may be working unconsciously in the Poet’s mind during the construction of the Symbol’ (Lects 1808–19, ii. 418). The inadequacy of Coleridge’s very few attempts to expound the concept of the symbol with illustrations from literature, such as a reference to the humour of Tristram Shandy (Lects 1808–19, ii. 417–18), suggest that he was little interested in accounting for the possible literary use of symbols. Nonetheless, he chose to contrast the symbol with allegory, which by the eighteenth century was classified not only as a trope or an interpretive method, as had been the case since antiquity, but also as a distinct literary genre. Coleridge clearly shared Lowth’s basic conception of allegory as narrative devoid of intrinsic interest, continuously directing the beholder’s attention to a meaning outside itself. But he was hardly dependent on Lowth for this conception, which was a commonplace derived from classical rhetorical theory and mediated through Enlightenment semiotics. Closely identified with the use of artificial signs, allegory was held in generally low esteem in eighteenth-century criticism and was expected to compensate for the limitations of its nature by rendering its meaning as transparently as possible (see Halmi 2007b: 8–10). Consequently, the least interesting allegories were judged the most successful. De Man’s claim that late-Enlightenment allegory soberly accepted the irrecoverable anteriority of its meaning to its narrative would have come as news to the practitioners of the genre. Finally, notwithstanding the genuine affinities between Lowth’s concept of mystical allegory and Coleridge’s of the symbol, there is no evidence that Coleridge reread De sacra poesi Hebræorum after 1796. On the other hand, there is no question that before 1816 he read at least one work in which the symbol and allegory were explicitly contrasted, August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (as is noted by Ward 1966: 24– 5; and Halmi 2007a: 138–9). Although both Goethe’s essay ‘On the Subjects of the Fine Arts’ (1797), in which the contrast was first adumbrated, and Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of art (1802–3), in which it was elaborated with Goethe’s encouragement, remained unpublished till after Coleridge’s death, Schlegel’s lectures (published in three volumes between 1809 and 1811) had been given to him no later than December 1811 (CL, iii. 359–60; Lects 1808–19, i. 353–4) and provided him with material for his own lectures of 1812–13 (see Lects 1808–19, i, pp. lix–lxiv, 172–5; and Chapter 10 of this Handbook). Thus in so far as any text can be identified as the immediate source of Coleridge’s distinction, the most plausible candidate is Schlegel’s sixth lecture, in which the figures of the gods in Greek literature are described as symbolic but not allegorical: ‘Allegory is the personification of an idea, a fable solely undertaken with such a view; but that is symbolical which has been created by the imagination for other purposes, or which has a reality in itself independent of the idea, but which at the same time is easily susceptible of a symbolical explanation [einer sinnbildlichen Auslegung sich willig fügt]; and even of itself suggests it’ (Schlegel 1815: i. 105; Schlegel 1962–74: v. 81). Here too, however, the parallel is inexact, for Coleridge did not follow Schlegel in applying the distinction to Greek literature till almost a decade after he had adopted it in his biblical exegesis and natural philosophy. 7 Tautegory Coleridge made two principal contributions to Romantic theorization of the symbol, both in The Statesman’s Manual and both, characteristically, terminological. One was to coin the word tautegorical to emphasize the difference between the symbol and allegory; the other, which has been the source of considerable misunderstanding, was to describe the symbol as consubstantial with its referent. The former term, created by combining the Greek adjective tautos (‘identical’) or noun tauto (a contraction of to auto, ‘the same’) with the verb agoreuein (‘to speak in the assembly’)—by analogy to allegoria (from allos, ‘other’, + agoreuein)—was introduced to the world in what would have been its original form, appropriately declined, had it been a genuine Greek word.4 By way of criticizing contemporary exegetes for failing to appreciate the nature of biblical imagery, Coleridge inserted into his explanation of the symbol a parenthesis that may be translated ‘which is always tautegorical’: Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picturelanguage which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses. . . . On the other hand a Symbol (ὁ ἔστιν ἄει ταυτηγόρικον) is characterized by the translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. (LS, 30) Returning to this theme nine years later in Aids to Reflection (1825), Coleridge anglicized and defined his neologism: ‘tautegorical (i.e. expressing the same subject [as itself] but with a difference) in contra-distinction from metaphors and similitudes, that are always allegorical (i.e. expressing a different subject but with a resemblance)’ (AR, 206). Still in 1825, in a lecture before the Royal Society of Literature, Coleridge turned from the Jewish prophets to the Greek gods, arguing that the figure of Prometheus in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound was ‘tautegorical’ by virtue of embodying a ‘philosopheme’, a proto-philosophical meaning that could neither have been expressed otherwise nor imputed arbitrarily (SW&F, ii. 1267–8, 1280). (This argument, influenced by Schelling’s On the Deities of Samothrace (1815), represented a revision of his earlier, uniformly negative judgement of Greek myth (as in CL, ii. 865–6).) Curiously, however, Coleridge did not oppose symbol and allegory as rigorously in the lecture on Prometheus as he did in Aids to Reflection or as he had previously: referring to myths of ‘Jove’s intrigues with Europa, Io, &c.’, he conceded without elaboration that the ‘symbol fades away into allegory’, as if they were stages along a representational continuum, although he also added that even while fading the symbol ‘never ceases wholly to be a symbol or tautegory’ (SW&F, ii. 1280; see also Harding 1995: ch. 9). Published in 1834, ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ eventually caught the attention of Schelling, who was sufficiently impressed by Coleridge’s coinage to appropriate it—with a footnote acknowledging the irony of the fact—in one of his own lectures on Greek myth: ‘Mythology is not allegorical but tautegorical [tautegorisch]. In it the gods are actually existing beings whose existence is not different from their meaning, for they mean only what they are’ (1856–61: xi. 195–6 (my trans.); see also Halmi 2005). Although by the early 1840s, when Schelling started lecturing on the philosophy of mythology, the concept of the symbol as such had long since lost its centrality in his thought, he recognized Coleridge’s ‘apposite term’ as encapsulating what he himself now taught about the Greek gods in particular and had once taught about symbols in general: that their meaning is the same as, because it inheres in, their ontological content. 8 Consubstantiality For Coleridge, as for Schelling, the identity of the symbol with its referent was grounded in its participation in its referent: that is, the symbol was tautegorical because it was synecdochical. But Coleridge alone, in The Statesman’s Manual, used the theologically fraught adjective consubstantial as a synonym of synecdochical: ‘Imagination . . . incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors’ (LS, 29). Since a central point of the Manual was to establish the equivalence of the Bible with ‘another book, likewise a revelation of God—the great book of his servant Nature’ (LS, 70; cf. pp. 49–50), in so far as both consisted in symbols, it was daring of Coleridge to apply to the symbol, and hence to the relationship of natural phenomena to divine reason, a term with exclusively Christological associations. But it was precisely because of one of those associations, if not the other, that the term was useful to him. In the creed recited in the Anglican Communion, Christ is affirmed as ‘the onlybegotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God, Begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, By whom all things were made’. This periphrasis expresses the sense that the word consubstantial (Greek homoousios) had acquired in Trinitarian theology as a result of the early Church’s concern to assert the orthodoxy of the doctrine of Christ’s divinity. Whatever else might be said of it, the relationship between the Father and the Son was distinguishable in kind from that between the Creator and the creation: ‘All Beings are Created’, as Coleridge himself summarized the matter, ‘save the Father, from whom all are, and the Son, eternally begotten of the Father, and the uncreated Spirit eternally proceeding—and the Father, the Son and the Spirit are the one only God’ (CM, ii. 732). Thus there was no more forceful way of claiming the ontological connection of the symbol to its referent than by describing that connection as consubstantial, albeit at the cost of dissolving the distinction between generatio ex Deo and creatio ex nihilo on which Trinitarian orthodoxy was founded. (For a fuller consideration of the theological contexts and implications of Coleridge’s use of the word consubstantial, see Halmi 2007b: 110–20.) Coleridge’s natural philosophy, to the extent it embraced the concept of the consubstantial symbol, might have come into open conflict with his theology if he had accepted the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation, according to which the body and blood of Christ coexist with the original substance of the consecrated bread and wine in the Eucharist. But while referring to the Eucharist, from the 1820s till his death, as a symbol and defining it as ‘a part, or particular instance selected as representative of the whole, of which whole however it is itself an actual, or real part’ (CM, i. 862), Coleridge steadfastly disallowed the sacramental elements the consubstantiality he attributed to scriptural and natural symbols. Indeed he lamented that Luther would never ‘have had to seek a murky Hiding-hole in the figment of Consubstantiation’ if had understood ‘the true definition of a Symbol as distinguished from the Thing on one hand, and from a mere metaphor or conventional exponent of a Thing, on the other’ (CM, ii. 280). Consubstantial symbols were evidently to be found everywhere except at the altar. In that respect Coleridge may be said to have formulated two mutually exclusive concepts of the synecdochical symbol, one consubstantial and the other sacramental (see further Halmi 2007b: 127–32). Yet it must be emphasized that Coleridge no more sought to reject Christian orthodoxy by appropriating the concept of consubstantiality than, as an admirer of Dante, Spenser, and Bunyan, he sought to disparage all allegorical writing by opposing allegory to 9 the symbol. The true target of the intellectual labour represented as it were synecdochically in his theorization of the symbol was what he referred to in The Statesman’s Manual as ‘the general contagion of [the] mechanic philosophy’ and ‘an unenlivened generalizing Understanding’ (LS, 28). Rejecting reductive interpretations of scripture on the one hand and reductive explanations of nature on the other, Coleridge undertook, with an accommodation to the exigencies of Enlightenment semiotics, to justify theoretically the belief in a numinousness that was no longer intuitively recognizable. 10 Notes 1 Berkeley referred to the ‘language’ of nature in, e.g., A New Theory of Vision (1709), §147, and The Theory of Vision . . . Vindicated and Explained (1733), §§38–40. See Halmi 2007b: 53–62, and Wellbery 1984: 24–30, for fuller analysis of the concept of the natural sign in Enlightenment semiotics. 2 Cf. The Pleasures of Imagination 1.99–107: ‘To these [sc. of ‘higher hopes’] the sire omnipotent unfolds | The world’s harmonious volume, there to read | The transcript of himself. On every part | They trace the bright impressions of his hand: | In earth or air, the meadow’s purple stores, | The moon’s mild radiance, or the virgin’s form | Blooming with rosy smiles, they see portray’d | That uncreated beauty, which delights | The mind supreme’ (Akenside 1996: 94). On Akenside’s moralizing celebration of imagination (itself indebted to the third earl of Shaftesbury’s Moralists (1711)) and its importance to Coleridge, see Engell (1981: 42–7). 3 Strictly speaking, the term synecdoche may be applied to any trope in which a less inclusive stands for a more inclusive term, or vice versa (part for whole, singular for plural, species for genus, particular for general, etc.). But Coleridge implicitly included cause/effect relations in this class by defining natural phenomena as symbols of an immanently operating divine reason (LS, 72, 79), and the distinction between part/whole and cause/effect substitutions remains ambiguous in semiotics, though the latter are normally considered metonymical (see Eco 1984: 116–17). 4 Hedley (2000: 134) suggests that Coleridge may have encountered the related noun tautotês (‘identity’), used by Plato and Aristotle, in John Smith’s Select Discourses (1660: 97), a book he first read in Sicily in 1804 (CN, ii. 2164–7 and nn.). References ABRAMS, M. H. (1974). ‘Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World’, in The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism. New York: Norton, 1984, 192–224. AKENSIDE, M. (1996). The Pleasures of Imagination, in The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, ed. R. Dix. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 85–174. BARTH, J. R. (1977). 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