John Dunn

Taking up his crossbow

Sunday, 20 April 2025 at 20:41

Taking up his crossbow

Coleridge in the poem shot at the reified sensitivities of the ‘they’ and their ‘animal faith’. Stop - what are we doing? was the implied question. In taking up his crossbow he was taking up the cross against a societal boat full of Pharisees. Shooting the albatross was a crime - the neo-feudalist crime of self- assertion. It marked the awakening of the individual. It was a transgression against the necessary, against determinism, but this was also a spontaneous intervention of human agency and the mariner was vilified for it. After the death of albatross, the shipmates in their sore distress shift all the responsibility for their woes onto the ancient mariner. ‘Instead of the cross, the Albatross / about his neck was hung’. The phrase ‘instead of the cross’ signifies that the albatross hung around mariner’s neck has intimate connection to the crucifix of Jesus.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Albatross Shot

Friday, 18 April 2025 at 19:58

Albatross Shot

Commentators upon The Ancient Mariner are often puzzled by the abruptness of the Mariner’s sudden and inexplicable act of shooting down such a benign and harmless overgrown seagull. But this is exactly what makes this event the central point of the poem, indeed the whole crux of the poem. The central point is that there was no reason. The shooting of the albatross was an allegorical blow against the age of reason. This was a wilful act and, therefore, a distinctly human act, certainly by Coleridge’s later definition in Biographia Literaria.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

First shot of the revolution

Thursday, 17 April 2025 at 22:07

First shot of the revolution

Pushed to its logical conclusion, the necessitarian philosophy of Priestley would finally terminate in the pantheism of Spinoza, which, indeed, was its root source, as it was for Locke, Hartley, Newton, Condillac and other necessitarians for whom the youthful Coleridge had once had an intense and committed enthusiasm. This was exactly the undifferentiated pantheism that Henry More had recognised in Spinoza’s kabbalism more than a hundred years before. Coleridge’s famous turn against the necessitarianism of Priestley, Hartley and others was a ‘bargain-basement’ revolt that augured the real thing in Coleridge’s later open revolt against Spinozism. And it was in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner that the first shot of the revolution was fired.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Priestley’s ‘bargain- basement Spinozism rejected

Wednesday, 16 April 2025 at 21:39

1801 portrait of Joseph Priestley

Priestley’s ‘bargain- basement Spinozism rejected

When composing the Ancient Mariner,Coleridge was already having doubts about what Thomas McFarland has described as Joseph Priestley’s ‘bargain-basement Spinozism’. Already in March 1796, when he was still calling himself a necessitarian, Coleridge confided in a letter his difficulty reconciling Priestley’s theism with his materialist monism: ‘How is it that Dr Priestley is not an atheist?—He asserts in three different Places, that God not only does, but is, every thing. But if God be every thing, every Thing is God: —which is all, the Atheists assert—’. The pressure of that question grew more insistent in the following years, and finally intolerable in April 1799, when Coleridge, then attending lectures in Göttingen, received word that his infant son Berkeley had died back in England. In a consolatory letter to his wife he wrote, ‘But the living God is everywhere, & works everywhere - and where is there room for Death? .. . I confess that the more I think, the more I am discontented with the doctrines of Priestley’. This reflection augurs a crucial turning-point in Coleridge’s intellectual life, after which he was no longer prepared to accept Priestley’s ‘bargain- basement Spinozism’. Coleridge was touching on a fundamental issue in this letter. If ‘every Thing is God’, then He, not the individual moral agent, must accept responsibility for human shortcomings. Such is the passivity of the individual under such a theo-tyranny that all his humanity is diminished. He is left with only an ‘animal faith’. The individual is reduced to a passive receptor of sense-experience, a Lockean tabula rasa.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Romantic reaction

Monday, 14 April 2025 at 17:20

Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Thomas Phillips

Romantic reaction

Taking his lead from Fichte, Coleridge viewed education as synonymous with the humanising process. It offered the encounter with the ‘other’, or ‘not-I’, that was essential to the development of the ‘I’. But this had been just one facet of Coleridge’s Romantic reaction to Spinozism. Where Coleridge surpassed Fichte was in the exploration of what it means to be human at all. A reading of Coleridge’s struggle with this issue was inspirational to my own attempt to answer the ‘who am I?’ question, particularly in relation to conceptions of God.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Humanising

Sunday, 13 April 2025 at 21:42

Rousseau (left) subverted by Coleridge

Humanising

Taking his lead from Fichte, Coleridge subverted Rousseau’s social contract, turning it instead into something which tends towards an ideal future, in which we contract freely with each other as autonomous individuals, each treating each always as an end in himself rather than as a means to an end. For such an ‘idea’ to be realised, individuals had to be transformed from ‘things’ into human beings. And taking his cue from Fichte, Coleridge would place national education at the heart of the humanising process.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Humanising

Saturday, 12 April 2025 at 21:55

Rousseau (left) subverted by Coleridge

Humanising

Taking his lead from Fichte, Coleridge subverted Rousseau’s social contract, turning it instead into something which tends towards an ideal future, in which we contract freely with each other as autonomous individuals, each treating each always as an end in himself rather than as a means to an end. For such an ‘idea’ to be realised, individuals had to be transformed from ‘things’ into human beings. And taking his cue from Fichte, Coleridge would place national education at the heart of the humanising process.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.