Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the Opus Maximum ed. by Jeffrey W. Barbeau, and: Coleridge, The Bible, and Religion by Jeffrey W. Barbeau (review)

556 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE reconstructing their debates about how to interpret texts. He gives only passing attention to devoted readers' responses to his authors, rarely discusses particular reading constituencies, and, as far as I have discerned, never analyzes audiencespecific practices and habits of reading. These omissions sabotage the full force of McKelvy's hard-won thesis about the sacralization of "the individual reader, and the evolving reading of the nation" (35). The virtue of McKelvy'sbook is that such criticisms only point out the need to develop further its provocative new story about the religious vocation of literature. The English Cult of Literature may not do enough to recognize the readers in its subtitle, but it has done more than enough to inspire a devoted readership to continue the narrative it leaves unfinished. It should be on the shelf and in the mind of any serious scholar of nineteenth-century religion, literature, and culture. Joshua King Baylor University Coleridge's Assertion ofReligion: Essays on the Opus Maximum. Edited by Jeffrey w. Barbeau. Leuven: Peeters, 2006. ISBN-10 90-429-1787-3/13 97899042917873. Pp. xvi + 312. $58.00 Coleridge, The Bible, and Religion. By Jeffrey w. Barbeau. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ISBN0-230-60134-0. Pp. xii + 234. $74.95. Though the former is a collection of essays by diverse hands on a single work, while the latter aims to provide a systematic approach to Coleridge's notoriously scattered and superficially unsystematic writings on the Bible, these two books are in fact closely linked. All his life Coleridge struggled to produce a huge, multivolume work bringing religion, literature, and philosophy, together with all human and physical sciences into a single comprehensive totality. Not surprisingly, this goal was never achieved-constantly receding like the rainbow's end, somehow just in sight (at least to him) but always apparently just beyond his grasp. For Coleridge, already dogged by a sense of personal failure, this, perhaps his greatest, was usually bewailed as yet another example of his constitutional inability to bring his grand schemes to fulfilment-and, despite the mounting evidence of his enormous and varied output, most critics, and even his most avid disciples, have tended to follow his assessment. It was not until 2002 that all the surviving manuscripts of this great but doomed endeavor were gathered up and published in the Bollingen series of Princeton University Press under the experienced editorship of Thomas McFarland and Nicholas Halami. The essays in Coleridge's Assertion of Religion are primarily the BOOK REVIEWS 557 product of a seminar held at Clare College Cambridge shortly thereafter, under the aegis of Douglas Hedley, to consider the fragments of the "Opus Maximum" as they had finally been brought to light, and to assess its implications. Apart from an explanatory Preface, Barbeau's own contributions to this wideranging discussion are an introductory essay titled "Ihe Quest for System" and a more technical one, "Science and the Depersonalization of the Divine: Pantheism, Unitarianism, and the Limits of Natural Theology:' Both are interesting, and in their own ways controversial. Writing on Coleridge's "system;' Barbeau defends a thesis that is central to both these books: that, despite appearances, and in the teeth of most (though notably not all) subsequent critical opinion, Coleridge was actually a highly systemic thinker, constantly striving to bring theology, philosophy, and aesthetics into a single comprehensive synthetic unity. Though Barbeau brings a wide knowledge of Coleridge's writing to support his case, some skeptics may continue to feel that this judgement is more influenced by Coleridge's intentions than by his actual achievements. Rightly, I believe, he claims that "incompleteness was never Coleridge's goal" (28), but this fails to distinguish between theoretical incompleteness and the actual failure to complete-which affected not merely so much of his philosophical and theological writing but even such popular and widely-anthologized poems as "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel," Certainly by the end of Coleridge's life, many English thinkers-including some of his most ardent disciples, such as Julius Hare, James Stirling, and F. D. Mauricehad not merely come to the conclusion that a systematic philosophy was impossible, but actually undesirable. To complicate matters still further, philosophy...