Coleridge and Newman: The Centrality of Conscience (review)

Philip C. Rule claims that John Coulson, in a one-page appendix to his Newman and the Common Tradition: A Study in the Language of Church and Society (1970), was "the first writer to deal at any length with Coleridge's influence on Newman" (24, n. 35). In fact, in an article written in 1945, H. Francis Davis had already pointed out that Newman first read Coleridge in 1835. In a 29 March 1835 diary entry, Newman noted, "During this Spring...I have for the first time read parts of [Coleridge's works]—and am much surprised how much I thought mine, is to be found there. I believe...in 1831 I carelessly looked into the Idea of Church and State—and had read two or three sentences in... Aids to Reflection" (The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman [Clarendon, 1981] 5: 53). Coulson's appendix is concerned with how much of Coleridge Newman had read, not with the question of influence, which is a very different matter. Certainly the diary entry implies that, as Davis maintained, Newman merely found that Coleridge had anticipated his own ideas. Rule refers to "Coleridge's influence on Newman" (24), but his own discussion of this alleged influence (33–39) only shows that Newman had read Coleridge, not that he was influenced by him—with the exception perhaps of the "Treatise on Method" of which Newman wrote an analysis in preparation for his Office and Work of Universities (1856) (not The Idea of a University [1852] as Rule alleges [36]). But this late reading hardly bears on Rule's argument, which asserts as though it were a proven fact that "Coleridge...influenced Newman" (4). Nor is it true that Coulson's book "established Newman as a leading spirit in contemporary theology" (4); Newman was already well- established in continental Europe, not least by Jan H. Walgrave's Newman the Theologian, translated into English in 1960, which is especially concerned with his thought on conscience, both in its philosophical and theological aspects, a subject of minor importance in Coulson's study.

There were certainly "strong similarities" between Coleridge and Newman, especially in their "unusually heightened sense of self-awareness and a rare capacity for writing about the landscape of the inner life in both its affective and cognitive aspects" (25). But Coleridge was primarily a metaphysical philosopher, who, in Newman's disapproving words, "indulged a liberty of speculation, which no Christian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian" (Apologia pro Vita Sua [Clarendon, 1967] 94). Coleridge looked at "the Church, Sacraments, doctrines etc rather as symbols of a philosophy than as truths, as the mere accidental signs of principles" (Letters and Diaries, 5: 225). Still, Newman did approve of what he called Colderidge's "higher philosophy" in an 1839 article, quoted at length in the Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), where he attributes the success of the Oxford Movement to "a re-action from the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the literature of the last... century" and "the need...for a deeper philosophy" as witnessed by the rise of the Romantic movement (Apologia, 93–94).

Rule points out that Coleridge's Aids to Reflection in the Formation for a Manly Character (1825) is echoed in Newman's title An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). For both writers the individual self was not the autonomous rational individual of the Enlightenment but a being defined by a moral and religious dimension. Both developed a new apologetic for revealed religion through "an analysis of our concrete cognitive and affective operations [that] reveal God as the ground for our knowing and loving" (39). This explains Newman's dictum "egotism is true modesty": God is knowable no longer through the "Evidences of Christianity" but through self-awareness (An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent [Clarendon, 1985] 248). In the Aids to Reflection conscience is something...