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The Symbolic Imagination
Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition
By J. Robert Barth PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06320-1
CHAPTER 1
Symbol as Sacrament
Considering how relatively little Coleridge wrote expressly on symbol, it is remarkable how central it is in his thinking. He often said, in fact, that one of his primary aims was to teach English thinkers — whether fundamentalists on the right or rationalists on the left — that there is a middle ground between the literal and the metaphorical. Especially in his later thought — during the years, say, from 1815 to 1834 — symbol seems so often to be present. Whether he is talking of idea, of method, of faith, or of poetry, even when he does not use the word symbol, the concept always seems to be there, lurking on the "periphery of advertence." Yet few critics have attempted to come to grips with it, at least insofar as we find it outside the context of poetry itself. But it is precisely outside the context of poetry and poetic theory that I think we must look to learn the deepest meaning of Coleridge's idea of symbol.
The locus classicus, in The Statesman's Manual, remains the best place to begin. Here, in his discussion of Scripture and the nature of scriptural truth, Coleridge makes much of the distinction between allegory (or metaphor) and symbol:
"It is among the miseries of the present age that it recognizes no medium between Literal and Metaphorical. Faith is either to be buried in the dead letter, or its name and honors usurped by a counterfeit product of the mechanical understanding, which in the blindness of self-complacency confounds SYMBOLS with ALLEGORIES. Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand a Symbol ... is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or 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 as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative."
What, then, is the crucial point of difference between the allegorical or the merely metaphorical, and the symbolic? Clearly, as has been so often pointed out, a symbol "always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible." We see this too, much earlier, in the long letter of September 10, 1802, to William Sotheby. The word "symbol" does not appear, but the concept is clearly in Coleridge's mind. "Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a Life of it's own, & that we are all one Life. 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 [sic.]" The "one Life within us and abroad" of "The Eolian Harp" is distant only in time from the reflection, twenty years later, in The Statesman's Manual.
All this has been said often enough: a symbol, for Coleridge, always partakes of the reality it represents. But there remains a further question, not so often asked: what is it that allows this to be so? What is there in his view of reality that allows him to see "one Life within us and abroad," to assert implicitly that a given reality, whether material or spiritual, is essentially linked with all other reality — that we live in a world of symbols, and therefore of symbolic knowledge? The answer lies in what we may call his principle of the "consubstantiality" of all being, clearly akin to the traditional notion of the analogy of all being. For the term "consubstantial" we need turn back only one page from the quotation we have already seen from The Statesman's Manual. Speaking of the Scriptures, Coleridge speaks of the faculty of imagination as "that reconciling and mediatory power, which 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." Nor is it only the products of the human imagination, the poetry of the Scriptures, that are to be read as symbolic. The same is true of "another book, likewise a revelation of God — the great book of his servant Nature." For "it is the poetry of all human nature, to read it likewise in a figurative sense, and to find therein correspondencies [sic] and symbols of the spiritual world."
What is included in this symbolic perception of reality? Potentially, it is unlimited in its scope: particular and universal, idea and image, new and old, subjective and objective. The imagination, which is always for Coleridge the symbol-making faculty, is the unifying faculty, and what it can unify is as broad as all reality. The classic description of the working of this faculty is worth quoting in full:
"The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul (laxis effertur habenis) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry."
Add to this description of the symbol-making faculty (and so implicitly of the symbol) the description we have already seen — "a Symbol ... is characterized by a 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" — and it is clear that symbol potentially encompasses the depth of man himself and the height and breadth of all the world, in and out of time. Symbolic knowledge reaches out to all that man can know.
With this in mind, we might do well to avoid the kind of distinction made, for example, by James Baker in his otherwise excellent treatment of Coleridge on symbol. Baker distinguishes quite sharply between romantic symbol and modern symbol: "The romantic was vertical, if we assume the old scheme of the chain of being; something 'below,' on the physical plane, was the analogy of something 'above' on the plane of ideas or spiritual realities. In modern symbolism, 'above' and 'below' have been abolished, and modern symbolism is horizontal, the symbol chosen being a means of conveying the author's manifold experience of life as we know it." The implication of Baker's distinction is that Coleridge's notion of symbol does not properly apply to "modern" symbolists (his examples are Kafka and Mann, Eliot and Yeats), but only to the work of an earlier age. But in the face of Coleridge's rich idea of symbol — as well as in the face of the practice of the best of symbol-makers in any age, like Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, as well as Kafka and Mann, Eliot and Yeats — such a distinction seems an unjustified narrowing of the scope of symbol. Baker seems to be content with an analysis of modern literature that "flattens out" the actuality of symbol, that sees modern poetry lacking the transcendent element of symbol so important in Coleridge, leaving a wholly "secular" form of symbol in its place. But in the very best of artists, including the ones he adduces, symbol reaches both vertically and horizontally, as it does for Coleridge.
Baker's distinction is similar to the distinction of Erich Kahler between descending and ascending symbolism. Descending symbolism is "all symbolism in which symbolic representation detaches itself, descends to us, from a prior and higher reality, a reality determining, and therefore superior to, its symbolic meaning. That is to say, genuinely mythical and cultic works are not intended as symbolic representation, they are meant to describe real happenings. It is we who, a posteriori, derive a symbolic meaning from them." Ascending symbolism, on the other hand, is "a new creation entirely, springing from artistic imagination. Here, no external, pre-existent material is furnished to the artist; no longer is he guided by cultic patterns. He is free to create images which, though being unique, singular forms, imply something commonly human. In such works the symbol reaches the stage of consummate representation." Coleridge would find this distinction, I think, as unnecessary or as unjustified as Baker's. The product of the symbol-making faculty is never "a new creation entirely." It is always a reconciliation of the old and the new, the temporal and the eternal, the immanent and the transcendent, the objective and the subjective. The maker or perceiver is always part of the symbol, just as is, potentially, every dimension of external reality. There are differences in emphasis from age to age and from person to person, but symbol itself remains always open-ended; one leg always, in John Unterecker's phrase, "kicks at the stars." Since all reality is "consubstantial," all reality is capable of symbolic representation.
Coleridge's idea of consubstantiality is very much like the traditional philosophical conception of the "participation" of all being, which is the basis of the Renaissance "great chain of being." All beings, from God down to the lowest finite forms, share in "being." With this, the way is open for common predication among all things — analogously but really. A molecule is beautiful, a stone is beautiful, an animal is beautiful, a man is beautiful, God himself is beautiful. They are not all beautiful in the same way, but they can all legitimately be called beautiful, and this naming somehow corresponds to reality. One might say, with Robert Burns, "O My Luve's like a red, red rose." Or one might say, with St. Paul, that the marriage of a man and a woman is symbolic of the covenant between Christ and his people. In each case, the attribution is no mere fiction; there is a shared reality, analogous (different, yet in some way the same) but real. In learning something about the beauty of a rose, one learns something new about the beauty of the beloved; in learning something about the love of a man and a woman, one learns something new about the meaning of the scriptural phrase, "God is love." Beauty is somehow one, love is somehow one, being is somehow one. "Turn but a stone and start a wing."
This predication is not possible, obviously, of all characteristics; most of the examples adduced above are based on the so-called "transcendental properties" of being, which are attributable to all beings without exception. Other qualities are attributable to some beings, not to others. We can say, for example, that a plant, an animal, a man, and God, all share analogously (each in its own way) the characteristic of life; we cannot say this of a stone. But once we admit the universal transcendence of being itself and of the transcendental properties of being (commonly taken to be one, true, good, and beautiful), the way is open for the more limited but still wide-ranging sharing of reality on many levels. Something like this, I believe, is what Coleridge means by the consubstantiality of the symbol.
But there remains the problem of perception. On what does Coleridge base such a view? How does one perceive this consubstantiality, this oneness of all things that makes symbolism possible? There seems to be implicit a kind of act of faith in this oneness. Exactly so. Symbol-making — and indeed symbol-perceiving — is for Coleridge essentially a religious act. In order to understand his idea of symbol, we must ultimately place the discussion in a religious context, where alone we can find its true meaning.
Nor should this be surprising, if we take into account the extraordinary "wholeness" of Coleridge's thinking. For him, all knowledge is ultimately one, whether it be scientific, poetic, philosophical, or religious, and the capstone of all knowledge for him is knowledge of God. We might also have found a hint in the word "consubstantial" itself as it is applied to symbol. Its origins are perfectly clear; it is the privileged word canonized by the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325 to express the relationship of the Son to the Father in the Trinity. Coleridge once referred to it (in its Greek form) as "the dear lucky homoousios, that had set all Christendom by the ears"! It is somehow fitting that Coleridge's prime analogate for this word should be an expression of the deepest and highest unity possible (the unity of the Godhead) together with the most meaningful and closest relationship of difference (the Persons of the Trinity). For this unity and difference, within the framework of deeply shared reality ("partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible"), are of the essence of symbol for Coleridge. The Son truly "symbolizes" the Father; he "images him forth," at the same time partaking in the most perfect possible way in the inner reality of the Father.
But there is a much more obvious source that might have turned our attention to the religious context for an understanding of symbol in Coleridge. It is the definition of the imagination, the symbol-making and symbol-perceiving faculty, in Chapter XIII of the Biographia Literaria: "The Primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and Prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation." The act of perceiving symbols (the primary imagination) or of making symbols (the secondary imagination) is essentially a religious act, a finite participation in the infinite creative act of the supreme symbol-maker, the supreme symbol-perceiver, just as creation itself is (apart from the eternal processions of the Son from the Father and of the Spirit from the Father and the Son) the supreme symbol. And what kind of religious act is it? At bottom, it is an act of faith.
As with the supreme symbol, creation, so with all other real symbols (those which truly "partake of the Reality which they render intelligible"), an act of faith is necessary to perceive the true unity of being — the consubstantiality — within the differences. This is because the making or perceiving of a symbol, in Coleridge's view, always involves a union of subject and object. If there is to be a union of a thinking and willing subject with someone or something outside itself, there must be a commitment of self — involving trust and love as well as knowledge — an act of faith.
An act of faith, for Coleridge, is precisely that — a commitment of self. In his many writings, published and unpublished, on the problem of faith, he walked a careful line between the traditional Roman Catholic emphasis on faith as an act of knowing, essentially an intellectual act, and the Protestant emphasis on faith as an act of the will. For him faith was a commitment of one's whole self, an act of intellect and will and emotions. Faith is not apart from hope and love, the other theological virtues; each one, if complete, includes the others. An act of faith is an act of love, a commitment of one's self to another. An act of faith, like the act of the poet, "brings the whole soul of man into activity."
In this sense, as in other ways as well, true symbol for Coleridge might be said to be "sacramental." Some of the similarities between sacrament and symbol will be strikingly obvious. A sacrament is a sensible sign — a spoken word of forgiveness, a ritual gesture, a material object (a piece of bread, a bit of wine) — pointing to something beyond itself. So, for Coleridge, is a symbol. A sacrament is an efficacious sign; it actually makes present what it represents — the grace of God, which is a share in the life of God. It "partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible." So does a symbol. A sacrament — Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, the Eucharist — involves the union of a subject and an object, the faithful recipient and the material sign in which the grace of God is mediated to the Christian. So does a symbol. A sacrament is one of the ways in which God shares his power with men, allows them to act in his name and with his power; it is a finite participation in the infinite creative act of the I AM. So, for Coleridge, is a symbol.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Symbolic Imagination by J. Robert Barth. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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