Coleridge and Anglicanism as integral humanism
Coleridge's prose suddenly opens up and lifts as he proposes a union of Christian and literary excellence and encourages young writers to deepen their faith and seek holy orders. What Coleridge sees is a rich new vision of the parish, and a central place for the Church in the education and cultural life of the nation.
Here again we get a sense of Coleridge's restating of the High Church ideal, of the national Church sanctifying and blessing human society, and orienting society towards an authentic flourishing:
That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten.
Words from John Milbank come to mind as a contemporary expression of Coleridge's vision:
sturdily incarnated in land, parish and work, yet sublimely aspiring in its verbal, musical and visual performances.
As Coleridge puts it, rejoicing in the legacy of rich verbal performances:
that man must be deficient in sensibility, who would not find an incentive to emulation in the great and burning lights, which in a long series have illustrated the church of England.
Against this we may contrast the alternative, the desiccated vision of community which can arise in the absence of such a blessing and sanctification of society. As Coleridge puts it On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830):
Talents without genius: a swarm of clever, well-informed men: an anarchy of minds, a despotism of maxims. Despotism of finance in government and legislation—of vanity and sciolism in the intercourse of life—of presumption, temerity, and hardness of heart, in political economy ... The Guess-work of general consequences substituted for moral and political philosophy.
Again we can see something of how Coleridge offers an idea of what High Church renewal could look like, an alternative to the Oxford Movement in being definitively rooted in the Old High Church tradition, while yet addressing the social and cultural experiences which gave rise to the Movement. Above all, in Coleridge we see the continuing vitality of the idea and vocation of a National Church, an idea and vocation abandoned by the Movement in favour of a sectarian anti-establishmentism.
Thus Coleridge, in stark contrast to the Tridentine ideal which emerged within Anglo-Catholicism, celebrated the parson and parsonage:
The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, or in the wilderness, but a neighbour and a family-man ... He is, or he may become, connected with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage.
Rejecting ecclesial sectarianism, Coleridge's restatement of the High Church ideal of the parish of the National Church, "a germ of civilization", is that 'Anglicanism as Integral Humanism' of which John Hughes spoke:
a way of understanding our relation to culture and society ... as not being a liberal secularizing humanism that sells out on the Church's central task of making new disciples of Christ, but rather as flowing from and to him, who is the Alpha and Omega of all things.
(The painting is John Bonny, 'All Hallows Church, Totenham', 1912.)
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