"That most vital mystery": Coleridge and the Eucharist
Coleridge's comment in Lay Sermons (1817) regarding the Cup of the Lord in the Sacrament is indicative of the High Church Receptionism which he embraced. As with other examples from the pre-1833 High Church Eucharistic tradition, such Receptionism nurtured a vibrant and vital Eucharistic piety. We get a sense of this when, in Notes on the Book of Common Prayer (published in 1836, after his death), Coleridge describes how to prepare for the Sacrament:
The best preparation for taking this sacrament, better than any or all of the books or tracts composed for this end, is to read over and over again, and often on your knees–at all events with a kneeling and praying heart–the Gospel according to St. John, till your mind is familiarised to the contemplation of Christ, the Redeemer and Mediator of mankind, yea, of every creature, as the living and self- subsisting Word, the very truth of all true being, and the very being of all enduring truth ... As truly and as really as your soul resides constitutively in your living body, personally and substantially does Christ dwell in every regenerate man.
The seriousness of such preparation, together with the focus on real indwelling of Christ in the faithful receiver, is indicative of a warm Sacramental piety. Coleridge continues by contrasting belief in the spiritual feeding on the Lord in the Eucharist with a bare memorialism:
After this course of study, you may then take up and peruse sentence by sentence the communion service, the best of all comments on the Scriptures appertaining to this mystery. And this is the preparation which will prove, with God’s grace, the surest preventive of, or antidote against, the freezing poison, the lethargising hemlock, of the doctrine of the Sacramentaries, according to whom the Eucharist is a mere practical metaphor, in which things are employed instead of articulated sounds for the exclusive purpose of recalling to our minds the historical fact of our Lord’s crucifixion.
Of particular significance here is his emphasis on meditation on the Prayer Book Communion Office as the means of ensuring against "the doctrine of the Sacramentaries": in other words, the Prayer Book draws us to a lively, vital Receptionist piety.
This is given warm and vivid expression in Coleridge's account of returning to the Church and receiving the Holy Sacrament for the first time in decades, in 1827:
Christmas Day. Received the Sacrament - for the first time since my first year at Jesus College/Christ is gracious even to the Labourer that cometh to the Vineyard at the eleventh hour - 33 years absent from my Master's Table/ - Yet I humbly hope, that spiritually I have fed on the Flesh & Blood the Strength and the Life of the Son of God in his divine Humanity, during the latter years - . The administration & Communion Service of our Church is solemn & affecting - from Notebooks (published shortly after his death in 1834).
Again we see his reverence for the Prayer Book Communion Office. He contrasts it with the Roman rite. The Roman rite "may excite awe & wonder in such as believe in the real transmutation of the Bread and Wine, but assuredly no individual comfort or support". The reference to the "individual comfort and support" captures a significant aspect of the piety of the Communion Office: "Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving", "and dost assure us thereby of thy favour and goodness towards us".
He also, however, contrasts this with the "cold and flat" understanding he associates with Dissent:
when the Eucharist is considered as a mere and very forced metaphor ... and without any connection with that most vital mystery revealed in John VI, of which the Eucharist is at once symbol and instance!
Hence he declares, "Compared with either the Romish or Dissenting service our's is a subject of gratitude with me."
High Church Receptionism and the Book of Common Prayer: not only did these attract Coleridge back to the Church of his baptism, they also were the means of profoundly renewing his Sacramental faith and practice. In other words, there was no need to search out a different Eucharistic doctrine (as did the Tractarians) or create a different Eucharistic practice (as did the Ritualists). As Coleridge put it in his Aids to Reflection (1825):
my belief respecting the mystery of the Eucharist, — concerning which I hold the same opinions as Bucer, Peter Martyr, and presumably, Cranmer himself.
Coleridge has been described by Jeffrey W. Barbeau as "unquestionably one of the great Anglican theological minds of the age". Where I would differ from Barbeau - and agree with Luke Wright in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church (2010) - is that while Coleridge may have contributed to the emerging Broad Church tradition, he quite firmly stands within the pre-1833 High Church tradition (although an interesting conversation is to be had about the relationship between, and intermingling, of these traditions as the 19th century progressed).
Coleridge's Eucharistic doctrine and piety were characteristically Old High Church. This public intellectual, a key figure in the Romantic movement, who was moved by and avidly responded to the piety of Receptionism and the Book of Common Prayer Communion Office, is suggestive of how the divisive paths taken by Tractarians and Ritualists were unnecessary. The resources to renew, in a changed cultural context, Anglican sacramental teaching, devotion, and practice were all to hand in the native piety of the Old High Church tradition.
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