Ronald C. Wendling, Coleridge's Progress to Christianity: Experience and Authority in Religious Faith. London: Bucknell University Press, 1996. ISBN: 0-8387-5312-4. Price: £30 ($41.50).

This book is surely the best monograph to have appeared to date on the subject of Coleridge's Christianity. I do not say this lightly (though I should, perhaps, signal my own position as an atheist). There are, after all, other excellent books on this subject—J.F. Boulger's Coleridge as Religious Thinker (1961) and J. Robert Barth's Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (1969) to name just two. But Wendling's book (very different from these earlier works) represents a clear advance on them. Boulger and Barth were concerned above all to expound Coleridge's later religious thought. Both proceeded by means of conceptual analysis, asking questions such as "what does Coleridge understand by 'faith'?". Ronald C. Wendling asks: 'what was the function of such questions in the developing totality of Coleridge's thought?' and 'how did the circumstances of Coleridge's life contribute to the answers he settled upon?'. Coleridgeans will immediately recognise the pertinence of Wendling's questions. For Coleridge was first and foremost, a religious thinker whose endeavours in other spheres were always subordinate to this end. It is all but impossible to develop a rounded picture of Coleridge as poet, critic or metaphysician without referring to his religious beliefs, which formed collectively, as he said, 'the keystone in the arch'. And yet works on Coleridge as a religious thinker rarely convey this centrality very vividly. This should not surprise us: theology is the one area of his thought in which the primacy of religion can be taken for granted. Yet Coleridge's religious evolution is at work everywhere in his oeuvre. In 1815, he began work on a 'Preface' to his Collected Poems, which grew and grew, eventually reaching two volumes. It was published two years later under the title Biographia Literaria. Biographia is a special kind of autobiography; the subtitle tells us it is the history of Coleridge's 'literary life and opinions' and readers usually expect a mélange of the two. In fact, life and opinions are rigorously segregated: Coleridge rarely tells us what the opinions meant to him; and some of what he does say is questionable. The first volume expounds and evaluates the philosophic arguments that he espoused in youth and early middle age; the second, centering on the works of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton, evinces the literary judgements that this trajectory inspired. He is concerned only with whether they were true or false. The result is magnificent but odd. The pages on Wordsworth are justly regarded as among the best in English literary criticism. But precisely because his response to his friend's work is so detailed and so rich, we begin to wonder why it is necessary to approach his own verse from such a high level of abstraction. If personal motives were important—due modesty, for example, and an unwillingness to admit that he was an ordinary mortal who changed his mind from time to time—I believe that the primacy of religion was a still more significant factor. For if Coleridge had offered practical criticism of some of the poems for which he was best known, he would have had to direct attention to the fact that many of them aimed to bring about in his readers' minds psychological experiences of a kind described by David Hartley, in which the mind observes its own processes and finds them mirrored in the workings of nature. This, in turn, might have alerted them to a pantheistic claim running through his early poetry (that the mind of man and the 'mind' of nature are one). Coleridge was sufficiently anxious about this possibility that he actually changed some of his poems for later publication. …