The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”

“Religious Musings” is Coleridge's earliest in-depth poetic exploration of religion, politics, philosophy, and metaphysical enquiry. The explicitly Christian context of the poem is established from the outset in the Miltonic argument, the opening descriptions of Jesus Christ and the original subtitle, which claims that the poem was “written on Christmas’ Eve, in the Year of our Lord, 1794.” The poem was actually completed in haste for publication in Poems on Various Subjects (1796), consequently substantial revisions were made for Poems (1797) and this version is generally accepted as the preferred text. It is an overtly Christian poem and yet, as Kathleen Coburn notes, Coleridge “poured into it his reading and enthusiasms, making the text and notes a repository of his beliefs and cherished opinions.”

Despite the deliberate and definitive Christian overtones, the poem's description of divine transcendence seems to be heavily reliant on a multitude of sources and, whilst many of them are identified by Coleridge in the poem's notes and occasionally its content, this process is self-conscious and selective. Coleridge often uses the notes to pre-empt possible critics with an insistent attribution of unorthodox and potentially controversial religious and philosophical content to reputable and respectable sources. However, Coleridge's reading of ancient philosophy and religion also influenced his presentation of the process of transcendence in “Religious Musings,” and in order to fully understand the poem his unacknowledged sources must be examined; texts that he was ashamed to cite publicly but that privately fascinated him, and inevitably contributed to his religious and philosophical musings in the mid-1790s.

In a letter to John Thelwall in 1796, Coleridge expressed particular enthusiasm for “all out of the way books, whether of the monkish times, or of the puritanical aera” and identifies “Metaphysics, & Poetry, & ‘Facts of mind’— (i.e., Accounts of all the strange phantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers from Tauth [Thoth], the Egyptian to Taylor, the English Pagan,)” as his “darling Studies.”