Abstract
The descriptive title gives a good sense of this book. Corbin, clearly an evangelical Coleridgean, writes to persuade us that Coleridge’s eventual position, when he returned to communion with the Church of England at Christmas 1827, was closer to that of an Anglican Evangelical than to any other Christian group. To this end he gives us an extensive and thorough description of the theological positions of nearly all the relevant Protestant sects and parties of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. He is particularly good on the spectrum of beliefs shading between Calvinist on the one hand and Arminian on the other – one of the main divisive theological issues of the day. He also looks closely at Coleridge’s note that Socinianism (in effect, contemporary Unitarianism) was ‘moonlight’, while Methodism was ‘a stove’. ‘O for a sun,’ he added, ‘that shall unite Light and Warmth!’ Corbin traces Coleridge’s movement from the 1790s to the 1820s in terms of his search for such ‘sunshine’, and argues that he eventually settles for what he calls ‘an imperfect sun’ in the Evangelical Anglicanism of the 1820s.
Along the way Corbin also provides an excellent summary of the theological and philosophical positions of David Hartley, Joseph Priestley and William Paley, the first a big influence, the second a minor one, and the third a whipping boy in the development of Coleridge’s thinking. For anyone wishing to find a simple but comprehensive survey of the various theological movements of the second half of eighteenth-century England, Corbin’s summary can scarcely be bettered. He has read extensively and insightfully in the material of the day and has a good feeling for what may be a theologically unfamiliar period.
All of which makes his omissions the more surprising. Although he includes the old-style Latitudinarians, the High Church (including the later Oxford Movement) and, naturally, Evangelicals in his description of Anglican church ‘parties’, with a good sense of their doctrinal overlaps and loose edges, he never discusses the grouping into which most of Coleridge’s contemporaries assumed he belonged: the ‘liberal Anglicans’, or ‘broad Church’. Nor does the work of Duncan Forbes (The Liberal Anglican Idea of History) or Tod Jones (The Broad Church), for both of whom Coleridge is a central figure, appear in the bibliography. Similarly, the names of Coleridge’s best-known theological disciples, Julius Hare, F. D. Maurice, George MacDonald, and even the more evangelical Charles Kingsley, do not appear in Corbin’s narrative, nor do the ‘Cambridge Apostles’ (including in their number not merely Hare and Maurice, but John Sterling and Alfred Tennyson), whose raison d’être was to apply the teachings of Coleridge. On the Evangelical side, although Charles Simeon gets a couple of mentions, there is nothing about the ‘Clapham Sect’ and its work in creating the mainstream Anglican Evangelicalism of the Victorian age. In short, this is an interesting but truncated survey, strong on the eighteenth-century context of Coleridge’s spiritual journey, but less so on his final position, or its extensive theological legacy.