THE MEMORY OF HUME AND PALEY’S NATURAL THEOLOGY IN COLERIDGE’S AIDS TO REFLECTION
THE MEMORY OF HUME AND PALEY’S NATURAL THEOLOGY IN COLERIDGE’S AIDS TO REFLECTION

Summary/Abstract: The Aids to Reflection, Coleridge’s most influential theological work, is in a strong polemic with two very important works on religion – David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and William Paley’s Natural Theology. The main focus of the present paper will therefore be that of outlining Coleridge’s perspective with reference to Hume and Paley’s views on natural theology. In doing so, it will hopefully become clear that an empiricist account of religion can only amount to the apologetic genre of natural theology. On the one hand, by showing his interest towards the cultural history of natural theology, Coleridge exposes the poverty of empiricism and its inability to move past demonstrations of God’s existence and arrive at a spiritual understanding of the self in relation to God. On the other hand, he re-categorizes Reason, by rediscovering its original meaning as Logos and positing it as the structure on which true morality should be build, unlike in the empiricist system of common-sense ethics. The characters from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion assert the consequences of living in a sceptical and empirical mindframe. Coleridge not only combats such attitudes, he also asserts the need to think in terms of Platonic and Kantian otherworldliness and rethink spirituality. He is no Christian dogmatist however, so questions such as what is the true faith are open in Coleridge’s open, aphoristic and dialogical construction that makes up Aids to Reflection. In discussing the three philosophers, I bore in mind Renate Lachmann’s concept of participation in the sense that the three texts are distancing and surpassing one another.

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