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COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University
To Preserve one nation free from Idolatry in order that it might be a safe receptacle for the precursive Evidences of Christianity, was the principle design of the Mosaic Dispensation.
--Lectures on Revealed Religion (1)
FOR COLERIDGE, THE BIBLE WAS A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION AND EQUALLY A source of law. As Elinor Shaffer has argued in Kubla Khan and The Fall of Jerusalem, aware of the German Higher Criticism as filtered through the work of Alexander Geddes, by the mid 1790s Coleridge began to conceive of modern poetics as an expression of prophecy; assuming a program of mythic writing and reading, Coleridge sought to reproduce the moment of inspiration in lyric form, a revelation that not only proclaimed the Divine cause of its poetic effect but also attempted to recreate the inspired moment in readers as they experienced the text. (2) Insofar as the reader perceived through the syncretic overdetermination of symbol a pan-cultural spirituality that registered on some deep psychological level, he became a witness of deity, an experience that overcame the textual disjunction Paine posited in the Age of Reason as inevitably nullifying any conveyance of inspiration from prophet to reader. (3) In Shaffer's view, Coleridgean lyric undertakes Biblical work. Poetry becomes a mechanism for revealed religion, a religion stripped of the false ornamentation of translational mistake, historical mischance, and cultural or systematic prejudice. However, as I will suggest, Coleridge's exploration of the Mosaic Dispensation in the second of his Lectures on Revealed Religion implies that revelation also requires regulation. Witnessing a higher power does not occur in a vacuum, but within the legally controlled context of a political system; prophecy needs a "safe receptacle" in which to grow, a constitutional haven created by law to stave off the forces of idolatry that will interfere with the perception of deity both by those who create prophecy and those who recreate it through interpretive action.
This regulatory system or "dispensation" must therefore register not only in the historical world of biblical authors and glossators but also in the modern poetic community Coleridge constructs within and around lyric. Written only a few months after his exploration of this formal need in the second lecture, the "Eolian Harp," or "Effusion xxxv" as it was then known, expresses just this required circumscription of revelation by law. For a prophet of the 1790s, however, the infiltration from which the potential for prophecy must be isolated were not "idolatrous" customs per se, but forces Coleridge tended to associate with idolatry in contemporary political life: the instrumentality of terror and influence exerted as mechanisms of control and authority by the British Government. Pressure from the "Church and King" to control or annihilate radical discourse in the 1790s caused political thinkers to seek a space in which radical sentiment could flourish free from the possibility of criminal prosecution or public censure; Coleridge's revisionist historical account of the "republican" Mosaic constitution is one of them. Positing in his historical exegesis that a suspension or denial of temporal authority in the Mosaic Dispensation provided some isolation from the forces of idolatry extant in Biblical times, Coleridge begins to envision lyric as a similarly-isolated realm in which prophetic and radical content could find an avenue back into the public sphere. Working from a position first voiced in The Fall of Robespierre in which he associates lyric with an apolitical realm defended against the terror and greed that control modern politics, Coleridge's poem of August 1795 settles on a constitutional organization for lyrical space that emulates that of the Mosaic Dispensation--a place isolated from government forces through the same suspension of earthly authority as immunized the ancient Hebraic community from the idolatrous practices of the nations that historically surrounded it. Thus, I will read the problematization of authority in "Effusion xxxv" as a meta-lyrical claim that prophetic poetry is written and read within the ambit of a "dispensation" designed, in the tradition of 1790s radical reactions to government pressure, to carve out a safe haven from which revelation and the witnessing of Christ could infiltrate back into the public sphere as radical content.
For Coleridge, the Mosaic Dispensation was that which ensured the Jewish nation would perform its role as the historical antecedent to Christianity. Laws against idolatry provided an insulated space for the prophecy by which later generations of Christians could become witnesses of Christ: The circumstance of the Mosaic Dispensation were these--To shew the great power of God and by the immediate consequences [of] their frequent apostacy from him to shew the hateful Effects of Idolatry the Jews were chosen above all others--a people of a stupid and earthly imagination and blindly addicted to idolatrous Rites from the splendid Ceremonies and sensual Pleasures which attended them. Such were the circumstances--to preserve this nation free from Idolatry, that there might be publickly acknowledged such a series of Prophecies as to us of later ages is a necessary part of the proof of Christianity. (Works 1.139) The Mosaic dispensation preserved a state free of idolatry so that evidence of the divine origins of Christianity might flourish; in order to provide the textual basis for revelation, prophecy must occur in a state circumscribed and idol free. The particular mechanism through which the dispensation accomplished this effect was to treat the Jewish people as children and arrogate to God the preponderance of authority in political decision making: There were no proper legislative powers lodged anywhere in the Constitution--for even the whole Nation had no authority vested in them either to repeal laws in being, or to make new Laws. The Laws of the Nation had proceeded miraculously from God--none might add to or diminish aught from them. The Laws of Moses were fully adequate for the regulation of a People among whom Land had been equalized, and each one of whom was to he an agriculturalist--and
Commerce and Manufactures were either expressly forbidden by the
Law, or at least clearly contradictory to the Spirit of it, as
tending to introduce the accumulative system. (Works 1.130) The Hebraic Constitution was a network of laws maintaining a society in which equalization of property and limitation of profession negated the need for virtually all political activity--the people did not need authority to make decisions or legislate alterations. In those rare cases in which they were granted such authority, it was fragmented and split so that no one individual could rise up and dominate an otherwise-corporate expression of public will. Although there was a "Congress of the Hebrew Nation" in the time of David that "possessed all the legislative Powers which existed in the Jewish Constitution," this Congress would act to create or apply law only in those uncommon instances not contemplated by the Mosaic Dispensation (Works 1.129). Even this small authority was circumscribed by the fact that the congress was filled by rotation and "when any point of more than common importance was proposed" all twelve tribes met eu masse and "enacted it personally" (Works 1.130). This entire structure was expressly directed towards making "every Hebrew ... the subject of God alone"; it was "unlawful to acknowledge any human superior" because such acknowledgment amounted to idolatry, to a mediation between the subject and God (Works 1.126, 134).
By keeping most authority from temporal hands and ensuring the little that remained would be unlikely to be concentrated in one individual, Coleridge saw the Hebraic system as discouraging the kind of idolatry of greed, graft, and hierarchy that ultimately seduced the Jews and also characterizes the behavior of his fellow citizens in the public sphere. By his allusion to Samuel in the midst of the lecture, Coleridge inserts his interpretation of the Hebraic constitution into a radical republican tradition expressed in such contemporary authors as Warburton, Priestly, and Paine, a tradition that saw the establishment of any political hierarchy as interfering with the divine constitution in which each individual was solely and directly responsible to God for all actions and decisions made in the public sphere. This tradition saw the Jewish adoption of monarchy as a sin, as an act of idolatry instigated by the seductive power of splendor and greed. (4) Coleridge depicts it in a similar light: "Their crime was the foulest of which human nature is capable--they were weary of independence, and their punishment was the heaviest. They had their Request granted" (Works 1.133). Placing any individual above others in the chain of political decision-making is an act of idolatry, a "prostitution of the Almighty's titles" that began when the people of Israel were "seduced by the splendor of monarchical Courts around them" (Works 1.134, 132). Read next to Warburton, Priestly, and Paine, these sentiments become equally a criticism of the self-subjection of England to the Georges in the 17th Century, a comparison Coleridge seeks to evoke through a brief, ironic contrast between ancient Jewish and modern British government:
Moses, it should seem had received no divine Revelation of that
great Mystery recently delivered by an English Statesman that Power
was for the People not from the People, and that whether Murders
and Famine are to be hazarded by a national War is a point...
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