Coleridge and the Church of England

About

Coleridge and the Church of England by J. Robert Barth, SJ, is a thorough examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s complex relationship with the Church of England. This essay, featured in The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, explores Coleridge’s journey from Unitarianism back to Anglican Trinitarian orthodoxy. Barth delves into Coleridge’s theological evolution, his intellectual and emotional bonds with the Anglican Church, and his lasting influence on Victorian religious thought. This essay is essential for students, scholars, and enthusiasts of Coleridge, Romantic literature, and the history of religious thought.

First published in *The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland*, ed. Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure, Macmillan, 1990. Extracted from the revised edition, Humanities-Ebooks, 2007.

from the essay

‘Consideration of Coleridge’s relationship with the Church of England could quite appropriately begin, of course, shortly after his birth, with his baptism in the village church of Ottery St. Mary. For this was the beginning of a bond – spiritual, intellectual and emotional – which was to be at the centre of his life for most of the next sixty-two years. Indeed, as a boy he was assumed to be destined for a career in the Church. However, since Coleridge’s upbringing (initially under the tutelage of his vicar father, John Coleridge) was unexceptionably Anglican, and since his flirtation with Unitarianism is treated by H. W. Piper in this volume, we may begin with his return from Unitarianism to Trinitarian orthodoxy in 1805, during his sojourn in Malta.’

author

Richard Gravil is author of Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842 (2003) and editor (with Nicholas Roe and Lucy Newlyn) of Coleridge's Imagination (1985). Molly Lefebure's books include Cumbrian Heritage (1970), Samuel Taylor Coleridge: the Bondage of Opium (1974), Cumbrian Discovery (1977), Thomas Hardy's World (1997).