Coleridge and the 'Ode on the Eucharist'

Here is one of STC's Notebook entries, from June 1810 [Coburn (ed), Notebooks 3.1:3765]:

3765 17.163 Ode on the Eucharist
Great allegorical Reality!—
Substance & Symbol!—
{Necessary Will of God} το εν κ’αγάθων λόγος—στοργὴ at the first contemplation of the λόγος—from the στοργὴ, the τα εν λόγω, and first the divine Humanity—Creation of free will of God—Finiteness—and free will in the finite—the Fall—the mysterious corruption of the Human Will, evidently as a fact compatible with free will because accompanied with remorse/ the process of Redemption by the descent of the divine Humanity—the outward manifestation & life of Jesus the allegorical Reality vouchsafed by God, & properly called revelation/it is manifested by the assumption of a double or [?clouted] Veil—

The Greek means 'the one and the logos of the good—the storgèe at the first contemplation of the logos—from the storgèe, the things of the logos and first the divine Humanity'. στοργὴ/storgèe means 'love, affection; especially of parents and children/(rarely) sexual love'; 'deep love and affection, as of a mother for her child'. 'Good', there, should be 'goods', if that didn't make us think of 'goods and services': αγάθων is the genitive plural of ᾰ̓γᾰθός, so the Greek actually means 'the one and the Logos of the many good things', or '... the Logos of the virtues'. Clear? OK.

Kathleen Coburn thinks the 'Ode on the Eucharist' must be an abortive project which Coleridge himself planned to write ('a work projected by himself'), since 'the description does not apply to The Eucharist or the Holy Sacrament of Our Lord's Supper: A Divine Poem (1751) or The Eucharist (1737)'. I think we need to go back a bit earlier than that; indeed all the way to a 16th-century poem written by Suor (that is, sister) Laurentia Strozzi (1514-1591), a Dominican nun and Latin poet. The poem in question is 'Ode in Eucharistiam', from Strozzi's Hymni (1588)

Strozzi is a fascinating figure: a highly intelligent, well-educated daughter of the influential Strozzi family who entered a convent by choice and wrote some of the best Latin verse of her generation (you can read more about her here). Here's an English version of her Eucharist Ode:

Sky of earth applauds; and so, believers, ye rejoice:
   Born of a supernal father and chaste mother, into Time,
   He sets his all-lasting Passover to save the people.
As the hour of death approached him, eating with his sons:
   He'd perfected the old Law, given to the Patriarchs:
   Now ordains a new one, passes it into his sons’ breasts.
Sweet the Manna given to the world under the figure of wheat,
   Bread of angels now become the true believer's food,
   Changes wine, through the Thunderer’s words, into blood
Offered to the multitude, and JESUS spoke this word,
  This take as my body, and we dearly so receive it:
   Everyone of purer mind may taste, the master pledged it.
Then he handed them the cup, and he said these sacred words,
   In atonement's name my blood is given to the living,
   So that, drinking it, they may renew the Maker’s passion,
So the priest speaks whilst completing purest sacrifice:
   Offering it daily there before the Father's greatness,
   And he calls to guiltless souls to join the holy feast.
Christ commands a pure heart, clean from sinfulness:
   He floods on the innocent mind like a river in full spate,
   Anyone with guilt inside will never bear sweet fruit.
He will feed and shelter virtue, sacred heaven victim he
   Sheds the impious in death, and leads them down to hell
   Lusting to drive themselves to wickedness's furthest realms.
Hail, though gate-of-life food, sweeter milk and honey,
   Christ JESUS, radiant sun, the most powerful of joys,
   Let your worshippers be carried gladful home. Amen.

(Not much of a translation, this; although I have at least tried, very roughly, to capture something of the trochaic form of the Latin). If Coleridge did read this poem, then I wonder if his focus on στοργὴ responds to the way Strozzi describes Christ not as son, but as father, sitting at the last supper with his disciples and motivated by a paternal love:—eating with his sons, instilling love into his sons' breasts. The 'double or [?clouted] Veil' (should that be 'pleated', I wonder?) might connect Strozzi's own adoption of the Dominican veil with the double allegory in his ode: for Christ, here, is both bread, 'angelorum panis unde fit cibus credentium', and the sun, 'Sol refulgens'. And indeed, this double figure is itself doubled, or pleated; since the bread that he is figures divine Manna: 'Manna praebet dulce Mudo, sub figura tritici'. The stuff about 'descent of the divine Humanity' into 'the finite' perhaps reflects Strozzi's description of the incarnation as happening 'in tempore', in Time. And the free will speculation may riff off the doubled-sense, in the last lines of the poem, that Christ both 'leads' (ducit) the wicked to Hell, and they take themselves there on account of their own concupiscence.

Coleridge had a rather, well, seventeenth-century attitude to the eucharist: that is to say, he thought about it a great deal, it mattered to him, as a crucial feature of Christian worship. He took communion as a student at Cambridge in the early 1790s, but then stopped until 1827, late in his life, when he started again. According to a letter written by his daughter after his death 'my Father's views on the Eucharist ... were deep and spiritual, but in perfect harmony & analogy of his view of baptism, and all his other ways of conceiving religious subjects—they were perfectly—I think what Pusey would call rationalistic':

He would subscribe to no form of words supposed to convey a religious truth, on a merely supposed external evidence, such as what is called the tradition of the Church. All doctrines of the Eucharist which connected a spiritual presence with the elements, apart from the soul of the receiver, were separated from his faith by an equally impassable chasm. He sometimes discussed the different forms and phases of this doctrine, as I might turn over pink, yellow or blue garments, with no thought of wearing such but only of considering which will suit others best. Just in this spirit S.T.C. used to defend Transubstantiation, & contend that it was a more convenient form of belief than our Anglo-Catholic theory of the real presence. [quoted Coburn, 3:2 3847]

One thing is clear: that around this time, mid to late 1810, Coleridge was reading and thinking a lot about the Eucharist. His reaction to Strozzi's poem (if that is what he is reacting to) is one example, probably from early June 1810; later in June he wrote two lengthy Notebook entries [3847, 3934] on the subject, and around this time he was reading, or re-reading, the 17th-century Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson's Discourse Against Transubstantiation (1684) [see Notebooks, 3868]. It was also at this time that Coleridge (in Richard Holmes' words) 'began the remarkable group of entries concerning St Theresa of Avila', prompted by his reading of her Life and Works (1671). Holmes thinks he grew 'more and more fascinated by the mixture of spiritual and erotic mysticism in her visions' [Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Visions (1998), 205], visions he read as psychological manifestations rather than divine inspiration, but as eloquent and powerful nonetheless. Holmes astutely singles out Coleridge's version of the way Theresa used 'water metaphors' to describe the four stages of prayer:

Prayer begins as an act of "seeming unassisted poor labouring Will", like water drawn up painfully from a well in a bucket, "by mere force of the arm"; later it is assisted "by the wheel & pulley"; thirdly it becomes easier "like the drawing off streamlets from a River & great Fountain"; and lastly it becomes the effortless pouring down of "copious rains from Heaven." [Holmes, 206]

The connection with the Ancient Mariner is the obvious one ('My lips were wet, my throat was cold/My garments were all dank;/Sure I had drunken in my dreams/And still my body drank'). But Strozzi's poem is also about the way Christ is actual as well as spiritual refreshment to us: how he fills our mind like a full-flowing river ('menteis replet alto fluimine'), how his flesh is sweeter than fruit or Manna, the bread of the angels, his blood wine. Does it stretch matters to see in the opening line of Strozzi's poem an oblique reference to the refreshing rain falling from the sky?—just as the Mariner, and before him, Theresa slaked their thirsts on rainfall? (If not, then what does that first line mean, I wonder?)

The Notebook entries of the second half of 1810 paint the picture of a man craving some kind of heart-food, some refreshment of spirit and mind. And there is a clear enough biographical reason for this: March 1810 was when Sara Hutchinson, abruptly, left the Wordsworths' house to go and live with her brother Tom and a man called John Monkhouse on the two men's farm in Wales. Coleridge, as Holmes put it, 'felt he had been stung to death'; and in the months that followed his despair curdled when 'Asra' didn't write or contact him, and he felt he had been utterly abandoned by her. His own letters record his 'depression of spirits, little less than absolute Despondency', and mourn, not unangrily, Asra's 'cruel neglect & contemptuous silence ever since' [Letters 3:287].

There's clearly a danger in reading everything Coleridgean 1799-1810 through the lens of his hopeless love for Sara H.; but in this case it strikes me as very likely that that's what's going on. Coleridge is craving a particular body, is desperately hungry for it, and the fact that it has moved wholly out of his ken only makes his sense of craving more acute. He generalises his starvation into a larger, spiritual narrative of bread and wine, refreshment and atonement. This, I'd say, is why he discusses στοργὴ, here. His erotic obsession with Asra had always had a strange quasi-incestuous element to it: he often refers to her in writing as his 'sister', and in his lyric of love-longing, 'Recollections of Love', he describes meeting Sara Hutchinson again as a strange mix-up of adult sexual desire and maternal storgèe:

As when a mother doth explore
The rose-mark on her long-lost child,
I met, I loved you, maiden mild!

This in turn opens into a broader discussion of food and drink in Coleridge, the role they played in his life and his imagination. It's hard to put it this way without sounding condescending, but one way desire becomes a physical appetite for consumption is when it shades towards a sort of oral infantilism. But it's not just that: not just, that is, the adult-erotic fantasy of forever feeding at the ever-supplying maternal breast (Strozzi's lacte melle dulcior).  Two years before his death, Coleridge began—though he never finished—a piece of autobiographical prose, the 'Folio Notebook'. Here's Theodore Leinwand useful account:

In what is called the 'Folio Notebook,' Coleridge begins with his childhood, passes on to his father's death, and then to his years at Christ's Hospital school. He remembers that a stranger gave him borrowing privileges at a circulating library in King's Street, Cheapside, and that he 'read thro the whole Catalogue, folios and all. ...' He describes how his 'whole Being was with eyes closed to every object of present sense—to crumple myself up in a sunny Corner, and read, read, read,—finding myself in Rob. Crusoe's Island, finding a Mountain of Plum Cake, and eating out a room for my self, and then eating it into the shapes of Chairs; Tables—Hunger and Fancy—'. [Theodore Leinwand, 'Shakespeare, Coleridge, Intellecturition', Studies in Romanticism, 46:1 (2007), 81]

'What struck me when I first read this,' Leinwand adds, 'was what Kathleen Coburn calls Coleridge's "solitariness," I was brought up short when I found Coburn shrewdly asking us to notice that "the plum-cake room had tables and chairs, in the plural, for sociability".'That is a good point: eating, for Coleridge, even in this Erysichthonic extremity of hungry-devouring-reading, is about making a connection with another, not just about the selfish indulgence of appetite. Coleridge is metaphorically eating his way into the world, sculpting his world through a strange hybrid reading-devouring. And this brings me back, at the end of this very lengthy post, to his thoughts on Strozzi's Ode on the Eucharist'. The doubled, or clouted, metaphor at work here is not only that of divine eating, and not only the frisson of engaging with the inspired writing of a beautiful woman (as with Saint Theresa). It is also about reading. We read this poem about eating; and reading is a process Coleridge considers an eating. The argumentum in circulo he (boldly, I think) valorises in the Biographia Literaria as the truth of individual engagement in faith finds its actualisation in this conceptual gyre: not that the bread turns magically into the body of Christ, one thing linearly becoming another thing, but rather that reading the divine word, or logos, and eating his sustaining food, and the craving the erotic intimacy of another body, are all revealed as versions of one another, reverting back upon one another, and circling round as strophe and antistrophe.