Prickett's "Words and The Word" (1986) and Coleridge

Stephen Prickett's Words and "The Word": Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (1986) is about more than Coleridge; far more than I can touch on here. But I wanted, in a slight departure for this blog, to review what he does say about Coleridge. It's a pretty famous work, of course; at least among those who explore the intersections between scripture and literature, although it probably gets cited more often by theologians than literary critics.

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Words and The Word is an unusually wide-ranging work of literary and theological scholarship, very dense (or, if you prefer, rich) and as such it really does resist easy summary. In a nutshell, Prickett goes back to the eighteenth-century to trace the intricate lines of thought that sought to establish how we should read the Bible, and by extension what mode is the best one in which to approach the divine. He argues that nowadays there is a wall (a 'glacial moraine', he calls it, following Hermann Usener: gletscherwall) separating biblical studies and the study of literature. He traces this back to the influence of Germany had on the establishment of universities in the later 19th-century, but notes that, for a short time, things looked different in England:

The work of Robert Lowth had made possible a new aesthetic appreciation of biblical poetry, and the fact that the first generation of English Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, so far from rejecting Christianity like Humboldt were devout Christians of one kind or another, helped them to find in the Bible far more powerful sources of inspiration than their German contemporaries or their immediate predecessors of the Enlightenment. [1-2]

Nonetheless, Prickett thinks, by the end of the 19th-century, and for various reasons, 'the same wall that divided German scholarship had been successfully transplanted into English institutions and thought'. The consequence of this, he argues, has been a prolonged crisis not just in biblical hermeneutics, but literature as well ('in particular, poetry') which he thinks 'has also suffered a crisis of meaning in the twentieth century' [2]. The book as a whole is a superbly fine-grained, sometimes rather labyrinthine, discussion of the best way of apprehending the biblical 'word': science, hermeneutics, cultural contextualisation, 'the religious and the poetic', paradox, prophesy and metaphor.

According to Prickett Robert Lowth plays a key role in this larger story, on account of his 1754 treatise Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, later translated into English by George Gregory as Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787), and very often reprinted. 'Epoch making', Prickett calls this volume [41]. Now, one of the things Lowth argues is that a prose translation of the Hebrew songs can capture perfectly well many of the poetic qualities of the original. Prickett thinks this directly informed Wordsworth’s thesis, so important in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, that poetry and prose are not opposites, and that more than mere metrical regularity defines the former—dignity, passion, authenticity and so on. Coleridge discusses precisely this in the Biographia, including some of his own prose-poetic Biblical translations. It’s a cliché to note (though that doesn’t stop it being true) that Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ was one of the modern era's single most influential interventions into poetics; and for Prickett this has implications for how we read the Bible as much as it has for how poetry gets written. So for example, in his discussion of Manley Hopkins, Prickett notes that ‘for Hopkins the rediscovery of the Bible as “poetry” did not mean the progressive rediscovery of formal distinctions between verse and prose so much as a rediscovery of the meaning behind the traditional constructs.’ [Prickett, 119]. For Lowth, the calm and rational mind expresses itself in a way we might nowadays call 'scientific'—'the language of reason is cool, temperate, rather humble than elevated, well-arranged and perspicuous'—where where the passionate and agitated mind falls naturally into poetry:

The language of the passions is totally different:—the conceptions burst out in a turbid stream, expressive in a manner of the internal conflict; the more vehement break out in hasty confusion; they catch (without search or study) whatever is impetuous, vivid, or energetic. In a word, reason speaks literally, the passions poetically. The mind, with whatever passion it be agitated, remains fixed upon the object that excited it; and while it is earnest to display it, is not satisfied with a plain and exact description; but adopts one agreeable to its own sensations, splendid or gloomy, jocund or unpleasant. For the passions are naturally inclined to amplification; they wonderfully magnify and exaggerate whatever dwells upon the mind, and labour to express it in animated, bold, and magnificent terms. This they commonly effect by two different methods; partly by illustrating the subject with splendid imagery, and partly by employing new and extraordinary forms of expression, which are indeed possessed of great force and efficacy. [Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 140]

One idea that runs through the work of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers is that 'poetry is the natural language of religion', and that 'the Bible was to be treated as belonging to a higher, more sublime order of discourse than prose', which latter was 'an inferior and late medium fit only for describing the mundane and practical world of everyday affairs' [Prickett, 40]. The business of translating Hebrew and Greek into English becomes more than a series of practical textual difficulties; it stands for a chasm between divine revelation and mundane existence that is, in a strict sense of the term, sublime. Samuel Tongue summarises:

However, as Prickett claims, ‘…the idea of a language of primal of original participation in this sense is only possible to an age that no longer possesses it.’ A sense of the ‘original text’ in an ‘original language’ becomes a major project of discovery and animating absence for both types of Bible. The historical critics attempt an archaeology of biblical linguistics to excavate the authority of the ‘original’; poets and writers go on to attempt a new sense of the ‘originality; of religious-poetic genius in the sublime aesthetic authority of the poetic Bible. [Samuel Tongue, Between Biblical Criticism and Poetic Rewriting: Interpretative Struggles over Genesis 32:22-32 (Leiden: Brill 2014), 41; quoting Prickett, 86]

'Animating absence' is a well-chosen phrase. This necessary belatedness, this (Prickett doesn't use this term, but there was a lot of this sort of stuff about in 1986) aporia, is in an important sense constitutive of Christianity. Words and The Word doesn't discuss the Qu'ran—if Prickett wrote the book nowadays, I wonder if he would have done this—but the contrast is a fascinating one. Muslims are required to apprehend their holy book in its original Arabic, a feature of the core Islamic belief in the Qu'ran's 'inimitability' or I'jaz. There's really nothing like this in contemporary Christianity. Even self-professed literalists in as-it-might-be the US Bible Belt rest their claims that scripture must be interpreted literally on translations of scripture, rather than on the original Hebrew or Greek, languages very few of them are inclined to acquire. Islam is not like this; and one of the things I take Prickett to be arguing (in his roundabout way) is that in a sense it is this very non-inimitability that has proved constitutive of the modern development of Christianity. Not in the sense that Romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey felt licensed to disregard the 'original' in their poetic recreations (on the contrary, Prickett is clear that 'the most noticeable feature of the English "poetic" theological tradition leading from Lowth to the Romantics is its essential conservatism' [124]); but in the sense that a poetic apprehension of religion opens up rather than closes down 'meaning', that it is about animating absences, or opacities, as much as semantic presences.

Indeed, when considering this question Prickett can get very, well, prickly. He has a particular dislike for both the New English Bible and the Good News Bible, both of which he considers not only manifestly inferior to the King James Version, but based on a fundamental misunderstanding, viz. that it is possible to 'write out the meaning plainly' of the Bible.

This belief that religious experience, and the historic record of mankind's deepest questionings and insights can only be adequately described today in the slack, verbose and cliché-ridden language of international communication would be disconcerting if it were not ... so evidently self-defeating. How far is it possible, in the words of the Good News Bible's Preface, 'to use language that is natural, clear, simple and unambiguous', when the Bible is not about things that are natural, clear, simple and unambiguous? or for the linguistically-enfeebled modern theologians struggling on the New English Bible to 'write out the meaning plainly' of what to the taut and concise translators of the seventeenth-century was essentially ambiguous and obscure? [Prickett, 10]

Ouch. This is a little unfair, I think: neither the NEB nor the GNB present themselves as the only works capable of 'adequately' describing the Bible; and the belief that the bible is intrinsically complex, elusive and opaque, whilst flattering the kind of person (like me, I confess; like Prickett, I assume) who tends to valorise difficulty and density, surely doesn't really describe the bible as such, many portions of which are perfectly clear and intelligible. There's clearly merit in making scripture more accessible to the sort of people who would be turned away by the difficulty of the KJV. But you take his point, and there's something rather stirring in his desire to realign the Bible and poetry, or more modestly the Bible and literary criticism, in order ‘to restore a wholeness of approach that has been disastrously fragmented over the past hundred and fifty years’ [197].

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What, in this larger context, does Prickett have to say about Coleridge? Words and The Word returns to my man several times, and could have done a lot more with him. He doesn't, for instance, discuss STC's close friendship with Hyman Hurwitz, the preeminent Hebraicist of his era in Britain, a friendship that included Coleridge editing and correcting the English of Hurwitz's Vindiciae Hebraicae, being a Defence of the Hebrew Scriptures as a Vehicle of Revealed Religion (1820) and translating Hurwitz's lengthy Hebrew lament 'On the Death of the Princess Charlotte' (1817). But Prickett does note how Coleridge located a wholeness of expressive poetic symbolicism in scripture, and quotes the famous passage from The Statesman's Manual to the effect that

the histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy, and are the product of an unenlivened generalizing understanding. In the Scriptures they are the living educts of the imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. [LS, 29]

Prickett discusses this passage, but I think misses a nuance. In his own copy of The Statesman's Manual, Coleridge scratched out 'educts' and wrote-in 'Produce', and then added this marginalium: 'Or perhaps these μóρφωματα of the mechanic Understanding as distinguished from the 'ποίησεις' of the imaginative Reason might be named Products in antithesis to Produce—or Growths.' The distinction between the two Greek terms, also developed in the Biographia, is elaborated in the headnote to this blog.

I take it that Coleridge sees no functional difference between an educt, or a force that draws something out of us, and a ποίησεις or 'making', a force that 'produces' something in us. Coming out and going in are, he thinks, the same in this case. Or to be more precise, where the sacred 'myths' (in a non-judgmental sense of the word) of scripture are concerned these actions are indistinguishable. Prickett doesn't go into any of that, and when he says 'Biblical narrative ... lives as extensions from the creative or "poetic" imagination' [44] he's only sort-of right: I think Coleridge has in mind a more reciprocal arrangement than is implied by 'extension'. But Prickett is surely right that Coleridge sees the poetic symbol as essentially 'bi-focal', 'always partaking' (to quote The Statesman's Manual again) 'of the Reality which it renders intelligible' and 'abid[ing] itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative'.

A symbol is thus the opposite of a generalization. The latter is a kind of lowest common denominator, deduced by the understanding from outward events according to the dead arrangement of a mechanical philosophy. In contrast, to describe a symbol, he uses the metaphor of a lens: it is 'translucent'—focusing the universal generality through the concreteness of a particular example. [Prickett, 44]

'There is more [in it] that finds me,' was how Coleridge described the Bible 'than in all other books put together.' This is a beautifully reciprocal way of putting it: you go into your Bible, and your Bible goes into you. You look for things in the Bible; the Bible finds things in you.

In the 'Book of Nature' chapter Prickett brings Coleridge back in. There's a good account of his reading of Horne Tooke's linguistic system: 'Tooke believed that he had shown the stable and unchangeable nature of words. Coleridge fell delight upon his "proof" and rapidly deduced the opposite: the flux and constant change of language. Hartley had assumed a fixed relationship between words and ideas; in attempting to prune back all words to their roots, Tooke had shown Coleridge the astonishing diversity and luxury of the undergrowth that had sprung up' [Prickett, 136-37]. Prickett quotes one of STC's letters:

Are not words etc parts and germinations of the plant? And what is the Law of the Growth?—In something of this order I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, and living Things too.

This is another iteration of Coleridge attachment to the word-made-flesh Logos as the cornerstone of his religious and literary life. There's some stuff on desynonymy, from the 1819 'Philosophical Lectures' (which concept Paul Hamilton, in Coleridge's Poetics (1983) applies as the key to unlock the whole of Coleridge's thought, although not entirely convincingly), but just as things get going we read this:

One could say much more about Coleridge's theories of language. It is a fascinating subject and one that has by no means been fully explored. [138]

And off we go elsewhere. A shame! Instead Prickett argues that most of Coleridge's attempts at desynonymising have failed to catch on. They 'proved over-subtle and too complex to have passed into the language':

His distinction between 'types' and 'symbols' has not survived; his attempt to anglicize the Kantian polarity of 'Reason' and 'understanding' survives only in relation to Idealist philosophy rather than in standard usage; and the carefully elaborated bnaries of Church and State such as 'opposite' and 'contrary' have not passed even into the technical vocabulary of dialectics whose terms are more often from Germany and France. [Prickett, 141]

This is broadly right I think (although 'opposite' and 'contrary' do figure as distinctions in the Greimas square; and that's proved quite influential. Fredric Jameson seems to build all his books around them, for instance. Greimas, as a literature specialist, presumably knew about Coleridge). Aha, you're thinking: what about the distinction between 'imagination' and 'fancy', one of Coleridge's most influential ideas? Surely that piece of desynonymising has passed into popular currency? But Prickett's not having that:

This distinction has suffered a curious and possibly unique fate in the history of semantic separations. On the one hand it has become famous—every student of literature in the English-speaking world finds himself supposed to have heard of it; on the other, it is scarcely ever used, and never in common speech. [Prickett, 141]

I'm not sure that's correct, actually; but it's hard to know how the assertion could be proved, one way or the other. Prickett thinks the imagination/fancy distinction actually folds three separate concepts into its dyad, which is correct (I think); and makes the case that the fusing of the two modes of imagination is actually what Coleridge intended (which I'm not so sure about). Prickett ties his discussion together with the logos ('the subordinate logos of nature is a repetition in the finite human mind of God's eternal act of creation' is how he puts it, which is tricky), and quotes The Statesman's Manual one last time:

The great book of Nature has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all ages, it is the poetry of all human nature.

This leads into a kind of Prickettian peroration:

We are here very close to what Abrams has designtaed 'apocalypse by cognition'. Behind the continual Romantic reiteration of the 'poetic' as a metaphor for religious experience lies what we have seen is the very ancient association of poetry with divinity, but here the 'peculiar language of heaven' has been translated into a typology of psychological and spiritual states. As in Dante, poetry is a kind of imaginative psychopomp leading the soul towards a mystical and otherwise inexpressible bliss, or 'apocalypse', in which the partaker is caught up in the divine vision. But just as Schiller's 'third kingdom' of aesthetic liberation ... is not merely an internal state, but also a social one, so Coleridge's poetic 'apocalypse' is at once individual and communal. The difference is that Coleridge's mature theory of language and his later Trinitarian Anglicanism (as always in his thought, all elements are connected) no longer involves seeing this transformation as part of a future ideal state, but, in true New Testament style, proclaims that it is already here. [Prickett, 144]

In other news: 'Imaginative Psychopomp of Bliss' is the name of my next band.