No Such Book As Ulricus Rinovius's "De Controversiis" (1590)

‘Essay IV’ in The Friend sets out the principles to which Coleridge declares he will adhere in the essays that follow. He won't, he says, be constantly I-ing his prose (he promises ‘solicitude’, though not ‘excessive solicitude’ when it comes to avoiding ‘the use of our first personal pronoun’), he'll try not to be too obscure, he'll do his research and support what he says with evidence, and above all he promises to do his very best to avoid ‘Arrogance’ and ‘Presumption’. Those latter qualities are the real focus of the essay, in fact. ‘The word, Presumption, I appropriate to the internal feeling [of superiority], and arrogance to the way and manner of outwardly expressing ourselves’ [Friend, 1:27]. Coleridge discusses several varieties of this arrogance as it appears in other writers, with some tart examples, and the essay ends with this lengthy sentence:

As long therefore as I obtrude no unsupported assertions on my readers; and as long as I state my opinions and the evidence which induced or compelled me to adopt them, with calmness and that diffidence in myself, which is by no means incompatible with a firm belief in the justness of the opinions themselves; while I attack no man's private life from any cause, and detract from no man's honours in his public character, from the truth of his doctrines, or the merits of his compositions, without detailing all my reasons and resting the result solely on the arguments adduced; while I moreover explain fully the motives of duty, which influenced me in resolving to institute such investigation; while I confine all asperity of censure, and all expressions of contempt, to gross violations of truth, honour, and decency, to the base corrupter and the detected slanderer; while I write on no subject, which I have not studied with my best attention, on no subject which my education and acquirements have incapacitated me from properly understanding; and above all while I approve myself, alike in praise and in blame, in close reasoning and in impassioned declamation, a steady FRIEND to the two best and surest friends of all men, TRUTH and HONESTY; I will not fear an accusation of either Presumption or Arrogance from the good and the wise, I shall pity it from the weak, and despise it from the wicked. [Friend CC 4.1: 32-33]

Wordsworth specifically praised this one sentence for its ‘architecture.’ And you can see why he liked it: it's a lovely bit of writing, constructed with enough syntactic and expressive aplomb that the reader never loses her way, but building to a very cleverly, rhetorically-weighted conclusion.

Now: this essay starts, as you can see above, with a Latin epigraph:

Si modo quæ natura et ratione concessa sint, assumpserimus, PRÆSUMPTIONIS suspicio a nobis quam longissime abesse debet. Multa Antiquitati, nobismet nihil, arrogamus. Nihilne vos? Nihil mehercule, nisi quod omnia omni animo Veritati arrogamus Sanctimoniæ. ULR. RINOV. De Controversiis

(Translation.)—If we assume only what Nature and Reason have granted, with no shadow of right can we be suspected of Presumption. To Antiquity we arrogate many things, to ourselves nothing. Nothing? Aye nothing: unless indeed it be, that with all our strength we Arrogate all things to Truth and Moral Purity. [Friend CC 4.1: 25. This is the 1818 version of this quotation and its translation; a variant text from the 1837 version edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge is screenshotted above]

Barbara Rooke, whose Bollingen edition of The Friend I'm using, annotates this passage drily: ‘source untraced’. Because in fact it's a made-up quotation (Rooke's footnote adds ‘as early as Poems (1797) C confessed that when he did not find “a suitable motto” he “invented one”’). There's no such person as Ulr. Rinov., and non-he never wrote the words attributed to him here. Coleridge concocted this Latin for the 1818 edition (this epigraph isn't part of the original 1809 text).

Still, made-up though it be, we can intuit certain things about this bit of faux-Latin, and those things shed an, I think, interesting light on Coleridge's essay, and indeed his larger project in The Friend. Ulricus Rinovius wasn't a person, but there was a 16th-century German priest and historian called Petrus Rinovius; which enables us to deduce that Ulricus was German, and to speculate that Peter might be his relative. And though no book called De Controversiis was authored by any Rinovius, there was a famous book that had that title. This one, in fact:

This is Robert Bellarmine's extremely influential defence of the legitimacy of Papal authority: Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei adversus hujus temporis Haereticos (3 vols 1581-93). So important, indeed, has this book proved to Catholicism that Pope Pius XI canonised Bellarmine in 1930 and made him a Doctor of the Church a year later. The De Controversiis remains one of the prime documents of the counter-Reformation.

One index of its influence was the ferocity with which it was attacked by Protestant thinkers. Indeed, attacking Bellarmine became for a while something of an industry: specific university chairs were endowed in England and Germany for scholars to disseminate Protestant counter-arguments to Bellarmine's work. The De Controversiis was attacked, as Gordon Campbell notes, ‘by Protestants of all persuasions: in England attacks were mounted by Alexander Cooke, William Whitaker, Francis Bunny, John Rainolds, Matthew Sutcliffe, and Joseph Hall; on the continent [by] Johannes Piscator, Amandus Polanus, and Francis Junius’ and Campbell thinks Milton himself prepared a rebuttal to the De Controversiis, now lost [Campbell, ‘Milton's Index Theologicus and Bellarmine's Disputationes De Controversiis’, Milton Quarterly 11 (1977), 13].

The controversiae to which the book's title refers are those points of faith in dispute between Catholicism and Protestantism. Specifically, Bellarmine discusses the question of faith versus good works, the need or otherwise for extreme unction, the status of the Pope (controversially enough he insists the Pope is not the antichrist prophesied in the Revelation of St John), issues of grace and free-will and, as you'd expect, the nature of the eucharist. He engages with the writing of various Protestant theologians, concentrating particularly on Calvin and Luther, quoting and interrogating their works. Robert Richgels calls De Controversiis ‘massive anti-Protestant summa’ (‘Bellarmine goes directly into the works of his foes, noting carefully their views and arguments on the issues and then providing the Catholic response to each point in turn’ [Richgels, ‘Scholasticism Meets Humanism in the Counter-Reformation the Clash of Cultures in Robert Bellarmine's Use of Calvin in the Controversies’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 6:1 (1975), 54].)

Coleridge's imaginary addition to the extensive body of anti-Bellarmine tracts (written by a German and therefore a Protestant it would of course be an anti-Bellarmite work) does two quite interesting things in its context, here. One is that, without leaning too heavily on the reader, it connects what follows—Coleridge's discussion of the proper way of writing literary and moral essays—with the larger theological questions of the whole Reformation. It's not hard to extrapolate what the larger argument of ‘Ulricus Rinovius’ must be: that instead of blindly trusting to the authority of the (ancient) Roman Church, we must orient ourselves to God by means of our individual truth and moral purity. By appropriating this confected book to his argument, Coleridge is tacitly aligning what he does with religion; in much the same way that he'd styled thoughts on the role of the statesman in society ‘Lay Sermons’ in 1816-17. It's not belle lettres; its much more godly and important than that.

The other thing STC is doing in this made-up quotation is an etymological unpacking of the words ‘arrogance’ and ‘presumption’. By inventing a Latin quotation that actually uses the words, he picks out the way the English arrogance, ‘an extreme and foolish pride, a sense of superiority to others’ derives from the Latin arrogo, which means ‘to claim as one's own, arrogate to oneself, assume’ and so is connected with assumo (‘to take to or with one's self, to take up, receive, adopt, accept, take’). He is saying, in other words, that arrogance is a matter of unchallenged assumptions, which in turn devolves on where we ground our beliefs. If we assume (si assumpserimus), if we take up, what ‘natura et ratione’ offer us, then we cannot be accused of præsumptio, presumption; but if we instead take up the offerings of tradition, ‘antiquitas’, then we move from assumption to arrogation and thence to the outward form of presumption, arrogance. Instead of the antique, we should take up what veritas and sanctimonia proffer.

The question is how far Coleridge is aligning Catholicism with arrogance and Protestantism with assumption. Essay 4 isn't specifically about religious faith, or doctrinal affiliation, but still: his examples do seem to divide along sectarian lines. So those doughty Protestants Newton and Locke are praised, ‘despite being assailed with a full cry for [their] presumption in having deserted the philosophical system at that time generally received by the universities of Europe’ [Friend 1:28] because their genius grounded their assertions in nature. On the other hand Coleridge contrasts a Jesuitical counter-example: ‘I have,’ says Coleridge, ‘looked into a ponderous review of the corpuscular philosophy by a Sicilian Jesuit, in which the acrimonious Father frequently expresses his doubt, whether he should pronounce Boyle or Newton more impious than presumptuous, or more presumptuous than impious. They had both attacked the reigning opinions on most important subjects, opinions sanctioned by the greatest names of antiquity, and by the general suffrage of their learned contemporaries or immediate predecessors.’ This is presumably a reference to Fr Ruggerio Giuseppe Boscovich (though Croatian rather than Sicilian, he published under the Italian version of his forenames, and d'Alembert was one of many contemporaries who thought him Italian—Boscovich wrote back politely to correct his misapprehension—so STC can be forgiven for getting this wrong). Historians of science today mostly argue that Boscovich's atomic theory position him a scientist and thinker of the same stature of a Leibniz or a Locke (perhaps not quite the statue of a Newton: but then, who is?) Coleridge isn't having that, though: any Jesuit investigator into the atomic or corpuscular philosophy’ must be in the sense that Coleridge means it presumptious, because, Coleridge thinks, as a Jesuit he is bound to situate his belief in the authority of the Church rather than in reason and nature.

It's an interesting if rather stretched reading of the nature of arrogance, this, seeing it not only as a matter of pride but of from whence its assertions are taken. It would, surely, be more conventional to ground presumptious arrogance more straightforwardly in egoism and self-love. ‘Pride, simply considered,’ as Samuel Johnson famously remarked ‘is an immoderate degree of self-esteem, or an overvalue set upon a man by himself ... he that overvalues himself will undervalue others; and he that undervalues others will oppress them’ [Johnson Sermons (1688)] And, as you'd expect, Coleridge talks about pride as an underlying arrogant display: arrogance manifests in a ‘proud or petulant omission of proof or argument’ [1.29], something he promises to avoid in his own writing.

But it is more than just ego. STC diagnoses an immoderate self-esteem in the writing of the radical Thomas Paine (‘the illiterate perpetrator of the Age of Reason,’ Coleridge scoffs, ‘must have had his very conscience stupified by the habitual intoxication of presumptuous arrogance, and his common-sense over-clouded by the vapours from his heart’ [1:32]). It is in its deliberate repudiation of Christianity that The Age of Reason embodies its arrogance. Paine's radicalism ‘takes up’ a set of deist-materialist premises that lead it not into mere error but into the arrogant elevation of a hostile and destructive political faux-superiority over the status quo. The notional Jesuit, on the other hand, presumably goes too far the other way, elevating an exploded and superseded past over the necessities of the present.

One, to me, odd aspect of this argument is that Coleridge associates arrogance with both ignorance and plagiarism:

Lastly, it must be admitted as a just imputation of presumption when an individual obtrudes on the public eye, with all the high pretensions of originality, opinions and observations, in regard to which he must plead wilful ignorance in order to be acquitted of dishonest plagiarism. On the same seat must the writer be placed, who in a disquisition on any important subject proves, by falsehoods either of omission or of positive error, that he has neglected to possess himself, not only of the information requisite for this particular subject; but even of those acquirements, and that general knowledge, which could alone authorize him to commence a public instructor. This is an office which cannot be procured gratis. The industry, necessary for the due exercise of its functions, is its purchase-money; and the absence or insufficiency of the same is so far a species of dishonesty, and implies a Presumption in the literal as well as the ordinary sense of the word. He has taken a thing before he had acquired any right or title thereto.

Given the notoriety of Coleridge's own dabblings with plagiary, this rather looks like a self-own.

Coleridge in this essay is not promising he will avoid controversies in The Friend. Quite otherwise: De Controversiis Protestanticorum would be a serviceable alternate title for this whole enterprise, actually. But we'll get onto more specifically religious-themed essays a little later on.

What's going on here, I think, speaks to the heart of Coleridge's ambition to establish the project of The Friend (and, indeed, much of his output as a writer of critical prose) as the articulation of the principles upon which morals, art and life should be founded. In her excellent book-length study of The Friend, Deirdre Coleman explores the ‘unresolved conflicts’ that structure what Coleridge is doing inThe Friend: ‘This striving for absolutes or principles, and its accompanying rhetorical expansiveness, coexists with a more cautious rhetoric, and an intense dislike of abstractions’ [Coleman, Coleridge and The Friend (1809-1810) (Oxford: Clarendon 1988), 17] The more I dig into this work the more convinced I become that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the draw towards tradition and authority on the one hand and change and spiritual refreshment on the other, is one of the main ones here. The Catholic may be prone to socially-sanctioned arrogance, with all the pomp and performative superiority of his or her Church heirarchy around them; but the Protestant needs to watch out that s/he doesn't become puffed-up with presumption, believing him/herself inwardly better than those poor benighted others.