The Alienation of the Elect in Coleridge's Unitarian Prophecies

Abstract

The contradictory representations of the historical process in Religious Musings and ‘Preternatural Agency’ originate in Coleridge's efforts to reconcile Unitarian optimism with the political violence occurring in revolutionary France. Coleridge's Unitarianism depended on the theology of Joseph Priestley and was therefore necessitarian. The notion of progress inherent in the idea of necessity was gradualist and non-apocalyptic. When Priestley resorted to apocalyptic prophecy to contain the spectacle of French revolutionary violence, he adopted a reading of contemporary history that was fundamentally, if implicitly, opposed to the cumulative betterment envisioned by his own liberal theology. As a result, Priestley's two fast sermons depict his Unitarian ‘elect’ as both agents of enlightenment working to realise God's benevolent plan and, at other moments, as the alienated spectators of a historical process they can neither control nor guide. Similar contradictions emerge in Coleridge's early Unitarian prose. But they emerge even more clearly in his two poetic exercises in Unitarian millenarianism. Looking carefully at the descriptions of the elect in Religious Musings and at Joan's visionary experiences in ‘Preternatural Agency’, this essay argues that Coleridge's efforts to empower his elect end up rhetorically compromised, with both texts finally positioning the elect on the margins of history. The alienation of the elect in Coleridge's Unitarian prophecies provides early evidence, then, of his inability to fit Priestleyan moral theory to his sense of worldly suffering. Behind Coleridge's subsequent turn to nature in the conversation poems of 1797–1798, and his ultimate turn from Unitarianism to Anglican orthodoxy in 1805, lies a dissatisfaction with necessitarian optimism first evident in Religious Musings and ‘Preternatural Agency’.

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