In Coleridge's case his own ardent missionary spirit combined with his straitened circumstances was a constant temptation to dissipate his powers in practical applications instead of in the systematic development of his ideas.
~John MuirheadFootnote 1
What is Christianity at any one period?—The Ideal of the Human Soul at that period.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge Footnote 2
Thought. He who begins with loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his Church (or Sect) better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all three.
~Samuel Taylor ColeridgeFootnote 3
Introduction
Samuel Taylor Coleridge addressed Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion (1825, 1831) to students preparing to be missionaries: “Pastors, Preachers, Missionaries, or Instructors of Youth.”Footnote 4 Coleridge proposed six and then seven supplementary essays, but did not write the seventh essay on missions and missionaries.Footnote 5 From Coleridge's works, Christopher Stokes “reconstituted” Coleridge's unwritten essay, “philosophy of prayer,” as an additional supplementary essay for Aids to Reflection (1825). Stokes notes: “Although he did not make good on the promise, the essays can to some extent be reconstituted from scattered material such as marginalia and notebooks.”Footnote 6
I propose to reconstitute Coleridge's essay on “missions and missionaries” to show that Coleridge articulates a philosophy, not a theology, of missions before Gustav Warneck (1834–1910), whom contemporary missiologists consider their founder. Coleridge addresses the same issues: the rationale for missions and engagement with other religious traditions. Coleridge argues for a philosophical rather than a biblical-theological rationale, favoring dialogue with some religious traditions (Zoroastrianism, for example), and conversion through civilizing, exemplary conduct on the part of missionaries, in other cases (African traditions, for example); he calls for the elimination of superstition wherever it occurs, including in Christianity. He is aware that religions, including Christianity, originate in particular physical and cultural environments. Coleridge considers the problem of inter-cultural engagement between Christianity and other traditions. The recognition that the Indian tradition, for example, shares with Christianity the idea of salvation (“life”), but, metaphorically, “drapes” that idea in the language of the nervous system, not in the metaphorical language of blood (“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you” in John 6:53 KJV) in Christianity, makes dialogue possible. Coleridge does not resolve his question of whether Christianity is the one true religion for the entire world. Religion for Coleridge is fundamentally a philosophy of education that aims at self-realization, expressed by his aphorism, “Be!”Footnote 7 “Christianity,” as Coleridge wrote to his son, is “The Ideal of the Human Soul” in any period, but so are other religions.
Coleridge's missiology is a part of his “system,” which is philosophical in the sense stated by John Muirhead: “For the purposes of this Study Coleridge's relation to Christianity is secondary. What we are concerned with is primarily his general interpretation of the meaning of religion, what beliefs it seemed to him to involve, as to the nature of God and the destiny of the human soul.”Footnote 8 Mary Ann Perkins argues
that he developed on the ground of the Logos principle and in his ‘logosophic’ system, a framework for the reconciliation of thought, faith, and experience which is potentially as generative of critical thought in the areas of psychology, philosophy, and religion as, for example, the systems of F. W. J. Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel.Footnote 9
Coleridge's philosophy of missions is situated in his philosophical system. This essay considers that he is a pioneer for contemporary missiology; a reformer of religion, allowing that superstition is positive when it leads to knowledge and negative when it inhibits knowledge; an educator, emphasizing that missions fosters self-knowledge; and a critic of the superstitious, literalist dictation theory of biblical inspiration because it blocks engagement with other religious traditions in not recognizing the role of metaphor. However, he contradicts his ethical principle (and his missiology) that persons are not things, insisting that African slaves be forcibly reminded of the providence that brought them Christianity. In reconstituting Coleridge's essay on “Missions and Missionaries,” note Kathleen Coburn's point that Coleridge's thought is provisional: “His is the kind of not-rigidly-compartmentalized mind that asks questions that are more important than the answers.”Footnote 10 Coleridge notes: “If any Stranger should light on this or the preceding Numbers of the ‘Fly-catcher,’ let him read them not as asserted truths but as processes of a mind working toward truth”: here is a work in progress.Footnote 11
Missiology
Coleridge's pioneering philosophy of missions has a contemporary ring in Jan A. B. Jongeneel's philosophy of missions: “The philosophy of mission, defined as ‘the logical study of missionary and missiological concepts, arguments and language’, is not at all identical with . . . ‘the theology of mission.’”Footnote 12 Much current missiology is formulated as theology of missions, based on biblical texts, often Matt 28:16–20, commonly called “The Great Commission,” read literally or non-literally.Footnote 13 Andreas J. Köstenberger interprets it literally as a command: “it is a commission to be obeyed: ‘Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.’”Footnote 14 There is no salvation (escape from hell) apart from an explicit faith in Christ: “Theologies of ‘wider hope,’ ‘universal accessible salvation,’ and ‘salvation through general revelation,’ while engaging, are not biblically acceptable.”Footnote 15 Coleridge is unhappy with both prospects: “I can as little talk the language of the universalists with satisfaction to my Judgement as I can the language of the Calvinists without an outraging my feelings.”Footnote 16 David J. Bosch rejects this view: “We cannot deduce a universally valid missionary theory from Matthew's gospel; we are, however, challenged to look in the same direction Matthew does.”Footnote 17 Fundamentalism tends “to turn the Bible into a fetish and apply it mechanically to every context, particularly as regards the ‘Great Commission.’”Footnote 18 Missions is not in “competition with other religions,” and conversion is possible only if it is “conducted in a different manner in the new, emerging paradigm.”Footnote 19 Köstenberger and Bosch, despite the difference in their interpretation of the “Great Commission,” are engaged in formulating a theology, not a philosophy, of missions (Jongeneel), to which Coleridge made the earliest contribution.
The problem with a theology of missions in these contemporary missiologists appears in the acknowledged founder of missiology, Gustav Warneck (1834–1910),Footnote 20 who sees the sciences as a means to missions: “Geographical, ethnological, or linguistic investigation is the end of science but only means towards the end of the mission,” namely, bringing salvation.Footnote 21 Coleridge disagrees, and he uses the metaphor of a building to claim that the sciences are the foundation of Christianity: “knowledge and civilization must, in the first instance, form the foundation, not the superstructure, of Christianity.”Footnote 22 Science is an integral part of, not a means to, Christianity:
Necessity if Christianity, a s world-religion, be of God, that universal Physics but Zoology especially must form a part of the magnificent System of Redemption/& so St Paul indeed asserts— —But if so, then must the Insight into the Faith increase—with the growth & extension of Science & Philosophy. Proof—the Demons of the Gospels—the ascension thro’ the Clouds up to Heaven /Footnote 23
Without science, Christianity regresses into superstition, for which Coleridge proposes his “science of superstition” as its solution.
Superstition
Coleridge is a reformer in exposing enthusiasm, fanaticism, and superstition. Reading widely in travel literature, he commends a representative of the Russian Bible Society for avoiding “Missionary enthusiasm”: “A very interesting little Volume. . . . The perfect freedom from all sectarian bigotry, Missionary enthusiasm and bibliolatry is as exemplary as it is remarkable.”Footnote 24 Christianity and Christian missions need to be purged of superstition (“bibliolatry”), enthusiasm, and fanaticism, for Coleridge is impartial in exposing superstition. He pleads for the reforming of religious traditions through the removal of superstitions. Enthusiasm focuses on the senses, rather than on faith and knowledge:
Nor has the contrary Doctrine, according to which the Baptized are yet, each individually, to be called, converted, and chosen, with all the corollaries from this assumption, the watching for signs and sensible assurances, “the frames,” and “the states,” and “the feelings,” and “the sudden conversions,” the contagious Fever-boils of the (most unfitly, so called) Evangelicals, and Arminian Methodists of the day, been in any age taught or countenanced by any known and accredited Christian Church, or by any body and Succession of learned Divines.Footnote 25
There is a feverish and individual preoccupation with “sensible assurances” (“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine” [Fanny Crosby, 1873]) instead of participation in the community of the church. Coleridge clusters superstition, enthusiasm, and fanaticism (expressed in a medical metaphor) against knowledge: “it is a spiritual Working, of which I speak, and a spiritual Knowlege—not thro’ the medium of Image, the seeking after which is Superstition; nor yet by any Sensation, the Watching for which is Enthusiasm, and the Conceit of its presence Fanatical Distemperature.”Footnote 26 Superstition, however, plays a positive, though limited, role in acquiring knowledge.
In his philosophy of superstition,Footnote 27 Coleridge characterizes superstition as a “mistaking,”Footnote 28 either positive or negative.Footnote 29 In developing visual perception, one corrects the necessary mistake of taking square objects for round, thereby acquiring the concept of distance—knowledge arises from error:
Observe, how graciously Nature instructs her human children. She cannot give us the knowledge derived from sight without occasioning us at first to mistake images of reflection for substances. But the very consequences of the delusion lead inevitably to its detection; and out of the ashes of the error rises a new flower of knowledge. We not only see, but are enabled to discover by what means we see. So too we are under the necessity, in given circumstances, of mistaking a square for a round object: but ere the mistake can have any practical consequences, it is not only removed, but in its removal gives us the symbol of a new fact, that of distance.Footnote 30
He uses a metaphor from botany: cotyledons have a positive role in the early stages of the development of a plant, and then drop off, and are not part of the mature plant, otherwise the early superstition becomes “faithless.”Footnote 31 Superstitions are a product of fancy at an early stage only (“and haply, for a time”) of the formation of knowledge: “these Bodings will set the fancy at work, and haply, for a time, transform the mists of dim and imperfect knowledge into determinate superstitions.”Footnote 32 Genuine religious feeling may arise through the fancy, grasping divine attributes as really existing in the natural world (“forbidden symbols”), and is preferable to skepticism:
For surely the poor Heathen who represents to himself the divine attributes of wisdom, justice, and mercy, under multiplied and forbidden symbols in the powers of Nature or the souls of extraordinary men, practices a superstition which (though at once the cause and effect of blindness and sensuality) is less incompatible with inward piety and true religious feeling, than the creed of that man, who in the spirit of his practice, though not in direct words, loses sight of all these attributes.Footnote 33
Superstition, comments the editor, Anthony John Harding, is “misdirected”:
There is a right use of the Egyptian Superstition, that would convert it into true Religion—No thing that God has created in the Microcosm but what may be united with the some Idea as to become it's Symbol—and the very Beetle and Serpent, with the Hawk and the Ibis may have a place in the Temple & be honored with due worship as so sanctified.Footnote 34
The superstition about the dung beetle may be redirected (“right use”) from idolatry to symbolize an Idea of religion (creation, rebirth). Any mythology, then, can have a “right use” as symbols of religious Ideas, a view that Coleridge would impart to missionaries.
Superstition is negative when it persists into the later stages of cognitive development. Coleridge regards bibliolatry as a superstition, where the Bible is regarded as divinely dictated and therefore inerrant and infallible throughout, thereby blocking a mature view of the Bible as inspired in spirit: he aims “to do away the servile superstition, which makes men Bibliolaters & yet hides from them the proper excellencies, the one continued revelation, of the Bible-documents which they idolize.”Footnote 35
Superstition occurs when one does not formulate an educational plan in accord with developmental psychology. Christianity comes first, and then the Bible:
O the gathering storm of sense, the sense of the exceeding importance of the Position, that the Belief and the Study of the Bible ought to be consequent on the <knowledge and> Belief of Christianity—and not the ordinary means of acquiring that Knowledge, or of grounding that Belief!—much less imposing on made an essential part of Christianity and imposed on the Conscience, as a distinct Article of Faith.Footnote 36
Putting the Bible first is “an instance of Superstition and tyrannidos patriæ.”Footnote 37 Coleridge's view accords with twentieth-century developmental psychology:
To formalize religious education in terms of religious instruction at this stage [ages 5–9] is to force the child to formulate his ideas too much in words which too easily crystallise into inflexible concepts. Activities, on the other hand, help fantasised ideas to be expressed and explored and then discarded for the next stage of thinking to occur.Footnote 38
Crystallization marks the negative sense of superstition, where God's presence is thought of literally as “the popping in, as Hartley [Coleridge's eldest son] says, of the old man with a beard.”Footnote 39 Superstition, an exercise of the fancy, is positive when confined to the early stage of cognitive development; negative and “improgressive” when fancy and the understanding block knowledge, as stated in his title, “On the limitations of a philosophy of the understanding and on its tendency to foster superstition.”Footnote 40 Coleridge's project of purging religious traditions of superstition, bibliolatry or any form of idolatry, is his program of remedial education, the core of his philosophy of missions, intended for the preparation of missionaries.Footnote 41
Educator
Coleridge is an educatorFootnote 42 of missionaries and their instructors. His projected essay on “Missions and Missionaries” will aim at founding missions on education: critical biblical scholarship, developmental psychology, and an understanding of geography and culture as determinants of religion. Coleridge rejects William Carey's call (1792) for converting the heathen: “first, my utter ignorance of God's Purposes with respect of the Heathens—& second, the strong conviction, I have that the Conversion of a single Pro<v>ince of Christendom to true practical Christianity would do more toward the Conversion of Heathendom than an army of Missionaries.”Footnote 43 Let Christianity begin at home! Setting an example in Christendom through education is the right way of conducting missions elsewhere. The exemplary conduct of persons who have a religious vocation as fully realized human beings—souls attuned to their culture—is the only correct method for missions: “To become a Christian the Individual must first be a Man: for Christianity is the Flower & Seal of Chr Humanity.”Footnote 44 Coleridge corrects his statement to “Humanity,” implying that Christianity aims at the realization of one's humanity. The rationale for missions is fostering the potential for being fully human through self-knowledge. Missions aims at educing self-knowledge in any cultural or religious tradition through example—be a better Christian, Muslim, Brahmin, or Heathen: in short, be a better human being, ethically and intellectually: “The postulate of philosophy and at the same time the test of philosophic capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended know thyself! (E coelo descendit, 
. And this at once practically and speculatively.”Footnote 45 Coleridge's missiology is a philosophy of education leading to self-knowledge. The seven supplementary essays and Aids to Reflection constitute Coleridge's philosophy of religion, which includes his philosophy of missions: “as forming with the Aids a compleat System of the Philosophy of Religion.”Footnote 46 That Coleridge is a philosopher of missions is shown by his distinguishing his “compleat System” from, but working for agreement with, the teaching of the Church of England: “I see the necessity of greatly expanding and clearing up the Chapter on Baptism in the Aids to Reflection—/and of proving the substantial accordance of my Scheme with that of our Church.”Footnote 47 Coleridge will want agreement with the Church regarding his missiology.
Coleridge proposes six supplementary essays to amplify topics in Aids to Reflection,Footnote 48 informing his publisher of a seventh: “[I] am inclined to think, that I shall add a 7th—by putting together some letters, I have been composing at the earnest request of Sir Alexander Johnson, the late chief Judge at Ceylon, on the Subject of Missions and Missionaries.”Footnote 49 The title could be “Letters on Missions and Missionaries,” following “a series of Letters on the right and the superstitious use and estimation of the Bible,”Footnote 50 a supplement to AR, posthumously published as Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, a much less trenchant title, where he exposed the superstition of biblical inerrancy.
In his last year Coleridge tells of his life-long concern for education, the “advancement of humanity . . . from Individual to Individual—in short, from the Gospel.”Footnote 51 He had emphasized this point in reviewing Thomas Clarkson's History of the Slave Trade: African superstition could be countered only by education using the forts as centres of civilization for their chiefs and priests:
by a systematic repression of all religious proselytism, except indeed that most effective instrument of conversion, the Christian conduct of our agents; . . . and by sedulous endeavours to enlighten them as men; . . . that knowledge and civilization must, in the first instance, form the foundation, not the superstructure, of Christianity.Footnote 52
Method is required for the advancement of science, especially the science of education: “that most weighty and concerning of all sciences, the science of Education . . . as the nisus formativus of social man, as the appointed protoplast of true humanity.” Footnote 53 Missiology is education for socializing human beings, not proselytizing to secure conversions: to be a Christian, one must first be a human being.
Coleridge expresses concern about the inadequate preparation of missionaries to his friend from Bristol days, the Rev'd Joseph Hughes, a Baptist, a founding secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804).Footnote 54 Hughes was a reliable reader of works in progress, whom Coleridge acknowledges in the preparation of AR: “But the former I must have looked thro’ before I dare publish my Life—well aware of the immense importance of the Advice given me in the inclosed Note from that worthy & enlightened man, the Revd. Joseph Hughes, the Secretary of the Brit. & For. Bible Society.”Footnote 55 Coleridge writes to Hughes regarding candidates and their instructors: “I have long regretted the too general unfitness of the men chosen as missionaries . . . that the instructors of the missionaries had not previously convinced them that civilization and Christian faith ought to move pari passu, mutually aiding each other.”Footnote 56 Coleridge adds the metaphor, foundation (“knowledge and civilization must . . . form the foundation, not the superstructure”) to interdependence (“mutually aiding each other”). Coleridge gives constructive criticism because he deplores unwarranted attacks on missionaries. He concludes by expressing the “strong desire” to “converse with you, and with some sincere Christians interested in and acquainted with the Missionary proceedings, on the subject generally.” Coleridge would have invited Joseph Hughes, Alexander Johnston, Edward Irving, Thomas Clarkson, and young clergy (his son Derwent, nephew Edward, and James Gillman, Jr.), his nephew, William Hart Coleridge, Bishop of Barbados, his friends, Joseph H. Green, and, perhaps, Hyman Hurwitz, to his “Oneversazioni.”Footnote 57
Coleridge corresponds with young clergy to advance their preparation. He writes to his son Derwent: “It does seem to me a very mean & false view of Christianity to suppose that even the Apostles themselves had the degree of clearness & enlargement which a philosophic Believer of the present day may enjoy—. . . . What is Christianity at any one period?—The Ideal of the Human Soul at that period.”Footnote 58
Here is the central theme of education, the realization of human potential: Christianity is not fixed in a single period, but changes with the sciences: it is “the Ideal of the Human Soul at that period.” Coleridge recommends that Derwent reflect philosophically on the early Christian texts in order to understand that Christianity changes over time; that John and Paul are superior to the other apostles; and that Jesus's parousia is to be understood in the light of current science, not in terms of the three-decker universe of the ancient world: “Could Paul with our knowledge of the Solar System, have believed that going up to the Clouds was the way to Heaven!”Footnote 59 The “Ideal of the Human Soul,” at whatever time this question is raised, is not fixed for all time, not even by Paul, who changed his own mind:
The unhappy effect which St Paul's incautious language respecting Christ's Return produced on the Thessalonians, led him to reflect on the subject—and he instantly (II Ep. to the Thess.) qualified the doctrine/ and never afterwards resumed it; but on the contrary in the 15th of Corinthians substitutes the doctrine of immortality in a celestial state & spiritual Body.Footnote 60
It is evident to Coleridge that Paul's thinking changed.
Coleridge proposes a curriculum for Oxford and Cambridge for a critical study of the entire Bible independent of theology: “a compleat Commentary, excluding all dogmatic theology, and purely grammatical, logical, geographical, historical, phyto-& zoo-logical elucidation, might exist for the Candidates for Holy Orders.”Footnote 61 It is based on the principle that Christianity and science must proceed hand in hand. Critical biblical analysis, not dogmatic theology, is needed to prepare missionaries, whose education lies in both the National Church (the clerisy or learned class) and the Christian Church.Footnote 62 Lay members of the Christian Church may also participate in the National Church: “To the Students in Theology, the future Teachers, and to the better educated & riper Members of the Flock, the truths of the Mystery of the Tri-unity often & explicitly—to the flock somewhattimes . . . .”Footnote 63 One may add “Missionaries.” Coleridge presents the relationship between the Christian and National churches in the metaphor of a circle: the Christian Church should be the “inmost concentric circle” of the National Church.Footnote 64
The rationale for missions is Coleridge's philosophy of education, not early Christian texts, as William Carey had argued in his Enquiry (1792):
Our Lord Jesus Christ, a little before his departure, commissioned his apostles to Go, and teach all nations; or, as another evangelist expresses it, Go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. This commission was as extensive as possible, and laid them under obligation to disperse themselves into every country of the habitable globe, and preach to all the inhabitants, without exception, or limitation.Footnote 65
Carey cites Matt 28:19 and Mark 16:15. Coleridge read Carey's journals.Footnote 66 Coleridge's literary-historical criticism, or the Higher Criticism,Footnote 67 of early Christian documents, which he learned from Johann Gottfried Eichhorn at Göttingen in the late 1790s, undercuts Carey's argument: the texts to which Carey had appealed are of doubtful authenticity: “and tho’ the inference from the Baptismal Institution in Matthew is very strong, & indeed decisive as to a third Distinctity in the Godhead, yet there is a heavy doubt among the Learned respecting the apostolical age of this Text” because a Trinitarian formula for baptism must belong to a later period.Footnote 68 The long ending of Mark (16:9–20) is not authentic because, contrary to Eichhorn's conclusion (but not Eichhorn's method) he thinks the short ending, 16:1–8, is authentic: “But says E.—did any Book ever end in a sentence like efobounto gar?—I really cannot feel this—it seems to me a very natural conclusion of an inartificial Narrator.”Footnote 69 Coleridge, therefore, rejects the longer ending of Mark on which Carey's argument rests.
Coleridge challenges the interpretation of the command in Matthew 28. He expresses the point that interpreters do not consider the circumstances of composition: “One great Error of Textual Divines is their inadvertence to the dates, occasion, object, and circumstances, at & under which the words were written or spoken.”Footnote 70 Steve Mason and Tom Robinson say it neatly:
Rather than trying to understand the distinctive situation and context of each real life author, Christians have usually devoted their energies to uncovering the timeless divine revelation in the nt. Their task was, in large measure, to arrange by subject what the nt had somewhat inconveniently filed under author.Footnote 71
Coleridge's reading of “the Great Commission” in Matthew 28 goes against reading it as a charter for missions. Coleridge comments on “teach all nations”:
—and offer my Gospel to all Nations”—i.e. without respect to the Individual's birth & locality, not as our fanatics interpret the words—as if our Lord had been sending his disciples off, like so many Mungo Parks, this to the heart of Africa, another to the undiscovered, but by revelation made known, continent of America.Footnote 72
Coleridge's humour comes into play regarding missions in the ancient world: “Orpheus <& his Disciples> finally founded Schools throughout Greece!—Whether the Missionaries travelled by Mail Coaches or Steam-boats is not ascertained!”Footnote 73
Coleridge regards Carey's rationale for “Missions and Missionaries” as fanatical: the command “signified no more than the rescinding of his former Command which had confined the preaching of the 70 to the children of Israel.”Footnote 74 Jesus had limited his mission to Israel: “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not.”Footnote 75 The early Christian mission was to the Roman world only:
The (Modern) Calvinists I should offend bitterly. . . . Above all, the Missionary Society—how would they recoil from the assertion, that Go ye uninto all nations, &c means nothing more, than/ Preach the Gospel indifferently to <Jews and Gentiles—> all that will hear you, in whatever part of the Roman Empire the Hearer may have been.Footnote 76
Coleridge argues, against Carey, that missions in the first century of Christianity took place within the Roman world only. Coleridge's rationale for missions is extra-biblical and philosophical because he rejects a theologically dogmatic reading of the Bible.
Contemporary missiologists regard evangelism as a part of missiology, the goal of which is conversion. Coleridge rejects “sudden conversion”: “Our Childurch most wisely and scripturally precludes all the mischievous fanaticism of moments of Conversion.”Footnote 77 He makes the same point in AR: “Precautionary Remark.—We meddle not with the dispute respecting conversion, whether, and in what sense, necessary in all Christians” [italic in original].Footnote 78 Conversion is a process, but not instantaneous. Coleridge's rejection of “moments of Conversion” accords with the Church of England's teaching about salvation. Coleridge asks about the formation of religious character:
In short, by what means can or ought a religious Character to be formed? And when should the process commence. I can distinctly remember that I had myself many deep religious impressions & feelings in my childhood: and I am inclined to think that this is common and that the most unreligious period of life usually is from 12 or 14 to 4 or 5 & 20, or even 30.Footnote 79
The acute observation of his own childhood belongs to his developmental psychology of religion: formation over time is usual, not John Newton's “the hour I first believed.” “Formation” is explicitly included in the subtitle of AR as constituting its central theme, the formation of missionaries.
Dialogue
Coleridge examines world religions for the possibility of dialogue, neither conversion nor toleration. Jay Newman expresses a Coleridgean view of missiology—the promotion of civilization (and culture) rather than proselytizing: “Most religious proselytizing tends to promote resentment. Resentment promotes intolerance, which in turn promotes barbarism. But religious dialogue tends to promote understanding. Understanding promotes tolerance, which in turn promotes civilization.”Footnote 80 He concludes: “Tolerating a religious belief, then, does not involve a half-hearted acceptance or endurance of the belief in itself, but rather it involves acceptance or endurance of someone's holding that belief.”Footnote 81 Since Coleridge says that there is no difference between the Zoroastrian system and his own, then he is not tolerating it, but recognizing its truth.
Coleridge rejects Unitarianism, but he refuses to say that Unitarians are not Christians. He tests religious traditions in accordance with his own system of Christianity: Incarnational, Trinitarian, anti-infallibilist, and redemptionist. Each culture has its own learned class. Other religious systems may overlap with his own system, partly (Hinduism) or entirely (Zoroastrianism). A select survey of what Coleridge says about religious traditions indicates why Coleridge's philosophy of missions favors dialogue over evangelizing, and certainly not proselytizing, except by exemplifying the ideal of a fully realized human being in accordance with Coleridge's Christian system, marked by ethics, and a commitment to science and knowledge.
Coleridge ponders whether Christianity is a world religion, for it is rooted in the Roman world: “Beyond the bounds of Trajan's Empire Christianity exists only as a sickly exotic.” He is not sanguine about “the success of our East Indian & China Missions.”Footnote 82 He is the first writer to use “anthropography” in the sense of ethnography, and he uses it with respect to religious traditions: “Anthropography: or a Description of the different Races, and Varieties of Men, the effects of Climate, and Civilization.”Footnote 83 In his anthropography, Coleridge raises the question whether Christianity can be a religion for all people because what an individual is depends on culture and geography (“The individualiy of Man, how wonderful. . . . the Zone, Climate, Soil, Character of Country”): “Beyond this ring-fence he cannot stray. . . . this necessity is himself.”Footnote 84 Coleridge's “this necessity is himself” accords with his developmental psychology. It is unlikely that any single religion could be global.
Coleridge uses “drapery” to show that it is not always possible to eliminate all differences among religions because not all drapery is separable from the substance. Life is understood as blood in Christianity and as the nervous system in Hinduism: “Again, I would suppose the Apostle Thomas essaying to impress the same truth on the mind of a Brahmin who held the shedding of Blood in abhorrence, and placed the seat of Life exclusively in the Nervous System.”Footnote 85 Christianity is rooted in the Hebrew tradition, where “Life is in the blood” is “adherent Drapery, indetachable from the Substance.” This drapery may be detachable: eating Jesus's flesh and drinking his blood in John 6 is followed by, “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”Footnote 86 “Life is in Jesus's flesh and blood” is construed as “Life is in Jesus's “words.” John re-drapes “life” with “words” in place of “flesh and blood,” implying knowing is eating. Elsewhere, Coleridge argues that the different theological theories of atonement (“Sacrifice, Vicarious Sacrifice, Debt, Satisfaction, Atonement &c”), because they are inconsistent, cannot be predicated of God, but they can be a set of metaphors: “without debasing the Idea of the Divine, I was constrained to interpret them per metaphoram.”Footnote 87 Coleridge has dissolved that sterile debate. An anthropography of religion will look for shared ideas, and avoid interpreting literally the draperies characteristic of another tradition even if the draperies are indetachable.
Religion is a system that advances with the developments in a culture, especially the sciences. Coleridge thinks Islam could not be a world religion because of its origin: “But thro’ the whole of the Koran there is evidently an intention of legislating for a particular time, a particular people, a particular climate & country—& therein betrays the hollowness of it's pretensions to be a mundane religion.”Footnote 88 Neither does Islam engage the whole human being, requisite for religion:
The Object of the Wahabies was to reform Islamism into a pure Unitarianism, but with a visible Centraler of Unity in the Leader of the Reformers/They became the Idoliclastæ of Islamism—but this too has failed—as every theological scheme must do which appeals only to some one or more of the Qualities & Faculties of Man.—The infallible Test of the Gospel Faith is that it appeals to all the Constituents of our present Humanity, & brings them all to an equilibrium—to a Beauty of Holiness.— The evolution of this idea in all the detail, commencing with an enumeration of our Powers—The Will, the I AM, the Reason, the Imagination, the Understanding, the Fancy, the Sense, the Affections, the Passions, the Impetites, the Appetites, the Life—is indeed a Desideratum.Footnote 89
Fancy is crucial in the early stages of the developmental psychology of education (superstition). Christianity is, as he wrote to Derwent, the “Ideal of the Human Soul”—a fully realized human being—in any given epoch. Islam, however, is not hollower, surely, than Christianity, “the sickly exotic.” That Islam has become a world religion would surprise Coleridge: “Islam is a world religion that rivals, if it does not surpass, Christianity in its ability to spread to highly diverse cultures and regions.”Footnote 90
Coleridge sees dialogue with, rather than proselytism directed to, some religious traditions; namely, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, and, to a lesser degree, the Indian tradition. Missionary activity (conversion), however, was appropriate for African traditions. He saw an affinity between his own philosophical system and the Zoroastrian Zend-Avesta: “I can really find no essential difference between my philosophy & the Zend Avesta the act of the material creation Chaos in both is an Apostasy—the potentiating creation the Spirit & the Word—the final causa redemptionis; & reascent to the Plenitude.”Footnote 91 Coleridge finds common ground with regard to key elements: Chaos, Spirit, Word, redemption, and the final restoration of all things.Footnote 92 Christian missions would certainly not be a matter of proselytizing; rather, dialogue—Zoroastrians would be invited to The Grove, Highgate for the meeting to discuss “missions and missionaries.”
Coleridge is inclusive and ecumenical with regard to salvation: “I know of no Church, Jewish, Turkish or Brahman, in which and in spite of which a man may not possibly be saved. Who dares limit the Spirit of God?”Footnote 93 These churches are confessional institutions that are allied to national churches, a learned class. The Spirit of God may operate independently of missionary activity, but only if a people have sufficient civilization and culture to have institutionalized learning.
That Coleridge criticizes religions for superstition and childishness, the Indian tradition, for example, means that Coleridge advocates reform, not rejection, because he attacks the superstition of bibliolatry in Christianity. He cites two passages from The Bhagavad-Gita. The first passage presents Krishna as a devourer: “Having beholden thy dreadful teeth, and gazed on thy countenance, emblem of Time's last fire.”Footnote 94 Coleridge regards this portrayal as employing “ridiculous forms” that “distract” from the sages’ articulation of “unity.”Footnote 95 Coleridge misconstrues “teeth,” missing “emblem of Time,” which implies the metaphor, “Time is a destroyer.”
Owen Barfield argues Coleridge should have been able to engage inter-culturally with the Brahmanical system:
However it may be, he seems in this instance to have ignored the wise maxim that, if you wish to extricate a man from error, you must first do justice to his truth. Otherwise he could hardly have failed to acknowledge much in the tradition of the Gita which he himself not only approved but actively maintained: the identity in difference of subject and object, for instance, the conception of the ultimate reality as I AM and of the material world as the outward appearance of consciousness.Footnote 96
Coleridge makes Barfield's point:
If an opinion attributed to an ancient philosopher, or even to a Contemporary of another Country is not at the first hearing understood and admitted by them—out flies at once the scorn—What Nonsense! how absurd! &c—Surely, the palpable absurdity, the glaring Nonsense of the words interpreted as they had interpreted them, ought to have supplied a strong presumption that such was not the Sense in which the Asserter of the Position meant them to be understood.Footnote 97
Coleridge rejects a literalizing interpretation of Pythagoras, and he should have been able, as Barfield argues, to reconsider his literalizing reading of the Bhagavad-Gita, as he does the Bible: “If there be one sure Conclusion respecting the Bible, it is this—that it not only uniformly speaks the language of the Senses, but adopts the inferences which the Childhood of the Race drew from the appearances presented by the Senses. The Bible must be interpreted by it's known objects and Ends.” Footnote 98 That the Israelite biblical texts belong to the “Childhood of the Race” is no reason to reject them, but is an indication that one must interpret them according to “the moral and spiritual Education of the Human Race”—that is, in terms of Coleridge's philosophy of early education. Coleridge does interpret another passage from the Bhagavad-Gita in terms of “unity” (Barfield's point) and his own system of education and missions: “I am the String of the Pearls. I, the God-man, am Center and Circle too! ‘Hast thou seen me, Philip? Thou hast seen the Father?’”Footnote 99
The editors indicate that “I, the God-man, am Center and Circle too!” is Coleridge's own text to which he adds his citation from John 14:9. That Coleridge replaces one part of the passage from Bhagavad-Gita with his own text, speaking of Jesus as the Word incarnate, implies that he sees an affinity between Krishna and Jesus in relation to the ideas of incarnation (Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu) and unity, which Owen Barfield thought Coleridge should have seen for himself. Coleridge recognizes the Indian sages as members of the National Church of Indian civilization and culture.
Four years later, in 1825, Coleridge expresses skepticism: “In short, my researches with the light of English Common Sense have rendered me a sturdy Anti-egyptian & a very skeptical Hindostanist. S.T.C.”Footnote 100 He is sceptical, too, about the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke (below).
Three years on, in 1828, Coleridge has a positive view of the Indian system when it presents an analogue of the Christian doctrine of the trinity:
According to the Brahmin Theology, the Godhead is manifested in Nature in the trinity of crea Production, Destruction and Reproduction: and there is in this a Hint, of which both a philosophic and a Christian use may be made. Observe, its place corresponds to that of the Logos 
in the Christian Triad.Footnote 101
The correspondence—and Coleridge writes “corresponds”—between Logos and Vishnu (or his avatar Krishna) supports a positive reading of the passage from the Bhagavad-Gita where Coleridge inserts “God-Man.” Coleridge has the affinity that Barfield desires. Coleridge here engages in inter-cultural dialogue with the Hindu National Church from the perspective of his Christian philosophical, trinitarian system. Coleridge, in 1822, had totally rejected the Hindu system: “so that the system so strangely eulogized and even assimilated to the mysteries of the christian faith is essentially and in fact Atheism in the form of Polytheism.”Footnote 102 Six years later, Coleridge holds a positive view.Footnote 103 Criticism in other respects continued: “In Brahmanism & Buddaism I find grotesque fancy, gigantic littlenesses but no imagination.”Footnote 104
Coleridge's trinitarian theology displays a positive attitude towards neo-Platonism: “It is well for me that my Faith in the Trinity is already well grounded by the Scriptures, by Bishop Bull, and the best parts of Plotinus.”Footnote 105 A common element would be “the One,” the “Prothesis” of his Trinitarian Pentad.Footnote 106 With Zoroastrianism he has no quarrel at all. Coleridge recognizes that each of these traditions had a “National Church.” Coleridge's philosophy of missions embraces dialogue with like-minded traditions.
Judaism holds a special place in Coleridge's philosophical system. In 1823 Coleridge objects to missions for the conversion of Jews: “The modern Conversions are in the face of God's Commands.”Footnote 107 He expresses his opposition to the requirement for conversion that Jews renounce the Abrahamic covenant:
Will my great Objections to the mode in which the conversion of the Jews has been attempted hitherto, and to the harsh conditions required of all every Jew in order to his being received into Christian Name—no less than that of disowning Abraham & the covenant of God with his Race before the Law, acquit me before Christ for not my refraining from all endeavor to bring H. H. to the knowlege of the truth? I profess myself his friend. Am I acting like one?Footnote 108
Coleridge is loath to proselytize his friend and colleague, Hyman Hurwitz, because he rejects the Church of England's requirement that Jews renounce their Covenant upon conversion. Converted Jews, Coleridge thinks, should form their own Church: “if a thousand Jewish Families were converted, it would be their duty to form themselves into a Jewish Church, distinct from, tho’ federally and with fraternal affection allied with, the Gentile Churches.”Footnote 109 Coleridge wishes to reform Christianity by eliminating supersessionism in favor of federation, and replacing the constrictive view of the Bible, on which hostility to other religious traditions was based, with a critical and spiritual reading.
Bibliolatry
In his time, the Bible was regarded as dictated by God, infallible, and inerrant, and self-interpreting, which changed “the pen-menan into a Man-pen!”Footnote 110:
I have <come> fresh from a have frequently attended the <great> meetings of the <B. & F.> Bible Society, where I <have> heard Speakers of every denomination. . . . What is more, their principal arguments are grounded on thise position, that the Bible did not consist of human composition throughout was dictated by Omniscience, and therefore in all its parts infallibly true & obligatory. . . . On this very account all notes and comments are declared superfluous, nay, presumptuous.Footnote 111
This view of inspiration could not recognize problems, e.g., the textually suspect and inconsistent birth narratives of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, absent from Mark and John, and of the same genre as the birth narratives of folk heroes. The problem is pressing because “born of the Virgin Mary” is “The only Article of the Universal Church endangered by the higher Critique”Footnote 112:
My <inward> Creed, as a Christian, remains without substraction or addition as it stands in the Aids to Reflection—189–191.—My outward Creed is the Apostles’ as expanded in the Nicene,—save only with regard to the former, I find a difficulty in receiving as an essential of Faith in the words “born of the Virgin Mary . . . tho’ I receive it as a point of assent on the authority of the Church.Footnote 113
As a member of the National Church he may consider higher critical issues without regard to dogmatic theological considerations, his requirement for training missionaries.
Coleridge considers why there is no birth narrative in John. He suggests that John gave a different explanation of Jesus’ origin to oppose the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke: “Is it not possible, that the last & greatest Evangelist may have implicitly & covertly opposed this rumour to in giving another and more spiritual explication of the Title—The Son of the living God.”Footnote 114 John states that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,”Footnote 115 without giving any narrative explanation of it, as Luke does, when the angel Gabriel answers Mary's question, “How shall this be . . .?,” saying, “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee.”Footnote 116 Coleridge's view is supported by John's “the mother of Jesus” instead of a proper name.Footnote 117 Coleridge applies “the diagnostic Criterion of floating Tradition” (tradition, as distinct from “regularly authenticated History”) to explain the “strange difference of the same ground-work in the 1st & 3rd Gospels.”Footnote 118 Christianity is saddled with these birth narratives because “born of the Virgin Mary” is in the creeds that the clergy, members of the Christian Church, are obliged to read from the Prayer Book, not dispute from the pulpit, but may question in their book rooms as members of the National Church. Critical biblical scholarship is incompatible with the British and Foreign Bible Society's view that the Bible was inerrant and self-interpreting.Footnote 119 Note the link between “bibliolatry” and “superstition” in the view that the Bible does not need interpretation:
What? A Book in two dead languages not need a translation to those that understand neither? And must not such a Translation either be or require an interpretation, according as it is equivalent or literal? Oh! this strange Bibliolatry of the Protestants is a superstition scarcely less depressive of Gospel Liberty, scarcely less suffocative of Gospel Light and the Life of Faith, than the Hagiolatry and Papoduly of the Romanists.Footnote 120
Protestant Christianity is no less superstitious than the Roman Catholic worship of saints and the Pope. Translations are already interpretations, or require interpretation: the position of the British and Foreign Bible Society, a para-missionary society, is untenable.
Coleridge's use of a Bible published by the BFBS does not show that he approved of the BFBS:
Would it, think you, justify the expence, to purchase from the Bible Society (the Church Bible Society), a Quarto Bible with the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testament—in sheets: and to have them half-bound in three or four Volumes interleaved? . . . would you make some enquiry, as to what the expence would be, Copy, interleaving and binding?Footnote 121
Coleridge asks Joseph Green, his friend and literary executor, to obtain a Bible from the “Church Bible Society,” with the Apocrypha, which the BFBS Bibles did not then include. Coleridge asks for the Bible “in sheets”: the binding would be done elsewhere. The BFBS would not sell their Bibles in unbound sheets: Leslie Howsam explains: “But the bookbinding operation was also the Committee's way of claiming the book as their own, assuring that BFBS-stamped covers would contain only BFBS approved text . . . to ensure the circulation of ‘the Bible without note or comment.’”Footnote 122 Coleridge's desire dovetails with his university curriculum for a critical, non-dogmatic study of the Bible for candidates for Holy Orders, and missionaries.
Race and Slavery
Two areas, in particular, where Coleridge's philosophy of missions is unsatisfactory, are attributable to his speculations about race: whether Christianity is the one and only religion, and the rights of African slaves. He is divided in his two views of Christianity: that Christianity is the superior and only religion for the world, embedded in its largely English cultural matrix, to be exported to the world. This view is supported by his speculations on race in 1828.Footnote 123 His “modification of Blumenbach's Scheme” makes Noah's three sons the founders of the races. Genesis 6–9 is founded “on history, at all events on an ancient and justly venerated tradition.”Footnote 124 Coleridge has to accept the Flood story as literal because the race material is embedded in it. Where did the five-mile depth of water go? “There might have been a ring like that of Saturn, composed of . . . aqueous Vapor round our planet: and the diluvial Waters have been absorbed by the Atmosphere.”Footnote 125 Myth in 1824 becomes fact by1829. Race speculations trump Coleridge's “anthropography”: “it does escapes the error of attributing to the Climate and the accidents of Circumstance a larger share of influence than either sound Philosophy or the Facts themselves will admit.”Footnote 126 In July 1824 Coleridge had warned against “the Pressing of Moses & the Bible in the Service of Geological Theory,” to which add Race Theory. Since the Bible “speaks the language of the Senses” and adopts the inferences made by “the Childhood of the Race,” its purpose is “the moral and spiritual Education of the Human Race.—These ends served, the truths of Science follow of their own accord.”Footnote 127 Coleridge had said that science was the foundation, not the superstructure, of Christianity.Footnote 128 In his speculations on race, Coleridge, reading Genesis uncritically, falls into superstition.
His second view is that Christianity, though “a sickly exotic,” is engaged in dialogue with traditions outside the Roman world and is not, therefore, the one and only religion for the world, for it does not replace Zoroastrianism or supercede Judaism. Missiology in the twenty-first century displays this division, from a proselytizing missiology (Terry), to an interreligious theology, as exemplified by Perry Schmidt-Leukel:
Moreover, what Jews develop theologically in dialogue with Buddhists and what Christians learn from their dialogue with Buddhists will also have its impact on the relation between Jews and Christian or between Jews and Christian and Muslims as far as Muslims too develop their theological understanding in Buddhist-Muslim dialogue.Footnote 129
No one tradition is supreme. Coleridge's friendship with Hyman Hurwitz would incline him to a dialogical missiology with Judaism. Coleridge, in advocating dialogue, would limit proselytizing to uncultivated and uncultured groups, and then only by exemplifying fully realized human beings.
Coleridge contradicts his philosophy of missiology with regard to African slaves, upbraiding Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society:
You are always talking of the rights of the Negros;—as a rhetorical mode of stimulating the people of England here, I don't object, but I utterly condemn your frantic practice of declaiming about their Rights to the Blacks. They ought to be forcibly reminded of the state in which their brethren in Africa still are, and taught to be thankful for the Providence which has placed them within means of grace. I know no right except such as flows from righteousness, and as every Christian believes his righteousness to be imputed, so his right must be an imputed right. It must flow out of a Duty, and it is under that name that the process of Humanization ought to begin and be conducted throughout.Footnote 130
A providential means of grace, but only for the Africans who survived the Middle Passage, and a dogma of “right” requiring “humanization” of persons who had been dehumanized as things.Footnote 131 The violation of that principle explains the way in which these Africans were “placed within the means of grace.” He contradicts his position taken in his review of Clarkson that an exemplary Christian life is the only allowable form of proselytizing.
Conclusion
Coleridge is a pioneering missiologist: his projected essay would have presented a philosophical missiology informed by critical biblical scholarship, developmental educational psychology, and ethnography, and reform Christianity by removing bigotry, missionary enthusiasm, and superstition, in favor of an exploratory philosophy of missions in which the rationale of missions is not proselytism but a philosophy of education that embraces science and ethics in the on-going project of self-knowledge—“Be!” The Gospel is the basis for educing self-knowledge, the realization of the ideal of humanity in any age. The Bible is indispensable: Coleridge uses familiar metaphors, the mirror, and a plant: “The Bible is that which it is capable of reflecting—It is the Mirror of Faith—and that it is capable of reflecting the faith in all it's growths and phases, age after age, of all the Faithful, constitutes it's divinity, demonstrates it's divine origin.”Footnote 132 The Bible is a constant in mirroring the continual contextual changes (“growths and phases”) in Christianity. In response to Jongeneel's, “Is Missiology an Academic Discipline?,” Aids to Reflection and the supplementary projected “Letters on Missions and Missionaries” constitute Coleridge's philosophy of missions.
