Coleridge's 'Literary Remains', vol. 4

Ib. p. 168.

The Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment to the Son.—John v. 22. Should the Father judge the world he must judge as the maker and sovereign of the world, by the strict rules of righteousness and justice, and then how could any sinner be saved?

(Why? Is mercy incompatible with righteousness? How then can the Son be righteous?)

But he has committed judgment to the Son, as a mediatory king, who judges by the equity and chancery of the Gospel.

This article required exposition incomparably more than the simple doctrine of the Trinity, plain and evident

simplici intuitu

, and rendered obscure only by diverting the mental vision by terms drawn from matter and multitude. In the Trinity all the

Hows

? may and should be answered by

Look

! just as a wise tutor would do in stating the fact of a double or treble motion, as of a ball rolling north ward on the deck of a ship sailing south, while the earth is turning from west to east. And in like manner, that is,

per intuitum intellectualem

, must all the mysteries of faith be contemplated; —they are intelligible

per se

, not discursively and

per analogiam

. For the truths are unique, and may have shadows and types, but no analogies. At this moment I have no intuition, no intellectual diagram, of this article of the commission of all judgment to the Son, and therefore a multitude of plausible objections present themselves, which I cannot solve —nor do I expect to solve them till by faith I see the thing itself.—Is not mercy an attribute of the Deity, as Deity, and not exclusively of the Person of the Son? And is not the authorizing another to judge by equity and mercy the same as judging so ourselves? If the Father can do the former, why not the latter?

Ib. p. 171.

And therefore now it is given him to have life in himself, as the Father hath life in himself, as the original fountain of all life, by whom the Son himself lives: all life is derived from God, either by eternal generation, or procession, or creation; and thus Christ hath life in himself also; to the new creation he is the fountain of life: he quickeneth whom he will.

The truths which hitherto had been metaphysical, then began to be historical. The Eternal was to be manifested in time. Hence Christ came with signs and wonders; that is, the absolute, or the anterior to cause and effect, manifested itself as a

phenomenon

in time, but with the predicates of eternity;—and this is the only possible definition of a miracle

His next argument consists in applying such things to the divinity of our Saviour as belong to his humanity; that he increased in wisdom, &c.:—that he knows not the day of judgment;—which he evidently speaks of himself as man: as all the ancient Fathers confess. In St. Mark it is said, But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels that are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. St. Matthew does not mention the Son: Of that day and hour knoweth no man, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

How much more politic, as well as ingenuous, it had been to have acknowledged the difficulty of this text. So far from its being evident, the evidence would be on the Arian side, were it not that so many express texts determine us to the contrary.

Ib.

Which shows that the Son in St. Matthew is included in the Greek: oudeìs none, or no man, and therefore concerns him only as a man: for the Father includes the whole Trinity, and therefore includes the Son, who seeth whatever his Father doth.

This is an

argumentum in circulo

, and

petitio rei sub lite

. Why is he called the Son in

antithesis

to the Father, if it meant, "no not the Christ, except in his character of the co-eternal Son, included in the Father?" If it "concerned him only as a man," why is he placed after the angels? Why called the

Son

simply, instead of the Son of Man, or the Messiah?

Ib.

Greek: Oudeìs is not Greek: oudeìs anthrôpôn, but, no one: as in John i. 18. No one hath seen God at any time; that is, he is by essence invisible.

This most difficult text I have not seen explained satisfactorily. I have thought that the

Greek: ággeloi

must here be taken in the primary sense of the word, namely, as messengers, or missionary Prophets: Of this day knoweth no one, not the messengers or revealers of God's purposes now in heaven, no, not the Son, the greatest of Prophets,—that is, he in that character promised to declare all that in that character it was given to him to know.

Ib. p. 186.

When St. Paul calls the Father the One God, he expressly opposes it to the many gods of the heathens. For though there be that are called gods, &c. but to us, there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him: where the one God and one Lord and Mediator is opposed to the many gods and many lords or mediators which were worshipped by the heathens.

But surely the

one Lord

is as much distinguished from the

one God

, as both are contradistinguished from the

gods many and lords many

of the heathens. Besides

the Father

is not the term used in that age in distinction from the gods that are no gods; but

Greek: Ho epì pántôn theós

see previous image

Ib. p. 222.

The Word was with God; that is, it was not yet in the world, or not yet made flesh; but with God.—John i. 1. So that to be with God, signifies nothing but not to be in the world.

The Word was with God.

Grotius does say, that this was opposed to the Word's being made flesh, and appearing in the world: but he was far enough from thinking that these words have only a negative sense: * * * for he tells us what the positive sense is, that with God is Greek: parà tô patrí, with the Father, * * and explains it by what Wisdom says, Prov. vii. 30. Then I was by him, &c. which he does not think a prosopopoeia, but spoken of a subsisting person.

But even this is scarcely tenable even as Greek. Had this been St. John's meaning, surely he would have said,

Greek: en theô

not

Greek: pròs tòn theón

see previous image

in the nearest proximity that is not confusion. But it is strange, that Sherlock should not have seen that Grotius had a hankering toward Socinianism, but, like a

shy cock

, and a man of the world, was always ready to unsay what he had said.

Footnote 1:

A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and ever Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation of the Son of God, occasioned by the Brief Notes on the Creed of St Athanasius, and the Brief History of the Unitarians, or Socinians. and containing an answer to both. By Wm. Sherlock, London. 8vo. 1690.

return to footnote mark

Footnote 2:

The third General Council, that at Ephesus in 431, decreed

"that it should not be lawful for any man to publish or compose another Faith or Creed than that which was defined by the Nicene Council."

return

Contents / Index

Notes on Waterland's Vindication of Christ's Divinity¹

In initio

It would be no easy matter to find a tolerably competent individual who more venerates the writings of Waterland than I do, and long have done. But still in how many pages do I not see reason to regret, that the total idea of the 4=3=1,—of the adorable Tetractys, eternally self-manifested in the Triad, Father, Son, and Spirit,—was never in its cloudless unity present to him. Hence both he and Bishop Bull too often treat it as a peculiarity of positive religion, which is to be cleared of all contradiction to reason, and then, thus negatively qualified, to be actually received by an act of the mere will;

sit pro ratione voluntas

. Now, on the other hand, I affirm, that the article of the Trinity is religion, is reason, and its universal

formula

; and that there neither is, nor can be, any religion, any reason, but what is, or is an expansion of the truth of the Trinity; in short, that all other pretended religions, pagan or

pseudo

-Christian (for example, Sabellian, Arian, Socinian), are in themselves Atheism; though God forbid, that I should call or even think the men so denominated Atheists. I affirm a heresy often, but never dare denounce the holder a heretic.

On this ground only can it be made comprehensible, how any honest and commonly intelligent man can withstand the proofs and sound logic of Bull and Waterland, that they failed in the first place to present the idea itself of the great doctrine which they so ably advocated. Take my self, S.T.C. as a humble instance. I was never so befooled as to think that the author of the fourth Gospel, or that St. Paul, ever taught the Priestleyan Psilanthropism, or that Unitarianisn (presumptuously, nay, absurdly so called), was the doctrine of the New Testament generally. But during the sixteen months of my aberration from the Catholic Faith, I presumed that the tenets of the divinity of Christ, the Redemption, and the like, were irrational, and that what was contradictory to reason could not have been revealed by the Supreme Reason. As soon as I discovered that these doctrines were not only consistent with reason, but themselves very reason, I returned at once to the literal interpretation of the Scriptures, and to the Faith.

As to Dr. Samuel Clarke, the fact is, every generation has its one or more over-rated men. Clarke was such in the reign of George I.; Dr. Johnson eminently so in that of George III.; Lord Byron being the star now in the ascendant.

In every religious and moral use of the word, God, taken absolutely, that is, not as a God, or the God, but as God, a relativity, a distinction in kind

ab omni quod non est Deus

, is so essentially implied, that it is a matter of perfect indifference, whether we assert a world without God, or make God the world. The one is as truly Atheism as the other. In fact, for all moral and practical purposes they are the same position differently expressed; for whether I say, God is the world, or the world is God, the inevitable conclusion, the sense and import is, that there is no other God than the world, that is, there is no other meaning to the term God. Whatever you may mean by, or choose to believe of, the world, that and that alone you mean by, and believe of, God. Now I very much question whether in any other sense Atheism, that is, speculative Atheism, is possible. For even in the Lucretian, the coarsest and crudest scheme of the Epicurean doctrine, a hylozism, a potential life, is clearly implied, as also in the celebrated

lene clinamen

becoming actual. Desperadoes articulating breath into a blasphemy of nonsense, to which they themselves attach no connected meaning, and the wickedness of which is alone intelligible, there may be; but a La Place, or a La Grand, would, and with justice, resent and repel the imputation of a belief in chance, or of a denial of law, order, and self-balancing life and power in the world. Their error is, that they make them the proper and underived attributes of the world. It follows then, that Pantheism is equivalent to Atheism, and that there is no other Atheism actually existing, or speculatively conceivable, but Pantheism. Now I hold it demonstrable that a consistent Socinianism, following its own consequences, must come to Pantheism, and in ungodding the Saviour must deify cats and dogs, fleas and frogs. There is, there can be, no

medium

between the Catholic Faith of Trinal Unity, and Atheism disguised in the self-contradicting term, Pantheism;—for every thing God, and no God, are identical positions.

Query I. p. 1.

The Word was God.—John i. 1. I am the Lord, and there is none else; there is no God besides me.—Is. xiv. 5, &c.

In all these texts the

was

, or

, ought to be rendered positively, or objectively, and not as a mere connective:

The Word Is God

, and saith,

I Am the Lord; there is no God besides me

, the Supreme Being,

Deitas objectiva

. The Father saith,

I Am in that I am,—Deitas subjectiva

Ib. p. 2.

Whether all other beings, besides the one Supreme God, be not excluded by the texts of Isaiah (to which many more might be added), and consequently, whether Christ can be God at all, unless He be the same with the Supreme God?

The sum of your answer to this query is, that the texts cited from Isaiah, are spoken of one Person only, the Person of the Father, &c.

O most unhappy mistranslation of

Hypostasis

by Person! The Word is properly the only Person.

Ib. p. 3.

Now, upon your hypothesis, we must add; that even the Son of God himself, however divine he may be thought, is really no God at all in any just and proper sense. He is no more than a nominal God, and stands excluded with the rest. All worship of him, and reliance upon him, will be idolatry, as much as the worship of angels, or men, or of the gods of the heathen would be. God the Father he is God, and he only, and him only shall thou serve. This I take to be a clear consequence from your principles, and unavoidable.

Waterland's argument is absolutely unanswerable by a worshipper of Christ. The modern

ultra

-Socinian cuts the knot.

Query II. p. 43.

And therefore he might as justly bear the style and title of Lord God, God of Abraham, &c. while he acted in that capacity, as he did that of Mediator, Messiah, Son of the Father, &c. after that he condescended to act in another, and to discover his personal relation.

And why, then, did not Dr. Waterland,— why did not his great predecessor in this glorious controversy, Bishop Bull,—contend for a revisal of our established version of the Bible, but especially of the New Testament? Either the unanimous belief and testimony of the first five or six centuries, grounded on the reiterated declarations of John and Paul, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, were erroneous, or at best doubtful;—and then why not wipe them off; why these references to them?—or else they were, as I believe, and both Bull and Waterland believed, the very truth; and then why continue the translation of the Hebrew into English at second-hand through the

medium

of the Septuagint? Have we not adopted the Hebrew word, Jehovah,? Is not the

Greek: Kyrios

, or Lord, of the LXX. a Greek substitute, in countless instances, for the Hebrew Jehovah? Why not then restore the original word, and in the Old Testament religiously render Jehovah by Jehovah, and every text of the New Testament, referring to the Old, by the Hebrew word in the text referred to? Had this been done, Socinianism would have been scarcely possible in England.

Why was not this done?—I will tell you why. Because that great truth, in which are contained all treasures of all possible knowledge, was still opaque even to Bull and Waterland; —because the Idea itself—that

Idea Idearum

, the one substrative truth which is the form, manner, and involvent of all truths,— was never present to either of them in its entireness, unity, and transparency. They most ably vindicated the doctrine of the Trinity, negatively, against the charge of positive irrationality. With equal ability they shewed the contradictions, nay, the absurdities, involved in the rejection of the same by a professed Christian. They demonstrated the utterly un-Scriptural and contra-Scriptural nature of Arianism, and Sabellianism, and Socinianism. But the self-evidence of the great Truth, as a universal of the reason,—as the reason itself—as a light which revealed itself by its own essence as light—this they had not had vouchsafed to them.

Query XV. p. 225-6.

The pretence is, that we equivocate in talking of eternal generation.

All generation is necessarily

Greek: ánarchón ti

without dividuous beginning, and herein contradistinguished from creation.

Ib. p. 226.

True, it is not the same with human generation.

Not the same

eodem modo

, certainly; but it is so essentially the same that the generation of the Son of God is the transcendent, which gives to human generation its right to be so called. It is in the most proper, that is, the fontal, sense of the term, generation.

Ib.

You have not proved that all generation implies beginning; and what is more, cannot.

It would be difficult to disprove the contrary. Generation with a beginning is not generation, but creation. Hence we may see how necessary it is that in all important controversies we should predefine the terms negatively, that is, exclude and preclude all that is not meant by them; and then the positive meaning, that is, what is meant by them, will be the easy result,—the post-definition, which is at once the real definition and impletion, the circumference and the area.

Ib. p. 227-8.

It is a usual thing with many, (moralists may account for it), when they meet with a difficulty which they cannot readily answer, immediately to conclude that the doctrine is false, and to run directly into the opposite persuasion;—not considering that they may meet with much more weighty objections there than before; or that they may have reason sufficient to maintain and believe many things in philosophy and divinity, though they cannot answer every question which may be started, or every difficulty which may be raised against them.

O, if Bull and Waterland had been first philosophers, and then divines, instead of being first, manacled, or say articled clerks of a guild;—if the clear free intuition of the truth had led them to the Article, and not the Article to the defence of it as not having been proved to be false,—how different would have been the result! Now we feel only the inconsistency of Arianism, not the truth of the doctrine attacked. Arianism is confuted, and in such a manner, that I will not reject the Catholic Faith upon the Arian's grounds. It may, I allow, be still true. But that it is true, because the Arians have hitherto failed to prove its falsehood, is no logical conclusion. The Unitarian may have better luck; or if he fail, the Deist.

Query XVI. p. 234.

But God's thoughts are not our thoughts.

That is, as I would interpret the text;—the ideas in and by which God reveals himself to man are not the same with, and are not to be judged by, the conceptions which the human understanding generalizes from the notices of the senses, common to man and to irrational animals, dogs, elephants, beavers, and the like, endowed with the same senses. Therefore I regard this paragraph, p. 223-4, as a specimen of admirable special pleading

ad hominem

in the Court of eristic Logic; but I condemn it as a wilful resignation or temporary self-deposition of the reason. I will not suppose what my reason declares to be no position at all, and therefore an impossible sub-position.

Ib. p. 235.

Let us keep to the terms we began with; lest by the changing of words we make a change of ideas, and alter the very state of the question.

This misuse, or rather this

omnium-gatherum

expansion and consequent extenuation of the word, Idea and Ideas, may be regarded as a calamity inflicted by Mr. Locke on the reigns of William III. Queen Anne, and the first two Georges.

Ib. p. 237.

Sacrifice was one instance of worship required under the Law; and it is said;—He that sacrificeth unto any God, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed (Exod. xxii. 20.) Now suppose any person, considering with himself that only absolute and sovereign sacrifice was appropriated to God by this law, should have gone and sacrificed to other Gods, and have been convicted of it before the judges. The apology he must have made for it, I suppose, must have run thus: "Gentlemen, though I have sacrificed to other Gods, yet I hope you'll observe, that I did it not absolutely: I meant not any absolute or supreme sacrifice (which is all that the Law forbids), but relative and inferior only. I regulated my intentions with all imaginable care, and my esteem with the most critical exactness. I considered the other Gods, whom I sacrificed to, as inferior only and infinitely so; reserving all sovereign sacrifice to the supreme God of Israel." This, or the like apology must, I presume, have brought off the criminal with some applause for his acuteness, if your principles be true. Either you must allow this, or you must be content to say, that not only absolute supreme sacrifice (if there be any sense in that phrase), but all sacrifice was by the Law appropriate to God only, &c. &c.

How was it possible for an Arian to answer this? But it was impossible; and Arianism was extinguished by Waterland, but in order to the increase of Socinianism; and this, I doubt not, Waterland foresaw. He was too wise a man to suppose that the exposure of the folly and falsehood of one form of Infidelism would cure or prevent Infidelity. Enough, that he made it more bare-faced—I might say, bare-breeched; for modern Unitarianism is verily the

sans-culotterie

of religion.

Ib. p. 239.

You imagine that acts of religious worship are to derive their signification and quality from the intention and meaning of the worshippers: whereas the very reverse of it is the truth.

Truly excellent. Let the Church of England praise God for her Saints—a more glorious Kalendar than Rome can show!

Ib. p. 251.

The sum then of the case is this: If the Son could be included as being uncreated, and very God; as Creator, Sustainer, Preserver of all things, and one with the Father; then he might be worshipped upon their (the Ante-Nicene Fathers') principles, but otherwise could not.

Every where in this invaluable writer I have to regret the absence of all distinct idea of the I Am as the proper attribute of the Father; and hence, the ignorance of the proper Jehovaism of the Son; and hence, that while we worship the Son together with the Father, we nevertheless pray to the Father only through the Son.

Query XVII.

And we may never be able perfectly to comprehend the relations of the three persons, ad intra, amongst themselves; the ineffable order and economy of the ever-blessed co-eternal Trinity.

"Comprehend!" No. For how can any spiritual truth be comprehended? Who can comprehend his own will; or his own personeity, that is, his I-ship (

Ichheit

); or his own mind, that is, his person; or his own life? But we can distinctly apprehend them. In strictness, the Idea, God, like all other ideas rightly so called, and as contradistinguished from conception, is not so properly above, as alien from, comprehension. It is like smelling a sound.

Query XVIII. p. 269.

From what hath been observed, it may appear sufficiently that the divine Greek: Lógos was our King and our God long before; that he had the same claim and title to religious worship that the Father himself had—only not so distinctly revealed.

Here I differ

toto orbe

from Waterland, and say with Luther and Zinzendorf, that before the Baptism of John the

Logos

alone had been distinctly revealed, and that first in Christ he declared himself a Son, namely, the co-eternal only-begotten Son, and thus revealed the Father. Indeed the want of the Idea of the 1=3 could alone have prevented Waterland from inferring this from his own query II. and the texts cited by him pp. 28-38. The Father cannot be revealed except in and through the Son, his eternal

exegesis

. The contrary position is an absurdity. The Supreme Will, indeed, the Absolute Good, knoweth himself as the Father: but the act of self-affirmation, the I Am in that I Am, is not a manifestation

This point being settled, I might allow you that, in some sense, distinct worship commenced with the distinct title of Son or Redeemer: that is, our blessed Lord was then first worshipped, or commanded to be worshipped by us, under that distinct title or character; having before had no other title or character peculiar and proper to himself, but only what was common to the Father and him too.

Notes on Waterland's Vindication of Christ's Divinity1

Notes on Waterland's Vindication of Christ's Divinity¹