Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion

Jeffrey Barbeau, Associate Professor of Theology at Wheaton College, has published a number of studies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: entries in reference books, journal articles on his hermeneutics and interactions with German idealism, and a collection of essays on the Opus Maximum, an unfinished synthesis of his ideas which was published in 2002 as the final volume of the Collected Works, published by Princeton University Press. The focus of his latest book is Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, a work that also remained unpublished during Coleridge's lifetime (it first appeared in 1840, edited by his nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge, and is part of Volume 11 of the Princeton series). The Confessions has not received a great deal of critical attention, but Barbeau has devoted an entire monograph to it because of the critical place he believes it occupies in Coleridge's thought. In Barbeau's view, the book ‘establishes Coleridge's religious system and provides a framework for recovering his late writings on Christian doctrine’ (pp. 2, 161). Studying it thus has the potential to revolutionise scholarship, as it can open ‘the whole of Coleridge's literary corpus to fresh and captivating readings’ (p. 169)

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