Error in Coleridge

To understand Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of error, it is only fitting to begin with his concept of truth. In a sense, this entire essay is devoted to that beginning, for it will be concerned throughout more with Coleridgean truth than error. Such an approach seems more than fitting, however. It is only natural, of course, to assume that truth and error should always go hand in hand, that each should be defined with the other in clear view. But in making this beginning, I aim to reflect more than certain classical assumptions about the primacy of goodness, truth, and beauty; I aim to underscore instead Coleridge’s reverence for the rarity, and awesomeness, of truth. If Coleridge is right, we live in a world composed largely of error. “Errors beget opposite Errors,” he believed, “for it is our imperfect Nature to run into extremes.”^[1] The greatest truth that a man can come to know, therefore, is how extraordinary truth really is, and how commonplace is error.

We would do well to focus for a moment on this claim, because it was in light of the distinction between the com­monplace and the unusual, the familiar and strange, that Coleridge’s own deeply Romantic sense of truth first began to grow. Error is commonplace, he believed, but there is more to the maxim than may first meet the eye. The copula is, in this instance, sheer equality. Error is commonplace, but the commonplace is also error. A thing that is so familiar as to be common or customary is a thing that has lost its truth. Coleridge made this discovery, he tells us in the Biographia Literaria, when he first began to recognize the genius of Wordsworth’s poetry, when he first sensed there “the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed.”^[2] Truth, he discovered, cannot be truth apart from a total re-orientation of a man’s perception, a re-orientation or transformation in which a certain freshness, even strangeness, is restored to the world around him. Coleridge had come to realize that

truths of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of truth, and lie bed-ridden, in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.^[3]

To restore to truth its life and efficiency and to overcome its confusion with error, he learned, is the work of nothing less than true genius:

In philosophy equally, as in poetry, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues the stalest and most admitted truths from the impo­tence caused by the very circumstance of their uni­versal admission.^[4]

But how, more precisely, does the Romantic genius work this magic? What was it that the genius of a Words­ worth had accomplished and that Coleridge was hoping he, too, might accomplish in their work together on the Lyrical Ballads? What was the transformation by which the error of habit could be exchanged for the newness of truth? Again, the Biographia Literaria is important, for it is in many ways a record of Coleridge’s attempts to answer these very questions: “This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth’s writings is more or less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt, than I sought to understand.”^[5] As those who are familiar with the Biographia know well, his search for understanding led him, and leads his readers, through a labyrinth of words and systems: through Plato and Plotinus and much of the Christian Pla­tonic tradition; through Jakob Boehme and a host of other theosophists, mystics, and alchemists; and through Kant and post-Kantian German transcendentalism. In view of this complexity, it would be an obvious mistake to take lightly Coleridge’s sense of truth or to suggest that our questions about the means of the transformation which makes for truth have any easy answer.

Nevertheless, as long as the complexity is kept in mind, we are justified, I believe, in proposing for consideration here a single possible solution. For there does remain, in spite of the labyrinth, a clear, if not an easy, answer—a clear, if an intricate and complex, principle of explanation for Coleridgean truth and freshness.

We can begin to appreciate that principle by recalling Coleridge’s earlier contention that “Errors beget opposite Errors.” Again, it is perhaps little wonder that truth and error should always be requiring the explanatory presence of the other. “It is our imperfect Nature,” Coleridge observed above, “to run into extremes.” And it is this matter of extremity, I suggest, which is just the principle we are looking for, the very key to the relationship between truth and error in Coleridge. If, in our imperfect Nature, in the begetting of Errors, the mind is always at extremes, then it would seem to follow that, in truth, there must always be some reconciliation, some uniting or overcoming of these extremes. We are led to expect, in other words, from Coleridge’s sense of error, that his concept of truth should be a matter, not of extremities and divisiveness, but of unity.

This is precisely what we do find. It has been seen that Coleridgean truth and the transformative work of genius always go hand in hand. But what, again, of genius? Once more, we are led to ask, how is this transformation to be accomplished? Coleridge’s brief and gnomic answer to our questions—this time in The Friend, where, again, he found himself considering the effects of poetry and philosophy on perception—confirms our expectations. In the work of true genius, through transformation, as truth is rescued from error, he tells his reader:

Extremes meet—a proverb, by the bye, to collect and explain all the instances and exemplifications of which, would constitute and exhaust all philosophy.^[6]

Though there will be no attempt in the following to do what Coleridge did not, “to collect and explain all the instances and exemplifications” of the unity of extremes, it does seem appropriate that we should now focus our investigation into error by attempting to clarify this proverb’s basic meaning, the meaning of the meeting of extremes, and the meaning of the extremes that meet. For though “it is our imperfect Nature to run into extremes,” “this trite because ever-re­curring Truth,” Coleridge is quick to add, is not the whole—Alas!— those are endangered who have avoided the Extremes.”^[7]

It is possible to begin this work of clarification by recalling the root-meaning of the Greek word for error, hamartia, the word which has afforded the present volume its basic theme. Hamartia, we are told, in its most literal signi­fication, involves “the missing of a mark or target.” Now it would seem that there are at least two ways of conceiving what it means to miss a mark, to commit a hamartia or make an error. And there are, accordingly, at least two ways of conceiving what it means to hit a mark. It is important that the two ways be clearly distinguished, for it is only the second of the two conceptions that Coleridge judges adequate to the true nature of error, and the second conception can be understood only by contrast with the first. In describing both conceptions, it will be useful to extend the metaphor provided by hamartia and to employ the picture of an archer, his arrow, and his target.

It may be said, on the one hand, that the hitting of a mark or target involves the directing of the arrow by the target through the archer. Perhaps it seems odd to speak of the target as doing the directing, for the target is certainly not a conscious agent; the archer is the only such agent; Nevertheless, the archer’s act of shooting his arrow toward the target is always the consequence of his previous act of response, a response to the target’s presentation of itself as a possible target. In taking aim, the archer readies himself for shooting, but he can do so only by submitting his eye, his concentration, and his muscles to the attraction of the mark itself. The target calls for his unwavering attention, and it is through that attention, then, if it is sufficiently keen, that the arrow may be truly shot.

In employing this analogy, and in stressing the responsive character of the archer’s act of shooting, I am reminded of Coleridge’s comparison of thinking to the act of leaping:

In every voluntary movement we first counteract gra­vitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It must exist, that there may be a something to be counter­ acted, and which, by its reaction, may aid the force that is exerted to resist it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to light on the spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous.^[8]

If the reader detects a flavor of Zen or the Tao in this quo­tation, or in my illustration of the archer, it is no accident. Coleridge’s descriptions of nature, particularly his descrip­tions of the activities of animals, often convey a certain harmony or balance that one would not have expected to find in a western, even Romantic, author. Consider, for example, what follows the previous quotation in the Biographia:

Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking.^[9]

But with leaping and water-insects and the act of thinking, we are getting ahead of ourselves and anticipating the second conception of error. We need one further word about the first.

According to the first conception, the missing of a mark is the result of the mark’s having exerted too little force upon the archer. He was, we say, “distracted.” His atten­tion, in other words, was not attracted or directed solely by the target but was pulled aside toward other things, from the rabbit bounding in front of the target to the itch on the back of the archer’s head. Thus, a hamartia consists in the directing of an arrow through the agency of an archer, but not exclusively by the proper target. If the proper target is represented by the letter A and the direction of the erring shot by the letter B, error may be pictured according to the diagram in Figure 1 below. The path to B described by the solid arrow involves a hamartia insofar as this path is a deviation from the path to A described by the dotted arrow.

But there is a second way of understanding error. Again, it is helpful to think of the archer, his arrow, and his target. But two additional elements must also be considered. For in this second conception, the hitting of the mark or target involves the directing of an arrow through the agency of the archer, not directly by the target itself, but by two other possible targets each of which is equally not the actual target. Once more, it should not be assumed that these possible targets are somehow conscious of their work of direction. As before, we are simply being asked to remember that taking aim means responding to attraction and spurning distraction. The second understanding of hitting the mark is quite different from the first, however, since it conceives the attraction to be a double attraction, an attraction of two equals. It should be repeated: the archer’s success in hitting the target with his arrow depends upon his response to two possible targets each of which is equally not the actual target. The adverb “equally” is most important. The archer’s success is not determined by the target’s single attraction, as was thought according to the first conception. And yet, success is determined with no less precision. Not any two possible marks, but only those two that differ from the actual target in the same measure, are the cause of an accurate shot.

Hence, to miss the mark is the result of the archer’s failure to respond to the possible targets equally. This way of conceiving what it means to err looks thus at every error as a lack of balance. To this way of thinking, no error is ever completely in error. For erring comes always from one’s being overly attracted by that which ought to have exercised, not no attraction at all, but simply less attraction, a more moderate attraction. Erring consists in being half right. Once again, if the target is represented by the letter A and the direction of the erring shot by the letter B, error may be pictured according to the diagram in Figure 2 below. The path to B described by the solid arrow involves a hamartia insofar as this path is a deviation from the equally possible path to C described by the dotted arrow.

It might be useful here to distinguish between recognition and cause. The shot through point B is recognized to be an error, and is called an error—as it was also according to the first conception—because it is not through A. But the cause of its being an error, the way it becomes an error, is not—as it was for the first conception—by virtue of its deviation from A, but by virtue of its deviation from C. The archer ought to have been attracted equally by C and B. But, instead, the proper measure of attraction toward C has been wholly appropriated by B.

As was said before, it is only this second way of con­ceiving what it means to miss a mark that Coleridge judges adequate to the true meaning of error. Before proceeding to explain and illustrate his judgment, however, I must ask that we now set the analogy of the archer aside. It has served its purpose, and carrying it further forward in the discussion would serve only to negate the progress we may have made. It is important that the idea of double attraction be retained, even as the archer, the arrow, and the target are now abandoned. For Coleridge’s conception of truth, and thus of error, is a conception based above all on his unrelenting opposition to the very picture-thinking so far employed. All truth, he believed, is spiritual. But all depiction is material. Truth, therefore, can never be adequately explained in diagrams, pictures, or models drawn from the world of objects. It is what he called the “despotism of the eye,”^[10] man’s slavery to the data of sense and thus to matter, that is the source of most error:

In a world, the opinions of which are drawn from outside shows, many things may be paradoxical, (that is, contrary to the common notion) and nevertheless true: nay, because they are true. How should it be otherwise, as long as the imagination of the worldling is wholly occupied by surfaces?^[11]

Coleridge’s fidelity to spirit and distrust of matter must be kept in mind throughout this discussion. For there is a great temptation to describe his ideas concerning error by means of analogies drawn from the worlds of physics and mathematics, worlds in which Coleridge was always ill at ease. The truth about error, he believed, can be discovered only at a level of thinking that transcends the mutual exclusions of impenetrable material objects and only, therefore, where a balance is struck beyond quantity. It is tempting, for example, to suppose, by analogy, that when two is added to two, the error called “five” is produced, not because five is not four, as we would normally think, but because five is insufficiently three. Such an example, how­ ever, reduces the second conception of error to absurdity, for it applies the conception in a way that Coleridge never intended. Coleridge was, in fact, little concerned in his writings with such things as arithmetical mistakes, with what might be called material errors or errors of fact. To miss the mark in the literal sense of shooting one’s arrow past a target, to mistake an alligator for a log, to think that it is ten o’clock when it is only seven, to add numbers incor­rectly: all such forms of hamartia fall outside Coleridge’s special area of interest. He is concerned, instead—almost exclusively—with what might be called spiritual errors or, more precisely, with the errors that result when spiritual truths are made to conform to a kind of thinking that is applicable only to matter: the errors that result, even more precisely, when the first conception of what it means to hit a mark is mistakenly applied to a mark that may be hit only in a way consistent with the second conception. To understand Coleridge’s meaning of error, one must therefore understand what he means by truths of spirit.

It should be said, first, that truths of spirit always involve unity. We anticipated this point earlier, of course, when speaking of the relationship between truth and the meeting of extremes. Like every Romantic of his age, Coleridge aimed in all of his thinking and writing, whether in verse or prose, toward unity, wholeness, participation. Like the other Romantics, he was able to rest content only with a vision of the world in which everything was intrinsically related, everything an expression of a single principle, everything both affirmed and enhanced by its inclusion in ever deeper, more comprehensive, yet more subtle wholes. The seeming divisions of subject and object, value and fact, the inner man and the outer world, must be overcome in a single truth that embraces all. M. H. Abrams has observed that “Romantic philosophy is thus primarily a metaphysics of integration, of which the key principle is that of the ‘recon­ciliation,’ or synthesis, of whatever is divided, opposed, and conflicting.”^[12] With their love of nature, life, organism, the Romantics were much alike in seeking to express the sense of a whole whose power could be discerned only in its primacy to parts. And Coleridge was enough more than like in this search to be considered their paradigm.

But it must be said, secondly, that Coleridgean truths of spirit involve a very special kind of unity. Coleridge seems to have realized that the call for oneness is among the easiest and most fatuous of calls a man can make. And thus, while it is necessary to understanding Coleridge, the idea of unity, alone and unqualified, is insufficient, even as a starting-point. Not just any unity is adequate for truth.

On the one hand, no single thing alone makes for true unity. Though it have an integrity of its own, an internal unity, such a thing falls short of the unity Coleridge is seeking, for no single thing is able to embrace the whole. Nor, on the other hand, is true unity the product or result of taking things, even all things, together. Taking things together is an act that depends upon the prior existence of the things being taken together. Every association, collection, aggregation, synthesis of things—even a synthesis of everything—is infected by the original separateness of the things united. Hence, no taking of things together can pro­ duce a unity more intimate than that allowed by the surfaces and boundaries that permitted the things to be recognized as distinguishable things in the first place. To appreciate the meaning of Coleridgean unity requires accompanying him to a point deeper and far more inward than the meeting of sur­faces, however immediate the contact or great the pressure between those surfaces might be. For no matter how intimately united surfaces become, even if fused together by torch and metal, they can never be as unified as spirit demands. The apprehension of spiritual truth can occur only when boundaries and surfaces lose their resisting power.

We have been seeing only what Coleridge’s unity is not. It is time to begin following the way of affirmation. True unity, Coleridge affirms repeatedly—thus. echoing the proverb of extremes—is polar, and it is by means of the idea “polarity” that he attempts throughout his prose to clarify the meanings of truth and spirit. Perhaps the most succinct of his descriptions of polarity is one deposited, with typical cunning, in a footnote to one of the numbers of his periodical The Friend:

EVERY POWER IN NATURE AND IN SPIRIT must evolve an opposite, as the sole means and condition of its manifestation: AND ALL OPPOSITION IS A TENDENCY TO RE-UNION. This is the universal Law of Polarity or essential Dualism.^[13]

If this Law is to be grasped, one must understand, first of all, which of the two opposite meanings of polarity Coleridge intends. For “polarity” must certainly be numbered among that strange collection of words, including the English “cleave” and the German aufheben (which Hegel found so felicitous), whose meanings embrace two antonyms. At the one extreme, a polar relationship may mean a relationship between antagonists, a relationship robbed of Coleridgean unity altogether. This sense of the term is clearest, perhaps, in the verb “to polarize.” It is said, for example, that governments have been polarized in an international dis­pute. In this case, polarity tends to double for the words “conflict” and “enmity.” When used in this fashion, the poles in question are seen predominantly as independent individuals. In this way, polarity may come to mean pre­cisely the opposite of harmony, participation, and unity: that which the poles have in common may be no more than the fact that they have nothing in common, that they tend only to draw away from each other. The language of existentialism, with its encounters and estrangements, would seem to have made this sense of the word the most common.

But, on the other hand, the word’s original application to magnetism may be emphasized. One may thus attend, not to the separation of antagonistic poles, but to the oneness of poles within a magnetic field or to the literal and metaphoricaI fact that opposites attract It is this second sense of polarity that must be stressed if spiritual truths are to be understood. Coleridge repeatedly focuses his readers’ attention upon this meaning of the word, as when he writes:

Polarity is not a Composite Force, or vis tertia con­stituted by the moments of two counter-agents. It is 1 manifested in 2, not 1 + 1 = 2…. The polar forces are the two forms, in which a one Power works in the same act and instant. Thus, it is not the Power, Attraction and the Power Repulsion at once tugging and tugging like two sturdy Wrestlers that compose the Magnet; but The Magnetic Power working at once positively and negatively. Attraction and Repulsion are the two Forces of the one magnetic Power.^[14]

Here the poles are seen, not so much with reference to opposition or discord, but in view of the fact that the poles are both parts of one thing, of a unity, whether it is a magnet, an electric current, or a globe. Polarity in this case entails harmony and co-operation, with one pole supplying what the other lacks and vice versa. Such poles complete each other and are required for each other’s existence. This meaning of the word is today more commonly employed, it seems, in scientific discussions, where positive and negative electrical charges are believed to support and stabilize each other, as in the nucleus of an atom. And this is the meaning first hinted at when it was asked that the analogy of the archer be set aside while the idea of double attraction be retained.

Two entries from Coleridge’s Notebooks help reinforce this second meaning of polarity while illustrating well his distinctively Romantic quest for oneness. The first of the following passages describes his vision of the sea while aboard a ship bound for Malta, the other the topography of a Coleridgean country walk:

O said I as I looked on the blue, yellow, green, & purple green Sea, with all its hollows & swells, & cut-glass surfaces—O what an Ocean of lovely forms!—and I was vexed, teazed, that the sentence sounded like a play of Words. But it was not, the mind within me was struggling to express the marvellous distinctness & unconfounded personality of each of the million millions of forms, & yet the undivided Unity in which they subsisted.^[15]

Still as I rise, I am more & more enamoured of the marvellous playfulness of the Surface of the Hills/ such swellings, startings, sinkings, and yet all so combined as to make it impossible to look at as many/no! it was a manifold One! ^[16]

If we are to appreciate fully the meaning of polarity, it is most important that special attention be paid, in both of these quotations, to the conjunction “yet.” For in each case, “yet” signals the fact that Coleridge is attempting to express a unity beyond· conjunction. The unity that Coleridge had seen on board ship and in the hills of the English countryside is a unity seen and communicated, he believes, only in spite of our customary perception of material things: a perception in which a thing is what it is, not through another or because of another, but because it is not another: a perception ratified in the A or not-A of Aristotelian logic. Polarity is the concept with which Coleridge aims to point to this perceptual experience of “yet.” For experiencing this “yet” is to Coleridge the sine qua non of understanding the unity of spirit and thus of understanding truth. It is, he believes, the persistent temptation of all men to assume that unity is consistent always with mechanical arrangements of parts and wholes. Things having surfaces dominate our thinking: a certain number of gears, a certain number of nuts and bolts, and an assortment of pulleys make for one complete machine; just so, men mistakenly assume, many waves make one sea and many hills one landscape. But such waves and hills are not the many that are yet, that are nevertheless, one. The oneness Coleridge experienced is precisely counter to this sort of collection and conjunction.

The deficient unity of mechanism and the true, polar unity of spirit are further distinguished when Coleridge con­trasts what he calls “mechanic” and “vital” philosophy. “The leading differences between mechanic and vital philosophy may all be drawn from one point,” he writes:

The former, demanding for every mode and act of existence real or possible visibility, knows only of distance and nearness, composition (or rather juxta­ position) and decomposition, in short, the relations of unproductive particles to each other; so that in every instance the result is the exact sum of the component quantities, as in arithmetical addition. This is the philosophy of death, and only of a dead nature can it hold good.

It could be added: this is the philosophy that attempts to apply the first conception of what it means to hit a mark even to marks that may be hit only in a way consistent with the second conception. Coleridge continues:

In life, much more in spirit, and in a living and spiritual philosophy, the two component “counter­ powers actually interpenetrate each other, and generate a higher third, including both the former, ita tamen ut sit alia et major [so that, nevertheless, it may be other and greater].^[17]

This “higher third” is Coleridge’s way of naming the mark that is hit only when two other possible marks are equally attractive.

Where before attention was directed to the importance of the conjunction “yet,” here the Latin tamen, “nevertheless,” specifies the sense of oneness. For no mind under the “despotism” of the empirical eye and a slave to mutual exclu­sions can think the meaning of a word like “interpenetration,” a word that demands of two united things that they be inside each other. No materialist, therefore, without being thrown back against the source of his assumptions, can begin to experience the reality of a oneness in which the elements are themselves, nevertheless alia, not themselves.

Coleridge’s interpenetration, it should be noticed, is not the same as interlocking or intertwining or any number of similar conceptions in which the components are allowed to retain their original solidity and substantial integrity. For in order to interpenetrate, and not just interlock, each of two things must give up its bounded- ness and sacrifice a part of its own integrity in behalf of the other. The point or area of the “surface” of a given thing where it penetrates another thing and, in so doing, exercises its own outwardly directed power—the place at which it resists and pushes into the substance of the other—must also be the very point or area of its “surface” where it is itself pierced and entered, where it gives way to the outwardly directed power of the other. In fact, in order for things to interpenetrate, the normal concept of surface must be rendered meaningless. Indeed, to understand the meaning of interpenetration and polarity, and thus of unity and spiritual truth, and thus finally of Coleridgean error, the interpreter of Coleridge is forced to give up thinking of things altogether.

The interpreter is forced, in other words, to give up thinking of truth as a matter of this or that. It is neces­sary instead, Coleridge believes, to begin thinking of truth as polar, the meeting of extremes, and as the expression of a double attraction. And it is also necessary, therefore, to begin realizing that truth can never be expressed in propo­sitions with the simplicity afforded by the law of the excluded middle. “This is the test and character of a truth,” Coleridge declares,

… that in its own proper form it is inconceivable …. It can come forth out of the moulds of the under­ standing only in the disguise of two contradictory conceptions, each of which are partially true, and the conjunction of both conceptions becomes the represen­tative or expression (the exponent) of a truth beyond conception and inexpressible.

He proceeds to give his reader three examples of what he means by truth and thus provides a glimpse, perhaps, of what he was thinking and how he was seeing on board ship and walking in the hills:

Examples: Before Abraham was, I am.—God is a circle, the centre of which is everywhere, and cir­cumference nowhere. The soul is all in every part.^[18]

What truth in particular may be expressed in each of these examples lies beyond the scope of this essay. It is, how­ ever, important to note the kind of ideas Coleridge has in mind as illustrative of truth. These examples are certainly typical. For throughout his work, Coleridge’s chief aim was to testify to the cogency, the reasonableness, of religious truth, spiritual truth, especially the truth of Christian doctrine.

One finds his thinking returning again and again to the one and three of God, to the God and man in Jesus Christ, and to the faith and grace of human salvation. One finds him returning repeatedly, that is, to the special polarities of Christian faith. It is possible, in fact, to make the point much stronger. It is possible to say that it was his Christian faith itself that compelled Coleridge to search for a conception of truth that would be adequate to the spiritual unities that he believed in. Christianity, he saw, requires polarity; they grew together in his mind. And so, it seems to have become his task to look for polarity in everything: in the “ever-varying balance, or balancing, of images, notions, or feelings, conceived as in opposition to each other” in the fine arts; in “the co-instantaneous yet reciprocal action of the air and the vital energy of the lungs in breathing”; in the “Hic et alter qui nihilominus est Hic: or Ego, et alter Ego” of personality; and, as we saw earlier, both in “every voluntary movement” where “we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it” and in the “alternate pulses of active and passive motion” of the “small water-insect on the surface of rivulets.”^[19] For by directing the attention of his interlocutors and readers to the polarity in everything, he might, through everything, display the reasonableness of his faith.

It is in this light that Coleridge’s conception of error may now begin to make sense. For the greatest possible error to his mind was the error of unbelief, the error that results when one deviates from the truth of Christianity. Therefore, an adequate explanation of hamartia, one can imagine him saying, must be an explanation consistent with the kind of truth involved in Christian doctrine, an explanation that will account for unbelief. Error, then, cannot be a matter simply of mistaken substitution; to err must involve more than just conceiving one thing as another thing. For if Christianity is true, then truth itself involves conceiving one thing as another thing. Truth comes into being only through the unity, the interpenetration—the communicatio idiomatum—of one thing and another thing that the first is not, only through the speaking of a Word that is, and yet is with, God. Accordingly, error must consist in one’s failure to allow the necessary interpenetration to take place. Every instance of error must be seen as the result of one’s forcing spiritual truth into the mold of material enclosure, of forcing a part of the truth to bear the whole truth. All error must be seen, that is, as the result of being, not totally in error, but half right and half wrong. “The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists,” writes Coleridge, describing one example of error, “was one of the greatest and most impor­tant that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right, and both wrong. They each maintained opposite poles of the same truth.”^[20] Every error arises—every error, that is, that Coleridge aims to oppose—because man fails to see through the boundaries and surfaces that preclude polar unity, because he fails to see beyond matters of this and that—and thus beyond materialism per se—to a oneness of things inside each other, a oneness of things in spirit. “How should it be otherwise,” Coleridge laments again,

as long as the imagination of the worldling is wholly occupied by surfaces, while the Christian’s thoughts are fixed on the substance, that which is and abides, and which, because it is the substance, the outward senses cannot recognize?^[21]

Coleridgean error consists thus, we might say, of two distinguishable acts. The person erring errs, first, by reducing truth to two mutually exclusive conceptions in accordance with the materialist assumption that things must exclude one another; and second, he errs in choosing to believe that one of those conceptions, and only one, expresses the entire truth. The person erring, as was said earlier, becomes overly attracted by that which ought to have exercised, not no attraction at all, but simply less attraction, a more moderate attraction. It is with this conception of what it means to miss a mark that Coleridge therefore writes,

The most influencive Errors have ever been partial Truths mistaken for the whole Truth, Truths divorced from their correspondent and supporting opposites and converted into contrary Falsehoods by being reciprocally unbalanced and disintegrated …. He alone deserves the name of a Philosopher, who has attained to see and learnt to apply the difference between Contraries that preclude, and Opposites that reciprocally suppose and require, each the other..^[22]

The greatest error of all consists in supposing, therefore, that Opposites are Contraries. Indeed, it is precisely this supposition that has continually reduced Christianity to empty speculation and vain debates, to the debates of monarchians and tritheists, docetists and Ebionites, Arminians and Calvinists. It is this very error that has left Christians senseless of their central mystery by presenting them a eucharist “volatilized … into a metaphor” by some, and by others “condensed … into an idol.”^[23]

The aim of this essay has been to describe Coleridge’s understanding of error—what error is—and not to describe his explanation of the origin of error—why error exists. Our concern has been with the cognitive meaning of hamartia as mistake, and not with the moral sense of hamartia as sin. And yet, it would be a mistake, if not a sin, to conclude this discussion without a word about morality. For in Coleridge’s view, misperception and imbalance at the cognitive level are always the results of sin, sin understood especially as selfishness or self-centeredness.

As we have seen, error for Coleridge consists in a deviation from the truth of polar unity. Missing the mark results from an inadequate response to double attraction. Error denies interpenetration by attempting to divide the unity of things inside each other; it reduces interpenetration to juxtaposition or, at best, interlocking. And it does so because the person erring has failed to allow for the possiblity of sacrifice in what he sees; he has not seen that not all things are material, that some things exist, not to the exclusion of each other, but through each other, each becoming active through its passivity, each increasing by decreasing. And this failure of vision is a clear sign to Coleridge that he who errs has himself failed, indeed has refused, to give himself in another’s behalf. He has rendered himself unable to see a polar world, a world conformable to him who prayed that all might be one “even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee,”^[24] and he has done so by choosing to live only in himself and never in another.

Man’s avoiding error and coming to a knowledge of the truth is for Coleridge a matter of setting aside the surfaces and resistances of the self. Man must discover that he is permeable and permeated before he can begin to see beyond the error of surface to an inwardness more inward than enclosure. For true unity cannot be detected from the out­ side. It requires participants, and not spectators. Man must choose to become the kind of self that is, in Coleridge’s words, “permeable to a holier power … at once hidden and glorified by its own transparency.”^[25]

He must make the painful, in fact mortal, choice to become that “Self, which then only is when for itself it hath ceased to be.”^[26] “Quantum sumus, scimus [as much as we are, we know],” Coleridge is fond of observing: “That which we find within ourselves, which is more than ourselves, and yet the ground of whatever is good and permanent therein, is the substance and life of all other knowledge.”^[27]

For that man, on the other hand, who can find within himself nothing more than himself because he has chosen to exclude everything else, and who maintains the exclusion because of pride or malice, there can never be any experi­ence of truth, but only error. And it is for this reason that “the desire of distinguishing yourself from other men, in order to be distinguished by them” must first be quenched if know- ledge is to be gained. “Hoc revera,” Coleridge concludes, “est inter te et veritatem.” This “interest”—this desire—”does indeed stand between thee and truth.”^[28]