[ON SYMBOL AND ALLEGORY] 1
The histories and political economy2 of the present and preceding century
partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy, and are the -prod
's. Outer covering of part of a plant. or The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and 6. Plural of 'Zoilus,' who in classical times was Foresight in 1816; it was intended to show that the the standard example of a bad critic. Scriptures, properly interpreted, provide the uni7. The French writer Voltaire (1694-1778) vexed versal principles that should guide lawmakers in British nationalists with his description of Shake-meeting the political and economic emergencies of speare as a barbarous, irregular, and sometimes that troubled era. His discussion there of symbol, indecent natural genius. in contradistinction both to allegory and to meta8. August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845), phor, has been often cited and elaborated in treat- German critic and literary historian, whose Lec-ments of symbolism in poetry. Coleridge's analysis, tures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808-09) however, is directed not to poetry but to his view proposed the distinction between mechanical and that the persons and events in biblical history sigorganic form that Coleridge develops in this lec-nify timeless and universal, as well as particular
ture. and local, truths.
9. Creative. 2. The increasingly prestigious intellectual disci- I. Coleridge published Tlte Statesman's Manual, pline of economics.
.
THE STATESMAN'S MANUAL / 489
wet of an unenlivened generalizing Understanding. In the Scriptures they are
the living educts3 of the Imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power,
which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it
were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of
the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and
consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors. These are
the Wheels which Ezekiel beheld, when the hand of the Lord was upon him,
and he saw visions of God as he sat among the captives by the river of Chebar.
Whithersoever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and thither was their spirit
to go: for the spirit of the living creature was in the xvheels also.4 The truths and
the symbols that represent them move in conjunction and form the living
chariot that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity. Hence, by
a derivative, indeed, but not a divided, influence, and though in a secondary
yet in more than a metaphorical sense, the Sacred Book is worthily intitled
the WORD OF GOD. Hence too, its contents present to us the stream of time
continuous as Life and a symbol of Eternity, inasmuch as the Past and the
Future are virtually contained in the Present. According therefore to our rel
ative position on its banks the Sacred History becomes prophetic, the Sacred
Prophecies historical, while the power and substance of both inhere in its
Laws, its Promises, and its Comminations.5 In the Scriptures therefore both
Facts and Persons must of necessity have a twofold significance, a past and a
future, a temporary and a perpetual, a particular and a universal application.
They must be at once Portraits and Ideals. Eheul paupertina philosophia in paupertinam religionem ducit:6?A hunger-
bitten and idea-less philosophy naturally produces a starveling and comfortless
religion. It is among the miseries of the present age that it recognizes no
medium between Literal and Metaphorical. Faith is either to be buried in the
dead letter,7 or its name and honors usurped by a counterfeit product of the
mechanical understanding, which in the blindness of self-complacency con
founds SYMBOLS with ALLEGORIES. Now an Allegory is but a translation of
abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstrac
tion from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than
its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot.
On the other hand a Symbol (o EOTLV ct.L TauTrp/opiKOv)8 is characterized by
a translucence of the Special9 in the Individual or of the General in the Espe
cial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the
Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which
