Aids to Reflection; and, The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As in great maps or pictures you will see the border decorated with meadows, fountains, flowers, and the like, represented in it, but in the middle you have the main design: so amongst the works of God is it with the foreordained Redemption of Man. All his other works in the world, all the beauty of the creatures, the succession of ages, and the things that come to pass in them, are but as the border to this as the mainpiece. But as a foolish unskilful beholder, not discerning the excellency of the principal piece in such maps or pictures, gazes only on the fair border, and goes no farther—thus do the greatest part of us as to this great Work of God, the redemption of our personal Being, and the re-union of the Human with the Divine, by and through the Divine Humanity of the Incarnate Word.

APHORISM XV.

Luther.

It is a hard matter, yea, an impossible thing for thy human strength, whosoever thou art (without God's assistance), at such a time when Moses setteth on thee with the Law (see Aphorism XII.),—when the holy Law written in thy heart accuseth and condemneth thee, forcing thee to a comparison of thy heart therewith, and convicting thee of the incompatibleness of thy will and nature with Heaven and holiness and an immediate God—that then thou shouldest be able to be of such a mind as if no Law nor sin had ever been! I say it is in a manner impossible that a human creature, when he feeleth himself assaulted with trials and temptations, and the conscience hath to do with God, and the tempted man knoweth that the root of temptation is within him, should obtain such mastery over his thoughts as then to think no otherwise than that from everlasting nothing hath been but only and alone Christ, altogether Grace and Deliverance!

Comment.

In irrational agents, namely, the brute animals, the will is hidden or absorbed in the law. The law is their nature. In the original purity of a rational agent the uncorrupted will is identical with the law. Nay, inasmuch as a Will perfectly identical with the Law is one with the divine Will, we may say, that in the unfallen rational agent the Will constitutes the Law.[122] But it is evident that the holy and spiritual power and light, which by a prolepsis or anticipation we have named law, is a grace, an inward perfection, and without the commanding, binding and menacing character which belongs to a law, acting as a master or sovereign distinct from, and existing, as it were, externally for, the agent who is bound to obey it. Now this is St. Paul's sense of the word; and on this he grounds his whole reasoning. And hence too arises the obscurity and apparent paradoxy of several texts. That the Law is a Law for you; that it acts on the Will not in it; that it exercises an agency from without, by fear and coercion; proves the corruption of your Will, and presupposes it. Sin in this sense came by the law: for it has its essence, as sin, in that counter-position of the holy principle to the will, which occasions this principle to be a law. Exactly (as in all other points) consonant with the Pauline doctrine is the assertion of John, when speaking of the re-adoption of the redeemed to be sons of God, and the consequent resumption (I had almost said re-absorption) of the Law into the Will (νομον τελειον τον της ελευθεριας, James i. 25.,)—he says—For the law was given by Moses, but Grace and Truth came by Jesus Christ. That by the Law St. Paul meant only the ceremonial law, is a notion that could originate only in utter inattention to the whole strain and bent of the Apostle's argument.

[122] In fewer words thus: For the brute animals, their nature is their law;—for what other third law can be imagined, in addition to the law of nature, and the law of reason? Therefore: in irrational agents the law constitutes the will. In moral and rational agents the will constitutes, or ought to constitute, the law: I speak of moral agents, unfallen. For the personal Will comprehends the idea, as a Reason, and it gives causative force to the Idea, as a practical Reason. But Idea with the power of realizing the same is a Law; or say:—the Spirit comprehends the Moral Idea, by virtue of its rationality, and it gives to the Idea causative Power, as a Will: In every sense therefore, it constitutes the Law, supplying both the Elements of which it consists—namely, the Idea, and the realizing Power.

APHORISM XVI.

Leighton and Coleridge.

Christ's death was both voluntary and violent. There was external violence: and that was the accompaniment, or at most the occasion, of his death. But there was internal willingness, the spiritual Will, the Will of the Spirit, and this was the proper cause. By this Spirit he was restored from death: neither indeed was it possible for him to be holden of it; being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit, says St. Peter. But he is likewise declared elsewhere to have died by that same Spirit, which here, in opposition to the violence, is said to quicken him. Thus Hebrews ix. 14. Through the eternal Spirit he offered himself. And even from Peter's words, and without the epithet, eternal, to aid the interpretation, it is evident that the Spirit, here opposed to the flesh, body or animal life, is of a higher nature and power than the individual soul, which cannot of itself return to re-inhabit or quicken the body.