Of the writing of many books on Samuel Taylor Coleridge there seems no end, not least, in recent decades, on Coleridge and religion. And yet there is, it seems always room for more, and this work of Christopher W. Corbin sheds some fresh light and offers yet new insight into the importance and elusiveness of Coleridge as a theologian, religious thinker and Christian. Coleridge was, after all, a profound influence, on the one hand, on the theology of the Oxford Movement (of Newman, who was also evangelical in his youth) and, on the other, on the Anglican Broad Church of F.D. Maurice and others. Here we see him also among the Evangelical groups and churches of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Unlike so much of the mazy, sometimes over complex writings of Coleridge himself, Corbin writes with workmanlike clarity, which in this context of religious discussion is both a strength and a weakness. This is a book in which it becomes clear what was evident on the surface of Coleridge’s mind, but it does lack some of the deep complexity, paradoxicality and indirectness that was so much part of it as well.

Corbin begins his argument with admirable efficiency, in the first two chapters clearly outlining the philosophical and religious geography of England at the end of the long eighteenth century and also the nature and history of early Evangelicalism both within and beyond the established Church of England. Although much of this material is familiar enough to the student, it is still useful to find it drawn together as a prelude to discussing Coleridge himself, both biographically and intellectually. Chapter 3, beginning with his Confessio Fidei of 3 November 1810, establishes the fundamental and characteristic polarity in the book’s argument – Coleridge’s insistence on a balance in religion to be maintained between thought and feeling, the intellectual and the affective, the ‘stove’ of Methodism and the ‘moonlight’ of Socinianism. The ground covered here is by no means original, some being made familiar as early as the 1930s by Frederick C. Gill in his book The Romantic Movement and Methodism (1937), up to Luke Savin Herrick Wright’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church (2010), and Corbin also relies very heavily on the more historical work on early Evangelicalism of David Bebbington and others. However, he is an excellent synthesizer and draws upon a wide reading in the now voluminous published tomes of Coleridge’s writings in the Collected Works, the Notebooks and the Letters.

Perhaps less convincing is the brief reading of the Biographia Literaria within the tradition of confessional and conversion literature that in Anglican Evangelicalism includes the writings of John Newton, William Cowper and Thomas Scott. And inevitably even a brief review of the Biographia has to touch upon the influence of Kant (p. 146) and German critical thinking, reminding us that Coleridge cannot finally simply be identified within English thought and religious practice, which would include, by this stage, Moravianism as it established itself in a new home in England. It is true that Coleridge himself does affirm the influence of Anglican evangelical conversion narratives on the Biographia (p. 147) though even Corbin himself admits that this is a ‘likely reductive’ view of a book that is ‘multi-facetted both in its origins and purposes’. Coleridge is always one step ahead of us in his infinite complexity of sources and reading.

Chapter 4 serves well to remind us that Coleridge was not merely a religious thinker, he was also a theologian, engaging profoundly with Evangelicalism on the question of baptism and atonement theology. He challenged all literal acceptance of forms of substitutionary atonement (p. 209) in his sense of theology as both living and lived within Christianity and the life of the church. But in his profoundly felt need for salvation and his sense of the living word of Scripture (expressed most clearly in the posthumously published Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit [1840]) Coleridge never abandoned his fundamental belief that faith must be held intelligently and with intellectual rigour.

There are clear weaknesses in this book. Coleridge always repays close reading, and the absence of this in considering such works as The Statesman’s Manual (1816) and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830) is a pity and might have related the discussion more closely to his more philosophical and poetic thinking. Nevertheless, Corbin’s work is still a valuable and illuminating reminder of an aspect of Coleridge’s life and thought that is too often neglected. The actual nature of his return to Christian orthodoxy and Trinitarian belief will probably always be debated, and it is usually unwise to be too assertive about any religious position held by Coleridge. But of his genuine, even evangelical, piety no reader of his last Notebooks can remain unaware, and the nature and origins of this in the broad world of early English Evangelicalism both within and beyond the Church of England are made very clear in this book. It is a useful addition to the library of critical books on Samuel Taylor Coleridge.