Words Made Flesh: Embodying the “Correspondent Subjective” within Religion and Literature

In this talk I explore the implications of a speculative formalist approach to religion and literature, by highlighting how Samuel Taylor Coleridge views both scripture and literature as mediums that can deeply affect and orient not only readers’ postures of attention, but also their ways of navigating within a wider world of concern. I am particularly interested in how his critique of bibliolatry and reevaluations of Biblical reading practices in Aids to Reflection and “Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit” contribute to his understanding of what it means to possess a “poetic faith.” To treat the Bible as a charged or fetishized object, as the bibliolatrous do, is to suggest that the text is a vehicle for carrying conviction from author to reader through the distribution or channeling of particular kinds of sensations and particular kinds of shock or outrage. To be bibliolatrous is to justify through sensation what is presumed to be easily–-even transparently––understood in Scripture.

Coleridge instead advocates for a projective method of reading that enables reciprocal exchange, one where subjective experience becomes objectively available through its correspondence with the figures of Scripture, and where objective truths can become subjectively realized. For Coleridge, scripture enables readers to reflect upon their own lives via the mediation of its figures and symbols and through this process scripture’s dead letter is reborn through the reader’s inspired attention. “True religion” is experienced as a pleasurable unity, identity, or crossing of the objective text and what Coleridge calls the “correspondent subjective.” It is through this crossing or “lining up” that the reader can find sufficient evidence for belief without recourse to outside authority. In order to better understand how scripture can be an aid to reflection, I draw upon Johann Gottfried Herder’s understanding of reflection (Bessonenheit) as the navigation of an “ocean of sensations,” one which into a linguistic dimension while in pursuit of the right words.

This interest in how Coleridge helps us better understand how to “inly feel” the felt materiality of scripture and literature culminates in two larger interventions within the fields of Religion and Literature, which will be articulated by focusing first on how and why Coleridge’s model of scriptural reading works and then by considering what this model can illuminate about how to approach religion and literature in a postsecular age.

In understanding the how and why of Coleridge’s model I am influenced by the work of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his subsequent interpreters. Merleau-Ponty calls this mediating form of sensibility—Coleridge’s “correspondent subjective”—the “body schema,” which taps into those thought-imbued intensities (or sentiments) moving beneath and through consciousness and reflective judgment. It consists of that part of myself at the core of my being that does not think to think of itself. Our grammar of assent is embodied and performed through the postures of attention our body schemas put on. Both religion and literature can potentially operate at least in part on a virtual field of affects and sentiments, which flow below and within culturally organized registers of sensibility, appearance, discourse, justice, and identity. It is only when our passions and affects are attached to sense experience that our view of the world is determined.

If one can alter these underlying sensibilities, or body schemas, which have become second nature, then one’s worldview and even one’s perceptual view of the world will look different. This alteration can occur through the acquisition and interruption of habits because it is through habits that the body both gains new significations, new meanings, and restructures its world and itself. Merleau-Ponty argues that to change our habits is to appropriate “new instruments” with which to express “the power we have of dilating our being in the world.” Habits are significant politically, religiously, and poetically because it is at the depth of habit that unconscious strata of culture are built into social routines as bodily disposition.

Part of the value of both religion and literature is that they provide opportunities for participants to engage in new technical environments, which afford opportunities to suspend habitual causal patterns and forge new patterns through the medium of embodiment. The way an experimental poetics interfaces with the medium of embodiment can disrupt habitual cause and effect couplings and introduce new patterns of becoming. Works and activities that can disarticulate and/or rearticulate our ways of seeing are valuable because by doing so they call attention to the postures of attention we typically occupy. It is the posture of attention that we take that ultimately determines what is legible in any given partition of the sensible.

Given all of this, I will turn in the final part of my talk to a consideration of how the dynamics of Coleridge’s model relate to a broader trajectory of participatory ritual, scripture, and rhetoric that can traced back to debates about theurgy in Neoplatonism and forward to the possibilities that have emerged within various strands of contemporary Ecopoetics and Ecotheology.