Coleridge on the Prometheus of Aeschylus

When the Royal Society of Literature was formed in 1823, George IV established ten Royal Associateships, each to receive from the Privy Purse an annuity of 100 guineas.  Largely through the offices of Basil Montagu, Coleridge was nominated and duly elected as one of the Royal Associates early in 1824; his formal letter of acceptance was addressed to the Secretary, the Reverend Richard Cattermole, on 16 March 1824.  Only two duties were required of Royal Associates: that each should “state the particular department of Letters, to which ... he would be understood as being especially attached”^[1]; and that he deliver a paper each year before the Society.  Whether or not any papers were read in 1824 beyond a piece on the madness of Hamlet by the now notorious Thomas Bowdler, Coleridge on 26 April 1825 – a year after his appointment – threw himself effusively “on the indulgence of the Society,” and entreated them “to regard the Year past as a period employed in the liquidation of a [literary] debt previously incurred.”  Now, however, he was happy to be able to “lay before the Society the first specimen of a series of Disquisitions.”^[2]  Less than a month later, on 18 May 1825 (the first Wednesday after Ascension Day) Coleridge delivered his paper to the Society: “inflicted” in his own word.  He was fifty-two-and-a-half years old: he had composed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner twenty-five years before, and the Biographia Literaria almost ten years before.  It took him an hour and twenty-five minutes to read aloud the essay “On the Prometheus of Aeschylus”; and for his audience – not all of them highly literary in any case – he gaily confessed that he felt “most remorseful sympathy,” for they “could not possibly understand the 10th part” of it, it being “full of Greek and superannuated Metaphysics.”  It was, he admitted, a thing to read rather than to listen to.^[3]

The essay boldly announced itself in a sub-title as “preparatory to a series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian [theology], in connection with the sacerdotal, theology, and in contrast with the mysteries of ancient Greece.”^[4]  Whether through excessive informality in its proceedings or some punctilious neglect in insisting that Coleridge fulfil his obligations, the Society did not encourage him to continue with the series.  A Royal Associate until the pensions were withdrawn on the death of George IV and the Associateships discontinued, Coleridge never read another paper to the Society.  But in this matter he behaved much like his fellow Royal Associates; and the neglect cannot even be taken as negative evidence.^[5]

Whatever Coleridge’s contemporaries thought of the essay, it has in recent years attracted neither remark nor attention.  I cannot say that I am surprised.  Among the public specimens of Coleridge’s later intractable prose style, the Prometheus essay stands as a portentous and forbidding monument – opaque, intransigent, unlovely.  I know that by 1825 his nerves had tightened with a resentful sense of neglect and public hostility; he expected no sympathy but was wounded by the alternating condescension, abuse, and silence of the quarterlies and by the sceptical reticence of many of his friends.  In any case, the essay defies affection, resists a ready understanding, withholds lyrical delight.  Many years before he had noted how “instead of a Covey of poetic Partridges with whirring wings of music, or wild Ducks shaping their rapid flight in forms always regular ... up came a metaphysical Bustard, urging it’s slow, heavy, laborious, earth-skimming Flight, over dreary & level Wastes.”^[6]  And now, near the end of the essay, he cries: “We are now out of the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics” – but most readers, before they come upon those words of weary encouragement, have quietly slipped way.

There may be many reasons for the graceless obscurity of the piece: it was an introductory essay to a large scheme never completed; it may have been written hastily; it was certainly conceived with little regard to the need for charm; it makes no attempt to provide the larger conceptual landscape within which the thought would make itself accessible.  Yet biographical evidence suggests that the trouble was fatigue rather than haste, exhaustion rather than indifference; for the special topic had interested him for four or five years and most of the central issues had concerned him for half a lifetime.  Rising to no memorable heights of eloquence, repeating themes and even material used elsewhere and often, the essay is perhaps the more impressive for the signs it gives of the singleness, persistence, and self-energy of his thought, and the more interesting perhaps as an example of the Coleridgian method-in-action, an example drawn unpurified and unshriven from “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”  For here Coleridge has stated rather than established most of the doctrinal elements of the argument; and what looks like exegesis of a poem becomes a subtle figure of the Coleridgian philosophy.

Why Coleridge should have become interested in the Prometheus myth and why at this time is not at all clear.  As a boy he had preferred Aeschylus to Euripides or Sophocles, though his allegiance shifted with advancing years.^[7]  His early favourite was the Agamemnon,^[8] but in 1806 his Notebooks show him hovering over the text of the Prometheus (what if Christabel were translated into Greek? he wondered) paying close attention to the prosody.^[9]  But there is no outstanding discussion of the Prometheus myth in the 1818 Friend nor in the Philosophical Lectures of 1818-1819.  In the first quarter of the century several artists had been tempted by the Prometheus theme – Goethe, Byron, Beethoven to mention only a few – but Shelley alone, with the Prometheus Unbound in 1820, brought a literary work on this theme to public completion.  Probably Coleridge’s interest was drawn in the first place by the Egyptian archaeological discoveries under Napoleon and the resulting re-examination of early Greek history and Egyptian antiques.^[10]  His son Hartley, before he was deprived of his Oriel fellowship, started to translate Aeschylus into prose, with notes; and said he would use the Prometheus Vinctus as a “sort of text, for some observations on the sacerdotal religion of Greece, and on the sources and spirit of mythology.”^[11]  A year later – if not before – Coleridge himself had taken fire.

H[artley] has the noblest subject that perhaps a Poet ever worked on ­– the Prometheus – and I have written a small volume almost to him, containing all the materials and comments on the full import of the most pregnant and sublime Mythos and Philosopheme – in short the sum of all my Reading and reflection on this vast Wheel of the Mythology of the earliest and purest Heathenism, which makes it credible that (the names excepted) the Sibylline Poems contain far more of the substance of the genuine originals than it is the fashion to believe.^[12]

Hartley continued to work at, or work at working at, his version of the Prometheus for the rest of his life but never completed it.^[13]  His notes on the sacerdotal religion of Greece survive – if anywhere – in a graceful nostalgic essay “On the Poetical Use of the Heathen Mythology.”^[14]  Coleridge’s “small volume almost” on the Prometheus, written for Hartley and apparently sent to him, has not been preserved.  And unfortunately the larger study of myth and symbol which Coleridge promised in his correspondence with Cattermole never went beyond the one Prometheus essay.  The essay therefore assumes special importance in Coleridge’s later critical writing.

In the body of the essay Coleridge announced the scope of his proposed series: it was to be a comprehensive study of Greek literature and religion in order to give “a juster and more distinct view of this singular people [the Greeks], and of the place which they occupied in the history of the world, and the great scheme of divine providence, than I have hitherto seen, – or rather let me say, than it appears to me possible to give by any other process.”^[15]  This proposal, incidentally, is not much is not much at variance with the purpose and conduct of the Royal Society of Literature in its early years.  The Prometheus essay, however, was to deal with “one imagined objection”: “What proof have you of the fact of any connection between the Greek drama, and either the mysteries, or the philosophy, of Greece?  What proof that it was the office of the tragic poet, under the disguise of the sacerdotal religion, mixed with the legendary or popular belief, to reveal as much of the mysteries interpreted by philosophy, as would counteract the demoralizing effects of the state religion, without compromising the tranquility of the state itself?”^[16]  The best way to answer this, he said, was to cite the Prometheus of Aeschylus, and to give “an exposition of what I believe to be the intention of the poet, and the mythic import of the work. ...”  Since neither the larger scheme, nor even in its detail the smaller proposal was fulfilled, and since in the writing Coleridge’s attention leaks across from the smaller to the larger theme, a summary of the essay “On the Prometheus of Aeschylus” is essential.  (In the Ashe edition the essay runs to twenty-eight pages.)

A. Introduction (eight-and-one-half pages)

            1. (a) Preparatory to the whole series.  Assertion that the Egyptian religion, at the time of the Hebrew exodus, was a pantheism on the point of passing over into polytheism.

                (b) A distinction drawn between theism and pantheism.

            2. Purpose of the whole series (as given in part on p. 6 above); and purpose of this essay.

            3. Prefatory remark, and quotation from the Friend stating that the development of Greek civilization, in relation to Hebrew culture before and Christian culture afterward, is to be regarded as the work of “the hand of divine providence.”  Greek poetry and history, tragedy and philosophy, flowing out of the Greek mysteries, provided the bulwark against degeneration, and allowed the culture of Greece to flow into that of Christ.

B. The Prometheus Myth (twelve pages)

            1. The Greeks were the first philosophers in the true sense.  The characteristic impulse and direction of their thought is described.

            2. The Prometheus myth is a philosopheme, an image of the birth of reason in man.  Coleridge compares this Greek myth with the Hebrew and Phoenician counterparts to show their cosmogonic implications.

            3. The Prometheus myth shows the polarization (or tension) into law and idea.

            4. The relation between law and idea examined to show the polarization of Will and Nature to produce “Nous, the rational Will, the practical reason.”

C. The Symbolic Figures in Prometheus (eight pages)

            1. Interpretation of Zeus (and by corollary, Juno).

            2. Prometheus (other figures – Io, Hermes, Hephaistos – being mentioned in passing).

Only the reader unfamiliar with Coleridge’s ways would expect, seeing the title “On the Prometheus of Aeschylus,” that he was going to read a self-contained critical commentary on that play, or a clear-cut theory of myth and symbol as illustrated in or supported by Aeschylus’s drama.  Yet, whether we want to or not, we cannot clearly detach the theological and philosophical matter, regarding it as – in Carlyle’s scornful phrase – “swim-bladders and vehiculatory gear” and inessential to the discourse.^[17]  But if we first separate out those parts of the argument that Coleridge had dealt with elsewhere – in the Friend, the Philosophical Lectures, particularly – we shall provide ourselves with the context of general ideas within which the essay is to be seen.

(a) Coleridge’s philosophy of history centred around his conviction that the appearance and spread of Christianity is the most important event in history, imparting a deep and prolonged moral and imaginative impulse to Western culture.  Greek culture, and other early cultures, were not hostile to the Christian – Coleridge thinks – but merely antecedent; for Christianity had grown not only out of divine will but also out of historical and even philosophical necessity.  This conviction allows Coleridge to regard ancient cultures with an eye at once somewhat objective, unpartisan, and sympathetic.^[18]

(b) Coleridge is at pains to protect the primacy – in Christian terms – of the Hebrew culture, and the integrity of the link formed by Greek thought between Hebrew and Christian.  This accounts for his peremptory – even unseemly – dismissal of the authority and worth of Egyptian antiquities.  But after the opening salvoes Coleridge does not again mention the Egyptians: they belonged only to the larger scheme.^[19]

(c) At the end of the opening section, Coleridge draws a distinction between the pantheist’s and the theist’s view of the world: the distinction is a favourite with him.^[20]  But here he is using it instrumentally: it is essential to his argument and leads directly to the heart of it.  On grounds not stated, Coleridge supposed that the Egyptian sacerdotal religion had “degenerated from a patriarchal monotheism into a pantheism, cosmotheism, or worship of the world as God.”^[21]  A similar process was at work in Greek religion, but was held in check by the mystery religions.^[22]  Christianity was the outgrowth of Hebrew and Greek.  If a myth is an image of the world, then the matrix in which a particular myth or version of a myth is found will suggest what virtue may be ascribed to it as image of the world.  In this essay the emphasis falls emphatically upon Greece, upon the quality of Greek thought.  For Coleridge the Prometheus is a sublime myth; not only because it is a myth but also because of the mode of its conception – because it is a Greek myth, a product of Greek genius.  In the Philosophical Lectures he had already expressed clearly his sense of the centrality and importance of Greece: “In all that makes Greece Greece to us, we find it the great light of the world, the beating pulse, that power which was predetermined by Almighty Providence to gradually evolve all that could be evolved out of corrupt nature by its own reason; while on the opposite ground there was a nation [the Hebrew] bred up by inspiration in a childlike form, in obedience and in the exercise of the will.”^[23]  Or in Notebook 25: “As it was the Genius of poetic Greece in the earliest period to transform that which must be thought into a something that has happened ... timeless truth into historic event; so in a later period was the business of Philosophy and of the Mysteries (the nightly Penelope) to unravel the day work, and to reduce the mythic into Laws, sometimes openly, oftener at first in the vest[ure] of Symbols.”^[24]  His question is then: What Law does the Prometheus myth disclose?

The Penelope image – the dream-like unravelling by day and night – stands (it seems to me) insistently for the active relation between the rational and irrational, the conscious and unconscious elements at work in man – an aspect of human experience to which Coleridge, unlike the manner of his time, was sensitively alert.  The image then recalls an important passage in one of the essays on Method.

In order ... to the recognition of himself in nature man must first learn to comprehend nature in himself, and its laws in the ground of his own existence.  Then only can he reduce Phænomena to Principles – then only will he have achieved the METHOD, the self-unravelling clue, which alone can securely guide him to the conquest of the former [phenomena] – when he has discovered in the basis of their union the necessity of their differences; in the principle of their continuance the solution of their changes.  It is the idea alone of the common centre, of the universal law, by which all power manifests itself in opposite yet interdependent forces ... that enlightening inquiry, multiplying experiment, and at once inspiring humility and perseverance and will lead him to comprehend gradually and progressively the relation of each to the other, of each to all, and of all to each.^[25]

In the final preparation for Christianity, Coleridge saw coming together “the two great component parts of our nature” in the Hebrew and Greek cultures, “namely that of the will in the one, as the higher and more especially god-like, and the reason in the other, as the compeer but yet second to that will.”^[26]  For Coleridge the Prometheus myth is important because it was set in order by Aeschylus while “poetry yet remained the union of the sensuous and the philosophic mind,” before metaphysics and poetry had separated.  So it is “the sublime mythus ... concerning the birth of the nous or reason in man. ... The substance, the stuff, is philosophy; the form only is poetry.”  Coleridge sees the Prometheus here as pure myth – “an allegory, a propaideuma, the noblest and the most pregnant of its kind.”^[27]

Even the Prometheus – “this stupendous poem” ­– as work of dramatic art disappears from the field of Coleridge’s attention: the character of Prometheus (which he had seen elsewhere as a mixture of Redeemer and Devil) is not discussed; the reality and cause of Prometheus’s suffering is of no important to him.  Others might be content to identify the persons of the drama – Zeus, Prometheus, Io, Hermes – and so illustrate an assumed relation between the myth and the world.  But Coleridge is impressed most by the primary relation within the myth itself – by the tension between Zeus and Prometheus – a primordial and cosmic tension, yet internal, immediate, and personal.  This relation he is concerned to define as exactly as he can.  For he sees the Promethean fire - belonging to the gods, stolen from heaven, and given to man - as reason.  Aeschylus makes it clear, he says, that reason is not involved in man’s animal nature, but is superior in kind, spiritual, gratuitously given, preceding man in time; timeless and eternal.  He shows, by comparing cosmogonies, that in the Greek scheme the war in heaven is a productive and energetic tension between law (nomos) and idea – between those elements originally identical which, once separated in time, fall into polar opposites – thesis and antithesis – as dynamically complementary powers.  “As the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature.  They are correlatives, which suppose each other.”^[28]  Out of the struggle between law and idea, the world and the mind come into existence: for the struggle is not towards domination or destruction but towards mutual identity across the barrier of time.

The process is drawn like this.  Law, seeking to become Idea but prevented from that identification, produces a series of anti-types of Idea – sensation, instinct, memory, fancy, intelligence.  Idea, correspondingly, seeking to become autonomous law, produces as its highest analogon self-consciousness.  And since idea cannot identify with law, it combines with the highest analogon of law to produce mind – “that which knows itself, and the existence of which may be inferred, but cannot appear or become a phaenomenon.”^[29]  The groundwork of the Aeschylean myth, Coleridge claims, is laid in “the definition of idea and law, as correlatives that mutually interpret each other; – an idea, with the adequate power of realizing itself being a law, and a law considered abstractedly from, or in the absence of, the power of manifesting itself in its appropriate product, being an idea.”^[30]  Ideas, he states, following the Platonic belief in the face of Aristotle, are not merely regulative but also constitutive – being “one in essence with the power and life of nature.”^[31]  “Whether this be true philosophy,” Coleridge says, “is not the question.”  For himself, the Mosaic belief is what he does “regard as the truth.”  Nevertheless he presses on at once to make some further substitutions and transformations.

Thesis                                                    Product                                          Antithesis

idea                                               Nature as substance                            law (nomos)

Will                                               Nature as natural law                            Reason

Prometheus                                   Mind of Man                                         Zeus

                                                      (? Imagination)

Prometheus impersonates, but is not identified with, Idea – that is, Prometheus is Law without its productive energy; and Zeus impersonates Nomos (Law), or cosmotheism, the identity of God with the universe.  Skilfully and ingeniously, Coleridge then unfolds the various implications of this schema.  Zeus is law, he shows, in four senses – as opposed to Idea, as sovereign of the gods of the world, as subjugator of spirits, as law in the Pauline sense, opposed to the autonomous.  For Prometheus there are more characters and significations – the Idea before the law, the former friend and counsellor of Zeus, “the divine humanity, the humane God,” the giver and the gift (for “Reason is from God, and God is reason”).  Prometheus also is Reason-in-man and to that extent bound to a rock – barren and powerless without law, the embodiment of the secret which Zeus would learn from Prometheus; for Prometheus and Zeus are of like nature.

Coleridge long before this date had insisted, in the face of Kant, that object and subject were not in contradiction, but were “complementary aspects of a being which unites them, because more than either.”^[32]  Where Kant had failed, Coleridge claimed to have succeeded through his definition of mind as subject: “There are many kinds of subject; mind is that kind which is its own object.”^[33]  Or in a different context he had said that “to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature – this is the mystery of Genius in the Fine Arts.”^[34]  This was the mystery that Aeschylus had achieved in his drama, and so for the time being Coleridge is not primarily concerned with the play as a work of art.  In as much as the Prometheus legend was a myth – and his critical and artist sense told him beyond dispute that it was a myth – it would “partake of the reality which it renders intelligible, and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.”^[35]

But the myth was a Greek myth, and the genius of Greek philosophy – beginning with Pythagoras – was that it found the image of the world in man’s mind, seeing that “that in the soul of man ... in consequence of which he was a man and without it would not have been, most necessarily be of the same nature and kind with those laws of the universe which acted upon him and which he alone was capable of beholding.”^[36]  Kant’s greatness was that he “found a criterion of the acts of the mind, or the forms which arise out of the mechanism of the mind itself.”^[37]  But Coleridge wanted to go further than Kant; for he insisted upon the substantial existence of both the internal and the external world and upon the knowability of both.  This in turn reflected upon his view of knowledge.

It is at once the distinctive and constitutive basis of my philosophy [he said in his MS Logic], that I place the ground and genesis of my system, not, as others, in a fact impressed, much less in a generalization from facts collectively, least of all in an abstraction embodied in an hypothesis, in which the pretended solution is most often but a repetition of the problem in disguise.  In contradiction to this, I place my principle is an act – in the language of grammarians, I begin with the verb – but the act involves its reality.^[38]

Coleridge, assailing the dominant philosophical mechanism of his day, regarded facts in themselves as of limited virtue, and knowledge of fact as of neutral value.  Almost like a mathematician, Coleridge says that the artist “must out of his own mind create forms according to the severe laws of the intellect.”^[39]  Ideas, in his scheme, are not descriptive or derivative, but constitutive, creative.  Knowing was for him dynamic, forward-leaning, imparting direction and form; knowledge was an aspect of the world-coming-into-being, rather than a cognitive record of the already-and-forever-existing state or content of the world.  Knowledge for him was a spiritual value.  And self-knowledge – where knowledge comes first fully into its birthright – has therefore for him an apocalyptic import: for it is the end of his philosophy and the end of all human endeavour because the beginning of life.

Man, as a creature of Reason, must draw upon “living and life-producing ideas, which shall contain their own evidence, the certainty that they are essentially once with the germinal causes in nature – his consciousness being the focus and mirror of both.”^[40]  How, Coleridge asks, are we to interpret a poem except by reference to “the charioteering genius” of the author?^[41]  For “each thing that lives has its moment of self-exposition, and so has each period of each thing, if we remove the disturbing forces of accident.”^[42]  A work of art – the Prometheus of Aeschylus as a sublime myth for example – is at once a “moment of self-exposition” and the cognitive act that brings into the world a recognition of Being.  “A man of genius, using a rich and expressive language (Greek, German, or English), is an excellent example of the ever individualizing process and dynamic being of Ideas.  What a magnificent history of acts of individual minds, sanctioned by the collective mind of the country, a language is.”^[43]  A myth, for Coleridge, is a conjunction of being and knowing, of act, identity, and self-revelation.  So, even though he regards the Prometheus as “more properly tragedy itself in the plenitude of the idea, than a particular tragic poem,” Coleridge approaches Aeschylus’s play, not with an exclusively literary interest through (say) Aristotle’s Poetics (to which he was no stranger), but regarding it as a self-evident complex symbol which would disclose, on contemplation, the order of the world which it represents and of which it is part.  The tension between Zeus and Prometheus – “the most venerable, and perhaps the most ancient, of Grecian myths”^[44] – is the dynamic activity of Reason moving towards realization: and Ananke, the Orphic Necessity, he does not see with Greek eyes, as an arbitrary and extraneous power inflicting itself wilfully upon the world: rather, he sees it in the order of the actual, for Ananke seems to be time, the tragic shadow hanging over man, the gulf that man as man can never cross.^[45]

To our present critical taste, Coleridge’s reflections on the Prometheus may seem perverse because unliterary.  But by 1825 Coleridge had to some extent renounced the centrality of art: above the order of imagination he could see the order of Reason, though the higher did not exclude the lower; and above literature stood the sacred writings.  Ten years before he had written in the Statesman’s Manual:

The histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy, and are the produce of an unenlivened generalizing understanding.  In the Scriptures they are living educts of the imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense, and organising (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. ... 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 wheels also.”^[46]

Coleridge believed that “At the annunciation of principles, of ideas, the soul of man awakes and starts up, as an exile in a far distant land at the unexpected sounds of his native language, when after long years of absence, and almost of oblivion, he is suddenly addressed in his own mother-tongue.”^[47]  With an eye prophetically direct, but in a style less lovely than the prophets’ though not less inscrutable, Coleridge saw in the Prometheus myth (in Aeschylus’s version) the pure manifestation of the living mind at its most lucid, and set about to unravel what, if he is correct and the context be correctly grasped, must in any case have been self-evidently true.