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Imagine you are told to come up with the perfect metaphor for a human being. What would you choose? Something machine-like, where a computational brain runs the biological clockwork of the body? Or a caged bird, for a soul in a body that is waiting to be freed? Perhaps a plant, something starts as a seed and is ever growing throughout its life, nourished or malformed by its environment? It is a more important question than a mere thought exercise. In her book You Are a Tree, which explores the fruit and limits of metaphors, Joy Clarkson points out that metaphors “shape how we understand ourselves and how we act in the world” and so “there are metaphors that can damage and exhaust and metaphors that relieve and revitalize, redirecting action toward health.” ¹

". . . he saw the rise of our modern scientific understanding of the world, the migration of the population from rural to urban centres, great increases in economic disparity, the height of the slave trade, wars and revolutions in Europe, and significant shifts in the way people thought of God, nature, and our relationship to both." Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet, philosopher, journalist, critic, and theologian who thought a lot about how human beings are imagined. By that I mean how his culture, in 19th-century England, defined personhood and how this was a rapidly shifting concept. Coleridge lived from 1772–1834. In his lifetime he saw the rise of our modern scientific understanding of the world, the migration of the population from rural to urban centres, great increases in economic disparity, the height of the slave trade, wars and revolutions in Europe, and significant shifts in the way people thought of God, nature, and our relationship to both.

One of Coleridge’s great concerns was dehumanization. The slave trade was the most egregious example of this, as the very concept of owning another person was a violation of the imago dei. But Coleridge saw the dehumanization of slavery much more broadly, as something that debased the slave, the enslaver, and those who benefit from this economy. He also decried laws that kept the price of food high, that kept children working in factories, and that kept the poor entrapped in workhouses. But Coleridge saw these societal injustices as symptoms of a much deeper disease. He sought out their root cause, which was in the collective imagination of England. Too often, he wrote, people were treated as cogs in the great machine of the British Empire. More deeply than this, there was a theological turn to seeing the universe as one great machine, set in motion by a divine clockmaker who was no longer involved with creation. In this cosmic view, the purpose of a human being is merely to be a piece of that machine.

Coleridge rejected this view of the cosmic machine. He placed this worldview against the imagination of the Psalms. The machine is a cold system, according to Coleridge, which strips humanity of freedom, moral responsibility, imagination, and ultimately of inherent dignity and value. The Psalms give “each Thing . . . a Life of its own” while also bringing them into the community of “one Life” found in their Creator. ² What follows in the rest of this essay are five ways that Coleridge imagined the human being as something more than a piece of machinery. Rather, the person is something of a paradox, being both a finite creature and something set apart in creation.

One: The Universal Imago Dei

In Coleridge’s essay “The Theory of Life,” he imagines a cosmos that unfolds under the divine guidance behind all of life. Time and space give birth to the possibility of geometric shapes and movement, to the elements, to minerals, and eventually to the entire natural world. Each movement forward is more complex and more individualized than the last. But the creation of humanity required divine intervention, where God “breathed into him a living soul.” ³ Coleridge further defines this addition as “self-consciousness with self-government,” bringing moral responsibility and freedom into the elements of personhood. 

The sacred distinction of humanity within creation is both universal and particular for Coleridge. It is universal in that it applies to all people—a belief that informed Coleridge’s opposition to the slave trade and to child labour. But it is particular in that each person is truly individual. There is something in every “Man and Woman” that “can be understood, and a somewhat that cannot be understood.” ⁴ Each soul contains a mystery, possibly known fully by their creator. Because we stand in both commonality and mystery with one another, Coleridge urges his readers to “reverence the Individuality of those you live among.” ⁵ Even as he fully acknowledged sin and human frailty, Coleridge called others to a more holy vision, asking, in Anya Taylor’s words, what “religious beliefs might foster ‘humanness’ and banish the mechanization, fragmentation, and brutalization that are destroying us.” ⁶ The imago dei, possessed by all people without qualification, is his answer.

Two: Creatures of Imagination

So how do human beings come to know the world they live in? Coleridge lived in a time that celebrated reason and the only true way of knowing the universe, and the scientific method was yielding incredible advancements in knowledge and technology. It needs to be said that he did not oppose science—he read widely in biology, chemistry, and medicine, and was friends with some of the leading scientists of his day. But Coleridge was unsettled by the totality of empirical methods, and the ways that knowledge was being used for purely utilitarian ends. 

". . . but perception is not enough—we also need to find and make meaning out of what we are seeing. The imagination is what both apprehends and creates this meaning." In response, Coleridge attempted to upend the way people talked about “knowing.” Reason, he argued, comes only from the divine logos, analogous to the light that enables our eyes to see. This is important, but perception is not enough—we also need to find and make meaning out of what we are seeing. The imagination is what both apprehends and creates this meaning. One of Coleridge’s most well-known pieces of prose writing is his definition of the imagination in his Biographia Literaria:

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. ⁷

". . . for Coleridge, it is not enough to know the movement of the planets, or the structure of a bird’s wing, or of the existence of the water molecule, if this knowledge does not lead back to God and divine love." The primary imagination works with perception, finding order and making meaning out of the world that God has created. The secondary imagination is the artistic mode that people often associate with the world, although Coleridge still maintains its link to the divine, working with the primary imagination to “re-create” creation as works of art. And so, for Coleridge, it is not enough to know the movement of the planets, or the structure of a bird’s wing, or of the existence of the water molecule, if this knowledge does not lead back to God and divine love.

Three: Mutually Implicated 

Despite his high value on the individual, Coleridge saw human beings as essentially bound up with one another. Daniel Hardy calls this “mutual implication,” which extends to how Coleridge saw the relationship between bodies of knowledge, humans and creation, and humans with one another. ⁸ What one does will always affect the other. In his notebooks, Coleridge referred to this as the cornerstone of his system, that there is “no I without a Thou: no Thou without a Law from Him, to whom I and Thou stand in the same relation. Distinct Self-knowledge begins with the Sense of Duty toward my Neighbour.” ⁹ This deceptively simple entry affirms the individual, but only as something that can exist within a community. It affirms self-knowledge but makes this self-knowledge dependent just as much on knowing what we are not as what we are. And it affirms equality, as each individual stands in the same relation before their common Creator. 

Four: Caught in Mystery

Coleridge’s poetry adds further dimensions to how he imagined what it means to be human. Above, we saw how he wrote that the human person contains dimensions that we can understand but also a “somewhat” that cannot be understood. He extended this “somewhat” to the realm of nature, and his poems often depict the mystery that human beings may get caught up in. In the epigraph to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge quotes from Thomas Burnet, who wrote, “I easily believe that in the universe the invisible Natures are more numerous than the visible ones . . . . What do they do? In what places do they dwell?” ¹⁰ The poem that follows is one of ghost ships, angels, spirits, the embodiments of death and life-in-death, all centring on an immortal mariner who is cursed to tell and retell his tale.

"The uncanny and the preternatural are part of the human experience in Coleridge’s thought because they are what we cannot explain about the world and cannot explain about ourselves."The uncanny and the preternatural are part of the human experience in Coleridge’s thought because they are what we cannot explain about the world and cannot explain about ourselves. C.S. Lewis echoed this sentiment when he wrote of faeries in the medieval worldview, that “they intrude a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into a universe that is in danger of being a little too self explanatory, too luminous.” ¹¹ Sometimes Coleridge called this “the Vast.” There is danger in this vastness, but it also contains an element of hope. What is possible may be beyond what we can reason or even imagine. 

Five: Friendship with God

Perhaps the greatest impossible truth for Coleridge is that mortal, finite, sinful humans could be friends with God. Not only that, but God actively seeks out loving relationship with his creation. This ran counter to the fashionable philosophical and theological thought of his day, where God was seen as a useful concept, but any aspect of divine personhood was dismissed. The Trinity was viewed as a nonsensical doctrine, best left to a more primitive era. 

Coleridge, in contrast, sought to recover Trinitarian doctrine as it presented a God who was inherently relational. His unfinished theological opus was to be an exploration of the Trinity, divine love, and the Gospel of John. God was not an impersonal force that could be used to explain a clockwork universe—He was three persons in one, who sent the Incarnate Son to earth in order to restore his beloved creation back to himself. The highest religious practice, Coleridge wrote, was prayer. His late notebooks are filled with his prayers for a stronger faith, for the coming of God’s kingdom, for purity in his desires and imagination, for relief from his physical and mental suffering, and for the gift of “that best heavenly Friend, Christ Jesus.” ¹² And so, Coleridge imagined that the human being, as frail as they were, could nevertheless reach out to the infinite and holy God, and that God would reach back in love. 

This posture of reverencing one another, of standing humbly before the mystery of creation, and of seeking and enjoying friendship with God, is at the heart of Coleridge’s imagination of what it means to be human.