‘An Unrolled but Glorious Fragment’: Spirituality, Imagination, and the Legibility of Nature

Abstract

Traditions relating to the book of nature have long held that nature can be approached as something legible, as a text with spiritual meaning. Modern epistemological, cultural, and philosophical shifts called much of that approach into question. But, in this essay, I argue that Romanticism, especially as exemplified in figures such as Novalis, Wordsworth, and especially Coleridge, provides a powerful response to such disenchantment and points the way towards a non-reactionary, non-anachronistic retrieval of the legibility of nature.

1. Introduction: Is Nature Legible?

When we speak about the book of nature nowadays, we often mean something like the information encoded in our DNA or the startling capacity of our mathematics to model and predict reality. But until the late medieval period, Christian thinkers used such language to point to a richer sort of meaning in the world, not informational or mathematical intelligibility alone, but rather contemplative approaches and practices that related to the created world as if it were a kind of sacred scripture, one that required prayer and contemplation if it was to be read and heard. Arguably, this hermeneutical approach to creation has the powerful effect of unsettling the very dualisms between nature and culture that have become so problematic within the contemporary world, for if the world is indeed saturated with intelligibility, as this premodern tradition believed, if it is written as a divine text, the product of the divine ‘culture’, then it cannot be poor in meaning compared with our human products; rather than ‘a standing reserve,’ as Heidegger described our modern view of nature (Heidegger 1982), the world must be saturated with a deeper and so partly hidden meaning, one that requires participation more than mere manipulation, understanding more than mastery, and empathy and kinship more than objectification.

It may be that other cultures—one thinks of the traditional ecological knowledges among many indigenous peoples, or certain nondual traditions from outside the Qest—have retained greater resources for reverently approaching the world as expressive of deeper meaning. But it was the West that unleashed and exported the conceptual and technological engines that have so transformed the world precisely by first objectifying it. In doing so, we have acquired enormous powers but find ourselves increasingly threatened by ecological breakdown, genetic manipulation, and ubiquitous digital and algorithmic mediation.

Alongside all of this, we can also speak about a crisis of meaning and the pervasive specter of nihilism. Characterizing such broad changes is fraught and one can always cavil about the details, but it seems evident that modern Western culture coincides with (or brings about?) a change in the human experience of the world, a shift from an experience of the world as articulate and meaningful to one in which all meaning is felt to reside in discrete human minds, on the one hand, while the world seems mute, neutral, and disenchanted, on the other.1 In the middle of the last century, Carl Jung noticed the prevalence of what he characterized as a loss of kinship with the world and a correspondent elision of our emotional participation with nature:

Through scientific understanding, our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still harbors a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants, and animals… His immediate communication with nature is gone forever, and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious.2

Diagnoses of this condition often present it as untenable, if not inescapable, at least for those of us who have been formed by the traditions and cultures that constitute the modern West. Early in the Order of Things, for example, Michel Foucault argues that the modern sense of what counts as knowledge—the modern ‘episteme’ as Foucault puts it—was born precisely out of the collapse of older traditions about the communicability and legibility of the world. These older traditions reveled in discovering the world as shot through with language, a dynamic semiotic tableau of resemblance, signature, and sympathy that never ceases to round upon itself and so plunge the interpreter into ever renewed sites of deeper meaning. This renders both nature and language strange to our eyes: for if there is something inescapably linguistic in premodern understandings of nature, equally there is likewise something natural about the way they understood language. But Foucault argues that this interweaving of word and world was always fragile and so subject to dissolution since the prose of the world our predecessors sought to read was never anything but projection.3 In the wake of the disintegration of the legibility of nature as an organizing metaphor for society, modernity turns to new semiotic and epistemological strategies to understand how signs signify: representation replaces resemblance as a cleft is driven between language and nature, words and the fabric of the world.4

If this severing of language from nature were unsurpassable, then the human desire to know the world could be met at best by phenomenological or propositional adequacy, on the one hand, or postmodern despair at attaining to either, on the other. It could not consist in a reading of the world as the articulate disclosure of being, for language would exist in a realm of its own, would exist most fully in the mode of literature that does not signify anything about the world, but merely compensates for language’s signifying inadequacies. But is the severing of word and world final?

2. Word and World in German Romanticism

Admittedly, there is no going back. One cannot identically repeat the now anachronistic, premodern way of rendering of the world as God’s text, but are there alternatives within modernity itself that point towards a reweaving of word and world? In the rest of this essay, I argue that answering this question requires coming to terms with the unfinished legacy of those movements and traditions we associate with Romanticism. For, as Kate Rigby notes, it was “European writers and philosophers of the Romantic era (c. 1770–1830) … who posited that human language had emerged from, and remained indebted to, the self-organizing, self-transforming, and self-expressive capacity inherent in nature as a whole: Nature, for the Romantics, was the first poet” (Rigby 2009, p. 264). In the wake of Enlightenment rationalism and the mute mechanistic cosmologies of the Scientific Revolution, the Romantics most fully and forcefully sought to rediscover a more contemplative approach to reading the world as intrinsically communicative, meaningful, even spiritual. At the outset of the Disciples of Sais, for instance, Novalis (née Friedrich von Hardenberg) invokes:

…that great cipher which we discern written everywhere, in wings, eggshells, clouds and snow, in crystals and in stone formations, on ice-covered waters, on the inside and outside of mountains, of plants, beasts and men, in the lights of heaven, on scored discs of pitch or glass or in iron filings round a magnet, and in strange conjunctures of chance. In them we suspect a key to the magic writing, even a grammar…

(Novalis 2005, p. 3)

Here, the invocation of cipher, writing, grammar, and the book of nature appears not as part of an ontotheological proof for the existence of God, but rather as the continuation of the project, begun in some ways by Johann Georg Hamann and in others by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to overcome the bifurcation of the world into subject and object, ideal and real.5

This was not merely an aesthetic or nostalgic response to modern disenchantment but a profound reworking of what we might call the participatory ontology of Christian Platonism. As Charles Taylor puts it:

For the Romantics our power of symbolic disclosure was ontically grounded… It was derivative from the signs and symbols which were already there in the universe, the creation of God…

(Taylor 2024, p. 24)

Taylor points to a long tradition lying behind Hamann and Novalis, a tradition that reads the entire universe as a ‘body of signs.’ Mediated by figures ranging from Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and John Scottus Eriugena, to the Victorines and Bonaventure in the Middle Ages, to the theories of correspondences and signatures coming out of the Renaissance, and later the sophiology of Jakob Boehme and others, this tradition remained a potent counter-witness to the mechanized visions early modernity’s new sciences. But the Romantic appropriation of this tradition was not mere anachronism; it was not an attempt to return to the world image that modernity had discarded. Rather, as Taylor notes, while the Romantics borrowed heavily from this tradition, they also profoundly developed it by running it through the medium of the imagination. For Hamann, we come to read the signs in the book of nature not by merely cognizing them, but more profoundly by “re-creating, re-expressing them,” as Taylor puts it (Taylor 2024, p. 26). Hamann describes this recreation and re-expression as translation.

Our response to God’s signs in the world is to translate them into our own. And this, indeed, is how human language originates. This translation is human language: ‘Reden ist übersetzen’ [To speak is to translate]. The symbolic relation, with the distance it implies between two domains, between the A and the B through which it appears, applies not only to the things in the world, but also to the relation between our signs and those of nature or God.

(Taylor 2024, p. 26)

The new recognition that the Romantics brought to the Christian Platonic reading of nature was a sense that any such reading had, as it were, to take a detour through human imagination and language. We cannot simply read the text of nature and reproduce the divine grammar univocally, but must rather make our own translations. This means more fully engaging our creative capacities in any effort to read the world. While Nicholas of Cusa had already anticipated something like this picture of human knowing in his De Coniecturis, Romantics like Friedrich Hölderlin and Novalis set this creative knowing at the center of their literary and philosophical projects. For Novalis, this involved him deeply in the scientific study of the world, as well. However, in his science, as in his philosophy and his poetry, Novalis sought to realize in himself a different relation to nature, one that would restore to experience what abstraction and the buffered modern self had elided, a wholeness otherwise lost in the atomizing approaches of the new epoch.

All of this was bound up with the deliberate use of the imagination not as a source of ornamentation or fantasy, but as a truth-conducive faculty. Novalis sought, what Gabriele Rommel describes as:

the poeticization of the sciences, where cognition is conceived as a historic-genetic process and becomes freed of all systematic constraints (whether through philosophy or natural science) to thus offer a glimpse of the essence of things. The poetic view alone leads out of the chaos by estranging the familiar and by presenting the uncommon in a familiar way, that is, by romanticizing the world.

(Rommel 2004, p. 217)

For someone like Novalis, the sciences can be poeticized and the world romanticized because both we and the world are shot through with meaning and are thus expressive. “The world is a universal trope of the spirit—a symbolic picture of it.”6 Novalis presents a vision of the direct experience of life as poetry, which entails a comportment to the world as living and eloquent rather than dead and mute. Towards the end of his tragically short life, he writes, “Poetry is true idealism—contemplation of the world as one would contemplate a great mind—self-consciousness of the universe.”7 We are able to view the world poetically because the world is itself already poetry, already mind, meter, rhyme, form, lyric and so on. Or better, we only see the world rightly when we see it poetically because the world is its own singing: “the harmonic products of an Aeolian harp—nature itself.”8

3. The Legibility of the World in Wordsworth and Coleridge

During these same fateful years, on the other side of the North Sea and the English Channel, Coleridge and Wordsworth were wrestling with comparable questions about the expressive and symbolic capacities of nature. In ‘Tables Turned’, Wordsworth exhorts his listeners to take leave of their books and attend rather to the natural world:

• One impulse from a vernal wood
• May teach you more of man,
• Of moral evil and of good,
• Than all the sages can.
• $$
• Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
• Our meddling intellect
• Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
• We murder to dissect.
• $$
• Enough of Science and of Art;
• Close up those barren leaves;
• Come forth, and bring with you a heart
• That watches and receives.
(Wordsworth et al. 2013, pp. 118–19)

Its lyrical quality and the keen sense of nature as communicative, formative, and intelligible notwithstanding, ‘Tables Turned’ is rather intemperate in its dismissal of science and art. Elsewhere, however, Wordsworth saw the need for an integration of the new sciences with the poet’s more humane appreciation of the world’s depths. In the 1802 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth compares poet and scientist.

[The Poet] considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature… The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.

(Wordsworth et al. 2013, p. 106)

Wordsworth installs the poet, who is also a kind of mystic or contemplative in his vision, as the primary reader of the book of nature. But, writing after the advent of modernity and the apparent desemanticization of nature, Wordsworth recognizes the need to show how his poetic reading of the world might relate to the new sciences:

If the labours of men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself.

(Wordsworth et al. 2013, p. 107)

We ought to pay close attention, as Wordsworth certainly did, to the language here. It is all couched in the conditional. “If the labours of men of Science…” and then again, “If the time should ever come…” One might have thought that the revolution Wordsworth describes would have already been accomplished and readily acknowledged. From Galileo and Newton to Bacon, Harvey, and Boyle, early modern science had transformed the world and opened vast new arenas of learning and thought. So why the conditional? It seems that, for the poet, this is because the new sciences still needed to put on flesh and blood, to welcome sensibility (which is to say, subjectivity) into the realm of objectivity; in other words, Wordsworth is imagining a poetic partnership with Science perhaps akin to that which Goethe, Novalis, and Friedrich Schelling aimed to realize in their own, more Teutonic context.9

Of course, it was in the person of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that these two Romantic streams most merged. Wordsworth’s own interest in the sciences, such as it was, was largely stimulated by his near daily contact with Coleridge in Somersetshire throughout the first half of the ‘annus mirabilis’ year of 1798. In September of that same year, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, alongside Coleridge and his friend John Chester, journeyed from Britain to Hamburg. Soon thereafter, on 4 October 1798, the Lyrical Ballads, the first fruits of Coleridge and Wordsworth’s collaboration, was published in Britain. That winter, the friends and collaborators went their separate ways: the Wordsworths stayed in Goslar, while Coleridge left first for Ratzeburg and then Göttingen, where he began his immersion in German Idealism, especially the works of Immanuel Kant and Schelling. In The Prelude, Wordsworth sees Coleridge himself as the ideal type of the natural philosopher in and through whom the unity-in-multeity of all things is revealed:

• … Thou, my Friend! art one
• More deeply read in thy own thoughts; to thee
• Science appears but, what in truth she is,
• Not as our glory and our absolute boast,
• But as a succedaneum, and a prop
• To our infirmity. Thou art no slave
• Of that false secondary power by which
• In weakness, we create distinctions, then
• Deem that our puny boundaries are things
• Which we perceive, and not which we have made.
• To thee, unblinded by these outward shows,
• The unity of all has been reveal’d.10

As in Novalis, so too for Coleridge, the intelligibility and communicability of the world often appears in metaphors and tropes relating to the book of nature. The conversation poems of his early years regularly explore this contemplative dimension of the world’s legibility, a vision most perfectly realized in 1798’s Frost at Midnight. Addressing his infant son asleep in his arms, the poet wins his way through to a vision of the things of nature as both themselves and more than themselves.

• But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
• By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
• Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
• Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
• And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
• The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
• Of that eternal language, which thy God
• Utters, who from eternity doth teach
• Himself in all, and all things in himself.
• Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
• Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
(Coleridge 1991, p. 210)

The reciprocity of the human being and the natural world is signaled early in the stanza by the analogous wandering of both the boy and the breeze. But this initial analogy is followed quickly by the ability of the natural world to signal more than itself. The poet uses the word ‘image’ as a verb to point to a cascade of reflections—cloud and mountains, mountains and lakes—each imaging the other and pointing to the capacity of all nature to image that which lies beyond nature (Guite 2010, pp. 145–78). The outer world begins to appear not as a mute or opaque tableau, but as a diaphanous language of translucent symbols whose coherence, intelligibility, and legibility elicit and transform our own interiority.

• Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
• Whether the summer clothe the general earth
• With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
• Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
• Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
• Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
• Heard only in the trances of the blast,
• Or if the secret ministry of frost
• Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
• Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
(Coleridge 1991, p. 210)

This capacity to read the world as simultaneously disclosive of itself, of our inner being, and of the divine is a recurring theme throughout Coleridge’s prose writings, as well. In his early 1795 ‘Lectures on Revealed Religion, Its Corruptions and Political Views’, for instance, Coleridge repeats the trope multiple times: “to the pious man all Nature is thus beautiful because its every Feature is the Symbol and all its Parts the written Language of infinite Goodness and all powerful Intelligence.”11 Or again: “We see our God everywhere—the Universe in the most literal Sense is his written Language” (Coleridge 2015, p. 339). Coleridge laments the deadened and petrified hearts of those who cannot feel God’s benevolence when in the fields on a vernal noon or a summer evening. “The Omnipotent has unfolded to us the Volume of the World, that there we may read the Transcript of himself.” Coleridge returns to the theme again and again throughout his works. In the 1816 Statesman’s Manual, or The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight, Coleridge begs his reader:

Let it not weary you if I digress for a few moments to another book, likewise a revelation of God—the great book of his servant Nature. That in its obvious sense and literal interpretation it declares the Being and attributes of the Almighty Father, none but the fool in heart has ever dared to gainsay. But it has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all ages, it is the poetry of all human nature, to read it likewise in a figurative sense, defined there in correspondences and symbols of the spiritual world.

(Coleridge 1972, p. 70)

What follows over several pages is a profound reading of plant life and of the spiritual need for the human to, as it were, become-plant. “What the plant is, by an act not its own and unconsciously—that must thou make thyself to become! Must by prayer and by a watchful and unresisting spirit join at least with the preventive and assisting grace to make thyself…” (Coleridge 1972, p. 71). Similar themes relating to the reading of the Book of Nature appear in 1825’s Aids to Reflection, in the Opus Maximum he never brought to completion, and in countless notes and marginalia (Coleridge 1993, 2002b). Throughout these works, Coleridge insists that all knowledge of nature, all knowledge of any sort, aims towards this vision that sees all things as symbols of a mystery ever more fully in-and-beyond them. At the end of the ‘Essays on Method’ that bring to a close the second section of the Friend, Coleridge draws a memorable picture of someone learning to read for the first time, an image of what it is like for us when we learn to read the book of nature. As one acquires the capacity to read, the book is unsealed; “the depth is opened out; he communes with the spirit of the volume as a living oracle. The words become transparent and he sees them as though he saw them not” (Coleridge 1969, p. 51). Several years later, commenting on this passage in the Philosophical Lectures of 1818, Coleridge draws his conclusion:

And then too shall we be in that state to which science in all its forms is gradually leading us. Then will the other great Bible of God, the Book of Nature, become transparent to us, when we regard the forms of matter as words, as symbols, valuable only as being the expression, an unrolled but yet a glorious fragment, of the wisdom of the Supreme Being.

(Coleridge 2000, p. 541)

In Coleridge and Wordsworth, as in Novalis and the German Romantics, we have what amounts to a striking retort to Foucault’s claim that the unweaving of word and world is a fait accompli. But, one might still ask, is not all this romanticizing of science and nature a form of projection? What does any of this have to do with knowledge and truth? One response, to which Foucault himself was attracted, is to dismiss the concern with truth altogether. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes:

‘Is it true that God is everywhere?’ a little girl asked her mother; ‘I find that indecent!’—a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has grounds for not showing her grounds.

(Nietzsche 2001, p. 8)

While neither Coleridge nor Novalis would have been content with such a rejoinder, Coleridge was not himself immune to skeptical doubts. Where Frost at Midnight reverently evokes the eternal language that God utters in creation, Dejection: An Ode begins on a very different note. Indeed, the entire ode can be read as a critical interrogation of the Romantic sense of nature’s vitality and communicability. In the second stanza of Dejection, for instance, Coleridge finds himself gazing at the western sky as night descends. The pathos of the moment lies in the juxtaposition of the outwardly beautiful onset of evening and the poet’s own blank, internal stasis. He ought to be moved but is not.

• And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!
• And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
• That give away their motion to the stars;
• Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
• Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
• Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
• In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
• I see them all so excellently fair,
• I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
(Coleridge 1991, p. 393)

The poet has become like a machine, a camera obscura, reduced to the activity of mere seeing without the living feeling that ought to accompany it. Dead inside and yet living, this is the state of dejection in which all communicability is lost precisely because communication requires the inner communion of lives through participation in what they hold in common. Where there is no inner life there can perforce be no communication. In his magnificent essay, ‘The Harp and the Camera’, Owen Barfield argues that:

the camera is a caricature of imagination…It used to be said that the camera cannot lie. But in fact it always does lie. Just because it looks only in that immediate way, the camera looks always at never into what it sees. I suspect that Medusa did very much the same.

(Barfield 2006, p. 83)

As Dejection unfolds throughout the subsequent stanzas, Coleridge comes to see the role that the imagination must play in any experience of nature’s vitality:

• …We receive but what we give
• And in our life alone does Nature live;
• Ours her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
(Coleridge 1991, p. 395)

How should we read these lines? Is Coleridge conceding that the imagination merely projects life, meaning, and vitality onto the outer world? Is this the repudiation of the hopes expressed in Frost at Midnight? One might be inclined to read it that way were the poem to end after the fourth stanza, but Stanza V takes a surprising turn. Suddenly, the theme of dejection is overcome by an encomium to Joy.

• Life, and Life’s effluence, cloud at once and shower,
• Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
• Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
• A new Earth and new Heaven,
• Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud—
• Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud—
• We in ourselves rejoice!
• And thence flows all that charms ear or sight,
• All melodies the echoes of that voice,
• All colours a suffusion from that light.
(Coleridge 1991, p. 395)

Joy is a technical term for Coleridge, Wordsworth, and many of the Romantics. More than an emotion or merely a sense of inner well-being, joy refers to a transformation of one’s way of being. In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth connects joy and one’s capacity to see into a living world:

• While with an eye made quiet by the power
• Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
• We see into the life of things….
(Wordsworth et al. 2013, p. 106)

In his Notebooks, Coleridge reflects on this passage from Tintern Abbey. Why does Joy allow us to see not at but into the life of things? Coleridge’s response is to connect the Wordsworthian experience of joy with the progressive diminishment of the egoic self and its prefabricated ideas about the world. When we think the world through concepts, we necessarily bifurcate the world into subjects and objects.

By deep feeling we make our Ideas dim—& this is what we mean by our Life—ourselves. I think of the Wall—it is before me, a distinct Image—here. I necessarily think of the Idea & the Thinking I as two distinct & opposite Things.12

It is not that Coleridge wants to get rid of our ideas, for to do so would be to plunge us into a world without distinctions and so without the finite particularities that alone mediate the infinite. But he wants us to see through our ideas, to look alongside them rather than at them. He continues:

Now let me think of myself—of the thinking Being—the Idea becomes dim whatever it be—so dim that I know not what it is—but the Feeling is deep & steady—and this I call I—identifying the Percipient & the Perceived.

(Coleridge 1957, p. 921)

What Coleridge here describes as a dimming of the idea might be better described as making the idea diaphanous. The result is the reunion of subject and object, of the perceiver and the perceived, first in oneself perhaps, but then in one’s experience of the world. This is why the eschatological power of joy can yield a new heaven and a new earth. It is joy, not nature alone, that reunites the self and world precisely because joy breaks the echo chamber of the ego and the spiritual suffocation that keeps us listening only ever to our finite egoic selves. Joy, as Owen Barfield writes, was Coleridge’s name for “that sense of blissful union with the being of nature” (Barfield 1989, p. 55). Under the impress of joy, Wordsworth spoke of “the mighty world of eye and ear—both what they half create, and what perceive” and of reading divinity, morality, and intelligibility “in nature and the language of the sense” (Wordsworth et al. 2013, p. 107). The quieting of the ego places one in a posture of active waiting, attending to the movement of the Spirit that is the source of creation both in the world and in the shaping power of the imagination.13

4. Conclusions: Symbols and the Supplement of the Imagination

This capacity to wait upon both the world and our imagination is integral to the discovery of all true symbols. Where the understanding produces concepts cut to its own size, the Imagination–Reason in its most exalted mood–can birth symbols. As the world’s opacity dims, nature is rediscovered as eloquent and symbolic, or so Coleridge thought. Arguably, though, to see the world in this way is more than just an elective Romantic affinity; as the anthropologist of religion Tanya Luhrmann argues, such abilities are integral to faith and spirituality. After decades of ethnographic and experimental study across a diversity of groups and cultures of what we often take to be non-ordinary realms of experience—hearing voices, seeing visions, experiences of the supernatural, or the world of psychosis—Luhrmann argues that such experiences are deeply rooted in what we would describe as the imagination. In How God Becomes Real, Luhrmann writes:

Faith is about the mind. It is about the ontological attitude people take toward what must be imagined—not because gods and spirits are necessarily imaginary, but because they cannot be known with the senses, and people of faith must allow those invisible others to feel alive to them.

You must be able to look at a glorious forest, and see not just an ecosystem but intentions. You must be able to be moved by a sunset, and to think not only of the structure of light, but of a maker. You must allow yourself to move beyond the bare world and trust that there is more to the world than you see.

(Luhrmann 2020, p. 79)

I am not suggesting that Luhrmann is offering a metaphysical interpretation here. She retains a prudent silence about the ontological status of these experiences. Nevertheless, she insists that if the invisible world is to be experienced, it requires imaginative supplement. Recall, however, that the invisible world is not only the realm of faerie, of gods and goddesses, or the sacramental consubstantiality of creation; it is also the domain of persons, ideas, moral sources, and the vitality that courses through the life of things. In other words, it is not only the seemingly fantastical or the religious or the spiritual that requires such imaginative supplement. The very warp and woof of ordinary moral lives demand it. One does not have to be a Romantic poet or a German philosopher to see the world as symbol. Indeed, many of the subjects in Luhrmann’s anthropological studies would be hard-pressed either to define or to articulate the sophisticated epistemological processes through which the supplement of the imagination becomes truth-conducive. But one does require the efforts of a Coleridge or a Barfield to respond to modern complaint that these ordinary and sometimes extraordinary uses of the imagination can only lead us astray.

For it is, of course, always possible to dismiss appeals to the imagination as fanciful or deluded. Now, however, we can see that to do is to beg a question about the nature of the world. If the imagination is required not only to see divine beings or to find ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything,’14 but also to see persons of any sort, to say nothing of goodness, beauty, and meaning, then to refuse the imagination as ingredient in the perception of the real is something far graver than an act of epistemic hygiene. Must everything that really is be located in a catalog of the world consisting only of elemental particles and fundamental physical forces, a collection of things that can only be described mathematically and quantitatively rather than poetically and qualitatively? Is our feeling for the good, the true, and the beautiful alien to the cosmos? If not, then there is nothing in principle that prevents us from attending to the re-enchanted view of the world that Coleridge and his fellow-travelers commend to us. It is sometimes objected, as the young C. S. Lewis did to Owen Barfield, that the problem is not ontological but epistemological (Barfield et al. 2015). Whatever other virtues it may have, so the objection goes, the imagination does not mediate truth or knowledge to us. Truth requires judgment and judgment requires univocal terms, not Coleridgean symbols. The symbol is accordingly non-cognitive (cf. Adey 1978). But this is only the case if knowledge is exhausted by reflexive articulation, in other words, if we only know what we can clearly say. Descartes thought as much, but since the discovery of the unconscious in 1900 and its anticipation by Romanticism more than a century before, we have good reason to think that we in fact do know far more than we are able to say. Moreover, as Michael Polanyi argues in accord with Barfield and Coleridge among others, it is not only the case that we know more than we can tell but also that “we can tell nothing without relying on our awareness of things we may not be able to tell” (Polanyi 1964, p. x). If so, then there is nothing noncognitive in the appeal to symbols and the imagination. They express what we know, sense, and participate, but can never exhaustively articulate. Moreover, as Barfield chided the young Lewis, a strictly univocal term would be nothing more than a logical form and so would fundamentally be about nothing; it would have formal but no semantic content (Barfield et al. 2015).

If the imagination is to be understood as non-trivially truth-conducive, it can do so only insofar as it encounters the world as symbolic.15 What does it mean to see the world as symbolic? In his mature philosophy of the symbol, Coleridge draws a sharp distinction between symbolism and allegory. Allegories are more like codes or ciphers; they express external relations between things that could be just as well described in literal, non-allegorical language. The symbol, however, reveals dimensions of reality that could not be encountered otherwise. Coleridge coined the term ‘tautegorical’ to express this relation.

The symbol does not point to something else but rather partakes in that reality which it symbolizes. The imagination opens itself to the being of what it contemplates, actively dwells with it, attends to it, all the while refusing the easy mechanical associations the mind might otherwise throw over things. In this active-receptivity, the imagination dilates, as it were, what it knows and so comes to see more in the known thing than the senses first disclosed, ultimately to see wholeness of all things in each thing, the mirror of our deepest sources, and the movements of God behind it all (Pickstock 2020). But while this vision can be described or gestured at, it cannot be exhaustively said. Accordingly, the symbol constitutes what Percy Bysshe Shelley described as a ‘subtler language’: only through the symbol can we reach what the symbol participates.16 There is no non-symbolic route to what the symbol communicates, which is why finding the appropriate symbol is so difficult, and also why the symbol always partially conceals what it at the same time partially reveals (cf. Taylor 2007, p. 357). As Coleridge explains in his Lay Sermons:

Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses… On the other hand a Symbol (ὁ ἔστιν ἄει ταυτηγόρικον) is characterized by the translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.

(Coleridge 1972, p. 30)

Coleridge provides another definition of the symbol while discussing the interpretation of scripture in the Statesman’s Manual. Echoing Aquinas, Coleridge notes that the scriptures speak of God by means of analogy rather than metaphor. Beyond Aquinas, however, Coleridge adds:

these analogies are the material, or (to speak chemically) the base, of Symbols and symbolical expressions; the nature of which is always tautegorical, that is, expressing the same subject but with a difference, in contra-distinction from metaphors and similitudes, that are always allegorical, that is expressing a different subject but with a resemblance.

(Coleridge 1993, p. 206)

Although we tend to think of signs as conventional, Coleridge sees symbols as natural (Cutsinger 1987). Symbols point to the presence of unity in multeity, of all in each and each in all. We can think of this relation as holographic, though even the hologram is only itself a symbol of what Coleridge has in mind here. Not only are symbols natural rather than conventional, but they also do not point to anything else. This can be easily misunderstood. Symbols do point beyond themselves, but they do not point to something other than themselves. To point to some other thing would be to collapse the symbol into a mere metaphor or a cipher. The symbol, however, points to the infinite Unity or Wholeness in which it finitely participates. Because this wholeness cannot be captured, modeled, or even fully seen, the symbolic is its most rigorous re-presentation, the appearing of truth through that which also conceals the truth (Pickstock 2020, pp. 150–52).

What are we to make of all this today? Does the path Romantics like Coleridge opened lead towards a viable, non-anachronistic way to re-encounter the legibility of the world? In a recent essay, Jonathan Martin Ciraulo warns against theological appropriations of Romanticism. While he allows that the Romantics do express a greater openness to sacramentality than the Enlightenment philosophes, Ciraulo claims the re-enchantment they achieve is merely a kind of aestheticism and that their sacraments are merely “sacraments of the self” (Ciraulo 2024, p. 357). But while that may be the case for some of the figures Ciraulo focuses upon, it is hardly true for Coleridge and for those Romantics still rooted in the Christian Platonic heritage. For Coleridge, the imagination does not render the world a sacrament of the self, but rather discloses the real symbolic dimension in all things it truly beholds. Only the imagination can apprehend symbols, for the imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates” the materialistic logic of solid bodies that otherwise holds us captive. The imagination renders things translucent not to some other opaque mode of existence but to the common source of life and light in all things, the source of mind and world that fuels their nuptial relationship. The true imagination, which Coleridge famously distinguishes from the fancy, functions in the middle-voice: it simultaneously receives that which it also projects. This is especially true for what Coleridge calls the Primary Imagination, “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception… a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”17 The Primary Imagination adds to what the senses receive and synthesizes the meaningful world we perceive; it is the unconscious but active structuring of the phenomenal world. The secondary imagination is like the Primary in kind, but now coincident with human free will. Whether primary or secondary, the imagination is projective, but not self-assertive or egoistic. Coleridge sees such self-assertion as belonging rather to the realm of Fancy, an operation of the egoic self that reifies the divide between self and world, subject and object. The imagination, by contrast, is transpersonal. It is simultaneously projective and participatory.

Barfield illustrates this through a later episode in the Biographia Literaria, when Coleridge contends that “the Poet should paint to the imagination, not the fancy.” As an exemplary instance of the former, Coleridge commends Milton’s description of a banyan tree in Paradise Lost. As Coleridge writes:

This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura.

(Coleridge 1983, II.128)

Earlier I described the camera as an emblem of dejection, the picture of a soul that looks only at but never into things. But in his surprising invocation of the camera obscura as a metaphor for Milton’s imagination, Coleridge redeems the image of the camera, transforming it “from a caricature into a true emblem of the imagination” (Barfield 2006, p. 88). In this true emblem, it is not the camera that projects its capacities onto the world, freezing all things it sees like the Gorgon’s head. Instead, Milton’s imagination projects only insofar as it also receives. We must bring an imaginative supplement to the world if we are to perceive it at all, and certainly if we are to perceive it as true, meaningful, even spiritual. The book of nature not only cries out to be read but to be interpreted. As Barfield writes:

For us there must be projection, and the question for [us] is whether it is to be a projection of nothingness or a projection of the sun-spirit, the spirit of light.

(Barfield 2006, p. 88)

The legibility of the world depends on our capacity to approach it with imagination, reverence and even something like prayer, for nature appears as symbol only when we realize within ourselves those same fountains that bring forth all things around us. Or rather, we learn to read the book of nature precisely insofar as we come to recognize that nature is not built up around us but put forth through us, a recognition that requires we risk our own transformation in the process.18 As Coleridge wrote, several years after the publication of Dejection:

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim- glimmering [through] the dewy window, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phænomenon were the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature/It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is Λογος, the Creator! <and the Evolver!>.

(Coleridge 2002a, p. 88)