ABSTRACT
David Jasper outlines the syllabus of the undergraduate degree he had developed at Bristol with the title 'Religion with Literature'. John Coulson's degree syllabus in religion and literature, where for him the key word is 'imagination' in different modes of relationship between religion and the imagination. The history of the word begins most significantly for them in the familiar distinction between the Primary and the Secondary Imagination in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Rooted in the relationship between religion and the imagination Coulson's study of literature and religion was also profoundly theological, and herein, he think, lay the key to our whole enterprise. John Coulson and John Henry Newman tried to give the study of literature and theology and religion a formal and recognized place within the academy and it was doomed to failure. Newman, like Coleridge, saw university education as a balance between functions within the society in which it is set, in what Coleridge might have described as a 'unity in multeity'.
