ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Samuel Taylor Coleridge developed a spiritual politics based on a new theory of scriptural interpretation, and that the theory owed much to the Jewish Kabbalah. Coleridge distrust of figurative interpretation is noticeable, as is the blithe confidence with which he accepts the literal accuracy of his numerical computations. A Unitarian Coleridge was dependent on a particular reading of the Bible that denied Christ’s incarnate divinity. Defence of the authority of prophecy was necessary for rhetorical purposes of Coleridge’s own. Coleridge adapted prophetic words to suggest that the conditions required for the fulfilment of that prophecy were being met in his time, an adaptation of little import if writer and reader do not accept the prophecy as the word of God. The Trinitarian implications of the sephiroth were linked by Coleridge to the presence in Kabbalah of Pythagorean mathematics.
