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[In Opus Maximum Coleridge elaborates his ideas on how the heart’s stimulation to love actually happens in infancy, when the child still lacks both the power of abstraction and that of speech. He describes the child’s earliest bond with the mother, up to the point when he ‘leaves the gentle teachings of his first home’ and engages in the ‘austere discipline of the understanding’ (OM, 136). On the one hand, Coleridge gives an account of the way in which the child gets the sense of its own existence from the mother’s gaze, voice, and touch: in the dark night, when the three-year-old child has fears, he entreats his mother ‘I am not there, touch me, Mother, that I may be here.’ The witness of its own being had been suspended in the loss of the mother’s presence by sight or sound or feeling’ (132). On the other hand, the mother’s pious face is also indicative of God’s presence, and the mother comes to serve as a medium between God and the child:The infant follows his mother’s face as, glowing with love and beaming protection, it is raised heavenward, and with the word ‘GOD’ it combines in feeling whatever there is of reality in the warm touch, in the supporting grasp, in the glorious countenance. […] for the infant the mother contains his own self, and the whole problem of existence as a whole; and the word ‘GOD’ is the first and one solution to the problem. (131)]
Published: Dec 21, 2015
Keywords: Opus Maximum; External Object; Moral Truth; Dark Night; Good Habit
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