This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, volume 48, number 01 (2025).
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Psychologist William James, in his famous essay “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” includes an anecdote about a woman who believes the earth rests upon a rock. When asked upon what the rock itself rests, she replies that it rests upon another rock and that rock upon another. When pressed to say upon what the final rock rests, she declares, “it was ‘rocks all the way down.’”1 James employs this humorous anecdote to help him distinguish the implications of a material account of being from a moral (or theistic) account. On the materialist account, insists James, the world can have no absolute moral imperatives. On the moral account, imperatives inhere no matter how deep into being material causes take us. “[H]e who believes this to be a radically moral universe,” says James, “must hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate should or on a series of shoulds ‘all the way down.’”2 The philosophical difference makes an ethical difference because one who holds a materialist account is free to adjust his or her behavior to whatever the circumstances make convenient, while “the absolute moralist…when his interests clash with the world is not free to gain harmony by sacrificing the ideal interests [the moral imperatives].”3 As a moral account of being, the Christian tradition makes absolute claims upon its followers. For example, both Scripture and tradition teach that the world is the gift of God who — out of love — hospitably grants all things their being. As bearers of His image and recipients of His grace, He asks a similar hospitality of us — even when it requires sacrifice.
In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a gothic narrative poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge4 depicts a character who refuses to be hospitable in a moment of dire need. Though technically a Christian, he senselessly kills an albatross because he is afraid the food it eats will deplete his ship’s limited resources. In the ensuing horror and his redemption from it, he learns there are more than material forces at work in the world, and that love is the fundamental thread binding all things to each other and to God. Entwining poetic sensibility with theological insight, Coleridge crafts a tale that suggests divine love is always at play, that the same God who grounds being also sustains it — gratuitously — and makes it fecund.
The poem begins when a strange old man with glittering eyes interrupts one of three young guests on their way to a wedding. A former mariner, the old man immediately begins a tale of horror on the high seas. Irritated by the old man’s interference, in part because he has ceremonial responsibilities as the bridegroom’s next of kin, the Wedding Guest (the young man’s appellation in the poem) insults the Mariner, commanding, “Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”5 This rash invective frames him as arrogant, condescending, and inhospitable. Yet he cannot break the Mariner’s hold, whose “glittering eye” retains a kind of supernatural grip upon him. Thus, while the Wedding Guest’s friends attend the wedding, he remains outside, compelled — despite himself — to hear the tale.6
The story begins in apparent innocence, the Mariner enlisting the word “merrily” to describe the mood on the ship as he and his shipmates depart7— a merriness that will appear naive when these sailors finally face the evil in their hearts. As they pass the equator in their journey south, the weather, initially smooth and easy, turns ominous as powerful winds blow them farther south than they intended to go, into an icy world of eerie, inhuman noises. This world, to all appearances, takes no thought for them except insofar as it might devour them.
And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along….
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken —
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!8
Thus does the naive merriment with which this trip began turn to dread. Like the sailor in the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer,” these men fear they are “Alone in a world blown clear of love.”9 Yet, as their ship creeps through the dangerous ice “mast-high… / As green as emerald,”10 an albatross crosses their path, alighting on their mast. Simultaneously, the wind changes, turning them northward toward home. So joyful are the crew to see another living creature that “as if it had been a Christian soul / [They] hail it in God’s name.”11 For nine days, they host the bird, sharing their food with generous hospitality, until the Mariner, in fear lest it should deprive him of sustenance, kills it.12
With the death of the bird the fog lifts, which despite the good wind had hindered their navigation. The Mariner’s shipmates, who at first condemned the killing because they thought the bird brought the breeze, now approve it as they conclude that it “brought the fog and mist. / ’Twas right, said they, such birds to slay, / That bring the fog and mist.”13 Grounding their moral reasoning on simple self-interest (as well as on a post hoc fallacy), the ship’s crew implicate themselves in the Mariner’s crime, which unfolded from his fear that scarce resources rather than divine hospitality sustains his existence. So far as he is concerned, the albatross, by partaking of the ship’s limited resources, is a competitor, his rival in the struggle for survival. So far as they are concerned, the albatross, by complicating their journey, merits no share in the gift of being.
Upon the bird’s death, the poem takes a dark turn. Playing upon the sailor’s fear of doldrums, those stretches of sea near the equator where a sailing ship might be stranded for weeks or months on a windless ocean, Coleridge strands the Mariner and his crew in a strange and “silent sea.”14 This sea soon becomes a hell-scape, wherein each sailor suffers the unforeseen but horrifying implications of his crime. Stationary upon saltwater, their stores depleted, they endure the scarcity they fear.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.15
So brutally dehydrated are they that even speech — the lingual foundations of human relationships — becomes impossible.
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.16
Thus, each man becomes existentially isolated too, imprisoned within himself. Nature’s bounty no longer sustains them, as that which is basic to human life — fresh water — runs out.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.17
A sea without wind is a sea without rain; only saltwater remains. Meanwhile, the desolating heat at the burning heart of the equator amplifies their isolation from both natural and divine goodness.18 So reduced are these men by thirst that, when they absolutely must speak, they suck their own blood, enacting upon themselves the predatory practices of vampires.
Their horror increases when the Mariner spies a ghost ship, a skeleton-boat crewed only by Death and a terrifying spirit-woman.
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.19
As the two compete in a macabre game of dice, Death wins the lives of 250 crew members who “With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, / …dropped down one by one.”20 But Life-in-Death wins the Mariner, who is the preferred prize. He must do penance more horrible than dying by remaining alive while surrounded by death.21 His vision of scarcity has flowered into the hatred it implies. Though he consciously feared and killed only the bird, the logic of his fear makes even his shipmates his rivals. If the albatross, by partaking of a limited store of resources, is a threat to the Mariner’s life, then so are they. Indeed, anyone is a threat who depletes the stores upon which his life depends. Thus, to remain alive while all around him die is to get exactly what his action implies he wants.
But life without companionship is life without meaning: existence becomes an insufferable burden. “For,” says the Mariner, “the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky / Lay like a load on my weary eye, / And the dead were at my feet.”22 Neither joy nor gratitude nor hope invest him as he looks upon the sea, but hate and dread and loathing. The sea creatures appear revolting too: “Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea.”23 Having begrudged a fellow creature its part in the goods of life, destroying it as if its life had no value, the Mariner now inhabits a world without fellowship. Whatever remains alive presents itself to his desiccated imagination as monstrous and repellent, all things appearing loathsome because fear prevents him from receiving the world as a divine gift.
Not only is he deprived of human companionship, not only is he exiled from his fellow creatures, he is also exiled from the fellowship of the saints and from God. His isolation an excommunication, he endures a state of being immune to divine hospitality.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony….
I looked to Heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.24
Unable to pray either to God or the saints, he discovers the fountain of love dried up that should unite him to God and humanity. Like the Satan of Paradise Lost who makes out of heaven a hell, the Mariner, having turned against the given world, now inhabits a world turned inside-out, a world abominable and wretched, devoid of the love that would otherwise illumine it with beauty.
Until the subtle grace that has guided the Mariner’s journey all along turns the poem in a new direction. Adrift seven days in a burning seascape surrounded by dead bodies, the Mariner suddenly notices a shift in the light. The imagery of sulfurous rot gives way to the cooling colors of early spring, pitched to a beneficent supernatural intensity.25 As the loathing he feels for the water snakes dissipates, their sliminess also dissipates. Now they appear “Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,” while the light, says the Mariner, “Fell off [their backs] in hoary flakes.”26 Unconsciously, he blesses them.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The self same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.27
His exile from God rescinded, the Mariner can finally pray, while the curse breaks to which his crew subjected him by hanging the albatross around his neck. Immediately comes both wind and rain to refresh his parched body and move his ship toward home. For the first time in a week, he is able to sleep, this slumber a gracious gift from “Mary Queen….[who] sent the gentle sleep from heaven / That slid into my soul.”28 Recalled to the fellowship of the living in a world created and sustained by divine hospitality, he can finally rest, yielding to the care of One greater than himself.
Thus, the turning point of the poem yields the meaning of the poem. Had the Mariner been abandoned in his plight, his fear of scarcity would be justified, as would the hatred of being that it implies. His experience would have proved that there is only so much life, so much love, so much good in the world, and that each of these must be hoarded lest it be too quickly used up. He would have learned that condemnation and fear, loathing and death are ultimate. But he is not abandoned; he is redeemed, by One who loves him and shows that love by awakening a responsive love in his own soul. The Mariner partakes of God’s love by way of his own love for the creatures of the deep, from whom he asks nothing but to celebrate their living beauty. The nature of his world has changed because the nature of his soul has changed. Now he understands that to be without love is to be without God; that to be without God is to be within hell. To be delivered from hell is to be changed within — not place but person makes the profounder difference.
Still, Coleridge is a moral realist. Although the Mariner is recalled from death — both physical and spiritual — he remains responsible for the death of the albatross and culpable in the deaths of 250 men. Any facile expiation of that crime would be foolishly blithe. Therefore, true to his Anglo-Catholic faith, Coleridge reveals that though the Mariner “hath penance done, / …[he] penance more will do.”29 Nor does the gothic and supernatural quality of his experience end here. The bodies of the dead men, one of whom is his nephew, are possessed of angelic spirits, by whose aid he completes the circuit of his journey, arriving home to the same lighthouse, kirk (church) and country which he left.30 His point of return is his point of departure, though he himself has changed.
Although the ship quickly and mysteriously sinks, taking with it all evidence of his crime, the Mariner, as he repatriates, seeks the sacrament of confession and accepts the burden of a daunting penance.31 He wanders the lanes and roads of his country, “wrenched,” at specific times, “With a woeful agony,”32 which demands he tell his tale to a specific person, just as he has the Wedding Guest. To be selected to hear this tale is, of course, to be judged; for selection means one needs its lesson. But to be judged in this way is also to be graced. For the telling presumes the listener might change his ways, to become the hospitable conduit of divine love that the tale implies he ought to be.
Thus, the poem takes a didactic turn as the Mariner tells the Wedding Guest the moral of his story.
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.33
The Mariner has learned that he cannot circumscribe a domain in which love does not adhere, a domain given solely to pragmatic, supposedly realist, ethics. Either the virtue of love forms one’s soul and directs one’s behavior toward all creatures in all circumstances, or self-interest eventually excludes one from the fellowship of being.
In the Christian tradition, to lose one’s place at the wedding feast is to lose one’s place in the Kingdom of Heaven, when the redemption of the world is complete and God — so to speak — marries humanity. Coleridge, formed in this tradition, prevents the Wedding Guest from attending the wedding. Since, upon conclusion of the tale, he “Turned from the bridegroom’s door,” to rise the next day “A sadder and a wiser man,” we must consider the import.34 In his lesson to the Wedding Guest, the Mariner raises communion in the Church higher than communion in marriage, the former sweeter than the latter, as if the foundational relationship of human community — marital love — is itself grounded by an even more primordial love — that of God in His redemptive intention toward the whole created order.35
On this kind of love the Wedding Guest must form his soul. The tale has revealed him unfit for the wedding feast, both the human one to which he was invited and the divine one for which he is intended. In turning from the bridegroom’s door, the Wedding Guest confronts his own spiritual isolation, an isolation more profound than comes from missing a kinsman’s wedding — who is likely his brother, to whose children he will stand in the same relation as the Mariner did to his own brother’s son, for whose death aboard the ship, his inhospitable act made him culpable. Like the Mariner, the Wedding Guest must become worthy to attend the wedding feast. Yet the slow nature of spiritual and moral growth requires that Coleridge not show the change completed. The Wedding Guest has far to travel on the same road all Christian pilgrims travel — from divine unlikeness to divine likeness — as we make our way through life.
If Coleridge is right, then, however far down material causes go, love goes further still. Though we may see only the rocks, this poem reminds us that the source of the material order is Himself an infinite, immaterial font of generosity. Thus, it is not the gift of material creation itself that justifies and requires our answering generosity but the Giver of it. However little we may have, we offer hospitality, even when circumstances are dire, not because things like food, water, clothing, or medicine cannot run out. Rather, we offer hospitality because we understand that divine hospitality is the reason we have anything at all. His hospitable love, infinitely greater than the material order to which He gives life, permeates the whole, from the smallest quark, to the richest and the poorest human, to the farthest planet in the cosmos. If God is the source of it all and God is love, then it is love, not rocks, all the way down.
Stephen Mitchell teaches literature and philosophy at Covenant Day School in Matthews, North Carolina. He holds a PhD in humanities.
NOTES
- William James, “Rationality, Activity and Faith,” Princeton Review 2 (1882): 82, accessed February 8, 2025, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/acf4325.3-01.010/86?rgn=;view=image.
- James, “Rationality, Activity and Faith,” 82.
- James, “Rationality, Activity and Faith,” 82.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an 18th and 19th century British poet. With William Wordsworth, he published Lyrical Ballads, the poetry collection that launched British Romanticism. He was also an Anglican lay theologian.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illus. Gustave Doré (Orinda, CA: SeaWolf Press, 2023), 2.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 4.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 4.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 8–12.
- “The Seafarer,” Owl Eyes Library, accessed February 8, 2025, https://www.owleyes.org/text/seafarer/read/text-poem#root-21494-1.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 10.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 14.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 14–16.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 19–20.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 20.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 20.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 24.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 20.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 20–24.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 28.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 30.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 32–36.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 34.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 22.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 32, 34.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 36–39.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 40.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 40.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 42.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 50.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 44, 54.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 60–66.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 68.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 74.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 76.
- Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 74.
