A METHODIST VIEW

Ancient mariner offers lessons in modern morality

How far does owning up to mistakes make up for them? Quite a bit, if the recent behaviour of public figures is to be believed. It has proved difficult to be too harsh with an England football manager who owns up to "falling short of what was required in the job". Or take drugs, as, it seems, have half the Shadow Cabinet: doesn’t being honest about youthful indiscretions deserve moral credit rather than condemnation?

In spite of the breakdown of public morality alleged by many religious believers to have taken place, most people still expect public figures to behave morally and believe that being truthful is a key moral value. The common sense of what constitutes good moral behaviour may have shifted but does still exist. Most people don’t much mind that Peter Mandelson borrowed money to buy a house, but sense that he will have done something wrong if he then fibbed about it. We can even distinguish between good and bad motives for telling the truth: an admission about the past that seems to be a laddish boast about it makes our moral sense as uncomfortable as fourteen pints of ale make a bladder.

The moral role of truth in politics interested Samuel Taylor Coleridge - born this day in 1772 - a good deal. John Stuart Mill described Coleridge as "the great questioner of things established" but the quality Mill admired most in him was the application of poetic imagination to moral and political theory. Politics, for Coleridge, requires more than cool reason: it demands soul, and so does telling the truth. One can tell the facts truthfully, but mean to deceive, and one can find it necessary to lie to be faithful to what one believes true.

This kind of truth mattered to Coleridge even more than religion: "he who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity", he wrote, "and end in loving himself better than all"

Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a kind of moral commentary on the cost of owning up to mistakes. A sailor and his ship are becalmed when an Albatross comes, bringing wind and relief. But the mariner shoots the great bird and brings disaster and death to his ship. In spite of its gothic tones and archaic language it is a very modern poem, full of existential angst and a prophecy of the ecological disaster that follows an abuse of nature’s hospitality.

But Coleridge thought of it as a morality tale and worried that he might have overdone the moral message. And the moral seems to be about what it means to own up to guilt. The only survivor of his ship, the mariner in his home port devotes the rest of his days to recalling his story:

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

It is hard to compare smoking dope, losing a football game, and other similar crimes with shooting an Albatross. But Coleridge’s message seems to be that there is a kind of truth that is accurate but dead and a kind that is meaningful and living. And the difference between the two lies in the costliness of the truth that is told.

The Rev Stephen Plant is Europe Secretary of the Methodist Church.
The Times, Saturday 21 October 2000

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