Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

by Lori Branch

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a newfound love of spontaneity transformed Christian worship and revolutionized the Enlightenment's "culture of sensibility." Rituals of Spontaneity tells the story of how and why spontaneity came to be so revered. Using archival material and works of Bunyan, Shaftesbury, Goldsmith, Smart, and Wordsworth, Branch shows that the rise of spontaneity was intimately connected to the forces of commerce and science at the dawn of the Enlightenment. By focusing on the language in which spontaneity was defended and on its psychological repercussions, Rituals of Spontaneity challenges previous understanding of secularization and demonstrates the deep, often troubling connections between religion and secularism in modernity.

Genres: Research

275 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Sarah Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lori Branch's work is a quite fantastic explication of the 17th and 18th centuries' complicated relationship with the ideal of spontaneity in religious and moral discourse. Spontaneity emerges as a secularizing force from within Christianity, which nevertheless also generated its own conflicts and tensions and, in some cases, something of a return to liturgy.

The book is not aimed at a popular audience, and I think I would have gotten more out of certain chapters if I were more familiar with the authors under discussion, Shaftesbury and Wordsworth especially. I bless her, though for introducing me to Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno and his cat Jeoffrey. (Seriously, look this up now. He [the cat] is the servant of the Living God, and there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.)

I also thought Branch dropped suggestions of some sort of connection between the quest for epistemological certainty and the demands of a market economy more than she actually backed that up historically. It wasn't that I disagreed; it was just that she was hard to pin down on the basis for the claim.

All in all though, a very worthwhile read for anyone interested in the rise of the emphasis on spontaneity, free prayer, and intuition/sentiment in the 17th century. As well as the authors I already mentioned, Bunyan and Goldsmith also get a thorough treatment.

[Ryan Shelton]

This is outstanding historical research. Lori Branch tells a compelling narrative of the mutual growth of Protestantism and Early Modernism, as the mechanical efficiency of medieval religion, with its ritual efficiency, shifts toward a new kind of mechanism rooted in the emerging marketplace and empiricist economy.

"When the matter at hand is eternal salvation or damnation, the 'unsettled soul' suspicious of ritual and tradition looks for evidence of her spiritual condition as close to the knowing self as possible, not in the objective mathematical language to which the Royal Society aspired but in objective experiences of spontaneous, passionate speech: in the substance of the inmost, most immediate thoughts and feelings, evinced by spontaneous, fervent prayer, which it takes both scientifically and economically as proofs and tokens of grace. If the Restoration witnessed the rise of what Robert Markley has called the ideology of objectivity, it also saw the coalescence of a related ideology of spontaneity. Concerned with the science of the soul and informed by emerging market and commercial logic, the cardinal points of this ideology were authentic and immediate sincerity (as opposed to performance of artifice), pure desire (as opposed to coldness, hypocrisy or a bifurcation between doctrinal knowledge and feeling), freedom (as opposed to form), and novelty and currency (as opposed to the repetitive, the boring, and the out-of-date). In the consolidation of the discourse and practice of free prayer, we see the culmination of Reinaissance crises of representation and the fruition of the dramatic Reformation attacks on ritual, when under increasing pressures toward certainty and ever more entrenched economic logics, spontaneity becomes policy: not an option, but, for growing numbers of Protestants, paradoxically an obligation and the sine qua non of valid prayer and a saved subjectivity." (42)

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book kind of blew up my brain. I'm only two chapters in (and I don't know if I can make it through her chapter on Christopher Smart, whom I know nothing about), but so far Lori Branch has written an eloquent, dazzling synthesis of:

modern theories of subjectivity and their origin in long eighteenth century literature
the career of John Bunyan
the influence of Shaftesbury
the development of extemporaneous preaching over the conflicted 17th century
genealogies of the concept of sensibility

Really interesting stuff. Here's a good review in Touchstone by Peter Leithart. However, I completely disagree with his qualm that she oversells the influence of capitalism on religion.

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives...

[Jeremy]

Review by Peter Leithart here.