Rituals of Spontaneity Quotes

“Bunyan points out, for example, how the Pharisees of Jesus’ day no doubt phrased their prayers well but were condemned because they fell short of “pouring out” their hearts to God (IWP, 38). Without help from the Holy Spirit in purifying and pouring out the heart, he writes, one who prays is “hyp- ocritical, cold, and unseemly” and “abominable to God” (IWP, 37).
The hypocrisy God detests, then, is importantly not a matter of say- ing one thing and doing another, but of saying one thing and feeling another: of a disjunction between the logocentric intellect and the heart, between the propositional truths of abstract doctrine and the emotions which are substantively to mirror and confirm it.”
― Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

“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 or 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and feeling), freedom (as opposed to form), and novelty and currency (as opposed to the repetitive, the boring, and the out-of-date).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 Renaissance 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.”
― Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

“As William Bouwsma pointed out, the late medieval and early Renaissance crises of representation did not stall out at their skepticism of the old systems but rather progressed to an even more urgent defense of objective boundaries and quantifiable truths. In “The Secularization of Language in the Seventeenth Century,” Margreta de Grazia has shown how this pursuit of certainty led to a skepticism about language itself that dissociated words from God and deverbalized God’s message, prompting thinkers from Thomas Sprat of the Royal Society to Hobbes, Robert Hooke, Galileo, and Newton to seek certainty in mathematical knowledge; quantifiable, identifiable substances; and trial, experiment, and experience. As Puritan propagandist Vavasor Powell put it in the middle of the seventeenth century, “Experience is like steel to an edged tool, or like salt to fresh meat, it seasons brain- knowledge, and settles a shaking unsetled soule.” Paralleling more secular quests for certainty, the Puritan quest for grounding religious knowledge in a literalist reading of Scripture focused ever more intensely on manifest, genuine experience confirming salvation and the personal application of scriptural truth. The spontaneous “pouring out of the heart” in prayer was just such an evidentiary experience.”
― Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

“As William Bouwsma pointed out, the late medieval and early Renaissance crises of representation did not stall out at their skepticism of the old systems but rather progressed to an even more urgent defense of objective boundaries and quantifiable truths.27 In “The Secularization of Language in the Seventeenth Century,” Margreta de Grazia has shown how this pursuit of certainty led to a skepticism about language itself that dissociated words from God and deverbalized God’s message, prompting thinkers from Thomas Sprat of the Royal Society to Hobbes, Robert Hooke, Galileo, and Newton to seek cer- tainty in mathematical knowledge; quantifiable, identifiable substances; and trial, experiment, and experience.28 As Puritan propagandist Vavasor Powell put it in the middle of the seventeenth century, “Experience is like
42 Rituals of Spontaneity
steel to an edged tool, or like salt to fresh meat, it seasons brain- knowledge, and settles a shaking unsetled soule.” Paralleling more sec- ular quests for certainty, the Puritan quest for grounding religious knowledge in a literalist reading of Scripture focused ever more intensely on manifest, genuine experience confirming salvation and the personal application of scriptural truth. The spontaneous “pouring out of the heart” in prayer was just such an evidentiary experience.”
― Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

“Zeal to expunge every trace of Romish superstition resulted in text scrutinizing and “arguments from silence” that forbade traditions such as the exchange of wedding rings and kneeling at Communion, traditions which were not addressed in Scripture and which other Reformers considered adiaphora or “matters indifferent.” In the vigor with which they rejected ritual, turned to an “anti-magical” semiotics, and revised the liturgy, English Puritans have been said to have “out-Calvined Calvin,” becoming a sort of law unto themselves in the world of reformed religion.”
― Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

“If the “Cartesian moment” is that moment when as Francis Barker has asserted the self can be conceived of without the body, it is also the moment when it can be conceived of without ritual; by what might be called a Cartesian logic, the later English Reformation places efficacious signs of salvation elsewhere than church ritual, first in a literalist reading of Scripture, and ultimately in the individual conviction of the particular truths of Scripture and in the self who experiences it”
― Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth