Superstition, the National Imaginary, and Religious Politics in Wordsworth's "Ecclesiastical Sketches"

Abstract

Enthusiasm, individualistic energy derived from radical Protestantism, has become a central critical category for reconsidering what Robert Ryan has termed romantic religious politics, or way that Romantic theological diction enacted a creative and effective engagement contemporary religious crisis with far-reaching consequences political order (5). Jon Mee reads Wordsworth as harnessing power of enthusiasm to vitalize his prophetic and poetic vision while also regulating against what he viewed as its religious and political excesses (214-56). Yet enthusiasm only represented part of British post-reformation religious identity, which organized itself around Anglican ideal of via media, or middle way between dangerous extremes of radical enthusiasm and superstition. For instance, David Hume's 1741 essay On Superstition and Enthusiasm denounces way a superstitious imagination engenders threats from lifeless things and then seeks relief ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices (4). While Hume saw little redeeming this primitive and papal power, superstition often remained seductive, especially amid enthusiastic revolutionary upheavals. In American context, architectural historian John Davis has traced development of what he labels Catholic envy, a guilty facination with a Other's mysterious, embodied, communal aesthetic. A similar ambivalence over superstition structures Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822), which expresses both Wordsworth's anxiety over social threat of Emancipation and his attraction to remains of Britain's past. Begun 1820 and published 1822, Ecclesiastical Sketches addresses Question through a historical narrative about church property and national landscape. During these years, Wordsworth worried about rumors newspapers about the Ministers giving up Question--to conciliate new Friends (MY 2: 566), saw Roman concession as one of three great domestic questions along with liberty of press and Parliamentary reform (LY 1: 97), and feared that British Catholics were striving in co-operation with other Dissenters and Infidels to overthrow Protestant Establishment (LY 1: 58). In prefatory advertisement, Wordsworth claims that sonnet series derived from a December 1820 walk to view site for a new church being built by Wordsworth's patron Lord Lowther, a vehement parliamentary opponent of Emancipation. The sonnets were to be a private memorial of their feelings that were in harmony with cherishing influences of scene that led them to look back upon past events with wonder and gratitude, and on future with hope (137). Wordsworth contrasts this image of equipoise with unsettling influence of Catholic Question, which was agitated Parliament about that time (137). Regina Hewitt notes that this connection is not straightforward, that sonnets praising Catholicism outnumber attacks. This ambiguity, however, should lead one to ask how, rather than if, Ecclesiastical Sketches, is engaged with Question. Wordsworth's ostensibly positive approach to Catholicism attempted to bring British imagined community back to political, aesthetic, and spiritual middle way of 1688 Glorious Revolution. By rearticulating a threatened sense of national identity while signaling dangers of allowing Catholics back into British civil society, Ecclesiastical Sketches intervenes very issues of national and religious history that Wordsworth saw as political and social stakes of Question. A focus on events treated individual sonnets gives impression that Ecclesiastical Sketches is a mere chronology, a history textbook. Yet, this interpretation obscures strong presence of what Hayden White called deep structure of emplotment historiographies of nineteenth-century Europe (2, 7). …