Peter,

Check out: Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999) by Shaun Irlam; Stanford University, 1999, if UWA has a copy.

There may be material of interest to you given your PhD studies and your article contribution.

Sells and Romany,

Any comment the above posts?

"... From the perception of a dual threat to established English Protestantism there arose a two-edged polemic against the 'superstition' of Rome, which held Christ to be physically present in the sacraments, and the 'enthusiasm' of the sects, which held the Spirit to be immediately present in the congregation or even the individual. Because this was a polemic about the ways in which spirit could be present in matter, it came to be crucial in the formation of English and Enlightened philosophy; because it was concerned with the Spirit's action in human society and in respect of human authority..." - Polcock

Isn't the Catholic view on transubstantiation the more enthusiastic than the Anglican, in the old meaning of the term? Are seven sacraments more enthusiastic than two?

Oliver.

That is a great quote from Pocock that I did not find in either of the two articles I have from him. Can I ask your reference? This is important because it draws a connection between the Protestant distain for the doctrine of transubstantiation and the spirit filled sects and also indicates that it is to do with how spirit indwells matter, a primary concern of the time after the mechanical philosophy became so prominent. The ancients believed in the great chain of being, a hierarchy in which inert matter was at the bottom, then plants, animals, humans, heavenly beings and finally God. The mechanical philosophy destroyed this hierarchy and laid Spirit and matter side by side, so the problem then became how does spirit act on matter if spirit is non material?

There has been a misunderstanding in the forum about the difference between the modern meaning of enthusiasm and that of the 18th century and before as has been pointed out by Romany. For the 18th C and before, enthusiasm was not just commitment or energy it was more to do with the Spirit of God dwelling in the individual. That is, the individual did not act as himself but as the Spirit moved him, that is why it is similar to possession. This is quite different from the modern individual’s enthusiasm that we find in Emerson in which it is the energy of the individual that is the motive power.

So to say that Henry VIII enthusiastically demolished the monasteries is use in the modern sense. At the time it would not have been called enthusiasm.

I am still not sure how much the anti-enthusiastic move was a partial motivator in the cerebral English enlightenment. Certainly Romany is correct to point out the importance of utopian thought from More, Bacon, Descartes, Hooke, Boyle, Locke and the Royal Society. Even my subject Samuel Clarke in his parish at St James Westminster was opposed to any show of enthusiasm on Sunday morning.

Peter,

Block quote:

“The Church of England that took shape after the Restoration of 1660 was a not always easy alliance between so-called 'high churchmen' and so-called 'latitudinarians', who had found it possible to conform both before and after 1660. The former had insisted that a sacred monarchy was necessary to the being of the Church as by law established; the latter appeared inclined to the belief that forms of government were indifferent to religious experience, which was consequently capable of organising itself in subordination to any of them. But it is not possible to reconstruct the two streams of opinion as sharply opposed alternatives.

The 'high churchmen' saw their king and supreme governor as a sacred but not a priestly figure, holy because the natural and social order were holy, possessing divine right but not special spiritual gifts; the roots of their thinking were in Hooker, Erasmus and remotely Aquinas.

When they looked back to the 'Laudian' and 'Arminian' milieux in which most of them had been formed, they could see the liberation of human sociability and natural authority from the absolute decrees of Calvinist grace, quite as clearly as the swing towards baroque ritualism and ecumenical respect for even the Pope's authority which had briefly characterised 'Arminianism' in England more than elsewhere…” - Pocock

Oliver,
Thanks for that, but where is is from?
Peter

-cont.-

"Their veneration for apostolic origins drew them towards a history of the primitive church which did not emphasise the Petrine supremacy and presented the rise of the papacy as a late development, and they could follow Erasmus, Grotius and their own ecclesiastical historians in reconciling apostolical Christianity with a historical context.

There was nothing here which need set 'high' and 'latitudinarian' churchmen at odds, while on the level of philosophy— where the intellect confronted the problems of the presence of spirit in matter — both groups were equally responsive to Cambridge Platonism, which considered a divinely implanted reason the proper antidote to self-deluded enthusiasm, and to the Baconianism found with other positions in the Royal Society, which, while sharply critical of Platonism as itself enthusiastic, was working its way towards a view of God as creating matter and giving it laws, while remaining distinct from and in no way immanent in it.

The distinction between high-church and latitudinarian Anglicanism, therefore, does not itself impede the argument that the origins of Enlightenment in England lie in the maintenance by the church of its Erasmian, Arminian and Grotian traditions.” Pocock (pp. 24-25)

- It would appears that while the Anglican Church, as a whole, was separating from The Holy See, concurrently, there was factionalism regarding the extent of said revision. Perhaps, the answer to your question is in Pocock’s last sentence.

Of course, long before this time, both Abelard and Luther questioned the Catholic Church’s theology at their own peril. Regarding Catholic theocracy, I feel, above, Pocock has omitted the Councils of Kent.

Regards.