Deritualized selves

Lori Branch links the Reformation and post-Reformation attack on ritual with the formation of the Cartesian self: “the Reformation religious subject gradually became less a participant in communal, bodily ritual action, and more and more the Cartesian cogito , an individual, inward-looking possessor of knowledge drawn from evidence and analysis. If the ‘Cartesian moment’ is that moment when . . . 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 in 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.” Branch cites Patrick Collinson’s claim that “England’s wars of religion began, in a sense, with a maypole.”

I’m not so sure about the timing of this development; by speaking of “ritual” Branch glosses over right and necessary reform and root-and-branch de-ritualization; and I’m suspicious of Branch’s slam against “literalist” interpretation of Scripture. But the basic point is exactly right: The Cartesian self is a deritualized self (as it is also a disembodied and de-traditioned self).