Liturgical Cosmology

In a 1967 article, John Block Friedman captures the essence of Christopher Smart’s liturgical cosmology, best expressed in his Jubilate Agno :

“It was Smart’s belief that God creates and sustains a cosmic harmony upon which the universe is contingent – in effect, God sings the universe into being – and the poet’s duty is to serve as a kind of choir-master leading the creation in an answering song. Because harmony between God and His creation is necessary for the physical continuation of the universe, Smart’s concern with the multitude of animals, birds, fish, plants, stones, and even planets in the  Jubilate is much more than a rambling appreciation of them. He invokes them as models for men. For, in fulfilling their proper natures, the Lobster, the Hornet, and the Wild Beet contribute naturally to the universal harmony what man must contribute voluntarily, namely praise to the Creator of all.”

As Smart saw it, this liturgical cosmology was directly opposed to the cosmology of post-Newtonian science:

“In keeping with Smart’s conception of himself as an evangelical Christian, we find him defending his version of Christianity against certain aspects of eighteenth-century scientific and philosophical thought which he felt had helped to estrange the men of his time from God and make them guilty of ‘INGRATITUDE.’ He objects particularly to Mechanistic and Deistic approaches to the universe because they portrayed it as cold and quantitative rather than warm and pulsating with the song of the Creator. One of Smart’s favorite scapegoats in the Jubilate is Sir Isaac Newton: ‘ . . . Newton is ignorant for if a man consult not the WORD how should he understand the WORK?’  Smart connects Newton and the Newtonians with the Deist emphasis on natural religion as well as with the Mechanists’ rejection of spirit. To be sure, he does Newton a considerable injustice to associate him in this way with the strict materialists, since Newton’s view of God as a sustaining force in the universe has more in common with Smart’s own convictions than it has with Hobbes’s notion of an abstract first cause. But however accurately he understood the physics of his day, Smart saw it as his task to vindicate the spirit everywhere in the Jubilate Agno and to show God both virtually and substantially present in the universe.”