The foundry of worship

Peter J. Leithart, February 12, 2007

More from Christopher Smart:

For the feast of TRUMPETS should be kept up, that being the most direct and acceptable of all instruments.
For the TRUMPET of God is a blessed intelligence and so are all the instruments in HEAVEN.
For GOD the father Almighty plays upon the HARP of stupendous magnitude and melody.
For innumerable Angels fly out at every touch and his tune is a work of creation.
For at that time malignity ceases and the devils themselves are at peace.
For this time is perceptible to man by a remarkable stillness and serenity of soul.
For the Æolian harp is improveable into regularity.
For when it is so improved it will be known to be the SHAWM.
For it woud be better if the LITURGY were musically performed.
For the strings of the SHAWM were upon a cylinder which turned to the wind.
For this was spiritual musick altogether, as the wind is a spirit.
For there is nothing but it may be played upon in delight.

Of this passage, Lori Branch comments:

"Here, musical instruments are 'blessed intelligence[s]' like the earth and people. God plays on the shawm or harp, and the Aeolian harp, like the person, is not static or inert but can be harmonized and tuned, like a real harp or shawm. . . . This tuning or harmonizing, this improving of the spontaneous sounds into musical regularity, Smart connects to the liturgy, which, he asserts, should be musically performed: that is, in prayer, people turn themselves to receive the divine spirit, and through their self-speaking they also tune themselves as instruments to a sound that is pleasing to their ears and to God's. Prayer is not evidence of a hoped-for spiritual state like conversion or election; for Smart it is a workshop, a foundry. Through the medium of language in prayer, in blessing and addressing God and receiving the wind of the spirit, a person is worked like glass in the divine fire until she partakes of its nature, that is, experiencing theosis, that radical spiritual ideal which Smart would have encountered in Irenaeus and the church fathers."