Chapter 1 - Mediating the Modern

Summary

The liturgical forms depicted in William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) provide the foundational instance of the nineteenth-century resistance to excarnation and the natural/supernatural binary. Rather than naturalizing otherworldly Christian doctrines – as seminal readings of Romanticism suppose – The Excursion’s rituals disclose how material reality already participates in the divine. This participatory vision challenges voluntarist pictures of God as a large, powerful being who exercises his arbitrary will over creation – a picture of God often unwittingly adopted by modern readers. Divine participation, moreover, challenges typical readings of Wordsworth’s lyrical inwardness. For, liturgy not only draws the poem’s characters out of themselves, it also sacralizes nature. Nature’s sacredness in turn opposes the desecrating rituals – or anti-liturgies – of industrialization. Via liturgy, then, Wordsworth comments on material conditions and remains historically engaged. The Victorians will repeatedly echo this use of liturgy to sacralize material reality and to resist any forces that would violate that sacrality.