'My Yoke is Easy...': Robert Blakeway and his Essay on Religious Melancholy

ANDRÉS GATTINONI

Congreso; 51st Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies; 2022

British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies

The indictment on "enthusiasm" is a well-known feature of British culture and political languages in the long 18th century.G. Williamson, M. Heyd, M. MacDonald, J. G. A. Pocock, among other scholars, have shown that it was a powerful concept to deal with religious and political dissent and that it was closely linked to melancholy. Critics would accuse enthusiasts of being mentally ill and dismiss their pretensions of Pentecostal inspiration as the delusions of their troubled minds. Over the first decades of the century, according to L. Laborie, this lead to a medicalization of the discourse on enthusiasm. There was, however, another side to this matter which has not received enough attention. As important as it was to denounce the excesses of religious zeal, the medicalization of enthusiasm meant that many Christian writers had to defend their own faith against the charge of producing melancholy. In a sermon published posthumously in1716, John Sharp, Archbishop of York, commented: "some have so frightful Notions of Religion" that they "look upon it as made for none but either the Melancholy or the Miserable". Around the same time, Susanna Wesley lamented "how unjustly does the profane part of the world charge religion with melancholy and moroseness". Some of the most popular devotional works of the age, such as The Whole Duty of Man or William Law?s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, emphasized that the duty of repentance was not a melancholy task.The rebuttal of this "empty and groundless Objection of Melancholy to the Christian Religion" was also the starting point of An Essay Towards the Cure of Religious Melancholy, published in1717. This short volume was originally a letter of advice to a gentlewoman identified as Mrs. H?. Its author, Robert Blakeway, was a little-known clergyman, chaplain to Baron Cherbury, and rector of Little Ilford, Essex. Blakeway's Essay has been mostly overlooked by recent scholarship on the history of melancholy. When trying to assess the opinions within the Church of England, historians have paid more attention to the writings of eminent Bishops such as Simon Patrick, John Moore, or Gilbert Burnet. The voices of parish clergy like Blakeway are useful to gain a more comprehensive outlook on Anglican ideas about religious melancholy. This paper will focus on his argument against the melancholy nature of Christian religion. It will place the text within a wider effort from Church of England clergy to define the contours of an ?orthodox sorrow?, as a via media between enthusiastic melancholy and lukewarm indifference. This perspective will highlight the polemical overtones of the vocabulary of sorrow and, thus, provide insights on the emotional language of18th-century religious writings in England.p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 120%; background: transparent }