Attention, Coordination and Memory in Pious Practice: Prayer and Catechism

Abstract

This chapter takes up a central issue for Reforming practice: how to align external public practices and institutions with the experiences of the individual believer. Taken to its extreme, Reforming practice sought to make religious experience as online as possible — ideally it was to be affective, here-and-now, and spontaneously experienced, rather than off-line, off-loaded onto the environment, or governed by mere habit or routine. As we shall see, Protestant rhetoric charged Catholic practice with a kind of mindlessness, substituting inert practices and external compliance for genuine spiritual engagement. Rote memorization and recitation, as well as mere imitation of set gestures and bodily movements were seen as inimical to true spiritual experience. Mere verbal memorization of devotional material was not sufficient for the lay believer, who was instead charged to engage with the ‘lively word’ of God, preached and written. English Protestant Reformers attempted to establish a new cognitive ecology based upon reordering of mnemonic and attentional priorities. This chapter traces this rebuilding project through an examination of the new divisions of the distribution of cognitive tasks among individual worshiper, priest, and the social and material surround. We take up the revisions to the Protestant Prayer Book, which were designed to combat this mindlessness of Catholic practice, but which were also themselves subject to vigorous critique in the controversies over ‘set forms’ of prayer. We conclude the chapter with an examination of the Protestant practice of catechizing, which begins as an attempt to inculcate basic knowledge of the faith, but also risks replicating some of the very habits of mindless repetition that were the original target of reform.