Books and Religious Devotion by Allan F. Westphall

Author:Allan F. Westphall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780271064048
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

His desire to partake in a print program leads to the production of his one-page text rich in implication and sincerity. In a way it is the embodiment of Balmes’s notion of the treasure of thought: no long arguments, nor evasions, but instead “thoughts few but pregnant.” The printed letter has been inserted in O’Leary’s History of the Bible opposite the approbation from John Cardinal McCloskey, archbishop of New York. In this case, two forms of proclamation lean on each other—one being ecclesiastical, guaranteeing archiepiscopal sanction and doctrinal orthodoxy, and the other declaring personal faith and the certainty of salvation. Both are signed proclamations of spiritual authenticity.

Connary’s act of self-printing constitutes, in a sense, the boldest of paratextual moves. His self-styled paratext is in plain sight, inserted at the front of books as a devout preface before the title pages. But it is also an insertion of a new primary text that other readers can access in its own right and that may make of the main text, such as O’Leary’s History of the Bible, a paratext, a frame for the reading and appreciation of Connary’s own writing. Books can be accessed in ways that unsettle the distinction between text and paratext, primary and subordinate. Connary’s inserted self-publications, prefaces, dedications, and indices become part of the medium of the book, but their status need not always be paratextual and their function not chiefly, as Genette would have it, to aid the reception of the main text.

Connary concludes his letter to his family with a brief admonishment and declaration of just over four lines.

I say the terrible sin of choosing to be painfully unhappy everywhere, endlessly, in rebelliously opposing God, as practiced by human creatures purposely, is for the whole human family of immortal creatures who have done so, infinitely worse than senseless.

The four and one-third short lines of English words above this as heavenly truth everlasting, no power can ever change.

THOMAS CONNARY.

We do not know if Connary’s children had the statement printed as per his instructions, or if he in fact arranged it himself. In any case, his family members would have been aware of Connary’s drawing attention to himself as a composer and as a pastor, disseminating his message through both the pen and the press. Ultimately drawn to the durability, fixity, and dissemination that print can signify, he enhances his books as conveyors of prayer across space and time and as intercessory objects instrumental in human salvation.

There are interesting echoes here of a considerably older initiative for the circulation of devotional material, namely, the “common-profit” book scheme as this was practiced in England in the later Middle Ages, most notably in fifteenth-century London.25 As a way of securing the provision of books among laypeople and secular clergy of lesser means, books of common profit were sponsored through bequests and testamentary charity, with the donor requesting that books be passed on to those in need of edifying literature. Such books—mostly devotional miscellany volumes—would often travel within small devout reading circles as carriers of relationship that reinforced social and familial bonds.

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