One way in which the mythful retelling of the events of the sixteenth century works its way out is this: after the confusion of the reign of Henry, the austerity of Edward’s and the sheer bloody eventfulness of Mary’s, once Elizabeth came to the throne, all was peace and light; we had a Queen who was also tolerant, respectful and wise:
But Elizabeth was a queen who tortured heretics to death in public. What she meant by this supposed espousal of toleration is “she did not care what people understood by the formularies of the Church of England; only that they would assent to them.”2
Oral tradition only. The earliest written record of this espousal of toleration is in J. B. Black’s The Reign of Elizabeth 1558–1603 (1936), p. 19. [↩]
Andrew Brown, ‘Shuttered windows to the soul’, The Guardian : Comment is Freewebsite [↩]
We cannot escape the fact the Church of England as we know it came into being because of the will, whims, and cruelties of Henry Tudor, the eighth king of that name. The Church of England is not solely a product of Henry’s need for a divorce, but the gulf between the way the church was in the 1520s and the way the church was in the 1550s is stupendous: the way a church building was laid out, the way in which it was decorated, the language spoken in the church, the legal framework which compelled you to worship, the pattern of the church’s year, even the landscape of the country— all were unimaginably altered.
And this was caused by a loyal, thoughtful, conscientious Catholic: Henry VIII.
“The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England”
There are many myths about the origins of the Church of England, and most of them coalesce around the middle years of the sixteenth century: roughly from the time when Henry VIII began to worry whether he would ever get an air in the 1520s to when his daughter finally saw off the challenge of Presbyterianism to her new “Elizabethan Settlement” of the Church in the 1570s.
Curiously, there are two, almost entirely contradictory myths about this period.
Benedict was a Roman nobleman who lived in the last years of the Roman imperial rule. He was born in about AD 480 and died about 70 years later, shortly after Rome was sacked and destroyed by the Gothic king Totila (546). He lived at the beginning of what used to be called the “dark ages” and what can still be called fairly, the collapse of a particular society. As a young man he had left Rome, shocked by its depravity and licentiousness. At first he lived as a hermit, but gradually his reputation for sanctity and plain good sense spread, and he was asked to become the leader of a number of small communities, who had withdrawn from the world. He eventually withdrew again from the Roman countryside and settled on the top of a steep mountain in the hills south of Rome: Mount Cassino. Here Benedict gathered a community of like-minded men around him, and he drew up a rule of life for them, which came to be known as “The Rule of St Benedict”, the foundational document for the most influential monastic order in Europe: the Benedictines.
Benedict’s character, like the character of the Benedictines themselves:
must be discovered from his Rule, and the impression given there is of a wise and mature sanctity, authoritative but fatherly, and firm but loving. It is that of a spiritual master, fitted and accustomed to rule and guide others, having himself found his peace in the acceptance of Christ.1
The order spread swiftly throughout Europe, and soon arrived in England. The first Benedictine abbeys were founded by Wilfrid of York at Ripon and Hexham at the end of the 7th cent. The order spread rapidly. As time passed the great cathedrals of England came to be run by a chapter of Benedictine monks: the English clergy (monastic and parochial) were steeped in the ethos of Benedictinism, and even though Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell destroyed the monasteries, the ethos remained.
Rowan Williams has pointed out three key characteristics of Benedict’s ethos2: “(i) what the Rule has to say about the use and the meaning of time, (ii)what the Rule has to say about obedience, and (iii) what the Rule has to say about participation.”
Time is to be carefully structured in community, balanced between work, prayer, community time and rest. The purpose of the monastery is not to produce and neither is it to consume. The monastery is to be sustained, but that sustaining has to be, as it were, sustainable not just on economic grounds, but also to do with humanity and spirituality. We are more than our work.
Second, the monk is to live under a rule of obedience, and this is obedience for a purpose: “being ready to suspend a purely individual will or perception for the sake of discovering God’s will in the common life of the community.” We are better together.
Third, one of the abbot’s responsibilities was to make sure that everyone in the monastery worked in a way that was appropriate to their abilities and to the needs of the community. No one was to be excused boots, just because of their wishes or status: everyone had a contribution to make. We are all responsible for the health of our community.
The Rule of Benedict as lived in monasteries then and now has been called simply “Anglicanism with a structure.” Traits thought to be quintessentially Anglican, such as balance, thorough scholarship, hospitality, and an emphasis on practice rather than abstract theory, all have their origins in the Rule of St Benedict.
Anglicans are living proof that you don’t have to be a monk to be Benedictine.
This is part of a series of posts. Others in the series are:—
We are looking at the origins and history of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, to understand better where we have come from so as to understand better where it is that God wants us to be. As part of this process we will look at eight dates, four movements and four significant inheritances from the 1600+ year history of the CofE: the dates may not always be the most obvious, but each date, perversely chosen by me, has some lasting significance for the way the CofE/AC might be today.1Continue Reading »
This is part of a series of posts. Others in the series are:—
If you need some historical context for these dates, then look at Ed Friedlander’s Anglican Timeline, published by the Anglican Society of St Justus, which is useful, eccentric and has an unacknowledged debt to David Edwards’s Christian England (London : Fount, 1989; combined ed. with new prefaces; originally published in 3 vols 1981, 1983, 1984). [↩]
The intention for this series, based on a study day held on Pentecost Eve in Canterbury, is simply this:
Too often we know too little about where we have come from (the history of our church), and because of that, we know too little about where we are going (the future of our church).
Perhaps this doesn’t convince you: you might think that we should be concentrating on the challenges of the present and the future, rather than doing the naval gazing of looking over where we have come from? After all, we all know that history is bunk, don’t we?
And yet, there is something profound, vital even, which is lost if we don’t know where we come from. I propose to give four justifications for undertaking a “rooting exercise” in understanding who or what Anglicans might be.
The first justification comes from a most curious source, a Franco-Jewish radical, trade unionist, philosopher and professional troublemaker: this woman, Simone Weil— born in 1909 in Paris, died in 1943 in (of all places) Ashford, Kent.
Weil was one of the most original, brilliant, intense, and enigmatic thinkers of the twentieth century. Born to a family of notional Jewish heritage, Weil placed much more emphasis on left wing political activity. At the age of six she refused to take sugar in solidarity with the suffering of the French soldiers on the Western Front. As an adult she became active in the trade union and workers’ education movements in France. Her fierce moral earnestness and certainty earned her the nickname “the Categorical Imperative in skirts”. She was a pacifist until the rise of fascism in Spain, when she briefly served with the Republican forces before her physical frailty and ineptitude made her such a liability (she gave herself second degree burns over a cooking fire!) that she reluctantly returned to France. She worked as a manual labourer on farms and in the Renault car factory, until the outbreak of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of France. Weil sought ways to be involved in the Resistance, but at risk because of her Jewish ancestry, she was forced to flee France, and in 1942, after a short detour in the US, she finally settled in London. Determined to share in the privations of the people she had left behind, and further weakened by overwork, and overcome by self-doubt and depression, When she died in August 1943 she was just thirty-four. She was buried in Bybrook Cemetery, where her grave can be seen today.
In 1942 she had been invited by the Free French government in London to consider what would be needed for the reconstruction of France following liberation from Nazi control (this was back in the days when governments did post-war planning). Her thoughts were articulated in this work, L’Enraincement, which was published posthumously in 1949, and translated into English in 1952 under the title The Need for Roots. This is what Simone had to say about the title:
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.1
All of which is true, if a little dry.
If you need more persuading, then let’s try something English. Steve Knightley and Phil Beer, otherwise known as the incomparable Show of Hands, produced an album in 2005 called Witness. The single taken from the album, “Roots”, expressed the perennial frustration of the English folk musician, working in a time and culture which seems to have forgotten all its own songs.
Some of you might still uncomfortable with the justifications I have produced for studying our roots; a French radical and an English folk group. Would a bishop do?
Stephen Sykes, formerly Bishop of Ely, wrote:
… it is a mistake to think that if one is English one has no need to study this history [Anglicanism]. A Church which has not examined its past, with the best methods of analysis and interpretation open to it, is liable to misinterpret its present situation. We live from our memories as well as our hopes, and our accustomed way of telling our own story needs to be purged of vanity and illusion.3
Some of you might even feel that a bishop is not justification enough for such a historical exercise. Well then, will these words do?
“… the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away.”4
Remembering where we have come from, in a way which unpeels (perhaps) some layers of myth, falsehood and ignorance, so that we might have some kind of better idea of where we are, so that we might be open to hearing God tell us where we are to be.
This is part of a series of posts. Others in the series are:—
It might have escaped your attention, but there is some big Anglican conference happening this summer. For those of you with long memories, you might recall that the big issue is something that was discussed the last time the big Anglican conference met ten years ago.
And that’s the problem. Our longest memories go back ten years.
Which is all very disappointing, when you consider that the Church of England in particular, and the Anglican Communion in general, like to think of our selves as a historic church, with our roots in the succession of our apostolic churches. We haven’t just made all this up: we are inheritors of the past. And yet, “big picture” knowledge of our origins and our history seems to be pretty vague: not just among the people in the pews but also among the prelates in the palace.
Which means, of course, that we may face a problem when the newspapers and the blogosphere start writing about course of the conference. We will hear, I am sure, that the Church is facing an unprecedented crisis of faith and confidence, due to, they will say, its authoritarian and/or weak-willed Archbishop, its oppressive and/or irrelevant nature, its ultra-conservative and/or ultra-liberal character. Much of what will be printed will be contradictory, and lacking in any historical or theological context. This doesn’t matter, so long as it makes good press.
Which presents a problem for those who wish to remain faithful members of the Church. Too often we know too little about where we have come from (the history of our church), and because of that, we know too little about where we are going (the future of our church). Too many people think the Church is facing difficult questions for the first time, that this is the worst crisis in the Church’s history, that this is the closest we have ever been to breaking up. Of course, this is not the case.
So, in order to prepare ourselves for the Lambeth Conference, in order to have some idea about where we have come from, to recall the greater crises of our Communion, and to see the hand and purpose of God in what has happened in the past, I am going to start a new series of posts:
Based upon a study day hosted on Pentecost eve by St Stephen’s Canterbury, and Affirming Catholicism, Canterbury, I will look at eight significant dates in the history of the Anglican church, four significant movements and four significant inheritances the present day Communion possesses.
I hope that this won’t be of just historical interest. I firmly believe that the past, if not determining the future, at least builds it’s outline. Or, to put it more theologically:
If we know where we’ve come from,
we might learn where it is
God wants us to go.
This is part of a series of posts. Others in the series are:—
I'm Justin Lewis-Anthony, a priest in the Church of England, who is, either, "cocky" and "knowing" (Church Times) or "a bold, idol-smashing thinker" (Catholic Herald). I masquerade as the 3 Minute Theologian (words about God for the Attention Deficit Generation) and evangelist for the Killing George Herbert movement (slightly more than a movement of one by now).
Benedict was a Roman nobleman who lived in the last years of the Roman imperial rule. He was born in about AD 480 and died about 70 years later, shortly after Rome was sacked and destroyed by the Gothic king Totila (546). He lived at the beginning of what used to be called the “dark ages” and what can still be called fairly, the collapse of a particular society. As a young man he had left Rome, shocked by its depravity and licentiousness. At first he lived as a hermit, but gradually his reputation for sanctity and plain good sense spread, and he was asked to become the leader of a number of small communities, who had withdrawn from the world. He eventually withdrew again from the Roman countryside and settled on the top of a steep mountain in the hills south of Rome: Mount Cassino. Here Benedict gathered a community of like-minded men around him, and he drew up a rule of life for them, which came to be known as “The Rule of St Benedict”, the foundational document for the most influential monastic order in Europe: the Benedictines.
