Foundations of the Anglican Church LX

Selby Abbey in Yorkshire: when

the Benedictine Community was

suppressed, the Abbey Church

became the parish church

As mentioned in the previous posting, Henry did not find much opposition to his break with papal authority from the religious orders, save for the Carthusian monks and the Observant Franciscan Friars.  The Observants are the group known today as the OFM’s or “Brown Franciscans.”  These were the two strictest religious communities in England at the time, but even among these the majority of monks/friars seem to have gone along with the king in the matter of the supremacy.  All in all eighteen Carthusian monks and lay brothers were martyred, all for denying the Royal Supremacy.  I can’t come up with a reliable number of Observant Franciscans but it was less than that, perhaps a half dozen who stood firm after imprisonment and other scare tactics. 

Although most of the 15,000 religious in England went along with the royal supremacy and took the required oath that they recognized Henry as head of the Church, the King determined to suppress religious life in his realm.  It seems above all to have been a matter of finance rather than theology or even politics—the king saw the religious houses as a new source of revenue to expand his royal programmes without having to request the Commons for new taxes.  He had learned from Wolsey’s suppressions that there were vast amounts of wealth—primarily in land—to be gained by closing down the monasteries.  Henry’s agent in the work was Thomas Cromwell.  You might want to look at the posting for October 14^th to learn more about Cromwell, but Cromwell was in the employ of Cardinal Wolsey and learned well from Wolsey on how to please the King at any cost and without conscience.  When Wolsey fell, Cromwell rose to power.   It was Cromwell who designed most of the legislation by which Henry separated the English Church from the Roman Communion.  And it was Cromwell who moved to suppress the monasteries.

With the first suppressions in 1536 it appeared that this was simply the sort of reorganization that Wolsey had employed and for which even good Catholics had been calling in order to reform the Church.  Small houses with little income and few members were first to be targeted.  Monks and nuns were transferred to larger houses that could support them.  Royal Commissioners would visit the house, interview the community, inventory the assets and make a report back to Cromwell.  Not all houses were immediately suppressed—some were allowed for the time being to continue.  Those marked for suppression were visited a second time where the visitators would actually close down the house, transfer the religious, and dispose of the property.  In the disposal of the properties—the seizure of the assets in the King’s name or their distribution to the King’s friends—the commissioners were very careful to make sure all debts were first settled, those owned a pension given their rights, and matters settled amiably with tenants.  Properties were not just seize outright for the King.  Those religious—a minority—who wanted to secularize rather than transfer to a new foundation—were also given a cash settlement from the monastery assets.  As fair as the royal commissioners were, the canons of the two houses that resisted their suppression—were treated quite brutally, some with imprisonment and others with death. All of these foundations closed in the first wave of suppressions were either monks (Benedictine, Cistercian, or Carthusian), nuns of the same orders, or Canons Regular.  About eighty houses were suppressed in this first wave—most having less than a half dozen religious.  The Carthusian houses were larger communities but due to the resistance their now martyred colleagues had shown to the royal supremacy, came into particular focus for suppression. 

The second phase—in 1537—was accomplished by encouraging larger communities to voluntarily surrender their property and assets to the crown.  The Cistercians at Furness Abbey voluntarily surrendered their monastery because Henry was about to move against them for their involvement in the Pilgrimage of Grace—a popular uprising against Henry’s break with Rome.  Jervaulx, also Cistercian, surrendered for similar reason.  Lewes Priory (Benedictine), Titchfield Abbey (Premonstratensian) Bardsey Abbey (Augustinian), Eye Priory and Easby Abbey all voluntarily surrendered.  A new policy was put into practice with the religious not being allowed to transfer to other houses, but being given a modest pension on which to live on their own.  Monastic pensions averaged around £5 a year—at that time the income of a modest gentleman.  Nuns were less fortunate as their monasteries were usually less well endowed than those of the monks or canons and received about £3 per annum.  Henry required that monks and nuns, though no longer living in their cloisters, maintain religious garb and he forbad them a release from celibacy which prevented their marriage.  For nuns this mean they usually had to return to their families, but the pension due them provided them with the ability to contribute to the family income.  Abbots and priors usually received more handsome—and often more handsome by far—pensions.  They also were more likely to be offered Cathedral deaneries or even bishoprics, in which case their new position paid them a salary in lieu of any pension. 

Cromwell set up the Court of Augmentations to make sure that the disposal of monastic property was done in such a way as not to leave debtors, tenants, or the religious themselves in undue distress.  This was a very wise policy as the sudden collapse of these houses without providing for the religious or their employees or their creditors would have done serious economic damage that would have made the King and his policies very unpopular. As it was, with people able to get their hands on monastic wealth through royal grant or purchase, the dissolution was well received in most circles.  Indeed, when Mary came to the throne and investigated the possibility that such properties would be returned to the re-founded monasteries there was great alarm.

By 1538 many of the larger monasteries, seeing where the wind was blowing, were applying for permission to hand over their properties to the Crown in return for pensions.   Also by 1538 Cromwell had gotten the dissolution process down to a science and was closing down religious foundations quite quickly and with his usual efficiency.

To this point we have spoken of the monks and canons—both of whom had massive endowments.  The mendicant orders—the Augustinian Hermits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Carmelites—did not have extensive endowments but lived from their work and from alms.  Their convents were also closed down but the religious—not having the assets from which to provide pensions—were not pensioned off.  Their buildings were sold or given to clients of the King in return for services done the Crown.  This created some hardship for the friars.  The priests could seek work as secular clergy—and many having degrees in theology were often rewarded with decent posts—but the lay brothers had no choice but to enter the workforce as common laborers.  Like the monks and nuns, the friars—clergy and lay—were not release from the obligations of celibacy. 

Thus by 1539 most—but not all—of the religious foundations of England and Wales had been suppressed.  Only a few great abbeys remained. Vast amounts of land were in new hands and huge amounts of wealth were in the royal treasury.  At the same time, Henry was not releasing the religious from their vows and especially from celibacy.  England was in many ways still very Catholic but the elimination of the religious removed one very important bulwark of religious orthodoxy and in time that would tell.  

Benedict's Flawed Understanding of Evangelism

Pope Benedict grew up surrounded
by the rich cultural heritage of the 

Catholic Baroque in his native

Bavaria 

  In a recent posting (July 30), I mentioned that the re-Christianization of Europe is a priority for the papal ministry of Pope Benedict XVI.  Indeed, when Josef Ratzinger was elected pope in 2005 he chose the regnal name Benedict precisely because Saint Benedict, the great sixth century Abbot and monastic lawgiver is both one of the patron saints of Europe and the patron saint of culture.  Benedict’s followers, the great Benedictine Order of Monks and Nuns, has been one of the great sources of European—and thus Western—Culture.  We will do some entries on Benedict (the Abbot, not the Pope) sometime soon, but much of western art and architecture, music, literature and other cultural manifestations was conserved by or created for the Abbeys and monasteries of this Order.  Since the ninth century, and to some degree even before, the Benedictines have been great educators and their abbey schools—and this is true for the nuns as well as the monks—kept the liberal arts alive through the Viking invasions and incessant feudal warfare of the Central Middle Ages.  Names like the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, Suger, Peter the Venerable, Abelard (albeit somewhat reluctantly a monk), Heloise (as a second career), Hildegard of Bingen and other luminaries of the eighth through the thirteenth centuries are associated with the Benedictine Order.  Cluny, Westminster, Saint Gall, Monte Cassino, Saint Denis, the Nonnberg, and the great English Cathedral priories are (or were) all  Benedictine foundations.  So Benedict, both the pope and the saint, deserve our acknowledgement; but still it must be said that the pope gets culture wrong.   
     The Holy Father is a refined and cultured relic of the pre-Hitler German bourgeoisie.  His father, also Josef, recognized how Hitler’s policies were not only evil but undermined the rich German cultural heritage that had been so shaped by Christian faith and practice and was a firm anti-Nazi. Nevertheless the senior Ratzinger was a policeman who served in the German police both before and during the Hitler regime, retiring at the age of 60 in 1937.  The future pope had two older siblings—his brother Georg (also a priest) and his sister, Maria, who never married and kept house for Josef until her death twenty years ago.  The family were devoutly Catholic and like most Bavarian townspeople of the inter-war years wanted a classical education and exposure to German culture for their sons.  In school Josef studied Latin, Greek and French (subsequently he has learned several other languages) .  He also studied piano and is an amateur classical pianist.  (His brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, is an acknowledged musician, director of the famous Regensburg Dom (Cathedral) choir.  Georg claims that his brother has an “interesting” approach to Mozart and other German composers).  Ratzinger’s early education, typical to both his peasant/bourgeois background and seminary education, was remarkably narrow and while exposed to the artifacts of culture seems never to have explored the concept of culture itself.  While he became a significant theologian—in his own right and not merely as pope—his university studies would have focused quite narrowly on the philosophical grounds of theological reflection and it seems quite unlikely that he ever did address the issue of culture qua culture.  His mistake, and it is a common one and one shared by most Americans, is to confuse “culture” with its products.  Culture is not music or art or literature, it is a system of values inculcated in the consciousness, subconscious, and unconscious of a people.  It is a weltanschauung (a word often translated as “worldview” but meaning something even more pervasive) both unarticulated and articulated at every level of the society whose “culture” it is.  It is this set of fundamental understandings that influence and produce the art, the music, the literature, the architecture and every other expression of the society, including its religion. 
      As Ratzinger knew well growing up in Hitler’s Germany with its attempted revival of the ancient German mythology, the pre-Christian Nordic culture gave the German people a vivid but violent—extremely violent—vision of the world and their place in it.  Christianity came along and modified, indeed drastically altered this culture which is one of the reasons that the Hitler regime planned ultimately to destroy Christianity and replace it with a Germanic neo-paganism.  Indeed, while German Protestantism fragmented into different factions—some working with the Regime to varying degrees while the Confessing Church remained opposed to Hitler—in some Protestant Churches particularly tied to the government, the so-called “German Christians,” the Old Testament was rejected, the altar bible was replaced by Hitler’s Mein Kampf  and the cross by an upraised sword.   Both this Nazi altered “Christianity” and the more overt neo-pagan revival encouraged by such Nazis as Alfred Rosenberg saw that the introduction of Christianity to the Germanic peoples in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages weakened the German Spirit.  The Catholic interpretation of the same phenomenon, a view espoused by Ratzinger and indeed by most Euro-centric historians, is that Christianity and its Gospel transformed, indeed purified, the ancient Nordic—and Celtic, Slavic and other European root cultures—from their violent self-identities and unified them in a common culture that brought a civilizing Christian humanism to Europe and from Europe in the age of colonization to the larger world.   
      There is truth to this theory, but there are also dangers and, true or not, it doesn’t correct the mistaken view that culture consists of its products and that the task before us is to reinforce the products—the classical literature, art, music, etc.  After all, while rejecting the Christian contribution to European Culture, the Nazis kept—and manipulated to their own non-Christian ends—much of the product, whether the great classical German musical heritage so valued by Ratzinger himself, or the art, or the literature.  But much like the Nazi philosophers, the Europeanists presume that European culture is inherently superior to other cultures;  its music, art, etc. superior to that of other cultures; and that Christianity is exclusively linked to European culture.   I write this as a person who prefers Mozart to Indian music, Shakespeare to Kabuki, and Michelangelo to Aztec pottery, but I realize that is my subjective preference and does not denote an objective superiority of my cultural tastes over others.  And while I may prefer a Latin Sung Mass (or an Italian Opera for that matter) over an African Liturgy with drums and dancers, that does not mean that my preferred liturgy is more Christian, more pleasing to God, or more effective a means of salvation than an a Mariachi Mass, a “Guitar Mass,” or a Gospel Mass.   
        Two millennia of European Christian cultural tradition does not mean that the Christian faith and liturgy cannot be refitted into Japanese Culture,  Australian Aboriginal Culture, or the First Nations Culture of the Canadian West.  Christianity is not indigenous to Europe.  A Semitic system of doctrine and a Jewish practice of prayer had to be adapted to the Graeco-Roman world in the second and third centuries and then again adapted and adopted into the cultures of the ancient Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic peoples from the fourth through the eleventh centuries.  It has given us the beauties of the Russian Divine Liturgy, the devout Bach’s superb settings for the (Lutheran) Mass, the Catholic glories of the agnostic Mozart, and the ambiguously Catholic-Anglican liturgical settings of Tallis and Byrd.  But none of this is culture—it is only the manifestation of culture and that Christian culture can manifest itself in a wide variety of world cultures today if only we learn to think outside the very limiting box of what has  been and learn the possibilities of what can be for Christ’s Church and his Gospel.  A reformation today must be one that is open and inclusive ; not a looking back towards an admittedly glorious past but a looking forward to the New Creation Jesus proclaimed as the Kingdom of God    

Roots of the Reformation XIX--Cluny--a Reform from below

The former Cluniac Priory Church
in Paray le Monial, a miniature of the
Mother Abbey of the Congregation at

Cluny

At the very time that the papacy was at its all  time low in the tenth century, up in the Aquitaine, in what is today France, a great reform movement was taking shape at the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny.  Sergius III was sitting on the throne of Peter when he wasn’t lying in the arms of his lover, Marozia—and indeed the very year she gave birth to his son, the future pope John XI—when Benno and a small group of monks settled on lands at Cluny donated by Duke William of Aquitaine for the establishment of what would become the most important monastic foundation in Europe.  Incidentally, John XI, a very weak pope who was totally dominated by his mother Marozia until both he and she were overthrown by his half-brother Alberic II, put into prison and murdered, was a great benefactor of the reformed Abbey at Cluny.  Even the wicked sometimes support good causes; and even saints sometimes endorse wickedness.  But that is another story. 

Duke William “the Pious” established the Abbey in 910 and he granted it exemptions from any secular entanglement.  He renounced any rights over the abbey that he or his heirs might claim.  It was normal at the time when establishing a monastery that the benefactor retained the right to name the Abbot or to demand that in time of war the monks furnish a certain number of knights to fight for the benefactor.  It was even usual that the benefactor founding the monastery could claim a certain percentage of future donations—but William renounced any such claims.  Only the popes had any claim to the Abbey’s loyalty and they, fortunately (given the state of the papacy at the time) were far away. 

The monks, for their part, were determined to devote themselves entirely to the opus Dei—the Work of God—which meant prayer.  In the original vision of Saint Benedict for monks, the life of the monastery was to be divided between prayer and work—ora et labora.  At Cluny the life was almost entirely prayer—the laus perennis, unceasing praise.  The ceremonies were very elaborate and carried out with exquisite perfection; thus they consumed most of the monk’s day.  The solemnity of the worship drew many generous gifts on behalf of patrons who wished the monks’ prayers for themselves and for their deceased loved ones.  The generosity of their benefactors permitted the monks to commission beautiful vestments, vessels, and decorations for their church.  It also permitted them to hire workers to do the manual work of the monastery and free the monks for prayer.  The Abbey Church—actually the third Abbey Church which was built between 1080 and 1130 was the largest church yet built; it was mostly destroyed in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. 

Cluny drew huge numbers of vocations which enabled them to make many new monastic foundations.  Traditionally among Benedictine monasteries, such daughter houses themselves become independent abbeys, but Cluny devised another system in which the Abbot of Cluny was superior of all the foundations and each daughter house sent representatives to an annual chapter at Cluny which made legislation for all the houses affiliated to it.  This is where the idea of a “religious order” develops in the Western Church and it permitted  a uniform standard of religious observance to be maintained among all the houses.  Many independent abbeys, including those of nuns, voluntarily surrendered their independence to Cluny and became part of this monastic congregation.     

Cluny was not known for austerity as some later religious orders such as the Cistercians or the Carthusians would be, but neither was their life lax.  The focus of Cluniac life was the maintenance of a dignified and all-encompassing public prayer that seemed never to end, the monks taking shifts in the Church to enable the elaborate services to be carried out in meticulous detail.  Nevertheless, in a Church that had sunk into such great decay of morale and morals Cluny was a bright shining light of clergy who were seeking something other than their own personal power, wealth, pleasure, and comfort.  It would provide generations of Church leadership that would be responsible for the reform and renewal, not only of monastic life but of the Church itself in the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries.  Their foundation at a time when the Church, from the papacy down to the village priests, was pretty rotten is a lesson that Reform and Renewal do not have to come from above but most effectively come from personal renewal of ordinary men and women.  

Westminster: An Abbey No More

With the Royal Wedding, I thought it would be good to take a look at the Abbey Church of Saint Peter in Westminster.  Perhaps at a future time we can even do a series on its history in the Middle Ages with a look at monastic life in that period.

There had been a community of monks at Westminster, then an island in the Thames River, probably since the seventh century, but it was only in the late tenth century that a Benedictine community was installed on the site by Saint Dunstan, himself a monk of the ancient Abbey of Glastonbury and at the time Bishop of London.   King Saint Edward the Confessor decided to appropriate their Abbey Church as the Chapel Palatine for the palace he was building at Westminster—a place that would later become the home of Parliament—and for this end King Edward built a fine Abbey Church of stone in the Romanesque style.  It was consecrated at Christmas 1065, only a week before the King’s death.  Edward was buried in his new abbey Church.

Edward’s succession was a problem.  Edward had no direct heirs and on his death-bed he allegedly commended the Kingdom to Harold Godwinson, Earl of Essex.  The Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot—a sort of early form of Parliament—confirmed this and elected Harold King.  William, the Duke of Normandy wanted the throne as well and he had some claim to it as King Edward’s mother, Emma, was his aunt.  It was a tenuous claim.  William was not in the line of the Blood Royal but only happened to be the great-nephew of a queen consort.  However, Edward has spent time in exile in Normandy as William’s guest during the the Danish Cnut’s invasion of England and reign (1018-1035)  and William claimed that Edward had promised him the throne during William’s 1052 visit to England.    William also claimed that Harold, for his part, had sworn fealty to him (William) and thus was his vassal.  Harold, to preserve his claim, lost no time in arranging his coronation—less than a week after Edward’s Death—and to stress his legitimacy as Edward’s successor held the coronation in Edward’s new abbey and at Edward’s tomb.  It was in vain, however.  Within the year, William of Normandy had organized an invasion of Harold’s realm and defeated Harold on October 12, 1066.  William was crowned King of England on Christmas Day 1066.  Again, to establish the legitimacy of his reign, William—like Harold before him—insisted being crowned at the tomb of Edward the Confessor and thus in Westminster Abbey.  It then became customary for the Coronation of the English King to take place in Westminster Abbey.  Eventually it came to be that Kings were not only crowned there, but buried there when they died.  Between Henry III (1272) and George II (1760) most—but not all—English monarch were buried in the Abbey.  Among the exceptions is Henry VIII who is buried in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.

Being the site of coronations and royal burials made the Abbey central to the life of the nation and the legitimacy of the monarchy.  At its peak there were about eighty monks.  The community was exceptionally well endowed both the monarchs and those courtiers who wished to curry the royal favor.  A community of eighty monks—many scholars, some royal employees, and all gentlemen required an army of employees and servants and the Abbey was the economic foundation of the surrounding village of Westminster that grew up around it.  The Abbot sat in the House of Lords and indeed, parliament often met in the Abbey Chapter House—the large and elegantly vaulted octagonal room where the monks gathered each day for their monastic business and decision making.  In 1540, four years after the final separation of the Church of England from the Roman Communion, Henry VIII abolished the monastic community and made the Abbey a Cathedral of a new diocese which the King cut out of the London Diocese.  The Abbot, William Benson (also known as William Boston) was named Dean of the new cathedral and several of the monks were retained as canons.  The other monks were pensioned off, being provided with revenues from the former Abbey lands.  Ten years later, Henry’s son, Edward VI, suppressed the Diocese and the former Abbey Church became a “collegiate church,” a church used for Divine Service under the administration of a Dean and Chapter (of secular canons).  Henry’s Catholic daughter, Queen Mary, refounded the Abbey at considerable expense to the Crown, but when Protestant Elizabeth ascended the throne the Abbey was suppressed once again and the Church became once more “The Collegiate Church of Saint Peter in Westminster” with its Dean and Chapter.  Its subsequent history was not pretty.  Ignored for the most part except when needed for a coronation or royal funeral, the Church was poorly maintained.  Daily services (Morning Prayer and Evensong) continued except during the Puritan Commonwealth when the church was given over to Reformed (i.e. Presbyterian) worship.  Nicholas Hawksmoor built the matching towers between 1722 and 1745, doing a fair work in a period that did not favor the medieval style of architecture.  (A close look reveals many neo-classical details in his design.)   Finally in the nineteenth century with the influence of the Romantic Revival (and to some extent the Oxford Movement) Sir Gilbert Scott did a thorough restoration which gives the Abbey its modern look.

Today the Abbey—or more properly the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter in Westminster—is served by a Dean and six canons.  In addition to the rare royal wedding, the even more rare royal or state funeral, and the rarest of all—a coronation—the Abbey has a round of daily services: Morning and Evening Prayer, Daily Eucharist, and special events and ceremonies.  Tourists flood the Abbey every Day and some ask for religious or personal guidance. The Abbey is known for its superb music and solid preaching.