Foundations of the Anglican Church CIII

Archbishop Laud

Well, enough for now about Cardinal Burke and his proclivity for dressing up like Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.  Let’s get back to the Church of England and the Caroline Divines. There is a character there of some confused personality as well.  Actually there are several, but we will deal with one today.  

William Laud came from a merchant family in Reading and was born on October 7, 1573.  His origins were strictly bourgeois but high-bourgeois with his maternal uncle being Lord Mayor of London when Laud was 18.  William Laud was sent to Oxford where he took the Bachelors, Master’s, and Doctorate in Divinity.  He was ordained a priest at 28.  He never married; like many a churchman before and since he was discrete about his homosexuality and could make celibacy look like an option for holiness rather than a cover for psychological struggles.    

He began his career in his college of Saint John’s at Oxford where he was elected president in 1611.  With the patronage of Richard Neile who was Clerk of the Closet to James I Laud was named Dean of Gloucester in 1616.  (The Clerk of the Closet is the chief advisor to the King on matters of ecclesiastical appointments.)  At Gloucester Laud began introducing liturgical reforms that moved away from the Puritan/Calvinist austerity towards practices which would become known as “High Church.”  James was not fond of Laud—the King was quite Calvinist in his preferences for worship.  Moreover, Laud’s lack of genteel family background went against James’ favor of aristocracy.  Nevertheless, Neile was persistent in his pushing Laud for advancement and in 1621 managed to obtain for him the somewhat obscure Bishopric of Saint David’s in Wales. 

While Bishop of Saint David’s Laud switched horses and linked his cart to George Villiers, 1^st Duke of Buckingham.  Buckingham was the “favourite” (read: “lover”) of King James.  (James a man of varied sexual preferences—he fathered seven children born live and two miscarriages, but there is little question of his having a string of male lovers throughout his life and Villiers was perhaps the most formidable of them.) 

When James died, Villiers managed to have great influence of his son, Charles, who succeeded to the throne.  Laud was named Dean of the Chapel Royal which made him a regular preacher to the King, but Charles—unlike his father—preferred more formal liturgy and was little interested in sermons.  A King with High Church sensitivities was a perfect opportunity for Laud to advance his agenda of moving the Church of England away from its Puritan identity and towards a more solid theological foundation.

When I say a “more solid theological foundation” I mean a theology and practice more in accord with the patristic tradition.  Laud is often presented as a closet Catholic but he was anything but that.  Laud looked not to the continental Catholics for reshaping the Church of England but to the Greek Orthodox with whom he established some early ecumenical contact.  Laud wanted to Reform the Church of England—and especially its Liturgy—based on a sound appreciation for the theology of the Church Fathers.  The end result made it more “Catholic” but the route was not through the Tridentine Reforms of Catholicism but through the tradition preserved in the Greek Church.

Meanwhile Laud had moved from Saint David’s to being Bishop of Bath and Wells (1626-28) and then in 1628 Bishop of London.  It was no secret that he would ascend the chair of Saint Augustine at Canterbury when it became vacant as it did in 1633.  Once Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud was quick to move to ensure that every parish church in England faithfully conformed to the Prayer Book Liturgy.  At the same time, he was working for a new edition of the Prayer Book—one that would undo Cranmer’s weird Order of Service in the 1552 Book (and which was retained in the 1559 Book) for a more patristic liturgy.  That liturgy would look far too Catholic for the Puritan faction and that would bring down the entire house of cards.

The die was cast in 1637 when Laud persuaded Charles to impose a Prayer Book on the Church of Scotland.  James had reintroduced Bishops to the Scots Church, taking away its Presbyterian character.  But the Prayer Book proposed for the Church of Scotland reflected Laud’s High Church theology and that was far too much for the Scots to bear. The Scots rose in rebellion—the so-called Bishops’ Wars—and in the end would trigger the English Civil War which would cost both Charles and Laud their heads.

There will be more about William Laud in future postings as we continue to Look at the Caroline Divines and the English Civil War, but he marks a turning point in the Church of England—a turning from the radical Protestantism of Cranmer’s era and the subsequent Puritan domination of the Church to a serious and scholarly approach to Church life that is rooted in a somewhat sophisticated approach to the ancient Christian tradition.  That split in Anglicanism grows wider and wider throughout Laud’s time and will eventually fracture the Church into the Anglican Church and the various other Churches that spring from it in varying degrees of radicalness.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXI

The Church in England in the fourteenth century was rife for trouble and John Wycliffe was just the man to stir the hornet’s nest.  We have seen the anti-papal legislation of the Statutes of Provisors and of Praemunire that tried to limit papal power in England and, even more important, to stem the flow of English gold to Rome.  Geoffrey Chaucer would chronicle the amusing idiosyncrasies and corresponding dispiriting decay of the English religious scene at the end of the fourteenth century in the Canterbury Tales.  This was Wycliffe’s world.
John Wycliffe was born c 1323 in the Yorkshire village of Hipswell and after local primary school found himself at Oxford, probably about the age of fifteen as was then usual.  Though he would accept a number of Church appointments, Oxford would always remain the center of his life.  His career seems to have begun at Baliol, and he studied natural science, mathematics, philosophy, and theology.  Advancement to degrees was not the fairly straightforward things it is today and it took him over thirty years before he attained the doctorate in theology.  In the meantime he had served as the Master at Baliol and later as the head of Canterbury Hall—a residence for men preparing for the secular priesthood.  Wycliffe himself was a secular priest.  After only a few years at Canterbury Hall, the new Archbishop—Simon Langham—replaced Wycliffe as head of the Hall with a monk.  Wycliffe appealed his deprivation to Rome but without satisfaction.  Wycliffe seems to have turned against the monastic and religious clergy from this point. 
There was another event at this time that poisoned the feelings of many English towards the papacy.  If you remember our entry on King John, I mentioned that John had been forced to cede England to the Pope and receive it back as a feudal holding.  This was, as I said, largely symbolic but it did involve the paying of an annual tribute of one thousand silver marks.  This was at the time equivalent to about  £ 660; today it would be several million dollars.  In any event, over the years the tribute had ceased being paid to the pope and no one noticed.  Then in 1365 Pope Urban V demanded the tax once again.  Parliament—remembering the Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire—reacted strongly and declared that King John and, indeed no king or other person, had the authority to cede the sovereignty of England and no tribute would be paid.    The pope backed down but anti-papal feeling was running high in England.  And remember at this time the popes were living in Avignon where they were very much disposed politically in favor of the French, the enemies of England. 
As a theologian, Wycliffe was particularly interested in the scriptures and espoused the older patristic approach of doing theology based in the scriptures rather than the new scholastic approach which saw theological principles in the light of Aristotelian logic.  His study of the scriptures gave him a desire that they should be available to the common people—at this time there was no English translation and the scriptures were available only in Latin.  Granted, more people knew Latin in the fourteenth century—any educated man (and the relatively few educated women) knew Latin—but that still was only a handful of the population.  Wycliffe had been “given the rectory” of Lutterworth—that is, appointed the rector (we would say pastor) of Lutterworth parish in Leicestershire and while he continued his work at Oxford he spent considerable time in the parish and it was there he made the first English translation of the scriptures in an attempt to make them accessible to the common person. 
Wycliffe’s reading of the scriptures soured him on the wealth and power of the institutional Church.  The Gospels, in particular, can do that. The extravagance of the papal court at Avignon was a scandal to him and the greed with which churchmen accumulated salaries and appointments in order to have more luxurious lives stood in sharp contrast with the poverty of Christ and his apostles.  Wycliffe saw the religious orders to be no better. The monasteries held vast wealth in lands and Church ornaments.  Orders such as the various mendicant groups—Franciscans, Carmelites, Augustinians—once founded in poverty had become known for good food and drink, comfortable life, and immoral behavior.  Wycliffe saw the hope for renewal of the Church in secular priests who would live poor lives among the people teaching and preaching the scriptures.   
Wycliffe believed that the true Church of Christ was a pure and poor Church, very different from the Institutional Church of the hierarchy and monks.  He spoke of an “invisible Church of the elect”—an idea that would surface two centuries later with John Calvin.  This “invisible Church” was comprised of those holy souls whom God had predestined to salvation.  No one knew with certainty who were among these forechosen.   You could look at a Sunday congregation or a pilgrimage assembled at Canterbury or the throngs of faithful gathered to see the Pope and only God knew who belonged to him and who did not.  Such a view made not only the hierarchy but the clergy themselves irrelevant to the plan of salvation and it is not surprising that the Church’s axe fell on the priest of Lutterworth.  Gregory XI dispatched to England five copies of a bull condemning Wycliffe in May 1377.  But Wycliffe had a protector in John of Gaunt, the uncle of Richard II and, during Richard’s minority, his regent.  Joan of Kent, the King’s mother, as well as Henry Percy, the Lord Marshal of England also supported him.  It was a question of England vs. the foreigner—always a flash point for the English. Many of the nobility supported Wycliffe because they were jealous of the land that the Church had accumulated and wanted to seize it; the London mob was also pro-Wycliffe as they too resented the wealth and power of the Church while they lived with struggle and hard work and had little to show for it. But in the end it was his Englishness that saved Wycliffe.  Wycliffe was one of them and represented England; the Pope was a foreign prince and they resented a foreign prince claiming authority in England.  Perhaps the bishops and even the Crown had eventually caved in to the papacy but in the hearts of many English, they still wanted independence. 
Wycliffe was indicted several times in episcopal courts and had to defend his doctrines but he never was convicted of heresy nor was he deprived of his living.  On December 28^th 1384, the feast of the Holy Innocents, while saying Mass in his parish church, he suffered a stroke and three days later he died.  He was buried beneath the floor of his church. 
Wycliffe’s ideas spread through the universities of Europe and in Prague they were taken up by an energetic and evangelical young chaplain, Jan Hus.  Hus was not so fortunate as Wycliffe.  He was charged with heresy and when he came to the Council of Constance to defend himself, the Emperor broke faith with the safe conduct he had been guaranteed and Hus was burned at the stake as a heretic.  The same council posthumously declared Wycliffe a heretic and at the orders of Pope Martin V, his body was exhumed some  31 years after his death, burned, and his ashes thrown into a local river.  But Wycliffe’s influence survived where his ashes did not.   

just an advisory--I will be travelling and at meetings the next week or so and my posts may be somewhat sporadic --hope not, but no promises.

Foundations of the Anglican Church, XV

The stone in the pavement of Canterbury

Cathedral that marks the site of the

martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket

The issue of papal authority in England became more acute in the reign of Henry II and in particular with his conflict with Thomas Becket, his onetime chancellor and then, as Archbishop of Canterbury, the fierce opponent of royal authority over the Church. 
Medieval canon law, recognized by the King and his law as governing the Church, exempted members of the clergy from royal justice and mandated they be tried in Church courts.  In other words, there were two parallel legal systems.  If a layman stole a cow or killed his brother-in-law he was tried in the King’s Court and punished by the King’s court.  If a member of the clergy stole a cow or murdered his brother-in-law he was tried and punished by Church courts.  As Church courts were limited in their ability to punish grave crimes—they could only impose sentences of fines, flogging, loss of clerical state and office, and excommunication—the King was not convinced they could adequately punish—or deter—grave crimes.  Moreover, clerical privilege applied not only to bishops. Priests, and deacons but to any man who had been tonsured as well as monks, nuns, friars, hermits (both monastic and lay), pilgrims and anyone who lived “under the protection of the Church.”  There were many men who had been tonsured—subdeacons, acolytes, lectors, sacristans, clerks in minor orders, as well as most university professors and even students. Probably 15% or more of the adult population qualified for Church protection.  Many of these men—the majority in fact—had no intention of ever advancing to higher orders or Church ministry.  In addition to the problem of clerical exemption for the King’s justice, there were other issues where royal authority was coming into conflict with the Church or papal authority.  Some of these matters concerned appointment to certain church posts, what happened to church revenues during the vacancy of an ecclesiastical post, the right of a bishop to appeal over and against the King to the Pope and various other issues.  In 1164 King Henry issued a charter of 16 provisions called the Constitutions of Clarendon.  They were meant to regulate the conflicting authorities of the Crown and the Church.  Needless to say, they regulated them in favor of the Crown but to the modern ear, even the Catholic ear, they do not sound unreasonable.  They did not sound unreasonable to the Bishops and Abbots of England who, with one exception, approved them.  They did, however, sound unreasonable to Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of England.  Becket refused to accept the royal decree and for that was tried for contempt of royal authority and malfeasance in his office as Lord Chancellor.  Becket fled to France before he could be apprehended.  Louis VII of France, an enemy of Henry, was only too happy to give refuge to the exiled Archbishop.  Becket spent six years in exile before Pope Alexander III was able to negotiate a compromise between King and Archbishop that allowed Becket to return to his see.
Henry was a proud man and demanded a humiliation of Becket in return for his having had to accept the Archbishop back on more or less Becket’s own terms.  Henry arranged that his eldest son should be crowned king in June 1170.  This was not unusual in the central Middle Ages—the crowning of the “young king” while the old one was still alive and well.  In fact, Henry the Father would outlive Henry the Son by six years.  The point of a coronation, somewhat strangely, is not the crowning but the anointing.  The anointing with sacred chrism confers a special character on the monarch with the scriptural admonition: “Touch not the Lord’s anointed” (1 Chronicles 16:22).  While a second coronation would often be held when old king had died, having the heir in place, crowned, and anointed was seen to provide for a smooth transition.  So Henry the Father arranged for Henry the Son to be crowned with all due pomp at Westminster Abbey.  Henry invited the Archbishop of York, assisted by the bishops of London and Salisbury, to do the honors.  But the honor of crowning the monarch belonged by right to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket.  Becket—for his revenge—excommunicated Roger de Pont l’Évȇque of York, Gilbert Foliot of London, and Josceline de Bohon of Salisbury for usurping his, Becket’s, right to crown the king.  The bishops, all political enemies of Becket, fled to Henry who was at the time in Normandy. Becket was on a roll and went on to excommunicate several of the King’s nobles who had committed offenses against the Church, including one who had, in violation of the Church’s right to administer justice to its own, arrested a priest, tried him for murder (outside a Church Court) and hung him.  These excommunications were seen as challenges to Henry and his authority.  Shortly after Christmas 1170, Henry, probably under the influence of too much wine, exasperated “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their Lord the King be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”  Four knights, overzealous to win the royal favor, immediately set out, crossed the channel, and arrived at Canterbury on December 29, 1170. They were Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard de Brito.  They forced their way into the cathedral where they confronted Becket on his way to vespers and in the ensuing scuffle killed the Archbishop.
The murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury was not initially to the political advantage of the Crown.  Henry treated the matter lightly, advising the knights to flee to Scotland where Henry could not reach them so that he would not have to punish them.  Their property escheated to the Crown but Henry seems to have allowed them to continue to receive their incomes from their lands.  Pope Alexander III excommunicated them several months later, however, and the King was unable to protect them from the papal sanctions.  All four were ordered to go on Crusade to the Holy Land.  None seem to have returned.  Henry, though not personally excommunicated (though his lands were for a while placed under interdict), was sentenced by the Pope to go on Crusade.  Henry agreed but never, in fact, went.   By the Compromise of Avranches Henry permitted the English Church to appeal over royal authority to the Pope—thus expanding papal power in England.  He also annulled the Constitutions of Clarendon and restored the authority of Church courts to punish members of the clergy.  In other words, Henry lost the battle with Becket, but he still managed to win the war.   Henry managed to “spin” the cult of the martyred Archbishop to his own benefit and by his accepting his penances and then building shrines to the Becket and furthering the cult of the martyred Archbishop, actually became the hero of the story in the popular imagination rather than the villain.  Henry was far more cynical than he was pious but his strategy worked.  The conflict with Becket was a political misstep and Henry was unable to push back on the expansion of papal power in England, but he emerged all the stronger nonetheless.  His son, King John, would squander that heritage and lose even more power to Rome.   

 

Foundations of the Anglican Church V

Arms of the See
of Canterburby,
showing the pallium

Avery Dulles, the Jesuit theologian who was honored later in his life by being made a Cardinal by Pope John Paul II in recognition of his contribution to Catholic thought wrote that the first thousand years of the papacy were characterized by witness; the second thousand by power; the third thousand will be characterized by service.  I think the style of Pope Francis tells us that this third millennium has begun.  But let’s look back to that first thousand years of “witness.” 
The greater number of the Popes of the fifth through the mid-ninth centuries were very anxious to spread the gospel to lands that had yet to be evangelized.  Missionaries went out from Rome into what is now Ireland, France, Germany, and Switzerland.  From there a second generation of missionaries would spread to Scotland, northern Britain, what are today the Netherlands, Austria, and Scandinavia.  The Thessalonian brothers, Cyril and Methodius, represent a joint effort of the Sees of Constantinople and Rome to spread the gospel into the Slavic lands that are today The Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as Hungary.  Missionaries would eventually bring the faith as practiced by Rome to Poland and Prussia.    These missionary efforts originating from Rome would weave the western Church into a patriarchate led by the Bishop of Rome, even as the Eastern Slavs would follow Constantinople, the Syriac and Palestinian peoples, Antioch, and the Egyptian and Ethiopian peoples Alexandria.  Along with a fifth Patriarchate designed from the honors due its antiquity and place in the scriptures, Jerusalem, these five patriarchal sees would comprise the pentarchy. 
The Irish Church, though it eventually fell under the sway of the Roman Patriarchate, seems to have had its origins in a more oriental Christianity.  Despite the stories of Saint Patrick, the faith seems to have been originally brought to Ireland by monks, perhaps from Egypt, going to the finis terrae (the end of the earth).  Ireland was, after all, the westernmost part of the then known world.  Patrick seems to have belonged to a second or even third generation of missionary effort sent to secure this Irish Church in the orbit of Roman influence.  One cannot say that he was particularly successful.  The Irish Church had some very distinctly different customs than the Roman Church when it came to the date for Easter and styles of monastic life.  Its isolation from the Roman world—remember Ireland had never been part of the old Empire—confirmed it in its idiosyncrasies.   Consequently the Christianity brought to Scotland and northern Britain by Irish missionary monks in the fifth and sixth centuries stamped the British Church with customs that differed from Rome.
But while Northern Britain took its Christianity from sources other than Rome, the Roman See was about  missionary work and while the Irish worked in northern Britain, it was to Rome that King Aethelbert turned for missionaries to bring the Christian faith to his subjects in the southern kingdom of Kent.  Aethelbert was married to Bertha, the daughter of King Charibert, the Merovingian King of the Franks.  The Franks practiced Roman Christianity and so it was only to be expected that Aethelbert and his Frankish Queen would turn to Rome for missionaries.  Pope Gregory I sent forty monks from his own abbey of Saint Andrew on the Aventine under the leadership of their prior, Augustine, to help in the Christianization of the Kentish people.  Arriving at the capital, Canterbury (Kent-burgh) in 597 the missionaries had considerable success because of the royal patronage. In 601 Pope Gregory sent the pallium—the sign of an Archbishop’s dignity—to Augustine and the palium even today comprises part of the armorial bearings of the Archbishop of Canterbury. 
In 603 Augustine summoned the bishops from the north of Britain to meet him.  The bishops were used to their autonomy and reluctant to give up the unique rites and practices of the Church which they had learned from the Irish Missionaries.  They were ambivalent about the meeting and the devised a strategy.  If when they entered the meeting, Augustine rose to meet them as a brother they would submit to his authority.  If he remained seated like a Lord with his subjects, they would reject his authority.  Augustine, unfortunately, remained seated and his authority went unacknowledged in the North of England for some decades more.  And it was not only Augustine’s authority that went unacknowledged, but the authority of the Pope who sent him.  The English Church, while technically in communion with the Church of Rome, insisted on its independence.  The Kentish Church and its daughter sees of Winchester and Rochester acknowledged the Roman primacy but it would take time of the Ecclesia Anglicana to surrender its independence. The process of the Ecclesia Anglicana coming under the Roman umbrella would take some centuries.