Foundations of the Anglican Church CXI

A somewhat typical 17th century
Oxfordshire Communion Table

With the restoration of the monarchy and the episcopacy in 1660 and the subsequent imposition of liturgical conformity on the Church of England with the Act of Uniformity of 1662 there was an opportunity to make revisions in the Book of Common Prayer that set the form for the Anglican Liturgy.  The Savoy Conference of 1661 failed to reconcile the Presbyterian/Congregationalist faction which, in rejecting the Act of Uniformity, went on to become separate Churches and this separation, in turn, permitted the High Church wing of the Church of England to make several revisions in the Liturgy that stressed its Catholic heritage.  You may remember that one of the things that triggered the Civil War and the abolishment of both monarchy and episcopacy (in 1649 and 1646 respectively), was Archbishop Laud’s attempts to push some liturgical changes that departed from the puritan/Calvinist theology in favor of more a more ancient (read: Catholic) approach. 

The words “bishops,” “pastors,” and “ministers” were to be replaced in most instances with the terms “bishops,” “priests,” and “deacons.”  In the Liturgy itself, a prayer for the departed was inserted into the prayer for the Church Militant and while it was not so much intercessory as it was commemorative it is still a most noteworthy addition as it marks the first such commemoration of the faithful departed since the 1549 Prayer Book was superseded by the 1552 edition.   

There was also a re-introduction of the idea of “offertory” with the insistence that the alms be placed on the holy table alongside the bread and wine with the accompanying prayer: “We humbly beseech thee to accept our alms and oblations…”   Previously there was no mention of placing the elements on the holy table though obviously they had to get there somehow.  Their inclusion alongside the alms—which had formerly been placed directly in the poor-box—signifies an idea of the people offering their gifts and word “oblations” gives it a sacrificial connotation.     

The “Black Rubric” which had insisted on kneeling for Holy Communion, but insisted also that the kneeling should not imply the Real Presence much less adoration of the Sacrament had been dropped in the 1559 Prayer Book.  It was now introduced in an altered form to read

"Whereas it is ordained in this Office for the Administration of the Lord's Supper, that the Communicants should receive the same kneeling; (which order is well meant, for a signification of our humble and grateful acknowledgment of the benefits of Christ therein given to all worthy Receivers, and for the avoiding of such profanation and disorder in the holy Communion, as might otherwise ensue;) yet, lest the same kneeling should by any persons, either out of ignorance and infirmity, or out of malice and obstinacy, be misconstrued and depraved: It is hereby declared, That thereby no adoration is intended, or ought to be done, either unto the Sacramental Bread or Wine there bodily received, or unto any Corporal Presence of Christ's natural Flesh and Blood. For the Sacramental Bread and Wine remain still in their very natural substances, and therefore may not be adored; (for that were Idolatry, to be abhorred of all faithful Christians;) and the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ's natural Body to be at one time in more places than one."

As Protestant as this might sound, there is a significant shift from the 1552 text which read

… Lest yet the same kneeling might be thought or taken otherwise, we do declare that it is not meant thereby, that any adoration is done, or ought to be done, either unto the sacramental bread and wine thereby bodily received, or to any real and essential presence, there being of Christ’s natural flesh and blood.”

 Whereas in the 1552 text, it is denied that Christ is really and essentially present, the 1662 text denies the corporeal presence of Christ’s natural flesh and blood.  We Catholics can easily miss the distinction, but it would be very clear to a 17^th century Protestant.  The 1662 text is ambiguously worded to permit belief in the Real and Essential Presence of Christ as long that Presence is not confused with his physical Body that was Raised from the Dead and has ascended into heaven and has taken his place at the right hand of God.  In other words, while the 1552 text insists that Christ is present only in a spiritual or commemorative sense, the 1662 Book permits belief in a Real but not a corporeal Presence.  This distinction is strange to us Catholics, but it would be a crucial shift in theology for English Protestants of the time. The 1662 text was wary of a physicalist understanding of Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist but it was not denying that Christ was truly Present in a sacramental sense even as we might find him truly present but not physically present to us in moments of intense prayer.  This might even be compared to what Saint Teresa of Avila writes about the presence of Christ in a vision where he is, the Saint says, present but not corporeally. 

We Catholics, of course, believe that the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a corporeal presence and that, in fact, the bread and wine of the Eucharist have been transformed into the true flesh and true blood of the Risen Lord, indistinguishable from the flesh and blood that was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary, that died upon the Cross, and that was raised from the dead.  This revised text in the 1662 Book does not meet Catholic orthodoxy, but it does mark a significant step away from the Zwinglian understanding of Eucharist as memorial to an eating and drinking of Christ’s sacramental (as distinguished from physical) Presence.

Catholic theologians of the period had lost the intrinsic connection—so clear in the Eucharistic theology of Saint Augustine—of the Eucharistic Presence of Christ and the Ecclesial Presence of Christ (The Church as the Body of Christ)—and of the Ecclesial Presence of Christ with the Physical Body of the Risen Christ.  The 1943 Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, has helped us recover our awareness that we, as Church, are the Risen Body of the Lord, but the imagination of most Catholics even today restricts the Presence of Christ’s Body to the Eucharistic Bread and Wine.  For them, Christ is in heaven and he is in the tabernacle and nowhere else.  Consequently their belief in the Real Presence becomes an assertion in his Real Absence from our daily lives and leaves us with a very truncated understanding of both the Eucharist and the Church as well as a highly disempowered Christ who has no involvement with the world in which we live but only in the world that awaits us beyond death.  This distortion of Christ reduces his kerygma of the Kingdom of God to the post-mortem paradise and frees the believer from taking any responsibility for this world beyond his or her own moral righteousness.  Ironically this leads to the same over-spiritualization of the Christian faith that results from the purely Spiritual understanding of the Eucharist that has permitted the bi-level morality of Protestant/Capitalist Western Society.  There is no social sin, only personal sin because God has no investment in human society.  But enough of that.  I tend to digress, but thank you Max Weber for your insights about The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 

In addition to the text of the Liturgy, there were a number of rubrical changes.  The priest was required to wear as a vestment the surplice and not simply the black gown preferred by the Puritan wing.  The priest was also required to take up the bread and wine in his hands during the Words of Institution (Words of Consecration) and break the bread as he speaks the words.  These “manual acts” imply the priest consecrating the bread and wine as he reenacts the actions of Jesus while speaking Jesus’ words.  Perhaps the most dramatic revision was that whatever consecrated bread and wine remained after the Holy Communion were to be reverently placed on the Holy Table and covered with a fair linen cloth until after the service, at which time they were to be reverently consumed.  Previously the Eucharistic remains were to be given to the priest for daily use.  This rubric suggests that the “real and essential” (though not-corporeal) Presence remained, or perhaps better that the Presence was an objective reality regarding the bread and wine and not merely the subjective apprehension of the believing communicant. 

As to other matters, there is no mention of cross or candles upon the Holy Table and the Holy Table is still to be positioned in the chancel—supposedly in its accustomed spot in the center—with the priest standing on the north side.  In fact, more and more the Holy Table was placed in Laud’s preferred position at the east end in the traditional positioning of the pre-Reformation altar.  Normally, however, in this position the priest still stood at the north end of the table (which in its eastward positioning was no longer a long side); it would be some time before priests resumed the eastward facing positioning as it was important to the Prayer Book mentality that the “manual acts” of the priest breaking the bread and holding the cup be visible.  

The Service of Holy Communion was unquestionably Protestant but it was no longer a Zwinglian commemorative meal.  Freed of Puritan influence, the Church of England was free to chart a new course.  It would over the next century and a half take steps in several different directions.  

Of the Titanic, Cardinal Burke. Crabs, And Where the Church is Headed for the Next Millennium

I don’t publish all the comments that come in.  Some are personal messages.  Some are redundant.  Some contain information that is factually inaccurate.  Some are incoheret.  Some are from Katholik Krazies and some I just don’t like.  It’s my blog and I get to publish what I want.  As I said to one of my correspondents recently: if you want to see your stuff on the blogosphere, start your own blog.   Then you can make your own rules. 

That being said, I did receive some messages recently from one John Drake.  I published one message and then received a second.  The first was fine; the second was a bit odd.  Mr. Drake was not happy with my making fun of Cardinal Burke for his remark that “men should dress and act like men.”  I know I should not make fun of His Eminence; it is the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel.   He is just too easy a target.  If I could only muster a firm purpose of ammendment, I would even confess it.  Alas, I can’t even find imperfect contrition much less firm purpose of ammendment.  But that is not my point.  Mr. Drake went on to chide me because he has seen “your (meaning my) heroes” such as Cardinal Roncalli (later John XXIII) and Cardinal Montini (later Paul VI) in cappae magnae.  Of course he has.  It was standard dress for Cardinals at the time.  We were working with a different model of Church: still in the monarchial model with a royal court.  People wear all sorts of unususal things in royal courts.  Have you ever seen Prince Charles decked out as a Knight of the Garter? Even the indisputably heterosexual Prince Andrew gets frocked out like his grandma, the late Queen Mother, when it is time to put on the Garter robes.  The problem is that Paul VI abolished the papal court in 1968, eliminating many of the offices and reorganizing and retitling his remaining retinue as the Papal Household.  The following year he made drastic revisions in the costume of prelates.  The only rank that is explicitly mentioned as still having a right to the cappa magna are Cardinals; the protocols are somewhat ambigious regarding its use by Patriarchs, Archbishops, or Bishops. Presumably it is not to be worn by Abbots as even in the old rules, it had to be granted as a privlege to an abbot and was not an automatic privelege of rank.  Even for Cardinals, however, the winter cappa—that is with the fur hood—was definitively and totally abolished.  Cardinal Burke and several other prelates seem not to have gotten this message but that is probably the fault of Gamarelli’s as they can make some bucks of sewing dead rabbits into capes.  Also the cappa is not permitted—even to Cardinals—in Rome itself.  Pope Paul’s reforms of prelatial dress was an attempt to simplify the costume of prelates and move away from the princely model of the defunct royal courts.  Of course farm boys from Richland Center Wisdconsin appear to dream of growing up and becoming either cowboys out on the range or Princes of the Church in all their finery.  Chacun à son goût as the French say, but it does put His Eminence in a somewhat different camp, so to speak, from where Paul VI was leading the Church forty-some years ago and where Francis is pushing it today.  Cardinal Dulles (curse these Jesuits and their influence) made an important observation in his book The Catholicity of the Church (1985).  Dulles said that the for the papacy—and by that he meant the Church—the first thousand years were about spreading the Gospel; the second thousand were about power; and the third millennium will be about service.  In other words, we are at that shift of the Church’s tectonic plates where we move from the model of power to the model of service.  This is a difficult paradigm shift for many to accept and I think resistance to the Church adopting the service model is the chief gripe of Francis’ critics. 

All that being said, let me come back to Mr. Drake.  He loves Cardinal Burke.  He loves the yards and yards of scarlet watered silk.  And then he makes a curious shift.   He praises the Traditional (what I would call “neo-traditional”) and the Anglo-Catholic clergy for their retaining the trappings of the bygone era and concludes with the puzzled admission that he wonders that the whole world isn’t Anglican.  Isn’t Anglican?  Why doesn’t he write Cardinal Burke and get Burke’s insight on why we don’t all become Anglicans?  I sincerely doubt that for all his being enamored of a level of ecclesiastical foppery that would make the Highest Churchman in the world blush, Cardinal Burke would have any sympathy for the opinion that we should all float our boats down the Tiber and across the Channel. 

But I will give you one reason for not becoming an Anglican.  As the American Catholic priest, Father Joseph Goetz, allegedly said to his Cambridge mentor Anglican Bishop J.A.T. (Honest to God) Robinson when Robinson asked the anglophile (actually Anglophiliac) Goetz why he didn’t just become an Anglican: “Your Lordship, I am not one to desert a sinking ship for a sinking lifeboat.”  I am a great admirer of the Anglican Tradition.  We are treating in this blog the Caroline Divines.  You have the stellar Lancelot Andrews and you don’t get better than Jeremy Taylor.  I even admire Thomas Cranmer—for his command of the English language, not for his theological eclecticism or his moral ambiguities.  In the nineteenth century you get Pusey and then later there was Benson and Randall Davidson.  But alas, save for a few bright stars such as Rowan Williams or Desmond Tutu the picture has become bleak.  Good heavens, when you have John Shelby Spong as your theological wunderkind you had might as well just close up shop.

I was at a cocktail party in some brownstone down on Capitol Hill some years back and there was a former Catholic raving about his new parish: Saint Mark’s Capitol Hill.  Episcopalian;  American for Anglican.  “Oh,” it’s wonderful he gushed.  “Every August we have ‘Crab Sunday.” (You have to understand the place of the Maryland Blue Crab in the Chesapeake culture; somewhat akin to the quail God sent to console the starved appetites of the children of Israel in the desert.)  “The Choir call comes in wearing crab hats.  And we give the “Crab of the Year Award” to the parishioner who has been most bothersome to the Rector that year.  And the Eucharistic bread is baked in the shape of a large crab!”  The Eucharistic bread is baked in the shape of a large crab?!?  I was willing to allow that Leo XIII may be wrong about Anglican Orders and the question should be reexamined, and I am all in favor of using real bread for the Eucharist rather than something that appears to be an anemic necco wafer, but nobody who takes the Real Presence seriously would bake the Eucharistic bread to look like a giant crab.  Or even a normal size crab.  This is the problem.  To my mind too many people today ‘play church’ and don’t understand the gravitas sacra of being Church.

I remember reading an advertisement for a Service commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic at a Unitarian/Universalist Church back in 2012.  It sounded very nice.  The music advertised was particularly well chosen.  But then, at the end it said something like “worshippers are encouraged to come in period costume.”  Years ago I read Harvey Cox and The Secular City.  I remember that I liked Cox’s approach to Liturgy.  There was an element of playfulness in ritual.  I was young then but I would still agree that drab solemnity can too easy implode into idolatry.  But worship is never frivolous.  It is never giddy, or silly or flippant. 

All that being said, there is little difference between Unitarians in corseted gowns and hats replete with feathers, fruit, and birds and Catholics dressed for the court of Louis XIV.  The TLM is often very little other than an exercise in antiquarianism.  And whether you wear a crab hat down the aisle or a galero, religion becomes not only mockable but a mockery.      

History of the Anglican Church XCI

An Anglican Church in the
Puritan Style

One more posting on the 1552 Prayer Book and this is the story of the “Black Rubric.”  Archbishop Cranmer, as radical as were the reforms he proposed in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, had retained kneeling as the posture for receiving Holy Communion.  Some of the more radical reformers—the precursors of the Puritans of the next generations—objected to this and wanted the English Church to follow the Calvinist practice found in the Reformed Churches of Switzerland and of Strasbourg where the communicants received sitting as a clear indication that the Sacrament was a memorial of Christ but not his physical Body and Blood.   Cranmer refused to consider this change but the Royal Council ordered an addendum to the Prayer Book explaining that kneeling for Holy Communion was not meant to signify adoration of the Sacrament but to signify “a humble and grateful acknowledging of benefits of Christ…”.  Since the Book was already at the printers and the red inking had already be done, the “rubrics”—that is those parts that contain the directives for the service and which are printed in red to distinguish them from the text of the service which is printed in black—had been completed.  Thus the Council’s addendum was added but had to be printed in black ink.  It came to be known as the “Black Rubric.”  Here is the text of Black Rubric—with spelling updated to modern standards:

 Although no order can be so perfectly devised, but it may be of some, either of their ignorance and infirmity or else of malice and obstinacy misconstrued, depraved, and interpreted in a wrong part:  And yet because of brotherly charity willeth, that so much as conveniently may be, offenses should be taken away: therefore we willing to do the same.  Whereas it is ordained in the book of common prayer, in the administration of the Lord’s Supper, that the Communicants kneeling should receive the Holy Communion.  Which thing being well meant, for a signification  of the humble and grateful acknowledging of the benefits of Christ, given unto the worthy receiver, to avoid the profanation and disorder, which about the holy Communion might else ensue, Lest yet the same kneeling might be thought or taken otherwise we do declare that it is not meant thereby that any adoration is done or ought to be done, either unto the Sacramental bread or wine there bodily received, or unto any real and essential presence there being of Christ’s natural flesh and blood.  For as concerning the Sacramental bread and wine, they remain still in their very natural substances and therefore may not be adored, for that were Idolatry to be abhorred of all faithful Christians.  And as concerning the natural body and blood of our savior Christ, they are in heaven and not here.  For it is against the truth of Christ’s true natural body to be in more places than in one at one time. 

Why did Archbishop Cranmer refuse to have the communicants sit for Holy Communion?  Cranmer himself tended to prefer a somewhat ambiguous approach to the nature of Christ’s Presence in the Sacrament.   Though originally Lutheran in theological orientation, and later Calvinist, but this point Archbishop Cramer was basically a follower of the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli who taught that the Sacrament was simply a memorial of the Death of Christ and who rejected any sense of Christ being present except spiritually present in the heart of the believer by the believer’s faith.  But Cranmer also knew that the English—even those who accepted the Protestant faith—had a wide variety of understandings of the Sacrament and he was unwilling to force a uniform doctrine on them, at least in the liturgy.  There were those who, whether of Catholic or Lutheran leanings, still held for a real and corporeal presence of Christ.  There were those who, influenced by Calvin, held that Christ was truly present but not corporeally present in the Sacrament.  And there were those who, like himself, believed that the Sacrament was no more than a memorial that triggered a personal and interior response to Christ.  The Archbishop had worked to create a liturgy in which all could see their faith reflected and find some comfort, in the hopes that over time the single liturgy would solidify a single faith.  It was a vain hope, of course, as doctrinal ambiguity is the hallmark of Anglicanism to this day. 

When Elizabeth came to the Throne she did not have the “Black Rubric” printed in the 1559 Book, which was in several ways a (small) step back from the more radical Protestantism of the 1552 Book.  It did reappear in the 1662 Prayer Book in a futile attempt to keep the nonconformist and Presbyterian elements within the Church of England. 

The Black Rubric is significant because it clearly states, despite Cranmer’s wish for a certain liturgical vagueness, that the Church of England rejects the notion that Christ is present in the Eucharist in any physical sense.  By its naïve assumption that the Resurrected Body of Christ is nothing other than a resuscitated and assumed-into-heaven corpse, it reflects a false dichotomy between the resurrected Body of Christ “in heaven” and his Sacramental Body present not only in the Eucharistic Bread and Wine, but in the Church itself.  It is another indication of how the Church of England crosses over in the 1552 Prayer Book from a “Catholic” (albeit not “Roman”) Church to a Protestant Church.

When I started this series, I was far more positive on the continuity of the Church of England that I am now—having done considerable reading and research.  Yet I do think that it is essential that we always view the Church of England—and our own Church as well—in its historical context and realize that there is a certain evolution of doctrine and even of faith.  And we need to keep in mind that the 1552 Prayer Book has not been the final word in the Anglican theological liturgy.  We will see that the Book did not sit well with many because while it reflected the theology of Archbishop Cranmer and his friends,  it did not adequately capture the faith of the Anglican faithful.   Indeed the attempts to reform and refine it will bring down both the bishops and the Crown in the 17^th century—but that is a bit off in the distance yet.