Scarisbrick on MacCulloch

Writing for The Catholic Herald, Henry VIII biographer J.J. (Jack) Scarisbrick reviews Diarmaid MacCulloch's book of essays on the Reformations (English and Continental):

There are remarkable essays, for example, on the Protestant reformers and Our Lady, on the making of the Book of Common Prayer, the (Catholic) genius William Byrd and the (eventually rather tragic) career of Richard Hooker. There is a masterly review of writings on the English Reformation, including positive appreciations of Hilaire Belloc, the Redemptorist Fr Thomas Edward Bridgett and Philip Hughes’s bold trilogy; and a fascinating account of how the 17th-century Irish Protestant firebrand (psychopath?) Robert Ware produced blatant forgeries to promote his cause.

Some of these essays are a bit heavy going, but MacCulloch has a gift for explaining complicated things simply. He can also produce the arresting new insight: for example, that Thomas Cromwell may have indeed have been a “sacramentary”, as his enemies claimed, ie one who denied any Real Presence, and was thus more radical than was Cranmer at the time. Or how the Polish ex-priest-turned-Protestant Jan Łaski did much to drive forward the English Reformation. Or how remarkable was the survival – unique in Protestant lands – of our cathedrals with their full array of deans and canons, organs, choirs and closes, and how their liturgy and hymnody contributed to the rise of Anglicanism. . . . 

Alas, there is an anti-Catholic tone throughout this book. Catholics are always “Roman” or “Romish”. There are anachronistic references to “the Vatican” (a rather nasty place). The Jesuits are a “sect”. The revolution of 1688 is “Glorious” without inverted commas. It is really excessive to describe as a “catastrophe” the Council of Chalcedon (491) which, thanks not least to Pope Leo the Great, courageously reaffirmed the crucial truth that Christ is both truly God and truly man. . . .

There is another worry. He says several times that Catholics believe in a “corporal” or “corporeal” presence in the Eucharist. He even adds the word “physical” sometimes. That one so accomplished in elucidating even the subtlest differences between Luther and his ex-followers, and between him and other major Protestant leaders such as Bucer, Oecolampadius, Zwingli, Bullinger and, above all, John Calvin (not to mention the radicals who fled to Poland and Hungary, etc), this is alarming. How can he be so inaccurate?

One reason that Catholics don't like the label Roman Catholics is that it ignores the diversity of the Catholic Church. It forgets about the other Latin Rites, for example, and displays compete ignorance of Eastern Rite Catholics. The error that Scarisbrick is highlighting in MacCulloch's statements about the Eucharist is that our doctrine is that the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is Sacramental, not physical (corporal or corporeal). It's stated clearly in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, so MacCulloch has a ready resource for accuracy.

The cover illustrated above is the U.K. edition, which is out now. The U.S. edition, with a different subtitle, is due out in August. According to OUP-USA:

The most profound characteristic of Western Europe in the Middle Ages was its cultural and religious unity, a unity secured by a common alignment with the Pope in Rome, and a common language - Latin - for worship and scholarship. The Reformation shattered that unity, and the consequences are still with us today. In All Things Made New, Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of the New York Times bestseller Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, examines not only the Reformation's impact across Europe, but also the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the special evolution of religion in England, revealing how one of the most turbulent, bloody, and transformational events in Western history has shaped modern society.

The Reformation may have launched a social revolution, MacCulloch argues, but it was not caused by social and economic forces, or even by a secular idea like nationalism; it sprang from a big idea about death, salvation, and the afterlife. This idea - that salvation was entirely in God's hands and there was nothing humans could do to alter his decision - ended the Catholic Church's monopoly in Europe and altered the trajectory of the entire future of the West.

By turns passionate, funny, meditative, and subversive, All Things Made New takes readers onto fascinating new ground, exploring the original conflicts of the Reformation and cutting through prejudices that continue to distort popular conceptions of a religious divide still with us after five centuries. This monumental work, from one of the most distinguished scholars of Christianity writing today, explores the ways in which historians have told the tale of the Reformation, why their interpretations have changed so dramatically over time, and ultimately, how the contested legacy of this revolution continues to impact the world today.

England, the EU, and the English Reformation

I don't have any knowledge to speak of the debate about whether the UK should stay in the EU, but I do find this debate interesting: which is more like the English Reformation: staying or going?

In The Guardian, Giles Fraser says the UK leaving the EU is like the English Reformation:

And this should be entirely unsurprising, given that the Reformation was largely a protest about heteronomous power. “The bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England” goes the 37th of the 39 articles of religion, still – officially, at least – a summary of the theology of the Church of England, of which the Queen is supreme governor.

The backstory is familiar. In England, Henry VIII opportunistically purloined the pope’s authority under the pretext of localising the power of the church. There was nothing particularly honourable about Henry’s power grab. He just didn’t like being told what to do by some bloke in an Italian city. But freed from Roman authority, the Bible could be translated out of the elitist language of Vatican officialdom and into a vernacular that everyone could understand. And it was from this sense of grassroots empowerment that democracy was revived by the Protestant Levellers.

With every attempt – plots, armadas etc – by the pope to reclaim what he thought of as his, a stubborn commitment to English independence came to be lodged ever more firmly in our intellectual marrow. Nothing equivalent has shaped the intellectual worldview of Catholic countries. . . . 

. . . there are those of us who protest against our laws being crafted by some foreign power, beyond the control of our domestic parliament. Brexit perfectly recycles this defiant spirit of the Reformation.

Fraser sees the English Reformation as a political, not religious act: Henry VIII declaring England an Empire and himself its Caesar-Pope. Since Henry VIII's break from Papal authority and establishment of a new church is so complicated, I can see his point. 

But on this site from the University of Oxford, Diarmaid MacCulloch says the opposite is true: the UK staying in the EU is like the English Reformation:

Oh dear, Giles, how wrong can you be, about both the English Reformation and the wider movement across Europe? After its first explosion in northern Germany in 1517, the European Reformation was a completely international movement, transcending and breaking down local boundaries. The lesser Reformations of England and Scotland – distinct from each other, remember, Giles – were just part of this greater whole.

There was no idea of little Englandism in such Protestant reformers as the main author of England’s Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer, who is absent from Giles’s argument. Cranmer, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, was aiming for the English Reformation to resemble as closely as possible his favourite movement in Europe, that of a mainland European city called Strasbourg (though German Reformers, and Cranmer, the English Archbishop with a German wife, would have called it Strassburg). . . . 

MacCulloch makes an interesting point about the language of the Reformation, although of course the reformers all wanted the Holy Bible and the order of worship for their various communities to be in the vernacular:

This unity is also seen in the language of the Reformation: Latin, an international language. It is a mistake to think of Latin simply as the language of Roman Catholicism and its liturgy. It was more truly a universal language, a genuinely effective Esperanto, than English is today. You needed to learn it, certainly, but learning Latin was the main point of schools at the time, and once you had it, you truly were a citizen of a single culture. Without Latin, Protestantism simply couldn’t have spread across local boundaries.

How else would such star Protestant refugees in King Edward VI’s England as Strassburg’s Martin Bucer or Poland’s Johannes à Lasco have talked to their English hosts or indeed to each other, if not in Latin? Latin was the secret weapon of Protestant reformers just as much as it was the language of the Pope. Indeed, it helped either side in the great quarrels of the Reformation understand each other properly when they were insulting each other (which they did, a lot).

But I think MacCulloch overstates Protestant unity, which was already breaking apart during Edward VI's reign in matters of doctrine and worship. 

Finally, MacCulloch partially agrees with his friend:

Giles: you might have a slight point in characterising King Henry VIII of England as a Brexiteer. He broke with the Pope in 1533. Through force of personality plus quite a lot of threats and bluster, he bullied his parliament into pretending that his Church’s independence had actually always been there in English history, just hidden from sight by Romish cunning.

But do remember that Henry VIII was emphatically not a Protestant; in fact, he burned some of them for heresy. The Reformation here flourished in spite of him, not because of him. Henry VIII is definitely not my idea of an acceptable leader, either for the Reformation, the Church of England or modern Britain in general.

Diarmaid MacCulloch on Borman's Cromwell

I cited Leanda de Lisle's take on the new biography of Thomas Cromwell by Tracy Borman yesterday. Here's Diarmaid MacCulloch's view of Borman's grasp of religious issues:

How does Borman measure up to the challenge? She has a tin ear for religion, which is fatal in understanding the motives of a man who permanently altered its official expression in this land; it shows poor judgment to speculate that Cromwell "privately preferred the traditional faith" on the basis that a possible illegitimate daughter of his in Cheshire (their connection is questionable) became a Catholic recusant under Elizabeth I. Cromwell was deeply ideologically committed to Protestantism, already quietly helping to move the reformation forward in his years serving Wolsey; in fact, once he got the chance, he began steering England decisively past the relatively moderate reformation that Martin Luther constructed in north Germany. In 1537, at the height of his career, he did something suicidally risky, for no political gain: he established semi-clandestine relations with the far‑away Swiss city of Zurich, simply because its thoroughgoing (and non‑Lutheran) version of the reformation was the one he wanted England to follow, despite the king's evident hatred of Zurich's brand of Protestantism.

He does praise Borman for seeing a significant detail, and in the context of reading The Last White Rose, depicting Henry VIII's paranoia that everyone was out to get him, I understand hos it contributed to Cromwell's fall and execution:

Borman has spotted the significance of something others have missed: I remember how it brought me up with a jolt when I first noticed it. Cromwell married his son Gregory to Queen Jane Seymour's sister, and thus made himself King Henry VIII's uncle by marriage. Henry made a speciality of killing people who were potential dynastic rivals to himself and his children, so even if Cromwell had not been a Protestant, he might have had his head chopped off to stop him taking the throne. You did not have to make the attempt, you just needed someone with a grudge to whisper to the king that you might try.

His review concludes with reservations about the quality of the author's research:

Borman has read an impressively wide range of modern historical literature on Cromwell, though you have to know that literature already in order to see how it shapes her account: neither her footnotes nor the text itself are forthcoming about those sources. The book contains far too many little slips or misunderstandings of the period to inspire confidence. Its story is slightly out of focus, as is bound to be the case if a biographer almost exclusively uses the printed editions and Victorian summaries of original documents rather than the Tudor manuscripts themselves.

I must say, with two very different authors making the same point about Tracy Borman's confusion about Thomas Cromwell's religious views, this books seems more like a 21st century interpretation of Henry VIII's vice regent than an effective representation of Cromwell in his own time.

Henry VIII Upside Down is a Devil?

Even Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch thinks it could be so in this story from The Daily Mail:

When a British couple discovered a concealed, almost lifesize mural of Henry VIII while redecorating their 16th-century Somerset home a couple of years ago, they could not have been more excited, particularly when an expert spoke of its national importance. 
 
But husband-and-wife Angie and Rhodri Powell were unnerved by a further chance discovery.

When the portrait of Henry on his throne is viewed upside-down his features transform into the devil, with horns and goats’ eyes. The devil appears too when the mural is viewed through a glass [mirror].

The mural is in the couple's drawing-room in the village of Milverton, the former Great Hall of the summer residence of 16th-century archdeacons of Taunton including Thomas Cranmer.

While Henry’s portrait would have been an expression of loyalty, the hidden message suggests it was commissioned by someone with quite another view of a monarch who established himself as head of the Church in England in place of the Pope.

Mrs Powell, a bestselling children’s author who writes under the name Angie Safe, and Mr Powell, a former publisher, came across the devil by accident.

I wonder what happens when you play "Greensleeves" backwards?

Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, a specialist in the history of the church at Oxford University and Cranmer biographer, said that there was tremendous interest in optical illusion at the time, as shown by the distorted perspectives in Holbein's famous painting of The Ambassadors and William Scrots's portrait of Edward VI.

'So there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be true,' he said.

He noted that one of the then archdeacons felt 'very equivocally' about Henry VIII’s Reformation: 'It's just possible that, for a private joke, he put it in because you could only see it through an optic. I imagine that, in the privacy of his own dining-room… it could be enjoyable.'

For obvious reasons, the painting is unsigned.

Conservator Ann Ballantyne, who is working on the mural, noted that it was painted at a time when the king was behaving 'excruciatingly badly'.

I'm really not so sure about this, but it seems to be receiving quite a lot of real attention! What do you think? Check out the photos at The Daily Mail site, and let me know.

Iconoclasm on the BBC (Radio 3)

At 12:45 p.m. Central Time TODAY, BBC 3 will broadcast an examination of the iconoclasm of the English Reformation and of the Civil War:

From the Dissolution of the monasteries to the Civil War, Diarmaid MacCulloch tells the dramatic story of iconoclasm and reformation in the English church.

A difficult and gradual process, the English Reformation eventually succeeded in denuding churches up and down the country of all their images - and (during the Civil War) even their organs. Word replaced image as the medium for worship. Looking at the white-washed churches of Wetherden and Bures in Suffolk, Diarmaid assesses the complex set of motivations which drove the iconoclasts to tear down statues, dismantle rood screens and smash stained glass. He examines the journal of William Dowsing, probably the most notorious iconoclast of the Civil War period, and other documents that shine a light on the complex motivations of Reformation iconoclasts.

Diarmaid's journey also takes him to Winchester Cathedral where the great rood screen was attacked (probably under Edward) and the stained glass later smashed by Cromwell's soldiers. Academic Philip Lindley and sculptor Richard Deacon help to explain the power of religious images and the corresponding fear they induced in iconoclasts.

Finally, the Reverend Canon Doctor Roland Riem of Winchester and artist Sophie Hacker talk about the place of images in today's churches and cathedrals. Diarmaid considers whether the fanaticism of the Reformation reformers bears any relation to the iconoclastic attacks we have witnessed in our own century. And Tabitha Barber, Tate Britain curator, reflects on the legacy of this iconoclastic movement: has the destructiveness of the Reformation made a lasting impact on the history of British Art?

The View from the Organist's Bench: Roger Scruton on Anglicanism

I have heard of Roger Scruton as a philosopher who writes on beauty and is associated with tradition and conservative theories, in general, about society and economics. Last year his book Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England was published by Atlantic Books:

For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead. It offers its sacraments to a population that lives without rites of passage, and which regards the National Health Service rather than the National Church as its true spiritual guardian.

In Our Church, Roger Scruton argues that the Anglican Church is the forlorn trustee of an architectural and artistic inheritance that remains one of the treasures of European civilization. He contends that it is a still point in the centre of English culture and that its defining texts, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are the sources from which much of our national identity derives. At once an elegy to a vanishing world and a clarion call to recognize Anglicanism's continuing relevance, Our Church is a graceful and persuasive book.

Alas, Diarmaid MacCulloch  does not quite agree with that last sentence in the publisher's blurb. Reviewing the book in The Guardian, he begins with a statement of common experience and outlook:

I begin this review with a declaration of interest. Roger Scruton and I are rather alike. When very young, we watched our present queen's coronation on small black-and-white televisions, our first experience of the medium. We are both church organists, both distrust confident religious dogma and clerical pretensions, both love the Church of England in a grumpy fashion, and we have both been known to cultivate a fogeyish image on occasion.

MacCulloch comments that it's because they share so much in common that he cannot accept Scruton's version of the history of the Church of England, even if it is a "personal history":

A fundamental problem is that he persistently refers to "the Anglican church" throughout his account of its history since 1533, with a further implication that even before that, Anglicanism had always been sitting in the cupboard under the stairs, waiting for the pope to go away. Augustine of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory in 597 to establish Roman authority in the old imperial provinces of Britannia, would have been puzzled to learn that his mission had created such a body.

A millennium after Augustine, during the 16th-century reformation, we still couldn't talk about "Anglicanism" – only about the Church of England. Anglicanism really didn't take shape until some determined reconstruction in 1660-62. Previously, it was a "reformed" Protestant church of the European reformation – "reformed", technically, because it wasn't Lutheran – and it looked much to the reformed church in Zurich, a city that doesn't get a mention in Scruton's account, though Geneva does, excessively. The Tudor C of E lacked qualities Scruton admires: tolerance and an embrace of the "middle way". Its bishops ordered images and stained glass to be smashed, a regrettable vandalism that Scruton attributes to some vaguely characterised fanatical thugs called "Puritans". Tudor and Stuart England executed more Roman Catholics than any other Protestant church in Europe, and burned Anabaptists too, besides later dispatching quite a few Scottish Covenanters. The English church was not a "middle way" between the pope and Protestantism, because, as its leaders would brutally have made clear to Scruton, you can't have a middle way between the Antichrist and truth.

And MacCulloch continues, even though he apologizes for "breaking a butterfly upon a wheel" and does commend some parts of the book: "When he genuinely knows about something, other rewards appear: some enjoyably sensitive pages on the feel of a country church, church architecture generally, and some mostly accurate discussion of church music."

Read the rest here. Spoiler alert: MacCulloch does NOT approve of the Anglican Ordinariate.

UPDATE: In the headline, I refer to Roger Scruton as a church organist (as MacCulloch does when citing their shared experiences and views). This Telegraph interview includes some comments on Scruton's view and position while at the organ at his village church, ("All Saints church in the Wiltshire hamlet of Garsdon"):

So what’s the point of religion? “My faith – such as it is – is simply the old Anglican one. We don’t really know, but we trust, and we build a community out of that trust and we recognise as a central feature of that community the ultimate Christian sacrifice.”

His position is summed up by his place at the organ – halfway between the pews and the pulpit. “I can shut myself off and choose whether or not to listen to what’s going on. I don’t have to sing the hymns; I play them instead. My form of religious experience is very much that of an intellectual seeing things from a legacy of doubt.” He sympathises with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in whom he sees a similar “metaphysical doubt”.