Chesterton on the "Book of Common Prayer"

Hilaire Belloc commented on Thomas Cranmer's masterpiece of English prose in the Book of Common Prayer as I noted in my review of Mysterium Press's edition of Cranmer last week. Belloc was born and raised in a Catholic family; his friend G.K. Chesterton was a convert to Catholicism after sharing the Anglo-Catholic faith of his wife Frances for years. As an Anglican, Chesterton used the Book of Common Prayer in church services; as a Catholic (after 1928), he looked back on the experience.

The late Father John Hunwicke (+April 30, 2024), a former Anglican minister who converted to Catholicism as a member (and priest) of the Anglican Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, posted some comments from Chesterton about the Book of Common Prayer on his blog. He does not give the source, however, but I wonder if they're from a collection of columns from the Illustrated London News. This post from the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society doesn't give the source either.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment, May 2, 2018:

" ... why has the old Prayer-Book a power like that of great poetry upon the spirit and heart? The reason is much deeper than the mere avoidance of journalese. It might be put in a sentence; it has style, it has tradition; it has religion; it was written by apostate Catholics. It is strong, not in so far as it is the first Protestant book, but in so far as it was the last Catholic book. 

"As it happens, this can be proved in the most practical manner from the actual details of the prose. The most moving passages in the old Anglican Prayer Book are exactly those that are least like the atmosphere of the Anglicans. They are moving, or indeed thrilling, precisely because they say the things which Protestants have long left off saying; and which Catholics still say. Anybody who knows anything of literature knows when a style lifts itself to its loftiest efforts; and in these cases it is always to say strongly what we [Catholics] still endeavour to say, however weakly; but which nobody else ever endeavours to say at all. Let anyone recall for himself the very finest passages in the Book of Common Prayer, and he will soon see that they are concerned specially with spiritual thoughts and themes that now seem strange and terrible; but anyhow, the reverse of common."

Father Hunwicke further commented: More of this tomorrow; it comes from a collection of his pieces published in 1935, the year before he died (he had converted in 1922). When you read my next instalment, you will grow, I suspect, more and embarrassed about .... modern Catholic culture.

Here is the second post and here is the third.

Even though the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) revised some of the rubrics, etc., much of Cranmer's English prose, including the Litany and the Collects, etc., remained, as this interview about the 1662 BCP notes:

This quality is one that the 1662 BCP preserves from Cranmer’s work more than a century earlier. It reflects the orality of mid-sixteenth century written English. This is also why people notice its strong cadences. It was written for the ear. That’s a great usability advantage because it increases memorability.

So Belloc and Chesterton agreed on the excellence of Cranmer's English prose! ChesterBelloc!

Baring, Over-Bearing, and Past Bearing

Frank Weathers offers some notes on Maurice Baring, friend of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc:

What? There is a third person in the Chesterbelloc? George Bernard Shaw forgot someone? Exactly, dear reader.

See the portrait above? It’s by Sir James Gunn, and it is entitled, “The Conversation Piece.” Surely you recognize the heavyset fellow on the left, and the irascible looking fellow on the right. But who is the tall guy in the center? That would be Maurice Baring, the friend G.B. Shaw forgot.

It is said that when Chesterton saw the finished painting he quipped, “Baring, over-bearing, and past-bearing.” Joseph Pearce wrote at length about this friendship in his excellent book, Literary Converts. There is also a little article written by Pearce about him at Catholic Authors.

Baring wrote a fascinating historical novel about the English Reformation, Robert Peckham. I reviewed it for Catholicfiction.net. In contrast to the novels by Robert Hugh Benson, Baring daringly writes about a man who chooses neither to conform to the established church or to stand boldly against it, and suffers for his lack of action:

Baring offers a third way—also a way of trouble and suffering. Robert Peckham does not choose; as he admits at the end, he fails to speak and act when he should and as his conscience compels him: “I was most blameworthy . . . in my relations with my father. I never told him the truth; not the whole truth. . . . I never dared tell him that I saw full well that the consequence of his acts [supporting whatever changes in religious policy Henry VIII and his successors made] would be to bring about the contrary of what he desired and the ruin of all he held most dear” (p. 278). Fearing his father, who places loyalty to the monarch above family or Church, Peckham can never take the action he should to speak up, to protest, to resist.

Peckham’s father Edmund had determined that the best way to be a good Catholic was to be a good Englishman—and particularly to fulfill the oath of loyalty he made to Henry VIII to support each of his heirs without question.  Edmund Peckham thus accepts all the religious changes, including iconoclasm, suppression of the Holy Mass, heresy trials, burnings at the stake, etc.  Whatever Robert does say to his father cannot persuade him to change. Perhaps fortunately, Edmund Peckham dies at the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign: he can still have a Catholic priest at his deathbed, but the funeral service must be according to the Book of Common Prayer.

Robert Peckham also fails in his relationships with both his wife and the woman he should have married; again because he does not speak when he should. Baring’s great achievement in this novel—which is surely aided by his choice of first person narration—is that he keeps the reader fascinated by the relationships and relative lack of action in Peckham’s life.

Robert Peckham offers us a lesson: we must choose; we must choose either life or death; either the City of God or the City of Man—and if we do not choose rightly, or if we try to avoid the choice God places before us, we will not know peace merely by avoiding conflict and confrontation. In every age, Catholic Christians have faced momentous choices. Catholics in sixteenth century England faced the great choice of loving Jesus Christ and His Church more than life itself, suffering fines, imprisonment, torture, and death. Baring structured this novel, about a fictional “Robert Peckham” who avoids that choice, around the epitaph of the real Robert Peckham in the Church of St. Gregory the Great on the Caelian Hill in Rome:

Here lies Robert Peckham, Englishman and Catholic, who after England’s break with the Church, left England because he could not live in his country without the Faith and, having come to Rome, died there because he could not live apart from his country.

As Weathers notes, Maurice Baring did choose: he became a Catholic, received into the Church at the Brompton Oratory: he said of his conversion that it was "the only action in my life which I am quite certain I have never regretted.”

Robert Peckham certainly had many regrets:

I was rash when I should have been timid, and timid when I should have been bold. . . .I should never have left England. I should have remained and resisted, or died in the attempt.

Maurice Baring, RIP

As Joseph Pearce comments, it's not fair that Maurice Baring is ignored when Chesterton and Belloc are lionized. He references the portrait of Baring, Belloc and Chesterton which is among the illustrations in Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation, and G.B. Shaw's nickname "ChesterBelloc" (which should have been ChesterBarBelloc!):

His fame and reputation have been largely eclipsed by the enduring popularity of his two brothers-in-arms. This is both unfortunate and unjust because Baring deserves recognition as a distinguished poet and novelist in his own right.

Like Chesterton, Baring converted to Catholicism partly under Belloc's influence, and it is possible, perhaps probable, that he would never have emerged as one of the foremost Catholic novelists of the century if he had never met his mercurial mentor. Writing of his first encounter with Belloc in Oxford in 1897, Baring remarked that he was "a brilliant orator and conversationalist . . . who lives by his wits." The men soon became good friends, but Baring remained unconvinced of Belloc's vociferous and vehement championing of the Catholic Church. When his friend Reggie Balfour informed him in the autumn of 1899 that he "felt a strong desire to become a Catholic," Baring was "extremely surprised and disconcerted" and sought to discourage him from taking such a drastic step.

In spite of his unbelief, Baring accompanied Balfour to a low Mass and found himself pleasantly surprised. "It impressed me greatly . . . One felt one was looking on at something extremely ancient. The behavior of the congregation, and the expression on their faces impressed me greatly too. To them it was evidently real."

There was a potent postscript to this episode, which perhaps had a great influence on Baring's eventual conversion. Soon after their attendance at Mass, Reggie Balfour sent Baring an epitaph, copied from a tombstone in Rome and translated from the Latin: "Here lies Robert Peckham, Englishman and Catholic, who, after England's break with the Church, left England not being able to live without the faith and who, coming to Rome, died not being able to live without his country."

The epitaph is to be found in the Church of San Gregorio in Rome, and its underlying tragedy produced a marked and lasting effect on Baring's whole view of the Reformation. He always possessed a melancholy nature, and such imagery provided the inspiration for many of his novels. More specifically, the epitaph itself provided the starting point for his writing of the historical novel, Robert Peckham, 30 years later.

I read Robert Peckham and enjoyed how Baring depicted the obedience of the monarch's subjects accepting the religious changes during the Tudor dynasty. I thought the psychology was about right--the divided loyalty, the desire to remain Catholic and English, faithful to their Church and their country, the hope that things would change and they would be able to go on living their faith . . . until Peckham finds that he just can't, and goes into exile.

Maurice Baring died on December 14, 1945; he suffered from Parkinson's disease the last 15 years of his life. More about his life and career here.

Them's Fightin' Words!--"Is Belloc Best Forgotten?"

Based on a reading of A.N. Wilson's biography of Hilaire Belloc, Father Alexander Lucie-Smith asks that question in a Catholic Herald article:

. . . I once lived with a priest who loved to preach on the subject of “Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe”; and yet Belloc himself is nowadays neglected.

Mr Wilson’s excellent biography tells us why in terms that are rapidly understandable. Belloc was cursed with the necessity of making money all his life, and consequently wrote far too many books, most of which were hurried productions, indeed not written at all, but dictated. In this he sounds like that other most prolific author, Dame Barbara Cartland. Belloc could turn out a book in a week. He was a constant traveller too, and how he got any time to do any reading remains unclear. His history books are very thin on fact and solid research, and long on argument, and the arguments, one gets the impression, are repeated again and again.

Father Lucie-Smith also does not admire Belloc's Path to Rome, which I have mentioned before, and did admire. I do think the headline unfortunate--its one thing to say that his works might not stand the test of time, but to assign the man to oblivion is a little harsh. I do believe that Frederick Wilhelmson and Joseph Pearce, and Father McCloskey would disagree--and the owner of the Hilaire Belloc blog would definitely disagree!

I have enjoyed reading Belloc's Path to Rome twice, and know that much of his work on English and French history, while not up to the standard of profession history, has been proved correct in his interpretation of events. I believe it was Father Vidmar in his book on English Catholic historians writing about the English Reformation who said that Father Hughes and the later revisionists provided the footnotes and rigorous research Belloc neglected. Frederick Wilhelmson concurs:

Time prohibits my detailing Belloc’s revolution in English historical writing. Suffice it to say — and this is said formally and altogether without rhetorical emphasis — that one man, Hilaire Belloc, turned the whole writing of British history around. Since Belloc, nobody can get away with understanding the Reformation as the work of high‑minded souls bent on liberty and democracy, noble souls who brought England out of the darkness of Catholic superstition and medieval obscurantism. Others footnoted Belloc and traded on his vision. They did well in doing so, but the vision was his — as was the persecution of silence that followed on his work.

We have benefitted so much from Belloc's "revolution in English historical writing" that we perhaps take it for granted now.

I disagree with Father Lucie-Smith: Belloc is not best forgotten!