From "First Things": A Review of "God Is An Englishman"

Rhys Laverty reviews God is an Englishman*: Christianity and the Creation of England by Bijan Omrani for First Things. *Not to be confused with R.F. Delderfield's novel!

Of course, I particularly noticed the comments about the treatment of the English Reformation in the review:

While I would recommend Omrani’s book without hesitation, his treatment of the Reformation irked me a little. Omrani at one point refers to the “trauma” of the Reformation, alongside that of the English Civil War. This feels a lopsided term for how the English now see the Reformation, and even for how they saw it by the end of the sixteenth century, when Elizabethan England was a confident Protestant nation set self-consciously against its Catholic foes. Chapter 4 focuses on the history of religious art in England, with much lament over Reformation iconoclasm. Whatever one thinks of it, that iconoclasm and the resultant restrained aesthetic of most Anglican churches is now a part of Christianity’s formation of English identity, a fact Omrani doesn’t really acknowledge.

Furthermore, chapter 8, which outlines the English Reformation’s legacy of political liberty, contains two notable flaws. First, and somewhat pedantically: Omrani suggests that “the foundations were being laid for the divine right of kings” when Henry VIII argued that the fifth commandment (“Honor thy father and mother”) entailed obedience to the governing authorities. Yet this interpretation was novel neither to Henry nor even the Reformation. One can easily find it in Thomas Aquinas.

Second, Omrani fails to moderate his otherwise commendable account of Protestant political liberty with the English Reformation’s particular emphasis on conservatism and good order. . . .

With the comment that Omrani neglects to even mention Richard Hooker's Laws Ecclesiastical Polity, which Laverty notes "bridged the gap between medieval scholasticism and early modern political thought . . . and in a tumultuous time articulated the need for “orderly public judgment to prevail over private judgment” (to quote my friend Brad Littlejohn)." I think Robert Reilly would agree, as he included Hooker in his America on Trial.

Here's a link to the publisher's website; there's a preview offered there.

We're on a break from our 2025 anniversaries series on the Son Rise Morning Show for Memorial Day and the next week, but I'll be back soon with the double anniversaries this year for Saints John Fisher and Thomas More: Martyrdoms AND Canonizations!

Another View of Christianity in England: Peter Ackroyd on "The English Soul"

Catching up on my reading of periodicals, I looked at the book reviews in the December 2024 issue of First Things and saw a review of a new book by Peter Ackroyd written by Richard Rex, professor of Reformation history at the University of Cambridge. The book is titled The English Soul: Faith of a Nation and is published here in the USA by the University of Chicago Press with a paperback available in September this year (in the UK it's available now from Reaktion Books). The publisher's blurb:

This book portrays the spirit and nature of English Christianity, as it has developed over the last fourteen hundred years. During this time, Christianity has been the predominant faith of the people and the reflection of the English soul. This fascinating new history is an account of the Christian English soul, which recognizes the fact that Christianity has been the anchoring and defining doctrine of England while accepting respectfully that other powerful and significant faiths have influenced the religious sensibility of this nation. Peter Ackroyd surveys the lives and faith of the most important figures of English Christianity from the Venerable Bede to C. S. Lewis, exploring the mysticism of Julian of Norwich and William Blake; the tumultuous years of the Reformation; the emergence of the English bible; the evangelical tradition, including John Wesley; and the contemporary contest between tradition, revival, and atheism. This is an essential, comprehensive, and accessible survey of English Christianity.

Richard Rex comments on the unfulfilled promise of the title (his review is titled "Disintegrating England):

Peter Ackroyd is a major figure in contemporary English letters, a fluent and pleasing writer with dozens of fascinating books to his name in numerous genres—history, biography, chorography, criticism, and fiction. So the prospect of his reflections on the long history of Christian England is an appealing one. Yet, by his usual standards, The English Soul is a little disappointing. The book is cast as a catena of brief lives, with “England” an almost abstract backdrop, lacking that spirit of place which is so often the soul of Ackroyd’s writing. The eponymous “English Soul” is ritually invoked from time to time, often in phrases of atypical banality (such as the comment about Little Gidding, “It became a corner of the English soul”) or almost randomly (“This was a phase of the English soul”). The effect is of a halfhearted attempt to make something out of an eye-catching title that never really manages to marshal enough of an idea to justify itself. (p. 53)

And as the title of the review suggests, Rex comments on how Ackroyd does not address the moral decline and lack of Sunday observance in England today, as highlighted in the Crisis Magazine and National Catholic Register articles I posed on last week. What is "The Faith of [the English] Nation" today?

In the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) Lucy Beckett is a little unsure about it too:

The title and subtitle of Peter Ackroyd’s new book are both misleading: the book could more accurately be called From Bede to Don Cupitt: Essays in the history of English Christianity. Twenty-three chapters, each under the heading “Religion as …”, take the reader from the eighth to the twenty-first century, but six of these thirteen centuries are absent from the story. After Bede (“Religion as History”), the next subjects are the fourteenth-century English mystics (“Religion as Revelation”), who seem to be included principally to justify Ackroyd’s often-repeated idea that the (Christian) English soul begins in mystical experience and ends in pragmatism. For him, though they were orthodox Catholics, the mystics initiated the tradition of the individual’s connection with God, outside any structure of doctrine or sacraments, that was taken up first by enthusiasts in the sects that developed on the wilder fringes of Protestantism, then by William Blake. Contemporary with Julian of Norwich and the other mystics, who were very different from each other, was John Wyclif, a scratchy, clever, discontented academic, and indeed a proto-Protestant.

Beckett's review is titled: "A Practical faith: Peter Ackroyd’s Protestant reading of English Christianity". Ackroyd does indeed skip many Catholic writers after Julian Norwich and others in the fourteenth century, according to the Table of Contents until the nineteenth and twentieth. After her and Rolle and Hilton it's Wyclif, Tyndale, Cranmer, and Foxe. He does later devote chapters to John Henry Newman ("Religion as Thought"--YIKES!) and G.K.Chesterton (shared with C.S. Lewis in chapter titled "Religion as Argument"--Chesterton probably wouldn't mind that much because he did love a good argument!), two Anglican converts to Catholicism. I wonder if William Caxton, Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, Saint John of Beverley and Saint John of Bridlington (two of the English saints Henry V asked to intercede at the Battle of Agincourt),and otherss even merit a mention.

As Rex comments, "Having been called into existence by the papacy, English Christianity remained for nine hundred years intimately connected with Rome, but this truth is simply bypassed [by Ackroyd]. . . . the long continuum of English Catholicism, from 600 to 1500, is covered in fifty pages, a quarter of them on the idiosyncratic figure of John Wycliffe (sic) . . ." (p. 54 in the print edition) Rex also points out the irony that the cover of the book depicts Saint Thomas of Canterbury excommunicating Henry II when the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury is hardly mentioned in the book and by the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus, yet none of the medieval Catholic material culture of art and architecture is mentioned.

Lucy Beckett brings up some of the same issues with this trenchant comment, "Ackroyd writes as if Eamon Duffy had never bothered to revive respect for the warmth and depth of medieval English Christianity, and treats Catholic piety only with the contempt of a scornful Protestant."

Speaking of Eamon Duffy, here's his view of Ackroyd's success or failure. He concludes: "Ackroyd is an accomplished writer who has often written compellingly about the English past. But he is not at his best in this book, a sometimes dutiful catalog of major and some very minor religious figures, lacking a convincing unifying theme. Anyone looking for a key to the English soul must look elsewhere."

I think I'll wait for the paperback . . . or to see it on the shelf at a bookstore and scan the chapter on Newman.

Saint John Fisher's "A Defense of Free Will against Luther"

From an article in First Things--brought to my attention by one of my theologian friends--I found out about an upcoming publication of an important work by Saint John Fisher, the holy Bishop of Rochester, executed on June 22, 1535. The article by Michael Root, "Overcoming Theological Amnesia", argues that we skip too many centuries in our overview of Catholic theology, jumping from Saint Thomas Aquinas to the Ressourcement movement, and proposes:

We need to recover what has been lost. We need a wider ressourcement, not unlike the ressourcement of the mid-twentieth century, but one that casts a wider, more “catholic” net. The endeavor will not be easy. Late medieval and early modern theologians are hard nuts to crack. When a late medieval theologian says that a certain adjective is applied in the second mode of per se predication, one has to stop and figure out what that means. And the early modern theologians can be horribly long-winded. In many ways, twelfth- and thirteenth-century theologians are easier for us to understand than those of the fourteenth or seventeenth centuries. But the hard work will be worth it.

Root later comments:

It’s easy to anticipate the objection that a wider ressourcement seeks to perform the impossible, or at least what is impossible for most of us. Mastery of an almost two-thousand-year history of theology is more than can be expected from the theologian. Many important pre-modern theological works, especially from the late medieval and early modern periods, are untranslated, and most of us do not have the Latin facility typical of our theological forebears. Nevertheless, things are improving. The Catholic University of America Press series of Early Modern Catholic Sources is making available in English translation significant works that have been long ignored. Google Books, the Hathi Trust, and the Internet Archive make older editions available as never before.

So I clicked on the link to the CUA Early Modern Catholic Sources website and found this: A Defense of Free Will against Luther: Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio, Article 36, by Saint John Fisher; translated by Thomas P. Scheck. 

From the book's blurb:

Lord Acton said that of all the works written against Martin Luther in the beginning of the Reformation, Bishop John Fisher of Rochester's Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio of 1523 was the most important. Oddly enough this massive work of Catholic apologetics, composed in Latin, has never been rendered into the English language. It contains Fisher's detailed responses to all forty-one articles defended by Martin Luther against the censures of Pope Leo X found in the bull Exsurge Domine (1520).

In this volume Thomas Scheck presents for the first time in English translation, introduced, and annotated, Fisher's Preface to the Reader, Ten Truths, and the most important single article found in Fisher's Confutation, namely his Confutation of Luther's Assertion of Article 36, in which Fisher defends the existence of free will against Luther's claim that free will is a fiction with no reality. Fisher's reply is thoroughly grounded in Scripture and in the interpretation of Scripture found in the ancient Fathers of the Church. Interestingly to defend free will he makes abundant use of Augustine, Origen, Jerome, Tertullian and John Chrysostom. . . .

Something to consider next month!

Saint John Fisher, pray for us!

From "First Things": A Consideration of the 'Anglican Reset'

Hans Boersma, Gerald McDermott, and Greg Peters collectively ask: "Is the Anglican "Reset" Truly Anglican?" in First Things, posted on June 9 of this year:

The Kigali Commitment of April 21, 2023, was a shot heard around the world. Thirteen hundred Anglican leaders, dominated by bishops and clergy from the Global South, gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, to declare that they no longer recognized the Archbishop of Canterbury as their leader. Representing 85 percent of the Anglican Communion, they pronounced their determination to “reset the Communion on its biblical foundations.”  

The boldness of this statement is striking. Not only does it signal the end of English domination of the Communion, but it also demonstrates counter-cultural courage. The leaders of the Global Anglican Fellowship Conference (GAFCON) and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) have defied Global North elite opinion and financial coercion by denouncing the Church of England’s February 2023 decision to bless same-sex couples. . .

The question they ask, while commending the one thousand, three hundred leaders for taking a stand, is if they've taken their stand on the right foundation:

The Kigali Commitment repeatedly appeals to the authority of the Bible alone and fails to mention either the authority of the Church or the role of tradition, describing the Bible as “the rule of our lives” and the “final authority in the church” without mentioning that Scripture functions within the context of tradition—in particular, the common liturgy of the Church and the Book of Common Prayer—and the Church’s teaching authority.

They cite Bishop John Jewell (1552-1571), Richard Hooker (1554-1600), and Bishop Francis White (1564-1638), and more recently, the 2002 statement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together to demonstrate that Anglicans and even some Evangelicals have acknowledged "there is no such thing as Scripture without tradition, that every person reads Scripture through the lens of some tradition or other, whether he realizes it or not", attributing that sentiment to Hooker. This is in contrast to the Kigali Commitment's reliance on the "clarity" of the Biblical text as Boersma, McDermott, and Peters see it.

That reminded me that Catholic World Report recently featured an interview with Casey Chalk about his new book  The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (Emmaus Road, 2023). Chalk also refers to this hermeneutic of interpretation as "perspicuity", citing the Westminster Confession of Faith, paragraph 7:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.

Chalk's comment:

The above statement requires a little bit of unpacking. The Westminster divines are not saying that all of Scripture is equally clear, but that enough of it is that both learned and unlearned Christians, relying on the Holy Spirit in prayer and leveraging things like biblical preaching or good commentaries, that they should be able to understand what is necessary for salvation.

So, anytime you talk to a Protestant and he or she says something like “the Bible clearly teaches X,” they are making recourse to the doctrine of clarity. Of course, a lot of times that person may be going well beyond what the Westminster divines had in mind, given their narrow understanding of perspicuity. But the basic premise is that Scripture is clear enough on what’s necessary for salvation, or the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, that any well-meaning Christian should be able to read his or her Bible and find precisely that.

Be that as it may, when I read the text of the Kigali Commitment, I did note that the signers of this document did appeal to Anglican tradition and the teaching authority of the Church of England, specifically to the Lambeth Conference of 1998:

Public statements by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other leaders of the Church of England in support of same-sex blessings are a betrayal of their ordination and consecration vows to banish error and to uphold and defend the truth taught in Scripture.

These statements are also a repudiation of Resolution I.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, which declared that ‘homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture,’ and advised against the legitimising or blessing of same sex unions’. 

This occurred despite the Archbishop of Canterbury having affirmed that ‘the validity of the resolution passed at the Lambeth Conference 1998, I.10 is not in doubt and that whole resolution is still in existence’. (page 2)

I thought of what Saint John Henry Newman might say about this putative schism in the Anglican Communion. Or rather, what he did say to those in "the Religious Movement of 1833" who had remained in the Church of England as he referred to them in his lectures on Anglican Difficulties.

In the first lecture "On the Relation of the National Church to the Nation" he warned them:

I have said all this, my brethren, not in declamation, but to bring out clearly to you, why I cannot feel interest of any kind in the National Church, nor put any trust in it at all from its past history, as if it were, in however narrow a sense, a guardian of orthodoxy. It is as little bound by what it said or did formerly, as this morning's newspaper by its former numbers, except as it is bound by the Law; and while it is upheld by the Law, it will not be weakened by the subtraction of individuals, nor fortified by their continuance. Its life is an Act of Parliament. It will not be able to resist the Arian, Sabellian, or Unitarian heresies now, because Bull or Waterland resisted them a century or two before; nor on the other hand would it be unable to resist them, though its more orthodox theologians were presently to leave it. It will be able to resist them while the State gives the word; it would be unable, when the State forbids it. Elizabeth boasted that she "tuned her pulpits;" Charles forbade discussions on predestination; George on the Holy Trinity; Victoria allows differences on Holy Baptism. While the nation wishes an Establishment, it will remain, whatever individuals are for it or against it; and that which determines its existence will determine its voice. Of course {9} the presence or departure of individuals will be one out of various disturbing causes, which may delay or accelerate by a certain number of years a change in its teaching: but, after all, the change itself depends on events broader and deeper than these; it depends on changes in the nation. As the nation changes its political, so may it change its religious views; the causes which carried the Reform Bill and Free Trade may make short work with orthodoxy.

We'll have to wait and see how the Archbishop of Canterbury, et al, respond to the Kigali Commitment, but Newman predicted the direction the Church of England would go: following the Nation, the Parliament, and the zeitgeist of the age.

Latin Education after the English Reformation

First Things magazine hosted an event last week that I hope results in an article in a later issue: a presentation by Eleanor Pettus Schneider titled A Hole in the Renaissance: The Decline in Latin Education During the English Reformation:

By 1535, England had a robust and growing number of Latin grammar schools that aspired to teach some form of humanist Latin. The very reason for the early spread of humanist ideas, however, nearly proved the downfall of the Latin education in general and the educational fashion with it. Pre-Reformation English humanism had proven itself to be entirely compatible with late medieval religious beliefs about the role of intercessory prayers in the life of the church; schools founded by humanists maintained traditional expectations about the role of school as religious organization. Thus, when Henry VIII and Edward VI attempted to reform the church and stamp out practices they regarded as superstitious many schools vanished with the institutions that had been outlawed.

This presentation is based on Eleanor Pettus Schneider's 2015 dissertation for her PhD at the University of Notre Dame. She does not use the term, but I presume she is discussing in part the suppression of the Chantry Chapels which combined grammar schools for the poor and chapels for praying for the dead and offering Masses for the repose of their souls.

In her interview on the National Association of Scholars website, she explains some more about her research and what she wants to do next with a scholarship she had received:

How will the Fraser Barron Scholarship help you do your research?

Looking at more individual schools. Many of my conclusions are guided by large document sets—the returns of the Henry VIII and Edward VI chantry commissions, the surrenders of the monasteries, and the Latin grammar publication records. But these documents need to be fleshed out through more local stories— individual school fights for survival. The Fraser Barron will let me visit three such institutions.

What excites you about your research?

I love teasing out the definition of “education”. What made Renaissance society invest so heavily in their schools? How did they understand the connection between education and the soul? The scholar and the community? And how did the Tudor government so misunderstand the actual school endowment structures that Reformation-era legislation threatened the whole project?

I wonder how John Colet's humanist curriculum survived at St. Paul's School? Did his Latin grammar, written with Erasmus and William Lily, endure the neglect that Schneider saw in the publication of other Latin grammar books?

Image Credit: John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's (public domain the USA)

England's Nero and the Sacred Heart of Jesus

From First Things, a review of a biography of Henry VIII, focusing on the author's knowledge and understanding of medieval Catholic piety and devotion:

Matusiak is neither Catholic nor especially anti-Catholic. He acknowledges the recent attacks by historians on St. Thomas More, but isn’t persuaded by them. He is a little bewildered by sixteenth-century Catholic piety, but paints a vivid picture of it. And he is perceptive on the king’s relationship to Catholic orthodoxy: “Henry sought throughout the 1540s to impose his own idiosyncratic, hybrid version of doctrine which contained elements both to satisfy and at the same time to frustrate all sides.”

But while I was enjoying this book, I was conscious of an absence, which became obvious only when we got to St. John Fisher’s martyrdom. It is not just that Matusiak characterises Fisher’s stance as an “overreaction”; that is understandable. A non-Catholic is unlikely to sympathize with Fisher’s view that to reject a single doctrine is to abandon the Faith. No, what really rings false is Matusiak’s portrait of the saint as “a hair-shirted, hard-praying, uncompromising flagellant … a scholar and ascetic worthy of beatification.” That’s not inaccurate, but Fisher was so much else besides.

He was, before his dramatic end, a bishop who traveled his diocese visiting the sick of every parish, sitting by the bedside of some suffering invalid for three or four hours at a time; who gave cash and a meal to the beggars crowding at his door each day, while denying himself not just comforts but normal amounts of food and sleep; whose near-contemporary biographer wrote, “To poor sick persons he was a physician, to the lame he was a staff, to poor widows an advocate, to orphans a tutor, and to poor travellers a host.” What Matusiak misses is the deepest thing in St. John Fisher—his love for God and for his neighbor.

Likewise, Matusiak draws an affectionate sketch of the strong-willed Catherine of Aragon, who defied “an assemblage of England’s great and mighty with consummate ease.” But we do not glimpse the Catherine who yearned, as she wrote in a late letter, for “the calm life of the blessed,” when she would see the God she adored.

Matusiak gives us a sense of sixteenth-century English Catholicism, in its awareness of the supernatural—“At this time when funerals were among the most frequent of church services, hell itself was never more than a failed heartbeat or horse’s stumble away”—and its variety of devotions. But he cannot explain to the reader why the removal of the traditional religion so enraged Northern England that around 40,000 people took up arms. The Northerners were, he says in an unusually flat passage, “conservative.”

A better clue to their motives would be found in the banners they were carrying. The army—or as they called themselves, pilgrims—marched behind huge images of the Five Wounds of Christ, including His wounded heart: an image that was a precursor of the later devotion to the Sacred Heart.

Ignatius Press has published an updated edition of Timothy O'Donnell's excellent Heart of the Redeemer, in which the author traces the history of this perennial devotion. Here at the end of the month of June, dedicated to devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, it's appropriate to remember how Catholics throughout the ages have loved the Lord in His Sacred Heart.

Defending St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More

Watch this space for an article on St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, defending them again this year as brave and holy martyrs for Jesus and His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church! It seems like every year there's some attack against them or some disparaging of their opposition to Henry VIII's supremacy. This year it came from Peter Hitchens in First Things:

This leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Henry’s judicial murders of Thomas More and John Fisher were political in origin, not religious. Both More and Fisher were brave and principled, beyond doubt. They were also given to fierce and cruel persecution of Protestant heretics—both, along with their Catholic King Henry VIII, were implicated in the savage death by fire of the Protestant martyr Thomas Hitton in 1530. Nor is there any doubt that Fisher, saintly Englishman or not, made treasonous approaches to Eustace Chapuys, Charles V’s ambassador in London, urging Charles to invade England and overthrow Henry. By going to their deaths over the question of papal authority over the king, Fisher and More chose an issue peripheral to Christ’s teaching, which renders unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and is preoccupied with a kingdom that is not of this world. Far from being an unalterable principle, the dissolubility of marriage had already been conceded by the chief of their Church, and would be conceded again in the future, right up to the extraordinary annulment of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s first (and in Christian terms only) marriage.

These facts are a nuisance to Roman Catholic martyrology in England. More and Fisher are essential to the story of Protestant brutality and intolerance, which greatly aided the nineteenth-century re-founding of the Catholic Church in England and sustains it still. Reborn Catholicism in England needed a counterblast to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and its long list of Mary’s victims, and to the commemorations of Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley in Oxford. It needed Englishmen who had died for the Catholic faith. Foreigners were of no use.

It also needed a martyrs’ memorial. More and Fisher, like Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer, were undeniably great and courageous Englishmen, and eloquent ones, too. One especially potent use of their memory can be found in St Wilfrid’s Chapel in the Brompton Oratory in London, perhaps the supreme headquarters of Catholic militancy in England. Above the altar of the English martyrs, in a side chapel of this majestic church, is a powerfully sinister and suggestively grim mural. It looks very old, but it was painted in 1938 by Rex Whistler (who is possibly the model for Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited). It depicts executions at Tyburn, London’s principal place for such things, and is flanked by idealized portraits of More and Fisher. 

So check out my response here.

Saint John Fisher, pray for us!

Saint Thomas More, pray for us!

"A Protestant Understanding of England's Martyrs"

In the June/July 2018 issue of First Things (non-subscribers have access to three free articles a month), Peter Hitchens laments that Latimer and Ridley are Forgotten and provides A Protestant Understanding of England's Martyrs:

I offer these facts and thoughts to explain that this is the world in which I was brought up. I may even be the last living straggler of that era, a cultural coelacanth hauled up gasping from the silent, lightless depths of the day before yesterday. In my later, more multicultural life, I have learned that there are other versions of these events. I am more than ready to absorb these into my worldview, within reason. I know perfectly well that Elizabeth Tudor was not the simple figure of goodness and patriotism I was brought up to believe in. In general, I know that childhood history is merely a crude introduction to national myth, and that adults are required to treat it with severe and often brutal skepticism.

So please do not press William Cobbett’s view of the Reformation on me, or tell me to read the works of Eamon Duffy on the stripping of the altars, for I have done so. I know that there were terrible losses—of good men and women, of glorious art and sculpture, of valuable traditions, of learning and charitable works. I wish it had not been so. I only say that, without the Anglican compromise of Elizabeth, England would have had a far more savage Reformation than it did, and would have lost much more, as I think events in Scotland clearly show to this day.

Only one issue really concerns me here, on which I will stand my ground. And that is the argument, often advanced by Roman Catholics to me, that Elizabeth persecuted their faith just as Mary persecuted mine. It is not true to say that Elizabeth and Mary were mirror images of each other, and it matters that it is not true.

I am still reading the article, but my first reaction is that Peter Hitchens is either angry at Catholics for honoring the English Catholic martyrs from 1534 to 1681 or angry at Anglican Protestants for forgetting the English Protestant martyrs from 1553 to 1558. 

He is particularly upset at the honor Catholics pay to Saints John Fisher and Thomas More as depicted in one painting of the Brompton Oratory:

. . . More and Fisher, like Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer, were undeniably great and courageous Englishmen, and eloquent ones, too. One especially potent use of their memory can be found in St Wilfrid’s Chapel in the Brompton Oratory in London, perhaps the supreme headquarters of Catholic militancy in England. Above the altar of the English martyrs, in a side chapel of this majestic church, is a powerfully sinister and suggestively grim mural. It looks very old, but it was painted in 1938 by Rex Whistler (who is possibly the model for Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited). It depicts executions at Tyburn, London’s principal place for such things, and is flanked by idealized portraits of More and Fisher.

The execution scene is a masterpiece. The callous, lumpish crowd, backs turned on us, watches as several bodies dangle from a triangular gibbet. Many people are busy with horrible tasks. A condemned man is being guided up a ladder to join these broken, throttled corpses, and every inch of him betokens horror and resignation. Another man is being unstrapped from a hurdle before he too makes the ascent. A fire burns in the middle distance, oily black smoke curling into the summer sky (the trees are in leaf). That fire, it is clear, means no good to somebody. It seems to be dusk, but the darkness of the scene might only be the mood, or the smoke. Halberds and pikes, immensely tall, rise from among the mob, almost as high as the gallows, marking the presence of soldiers, presumably gathered around some notable victim. A castle tower commands the background. Far off, a windmill stands in a sort of Claude Lorrain landscape of sylvan peace. Yet the light in the painting is the light of a nightmare. A strong impression of evil and cruelty comes out of the frame, as I am sure it is meant to do. I would not want an impressionable child to see it. It is one of the most powerful pieces of propaganda I have ever experienced. When I recently revisited it, I was astonished to find how small it actually is. I had remembered it as huge. . . .

He contends that this painting is misleading since More and Fisher were beheaded, missing the point that the Catholic protomartyrs, the Carthusians St John Houghton, St Robert Lawrence, St Augustine Webster, the Briggitine St Richard Reynolds, and the parish priest Blessed John Haile were hanged, drawn, and quartered! He thinks that because More and Fisher are on the left and right hand panels, the center panel is supposed to represent their martyrdoms. 

Hitchens confuses doctrine and discipline (the laity receiving the Body and Blood of Holy Communion separately; married priesthood through the Anglican Ordinariate, and singing hymns), and doesn't think it fair that we don't honor Cranmer (or Latimer, or Ridley I suppose) on the Roman Calendar of Saints, while the Church of England honors More, Fisher, and the Catholic martyrs of the Recusant era on its Calendar of Saints. 

The Catholic laity have always received the Body and the Blood at Holy Communion; the Host is not exsanguinated flesh! He conveniently passes over the point of what Catholics are receiving--the Real Presence, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, of Jesus Christ under the form of Bread and Wine--and what Anglicans are receiving according to the 39 Articles of the Church of England. He doesn't understand what the Mass and Holy Communion are to a believing, devout Catholic. That's also why he thinks the Anglican Book of Common Prayer services should do quite well for Catholics today and should have done quite well for Elizabethan Catholics when Parliament passed laws forbidding the celebration of the Holy Mass as Catholics knew it at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign.

There have always been married Catholic priests, in the Eastern Rite--his view of the Catholic Church is too small and insular.

Singing hymns? That's a great sign of change in the Catholic Church? That started in the nineteenth century in England with the Oratorians when Catholics were at last allowed to practice their faith and worship God in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass!

The Church of England and the Catholic Church have completely different understandings of what it means to be named to their respective Calendar of Saints. Hitchens ought to know that.

He is piling on and mixing things up, and he displays as much misunderstanding as he does anguish--and thus he weakens what he wanted to argue in his thesis, that "It is not true to say that Elizabeth and Mary were mirror images of each other, and it matters that it is not true."

Please read the rest there. I'll be thinking more about that contention, apart from the misunderstandings that Hitchens has added to his article, muddling his central thesis.

Catholic Continental Ambitions

This book is on my wish list. Stefan McDaniel reviews it for First Things (access may be limited, unless you are a subscriber):

In his final book, Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America; The Colonial Experience, the late Kevin Starr set out to dispel this perception. Continental Ambitions tells the story of Catholic conquest, exploration, and settlement in North America (involving Norse, Spanish, French, and British Catholics), emphasizing the relevance of this story to understanding the present-day continental United States. “The history of Catholicism in America,” says Starr in his preface, “is not simply Catholic history. It is American history . . . part of the warp and woof, the very fabric and meaning, of American life.” . . .

Starr also brings out general issues in Catholic history, providing much matter for meditation. He is keenly aware, for instance, that as the Church works the hard clay of cultural, political, and economic reality, the resistance always generates contradictions and anomalies. How are Spanish Franciscans in the Southwest to create their Indian-Catholic utopia without the protection of the very Spanish soldiers whose criminality alienates and scandalizes the Indians? How to sustain the apostolate of Ville-Marie, meant to make the Indians sons of God, without selling them the guns and brandy that enthrall them to the devil? How can there be any Catholic freedom in Maryland without wealth from black slavery?

One general moral to be drawn from the history Starr relates is that intellectual clarity and practical competence are much more valuable in creating an authentic Christian society than is the mystical exuberance that is currently in fashion. This becomes clear when one compares the North American record of the Franciscans on one hand with that of the Jesuits and Dominicans on the other. Franciscans indulged extravagant theologies of Indians as the new chosen people, but it took cold Dominican pedantry to define and guard the Indians’ most basic rights as human persons. Franciscans let fly thunderous condemnations of the soldiers who abused their Indian charges, but it was the Jesuits, with their traditional insistence on (as Starr says) “polity, power, results,” who got Spanish soldiers on their payroll—that is, on a leash.

While praising many aspects of Starr's book, McDaniel also recommends another to fill some gaps he finds in Continental Ambitions--Our Land and Our Lady by Daniel Sargent:

. . . Our Land and Our Lady is an irenic and refreshing book. It reminds us that America, like many of its current residents, may have been raised Protestant, but it was baptized Catholic. Almost every region was first discovered, explored, and charted by ultra-Catholic Spaniards and Frenchmen. From the Bay of the Mother of God (the Chesapeake) to the River of the Immaculate Conception (the Mississippi) to the Bay of San Francisco, these Catholics christened the land with Catholic names. Far too often, these Catholics (especially the Spanish) went on to promptly profane the land with slaughter and slavery. But they also consecrated it with the blood of martyrdom—profusely in the Southwest, but also in Auriesville, New York, and by the Rappahannock, near Bull Run. Even British Catholics managed to play their part, discreetly devoting a Chesapeake colony to Mary, and there instituting a regime of tolerance based on Catholic humanism and prudence, not on the axioms of Locke. Even in the era of the Anglo-Protestant republic, the Church blessed our country with a true Enlightenment: heroic Catholic evangelization, such as Pierre-Jean De Smet’s work with the Indians of the Northwest, and the accessible Catholic education provided by vast armies of nuns. Finally, Catholics like the fathers of Maryknoll brought America to a sort of Catholic maturity when they harnessed its legendary wealth, energy, and goodwill for foreign missions, making it a spiritual center from which the Gospel is proclaimed to the ends of the earth.

Newman on Papal Infallibility, Then and Now

Father John Hunwicke, a priest of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham and a famous blogger, writes about Newman's concern before the First Vatican Council about Papal Infallibility for First Things. Father Hunwicke is writing in the context of Pope Francis' pontificate, but I am interested in Newman's ability to find the third way, neither being Ultramontane (relying on the Pope's decrees to an excessive degree) nor Cisalpine (ignoring the Pope):

Perhaps the greatest Anglican intellect of the late twentieth century, Henry Chadwick, described Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman as “a formidable controversialist, as supreme a master of irony and satire as any in our literature.” There can be little doubt that Newman's skills both dazzled his followers and admirers, and infuriated those whose own ecclesial comfort required them to evade his conclusions. In the febrile aftermath of the “Papal Aggression,” the restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy in 1851, Julius Hare, Archdeacon of Chichester, read a Charge to the clergy of his archdeaconry, in which he unloaded his wrath on “Dr. Newman's Circaean talent for metamorphosing historical facts.” 

Newman has employed a large portion of his time and of his ingenuity in the twofold process of transmuting fable into history and history into fable, until he seems to have almost lost the perception that there is any real, abiding distinction between them, and to fancy that they become one or the other at the touch of a sophist’s wand.

In our own day, as controversy swirls around the Bishop of Rome, we have much to learn from one particular touch of Newman’s “wand”—his account of what the pope can and cannot do.

In the Apologia pro Vita Sua of 1864, Newman takes up a criticism leveled against Catholicism—namely, that it is intransigent. Rather than denying this charge, he accepts and strengthens it, then characteristically turns it against the Church’s critics:

It is one of the reproaches urged against the Church of Rome, that it has originated nothing, and has only served as a sort of remora or break in the development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I embrace as a truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its extraordinary gift.

Newman denied that Rome was the site of innovation. He saw that “the Church of Rome possessed no great mind in the whole period of persecution,” nor in the centuries that followed. “For a long while, it has not a single doctor to show: St Leo, its first, is the teacher of one point of doctrine.” Just as Peter was not the dazzling originator of new teaching, his successors have more often served as a brake on innovation than as its impetus.

Before the First Vatican Council in the late nineteenth century, Newman feared that the kind of Ultramontanism William Ward anticipated, with a Papal Decree published everyday, would result. When Newman wrote his response to former Prime Minister Gladstone's attack on Papal Infallibility as a danger to the British government, he argued for the same limitation and balance that Father Hunwicke notes the German bishops cited against Bismarck's Kulturkampf fears, which Pope Pius IX endorsed:

Despite the misgivings of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, Vatican I led to a welcome clarification in Catholic thinking about the Roman primacy. Vindicating Newman's root conviction that doctrinal clarification normatively results from the repudiation of error, this clarification arose from an attack made upon the Council and the Church by Chancellor Bismarck. The German episcopate issued a ringing response to Bismarck, asserting that

even as far as concerns ecclesiastical matters, the pope cannot be called an absolute monarch, since indeed he is subject to Divine Law and is bound to those things which Christ set in order (disposuit) for his Church. He cannot change the constitution of the Church which was given to it by its divine Founder. … The constitution of the Church in all essential matters is founded in the divine arrangement (ordinatione) and is therefore immune from every arbitrary human disposition.

Their lordships went on to emphasize that papal infallibility “is restricted to the proper meaning of the supreme papal Magisterium; [which] indeed coincides with the extent of the infallible Magisterium of the Church herself and is bound to the doctrine contained in Holy Scripture and in Tradition and to the definitions already made by the Church's Magisterium.”

The German press appears then to have suggested that the German hierarchy had watered down the conciliar definitions and produced a document that was viewed with disfavor in Rome. Pio Nono himself responded by endorsing the German statement, in a manner too lengthily and exuberantly fulsome to be quoted in full.

Please read the rest there. I'm thinking about Newman and conscience and Newman and Papal Infallibility again now because of some presentations I'll be making in July this year at the Spiritual Life Center. Stayed tuned.

Psychoanalytic criticism: Man is Wolf to Man

First Things has made one of its February 2017 subscriber access articles available for free: Patricia Snow discusses the personal background behind Hilary Mantel's Cromwell novels:

Psychoanalytic criticism may have fallen out of favor, but it has not ceased to be useful. Even so bare an outline of Mantel’s life, drawn from her 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, makes clear the connections between Mantel’s biographical backstory and the goings-on at Henry VIII’s court. In her novels about Cromwell, all of Mantel’s formative issues are in play: the plot-driving engine of marital unhappiness; divorce and the impossibility of divorce; ambiguous sexual situations; the desirability but also the powerlessness of children. Mantel’s early experiences explain not only her richly ambivalent attitude toward her Tudor characters, but also her impressive “negative capability” as their artist—her ability, that is, out of the small circle of her original family, either to play or to cast all the parts.

For example, she herself is Mary, the king’s awkwardly placed oldest daughter who is banished from his presence together with a rejected, painfully dignified spouse (Katherine of Aragon). She is also Elizabeth, another unwanted but ultimately triumphant (if sterile) daughter who, at a stroke, lost a parent (Anne Boleyn) as a child. Mantel’s mother, of course, is Henry, the books’ capricious, death-dealing sovereign, and Jack is Anne Boleyn, the sallow Protestant parvenu. But Mantel’s mother is also Boleyn: small and catlike in her movements, unscrupulous and shape-shifting. Cross-referencing Mantel’s memoir with the novels, the reader encounters the same clusters of descriptors again and again, shared out among Mantel’s mother, Jack, and Anne Boleyn, or among Cromwell, Mantel herself as a child, and Cromwell’s small daughter, Anne. Sometimes a phrase or sentiment from the memoir is lifted virtually unchanged into the novels, as when Mantel’s mother and Jack, like Henry and Anne, are described as “[the] couple who had endured, to be together, so much adverse public opinion.”

In the novels, Mantel is reimagining the small-scale squalor of her parents’ domestic arrangements on a large scale, as consequential history. The exercise may have been exhilarating, or cathartic, as when history requires that she banish Queen Katherine and her daughter, Mary, not to a yellowing bedroom down a dimly lit hall, but to far-flung palaces. But any temptation on Mantel’s part to use the novels to romanticize or exorcise her own past is balanced in the writing by an equally strong authorial impulse to expose it.

For example, there is Mantel’s puzzling choice of a title: Wolf Hall. Scarcely mentioned in the novel that bears its name, Wolf Hall is the family seat of Jane Seymour, the eventual third wife of the king. Halfway through Wolf Hall, in a brief digression, the reader learns that old Sir John Seymour slept with his son’s wife for two years, during which time she gave birth to two boys. Laughing when the scandal of the boys’ dubious parentage becomes known, Anne Boleyn says to Henry, “They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall.” Inexplicable as a title choice apart from a familiarity with Mantel’s history, Wolf Hall is the world for Mantel personally. Or as Cromwell puts it to himself elsewhere: homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man.

Read the rest there. 

At the end of the article, Snow points out that The Mirror and the Light, Mantel's third novel about Thomas Cromwell, is taking longer to write (the first two books were published in 2009 and 2012). Snow suggests that killing off her father figure must be hard for Mantel. I wonder if Mantel will respond to Snow's comments: this cuts close to the quick and perhaps the article demonstrates why "Psychoanalytic criticism may have fallen out of favor". Man is wolf to man.

A Review of "Reformations"

For First Things, Eamon Duffy reviews a new survey of the history of the Reformations of "The Early Modern World, 1450-1650" by Carlos M.N. Eire (Yale University):

Eire is one of America’s most distinguished historians of early modern religion, and his absorption of the newer historiography is proclaimed in the fact that his book is entitled Reformations, in the plural. His book “accepts the concept of multiple Reformations wholeheartedly,” and seeks to deepen the concept by paying equal attention “to all the different movements and churches that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, stressing their interrelatedness.” The ambition to present a synoptic account of the multiple sixteenth-century movements for religious “reform,” Catholic and Protestant, has led some historians to search for a single interpretative framework for the reform impulse, to suggest that fundamental similarities underlay sixteenth-century religious reform wherever it occurred. So, the French Catholic historian Jean Delumeau proposed that we should understand both the emergence of Protestantism and the transformation of Catholicism after Trent as twin aspects of a process of “Christianization.” On this account, both Catholic and Protestant reformers labored to replace the inherited half-pagan folk religion of late medieval Europe with something more authentically Christian, focused on the person of Christ rather than often legendary saints, prioritizing orthodox catechesis and preaching over quasi-magical ritual, and imposing religious and moral discipline on a reluctant populace.

Rejecting the negative judgments implicit in Delumeau’s notion of “Christianization,” the English historian John Bossy, himself by upbringing and education a Catholic, offered a rather less benign overarching analysis of the Catholic and Protestant reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The central contention of Bossy’s short but scintillating Christianity in the West was that medieval Christianity had been fundamentally concerned with the creation and maintenance of peace in a violent world. “Christianity” in medieval Europe denoted neither an ideology nor an institution, but a community of believers whose religious ideal—constantly aspired to if seldom attained—was peace and mutual love. The sacraments and sacramentals of the medieval Church were not half-pagan magic, but instruments of the “social miracle,” rituals designed to defuse hostility and create extended networks of fraternity, spiritual “kith and kin,” by reconciling enemies and consolidating the community in charity.

Duffy notes that Eire takes a different view; please read the rest there.  

Note the significance of the dates: as Yale UP says: "from Gutenberg’s printing press and the subsequent revolution in the spread of ideas to the close of the Thirty Years’ War. "

Liturgy Bad; Spontaneity Good?

On the First Things blog, Peter Leithart references his review of Lori Branch's book, Rituals of Spontaneity from Baylor University Press published in the July/August 2009 issue of Touchstone:

Focusing on English literary culture and religion, Branch examines the formation of an “ideology of spontaneity” from the Reformation attacks on ritual through Puritan defenses of free prayer to the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth. She demonstrates that the anti-ritual attitude is a central theme in the formation of modern views of religion, subjectivity, morality, and literature.

The “ideology of spontaneity” is more explicitly expressed in the early part of this history. English Protestants attacked the ceremonies of the Catholic Church and the remnants of ceremony in Prayer Book liturgies, not only because they thought these ceremonies lacked biblical support but also because they believed that set liturgical forms were, in themselves, inimical to religious sincerity. This had the effect of detaching believers from communal actions. Medieval Christians were participants in rituals; after the Reformation, Christians began to see themselves as detached individual selves, desperately ginning up religious passion.

In the Touchstone review, he begins by locating the source of this attack on ritual as Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More's good friend:

We have Erasmus to thank not only for the word “ceremony” but also for the derogatory connotations attached to it. His Latin neologism, ceremonialae, has been translated as “trivial little ritual nonsenses.” Early English occurrences of “ceremony” follow the Erasmian usage. Gentility, one sixteenth-century critic wrote, is no more than a “meer flash, a ceremony, a toy, a thing of nought.”

Medieval Christians would have found these sentiments bewildering. Rituals were not toys but powerful tools that performed a kind of magic. So powerful was the ritual of the Mass that everything connected with it—the altar cloth, the chalice, the table—glowed with the radiance that, in historian Eamon Duffy’s term, “leaked” out of the consecrated host and wine.

As Leithart praised Branch's book, he identified two extremes of thought over ritual in religion: war and indifference:

For a variety of reasons, historians have not followed the story of ritual, sacrament, and ceremony beyond the Reformation. This is unfortunate, because no attitude is so characteristic of the modern Western mind as its indifference, or even hostility, to ritual. In the sixteenth century, Europeans fought wars over the meaning ofHocin the Eucharistic formula “Hoc est corpus meum” (“This is my body”). Today, differences of that sort are greeted with a quizzical yawn.

In her dense and sophisticated work, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Baylor University Press, 2006), Lori Branch has filled in a considerable part of the history between religious war and irreligious yawns. Focusing on English literary culture and religion, Branch examines the formation of an “ideology of spontaneity” from the Reformation attacks on ritual through Puritan defenses of free prayer to the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth. She demonstrates that the anti-ritual attitude is a central theme in the formation of modern views of religion, subjectivity, morality, and literature.

Read the rest of the First Things blog here; the rest of the Touchstone review, here.

A Catholic Hamlet in a Protestant Denmark?

In First Things, Peter J. Leithart reviews a book about Hamlet and his "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy:

Most readers and viewers of Hamlet take Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy as a meditation on suicide. In Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency, John E. Curran, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, argues there are bigger things at work. Hamlet is opposing two ontologies, religious universes, moralities.

The first Curran labels “the Be.” The Be is the realm of predetermined fixity, without freedom, choice or contingency. It is an either/or, zero-sum world where every divine initiative must be at the expense of human merit, where signs and things stand in antagonistic opposition rather than seeking reconciliation. The Be is static, atemporal, a world within which human action is meaningless. In the Be, things stay what they are. The Be is cold, logical, technical, empty. The Be is a Protestant world.

On the other side of the great ugly ditch is “the Not to be,” which is everything the Be is not. It is a world of both-and, a world of real contingency and freedom, a world where grace and merit, sign and thing, live together in merry fellowship. Human action makes sense, and makes a difference, in the Not to be, because the Not to be is dynamic and temporal. In the Not to be, anything can happen, even bread becoming flesh. The Not to be is warm, moist, organic, teeming. The Not to be is Catholic.

Hamlet’s dilemma, according to Curran’s interpretation, is that of a man of Catholic sensibilities and aspirations who finds himself stuck in a Protestant world. In his heart, he is a man of the Not to be who wants to breathe free of the stifling stagnant air of Geneva or Wittenberg; but he learns, with growing frustration, that he lives in the Be. By the beginning of Act 5, he is resigned to the fact that the Not to be is not to be. After that, there is nothing more to say. Submitting to the Be leaves us speechless and dehumanized. The rest is silence.

Leithart has some problems with Curran's interpretation:

Curran’s book is filled with footnotes to both secondary literature on Hamlet and an abundance of primary and secondary literature on Elizabethan theology. He has read a lot, but despite the genuine erudition, Curran is no theologian. His portrayals of Catholic and Protestant “ontologies” amount to caricatures. He knows a few things about Protestant and Catholic theology, and extrapolates from those ideas to conclusions about what Protestants and Catholics – especially Protestants – must have believed. But the things he knows are not entirely accurate, and his extrapolations even less so. In characterizing Protestantism as steady-state determinism, for instance, he ignores the significant continuities between medieval Catholic and Protestant theologies, the prominent role of sanctification in Calvin’s and Puritan theology, the notion of regeneration. He ignores the cross as an epoch-making event. In fact, a plausible – I think convincing – argument can be made that one of Protestantism’s great contributions to the church was a rediscovery the historical dimension of Christianity.

Read the rest at First Things.

Happiness is Just a Thing Called Gilbert

I read David W. Fagerberg's The Size of Chesterton's Catholicism many years ago (it was published in 1989 by the University of Notre Dame Press):

English writer G. K. Chesterton was widely known not only for his newspaper columns, novels, poetry, plays, and detective stories, but also for his theological and Catholic apologetic works. This celebration of Chesterton’s passion for his faith builds on his own words to reveal the Catholic paradox he was so fond of exploring. David W. Fagerberg draws on Chesterton’s theological writings—avoiding secondary sources so that the reader can encounter his thought as directly as possible—to show how Chesterton championed an accessible Catholicism of great robustness.

Now Fagerberg has a new book about Chesterton, this time from Emmaus Road Publishing, and he writes in First Things about Chesterton and happiness:

Chesterton’s modesty would have prevented him from claiming sainthood. It is I, not he, who shall compare his salutary effect with a saint’s, but the point is true, nonetheless, that what he said about saints is perfectly and exactly applicable to himself: “The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need . . . . Therefore it is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.” The way in which Chesterton contradicts us most is by being a happy man. By this trait he can serve as our antidote, exaggerating what we neglect, supplying what we need, even if we do not know we do.

The happiness that pervades every word Chesterton writes is occasioned both by things and by people. In his hands, as in the hands of an artist, something is done to the ordinary world that enables the viewer to see its landscape and its citizens anew. “At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence,” he said. “The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise or wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.” To Chesterton, all things appear as wonderful parts of a thrilling fairyland. He retains an innocent, original delight in things instead of succumbing to the monotony that assails most of us as we grow older.

Read the rest there.

Butterfield's Whig Interpretation of History

This is the book I'd ordered at Eighth Day Books--Butterfield's famous analysis of The Whig Interpretation of History.

It seems that many of the books I've been reading lately--from Chesterton's The Well and the Shallows, to a novel my husband just got me started on (Michael O'Brien's Father Elijah) and even Newman's "The Second Spring" sermon I quoted from on Monday--are talking about progress. What is progress? When or how do we know that we have progressed? What if we doubt that we have progressed at all?

The whig method of writing history, as Butterfield describes it, is all about the historian accepting our current state as progress and then interpreting the past as the prelude to the progress we've achieved. It's reading the past through the lens of the present and using the present to find signs of the progress we've achieved in the past.

This kind of history always assumes that we have achieved greater moral clarity, more civilized forms of government and legislation, a freer society, etc--and therefore we can look back on the past to point out moral failures and crimes. It does not try to understand the past but identify those people or events that aided the progress that has created our morally superior world and also those that tried to hold back progress.

Butterfield uses the example of Reformation History under the whig theory throughout his essay: Protestantism defeated Catholicism and so now we have a better world. If Catholicism had won, we would be stuck in the Middle Ages, because of course the Catholic Church would always have prevented progress! It would have always been against science, freedom, development of peoples, etc. One might almost think that Butterfield was a Catholic from the way he defends the Catholic Church from this view of history, but no, he was a Methodist.

What Butterfield proposes for the historian to do is find out and tell--like a travel guide for people who will never travel to the places she describes--what life was like in the past. He wants the historian to describe the past, not judge it for its influence on the present.

According to this article from First Things, Lord John Acton was Butterfield's target:

In this respect, Butterfield found particular fault in the writings of Lord Acton, a historian whom he otherwise greatly admired, but against whom much of the argumentative force of Whig Interpretation was directed. That Acton was himself a notable member of that shrinking band of believing Christian historians, and a Catholic to boot, and that Butterfield himself was a Whig by default, only adds further ironies to the mix.

The tendencies Butterfield resisted were illustrated in Acton’s 1895 inaugural address on assuming the Regius chair. In that address, Acton issued a rebuke to one of the chief characteristics of historicism: its insistence on confining the historian’s moral judgment to the specific historical contexts in which the actions under review took place. Acton embraced historicism as a method but drew a line against its tendency toward relativism. Instead, he offered a ringing defense of the historian as moral arbiter, urging his audience “never to debase the moral currency or lower the standard of rectitude, but try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.”

In other words, as we might say today, the historian should not hesitate to impose his values on the past. And Acton was in no doubt about the general direction of history’s movement: “I hope . . . this will aid you to see that the action of Christ who is risen on mankind whom he redeemed fails not, but increases; that the wisdom of divine rule appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world; and that achieved liberty is the one ethical result that rests on the converging and combined conditions of advancing civilization. Then you will understand what a famous philosopher said, that History is the true demonstration of Religion.”

While Butterfield was thinking of Acton when he wrote this, I was thinking of Thomas Cahill as I read it. He seems to be our time's great Whig historian. As he writes his "Hinges of History" series, he is, as one reviewer said of the latest volume, on the Renaissance and the Reformation, writing about the past to find traces of the present. The book is

essentially a search through history for characters presenting features that appear “modern” to the searcher. He then provides lively biographical vignettes that emphasize these features, and (as it were) announces—“Voila, modernity in the Renaissance (or Reformation).” . . . In the end, Heretics and Heroes is not an attempt to understand, or explain, the past from the perspective of the people of the past. It is a history of progress towards us, or, rather, towards those of us who are truly modern, in the right way. It is a peculiar kind of hagiographical enterprise—the scouring of history to find the people that are most like us. 

The First Things article points out some of the weaknesses of Butterfield's study, but with books like Heretics and Heroes still around, it's clear that we need to be reminded of its lessons.

Blame the Irish? No--Blame the English; Why Catholics Can't Sing

From First Things, an article in which the author (facetiously) blames the fact that Catholics in the USA can't/don't sing at Mass on Irish influence. He imagines conversing with his parish priest to solve the problem of "Why can’t Catholics sing like Lutherans?" and his answer comes back, "Blame the Irish." I thought we were supposed to blame Canada. Or Bush.

Q: Let’s get right to the point. Why are Catholics such poor hymn singers?
A: It’s because we don’t have enough Lutheran converts.

Q: The hymn singing I hear hardly amounts to a “joyful noise.” Sounds more like plaintive squeaks from depressed marmosets.
A: Bless you, my son, for your candor. . . .

Q: And then tell them any nine little old Lutheran widows can sing better than the whole lot of them.
A: How about if I said eight Methodists on walkers?

Q: That’ll work. You tell them how to sing: Stand up straight, hymnal front and center, lungs filled, voices projected up and out, like they want to praise God in song.
A: And after that?

Q: Try them out on a couple verses of A Mighty Fortress and see if they haven’t improved.
A: I get the idea. But it’ll never work.

Q: Why?
A: We’re programmed Irish. Lutherans are programmed German.

Q: Come again.
A: Simple history. German Lutherans came to America with two hundred years of hymns in their history and they kept writing new ones. Irish Catholics came with bawdy songs that can’t be sung in mixed company; it was the only music the English let them sing.

Q: What?
A: Sure. The Irish invented the low spoken mass. Catholics singing hymns in public would otherwise have attracted the attention of their English Protestant oppressors. Besides, if they can’t bang a bodhran in church they wouldn’t sing anyway, just on principle.

So my response to the article was we shouldn't blame the Irish for Catholics in the USA not singing--we should blame the English! The English persecuted the Irish so they couldn't sing hymns at secret Masses! "Blame the Irish"? No, "Blame the English"! It's all their fault!

The Irish did not invent the low spoken Mass, but they certainly used it! Low Mass, in which the priest speaks what he would sing at High Mass developed in monasteries and at cathedrals where many priests each celebrated Mass in separate chapels. The author, Russell E. Saltzman links a review of Thomas Day's Why Catholics Can't Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste. He misread or misstates what the reviewer said; she didn't say the Irish invented the Low Mass--they just used it for safety's sake:

The Irish people were persecuted for centuries. Their glory is that they "kept the faith." There was little opportunity for singing at Masses celebrated behind the hedge rows; one did not have to attract the attention of English soldiers by singing. The silent low Mass was the norm.

I read Day's book when it came out: he blamed the poor musical quality of the hymns chosen for the lack of congregational singing. When hymns like "Holy, Holy, Holy", "Holy God, We Praise Thy Name," various Marian hymns, "Faith of Our Fathers", or other traditional hymns are selected, Catholics usually sing out well, in my experience.

Even though William Byrd wrote his Masses for Three, Four, and Five Voices and the Gradualia so Catholics in England would have music for both the Ordinary and the Propers of the Mass, most Masses in England during the recusant era, from Elizabeth I's reign to the late eighteenth century--unless they were celebrated at the foreign government embassy chapels in London--were probably Low, just because they were illegal and therefore hidden.

What's so opportune about this discussion is that I have a section in my Cardinal Newman lecture on how Newman's Oratorians, including Fathers Edward Caswall and Frederick Faber wrote hymns for congregational singing or translated Latin hymns for the same purpose. Certainly Irish Catholics in England attending the Oratory churches in Birmingham and London learned to sing hymns in church--without a bodhran! Cardinal Newman on violin and the Irish on a bodhran--what a St. Patrick's Day!

A Trip to New York Every Month (or every other)?!

If I could, I would go for the October, November, January, and March sessions. Julia Yost, presenting "Anglo-Catholic Modernism: Writing Religious Beauty in the Modern Era" is a PhD candidate at Yale University in English. She wrote about Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ in First Things earlier this year, exploring the supposed inverse relationship between his priestly vocation and his poetry:

Hope, of course, is totally crosswise with the critical consensus on Hopkins. Among academic critics, it is an article of faith that there is not “One Hopkins,” but rather two: There is Hopkins the Poet, and there is Hopkins the Priest. Hopkins the Poet (of whom academic critics, pace Hope, cannot get enough) wrote Hopkins’s Nature Sonnets of the 1870s. Hopkins the Priest (who they wish had never been born) wrote Hopkins’s so-called Terrible Sonnets of 1884 and following.

The Nature Sonnets are full of the quirky, technicolor “Hopkinsian” vision, hymning “all things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled.” They are quirky to the point of self-parody, perhaps, but commonly celebrated as a major literary achievement, an eruption of Modernist poetics fifty years early.

Whereas the Terrible Sonnets, written during the miserable five years in Dublin that would kill him at forty-five (open sewers, typhoid), are done in black-and-white. They warn starkly of “two flocks, two folds—black, white; right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind / But these two.” Everybody is in one “flock” or the other, bound for heaven or for hell. Every action tends either to salvation or to damnation. (Hopkins was a Jesuit, back when that meant something.) These poems are less vibrant than the Nature Sonnets, less baroque, less original, less “Hopkinsian” in short.

So you can paint by numbers the common critical picture of Hopkins’s artistic decline. The more dogmatic, the less poetic. You can be a Poet or a Priest, orthodox or original, a dogmatist or an artist.

Now, of course these binaries are nonsense. Biographically speaking, Hopkins had been a Priest when he wrote the Nature Sonnets, and he was still a Poet when he wrote the Terrible Sonnets. Of course the Terrible Sonnets are less colorful than the earlier works—but they are no less poetic and original. Hopkins’s much-lamented dogmatism was what allowed him to discern divine design in unlikely places. This vision was the wellspring of his originality, and it was operating in Dublin as impressively as before—perhaps more so.

I would presume that Julia Yost will mention Hopkins in her January 17 lecture at the Catholic Artists Society lecture series.