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.

One of the 3%: A Painting that Survived the English Reformation

From The Guardian:

A rare medieval panel showing Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ survived the Reformation due to a remarkable instance of 16th-century recycling, researchers in Cambridge have discovered.

The brightly painted wooden panel of The Kiss of Judas escaped the systematic destruction of thousands of church paintings because someone turned it around and used the back for another purpose – most likely to display the Ten Commandments.

This recycling, discovered by the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Hamilton Kerr Institute, is also likely to have saved the panel from Puritan iconoclasts in the English civil war, who destroyed a lot of art that had survived the earlier purge.

“The single most fascinating thing about the painting is how it survived,” said Lucy Wrapson, the conservator who made the discovery. “This was basically repurposed and that’s how it made it through. I can’t stress how rare this is. I can think of one other image of Judas that survives from an English church of the period.”

Estimates say up to 97% of English religious art was destroyed during and after the Reformation.

The panel was bought by the Fitzwilliam in 2012 from the Church of St Mary in Grafton Regis, Northamptonshire, which did not have the money to conserve it. The funds went towards fixing the church roof.

The panel arrived in Wrapson’s lab in a sorry state, she said, covered in discoloured varnish, bat faeces, dust and cobwebs. “It was really dark and discoloured, you could see roughly what was on the surface but you couldn’t see the back, it had been covered by a horrible plywood board. The front was really dark and murky, you could not make out the vibrant colours.”

Please see the panel at The Guardian or at the Fitzwilliam link above. The other surviving Kiss of Judas painting is part of a series of panels depicting both the Last Judgment and the Passion of Christ in the Church of St. Michael and All Angels at Mitcheldean, Gloucestershire:

The four panels beneath the Doom painting are another visual aid in the form of eight scenes from the Passion of Christ and are reminiscent of Mystery plays of the time. The sequence starts at the bottom left hand panel showing Judas betraying Christ with a kiss accompanied by soldiers and St Peter. The scene above depicts Christ before Pilate who is seen washing his hands with water poured from a ewer. Next to this is the mocking of Christ who sits blindfolded between two tormentors. The scene below shows the further torment of the Flagellation of Christ who is tied to a miniature column similar to those used in Mystery plays. There is no painting of the crucifixion as that would have been seen in the carved figures on the Rood Loft. So the upper panel to the right of the centre shows the Deposition from the cross watched by three women, as described in Mark's Gospel. Immediately beneath this is the scene as Jesus body is laid in the tomb again watched by three women. The outer bottom right panel has the harrowing of Hell depicting Christ having descended to hell to free Adam and early Mankind. The final scene above is the Ascension, shown by the upward disappearance of Christ watched by the disciples. These panel paintings are not sophisticated in technique but the designs are bold and simple making their subjects quite clear.

Those panels had been whitewashed but uncovered in the nineteenth century.

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”.

Communion with the Spirit of the Writer

I hope you're having a wonderful Labor Day if you're in the U.S.A., relaxing and maybe reading a good book. Thanks to this blog, I found about this author, Emily Hickey, and her book  Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days. In that Project Gutenberg resource I read this brief chapter:

A man who made many a man and woman love literature and helped them to study it, the late Professor Henry Morley, has said that one who thinks that a bookroom is not a part of the world; one who thinks that, in leaving his books and going forth to commune with nature he is, as it were, passing from death to life, is one who has not yet learned to read. The good Professor saw that books have souls in them, so to speak, and that to love a book really and truly is to hold communion with that which is living and is a part of the great, beautiful scheme of God's great, beautiful world. To love one part of what Our Father has given us should never lead us to despise, or even undervalue, other parts. And we must remember, too, must we not? how one thing helps us to understand another; how great painters and great poets help us to understand the beauty of nature as we might not have understood it without them, just as they help us also to know men and women, and help us to know better some of the fair things in our great and glorious religion; things which God can and does teach without their help when He chooses, though He graciously and lovingly often uses their help—the help He has given them the power of giving—to teach others of His children. Our Father, being Our Father, not just your Father and my Father and his Father and her Father, but Our Father, the Father of us all as one big family of His, brothers and sisters in Him, wills that we all help one another with the gifts He has given us; and the more we can realise that all separate gifts are parts of one great harmonious whole, the more fully we shall live and feel and enjoy.

There is, of course, a delight in exquisite typography, and hand-made paper, and binding into which the soul of a true artist has gone. People may be willing to give large sums for these things, independently of the value of what is under them; or people may value books for their age, or because they are rare, or because they are records of facts which it is well to know and good to be able to verify.

But there is a better way of love than all of these. One may love the book through which one holds communion with the spirit of its writer, being ready to learn from him by direct learning, or by the learning received through suggestion, or through the rousing of the spirit of enquiry, or the spirit of opposition. Is not this the best kind of love, the love by which the thought of man is used by man, the spirit of man holds communion with the spirit of man?

All through the ages, great things have been handed down by written words, and people of all nations have shared one another's national heritage of written thought, and in that sharing made it larger and greater. We are now considering the earlier story of English Catholic literature, and it is surely well that people should know something of what things were said and sung in the olden time; the time when all art, all literature was fed by the great Mother of all Christian art and all Christian literature, the Holy Catholic Church.

As The Catholic English Teacher's main source for his post wrote in The Guardian:

A talented and complex writer, scholar and translator, Emily Henrietta Hickey, 1845-1923, was the daughter of a Protestant rector of Goresbridge, County Wexford. She eventually become a lecturer at Cambridge University, and a Catholic convert. Her history of English Catholic literature is still well worth reading for its lucidity and enthusiasm. She translated verse and tales from the Irish, and might seem to belong to the movement known as the Irish Literary Revival; however, she had a wide-ranging interest in languages and literature, and her contribution to the Revival doesn't seem to have had a nationalist motivation. She was a campaigning feminist, yet became, in her later life, primarily a religious writer. Probably her best-known work is her translation of the late Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon.

"One may love the book through which one holds communion with the spirit of its writer, being ready to learn from him by direct learning, or by the learning received through suggestion, or through the rousing of the spirit of enquiry, or the spirit of opposition."--that's what I love about reading! Happy Labor Day!