Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, RIP

Lancelot Andrewes, the Anglican minister and bishop, died on September 25, 1626 as the incumbent Bishop of Winchester. He's commonly thought of as a High Church Anglican. This blogger describes his career with an emphasis on his Eucharistic Theology:

Lancelot Andrewes, Laudian divine, early High Churchman, and one of the great preachers of his age, left a sizable impression on Anglican Eucharistic theology despite the paucity of his written works on the topic. Andrewes was a great advocate of frequent reception of the Eucharist and his sermons, including those before the courts of Elizabeth I and James I & VI, frequently expounded upon the great value of Communion. His Eucharistic theology, communicated principally in his published sermons and private devotions, emphasised the immense grace of the gift of the sacrament of Communion and the great benefits for unworthy humanity to be found in receiving it. Andrewes lived his life during a period of relative calm in the life of the Kingdom and Church of England. Born after the Elizabethan Religious Settlement and preaching for much of his career before her tolerant and theologically-learned Presbyterian successor, James, Andrewes enjoyed the luxury of an ecclesial environment where the most heated debates were generally academic in character, even when they were polemical. The great issues facing the Church of England in Andrewes’ day were the rise of Puritanism and the problems of recusancy and religious toleration. Of these Andrewes engaged mostly with the former, including in an early, oft overstatedly labelled ‘Puritan’ phase, the evidence for which is entirely in sets of unreliable notes taken by hearers of some of his earlier sermons. By the time Andrewes reached the greater heights of his career his Puritanism, if ever that had been an accurate label, had passed, and he faced the problem of working his Roman Catholic leanings into his written work and preaching in an age when ‘popery’ was a serious, career-ending accusation. Andrewes navigated this minefield of conscience and politik deftly and his sermons reflect far more of Calvinistic orthodoxy than do his private prayer and devotions.[1] However, all differences in emphases aside, the sources of Eucharistic theology which Andrewes has left to present a coherent picture of a clear theology with strong spiritual and ascetic leanings.

More on his life in the old Dictionary of National Biography here.

John Henry Newman translated Andrewes's private devotions from Greek into English and published them in Tract 88 of the Tracts for the Times (his next contribution would be Tract 90!). One can see how Andrewes would be a model for Newman's Via Media, as summarized from the (archived) blog post above:

Andrewes’ thought reflects his walking the line between Calvinistic and Roman Catholic theologies of the Eucharist. Andrewes rejected both the Calvinist theology of ‘virtual presence’ in the Eucharist and the doctrine of transubstantiation. His own teaching does not make clear any explicit theology of the presence or absence thereof of Christ in the Eucharist, though he did accept some form of real presence.

One can also see how Newman could not stop there: is Holy Communion the Real Presence of Jesus, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity or not? what does the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church believe? what has it always believed? Newman couldn't find answers to those questions in Andrewes as he learned while studying the Fathers of the Church. 

Here is Newman's translation of Andrewes prayer before receiving Holy Communion:

O LORD,
I am not worthy, I am not fit,
that thou shouldest come under the roof
of my soul;
for it is all desolate and ruined;
nor hast Thou in me fitting place
to lay Thy head.
But, as Thou didst vouchsafe
to lie in the cavern and manger of brute cattle,
as Thou didst not disdain
to be entertained in the house of Simon the leper,
as Thou didst not disdain
that harlot, like me, who was a sinner,
coming to Thee and touching Thee;
as Thou abhorredst not
her polluted and loathsome mouth;
nor the thief upon the cross
confessing Thee:
So me too the ruined, wretched,
and excessive sinner,
deign to receive to the touch and partaking
of the immaculate, supernatural, lifegiving,
and saving mysteries
of Thy all-holy Body
and Thy precious Blood.
Listen, O LORD, our GOD,
from Thy holy habitation,
and from the glorious throne of Thy kingdom,
and come to sanctify us.
O Thou who sittest on high with the FATHER,
and art present with us here invisibly;
come Thou to sanctify the gifts which lie before Thee,
and those in whose behalf, and by whom,
and the things for which,
they are brought near Thee.
And grant to us communion,
unto faith without shame,
love without dissimulation,
fulfilment of Thy commandments,
alacrity for every spiritual fruit:
hindrance of all adversity,
healing of soul and body,
that we too, with all Saints,
who have been well-pleasing to Thee from the beginning,
may become partakers
of Thy incorrupt and everlasting goods,
which Thou hast prepared, O LORD, for them that love Thee;
in whom Thou art glorified
for ever and ever.
Lamb of GOD,
that takest away the sin of the world,
take away the sin of me,
the utter sinner. . . 

The hymnist and translator John Mason Neale matched Newman's translation of Andrewes' Greek devotions with his own translation of Andrewes' Latin devotions, and compiled, that results in the volume pictured above.

Chesterton on St. Thomas Aquinas's Eucharistic Poetry

In chapter five of his study of St. Thomas Aquinas ("The Real Life of St. Thomas), Chesterton tries to convey some of the mystery of the saint in spite of the efforts of hagiography. He highlights the great vision St. Thomas had when Jesus asked him, "You have written well of me, Thomas. What reward would you have for your labor?":

Nobody supposes that Thomas Aquinas, when offered by God his choice among all the gifts of God, would ask for a thousand pounds, or the Crown of Sicily, or a present of rare Greek wine. But he might have asked for things that he really wanted: and he was a man who could want things; as he wanted the lost manuscript of St. Chrysostom. He might have asked for the solution of an old difficulty; or the secret of a new science; or a flash of the inconceivable intuitive mind of the angels, or any one of a thousand things that would really have satisfied his broad and virile appetite for the very vastness and variety of the universe. The point is that for him, when the voice spoke from between the outstretched arms of the Crucified, those arms were truly opened wide, and opening most gloriously the gates of all the worlds; they were arms pointing to the east and to the west, to the ends of the earth and the very extremes of existence. They were truly spread out with a gesture of omnipotent generosity; the Creator himself offering Creation itself; with all its millionfold mystery of separate beings, and the triumphal chorus of the creatures. That is the blazing background of multitudinous Being that gives the particular strength, and even a sort of surprise, to the answer of St. Thomas, when he lifted at last his head and spoke with, and for, that almost blasphemous audacity which is one with the humility of his religion; "I will have Thyself." Or, to add the crowning and crushing irony to this story, so uniquely Christian for those who can really understand it, there are some who feel that the audacity is softened by insisting that he said, "Only Thyself."

Because G.K. Chesterton was a poet himself he appreciated St. Thomas's poetry in the hymns and sequence for the Feast of Corpus Christi:

The one exception permitted to him was the rare but remarkable output of his poetry. All sanctity is secrecy; and his sacred poetry was really a secretion; like the pearl in a very tightly closed oyster. He may have written more of it than we know; but part of it came into public use through the particular circumstance of his being asked to compose the office for the Feast of Corpus Christi: a festival first established after the controversy to which he had contributed, in the scroll that he laid on the altar. It does certainly reveal an entirely different side of his genius; and it certainly was genius. As a rule, he was an eminently practical prose writer; some would say a very prosaic prose writer. He maintained controversy with an eye on only two qualities; clarity and courtesy. And he maintained these because they were entirely practical qualities; affecting the probabilities of conversion. But the composer of the Corpus Christi service was not merely what even the wild and woolly would call a poet; he was what the most fastidious would call an artist. His double function rather recalls the double activity of some great Renaissance craftsman, like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, who would work on the outer wall, planning and building the fortifications of the city; and then retire into the inner chamber to carve or model some cup or casket for a reliquary. The Corpus Christi Office is like some old musical instrument, quaintly and carefully inlaid with many coloured stones and metals; the author has gathered remote texts about pasture and fruition like rare herbs; there is a notable lack of the loud and obvious in the harmony; and the whole is strung with two strong Latin lyrics. Father John O'Connor has translated them with an almost miraculous aptitude; but a good translator will be the first to agree that no translation is good; or, at any rate, good enough. How are we to find eight short English words which actually stand for "Sumit unus, sumunt mille; quantum isti, tantum ille"? How is anybody really to render the sound of the "Pange Lingua", when the very first syllable has a clang like the clash of cymbals?

Several years ago I highlighted those hymns for Catholic Exchange. St. Thomas Aquinas also wrote great prayers for before and after receiving Holy Communion.

The painting above is by Peter Paul Rubens, depicting St. Thomas among the other "Defenders of the Eucharist." More about the painting here.

St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!