It has been said by many people well placed to know, that Austin Farrer (1904-1968) was probably the finest Anglican theologian of the twentieth century.  I find it very hard to disagree with that.  He has even been called ‘the one true genius’ of the Church of England in that century.  But recognition of his stature has built slowly since his death.  He was always recognised as a unique voice, a philosopher and theologian who wrote little by way of classic systematic theology apart from a scattering of essays and lectures only drawn together after his death, a metaphysician who clung obstinately to the Anselmian ideal of ‘faith seeking understanding’ when the whole of Oxford had apparently succumbed to the materialism of logical positivism, an astute scholar of the New Testament whose Biblical scholarship was thought eccentric in his lifetime, and above all a compelling preacher whose sermons were perhaps the primary expression of his intellectual brilliance.  A Baptist by birth but Anglo-Catholic by conviction, he was a humble, softly-spoken man, whose defence of orthodox Christian belief probably looked dated in the Church of England of the 1960s and 1970s, adjusting as it was to a rapidly-changing society and culture.  There was nothing ‘trendy’ about Farrer.  He worked almost all of his life in Oxford.  It would be easy to think that he never looked out of the ivory tower.

            But that would be a fatal misreading of his life and work.  He was always alive to the developments around him, and somehow always a step ahead.  A book like A Rebirth of Images (1949), his study of the book of Revelation, managed to be both traditional, alert to contemporary challenges, and prophetic, all at the same time.  Here, he responded to the seemingly desiccated nature of historical criticism of the Bible by adopting a radically different approach, emphasizing the key role in the book of images which he connected with recurrent, permanent features of religious belief.  In hands, the book of Revelation became like a kind of painting which opened up Scripture to a fresh way of looking, or rather, in his words, “the one great poem which the first Christian age produced”.  His immediate contemporaries were perplexed by this – it was far off the beaten track of Biblical scholarship.  But the influence of the book has grown and grown, and it has resonated with much more recent trends in Biblical scholarship.  His great book of metaphysics, Finite and Infinite (1943), a fearsomely challenging read, defended traditional Christian metaphysics, and by extension the rational theology of the medieval schools.  But it ends with a thoroughly contemporary application: “As I wrote this, the German armies were occupying Paris, after a campaign prodigal of blood and human distress…But rational theology knows only that whether Paris stands or falls, whether men die or live, God is God, and so long as any spiritual creature survives, God is to be adored.”  The philosophy of religion, you might say, subserves, promotes and ends in the worship of God.

            That is a clue to the extraordinary internal coherence of Farrer’s seemingly disparate intellectual work, a fusion of faith, logic, scholarship, reason and imagination which – in my view – is unequalled in modern Anglican theology.  Many of his books could be called ‘classics’.  But to me one of the simplest stands out.  The Crown of the Year (1952) is a collection of one-paragraph (they were nicknamed ‘Farrergraphs’) homilies following the Prayer Book year.  It is a short, simple, entirely unacademic and accessible book, designed to be read in preparation for Holy Communion, by way of – he hoped – prompting people to prayer.  What is characteristic about his approach is summed up in the short Preface, where he speaks about the necessity to “express the central truths touching the sacrament”, Sunday by Sunday.  The homilies originated in homilies preached in Trinity College Chapel, Oxford, where he was Chaplain.  Their theology is, then, sacramental, but also incarnational, and integrative in the best sense, connecting as simply as he could the central truths of faith.  I have sometimes used his homilies in place of anything I could say, if I needed to say something simply and briefly.  The language still holds up.  They are very concentrated paragraphs nonetheless – they move quickly, and that’s why it is good to have them to read. 

            Inevitably, for anyone unaware of Farrer and particularly of this book, the only way to illustrate their quality is to quote them.  And I’ll quote in full just one, to end this blog.  In an almost poetic way, his homily for Ascensiontide binds together a wonderful range of thoughts and images, around the central theme of ascending flame:

“We are told in an Old Testament tale, how an angel of God having appeared to man disappeared again by going up in the flame from the altar.  And in the same way Elijah, when he could no more be found, was believed to have gone up on the crests of flaming horses.  The flame which carried Christ to heaven was the flame of his own sacrifice.  Flame tends always upwards.  All his life long Christ’s love burnt towards the heart of heaven in a bright fire, until he was wholly consumed in it, and went up in that fire to God.  The fire is kindled on our alters, here Christ ascends in fire; the fire is kindled in the Christian heart, and we ascend.  He says to us, Lift up your hearts; and we reply, We lift them up unto the Lord.”

A number of people have asked me if I could describe something of what I observed when, early in October, I travelled in the Caucasus with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in particular what we saw of the unfolding crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh – or rather, its implications for Armenia, since it was of course impossible to go to Nagorno-Karabakh itself.  Incidentally, this is something of a misnomer, since the area is simply referred to as ‘Karabakh’ by the Azeris, and as ‘Artsakh’ by the Armenians.  Not only things and places, but names too are contested here.  What I am writing here represents only a personal point of view, of course.

The trip had originally been planned around two ecumenical commitments, ‘bookending’ the week – Rome on 30 September to attend the Prayer Vigil organised by the Taizé brothers in St Peter’s Square on the eve of the General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, and Armenia later in the week to fulfil a long-issued invitation from the Armenian Apostolic Church to the Archbishop.  His immediate predecessors, Archbishops Carey and Williams, had gone to Armenia, but hitherto Archbishop Justin had not been able to do so.  But the context of the trip changed dramatically on 19 September when Azerbaijan, provoked so it claimed by attacks on its citizens, invaded the ‘breakaway’ republic of Karabakh/Artsakh.  Within a matter of days, the conflict was all but over, the entire Armenian population of the area fleeing to neighbouring Armenia.

So what had originally been intended as an ecumenical visit, centring on some days at the Armenian ‘Holy See’, at Etchmiadzin, a few miles west of Yerevan, inevitably now was overshadowed by the crisis in Karabakh/Artsakh and its consequences.   We’d gone on briefly to Azerbaijan after Rome, and of course heard one side of the matter there, proceeded to Georgia for a couple of days, and then made the journey by minibus – a long drive – from Tbilisi to Yerevan.  Arriving at Etchmiadzin in the evening, all we could gather in the darkness was a muted sense of the sheer scale of the Holy See.  It was only next morning, when I opened the doors onto my balcony and saw, in the cold, clear air, the snow-capped peak of Ararat in the distance, and had a chance to walk around a little before breakfast, that I could appreciate the grandeur and, I think, holiness of that place, where it really did feel to me as if the veil between heaven and earth is a little thinner than almost anywhere else I’ve ever been.  It is a place for silence, for contemplation, for prayer, even when, in the day, numbers of tourists are walking around.  The old cathedral at its centre, nearing completion of a major restoration project, goes back at least 1500 years, though there was a cathedral on the site from at least the fourth century.  Armenian Christianity is old, and great, and rich in its literature and traditions.

But we had too little chance to immerse ourselves in the richness of that tradition, given the inevitable visits and meetings which occupied our time.  They included a visit to a picturesque, mountainous town some two hours outside Yerevan, where the Armenian Church had turned a youth centre, housed in what looked like a former Soviet, barracks-like building, into a refuge for displaced people from Karabakh/Artsakh.  Some 80 or so were living there temporarily, the hope being that more permanent places of residence and even work could be found elsewhere in Armenia in due course.  But this will be a huge challenge for the country.  Some 120,000 people fled to Armenia in just over a week, leaving everything behind.  Scale up in terms of size of population, and that is like 2 million people arriving in the UK in just over a week.  The strain on health, employment, welfare and other services will be enormous, for years to come, for a country which is not rich in natural resources, and currently 43^rd in the league table of European countries’ GDP.

The sense of disbelief, numbness, grief, desperation, even despair, was palpable.  Once you set this catastrophe – for no other word is possible for the experience of the former Armenian population of Karabakh/Artsakh – in the context of the long history of conflict and terror in the region (which has run on both sides), it is difficult to see how these people will ever have the confidence to return to their homes.  People spoke of being terrorized as they fled by random attacks, shootings, and bombings, even as some accounts from the other side emphasize the restraint exercised by the Azeri forces.  Their fears are of an impending, wholesale destruction of their homes and of their cultural heritage, including their churches and their graveyards.  This last point was something which hadn’t occurred to me, to my shame, until I heard it spoken about – the fear that where their families are buried will be bulldozed, their graves desecrated or destroyed altogether.

What has happened is a humanitarian disaster.  The complexity of the conflict over the last thirty or more years is such that it would be profoundly unhelpful for me to try to apportion blame.  But there is an urgent need here to put the human catastrophe back at the centre of all thinking about the future.  Karabakh/Artsakh was a religiously, even ethnically mixed area for centuries.  Something has to give here to enable the integrity and authenticity of ancient ways of life to be recognized and accepted.  There is not just a battle for territory, but also for memory.  Given that the international community, with just a few exceptions, always affirmed that Karabakh/Artsakh was part of the sovereign land of Azerbaijan, space needs to be found for a recognition of historic, communal identities.  Literature we were given on religious pluralism and toleration in Azerbaijan made almost no mention of Armenian Christianity, but instead appeared to substitute for it the highly controversial theory of an ur-tradition, an ‘Albanian-Udi’ form of the faith which had been all but obliterated by the Armenian Church.  The history of Armenian communities in Karabakh/Artsakh needs to be affirmed and valued, just as that of Azeri/Islamic communities in the same region.  That would be a start.

We flew back via Paris on 7 October, with all this still fresh in our minds.  Yet, even as we were waiting at Paris for our connecting flight, news was coming forward of the Hamas attack in Israel.  Since then, Nagorno-Karabakh has been completely erased from most of the media.  Please let’s not forget this war, and this people.

Never much interested in religious news, unless it also concerns money or sex, the British press showed barely any interest in what was happening in Rome last month.  But it was momentous, and all church people should take note.  It was an extraordinary opening-up of process and consultation in the Catholic Church.   It may be remembered as the summit of Francis’s papacy.

The title, ‘Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops’ is not, admittedly, going to get pulses racing.  It sounds like just one more of those meetings of hierarchs we hear about every so often, which appear to bring weight and gravitas but little change to the life of the Church.  As a Synod of bishops, it was not, of course, like our own General Synod.  The Synod of Bishops is a select gathering of representative bishops from across the world, convened from time to time for consultation by the Pope.  In the past, these meetings have been little more than a show of episcopal solidarity behind the leadership of the Pope.  They have scarcely touched the power and authority of the Papal office, and the way it is exercised in the Church.

But Francis, as in so much else, has transformed the spirit of the institution.  In his apostolic constitution, Episcopalis communio (Episcopal communion) of 2018 he signalled two radical departures from the established way of doing things.  One was to give added force to the deliberations of the Synod, by strengthening its connection to the magisterium of the Catholic Church, its teaching authority: instead of the Pope over the Synod, Francis has attempted here to embed a doctrine of Pope in Synod.  All very well, you might think, but doesn’t that simply reinforce the existing hierarchy of the Church?

That is where the second innovation comes in.  Francis widened the consultative process to include the voices of the laity for the first time in the modern history of the Catholic Church, bringing their opinions directly to the secretary general of the Synod.  For the first time ever, women were appointed as consultors to the process, with the French nun Nathalie Becquart also appointed as under-secretary to the Synod, which brought with it (again a first for a woman) the power to vote in the Synod.

Under the diocesan phase of the ‘synodical way’, or ‘synodical process’, across the world the Catholic faithful were consulted in 2021-2 for their views on what ought to be the priorities for the Catholic Church today.  The results were something of a shock to more traditional voices.  Largely absent – though emphases and priorities varied enormously across the globe – were preoccupations with traditional doctrine.  Instead, pastoral exigencies featured particularly strongly, with especial concern for excluded or marginalised voices, including the LGBTQ+ community, the young, and divorced and remarried people.  These concerns helped to shape the working agenda of the Synod.  Some 70 non-episcopal representatives were appointed to the Synod, alongside the near-300 bishops, with laity, women, religious, as well as male clergy.  A further 12 ‘Fraternal Delegates’ from ecumenical partners, including Bishop Martin Warner from the Church of England, were – in a remarkable show of respect – accorded speaking rights. 

How significant might this all turn out to be?  The theological justification, laid out in two documents from the Catholic Church’s International Theological Commission in 2014 and 2018, repeats the pastoral, participative theme of the Second Vatican Council’s key text, Lumen Gentium, with its emphasis on the ‘whole people of God’.  English observers might be tempted to trace a longer lineage, encompassing for example St John Henry Newman’s famous article ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’.  The Church is not just constituted hierarchically, with authority flowing outwards and downwards from Pope to people, but horizontally and even from ground up, by the ability of the people of God to recognise, confirm, and even criticise the processes by which the Church is governed, and so in turn (and this almost certainly goes beyond Newman’s sense) actively to shape them. 

If this impulse is really, and permanently, embodied in Catholic structures, the Synod may mark the beginning of a revolution in the Church.  But it is too early to say.  This October’s meeting was only the first of two.  Next October the Assembly will meet again in Rome to consider how what has been discussed this year can be translated into action and into structures.  And we do not yet know the outcome of this year’s Assembly, for its meetings were mostly in private.  I was privileged to attend one of the few sessions open to a handful of observers.  There was a great deal of talk of synodality and what it meant for the Church, and a sense of deep listening, but no votes were actually taken.  The closed nature of the sessions was, I presume, deemed essential to free expression of opinion.

Possibilities range from radical transformation (with some even speaking of the end of compulsory clerical celibacy, the ordination of women as deacons, and pastoral acceptance of same-sex relationships) to…well, not very much.  The Catholic Church is unlikely to embark on the wholesale creation of a synodical structure akin to ours, with houses of laity and clergy, parliamentary-style procedure, lobbying groups, and so on.  Progressives have seen this as the opening of a door, traditionalists as froth which will be blown away by a change of papacy.  But even if the structural legacy eventually process to be somewhat limited, the sense of fresh air – or more positively the free breath of the Spirit – blowing through the Catholic Church at this juncture is palpable.  In one of a number of addresses to the Assembly, Timothy Radcliffe OP reiterated the powerful sense of what synodality really means about the voice of the whole people of God: ‘Every baptised person is a prophet’.  If only we in the Church of England could really grasp that!

            Barbara Pym’s writing is probably something of an acquired taste.  Her well-observed, delicate, deceptively light and funny novels are steeped in the world of the churchgoing middle class she knew so well.  You can read them just as a gentle sending up of that world, almost like a comedy of manners.  Very little really happens in them.  Emotions are hinted at, loves suggested or coveted but rarely fulfilled, apparently trivial things filling up the lives of people who seem to have very little to do apart from observing each other’s foibles.  Some people have compared them to Jane Austen’s novels.  They’re lighter, gentler, less resolved in the end, but beautifully written.

            Yet they have serious undercurrents.  Pym, born just before the First World War, and the daughter of a lawyer, was a churchgoer throughout her life, mostly attending Anglo-Catholic churches.  She had a number of intense love affairs, but didn’t marry or have children.  Themes of unrequited love, social class and its infinitesimally small gradations, education and literary inspiration run through her novels.  But so does a preoccupation with the gap between high moral and religious aspirations, and the practical, if not downright comic, disappointments of everyday life.  I’m not sure that you can say that this in itself makes her novels somehow typically Anglican, but it’s tempting to do so: there’s a sort of modesty and caution about her view of religion, which is sometimes assumed to be intrinsically Anglican, a sort of fusion of emotion, pragmatism and faith in a complex personal via media.

            To me, though, what’s really striking about her work, making it fascinating to me, but also probably by the same token dating it somewhat, is the assumption of the centrality of religion to her social world.  Yes, it’s a world observed from one particular standpoint.  There are few Dissenters in her novels.  Roman Catholics feature mostly as somewhat dangerous threats or temptations at the margins of her characters’ experience.  Anyone who grew up in an Anglican parish in the 1950s and 60s – well, before then too, of course – will recognise the gallery of characters she parades – the elderly spinsters, the well-meaning but ineffectual clergy, the do-gooding and interfering ladies of the parish, the somewhat exotic or bohemian people who flit in and out of church, the forceful vicar’s wives who really run the parish, and so on.  Yet none of these people are dismissed or treated contemptuously.  Without trying to analyse them, Pym manages to capture both their absurd and their serious sides, and shows the reader something of what they’re really like.

            It’s probably the early novels for which she’s best known, apart from her late work Quartet in Autumn (1977), and my favourite is Excellent Women (1952).  It’s written in the first person, the narrator Mildred Lathbury being an unmarried young-ish woman who harbours some longing for the rogueish Rockingham Napier, although everyone seems to assume she ought to get married to Father Malory, the priest at the ‘high’ church she goes to, and who lives his sister.  But she is uncertain about Malory, Malory is distracted by the arrival of a beautiful young woman as a tenant, Mrs Napier leaves her husband Rockingham, and on the fringes of Mildred’s world hovers an austere anthropologist (there are many anthropologists in Pym’s novels) who plainly is attracted to Mildred and shares her religious seriousness, but seems strangely elusive.  Nothing is fully resolved at the end – as I say, that is one of the contrasts with Jane Austen.  But the ebb and flow of these relationships is peppered with comments on church life, and it’s a church life which is characteristically that of suburban High Anglicanism, particularly of the mid-twentieth century.  There is no thought of the ordination of women.  Yet women basically run the church.  The men – the male clergy I mean – are mostly a bit full of themselves, sometimes pompous, sometimes rather drippy.  Here’s a little exchange between Mildred and the acerbic Sister Blatt about Father Greatorex, standing uncertainly in the middle of a jumble sale:

“Sister Blatt looked at me and clicked her teeth with irritation. ‘Oh, that man!  How he gets on my nerves!’.

‘He certainly is rather useless at jumble sales,’ I agreed, ‘but then he’s so good, saintly almost,’ I faltered, for I really had no evidence to support my statement apart from the fact that his habitual dress of cassock and old overcoat seemed to indicate a disregard for the conventions of this world which implied a preoccupation with higher things.

‘Saintly!’ snorted Sister Blatt.  ‘I don’t know what’s given you that idea.  Just because a man takes Orders in middle age and goes about looking like an old tramp!  He was no good in business so he went into the Church – that’s not what we want.’”

Here, for all the force of Sister Blatt’s criticism, in fact I think it’s Mildred’s gentle humanity that comes through so strongly, as it does throughout the novel.  Her hesitation and apparent lack of confidence mask a genuine kindness and appreciation of the foibles of human beings. 

            Barbara Pym’s novels are very much of their age.  There are many Anglicans today who’d barely recognise themselves in them.  And so much of the world she knew has passed away, though sometimes you can still hear echoes in parish life even today of things that would have been entirely familiar to her.  But I do think that the adroit fusion of awareness of human frailty and confidence, or hope, in an essential human goodness which shines through her work has something still relevant for faith’s engagement with the world today.

This is probably going to be one of the more contentious posts in this series.  That’s not because there’s much dispute about the importance of The Kingdom of Christ in Anglican theological history – there’s some, but generally scholars recognize this is a significant book – but because most people trying to read it seem to find it unwieldy, overlong, and so confusingly written it’s almost indigestible.  It’s definitely one of those books more talked about than actually read – at least nowadays.

So why is it worth paying attention to this book?  It is, for a start, the most important theological work by someone who was probably, after Newman, the Church of England’s most significant theologian of the nineteenth century.  Maurice was a decisive influence in early ecumenical thinking, in the development of Anglican social theology, in eschatology,  in reflection on other faiths, in educational work, and in Anglican ecclesiology, to name just a few areas.  His work is hard going sometimes, but it does repay careful reading.  Time and again, he throws out unusual insights or provocative questions, which force you to question what you think and why.  If the overall drift of his theology was a blend of liberal Anglicanism and moderate High Churchmanship, nonetheless he is very hard to pigeonhole. 

The complexity of Maurice’s theological position in part derived from his relatively unusual – for a mid-nineteenth century Anglican clergyman – intellectual formation.  The child of a Unitarian minister, Maurice’s family home was riven by religious disputes between his father on the one hand, and on the other his mother and sisters who embraced a conservative Calvinism.  Maurice escaped this suffocating if emotionally warm religious turbulence by withdrawing into himself, reading intensively, and falling particularly under the influence of the Romantic poets and writers of the early nineteenth century.  He went to Cambridge to read Classics and Law (as a Dissenter, he could study there, but couldn’t take his degree without subscribing to the 39 Articles), and fell under the personal influence of Julius Hare, his tutor and a confirmed Coleridgean.  A little later, baptised as an Anglican and seeking ordination, he studied at Oxford. 

The Coleridgean influence was decisive.  Maurice was absolutely steeped in his outlook, drawing particularly on his philosophy and religious thought.  When Coleridge wrote in his Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (not published until well after Maurice had become a Coleridgean), “In the Bible there is more that FINDS me than I have experienced in all other books put together”, we see the shape or intellectual disposition of Maurice’s own theological method: the emphasis is placed not on the reader’s subjective conviction, but on the communicative objectivity of the revelation of God in Scripture.  In other words, for Maurice, as for Coleridge, human reason was not so much a sort of calculating or ratiocinating capacity, as a function of a spiritual imagination which could grasp the truth which emanated from the Word of God.  This did not cancel out the critical faculties, but relativised them by prioritising the action of God in revelation.  You can see at once why some people have thought, surprisingly, that there is an affinity of sorts between Maurice and, of all people, Karl Barth.  God’s Word, for Maurice, was self-authenticating.

And yet, at the same time, there is also in Maurice’s work, as in Coleridge’s, a stunning breadth of intellectual sympathy, which discerned truth in the tortuous, error-ridden processes by which human beings across the ages and across cultures have tried to think about the world and about God.  Some have described this facet of Maurice’s outlook as Neo-Platonic, and it’s certainly true that he tended to see the types and shadows of eternal things in the world of time and place.  I prefer to call this a strongly sacramental sense, but I can see why one might stress its affinity with Platonism.

This aspect of Maurice’s way of thinking is crucial to understanding The Kingdom of Christ.  It’s a long book, made up of what are essentially three distinct treatises, unequal in length.  The first is a sort of ‘placing’ of Anglicanism, or rather the Church of England (Maurice only uses the word ‘Anglicanism’ once in the book, and then disparagingly, in reference to Tractarianism), in the spectrum of Christian believing.  He does this by considering in turn the major traditions of the Christian Church (except for Eastern Orthodoxy), in each case identifying what he thinks they have affirmed strongly which expresses a vital truth of Christian faith, and how they have neglected other truths by an over-emphasis on their points of distinction.  Actually, the Roman Catholic Church is also not considered here amongst the others, as such.  That’s because Maurice thought that the Roman Catholic was like a corrupted shell of the true Catholic Church – it held principles and structures in common with the Church of England, but had effectively subverted them.  I don’t think Maurice knew much about the Roman Catholic Church, in all honesty, and his argument here is particularly weak.  What he did do was to assume that the Church of England simply was the Catholic Church in England – he assumed, in other words, as his starting point the intrinsic truth of the Anglican position.

The second treatise is a long examination of what Maurice regarded as the defining features of catholicity – the authority of the Scriptures, the creeds, the ‘signs’ of baptism and eucharist, the structure of the ministry, and the use of a regular liturgy.  Having established in the first treatise that the existence of the kingdom of Christ is a presupposition of all movements in the Church which participate at least in some respect in Christian truth, here Maurice is laying the outlines of the ‘constitution’ of the Catholic Church.  And it’s here, too, that he discusses the Roman Catholic Church, or ‘Romish system’, critically, as a shadow of the true Church.

The third treatise is by far the shortest, and is really like an appendix to the main argument.  Maurice turns his gaze on the Church of England itself, and here asserts firmly the existence of all these constitutional aspects of catholicity in the Church of England.  He also considers the various ‘parties’ or groups within the Church, and again the applies the methodology (learnt from Coleridge) of affirming their positive statements of principle, and criticizing their denials.  Each party, by implication, stands for a vital truth which must be properly articulated in the catholic Church.

The first treatise, or ‘book’, became influential for Anglican ecumenical theology, and indirectly influential on some Catholic theologians, such as Yves Congar.  The second helped to shape the approach to Anglican ecclesiology which bore fruit in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, the four-fold argument of Scriptures, Creeds, sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, and historic episcopate (i.e. dropping the fixed or regular liturgy) which came to characterize Anglican approaches to church unity.  The second also reinforced the ‘national church’ argument, because it defended the idea that the Church of England simply was the Catholic Church in England.  Maurice also brought to bear a rather schematized idea of three ontological categories of family, nation, and church, which sat within each other like Russian dolls, but this is probably the least influential part of his argument.  And the third treatise or book buttressed what is sometimes called the ‘comprehensive’ idea of Anglicanism, the thought that Anglicanism within itself as complementary perspectives the liberal, evangelical and high church interpretations of Christian faith.

Various aspects of Maurice’s arguments were taken up in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by theologians such as Charles Gore, Michael Ramsey, Alec Vidler and Gabriel Hebert.  By the 1960s it was commonly said that he was the greatest Anglican theologian.  But then Stephen Sykes attacked Maurice’s approach in his 1978 book, The Integrity of Anglicanism (I’ll cover that in a future post), and since then, for many different reasons, Maurice’s star has sunk.  It’s a pity, because the complexity and fecundity of this great work justify the effort required to read it – in my view.

For most of us, Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), bishop successively of Chichester, Ely and Winchester, is not much more than a name, famed for his great learning, and celebrated by T.S. Eliot, whose poem ‘Journey of the Magi’ draws on sermons, and whose essays For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) contain his public affirmation as a royalist and Anglo-Catholic.  Perhaps the greatest scholar of his age, and the presiding ‘genius’ of the Authorised Version, Andrewes was said to be King James I’s favourite cleric.  It was reputed that James even slept with a volume of Andrewes’s sermons under his pillow.

Andrewes certainly owed much of his spectacular success as bishop and court preacher to the patronage of James, yet no one could doubt the extraordinary and exhilarating depth and complexity of his theology.  His sermons abound in Biblical, Patristic and Classical allusions and quotations, dense in imagery and in tangled, subtle argumentation.  For a modern reader, they are hard going, and we owe a lot to a handful of modern scholars, including Nicholas Lossky, Marianne Dorman, and Raymond Chapman, for opening up insights into Andrewes’s theological world.  He had one of the highest profiles of the ‘avant-garde conformists’ of the early seventeenth century (a title preferred by some scholars to ‘Caroline divines’), celebrating church tradition, and the saints and in particular the Blessed Virgin Mary, and expressing a sacramental theology attuned to real presence. 

His sermons are mostly available only in selected editions, or in long-published second-hand editions.  They are rarely referenced in Anglican discourse today, largely because of the challenges of reading them.  This is less true of Preces Privatae, or ‘Private Prayers’, which are the prayers, notes and headings Andrewes developed for his devotional practice, and which have become probably his most influential writing.  They are, by any stretch of the imagination, an Anglican classic.  They have influenced subsequent prayers and devotional practices, been used as they stand for private prayer by many people, and also as texts furnished material for creative liturgical writing.  The intercessions used for many years at communion in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, for example, were a synthesis of memorable passages from the Preces Privatae.  The edition almost certainly used to make that synthesis was published by the Anglican liturgical scholar, F.E. Brightman, in 1903, and that is the edition and which I use myself.

There are some difficulties in claiming that these prayers were literally as Andrewes prayed them.  They were never published in any form in his lifetime, and there is no evidence that he ever intended that they should be.  Though all the original material has good claim to come from him, there are four different manuscripts, in hands other than Andrewes’s, with different (though overlapping) content, and transcriptions of Greek and Hebrew texts of varying accuracy.  No comprehensive edition in the languages originally used was published until 1675, i.e. half a century after Andrewes’s death.  English editions, variously abridged, starting appearing from 1630 on, but heavily edited and abridged at first, and with other material interpolated.  Not until the nineteenth century, when translations of parts I and II were made respectively by John Henry Newman (1840) and John Mason Neale (1844), did the text largely as Brightman edited it became properly available, though he also went back to the Latin and re-translated it, drawing on their work.  Before then, in 1883 these earlier translations were re-worked by Edmund Venables, with texts from the Prayer Book and Authorised Version substituted for the equivalent quotations Newman and Neale had used.  So Brightman was building on the work of Newman, Neale and Venables, let alone a number of earlier editors.  It is striking that he did not try to modernize the language (apart from spelling); the text reads very much like a transcription of early modern usage.

That’s quite a complicated publishing history!  And, of course, the further complication is that we don’t know for sure whether Andrewes himself would have recognised or acknowledged the Preces Privatae as they were eventually published in English.  Nor do we know – obviously! – what was going on in Andrewes’s mind as he prayed with them, and so in effect how he actually used them, mentally I mean, in his daily devotions.  So there’s quite a wide gap between the knowledge that these prayers in some form were developed and used by Andrewes, and the conviction that what we have in Brightman’s edition is an entirely accurate rendering in English of what Andrewes himself prayed. 

I’m not sure that that matters, though.  Perhaps it matters for scholars of Andrewes’s life and thought.  But those coming to these prayers for personal guidance and inspiration shouldn’t be put off by the complications in manuscript and translation history.  The Preces Privatae have never become a really widely-used resource for private devotion, and that seems to me a great pity.  If you look at the text, you can see at once why they are difficult simply to pick up and use as written.  It’s said that Andrewes prayed for five hours a day.  One early account of his private prayer says that the text of these prayers – this refers to a manuscript we don’t have any more – was “slubbered with his pious hands and watered with his penitential tears”.  What we don’t have is a text laid out, for example, as are the daily offices of the Prayer Book and Common Worship, with full prayers, directions for use, and so on.  There are morning offices for the days of the week, but also generic morning offices.  We probably have to assume Andrewes used the Prayer Book for evening prayer – provision isn’t made here.  Then there are sections on individual themes such as ‘Penitence’, ‘Confession of Faith’, ‘Deprecation’, ‘Comprecation’, and so on.  Some prayers are written out in full.  Others are in the form of lists.  Others still have, seemingly, alternative biddings, sometimes polar opposites, as in the intercessions for Monday morning, which include the following:

“for the succour and consolation

            of all, men and women, suffering hardness in            {dejection

                                                                                                {sickness

                                                                                                {resourcelessness

                                                                                                {unsettlement;

for the thankfulness and sobriety

            of all, men and women, that are in good case in        {cheerfulness

                                                                                                {health

                                                                                                {resourcefulness

                                                                                                {tranquillity”

For personal use, it seems to me, you have to make a choice about what material you want to use and when, before you pray, because it would be difficult to find your way through them ‘as you go’.  Some prayers and texts, however, are really magnificent examples of thoughtful, compassionate, early modern prayer.  The intercession for Wednesday morning is one of the finest.  It’s long – over three pages – but contains some memorable phrases:

“Moreover we beseech Thee:

remember all, o Lord, for good,

have mercy upon all, o sovran Lord,

be reconciled to us all:

pacify the multitudes of thy people,

scatter offences,

bring wars to nought,

stop the uprisings of heresies:

thy peace and love

grant to us, o God our Saviour,

            Thou that art the hope of all the ends of the earth.”

I hope that quotation just gives a sense of the remarkable language of Andrewes and his translators here.  The language is not inclusive in a modern sense, and it is powerfully evocative of a theological world, let alone a social and political world, very different from our own.  Hierarchy is everywhere, heresies are deprecated, pagans or ‘paynims’ are to be converted, and so on.  But then, the same issue arises with the Prayer Book.  Whether you want to use this language or not depends, then, on whether you think it gets in the way of personal devotion.  It doesn’t for me.  I think we are more than capable of making the necessary mental adjustments when we pray with the Prayer Book, as I do regularly, and so with this text.  In fact, I’ve often used Andrewes’s prayers as a source for intercessions which can be used alongside the order of the Prayer Book.  They do reflect the same world and time as the Prayer Book.  But, like the Prayer Book, indeed like any historic Christian classic, they speak out of the past to us now, their very strangeness or unfamiliarity in a sense a prompt to reflection and meditation.

            I returned a couple of days ago from accompanying the Archbishop of Canterbury to Kyiv, to meet church leaders and learn something of what they and their people have experienced this year.  It would be extremely presumptuous of me – foolhardy even – to go on to pretend that I have anything more than a passing knowledge, after this one trip and the media and material I’ve read, of the complexity of Ukraine’s religious and political situation.

            But there is one matter that has been preoccupying me during and after the trip (and clearly I am speaking only for myself here).  The dominant religious tradition in Ukraine is Eastern Orthodoxy, but it has not one but three manifestations.  One I shall put to one side.  It is the Greek Catholic Church, formerly called the Ruthenian Uniate Church, which can be traced back at least to the forced realignment of Orthodox churches with the Papacy during the years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Whatever the origins of this church as a distinct religious tradition today, it has a large following particularly in some western provinces of Ukraine, and its cathedral in Kyiv, and is firmly within the Roman Communion and not, despite its Greek rites, what I want to attend to here.

            The other two manifestations of Eastern Orthodoxy in Ukraine – and the names can at first be very confusing – are the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).  The former, the OCU, is the result of a recent unification of two churches which had attempted to break away from the Russian Orthodox Church immediately after the First World War, had been suppressed by the Soviets, and had then re-emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union.  In 2019 the united church was granted the decree or Tomos of autocephaly by the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, and it is now affiliated to the Ecumenical Patriarchate.  This very brief sketch of its history give some indication perhaps of how easy it might be to assume that OCU is the authentic voice of Orthodoxy in Ukraine.  Its identity and existence is almost inextricably bound up with the existence of an independent Ukrainian state.

            But then there’s the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.  At least before February 2022, it was almost certainly the largest church in Ukraine, spread across the entire country.  It is frequently described as the ‘Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Moscow Patriarchate’ (UOC-MP) to distinguish it from OCU, and to demonstrate that its affiliation until very recently was with the Moscow Patriarchate.  When people talk about the ‘Russian Orthodox Church’ in Ukraine, this is what they mean.  UOC have a large network of parishes, eminent theologians, cathedrals, a significant presence at the ‘Lavra’, the historic ‘monastery of the caves’ on the eastern edge of Kyiv.  They too see themselves as authentically Ukrainian, and yet their identity – obviously – is much more directly associated with the history of the Russian church than is, seemingly, that of OCU.

            But the question that arises now is this.  With Ukraine at war with Russia, what do you do with the ‘Russian’ identity of UOC?  You can see at once how the leaders of UOC find themselves in an extremely vulnerable position.  They have condemned the Russian invasion (perhaps not vociferously enough for some), mobilised their people to resist the Russian forces, and declared their independence from Moscow.  But their leadership includes many who were educated in the years of the former Soviet Union, and by culture they remain ‘Russian’.  In the dire circumstances in which Ukraine now finds itself, fighting for its very existence, with the most intense and unimaginable pressures facing its political leaders, it is hardly surprising that UOC finds itself being pushed hard on its Russian identity.  The President of Ukraine recently signed into force a measure which could lead to the effective suppression of Russian Orthodoxy in Ukraine, even though it seems the vast majority of UOC’s members are Ukrainian patriots who also want to see the Russian forces expelled from their country.  The ‘Lavra’ has been transferred from UOC to OCU control.  The very future of this church now as a self-declared, independent entity seems uncertain. 

            But in all this, an outside observer might wonder whether there is an ongoing confusion between two cultural/political/historical ideas of Russian Orthodoxy.  Unquestionably, to the Moscow Patriarchate, there is only one authentic Orthodox church in Ukraine – the UOC.  Even though the UOC has declared itself independent, the Moscow Patriarchate continues to recognise its clergy and hierarchy as properly canonical.  To the Moscow Patriarchate, the OCU is not even a church – it is a sect in schism from the Church.   If the tanks come back, then – as most certainly Ukrainians know – something like a forced realignment with the Moscow Patriarchate would take place.  This is, really, a national, political reading of Russian Orthodoxy that obliterates the independent voice of the Ukrainian people.  But this is not what the UOC now represent.  Instead, they are aligned with the defence of Ukrainian national independence.  Theirs is a cultural, ecclesiastical idea of Russian Orthodoxy, which should have little or no overlap with the imperial claims of Moscow.

             For Anglicans, I can think of one situation which bears some comparison.  During the American Revolution, many Anglican parishes in the thirteen breakaway colonies continued to describe themselves as Church of England, used the Book of Common Prayer, and even continued to pray for the King.  They were suspected by others of being traitors to the rebels’ cause.  Indeed, many colonial clergy in America were loyalists, and opposed to the Revolution.  They had a hard time in the immediate aftermath of the British withdrawal in 1783 in convincing their fellow American citizens that they could be trusted, and that they could become loyal citizens of the new republic.  They had to suspend direct ecclesiastical relationships with the Church of England for a time, eradicate royal references from the liturgy, and seek validation for their ordained ministry from the ‘dissenting’ bishops of the Episcopal Church in Scotland.  They had to reconfigure their polity to embrace a model of authority closer to that of the new constitution of America than was the dominant Anglican model, that of the Church of England.  In time, the tensions grew less, though they have never entirely disappeared. 

            It is probably much too early to consider whether or not a union of the two Orthodox churches in Ukraine could come about.  But surely one thing is clear – at least to me.  If it is to come about, there will need to be a constructive approach by each church to the other.  Pace St Augustine, truthful, honest affiliation cannot be compelled.  The national-political idea of Russian Orthodoxy, expressed in the suspect form of the Russky mir ideology, has to fall away from the discussion of church relations in Ukraine.  Russian Orthodox in Ukraine who are sincere Ukrainian patriots need to be free to find a space in civil society in which they can continue to stay true to their church’s traditions, including their historic debt to the Russian church, but separate themselves in all other ways from the political morass created by Putin’s invasion and the Patriarch’s evident support for it.

December 2022