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Vol I No. 10

The Catholicity of Common Prayer

by
The Rev’d Gavin G. Dunbar

Those who esteem the old Prayer Book are used to sniping from opposite sides – from Catholics, it is too Protestant; from evangelicals, it is too Catholic. It’s a pattern of criticism that can be traced back to the recusants (nonconforming papal loyalists) and Puritans (nonconforming advanced Protestants) of the 16th century. Those apparently contradictory criticisms bring to light the true character of the via media or middle way of classical Anglicanism. In more recent thought, Anglicanism’s middle way is often thought to mean a muddled compromise of Protestantism and Catholicism – but nothing could be further from the mind of the classical Anglican divines. For them, the moderate quality of Anglicanism meant the principle set forth in the preface to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: ‘[I]t hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any variation from it’. This moderation meant a church that was firmly anti-papal and firmly anti-Puritan. With the Puritans (and against the Papists) it held to reformed evangelical orthodoxy on the doctrines of sin and grace, but with the papists (and against the Puritans) it maintained ancient Catholic forms and customs of liturgy and ordained ministry. This middle way both reformed and Catholic but neither papist nor Puritan, is what Simon Patrick (1626-1707), Restoration bishop of Ely, memorably called ‘that virtuous mediocrity which our church observes between the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles’. First articulated by the 16th-century divines Cranmer, Jewel, and Hooker, this distinctive position, tested first by the Marian reaction and later the Cromwellian commonwealth, remained the acknowledged position of the Church of England at home and abroad (including the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America) well into the early 19th century. 

The erosion and fragmentation of Anglican churches in our time derives from the disappearance of this understanding. Many modern Anglicans understand it merely as a variant of revivalism or Romanism, or some kind of schizophrenic medley of the two. More commonly, they claim to have transcended those divisions by some imagined return to unity before the division began; this is the view of the 1979 Prayer Book revisers. All these positions deny that Anglicanism has any distinct identity of its own. Against that theological amnesia, however, the most interesting theological scholarship of our time has been done in the recovery of the historic character of Anglicanism not as a muddled compromise of Catholic and reformed, but as a tradition that stands fully within the orthodoxy of the Reformation while also standing fully in the Catholic tradition.

This reformed and Catholic character is evident at the heart of Cranmer’s revision of the daily services in his provision for the immersive and largely sequential reading of (almost) the entire Bible. On the one hand, Cranmer does not scrap the pre-Reformation services but simplifies, condenses, and translates them into English – so that is both Catholic in retention of tradition and reformed in the revision. At the core of the services was the reading of Scripture in large continuous chunks – a distinctively Protestant emphasis, one might think, and indeed, late medieval and Counter-Reformation breviaries (daily office books) reduced the reading of scripture to mere snippets. Yet Cranmer justifies this practice as a restoration of an authentic Catholic tradition: ‘[I]f a man would search out by the ancient Fathers’ what was the ‘first original and ground’ of these daily services, he shall find

they so ordered the matter, that all the whole Bible (or the greatest part thereof) should be read over every year; intending thereby, that the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves and be more able to exhort others by wholesome Doctrine, and to confute them that were adversaries to the Truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion.

Where Cranmer’s reform seems most Protestant, it is simultaneously most Catholic.

Such a claim is undoubtedly paradoxical but not merely a rhetorical flourish. The revival of extensive sequential reading of the Scriptures in the daily office is not only a return to earlier Catholic tradition but also an intrinsically Catholic act – one that makes the church’s historic public liturgy the normative context for the reading of scripture. It is to say that the Word of God and the Catholic church are correlative, that Christ speaks to the faithful church alone, and that the faithful church alone hears and receives the Word of God. It is a reminder that the scriptures held by Christians to be canonical are authoritative in establishing the canon or rule of the Catholic faith. They are Catholic scriptures, acknowledged by the Catholic church in its earliest struggles against heresy as authoritative witnesses to the truth of the Catholic faith. There is no catholicity of faith without a deep immersion in the Catholic scriptures and no fruitful immersion in the Catholic scriptures apart from the common faith and prayer of the Catholic church. The scriptures are rightly read – to the glory of God and the edification of His church and people – when they are read with and in the assembly of the Catholic church and in the context of the Catholic faith of the creeds.

For this reason, ‘that the people (by daily hearyng of holy scripture read in the Churche) should continuallye profite more and more in the knowledge of God, and bee the more inflamed with the love of his true religion’, Cranmer was ready to make drastic reforms to the inherited Catholic tradition of daily prayer. The eight daily hours of prayer were reduced to two, the texts were translated from Latin to English, and the complexity of its rules and devotional enrichments was dramatically simplified. As the original preface noted, ‘the nombre and hardnes of the rules called the pie, and the manifolde chaunginges of the service, was the cause, yt to turne the boke onlye, was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times, there was more busines to fynd out what should be read, then to read it when it was faunde out.’ The rules were drastically simplified, and the only seasonal element to be retained, apart from proper Psalms and lessons on major holy days and the reading of Isaiah in December, was the use of the collect of the day. The anthems, hymns, responses, and other elements proper to the time, day, and season of the church’s year, were scrapped, because they ‘did breake the continuall course of the readyng of the scripture.’

Cranmer’s liturgy was undoubtedly austere, and since his time that austerity has been modified. Though Cranmer seems to have experimented with translations of office hymns, he did not pursue this project – a wise decision, to judge from his clumsy translation of the Veni Creator. Yet the practice of singing metrical Psalms caught on very quickly, and became a standard part of liturgical practice if not of the Prayer Book text. In the 19th century, this in turn gave way to the singing of metrical hymns, including a rich provision for the church’s year. Moreover, in the cathedral and collegiate foundations, a tradition of Anglican chant and anthem was cultivated along with a degree of dignified ceremonial so that however austere the liturgy, it was not without popular appeal or aesthetic beauty. In the 19th century, Anglo-Catholics revived the breviary tradition in English translations, but with all its other defects intact; and in the 20th century the liturgists sought to reinvent it, at the expense of a return to a late-medieval complexity of rules and a brevity of scripture reading – ‘more busines to fynd out what should be read, then to read it when it was faunde out.’ Early 20th-century reforms of the office lectionary aligned it more fully with the seasons and holy days of the church’s year, though without sacrificing the continuous reading of entire books. There is a place for the musical, ceremonial, and devotional enrichment of Cranmer’s liturgy: but these are adjuncts to its proper function, not replacements of it: the public reading of the Catholic scriptures in the church through which the Spirit works repentance and faith in the hearers.

Ironically, it was evangelical Anglicans, once firm in their adherence to the daily office, who in the 19th century abandoned it for the pietist practice of ‘quiet time’ – unstructured individual study, meditation, and prayer divorced from the public worship of the church. It fell to Catholic-minded Anglicans to maintain the spiritual discipline of the daily office, though not always with an evangelical readiness to hear and receive their teaching. There is room here for Catholics to hear more deeply the scriptures as the Word of God and for evangelicals to hear the Word in the communion of the Catholic church. As Ps 95 says, ‘we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand … today, if ye will hear his voice’. 

It is in the liturgies it provides for the sacraments that the Prayer Book’s claim to be fully reformed and fully Catholic – without being Puritan or Papist – is most contested. Naturally, the chief focus is on the service known variously as the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, all terms with ancient origins and varied patterns of use among Catholics and Protestants. The matter chiefly contested is the nature of Christ’s presence in the sacrament and its relation to the physical elements of bread and wine.

The most common view of the Eucharist among many Protestants today is memorialist and symbolic. The Eucharist is a merely symbolic action, whereby Christians are reminded of Christ’s saving death on the cross and nothing more. It’s all subjective – a testimony to the faith of the receiver. One might ask, then, if Christ is just a projection of your own convictions or a figment of your imagination. When a literary hostess in Manhattan discoursed enthusiastically to Flannery O’Connor about the ‘rich symbolism of the Eucharist’, the writer responded, ‘If it’s just symbolism, I say to hell with it’.1James Martin. “Flannery O’Connor and Walter Ciszek on the Eucharist.” America Magazine. June 2, 2010. Martin recounts the anecdote from a collection of O’Connor’s letters, A Habit of Being. If Christ is not truly present, if we have no access to Christ by means of the Eucharist, then it is of no value to receivers. Merely symbolic reminders of Jesus are not Jesus. They are souvenirs – tokens of absence.

Against such subjective memorialism, among the Catholic-minded, the presence of Christ in the elements themselves is often affirmed in realistic terms that are quasi-physical (or material). It’s all objective; so objective, that the faith of the receiver seems irrelevant. The magic mouthful is all that is needed – a merely formal participation in a ceremony, a sign of group solidarity or institutional membership. The presence of Jesus is so completely identified with the material elements and ceremony of the community as to be indistinguishable.

These are of course one-sided sketches to the point of caricature, but they bring out the limitations of common accounts of the sacraments. The Eucharist is indeed a memorial of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice on the cross – ‘do this in remembrance of me’ – but it is also the church’s daily sacrifice – ‘let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually’ (Heb 13:15 cf. Rom 12:1) – it is a symbol of Christ’s body and blood given for us, but also a means of real participation in them – ‘The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?’ (1 Cor 10:16). If, following a conventional via media model of Anglicanism, you tried to blend symbolic memorialism with mystical materialism, you end up with an incoherent muddle. In the classical Anglicanism of the Prayer Book, we find something much better: an account of the sacraments that integrates without muddling objective and subjective, symbol and reality, Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice for us and the Church’s continual sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, one that does justice both to reformed and Catholic imperatives. The humanity of the ascended Christ is at the Father’s right hand in heaven, but according to his promise, his presence is truly manifested in the world by means of his Spirit, working in the hearts and minds of men through the Word and sacraments. His presence in the sacraments is ‘true and spiritual’, not fictive nor material, and it is given to faith alone. Christ once dead dieth no more – He does not fall again in the hands of wicked men.

The earliest generation of reformers shied away from calling this a ‘real presence’ – to them the word ‘real’ meant ‘carnal’ or ‘material’. Yet Richard Hooker speaks of ‘real participation’ in Christ and Bishop Andrewes of ‘real presence’. There can be no doubt that the English reformers believed Christ is really present ‘after an heavenly and spiritual manner’. As Cranmer said in his trial, 

In my book I have written in more than an hundred places, that we receive the selfsame body of Christ that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was crucified and buried, that rose again, ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, and the contention is only in the manner and form how we receive it. For I say (as all the old holy fathers and martyrs used to say), that we receive Christ spiritually by faith with our minds, eating his flesh and drinking his blood: so that we receive Christ’s own very natural body, but not naturally nor corporally.

The Anglicanism that emerged out of the 16th century unquestionably involved a drastic overhaul of the church’s government, doctrine, and worship, a reform that Catholic traditionalists think went too far – just as advanced Protestants think it did not go far enough. Though it was not the first time the Catholic tradition underwent reforms, it was more drastic than most. On what basis can we claim those reforms as consistent with the Catholic tradition?

It is generally recognized that the Reformation was built on a ‘return to sources’ pioneered by Catholic humanists like Erasmus. The humanists aimed to go beyond the selective use of anthologized quotations from the church fathers and the Bible by medieval theologians to recover the Scriptures and church fathers in their original languages, contexts, and literary fullness. It was on the basis of this recovery of Catholic antiquity that the reformers critiqued what was to them not authentically Catholic but modern corruption. As is well-known, for instance, the Reformers were much influenced by the teaching about sin and grace developed by the fifth-century church father Augustine in controversy with the Pelagians; and on that basis the reformers sharply criticized the Pelagian tendencies in the late medieval church’s teaching and practice on good works. Against salvation by works, they asserted that good works are the effect of saving grace, not its cause.

But that’s not the only element of ancient Catholic doctrine that drove the reform. Of even greater importance, perhaps, was their rethinking of the ancient Catholic theology of grace on the basis of the ancient Catholic Christology (as established by the ancient Catholic councils, from Nicaea to Chalcedon). Late medieval teaching on grace tended towards individualism, focusing on the relation of the individual soul to God. This turned salvation into a kind of chutes and ladders game of merits earned and lost through good works or bad. In their teaching on salvation, the reformers reasserted not only the priority of grace but also the centrality of Christ’s person and the sufficiency of Christ’s work as the sole mediator of God and men. It is by sharing in the righteousness of Christ that we attain God. Thus the Catholic tradition on grace was rethought in and through the paradigm set by the Catholic doctrine of Christ.

At the heart of the Catholic doctrine of Christ is what it said about His nature (‘what’ He is) and about His person (‘who’ He is). It affirmed the unconfused distinction of the two natures of Christ, divine and human, and their inseparable unity in his person. In thinking about how we participate in the righteousness of Christ, this principle of distinction without separation applies. On this basis, the reformers insisted on the distinction between justifying grace (by faith only) and sanctifying grace (in good works) while at the same time affirming their inseparable unity – faith unfruitful in good works does not justify. The same distinction without separation carries over in the doctrine of the sacraments, in which the reformers distinguished the outward and visible sign from the inward and spiritual grace while affirming the sign as the means whereby we receive the grace it signifies. In accord with the Christological paradigm, therefore, the sacrament has both natural and supernatural aspects; and though the natural elements of bread and wine acquire (by the operation of the Word and Spirit) the supernatural efficacy of Christ’s body and blood, they retain the integrity of their nature as bread and wine. To declare their natural substance abolished, as did the medieval teaching of transubstantiation, ‘overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament’. It departs from the Christological paradigm.

It was through the lens of this Christocentric understanding that the judicious Hooker could claim for this reformed perspective the characteristic emphases of Catholic Eucharistic doctrine – real presence, sacramental mutation, and even transubstantiation – as he does here: 

Christ assisting this heavenly banquet with his personal and true presence, doth by his own divine power add to the natural substance thereof supernatural efficacy, which addition to the nature of those consecrated elements changeth them and make them unto us which otherwise they could not be; that to us they are thereby made such instruments as mystically yet truly, invisibly yet really work our communion or fellowship with the person of Jesus Christ as well as in that he is man as God, our participation also in the fruit, grace, and efficacy of his body and blood, whereupon there ensueth such a kind of transubstantiation in us, a true change both of soul and body, an alteration from death to life. (Laws V.lxvii.11)

So far this essay has focused on the classical Anglicanism of the 16th to 18th centuries, a recognized strain (however idiosyncratic) within the world of reformed Protestant orthodoxy. We have not touched on the great sea change effected by the 19th-century Anglo-Catholic movement. As the name suggests, the movement sought to recover the Catholic heritage of Anglicanism; it assertively upheld the divine origin and authority of the church, its sacraments and orders of ministry. In theology it looked to the church fathers, to the divines of the 17th century rather than the 16th century, and the Prayer Book as rule of faith more than the Thirty-Nine Articles. In its second generation, the movement took a ritualist turn, reviving the liturgical practices of the medieval Church of England or adopting those of Counter-Reformation Rome. Theologically and liturgically, Anglo-Catholics can be located on a continuum that ranges from Prayer Book Catholicism to ‘more Roman than the pope’ Anglo-Papalism. The old high churchmen had been content to live within the parameters of the Reformation formularies; Anglo-Catholics often moved assertively beyond them, and even against them, leading sometimes bitter controversy, especially with evangelicals. Regrettably, a knee-jerk antipathy to and ignorance of the Reformation heritage lingers on in the Anglo-Catholic movement to this day.

Despite this alienation from the Reformation heritage, many Anglo-Catholics were and are deeply attached to the historic Prayer Book, whose rites they enveloped in the rich ornament, vestment, music, and ceremonial of the Sarum or Roman liturgy. When a liberal Catholicism hostile to the Anglican formularies became ascendant in the Episcopal Church in the post-war period and outlawed the historic Prayer Book in favor of the ecumenist Catholic liturgy of 1979, the movement was split at least three ways: between liberal Anglo-Catholics who embraced the 1979 Prayer Book and the progressive agendas in ministry and marriage that followed it; conservative Anglo-Catholics who also embraced the 1979 Prayer Book but resisted the subsequent innovations in doctrine and morals (many of whom have since entered the ACNA); and conservative Anglo-Catholics attached to the old liturgy, many of whom withdrew from the Episcopal Church and organized small “continuing” churches.

Thus, by a strange twist of history, catholic-minded conservatives inside and outside the Episcopal Church are among the chief guardians of the Prayer Book liturgy in the United States. It is not, of course, because of their appreciation for the reformational theology of the Prayer Book, about which they often know little. Many were put off by the rhetorical banality of the new rites, their inability to match the weight of conviction borne by Cranmer’s cadences, and the gratuitous vandalism of jewels of euchology like the Prayer of Humble Access. Many also intuited correctly that the disruption of liturgical tradition was psychological preparation for the progressive theological and moral agenda that followed. But the heart of their attachment was a reverence for liturgical tradition, one of the key elements of the Catholic outlook.

It was Robert Crouse, a Prayer Book Catholic unusually well-versed in and sympathetic to the Reformation heritage, who did the most perhaps to develop a theological rationale for this Prayer Book traditionalism. His argument built on the Augustinian theology of the soul and the analogy of memory in the human personality, which, he said, is ‘the ground of our attention in the present and our expectation of the future. The concreteness and sanity of our present understanding and judgments will depend quite radically upon the clarity and integrity of memory. Without that dimension, we would be as those who suffer a crippling amnesia.’2R. D. Crouse, ‘Tradition and Renewal’, in Tradition: Receive and Handed On, ed. D. A. Petley (St. Peter Publications, 1993) p. 92. As memory is in the soul, so is tradition in the church. Our memory as Anglicans, he wrote elsewhere, is

our lively awareness of that continuous tradition of faith and worship which must be the basis of any sound judgment in the present, and any genuine hope for the future. Memory is the necessary matrix of all creativity; amnesia can only produce disorientation and disintegration. The Book of Common Prayer is the form of the collective memory of Anglicans, the consensus fidelium, the common mind of the church, the principle of authority and cohesion of the institution, and the guarantee of its catholicity. 

Again, ‘Anglicans recognize no papal magisterium [teaching office]; for us, it is the tradition of common prayer which elucidates and defends and deepens our memory of the Word of God.’ In the reformed Catholicity of the Book of Common Prayer, Crouse’s generous Catholic traditionalism opened the way for Catholic-minded Anglicans to reappropriate more fully and sympathetically the Reformation heritage of Anglicanism.

Work cited in this essay

Footnotes

  • 1
    James Martin. “Flannery O’Connor and Walter Ciszek on the Eucharist.” America Magazine. June 2, 2010. Martin recounts the anecdote from a collection of O’Connor’s letters, A Habit of Being.
  • 2
    R. D. Crouse, ‘Tradition and Renewal’, in Tradition: Receive and Handed On, ed. D. A. Petley (St. Peter Publications, 1993) p. 92.
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