Dissident Dispatches
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In response, Alfred enlisted his bishops in a campaign to teach “all the free-born young men now among the Angelcynn” how to read in their own language “certain books,” including Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, “which are the most necessary for all men to know”. According to Sarah Foot, “Alfred was thus manipulating the history of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to create among his own subjects a sense of cultural and spiritual identity, by invoking a concept of Englishness particularly dependent on the Christian faith”.558 In short, Alfred set out to create a Christian nation. To grasp the significance of his achievement, one need only compare his kingdom to the “ecclesiastical polities” that radically transformed his prototype of Christian nationhood in the centuries following the Norman Conquest.
Ecclesiastical Polities
Immediately after the Conquest, the papal monarchy established a church-state (Kirchenstaat). Centuries later, that supra-national model of ecclesiastical polity was replaced in England by the state-church (Staatskirche) established by Henry VIII. Both of those ecclesiastical polities were clearly distinguishable from Alfred’s model of Christian nationhood. First of all, among the Angelcynn there was no clear separation between secular and spiritual authority. Alfred the Great remained firmly within the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the priest-king.559 Second, the social structure of his Christian nation was essentially trinitarian. The trifunctional nature of society supported his kingship just as three legs support a stool. The “three pillars of the community” were the “men of prayer, men of war, and men of labour” who provided the tools and materials necessary to practice the craft of rulership. But, because spirit must govern matter, only the magical aura of wisdom radiating from the person of the sovereign could combine the three elements of the social order into a harmonious whole.560
The Bible provided the third distinctive feature of Alfred’s Christian nation. He looked to scripture to provide both a warrant for his Christian kingship and a solemn warning to those who would flout the laws of God. In handing down a code of laws, “Alfred was legislating…overtly in the tradition of a Christian king, against an historical background of Old Testament law-giving”. In other words, he showed the Angelcynn “how similar their laws were to those of Ancient Israel and also inviting them to remodel themselves as a new Chosen People”.561 Old Testament Israel also provided abundant evidence that God’s providential wrath awaited any nation stubborn and stiff-necked enough to resist his divine sovereignty.
Alfred’s conception of Christian nationhood stands in stark contrast to the papal monarchy. It was also radically opposed to either Hooker’s early modern ecclesiastical polity or Williams’ postmodern vision of a politically progressive ecclesiastical corporation promoting an ever-more pluralistic society. The differences reflect both the history and the theologies flowing from the radical transformation in the lives of Angelcynn Christians initiated by the Papal Revolution and the Norman Conquest. In the time of Alfred the Great, religion and magic were intertwined in the social practices of everyday life. His Christian subjects were enchanted by the poetic vision of God become man sacrificed for the sins of his people. The first millennium of Christendom has been described as the Age of Incarnation. By contrast, the second millennium inaugurated by the Papal Revolution of the eleventh century can be seen as the Age of Disincarnation, a period of ever-deepening disenchantment during which life on earth became progressively more detached from God, whose heaven was projected somewhere beyond space and time.562
Interestingly, it is precisely the institutionalized disincarnation of God in Hooker’s ecclesiology that Williams finds so compelling. He approves Hooker’s rejection of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation on the grounds that “it presumes to supplement the fundamental christological witness to the prior activity of God in redemption; God has defined what it means to be a believer by the fact of the incarnation, and no human power has the liberty to add to that definition” by asserting the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the eucharist. Williams is kidding on the square when he remarks that Hooker sounds “alarmingly like Barth” in highlighting “the principle of God’s hiddenness in the act of revelation, a hiddenness that secures divine freedom”.563 While Hooker and Williams agree that the “mystical body” of the Church remains forever hidden, they both look to law and reason to preserve the public forms of worship which enable members of a conforming congregation to participate in the historical life of a sacred community.
In England and elsewhere the Papal Revolution set into motion changes that gradually replaced magical incantations with legal traditions (common law, canon law, Roman law), all sanctified by a rationalist theology premised on the doctrine of the two swords, temporal and spiritual. Set free to do its work in the novel autonomy of the secular sphere, human reason began its long exit from religion by pronouncing its blessing on two developments that combined to upset the spiritual monopoly claimed by the Papacy: the secular State and the Protestant Reformation.564 Hooker’s proto-Anglican theology was a response to those inexorable historical changes which remained firmly anchored in the rational legalism pioneered by the late medieval papacy.565 He took the separation of the spiritual from the secular sphere for granted. The sovereign was supreme head of the visible Church of England but his authority extended only to “the external frame of the Church’s affairs” as distinct from matters touching upon its “mystical body”.566 But in both spiritual and temporal affairs, “Hooker declares with Aquinas that God’s being is a law unto his working, that the structures of the world are rational and operate according to divinely ordained laws in their proper spheres and that reason is God’s highest gift to humanity”.567
Accordingly, for Hooker positive law, in church and state alike, was largely a product of human reason rather than binding scriptural authority. But his Anglican schema of a “Christian commonwealth” retained an essentially trinitarian structure. He recognized that “politic Society” was divided into two distinct corporations: the first was “the Church of Christ” housing “those who pray”; the other was “the Commonwealth” exercising the function of sovereignty. Both Church and Commonwealth necessarily rested upon and included the people as the indispensable third element which supported the whole structure; thereby creating “a figure triangular” in which “the base does not differ from the sides thereof” but in which every line “is both a base and also a side” depending upon the perspective from which it is viewed.568 But, as Williams points out, Hooker knew that the life of the Christian commonwealth must be animated by the divine action which becomes manifest in the sacramental rituals of the Church.569
Like the ancients, Hooker believed that men are by nature part “animal” but they also have a “divine” quality that distinguished them from other creatures and which must govern their baser instincts. Just as the Christian commonwealth is composed of three elements, each of its members seeks “a triple perfection, first a sensual” pursued above all by those who “have no God but only their belly”. There are also those whose chief aim is to cultivate “the law of moral and civil perfection” in this life. It was the distinctive role of the Church to meet the “spiritual and divine needs of both the people and their governors for “those things whereunto we tend by supernatural means here, but cannot here attain unto them”.570 It was through baptism that all members of the visible Church of the Commonwealth lay the foundation for their participation in the eternal life promised by Christ. It was through the ritual sharing in the flesh and blood of the Saviour that they “have here their nourishment and food prescribed for continuance of life in them”.571
In this manner Hooker sought to transform a state church established to impose religious conformity on its subjects into an “imagined community” or “Societie Supernaturall”. Such a community was to be “realized in antiphonal chant, sacramental participation, and pastoral care”. Unfortunately, the “imagined community” constituted thereby, “like other sacred communities imagined and improvise
d in early modern England,” was lodged “in the outskirts and interstices” of a State which over time came to identify itself as a surrogate for the nation.572 In the long run, Hooker’s ecclesiastical polity served only to sanctify a secular political process that today threatens the survival of the English nation along with the core population of every other erstwhile Anglo-Saxon country. In principle, the essentially Aristotelian philosophy undergirding Hooker’s ecclesiastical polity could be applied to the churches of any other nation.573 He treated the distinctively English character of the Church of England as adiaphora or a thing indifferent in the eyes of divine law. It may be that Rowan Williams’ evident admiration for Hooker’s theology stems from an even more profound, indeed chilling, indifference to the demise of the church-as-nation model of Anglican ecclesiology both in England and in the old white dominions.
Conclusion
Unlike Alfred the Great, Rowan Williams does not see the creation, much less the maintenance, of a Christian nation as the essential task of either church or state. Indeed, he trivializes the theological significance of national identity when suggests that “the freedom of national communities is a matter comparable to the freedom of a church, a union, or a charitable trust”. There is a market for loyalty in which any given ethnic group is only one among many competitors in a post-Christian, transnational, “community of communities”.574 In his infamous lecture on “Civil and Religious Law in England,” Williams declared that “what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction [such as Muslim “communities” in England] are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.575
In effect, this means that contemporary descendants of the Angelcynn have no special place in the Anglican Church. Certainly, they can no longer claim to be the autonomous, founding people of any Christian nation, in England or elsewhere. At best, they are one of a number of competing national communities sharing the same territory in officially multicultural states, societies, and churches. The ancient theonomic vision of Christian nationhood has given way to the postmodern secular law of universal human rights. Contrary, no doubt, to his intentions or expectations, Hooker’s ecclesiastical polity laid the groundwork for Williams’ liberal managerialist theology. Both “those who pray” and “those who fight” have been absorbed into an all-embracing, unitarian system of work, production, and consumption. Premised upon the integration of the church into the administrative apparatus of the modern corporate state, Williams’ political theology now aims not only to manage “the established Church of England and the global Anglican provinces” but to co-opt and marginalise “other more orthodox Christian ideologies and churches”.576 Under Williams’ direction, the Church of England set out not to baptize but to bury the English nation.
14: Lost Nation
The Place of the Anglican Church in Australian History and Society
Introduction
In his book Anglicans in Australia, Bishop Tom Frame provides a valuable analysis of the historical context from which the Anglican Church of Australia emerged and a critical evaluation of its present place in Australian society. Few would dispute his principal thesis; namely, that “the Anglican Church has fashioned its identity primarily on English Anglicanism, which relies heavily on Establishment for both its governance and intellectual coherence”. He points out, of course, that it was only in the first few decades of British settlement did the Church of England in Australia formally enjoy the privileges of an established church. By the 1820s, Anglicans were but one of many Christian denominations in the Australian colonies. Congregations, parishes, and dioceses were private, voluntary religious associations but Anglicans were notably over-represented among colonial elites. Nowadays, of course, aspirations toward an Anglican establishment can never achieve more than an implicit form. The Australian Constitution explicitly prohibits the establishment of a national church such as the Church of England. Nevertheless, Frame contends that the “Australian Church has frequently thought and acted like an Established Church”, thanks to the English inheritance that colonial Anglicans carried in their baggage and adapted to their new environment.577
Indeed, Frame’s book itself suffers from the insider effect. Born in 1962, having been a Bishop of the Australian Defence Force and head of a theological college in Canberra, Frame has spent his adult life straddling the formal constitutional barrier separating he calls the Australian Church from the Australian State. Perhaps because he is too close to the coalface, Frame fails to appreciate the truly revolutionary shift in the character of the Anglican Church of Australia which followed its declaration of independence from the Church of England in 1962. The Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia was given formal legal effect by Act of the Parliaments of the States and Commonwealth of Australia.578 The “establishment” implicit in such a procedure was nothing new. What changed over the following decades was the theological significance of nationhood.
The Anglican Church of Australia now claims to be “genuinely national” by virtue of its “distinctly Australian” identity.579 Before 1962, Australian Anglicans mostly identified themselves as independent Australian Britons. Long gone are the days when Anglican leaders in Australia proudly and publicly proclaimed that God has “called our British race to the lead among the nations in fulfilling his purposes”.580 Australian Anglicans must know that the God of Israel blessed blood — from the seed of Abraham down to the Christ Jesus and the apostle Paul — as the basis of belonging to that particular holy people. Blood is at once biocultural and biblical, biological and theological. It is not so long ago that the English people understood themselves to be a holy people. The sixteenth-century Church of England took for it granted that Christendom was a family of autocephalic national churches whose only universal head was the Lord Jesus Christ. To be English was a matter of both blood and faith.
Nowadays the Anglican Church of Australia embraces the secular State’s explicitly non-ethnic definition of Australian nationality.581 It is bound, therefore, to treat the English ancestry and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnicity of most of its communicants as a merely implicit (if not downright unmentionable) and contingent circumstance of no theological significance. Within the institutional structures of the Church, Australians of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ancestry are now a lost nation, a people that no longer dares speak their name. WASPs are the invisible race. They have been orphaned by a State and a Church that no longer incarnate their history and destiny as a distinctive people sharing the blood-faith of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The idea of Australia as a new Britannia set in the southern seas is now dead and buried.582 To its eternal shame, the Anglican Church of Australia was one of its principal grave-diggers.
The Church of England in a New Britannia
Before 1962, the British loyalties of the Church of England in Australia were never in doubt. The 1962 Constitution of the Church, however, merely confessed to “being derived from the Church of England”. The Australian Church also retained and approved the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-nine Articles until such time as the doctrine and principles therein might be altered and revised in accordance with the rules set out in the Constitution. Accordingly, the Anglican Church of Australia is now a loose confederation of autonomous dioceses under the nominal supervision of a Primate elected in accordance with a procedure determined by the General Synod representing the lay communicants and clergy of the Australian church as a whole.583 One little-noticed corollary of the legal independence of the Australian Church is that it lost its historic connection with the British monarchy. A tradition of Christian kingship stretching back to the priest-kings of Anglo-Saxon times has been severed without a second thought.
This is no small matter since Anglicans in both England and Australia traditionally regarded the monarchy as “a symbol of divine authority”. The doctri
ne of the Divine Right of Kings had long since passed into history “but Anglicans believed that the monarchy possessed divine attributes”. Even the notoriously progressive Red Bishop of Goulburn, Ernest Burgmann (1885–1967), prized kingship as a guarantor of “personal freedom, social unity, and stability and the just administration of law and order”. For that reason, “the monarchy…had played a crucial role in the history of the church”.584 Indeed, until the creation of the Diocese of Goulburn in 1863, the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed bishops in colonial Australia by means of Letters Patent issued by the Crown. Thereafter, bishops were elected by autonomous diocesan synods.585
If only in a formal legal sense, however, the reigning monarch remained the sole, anointed, and living icon of divine majesty within the Church of England in Australia for much of the twentieth century. But the Constitution of 1962 set the Australian Church on the road to becoming a thoroughly deracinated “little republic” bereft of any corporate connection to the blood royal of a Christian kingship schooled by the Church of England. Ironically, from 1962 until 1973, it was only by virtue of the short-lived Commonwealth Royal Style and Titles Act 1953 that the Queen retained her constitutional role as the defender of the ancestral faith confessed by Anglicans in Australia.586