Dissident Dispatches

by Andrew Fraser

  From the beginning, the English Reformation posed a fundamental problem in historical theology: Is ethno-nationalism compatible with Christianity? The first generation of English Protestants were convinced that their rejection of papal authority was part of God’s grand design; England was set apart as an elect nation destined to defend the true Church against the Antichrist. This nationalist ethno-theology received its clearest and most influential expression in 1563 when John Foxe published his Acts and Monuments (also known as the Book of Martyrs). This book played a decisive role in creating the mythomoteur, or constitutive myth, of England as a Protestant nation.803 Foxe provided his readers with a powerfully evocative vision of “the monarch leading the nation in a crusade against Antichrist”.804 He presented Roman Catholicism and foreign intervention as the evil twins threatening England’s Protestant identity. His grisly tales of the persecution suffered by ordinary English men and women at the hands of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary Tudor and her husband Phillip II of Spain persuaded generations of Englishmen that the agony of the martyrs “had been for a purpose, to demonstrate their own resolute faith and to bear witness to their countrymen’s Protestant destiny”.805

  In Foxe’s providential history, the biblical story of the Israelite prophetess who saved her people foreshadows the reign of Elizabeth I: “the second daughter of Henry VIII was as a second Deborah [see, Judges 4:4–14] to rescue the nation from Antichrist and restore the rule of Christ”.806 Well into the nineteenth century, there were English theologians who continued to affirm the basic axiom of Foxe’s martyrology: The English “nation was a theological fact, a providential reality”. FD Maurice (1805–1872), for example, was sure that God used both nation and Church “for His purposes — has been claiming each for a distinct part of His kingdom”. In particular, “God had taught England’s rulers ‘that it is our vocation to resist every power, papal, imperial, democratic, which strives to destroy the peculiarities of race, family, individual — and to construct a society which shall be an artificial corporation, not a living body’”.807 Few modern academic historians are game openly to affirm the providential character of the historical process, generally, or of the English Reformation, in particular. But a secularized Protestant interpretation of the Reformation remains visible in the work of those, such as AG Dickens, who suggest that the pre-Reformation English Church had transformed the vital, spiritual community of the early church, the earthly Body of Christ, into a hollow, legalistic, and self-interested ecclesiastical corporation ripe for reform.

  In Dickens’ account, the English Reformation was part of a broadly-based international movement which “sought first and foremost to establish a gospel-Christianity, to maintain the authority of the New Testament evidence over mere church traditions and human inventions” and “to cleanse the Church’s teaching from…unwarranted additions — made through many centuries — to the recorded gospel of Christ”. Both on the continent and in England that evangelical movement “was thus started on its gradual course several years before Henry VIII made the political break with Rome, over a decade before Thomas Cromwell persuaded him to allow the placing of English bibles in the churches, and more than two decades before England acquired its first Protestant government”. Indeed, fifteenth-century Lollards established a sort of underground movement which created “reception-areas for Lutheranism” when its influence extended to the prosperous and populous region of south-eastern England in the early sixteenth century. According to Dickens, the spiritual torpor and moral vacuity of the ecclesiastical hierarchy from top to bottom fatally weakened the defences of the Catholic party during the early years of the Reformation.808

  Dickens observed that “in an age when an increasing number of men were reading and thinking for themselves, the intellectual slackness of popular medieval religion played into the hands of Protestant critics”. Uneducated parish priests and a “hierarchy which excelled in diocesan administration but took no part in Christian teaching was no longer responding to the expectations of the younger scholars, the educated urban classes and a growing body of more or less literate craftsmen”. Moreover, “the bishops and other senior clergy remained appointees of the Crown” under Henry VIII “and proved habitually responsive to its pressures”. Certainly, “they gave the King no trouble when in the 1530s he staged his Royal Supremacy”. Perhaps “the gravest weakness in the spiritual leadership of the English Church and one of the reasons why its whole thinking became pervaded with legalism and denuded of the missionary spirit” was simply that most of its bishops had been trained as civilian lawyers well accustomed to accommodating the demands of a latter-day Caesar.809 This unflattering picture of the pre-Reformation English Church has prompted many Catholic historians to challenge Protestant triumphalism in the historiography of the English Reformation.

  Catholic (and Neo-Catholic) Revisionism

  Catholic revisionists attack the Protestant (and Dickens’ neo-Protestant) interpretation of the English Reformation at its weakest point; namely, its simplistic conflation of the English nation and the royal state apparatus constructed by Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Many secular historians have supported the Catholic critique of King Henry’s new-modelled ecclesiastical polity. In response, Dickens complains that Catholic historians and their neo-Catholic allies present the break with the papacy as “a mere act of state, foisted upon a nation which did not want to receive it”. But even he has to concede that, from the beginning, “the coherence of Anglicanism depended upon the State”. While “one must detest the King’s fitful acts of terror,” Dickens confesses his admiration for “that strength of character which combined into one organism men and opinions so exceedingly diverse”.810 Catholic writers have been less impressed “by Henry’s claims to godliness” and more inclined to expose his weaknesses. In the sixteenth century, papist polemicists charged that Henry “gave up the Catholic faith for no other reason in the world than that which came from his lust and wickedness”. By the early nineteenth century Catholic writers were forcing “Protestants to face up to the charge that the Reformation had not been a spiritual cleansing at all”. Instead, the whole episode was simply “a division of the spoils of a pristine Catholic church by money-grubbing monarchs, courtiers and climbers”.811

  It was an English Tory radical, William Cobbett, who popularized the idea of the Reformation as the shameful product of a Tudor despotism that “signalled the introduction of oppression into English society”. Prior to the dissolution of the monasteries and the royal theft of their property “the religious had cared for the poor, sick and needy”. Accordingly there was no need in pre-Reformation England for poor laws and other oppressive legislation which “devastated social provision in the interests of a rapacious monarch and a hungry aristocracy”. Cobbett’s polemical attack on the conventional wisdom of Protestant historiography was so powerful that it seeped “almost unnoticed into national consciousness”.812 Over a century and a half after the appearance of Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Revolution in England and Ireland (1824–1827), even a towering figure such as AG Dickens remained on the defensive, protesting that the dissolution was motivated not by finance but by Protestant teachings.813

  Dickens may have been right to insist that “the fate of the monasteries had only indirect connections with the rise of Protestantism”. It may also be true that the lead “in the destruction, division and purchase of the monastic lands…was emphatically not taken by men of the new faith but by men…who in time became pillars of the Catholic reaction under Queen Mary”.814 But neither point effectively refutes the Catholic critique of the Reformation State as a regime inspired more by the neo-pagan currents of Renaissance secular humanism than by the Christian ideals of faith, hope, and charity anchored in ecclesiastical tradition. Re-emerging in Italy and spreading soon thereafter to England, the civic humanist thought of the fifteenth century looked to the republic or Aristotelian polis not the Church to establish and preserve the foundations of t
he good life here below. In what became the “Atlantic republican tradition,” the State “was at once universal, in the sense that it existed to realize for its citizens all the values which men were capable of realizing in this life, and particular, in the sense that it was finite and located in space and time”.815

  William Cavanaugh has distilled the essence of the Catholic critique of the Reformation State, describing it as a “mere simulacrum of true catholicity, in which the antithesis of local and universal is effaced. The Eucharist gathers the many into one (cf. 1 Cor. 10.16–17) as an anticipation of the eschatological unity of all in Christ”. It therefore “transgresses national boundaries and re-defines who our fellow citizens are”. For that reason, “communion among churches is a threat to the unity of the state”. From this perspective, the English Reformation was an attempt to subsume the local and particular under the universalistic and imperial pretensions of the royal state. The bloody wars and persecutions associated with the Reformation “were not simply a matter of conflict between ‘Protestantism’ and ‘Catholicism’ but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging state over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order”.816

  Other Catholic writers dispute the idea that the medieval Catholicism was a decaying order. Eamon Duffy, for example, insists that “the Reformation was a violent disruption, not the natural fulfilment of what was vigorous in late medieval piety and religious practice”. The Tudor revolution produced “not a Protestantized people but a destroyed spiritual and liturgical context”.817 Similarly, Christopher Haigh contends that “[o]n balance, the Church was a lively and relevant social institution, and the Reformation was not the product of a long-term decay of medieval religion”. But it was a revolution in the theory and practice of statecraft. It created a powerful State which “brought Protestantism”. Protestantism did not bring the Reformation.818 Still other historians such as GR Elton and JJ Scarisbrick have debated whether the administrative despotism of the Tudor regime owed more to Henry VIII or to his brilliant advisor Thomas Cromwell. Neither takes seriously the idea of the English Reformation as a spiritual awakening.819 But the Catholic critique of the Reformation religion of the State is a two-edged sword. From the long-range perspective of Orthodox and neo-orthodox historians, the papal monarchy itself appears less the helpless victim and more the progenitor of (perhaps even the perpetrator responsible for) the secular idea of the State which came to fruition in early modern Europe.

  Orthodox (and Neo-Orthodox) Interpretations

  Prior to the eleventh century, the churches in Western Europe were like nations “joined together in a confederation of family of Faith”. Until the Great Schism of 1054, the orthodox Christian ecclesia incarnated the ideal of universal nationalism implicit in Acts 17:24–28. Fr Andrew Phillips, an English Orthodox Christian priest describes this period as an Age of Incarnation in which the evangelical mission of the Church was to infuse the Holy Spirit into the blood of each and every people or Volk.820 Nowhere was the Church more successful in that enterprise than in England where the charismatic authority of the Anglo-Saxon kings underpinned a symphonic harmony between the spiritual and temporal realms.821 The unity of the Church was anchored in the expression of a shared faith, which was “itself the expression of the experience of the Holy Spirit common to Her members”. According to Fr Phillips, “[t]he clearest sign that the Orthodox Church is not a secular institution but a divino-human one is the fact that She has no visible head, but the invisible Head of the God-Man, Christ, present in the Church through the Holy Spirit”.822

  Once the papal monarchy provided the prototype of the modern state, the Church ceased to be a family of ethno-nations. The Church grandly declared that “a universal God demands universal domination”.823 Through the apparently harmless filioque clause, added to the Nicaean Creed in the eighth century, the Papal Revolution of the eleventh century received its formal constitutional warrant. Pope Gregory VII claimed to be the “Vicar of Christ” rather than simply the “Vicar of St Peter” on the strength of the “statement that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father”. The effect was to lock “up the Holy Spirit between the Father and the Son,” thereby distancing God from man, putting the Holy Spirit beyond reach. Once the Holy Spirit was disincarnated, drained from the earth, “putting Him where the Gothic spires pointed, in the empty sky…man was deprived of grace. The only solution was to replace the Holy Spirit with a human institution”.824 It was the Kirchenstaat, or church-state, created by the centralization of the papal monarchy that stepped forward as the essential mediator between God and man. Such an unprecedented centralization of spiritual authority required a root-and-branch reform of theological discourse. Medieval scholasticism performed that function in its highly rationalized re-working of the orthodox doctrine of the incarnation.825

  The incarnation became a philosophical abstraction which provided the essential platform for “the rationalization and systemization of law and legality in the West”. As a consequence of that theological revolution, an older orthodox emphasis on baptism was supplanted by the Eucharist. Theology taught “that the rational order of the universe requires that sins always be punished”. Sins came to be “understood in legal terms as specific wrongful acts or desires or thoughts for which various penalties must be paid in temporal suffering”. Alongside the elaborate system of rules and standards associated with the doctrine of purgatory, the last supper was “rigorously defined and systematized; at the same time it was raised in importance to become the primary Christian sacrament, the principal symbol of membership in the church”.826 It was by means of the Eucharist — endlessly repeating Christ’s sacrificial victory over sin — that the Church maintained its spiritual hegemony over the entire community of sinners on earth.

  Roman Catholic theology made the seemingly contradictory claim that God is both transcendent and immanent. It was the task of the Church to reconcile those two self-substantiating orders of reality by serving as the essential intermediary between heaven and earth.827 This sacrament was understood as the “ritualistic repetition of an unrepeatable event,” the time when God became man. The clergy were a separate estate and order of men by virtue of their power to perform a miracle. Transubstantiation was not a merely technical scholastic doctrine. As Berman remarks, “in the sacrament the substance of bread and wine is miraculously transformed by the priest into the ‘true’ body and blood of Christ at the time it is consecrated”.828 By endowing the Church with a monopoly over the power to mediate between the beyond and the here-below, theological reason disenchanted the natural world.829

  By reserving the spiritual realm as the exclusive province of the Church, the logic of scholastic theology deprived secular rulers of their customary religious function and character. Equally, however, the specialized ecclesiastical hierarchy that enabled the papacy to assert itself independently of temporal powers also freed the secular sphere from a restrictive preoccupation with the supernatural. A huge gap opened up between the invisible realm of the divine and the mundane but now self-sufficient terrestrial sphere. Leaving the cure of souls to the exclusive responsibility of the Church, temporal bodies politic rushed into the gap, asserting their own autonomous power over the management of worldly affairs. Was it irony, or tragedy, when Roman Catholic theology provided doctrinal justification for the nationalization of the Church in England by sanctifying secular efficiency and legalistic rationalism? Scholastic theology itself affirmed the self-sufficient integrity of the secular realm. This interpretative loophole eventually permitted powerful princes to produce a Protestant Reformation.830

  In effect, the Reformation was the more or less inevitable “second wave of the western religious revolution” launched by the papal monarchy itself. As Marcel Gauchet explains, the never-ending preoccupation of the Church with the problem of indeterminacy (i.e., transcendent or immanent) lying “at the heart of our understanding of God,” also “sustained the necessity for a com
pletely personal reception of, and quest for, divine wisdom”. Challenges to the mediatory monopoly of the Church were unavoidable because the Church could maintain its position only by creating a “faith developing independently of it. When that happened, personal mediation turned against institutional mediation”.831

  It was just such a dialectic of unbelief that became manifest in the life-long struggle waged by Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) to sustain his personal belief in the “real presence” of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist. In Cranmer’s early years as a Cambridge don, before he became Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII, he was a Catholic conformist who had no quarrel with the doctrine of transubstantiation. In the early 1530s he moved closer to a Lutheran account of the real presence (consubstantiation), and finally affirmed to the end — his last words at the stake — the view that the elements of the Eucharist signified nothing more than the symbolic or spiritual presences of Christ. In other words, the material substance of bread and wine belong to a self-substantiating secular realm which has its own inherent integrity. But there lies the rub with the Protestant interpretation of the English Reformation. Even as Bloody Mary consigned him to the flames in Oxford, Cranmer remained utterly convinced that the simultaneously tyrannical and legalistic despotism set over the temporal realm possessed its own autonomous religious rationale. He died a martyr to the Machiavellian Royal Supremacy over the Church crafted by Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII.832

  Conclusion

  Cranmer’s fiery fate reveals a central truth concerning the causes and consequences of the English Reformation. The pragmatic political theology of the reformed Anglican establishment, then as now, exalted raison d’état above the idea of the nation as an order of creation within which men “would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him” (Acts 17:27).833 Indeed, the Church of England came to treat ethno-nationalism as the vile sin of “racism,” allying itself to a transnational corporate welfare state hopelessly addicted to the free flow of capital, technology, and labour across national boundaries. By subscribing to the civil religion of the State (whether in the form of the State-Church or the Church-State) as saviour, Catholics and Protestants alike helped to propel Christendom into the “departure from religion” characteristic of what Fr Phillips calls the contemporary Age of Disincarnation. If they are to re-incarnate the Holy Spirit into the temporal realm, the English Church, the English monarchy, and the English nation may be compelled to declare their independence of the State.834 Otherwise the human nature of Christ, as represented by the English people, will remain incapable of sanctifying itself. Without a second English Reformation, the nation will be “obliged to submit itself” in perpetuity both to the “exterior authority” of popes, prime ministers, and presidents and to the even more insidious, invisible power of the divine economy.835