By Jeff Condra
Thirty-five years ago, I served for a short spell on the vestry of the main Anglo-Catholic parish in a large Mid-South city. The local bishop was on the rightward end of the mainstream in the Episcopal Church (‘ECUSA’). However, he still would not make visitations to our parish, which he left up to its own devices. The 1928 edition of The Book of Common Prayer was in the pews; and no doubt our rector during Mass was interpolating prayers from the Roman offertory and canon as found in The American Missal. Our humble church had a Lady Chapel to the side of the nave. I made my first confession in that chapel to a gruff, old cathedral canon, regarded in the diocese as filling a need for Episcopalians who would want to do such a thing. This was a ‘spiky’ parish easy to lampoon, complete with a narcoleptic organist who would awaken startled, at different times during the service, to fire up off-cue.
My background being evangelical, I did not initially regard myself as a full-blown Anglo-Catholic. For a messy patch of five years; my young family worshipped in this parish, occasionally attended vespers at the local Antiochian mission, went through a full round of Orthodox inquirers’ classes, left ECUSA for the Continuing Anglican church, and finally entered Holy Orthodoxy.
For me, the rampant unbelief encouraged within ECUSA was a capstone to an older and much more basic problem, which is the fact that Anglicanism has always been a doctrinal mess. When I finally got to the point at which I fully embraced Anglo-Catholic beliefs, I knew that honesty compelled me to enter the Orthodox Church.
Put another way, I came to accept Anglo-Catholic faith, as expressed in its vision of worship, belief, and the spiritual life. But I was not at peace with Anglo-Catholicism’s claims about Anglicanism; both in the contention that Anglo-Catholicism was the faithful expression of what it means to be truly Anglican, and the related claim that Anglicanism was a ‘branch’ of the Church Catholic, a confrere with both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
The evangelical in me knew that this was not the case; that a theologian like J.I. Packer clad in suit-and-tie was a notch or so nearer to historic Anglicanism than the rector of my own parish turned out in his biretta-and-chasuble.
Trying to Work the Anglican Puzzle
The Dominican Aidan Nichols put the matter succinctly when he wrote that Anglicanism was comprised of Reformation theology “poured into an institutional mould which retained large elements of a Catholic structure.” Anglicanism was and is still (tenuously) the religious department of the English state. Any attempt to understand Anglicanism as a phenomenon must include reckoning with the fact that it was (and to a degree, is) an institution governed and legislated for not so much by historic canons as the legal fiction of the crown-in-parliament. The font of the Anglican settlement is decretal and statutory rather than noetic, or even confessional. Even in America, Episcopalianism was unofficially the establishment for most of our comparatively short history. This privileged status—which stretches back five centuries—has meant that Anglicans, in arriving at theological and moral positions, have always been uniquely prey to political calculation and prevailing elite fashion.
The religious changes initiated by King Henry VIII in detaching the English Church from the Papacy, followed over a decade later by his daughter Elizabeth’s Protestant settlement, are mischaracterized as ‘conservative’ by popular historians of the Reformation. I think this error reflects the lingering influence of Puritanism, which shifted the religious Overton Window so far to the left in Anglo-American Christianity that the veneer of episcopacy and liturgy left in place in what was otherwise meant to be a sober and (somewhat) Reformed church looks controversial to generations of pietists, revivalists, and evangelicals.
Henry VIII’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was committed to the doctrines of the Swiss Reformation. Cranmer did not so much compose The Book of Common Prayer, as ransack the Great Tradition, West and East, for its contents. There is relatively little in the Prayer Book original to Cranmer; and what is original is generally inspired by older pre-Reformation sources, evoking Chesterton’s quip that the Prayer Brook was compiled by “apostate Catholics.” What made the Prayer Book a Protestant manual of worship was largely what Cranmer did by omission. Invocations to the Mother of God and the saints were excised; and both of his communion liturgies, while keeping much of the traditional contents of the Mass, had a canon so arranged to eliminate any sense of oblation, conveying at most a receptionist belief in Christ’s presence. This agenda was covert in his first vernacular liturgy of 1549, while the mask was removed in his openly memorialist revision of 1552.
The Prayer Book coexisted in the Establishment alongside official doctrinal formularies, the 39 Articles of Religion and two books of Homilies. These are unambiguously Protestant, teaching an unsystematic Reformed theology. Their coexistence with the Prayer Book was not seamless. To take just one example, the prayers in the baptismal office teach the traditional belief in baptism as regenerative. However, the formulary on baptism (Article XXVII) is Calvinist, strongly suggesting that the sign—water, and the thing signified—the new birth, do not necessarily overlap, let alone merge.
None of these elements, which together reflected ad hoc shifts in state policy in the long rollercoaster period from the first Prayer Book in 1549 to the final triumph of episcopacy in 1662, fit hand-in-glove. Anglicanism is an example of the old trope about the affinity of lawmaking with sausage-making.
While it is true, as Anglo-Catholics will be the first to protest, that Anglicans are not Cranmerites; evangelical Episcopalians have regarded themselves as such, appealing to the 39 Articles as their confessional document. Post-Elizabethan bishops such as Lancelot Andrewes and William Laud attempted to chart a vision for Anglicanism that was patristic in orientation and catholic, but non-papal. This vision would only become mainstream in Scottish Episcopalianism, a boutique church isolated on all sides by Presbyterianism. South of the border, the energy of Puritanism, both in and out of the Established Church, kept such a vision from consolidating its hold by triggering a Civil War and the execution of a king.
Consistent Calvinism discredited itself in England. But by 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, the average layman in the Church of England was thoroughly Protestant in mentality, unable to grasp the distinction advanced by High Church divines that one does not have to bear allegiance to the pope to hold to the Catholic Faith.
Anglo-Catholicism yet emerged, full-blown, in the nineteenth century, because there had always been a creative minority that were able to grasp such a distinction. These people were not heroic (or wealthy) enough for recusancy, but they were arguably the devout core of dedicated churchmen; and they were justly repelled by the ideological mindset of Puritanism. This element was Tory, and to a certain extent donnish, which insured that they would exert an intellectual influence beyond their numbers. In the eighteenth century they included such figures as Samuel Johnson—not to mention the brothers Wesley, and they likely set the tone for Philip Ludwell’s religious upbringing. Pointing to the contents of the Prayer Book: the historic creeds (including the Athanasian), the Daily Offices, the calendar, and not least, the Establishment’s possession of an historic episcopate, they held themselves as heirs to a body of belief and devotion that transcended the points of contention with Rome, stretching back to the age of the Fathers.
Bishops and parsons of the foregoing bent, scholars like Bishop Thomas Brett, studied the shape of ancient Eastern liturgies, and sought to habilitate Cranmer’s communion service by a dexterous reshuffling of his prayers to convey a belief in an oblation of the holy gifts and by inserting an epiclesis. The labors of such churchmen over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would cause this High Protestantism to gradually blossom into a full embrace of Catholic belief with the Oxford Movement, which took the undivided Church, West and East, of the first millennium, as its lodestar.
The vision of the Anglo-Catholics, in their claim to be the true Anglicanism and a branch of the Church Catholic, veered towards fantasy, requiring as it did a blind eye to the doctrinal and social effects of Protestantism on the English church. F.W. Puller’s lectures, The Continuity of the Church of England, delivered to a Russian Orthodox audience in 1912, are a prime example, being both a dogged apology for Anglicanism’s catholicity, while consigning the pervasive, Protestant mentality of the Established Church to the religious indifference of the eighteenth century instead of giving full credit to the Reformation. Newman tried to reconcile the Articles of Religion with the budding catholic faith of the Tractarians, breaching the frontiers of intellectual honesty. And indeed, one of the spiritually toxic habits of Anglo-Catholics is a lawyerly approach to the sixteenth century formularies that regards something as acceptable if the words can at least be construed as not forbidding pre-Reformation faith and practice that is not “Romish!”
However historically wobbly their foundation was, Anglo-Catholics comprised a spiritual aristocracy in the otherwise sect-ridden and fissiparous world of anglophone Protestantism. And while they are open to the accusation of LARPING about their catholicity, they put flesh-and-bones on their vision; with missionary provinces, theological colleges, religious orders, regional congresses, slum ministry, and a superb body of patristic and liturgical scholarship.
Accordingly, if Anglo-Catholicism is extracted from its institutional prisons; the Church of England and its daughter churches around the globe like ECUSA, what this movement represents, in the so-called ‘G-3’ continuing churches, is a rather vibrant expression of western catholicism that has long outgrown the sociological baggage of Episcopalianism.
However vibrant this expression of western catholicism may be, in Orthodox eyes, it represents a mainly scholarly construction or appropriation. The Reformation not only severed anglophone Christians from the Papacy, it also severed their continuity with the practice of the Undivided Church, as brought to Britain by Saint Augustine of Canterbury or the monks of Iona. In the ritualist phase of the Oxford Movement, the liturgy and spirituality that prevailed in Anglo-Catholicism drew largely on post-Tridentine models from France or Spain. There was no charismatic transmission of faith and praxis available, through a line of spiritual eldership or monastic life.
In Orthodoxy, regular self-examination and confession are obligatory, not simply a matter of the gentle (and equivocating) adage of High Churchmen: “all may, some should, none must.” Our manner of living includes to a degree unknown to inquirers, a rejection of modernity by taking up again the old Christian ways that went down the memory hole for our ancestors a half millennium ago. In addition to a daily rule of prayer and reading scripture; holy water, blessed oil, and incense are a necessary part of our household furnishings. We venerate the relics of the saints and wonderworking icons when given the opportunity, and we share in the monastic life in our own way by pilgrimages and gifts. The coordinated destruction of these habits, however distorted by late medieval teaching in the West, was fundamental to the gestation of Anglicanism. Tradition is not something disclosed by antiquarian study or reconstruction, but by living the life of the church and taking advantage of charismatic eldership where it is available.
As I vacillated between Anglo-Catholicism and Orthodoxy all those years ago, I wanted to believe that Anglo-Catholicism was or could be a Western Orthodoxy. Books such as Vernon Staley’s The Catholic Religion appealed to me. I could be cozy in my life as an Anglican while holding to all of the things that the “easterns” believed and did in the Orthodox Church (and in a more restrained fashion!). I suspect that there are many other Americans of similar background, aware of their western European identity, who toy with similar ideas, desiring both authentic catholic faith and praxis without the steep cost of forsaking what is culturally or socially comfortable.
But the “choose-your-own-adventure” approach to churchmanship, hence fundamental belief, in Anglicanism is inherent to its historic constitution. This process is recapitulating itself within the relatively new Anglican Church of North America, a coalition embracing various shades of churchmanship, from crypto-Vineyard Fellowship to Anglo-Catholic, all held together by the shared opinion that the consecration of Gene Robinson to the episcopacy was (finally) the last straw. I was disappointed that my own jurisdiction, the Orthodox Church of America, chose to privilege dialog with the ACNA over the G-3 continuing churches that are much closer to us in spirit and faith.
The foregoing observations are simply a prelude to saying that I would not be disappointed if more Anglo-Catholics, including groups, are able to find their way into the Orthodox Church. From observation, they tend to make very stable Orthodox Christians. I appreciate that there are many obstacles to such a movement for a broad range of reasons that include their ethno-cultural fears and our inter-Orthodox dysfunction.
The Western Rite
Another legacy of my experience in Anglo-Catholicism is an interest in the Western Rite, a topic that immediately triggers strong sentiments, for and against, in Orthodox circles. My opinions about the Western Rite are those of a well-wisher, who desires to see a Western Rite flourish within the canonical bosom of our Church.
Two Orthodox jurisdictions in North America have made room for a Western Rite. Observing both versions from a distance, my impression is that the Western Rite has yet to find her royal pathway, being susceptible to two tendencies that miss the mark.
The first of these is that of baptizing and rationalizing every post-schism, and even post-Tridentine liturgical usage and paraliturgical devotion, as compatible with Orthodoxy. The second tendency is that of experimentation in the name of retrieving a pre-schism Western liturgy that is an exercise in liturgical archaeology. If the former tendency at times fails to reassure many of us in the Byzantine Rite that the Western Rite is serious about fully embracing Orthodoxy, or at the least has issues with discernment; the latter tendency can exude an atmosphere of vagante-style fantasy that ironically looks too Byzantine to be Western!
The two foregoing tendencies are not really compatible, yet the failure to recognize their divergence bedevils online debates and discussions about a Western Rite between advocates and detractors. Notwithstanding these opposing tendencies, I do not believe that the issue of a Western Rite is going to go away. The purpose of a Western Rite would be to serve as a vehicle for what Fr. Georges Florovsky postulated to be a vocation for Orthodoxy, that of diagnosing and healing the western religious tragedy.
Dr. Jeanie Constantinou has observed that “Orthodox embrace cultural plurality but not spiritual or theological plurality.” The Roman canon of St. Gregory Dialogos and the Divine Office of St. Benedict of Nursia remain the core culturally western expressions of our Orthodox patrimony. The challenge would be fostering these expressions of life and praxis in communities; monastic, parochial, and missional, that are consciously tethered to a foundation that does not merely omit the filioque, but is ‘Palamite.’
Foremost of the gifts that former Anglicans bring to our communion is the English version of the Divine Office, which was simplified and compressed at the time of the Reformation for parochial and lay use. The Daily, or ‘English’, Office, integrated with the Mass and habitual recollective prayer, provide a temperate and balanced vision of spiritual proficiency for the non-monastic who lives in the world. This is a uniquely Benedictine ethos, genuinely pre-Schism in phronema. It is one which, with its emphasis on Psalmody, the New Testament canticles, and praying with the Church, should be the model for the Western Rite as a whole, as opposed to embracing forms of affective piety in paraliturgical devotions and cults that characterized Roman Catholic spirituality in the post-Tridentine era. This was ironically an error among Anglo-Catholics.
Considering the Mass in the Western Rite, I think it is time to jettison the remaining traces of Cranmer in what is the most intimate step towards actualizing the Body of Christ each Lord’s Day, the Holy Anaphora. In Orthodoxy, the different eucharistic prayers are attributed to saints, not political survivalists with heretical theology who happen to be extraordinarily gifted prose stylists. Granting that the anaphora of the Divine Liturgy of St. Tikhon is clearly not the same as the Prayer Book consecration of 1662, the one most faithful to Cranmer and his theology, they ultimately share a common origin. Is not the special pleading required to justify use of a rite associated with Cranmer, even if the association is indirect, an albatross for the Western Rite? The practice by Anglo-Catholics of interpolating the Roman canon into the Prayer Book communion liturgy is a back-handed confession that what was Cranmer’s composition, even as re-shuffled and augmented by the Scots and the Non-Jurors, is inadequate for doing what the Catholic Church does when She offers the holy gifts. In developing an ordinariate Mass for former Anglicans, the Vatican (under Pope Benedict) wisely mandated the Roman canon. Surely the Western Rite would be capable of providing an ‘English Use’ version of her Divine Liturgy of Saint Gregory that frames the Roman canon with prayers and distinctive practices borrowed not only from the Prayer Book, but also from what we know of the Sarum usage.
Finally …
The above observations (which scratch the surface) are necessarily a mixture of both gratitude and criticism, from the perspective of a sexagenarian who has now spent half of his life in Holy Orthodoxy. Anglo-Catholicism mediated Holy Orthodoxy to me, by introducing me to the centrality of the Incarnation and its resulting conviction that the way of salvation opened to us by the Incarnation is sacramental. Finding my way into the Orthodox Church perhaps would not have been impossible, but the path would have been much more crooked apart from my Anglo-Catholic interlude. Holy Orthodoxy is the fulfillment of Anglo-Catholicism’s most noble aspirations.
Jeff Condra is an Orthodox Christian and an Alabamian. He and his family attend St. Symeon Orthodox Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Editor’s note: Source of images is The North American Anglican
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