Anglicanism...

I have been viewing my site meter lately and I have noticed two things: I, the number of daily visitors has declined (from an average of 50 to an average of 45) and that no one followed the link to the Ad Occidentem article. I am not surprised about the latter, but I wonder if the former is because some people have realised that I don't really have much to say on anything besides Tolkien?

I had started to write a post about Anglicanism the other day, but it developed into something beyond my experience or interest (the general history of the Church of England); it began as a look at the Book of Common Prayer and people like Cranmer and Cromwell - and how Cranmer had a much greater influence than Cromwell. I abandoned it because I actually know very little about the Church of England beyond the days of Archbishop Laud. But the complex questions of language, liturgy and the Book of Common Prayer I find especially interesting - especially when compared with later liturgical deform (that is not a typo) in the Latin Church. Cranmer understood with, one would almost say, a devilish understanding, the liturgical principle legem credendi statuat lex supplicandi - that in order to rend the common people from the ancestral and ''superstitious'' beliefs in Popery and Penance, it was necessary to change the liturgical books. This was emulated centuries later by liturgists like Bugnini.

The Book of Common Prayer is a masterpiece of English literature. Cranmer, for all his faults (and they were many, cowardice and hypocrisy not the least) had an excellent command of the English language, and the Prayer Book is rich in good liturgical English - much better than anything ICEL have ever produced. But it is also a masterpiece in a more sinister way - it is a masterpiece of ambiguity. In the early days of the Prayer Book, it was designed to be a ''via media'' between the ambivalent Englishmen of the time - fanatical Protestants (the Black Rubric and all that) and good, honest Catholics. Later revisions fluctuated in their sympathies. The 1552 Prayer Book was plainly a work of heresy. The 1559 edition was a compromise between these two. Elizabeth, the illegitimate tyrant and more ''bloody'' than her half-sister Mary ever was, was ambivalent herself. Her mother Anne Boleyn had wrought the destruction of the Catholic Church in England, and Elizabeth herself desired to bring the pendulum of the religious controversies to a steady middle. And so the 1559 Prayer Book still has the old Calendar of Saints' Days, priests were required to wear ''vestments'' of a sort (including the Surplice, which is older than the Roman cotta), and it was salutary for a priest to be celibate. I tend to think that what defeated the Catholic hope of a true restoration of Catholicism in England was the very length of Elizabeth's reign (45 years at the end of her life).

The ambiguity of the Book of Common Prayer moulded the sad minds of Englishmen well into the 20th century. There are perhaps still Anglicans out there, of a dying breed, who are still enamoured of tomfool English ritual and label the Holy Father as ''anti-Christ.'' I have spoken to many Anglicans in my life, and every one of them has presented to me a different view of the Church. One elderly woman I spoke to (whose liturgical preferences can be said to resemble ''high church'' practices) said that she considered the Thirty-Nine Articles to be ''centuries out-of-date.'' She snorted when I asked whether belief in the Divinity of Christ was out-of-date (I only followed her approach to religion!). Another man I spoke to, whose Anglicanism can be said to be that of the ''broad-church'' variety, queried almost every article in the Nicene Creed - except one - ''crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato.'' When I was little, my mother and I spoke to a woman outside a very ''high-church'' variety church, and when my mother told her that we were Catholic, she responded ''oh, we're almost Catholic.'' My mother aptly replied, with a somewhat triumphalist air: ''yes, well not quite.'' My old next-door-neighbour, who sadly passed away at around this time last year, died an Anglican. He was a nice and generous chap, and very tolerant, but on the few occasions that we discussed the finer points of religion, his manner was as one who didn't care much - this was a man who was very involved with his parish church too.

I understand that these are just four not-very-convincing examples, but I cannot give every example (even if I remembered them all). But it must be said: Anglicanism is a pathetic and nonsensical religion - a religion of tomfool snobs enamoured of out-moded and superstitious ritual, the ritual being the mere window-dressing and affectation of a completely shallow religion, and misguided common folk, so lapsed as to make a laughing stock of the lapsed Catholic. As an ex-Anglican, I think that Tolkien deserves a say. Tolkien's mother Mabel brought him and his brother Hilary into the True Faith in the Year of Our Lord 1900, when Tolkien was 8 years old. She immediately incurred the wrath of her Baptist and Unitarian family (she herself had been of the ''high-church'' variety of the Church of England), who were outraged that a respectable Suffield should have ''Poped.'' Tolkien's later opinions of Protestantism, particularly the Church of England, would thus be formed not only by his knowledge of the fissiparous and stupid nature of this sect, but also his immediate experience of the prejudice and persecution - treatment hardly applicable, even to Jews as he later remarked - which fell upon those who dared to convert.

In a letter which Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher during the Second World War, Tolkien said:

''But hatred of our church is afterall the only final foundation of the C of E - so deep laid that it remains even when all the superstructure seems removed (C.S.L [C.S Lewis] for instance reveres the Blessed Sacrament, and admires nuns!). Yet if a Lutheran is put in jail he is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are slaughtered - he disbelieves it (and I daresay really thinks they asked for it).'' (The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien, no. 83).

Of course, the Church of England in Tolkien's day was far-removed from what it is now. It was still merely the religious department of state, but at least it hadn't yet gone completely mad and started ordaining women and homosexuals, and other people ordinarily irregular by default in the Catholic sphere. Tolkien mentions C.S Lewis in the above letter - a man with whom he had a long-standing and mutually profitable friendship. In 1931, Lewis converted from ''theism'' to Anglicanism (in my opinion, he might as well have just stayed atheist), which was largely Tolkien's doing; although Lewis' decision to go back to the Church of England (which really constitutes no genuine conversion at all) was of profound disappointment to Tolkien (and probably others too). Lewis is these days held aloft as some sort of archetypal Christian, the ideal man. Such a misinformed attitude greatly irritates me. Lewis, while clearly a brilliant man, an intellectual, poet, clever wordsmith and a Classicist, clearly had no real grasp on any fundamental of Faith. His apologetical works exhibit his overtly Anglican look, which is shallow at best. There is no substance to his work, it is all rather like surface-shine on a cubic zirconia, compared with the many-faceted diamond of the True Faith, in which the light of Truth is reflected anew in many divers hues and colours, all the more marvellous and self-evident as one contemplates them.

Tolkien knew all this. Anglicanism was to him much as it is to me, although his view of it was perhaps better articulated than my own. In the aftermath of the Council, Tolkien complained:

''As Christians those faithful to the Vicar of Christ must put aside the resentments that as mere humans they feel - e.g. at the 'cockiness' of our new friends (esp. C[hurch] of E[ngland]). One is now often patted on the back, as a representative of a church that has seen the error of its ways, abandoned its arrogance and hauteur, and its separatism; but I have not yet met a 'protestant' who shows or expresses any realization of the reasons in this country for our attitude: ancient or modern: from torture and expropriation down to 'Robinson' and all that. Has it ever been mentioned that R[oman] C[atholic]s still suffer from disabilities not even applicable to Jews? As a man whose childhood was darkened by persecution, I find this hard. But charity must cover a multitude of sins!'' (The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien, no.306).

This sheds an interesting light on the modernist idea of Ecumenism, which we all know originated in Protestant mindsets. Why on earth has the Church not cut off relations with the Anglicans? I can think of many reasons for doing so. We have little to nothing in common. Some Ecumenical enthusiasts may bring up Anglican ritual, which is based on the old Sarum Use, but as I have already mentioned, the meaning and importance behind it has been lost, or forgotten by all save people like Henry Chadwick (whose, confessedly, eminent knowledge of the history of the Church has been recognized even in the Catholic Church - one wonders why he never himself actually crossed the Tiber). Anglican ritual is meaningless and ridiculous, and God help any Catholic silly enough to make such a declension as to become an Anglican...

I wonder whether I will ever see the day when most Anglicans realize that they don't need to go to a building to worship God (why bother when you can worship God in your own way, according to your own whims, and perhaps not at all?) and the Church in England will be able to get the old ancestral churches and cathedrals back, and re-orient them to the correct (Old Rite) worship of God as they were of old? In a post-Summorum Pontificum world, this may be an encouraging thought. If I have been repetative or just incomprehensible, it's likely because I haven't looked at this post for a while, but I got bored of thinking about it and decided to publish it anyway!