by CCW | 7 March 2017 22:00
The words of the Prophet Joel belong to the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Yet they have a powerful resonance throughout the whole of Lent and even more throughout the whole progress of the Christian life of Faith. In a way, it is all about the turning. This is an important spiritual principle which was well understood by one of the outstanding preachers and masters of the spiritual life in our own Anglican tradition, Lancelot Andrewes.
A celebrated preacher at the courts of Elizabeth and James in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, he stands not only with one foot in one century and the other in another but in the moments of transition between the medieval world and the early modern world and in ways that look back reflectively and profoundly upon the Fathers of the Patristic Period as well as ahead to the ambiguities and uncertainties that belong to our contemporary world. His sermons and his prayers are themselves an outstanding monument to the spiritual tradition which has come to be known as Anglicanism and which above all else connects that tradition to the essential Catholicism of the universal Church. It is, we might say, one of the counters to the fideism of our current situation by which I mean the narrow retreat into the ghettoes of our minds at the expense of the breadth and depth of the Catholic Faith in its truth and beauty.
Andrewes was a celebrated preacher in his day and his sermons and prayers have had a remarkable influence well beyond his time and place. While they are intense and demanding sermons, it seems to me worth considering the salient features of some of his Lenten Sermons precisely because they bring out a deep biblical wisdom understood creedally and doctrinally. They are indeed a redire ad principia, not just in terms of repentance which he especially refers to in these terms but because the whole of the Christian life is a turning back to God, a return to the principle, a point which appears in many of his sermons. Our endeavour will be simply to point out some of the themes of repentance that are presented and explored in some of the sermons which he preached in Lent.
There are eight sermons which were preached on Ash Wednesday, six sermons preached in Lent, and three sermons preached on Good Friday; in short, a total of seventeen sermons that belong in one way or another to the Lenten pilgrimage of love. This complements the number of remarkable sermons on the Nativity of Christ, on the Resurrection, and of the Sending of the Holy Ghost, which along with the more political sermons, if one may cautiously style them that way, such as the series on the Gowrie conspiracy and the infamous Gunpowder plot, as well as a number of other sermons of a didactic and miscellaneous nature. The Lenten sermons do not form exactly a series any more than the sermons on Christ’s Nativity, Resurrection and Whitsunday, with the one exception, it seems, of two, perhaps, three sermons on the Resurrection between 1620 and 1623, comprise an ordered and systematic programme proceeding from sermon to sermon.
That would be largely unthinkable and rather unpractical from a paedagogical or teaching perspective. Who really is going to remember from one Christmas to another, or one Ash Wednesday to another, or one Easter to another, or one Pentecost to another, just exactly was said? No the point of these sermons lies in the quality of their exhaustive and intense consideration of the main spiritual principles of each doctrinal moment. So too, with the sermons that pertain to the season of Lent. They offer an exhaustive and intense consideration of the power and nature of repentance understood through the witness of the Scriptures and the creeds; that is to say, doctrinally understood.
The Ash Wednesday sermons are further designated as Of Repentance and Fasting while the other sermons are referred to simply as Sermons preached in Lent and are more of a miscellany of meditations including a sermon on The Feast of St. Matthias which sometimes occurs in Lent. The three Good Friday sermons are entitled as Of the Passion.
It is the first Ash Wednesday sermon preached before King James VI in 1619 that contains explicitly the overarching phrase about repentance which is of moment. At once an echo of the Prophet Joel’s strong words that belong to the penitential liturgy used on Ash Wednesday, they capture precisely the essential theme of turning that undergirds much of the mystical theology of Andrewes. It is all about our participation in the mystery of God in his truth and being. Our turning away and our turning back are really only aspects of God moving our hearts and minds to him. “Repentance itself”, Andrewes famously says, “is nothing else but redire ad principia, ‘a kind of circling,’ to return to Him by repentance from Whom by sin we have turned away”. It is, I hope, worth pondering upon Andrewes unpacking of Joel’s text, a text which is one of the Scriptural sentences for the season of Lent to be used at Morning and Evening Prayer, one of the mantras of Lent we might say. What are Joel’s words? “Rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God; for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil”. A powerful and provocative passage.
A kind of circling. Nothing captures more eloquently the interplay of negative and positive theology, apophatic and kataphatic theology to use the technical terms, than this phrase which is part of Andrewes’ intense unpacking of the text and the theme, examined through the lenses of a number of complementary texts. And, as we noted on Ash Wednesday, this particular sermon with its exhaustive treatment of this particular prophetic text had an enormous influence on what is probably the most celebrated Ash Wednesday poem in the English language, T.S.Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday of 1930, a poem which in typical Eliotic fashion draws upon the medley of sources and influences: Dante’s Vita Nuovo and Andrewes’ 1619 sermon, among other allusions and references.
Apophatic and kataphatic theology refer to two contrasting yet complementary ways of thinking about God. Kataphatic theology or positive theology considers God’s likeness and relation to things in the created order while apophatic theology or negative theology emphasises the radical otherness of God in relation to everything in creation. It is the interplay of these terms which is an important feature of Andrewes’ sermons.
What is most striking in the 1619 Ash Wednesday sermon is the deep resonance of Andrewes’ sense of the meaning of Joel’s call to turn in the tenor of the ambiguities of late modernity. Andrewes lived and wrote in what is often called early modernity and yet the echoes of his thought speak wonderfully and provocatively to the late modernity of T.S. Eliot’s world and beyond to our contemporary confusions and uncertainties. It is all about the turning.
The term implies a principle from which we are in some sense or other separated and yet remain attached for that is the assumption of the return. Something is far greater and of greater moment than the sins and follies, the errors and confusions, of our humanity. We are the broken-hearted as the psalmist makes abundantly clear in the great penitential psalm of Lent, Psalm 51, the Miserere Mei, Deus, whose words are, perhaps, forever hauntingly etched in our souls through Allegri’s polyphonic setting of the psalm. The music itself is about a kind of turning, a kind of circling back to resolution and ecstasy through the extremes of sorrow and longing. That of course is the very nature of the Christian life understood as a life of repentance.
Andrewes’ task is the task of the Church in Lent. It seeks to move us inwardly to a deeper self-reflection through self-examination, through discipline both of appetite and mind, and, of course, through scriptural illumination. No sermons are more scripturally and theologically intense that those of Andrewes. They require our attention and they are perhaps de trop, too much, not as an acquired taste but by virtue of their exhaustive and relentless intensity which carries us forward and upward into the mystery of God and signifies the nature of our participation in that mystery sacramentally.
This evening we commemorate Thomas Aquinas, the celebrated Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, one of the giants of the theological world. His intense and orderly treatises such as the Summa Theologiae have influenced Andrewes’ sermons, too, it seems to me, precisely in their ordered and architectonic structure. Andrewes breaks every sermon down into two or three essential parts which are then sub-divided and sub-divided again, if needed, and all in the pursuit of a kind of Thomistic theological thoroughness, a kind of careful yet intense presentation of all that belongs to the question or theme under consideration. It is, to be sure, a rich fullness and yet one which carries us more and more into the mystery of God with us. The sermons end almost invariably upon a sacramental note. The interplay of apophatic and kataphatic theology is kept in a perfect balance. Neither is this thou and yet this is thou, to adapt a phrase used by Charles Williams. The mystery of God is something which we can only come to through a kind of circling dance, each according to his own capacities of beholding and yet all participating in the mystery, all being drawn around and around and into the wonder of the being of God. It is all in the turning.
Fr. David Curry
Comm. Of Thomas Aquinas
March 7th, 2017
Lenten Meditation # 1
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/03/07/lenten-meditation-1-redire-ad-principia-repentance-in-the-sermons-of-lancelot-andrewes/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.