by CCW | 21 March 2017 22:00
It is all about the turning. Redire ad principia is ‘a kind of circling’, as Lancelot Andrewes notes, by which we turn back to God from whom we have turned away. And while his 1619 Ash-Wednesday Sermon names that return to a principle as repentance, in a way, the whole of the Christian life is about our comings and goings to God through God’s comings and goings to us. Such divine motions are at once external and internal, temporal and eternal. The pattern of the Church Year laid out comprehensively in the classical Books of Common Prayer is not something linear but circular, a constant circling around the mystery of God revealed in and through the witness of the Scriptures in the living tradition of the Church. The intent is that we be constantly drawn more and more into the mystery of the triune God whose engagement with our humanity belongs entirely to the mystery of the divine life in itself.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present
So Eliot puts it in Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets. He is echoing Andrewes’ Ash-Wednesday sermon yet again, the same sermon which has influenced his own poem, Ash-Wednesday.
That sense of the gathering up of time into eternity without which time has no meaning is wonderfully set before us in the commemorations of St. Benedict and Thomas Cranmer on this day: the one, the founder of Benedictine monasticism in the sixth century which contributed to the shape and character of Europe; the other, an archbishop and a martyr, and the architectural genius of the Book(s) of Common Prayer in the sixteenth century. A thousand years separate them and yet they are united in the Church’s eternal medley of prayer and devotion to which they both contributed in such remarkable ways.
’A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For such a journey. And such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
So begins T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Journey of the Magi, the first poem written and published after his conversion to orthodox Trinitarian Christianity in the form of Anglicanism, particularly in its Anglo-Catholic expression. That conversion was more than partially occasioned by his careful reading of the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, particularly the Sermons on the Nativity and his Ash-Wednesday Sermon of 1619. This is more than amply demonstrated in the little book of essays that Eliot wrote to explain his conversion, a book entitled For Lancelot Andrewes of which the first essay is on Lancelot Andrewes and yet whose name is given to the whole collection. Eliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi begins with an almost verbatim quote from Andrewes’ Sermon XV On the Nativity (1622). It bears further testimony, if more were needed, to the strong influence of Andrewes’ “extraordinary prose”, his poetic prose, one might say, on T.S. Eliot’s own poetry. But it argues for something else that connects to the joint commemoration of Benedict and Cranmer. It is that strong sense of the presence of the voices of the past as living voices in the present, voices that belong to the spiritual community of faith.
There is something providential in the joint commemoration of Benedict and Cranmer that befits our Lenten meditations. It may have seemed to be ‘a cold coming of it’ but with the commemoration of Benedict and Cranmer, we are beyond the very dead of winter, even past the bleak mid-winter and are, at least astronomically speaking, at the beginning of Spring, notwithstanding the madness of a Maritime March. We have reached the vernal equinox and now at last the days begin to outstrip the nights. And yet, we find ourselves in a broken and confused world. The winter of our discontent seems unrelenting. Lent reminds us of the turning that changes our outlook and our thinking. It is, as Andrewes playfully puts it, the time which God has lent us to turn to him. “Now are ye light in the Lord”, as we heard in Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians on Sunday past but only if we “awake” from our slumber “and arise from the dead” for “Christ shall give [us] light.” We are recalled to God in the midst of the uncertainties, fears, and anxieties of our despairing culture, church and age. We are recalled to blessings found in the midst of trials and tribulations, suffering and pain, even death and dying.
The joint commemoration of Benedict and Cranmer does present us with something of a conundrum. Which of the Supplementary Collects, Epistles and Gospels, provided for in our Canadian Prayer Book, should we use? Benedict, listed in the calendars of the English Church since the sixteenth century, is designated as Abbot, though equally, one might argue that he was also a kind of missionary, a missionary of the spiritual life, who contributed to the Christian conversion of Europe. There are no specific Propers appointed for abbots though there are for missionaries.
Cranmer, noted in later calendars since the early nineteenth century, was Archbishop of Canterbury, and, of course, a martyr to the reformed character of the English Church. Propers are provided for bishops and for martyrs but how to commemorate both Benedict and Cranmer together? I have thought it best to use the Propers Of a Doctor of the Church, Poet, or Scholar[1], hoping that captures some of the distinctives of their witness to our life in Christ.
Benedict’s Rule had an enormous influence on spiritual and intellectual culture even as the form of coenobite monasticism – communal life – which he established contributed greatly to the intellectual culture of the western church. The routines of work and prayer provided for a context in which the Scriptures as well as a myriad of intellectual works belonging to the Patristic period and earlier times were transcribed and transmitted to the Latin West. Cranmer’s poetic genius, writing in English, is seen time and again in the Collects, the Litany, and in many of the phrases and prayers that shape the Prayer Book Liturgy.
Such considerations also relate to the intellectual and spiritual significance of Lancelot Andrewes, at once a bishop and a scholar of remarkable erudition and knowledge. His sermons bear eloquent testimony to his deep scriptural knowledge, and that in many tongues, as well as to a profound reading of the Fathers, the Schoolmen, and the works of his contemporaries. If that were not enough, Andrewes was also the architect of a large part of the King James Version of the Bible, acting as translator and editor to The Book of Genesis through to Second Kings, thus contributing to what is still the most influential work on the English language bar none. His sermons and prayers reflect the scriptural centrality of both Benedict and Cranmer.
It is not as if any of them lived in exactly easy times. Benedict lived in the ruins of the Roman Empire and belongs to the beginning of a new order that arose from its remains. Cranmer lived during the violent and turbulent times of the mid-sixteenth century revolutions and reformations and suffered in body and soul accordingly. Andrewes lived with one foot in the sixteenth century, born in 1555, and one foot in the seventeenth century, dying in 1626. He, too, was no stranger to intrigue and uncertainty, to danger and threat whether it be the Spanish Armada of 1588 or the recurring plagues that beset England, particularly London. ‘A cold coming they had of it’, we might say!
The lesson from Daniel is complemented by the Gospel from St. Matthew. Both speak to us in our current distresses. Daniel’s prayer of blessing signals the idea of the eternity of God who overrules the ups and downs, the removing and the setting up of kings, and of the changes in the seasons. In the face of such realities there is the greater insight into the abiding nature of God. “Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever; for wisdom and might are his”. That, we might say, is the central insight of Benedict and Cranmer and Andrewes. Their abiding attention to the things of God belongs to the spring of our souls even in times of uncertainty and unease. Matthew further expatiates on that theme by recalling us to what we have heard and seen in the witness of the Scriptures to Jesus, quoting Isaiah, and bringing home to us the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. In other words, through these Scriptures and through these witnesses we are drawn into the mysteries of God in Christ. Such is the mystical theology of Andrewes as drawing upon the wisdom and witness of Benedict and Cranmer.
Several of Andrewes’ Ash-Wednesday Sermons take as the text words from the Epistle and Gospel traditionally appointed for the day, Joel and Matthew respectively. I was somewhat mistaken in saying last week that the sermons do not comprise exactly a formal and systematic series. While each sermon stands as complete on its own strength, Andrewes does often refer back to the sermons of previous years, particularly when he is working through a particular text such as Joel 2. 12, 13 or Matthew 6.16 read as the Gospel. The same appears for the two sermons on Matthew 3. 7,8 about the fruits of repentance.
The eight sermons on Ash-Wednesday focus on the themes of repentance and fasting. The last four sermons emphasize particularly the importance of fasting as a dominical imperative that is part and parcel of the teaching and life of the English Church in the face of both puritan and catholic criticisms of the Church in England. But Andrewes’ interest is more pastoral than polemical. One of the hallmarks of his preaching is how unpolemical and irenical he is in his approach. So while providing a kind of apologia for the English Church, his concern is about our being drawn more fully and completely into the mysteries of God revealed in Jesus Christ through the witness of the Scriptures and in the living tradition and life of the Church.
“The lessons which this day have been, and yearly as upon this day are read in our ears, do all speak to us of fasting”, he says in the Fifth Sermon Of Repentance and Fasting. The previous four sermons emphasise to a greater or lesser extent the theme of repentance while the last four focus more on fasting. As such the eight sermons comprise a comprehensive treatment of the meaning of Ash-Wednesday doctrinally and devotionally. And this is the case even if the second sermon preached before Elizabeth in 1599 has a political context, namely, the military expedition to Ireland by the Earl of Essex. But as Nicolas Lossky suggests in his magisterial treatment of Andrewes’ sermons, the polemical and the political is always subordinate to the theological and spiritual. War, here, becomes the context for a kind of spiritual warfare “by turning from sin to God, and that with a serious not shallow, and an inward not hollow repentance.” You can sense something of the poetry of Andrewes in just such phrasing.
The Third Sermon on Ash-Wednesday preached before Elizabeth I in 1602 takes as its text Jeremiah 8, 4-7 particularly on the question “Shall they fall and not arise? Shall he turn away and not turn again?” It focuses on the theme of our turning and on the ways in which God moves us to turn back to himself “when He calleth us to repentance.” In this sermon the motive passion is sorrow, the idea of God’s sorrowing for us which requires Andrewes to explain how one can speak of a passion such as sorrow in relation to God. He observes that “sorrow many times worketh us to that, by a melting compassion, which the more rough and violent passions cannot get at our hands.” The sorrow of God is expressed in terms of divine complaint. “That he complains of is not that we fall and err, but that we rise not and return not; that is, still delay, still put off our repentance”, which is contrary, he says, to God’s will and “to the very light of nature.” How then are we to be moved and what does this divine sorrow mean?
God entreats us in three ways. “The first by a gentle yet forcible expostulation, Will you not? Why will ye not?” This actually reveals a feature of Andrewes’ own homiletical approach through his constant use of interrogative phrases. While the sermons have a deliberate order – preamble, division of the text, exposition leading to a sacramental conclusion and application – the use of the interrogative has a personal effect, a form of rhetorical engagement as well as a dialectical impulse that moves us more fully into the mystery being expounded. The second form of entreaty is “by an earnest protestation, how greatly He doth hearken after it.” The third is “by a passionate apostrophe, by turning Him away to the fowls of the air, that do that naturally every year which we cannot be got to all our life long.” In other words our humanity fails to do spiritually and rationally what the birds of the air do naturally in their cycles of migratory turnings.
What about the attribution of passions to God? “It is certain, the immutable constancy of the Divine nature is not subject to them, howsoever here or elsewhere He presenteth Himself in them. I add, that as it is not proper, so neither it is not fitting for God thus to express Himself”. This is an example of the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology in the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes. God is at once utterly and essentially distinguished from all and everything that belongs to the created order and yet God is also associated with the things of creation in one way or another. The distinction is as important as the reason for it. “That He, not respecting what best may become Him, but what may best seem to move us and do us most good, chooseth of purpose that dialect, that character, those terms, which are most meet and most likely to affect us.” It does not affect God; it is meant to affect us. God remains unchanged while he seeks to change us. Andrewes provides Patristic support for this form of theological reasoning by way of two contrasting but not contradictory explanations from Tertullian and Augustine. This, too, is a common feature of his sermons, namely, the careful way in which he draws thoughtfully upon the mind of the Fathers and is untroubled by different explanations for scriptural texts, seeing a deeper and more fundamental creedal unity.
Repentance is a major and critical theme. Andrewes notes in his Fourth Sermon preached before King James in 1619 – one of his more celebrated sermons which certainly influenced Eliot – that repentance takes different forms but of all of them the idea of turning is the greatest. “Scripture,” he says, “set[s] forth unto us the nature of repentance.” “Of renewing, as from a decay; of refining, as from a dross; of recovering, as from a malady; of cleansing, as from soil; of rising, as from a fall; in no one, either for sense more full, or for use more often than in this of turning.” The turning is about our being moved by God and turning to him from whom we have turned away. But it is a turning that involves the whole of our being. Following his text from Joel, he develops how we are to turn “with the whole heart”, “with fasting”, “with weeping”, “with mourning”, and “with the rending of our hearts”.
It means conversion and contrition, confession and satisfaction. And following his text, the time is now by the authority of the Church as grounded in Christ’s word and example. Again, it is all a kind of circling. “For, as in a circle, I return to the first word “now,” which giveth us our time when we should enter our first degree; “now therefore.” And when all is done we shall have somewhat to do to bring this to a nunc, to a time present. But besides that “now” at this time, it is the time that all things turn, now is the only sure part of our time. That which is past is come and gone, that which is to come may peradventure never come.” As in a circle, we are turned back to God from whom we have turned away.
The turning involves the whole of our being as he puts it in the Seventh and Eighth of the Ash-Wednesday Sermons on the text from Matthew 3. 7,8 about “bring[ing] forth fruits worthy of amendment of life, or repentance”. The sermons argue for the three fruits of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Each work of repentance pertains to the three aspects of our humanity: spirit or soul, thus prayer; our bodies, fasting; and our worldly actions, almsgiving. The latter point underscores the corporate nature of the spiritual life; it can never be a solitary or individualistic pursuit. The sermons seek to move us more fully into the corporate mystery of our life together in Christ as “living members of his mystical body, which is the blessed company of all faithful people,” as our liturgy puts it. How? By our hearing and our acting upon what we hear which is the thrust of our readings tonight as well.
Andrewes reminds us that “the only true praise of a sermon is, some evil left, or some good done upon the hearing of it”. Something is required of us inwardly and outwardly without which our repentance is not a living repentance, a living to God and for God in our lives with one another. I will conclude as Andrewes ends on this point. “I will shut up this point with St. Augustine’s prayer before one of his sermons,” he says, “that God would vouchsafe quod utiliter meditatum est cor meum, ‘what my heart hath profitably thought on’ to bring it thence into my tongue, and from thence into your ears, and from thence into your hearts, and from thence into your deeds; that so all may end in proferte fructus, “bring forth fruits.”” Such is our blessedness. It is all in the turning.
Fr. David Curry
Redire ad Principia: Lenten Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes
Lenten Meditation # 2
March 21st, 2017
Comm. of Benedict and Cranmer
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/03/21/lenten-meditation-2-redire-ad-principia-lenten-sermons-of-lancelot-andrewes/
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