Lenten Meditation 3: Redire ad Principia: Lenten Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes

admin | 28 March 2017

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary often falls within the season of Lent. Indeed, there have been times even when it has fallen on Good Friday which moved a poet like John Donne to write a powerful poem about the nature of God’s comings and goings with us, a theme which Lancelot Andrewes develops over and over again as well. In Upon the Annunciation and the Passion falling upon one day. 1608, Donne explores in a rich and allusive way the comings of God to us and the goings of God from us in the double mystery of the Annunciation and the Passion. “At once a son is promised her, and gone,/ Gabriel gives Christ to her, he her to John.” As Donne wonderfully puts it, “All this, and all between, this day hath shown,/ Th’Abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one/ (As in plain maps, the furthest west is east)/ Of the angels’ Ave, ‘ and Consummatum est”, a wonderful contraction of the mystery of God’s turning to us and for us. It is a kind of circling.

The turning is about God’s turning to us and our turning to him. Such are the motions of God’s comings and goings to, with and in us. Redire ad principia, a kind of circling, is all about turning. It is the dominant feature of Andrewes Ash-Wednesday sermons entitled in the collection made by Buckeridge and Laud as Of Repentance and Fasting.

In the first of those sermons preached in 1598 before Queen Elizabeth, Andrewes reflects upon the nature of the turning. He takes as his text what might seem an unusual passage, the 34^th verse Psalm 78, “when He slew them, then they sought Him; and they returned and enquired early after God.” The sermon undertakes to explore “the matter of repentance, expressed here under the terms of seeking and turning.” It focuses on the one to whom we turn just as the Annunciation is about God’s turning to our humanity in Mary and her turning to God in affirmation of the divine will for our salvation. Both Donne and Andrewes have a high regard for the significance of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the economy of salvation. In poems and in sermons, they contribute to the tradition of Marian devotion in seventeenth century Anglican divinity, a tradition that is largely shaped by a strong commitment to the doctrine of Chalcedon and to the measured sense of adiaphora, things indifferent though not unimportant, that allow for a breadth of expression about Marian doctrine but without sacrifice to the principles of essential faith as measured primarily by Scripture and Creed.

George Herbert, for example, following more or less the principle of restraint that governs Andrewes’ sermons, a restraint that means not saying any more or any less than what has warrant from Scripture creedally understood, reveals in his poem To All Angels and All Saints his own Marian sympathies. It is in the form of saying what it is that he would like to say but can’t say without the clear warrant of Scripture, taking a more rigorous sola scriptura approach. But in so doing, he has said it! More explicitly and somewhat controversially, Anthony Stafford’s famous work, “The Female Glory”, allows for the full range of Marion devotion but as doctrinally grounded in the Scripture and the Creeds while allowing for extra-scriptural devotions. Like Donne’s poem The Annunciation, there is room for such doctrines as the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception which is not scripturally based though it belongs to a certain kind of theological reasoning which sees the role of Mary in terms of Christ. Thus his sinlessness – a necessary feature of his being Saviour – is projected back upon the story of Mary’s birth. The close connection between Mary and Christ means that she, too, is without sin because she is the one prepared before the foundation of the world to be the theotokos, the God-bearer. In other words, and this is a kind of thinking which Andrewes appreciates even if he doesn’t allude directly to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Mary is the exemplary emblem of faith, the very picture of our humanity qua human as utterly pure but only through the grace of God.

“Lo, faithful Virgin, [God] yields himself to lie/ in prison, in thy womb” as Donne puts it, and then goes on to say, “and though he there/ Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet he ‘will wear/ Taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try.” God can take no sin from Mary nor Mary give sin to him. There is a powerful logic at work in such thinking. In many ways it is an extension of the logic of the Chalcedonian doctrine about the divine and human natures of Christ and its meaning for our salvation. Such is God’s turning to us so that we may be turned to him. It is all in the turning.

The seeking is a turning but that turns upon the idea of “right seeking”. As Andrewes puts it in Sermon I Of Repentance and Fasting, we do “not seek Him for somewhat we would have of Him, but to seek Himself for Himself.” This is quite significant. Deus in se, God in Himself, is the ground of Deus pro nobis, God for us. “It is one thing, say the schools, to seek God for fruition; another to seek Him to make use of Him. One thing, saith Christ, to seek for the miracle, another for the loaves”, an allusion to John 6. 26. “One thing to “seek His face,” another to seek His fingers’s end. One thing to consult with Him only for conscience, to know and do; another to consult with Him – if it hit our humour to make our advantage of it, if it go against us to set light by it. Such is our seeking for the most part.” In other words, while we are to seek God for God’s sake, our tendency is to seek God for our own ends. Such is death.

In contrast to that kind of seeking, we have the seeking of God and his will for us in the drama of the Annunciation in which there is an active engagement with the will of God in order to will that will in ourselves. It is about more than agreeing to seek, it is about actively doing the seeking. It is about the total turning of ourselves to God. That is the meaning of Mary’s ‘yes’ to God, her fiat mihi, her “be it unto me according to thy word.” In the Annunciation we see the true and perfect form of our humanity’s relation to God. She is defined not by circumstance and confusion, not by situation and accident, but by her complete acquiescence to the will of God. Mary is the image of our pure and perfect humanity simply considered in and of itself. Thus the Church’s purpose is to be Marian. And as Anthony Stafford brilliantly puts it, those who are not Marian are often Arian! Andrewes interest is always to argue for the full and complete divinity of the Son and the Spirit and to do so as integral to the mystery of salvation. It belongs in other words to the mystical theology of the English Church. The seeking is a constant seeking, a constant turning.

“For sure as we seek God to save us, so He saveth us to seek Him; if when we seek Him we are saved, when we are saved we should seek Him.” This expresses the dynamic of salvation as opposed to the static forms that appear in the iterations of the doctrine of assurance. The idea of being assured of our salvation becomes a vexing question. How to know whether you are saved or not? The anxiety that such a question creates eclipses our turning and seeking what God seeks for us in his turning to us. It eclipses the creedal essentials of the faith. It takes our eyes off Jesus and puts them on ourselves. For that reason, Andrewes was critical of the hyper-Calvinism of the Synod of Dort and advised against the addition of any further articles on predestination beyond the moderate Calvinism of Article XVII. Calvin himself answers the question about individual salvation by bidding us look to Christ for “Christ is more than a thousand testimonies to me.” “Christ therefore is for us the bright mirror of the eternal and hidden election of God, and also the earnest and pledge.” In short, Christ is our predestination.

As Andrewes notes in his Whit-Sunday Sermon of 1619, just after the Synod of Dort, “I speak it for this, that even some that are far enough from Rome, yet with their new perspective they think they perceive all God’s secret decrees, the number and order of them clearly; are indeed too bold and too busy with them. Luther said well that every one of us hath by nature a Pope in his belly, and thinks he perceives great matters”. T.S. Eliot observed about Andrewes and Richard Hooker a certain quality of mind which he described as “that determination to stick to essentials, that awareness of the needs of the time, the desire for clarity and precision on matters of importance, and the indifference to matters indifferent”. For Andrewes that meant a principled kind of refusal to add anything to things essential; neither to take away nor to add to the Creedal and Scriptural principles of the Christian Faith. This kind of thinking carries over into the rather irenical way in which he deals with different interpretations of Scriptural passages, recognising that there can be a legitimate range of possibilities within the Creedal understanding.

But it means, too, a more dynamic understanding of the nature of our engagement with God, something which Andrewes’ Sermon IX Of the Nativity in particular makes clear. His text is from Isaiah, a text which underlies the Annunciation story in Luke, and which is read as the Epistle at Mass. “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and she shall call His name, Immanuel.” Andrewes argues for the full force of the concipiet contrasting it with decipiet and recipiet, contrasting conceiving with deceiving and receiving, and in ways that emphasize the nature of our humanity’s interaction with God. God’s grace conceives in us a love that bears the fruits of love in our lives. Something is asked and required of us and that is what we see with Mary. She is not a passive vessel through whom grace is poured out, as if she has no part in it. As Donne puts it “Whom Thou conceiv’st, conceived”; Mary who conceives Christ was herself conceived in the mind of God “ere by the spheres time was created”; in short, from all eternity.

“A vessel is not said to conceive the liquor that is put into it. Why? Because it yieldeth nothing from itself. The blessed Virgin is, and therefore is because she did. She did both give and take.” That is the key point about the nature of our Lenten journeying. There is the turning of God to us and there are the motions of his love in us that turn us back to himself. We participate in the turning and are never more truly ourselves, never more truly human than in our turning to God. The example is Mary who “g[a]ve of her own substance whereof His body was framed; and take or receive power from the Holy Ghost, whereby was supplied the office and efficacy of the masculine seed. This is concipiet.”

Andrewes further explores the mistaken ways in which concipiet is and has been understood, ways which effectively turn concipiet into recipiet and decipiet. Concipiet, he points out, is “the bane of divers heresies,” such as Manicheanism and Valentinian Gnosticism which he associates with the Anabaptists of his world and day. Like Hooker, Andrewes understands that the heresies that belong to the working out of classical Christian doctrine in the Patristic period are ever the same in all ages. Ancient and modern they are all the same.

“That of the Manichee that held, He had no true body. That had been virgo decipiet, not concipiet; not – conceive Him, but deceive us”, Andrewes argues, reminding us that Docetism is one of the early heresies that really reflects a gnostic world-view, a kind of dualism where matter and spirit are seen in complete opposition even to the point of positing two separate principles. In such a view, there is no dynamic of salvation, no redemption of the material world. Salvation is escape from the world. The idea of Mary’s concipiet is an illusion, a deceit, what Andrewes cleverly calls decipiet non concipiet. But there is also the heresy of the Valentinians and Anabaptists which hold that “He had a true body, but made in Heaven and sent into her.” As Andrewes concisely puts it, “that had been recipiet, but not concipiet; received Him she had, conceived she had not.”

Andrewes argues for the true force of concipiet. “From which His conceiving we may conceive His great love to us-ward. Love, not only condescending to take our nature upon Him, but to take it by the same way and after the same manner that we do, by being conceived. That, and no other better beseeming way.” This applies to us. God engages our broken and fallen world to bring us back to himself. It means the redemption of our humanity, not its loss and destruction. Turning to the name Immanuel, Andrewes argues for a full meaning of ‘God with us.’

“We say nothing in saying, He is now with us, if He be not so with us now as never before. With them in types and figures of Himself; His shadow was with them; but nor He Himself.” We are, as the Ash-Wednesday Sermon of 1598 indicates, “to seek Himself for Himself”. The point is underlined here in the Nativity Sermon. “With them He was even thus, in this very Immanu; but how? In the future tense, concipiet pariet; as things to come are made present to hope. But now, conceptus est, partus est; re, not in spe – ‘He was conceived, he was born, really and not simply in hope’. “’So “with us” as even of us now;’ of the same substance, nature, flesh and bone that we. “With us” in concipiet, conceived as we; “with us” in pariet, born as we. Now true as never till now; now so as never so before.”

This is all part of the true form of seeking and turning to God in Jesus Christ. It is about our seeking him for himself and not in the vain attempt to use God for our own purposes and plans. Without him, it is not Immanuel; instead, “it will be Immanu-hell,” he suggests. “What with Him? Why, if we have Him and God by Him, we need no more; Immanu-el and Immanu-all,” playing with Immanuel, God with us. It is what we must truly seek, like Mary responding to the salutation, not unthinkingly but thinkingly, and only then saying, “be it unto me according to thy word.”

All that we can desire is for us to be with Him, with God, and He to be with us; and we from Him, or He from us, never to be parted. We were with Him once before, and we were well; and when we left Him, and He no longer “with us,” then began all our misery. Whensoever we go from Him, so shall we be in evil case, and never be well till we be back with Him again.

Repentance is redire ad principia, a kind of circling, whereby we return to Him from whom we have turned away. The intention is that we turn with the whole of our being even as Mary has yielded the whole of herself to him. Such is the radical turning that belongs to Mary’s fiat mihi, the measure and model of our turning.