by CCW | 10 October 2026 04:00
Fr. Thomas Plant addresses a world which has lost a sense of the spiritual, of things seen and unseen, distinguishing between the limits of our natural vision and the forgetting of our supernatural vision or seeing. One might think about Austin Farrer’s point that reason versus revelation is a false or at least a poor and incomplete dichotomy.
“We ought to say ‘Natural Reason and Supernatural Revelation’, and we ought to throw the emphasis on the adjectives rather than upon the nouns. We have not to distinguish between God’s action and ours, but between two phases of God’s action – his supernatural action, and his action by way of nature. It is difficult to see how anything resembling Christianity can survive the denial of this distinction. For Christianity is faith in Christ, and Christ is God acting not by way of nature, but supernaturally. If you reduce Christ to a part of God’s natural action, is he Christ any longer?” (The Glass of Vision, p. 16).
Plant suggests that we live in “a disenchanted world,” an idea popularised by Charles Taylor following Max Weber. At the same time, however, his book constantly calls attention to the forms of enchantment for good or for ill in our world, for instance, in literature and poetry in the images of dragons, fairies, and ghosts. The idea of disenchantment suggests the ways in which we are disengaged and disconnected from everything – the world, ourselves, one another, and God. But as has been well noted, the loss of the idea of living in an enchanted world belongs to the “myth of disenchantment” (Jason A. Josephson Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment). There is more than enough superstition and myths in the sense of untruths in our ‘post-truth’ world as there was ever before. The fascination with daily horoscopes is but one example.
‘Science’ in its mechanical, empiricist, and materialistic assumptions has much in common with magic, it is worth noting. Both are modern phenomena and in their modern forms seek to manipulate and control nature and humans, both in the natural sciences and the human sciences. In both cases, there is a problem about the forms of our knowing, about what scientia means in our modern world. One of the questions in the natural and human sciences, so-called, is whether we are primarily interested in trying to understand the world and human behavior or to predict and control both. It is really a question about the ethical, especially with respect to the ideology of progress. The great writers of satire, such as Swift (A Modest Proposal) and Voltaire (Candide), knew only too well that wanting to make the world better doesn’t always mean that we do. Our utopian fantasies turn into dystopias, as in Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984 or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Fr. Plant wants to place our modern discontents within a spiritual framework that looks back to the myths and stories of ‘old England’ and to the Scriptures, particularly Genesis and the story of creation and the fall. He sees lots of “the visible signs of the invisible world” but notes that we have lost the use of seeing things supernaturally. He draws on the image of Plato’s cave, the problem of mistaking the images for what they signify, or reality.There is a loss and forgetfulness of the things of beauty and truth that are nonetheless present. They are there before us, but ignored, for instance, in empty churches, seen but not seen. This is, of course, a recurring biblical refrain: eyes have they and see not. As he puts it, “powerful progressives without and within the Church have stripped our people of their spiritual inheritance.” He notes the idea of the “world as machine,” following Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine.
But he thinks, and rightly in my view, that the image of the Machine does not fully capture today’s “technocratic totalitarianism” (p. 9). The problem is more profoundly spiritual. It is about our attachment to the things of our own making; in short, the idolatry of ourselves in giving into the temptation to think that we are gods; as if it is all about what we can get away with; the ring of power in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the rings in Plato’s ‘the Myth of Gyges’ in The Republic, and, most recently, in the troubling Jason Arday affair at Cambridge who thought that somehow everyone would just believe him. All a matter of what we think we can get away with; the ring of invisibility as the power to do whatever you want, and never get caught, no compelling sense of the Good, of justice and truth, of the ethical – just what you can get away with.
Against this folly, ancient and new, Fr. Plant embarks upon “a project of re-enchantment” by recalling the myths and stories of the past in the specific, often very specific contexts of the ‘ancient Britons,’ and of the saints who battled against the dragons of the world because of the vision which they had come to embrace and know, the vision of Christ. He is writing to our culture in its spiritual emptiness in the effort to find a way to reconnect us with the richness and truth of our spiritual traditions and life. This requires a critique of how we have got to where we are in our “neopagan and technocratic world” and how that has infected the Church.
Yet that is only part of the far larger project in the greater task of our being “re-enchanted by the Good.” It is “a call to arms,” with respect to the spiritual battle ground of our souls and world; in short, to counter demonosis with theosis (p. 119), and to do so by way of the Catechism not, “at first sight,” as “dry Q & A dogma”(p. 13) simply thrust at us, but by what he calls “a reawakening of the spiritual imagination of the English-speaking people to the presence and sense of the sacred ”(p. 13, my italics). In that sense, his book extends beyond the bounds of England. He is writing as an Anglican Priest and an apologist for Anglicanism, particularly in terms of what he calls “the hallmark of Anglicanism”, namely, “freedom from attachment to error,” and to reclaiming through the English reformers, “whatever their errors … the pristine faith of the ancient, undivided, Holy Catholic Church in its English instantiation” (p. 15).
In a most ingenious and imaginative way he embarks upon this project by way of the Catechism in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Catechism derives from a Greek word about things echoed back (and forth). In a way, it is like the liturgy of priest and people, of versicles and responses, of things stated and affirmed, acknowledged and professed, sometimes antiphonally, heard and resounding in our hearts and minds. At the risk of being a bit provocative, the BCP catechism is very different from the Catechism of the modern Roman Catholic Church which is more like a text-book that provides an approved way of thinking and while excellent in many ways, it extends far beyond the consensus fidelium of the universal and catholic church, at least in my view.
I thought we might begin at the end of the readings for this first session with ch. 11, entitled Fiat Mihi which reflects on Jesus Christ “Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary” (Apostles’ Creed). It offers some lovely and poetic images for our thinking about the Incarnation and its wonder, placing the birth narratives within the larger panorama of the Hebrew Scriptures and within the dynamic of redemption by way of Tolkien and Plato to bring out the wonder of Mary’s great ‘yes’ at the Annunciation to God in the work of human redemption. Mary as the New Eve, Christ as the new Adam who comes from the New Eve’s womb, a lovely reversal of the Fall. “And as Adam was enticed to sin by Eve, the sinless Mary conceives a sinless Son” (p. 121).
“Like the power of Tolkien’s Ring, the power behind the apple (the unnamed fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), the power of the Serpent, will ultimately be destroyed. Chaos is derivative of order, not the other way around” (p. 121). All this is in the pursuit of awakening awe in us (quoting Pusey, p. 121). As he puts it, “Hence, 25 March is the day when the Dragon was put to rout, when he knew the war was lost” (p. 122); imagery that recalls the Michaelmas language from Revelation 12. For “there was war in heaven,” not there is war. The overcoming is all “by the blood of the lamb,” by the suffering of Christ, which has its beginning in time with Mary’s “consent to the suffering,” not by seizing power for ourselves but “in submission and in service to the Divine wisdom and goodness, offering oneself as ‘handmaid’ or servant to God’s will” (p. 123).
All this belongs to the unpacking of the idea of being “servants of the will of God” (ch. 3) through the catechetical question about the promises made on our behalf as infants at baptism by our Godparents, first, with respect to the renunciation of the devil, the world and the flesh, what he sums up as our attachments to “the attention of the world” (p. 51), secondly, the articles of the Christian faith in the Apostles’ Creed, and thirdly, “in keeping God’s will and commandments.”
All Christians are called to “these renunciations” (p. 46), but he gives as specific examples the monastic communities, particularly the mendicant orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans in Europe and then in England, and Cranmer’s remarkable project in the Book of Common Prayer for England as a “godly commonwealth” (John Booty’s term) whereby we are all gathered “into the fullness of the Church’s life of prayer” (p. 52). The title of ch. 3 is Servants of the Will of God. It refers to what he says is “the least known of the Anglican religious orders,” namely, the Servants of the Will of God, “an entirely silent order of contemplatives” (p. 48). This leads to the question about how can we know and obey God’s will and commandments.
He argues for what, as it seems to me, is the viewpoint of “radical orthodoxy” that locates modernity by way of John Duns Scotus and William Ockham, about which there is much debate that mostly turns on the relation of God’s will and nature and the danger of collapsing the one into the other in either direction. One could, for instance, read nominalismas an attempt at defending the uniqueness of Scriptural revelation (which is ironically why some see Luther as a nominalist, especially in his railings against Aristotle and ‘the whore of reason’) rather than seeing Ockham as somehow contributing in a fundamental way to ‘modern science’ and to a mechanistic world, however much Ockham’s razor is invoked in logic and in the over-simplifications of ‘scientific’ explanations in both the natural and the human ‘sciences’. “His nominal be reals,” as Lancelot Andrewes says about God, a rather concise resolution or at least a riposte to the nominalist/ realist debates. But in any event, the question at hand which Fr. Plant is driving at is about the catechetical imperative to know and follow what we believe.
The direction of his thinking points to the idea of the unity and mutual interdependence and interrelation of the divine will and divine reason whether in its Franciscan form in Bonaventure’s synthesis of affective and speculative theology from the side of the affective or in its Dominican form in Aquinas’s synthesis of speculative and affective theology from the side of the intellective. In my view, they complement one another and reappear in interesting ways in the classical Anglican divines such as Hooker, Andrewes, and others. Hooker, for instance, regarded Thomas as the wisest of the medieval schoolman and Scotus as the wittiest. Nice.
Fr. Plant’s argument proceeds to unpack the idea and, this is really quite interesting, that we are “bound to believe what others have promised for us” to believe (p. 53), which challenges contemporary assumptions about the autonomy of the self. He does this through the lovely example of St. Alban (ch. 4) (and St. Stephen) that then leads to “The Inheritance of Scripture” (ch. 5) and “Tradition” (ch. 6), and, subsequently to the Creed, first, by way of being “Called to Salvation” through Christ (ch. 7), explicated in the Creed (ch. 8). There he recalls the ancient practice of the instruction of catechumens at the Easter Vigil and thus the tradition of catechesis in passing on and explaining the Articles of the Creed. The Creeds come out of the Scriptures and return us to them in a pattern of understanding or thinking, (ch. 9), beginning with God the Father, and then with Christ in ch. 10, “The Spotless mirror,” Christ as the Son of the Father and us as sons of God, and so to ch. 11, Fiat Mihi about Christ as conceived and born of Mary. This sets us up for the consideration of Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, the Holy Spirit and the Church which we will explore in our later sessions. All this is the essential logic of the reformed catechesis found in the Prayer Book about the consensus fidelium of what belongs to the essential catholicism of classical Anglicanism.
With that brief outline in mind, we can perhaps more fully appreciate the story of Oswald, of Oswald’s tree or cross, and to the pageant of faithful witness to Christ in such figures as Alban, for instance, and of the monastic traditions of our heritage that leads us into the wisdom of the Catechism. Fr. Plant does this by way of expanding upon each question and answer of the catechism to bring out more fully and more completely its depth and meaning. Thus the first question, “what is your name?” is not like some boring bureaucratic process to which we are all endlessly subjected but something quite profoundly spiritual. Our names are given to us and our names in some sense connect us to places and persons through whom we are connected and joined to God in his own naming of himself as the blessed Trinity. Through that question, Fr. Plant bids us consider our own local histories, families, and places, and to cherish and honour our derivations naturally as ultimately being married to who we are spiritually.
This is to ground the first part of the Catechism in the sacred soil of our lives in the communities and places from which we come. We are not in the existentialist sense simply “thrown into the world” (geworfenheit) but born into life, the life that is given by God to us in the particularities of place and family.
A very abbreviated and inadequate account of just a few of the riches of argument and imagery provided for us in the first eleven chapters of Fr. Plant’s book. But I am sure that there are any number of things that have caught your attention spiritually and intellectually from your reading of his meditations and your study of the Catechism.
Fr. David Curry
October 8th, 2026
1st Seminar on the Catechism
Eve of St. Denis, Bishop & Martyr
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