Tag Archives: William Laud

Beauty versus Blasphemy

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Beauty versus Blasphemy

The opening ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris became the latest in a series of highly controversial events to have occurred this July.  I am not going to say much about the others as they have to do with American domestic politics.  Nor am I going to say a whole lot about what happened at the Olympics as I am merely using it as a springboard for a discussion of theological aesthetics.  That it shocked anyone is rather surprising in itself.   What else would one expect from the games that represent the apex of Modern man’s regression into the pagan idolatry of sports, especially when located in the capital city of a nation that at the end of the eighteenth century threw off and murdered its divine-right king and queen, threw off its ancient allegiance to the Church, and paraded a prostitute through said capital telling the people to worship her as the “goddess” Reason?   Note that the part of the Olympic ceremonies that included a blasphemous reenactment of the Last Supper featuring drag queens, a celebration of Dionysius the Olympian whose festivals threatened civilization even in pagan days (read Euripides’ Bacchae), and the same sort of tasteless garbage that takes place in those silly parades in honour of the deadly sin of Superbia, also included an honouring of the French Revolution. Despite the glorious events of the ninth of Thermidor, the anniversary of which we just passed, France never recovered from this disaster, not even to the extent that England had recovered from the mother of all left-wing revolutions, the Puritan one, in the Restoration of the previous century and even that recovery, alas, was not as complete as it should have been.  Perhaps there are some who might still be surprised that an alphabet soup fest took place at what might reasonably be expected to be a celebration of jock culture.  Such have not been paying attention to how the costume and makeup division of the alphabet soup brigade have claimed the field of athletics as their own territory in the last few years.

Christian condemnation of the mockery of a key event in our sacred history has come under criticism from two directions.  There are those “liberal Christians” who can always be counted on to condemn any act of Christians standing up for themselves and their faith as being “unchristian”, “judgmental”, “hindering the Gospel”, “politicizing Christianity” or some other such balderdash. I place little value on such opinions and do not think them worthy of a response.  The other type of criticism is almost the opposite of this.  It takes Christians to task for being too milquetoastish in their defense of their faith.  The reason people like the performers at the Olympics and those who approved their performance feel free to mock Christianity in ways they would not feel similarly free to mock other religions such as, for example, Islam, is because Christians do not respond with such things as fatwas and jihads when their faith is mocked.  A more insightful variation of this would be to say that much of the Christian response to this mockery has been based on liberal principles rather than Christian ones.  In other words it has taken the form of “you wouldn’t treat other religions this way, it is unfair that you are treating us like that, this is discrimination” rather than “you have mocked the true and living God, Who will not be mocked, and furthermore mocked Him at a key moment in the history of His having taken on human nature and become Man in order to save us, the world, and yes, even you, from the sins for which we all must repent rather than celebrate as you are now doing, and if you don’t change your sorry ways and seek His forgiveness, you will suffer forever the consequences of mocking Him .”

This incident brought to mind an earlier controversy regarding a depiction of the Last Supper.  No, I am not referring to Dan Brown’s silly book but to a painting by Venetian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese.  In 1573 he completed a very large – 18.37 ft. by 42.95 ft. – oil painting that had been commissioned by the Dominicans as a replacement for a painting by Titian of the Last Supper that had been lost to fire two years earlier.  The middle of the painting features Christ at the centre of a table with the twelve Apostles on either side of Him much like other familiar portraits of the Last Supper.  The setting is clearly not an upper room in first century Jerusalem, however, from the architecture of the room and the skyline of the city in the large window behind them.  Then there are all the extras.  There are close to fifty people in the painting, including a dwarf in jester’s attire, a few African slaves, German soldiers, and all sorts of other people, none of whom one would have expected to have been present on the occasion even if the factor of anachronism were to be excluded.  There are a number of animals there too including a cat peeking out from under the table at St. Peter’s feet at a dog sitting in front of the table and tilting its head to look back at the cat and a parrot on the jester’s arm.  These promoted an investigation by the local Venetian branch of the Inquisition which, on the grounds that he had violated the rules regarding religious art that the Council of Trent (1545-1563) had imposed, ordered him to fix the painting, which he did by re-titling it “The Feast at the House of Levi.”  Monty Python did a sketch loosely based on this although they switched in Michelangelo for Paolo Veronese and the Pope for the local Inquisition.

A comparison of this incident with the current one brings a few observations to mind.  It goes without saying, of course, that the Church was more powerful in the sixteenth century than today.  It is also evident that Veronese’s painting was not intrinsically blasphemous like the performance art at the Olympics.  Had it been so, the Inquisition would not have been satisfied with a change of title.  One conclusion that might be drawn from this is that the Church then took lesser offences in the realm of art more seriously than the Church today takes greater offences.  Which makes it interesting to note  that this incident occurred ten years after the closing of the Council of Trent.  The Council of Trent was the Roman Church’s response to the Reformation.  The Reformation primarily had to do with ethical matters (charges of ecclesiastical corruption that began with the 99 theses pertaining to the sale of indulgences) and doctrine (the authority of the Church in relation to that of Scripture, the doctrine of salvation), but there was also an aesthetic element that was intertwined with both the ethical and doctrinal.  The Protestant Reformers considered the invocation of the saints and a number of similar or associated practices to be in violation of the second commandment, that is to say, the commandment against idolatry.  This is an ethical issue because if the Reformers were right the practices in question are sinful, because idolatry is a major sin, and if the Reformers were wrong, they were guilty of the sin of falsely judging the motives of other Christians.  It is also a doctrinal issue, because for the Reformers to be right the ancient Christian doctrine of the Communion of the Saints, that all Christians, whether in earth or in heaven, are members of the one body of Jesus Christ within which there is no veil between the living and the dead because all are one in Christ, would have to be wrong.  It was an aesthetical matter as well and became increasingly so as the Reformation progressed and newer Reformers developed traditions within Protestantism that adopted such strict views as that any artistic depiction of God was idolatry or, more extremely, that any artistic depiction of anyone was idolatry, and that consequently Church buildings needed to be stripped of all adornment.  That it was the rules of the Roman Church, adopted in the Counter Reformation, that Veronese ran afoul of demonstrates something that a lot of Christians find difficult to grasp today.  Aesthetic permissivism is not the only alternative to Puritanism, the extreme version of Protestantism that stripped Churches of their artwork, Church music of its instruments, closed theatres, and basically looked at almost any attempt at artistic expression as an offense against the God Who had given the ability of artistic expression to man.

By “aesthetic permissivism” I mean the idea that artists should not be subject to any rules external to those of their art, an idea closely related to the idea that art should not be subject to any criticism other than aesthetic.  In practice these ideas quickly translate into the artist not being subject to any rules whatsoever and his art not being subject to any criticism.  These are popular ideas today, not least among artists for whom they have an obvious self-serving appeal, because of a) the widespread notion that beauty, the standard upon which all aesthetic rules and judgements are based, is purely subjective and b) the less widespread, except among left-wing activists who think they are artists, notion that beauty is a false standard that needs to be deconstructed and so art must be made to deliberately eschew the standard of beauty by embracing its opposite.  Much of the corpus of the late Sir Roger Scruton was devoted to demonstrating how erroneous these ideas are.  Most Christians are uncomfortable with aesthetic permissiveness in its bald form as described in this paragraph although there is an idea popular in certain Christian circles that resembles an inverted version of it.  This is the idea that while artists and their art should be subject to rules and criticism of a moral nature, albeit not to the extent demanded by Puritanism, aesthetic judgements are purely subjective and should not be influenced by theology or ethics.  A version of this that arises with regards to Church worship is the notion, often supported by a misinterpretation of St. Paul, that the matter of how we worship is adiaphora. Fr. Paul A. F. Castellano’s As It is In Heaven: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Introduction to the Traditional Church and Her Worship (Tucson: Wheatmark, 2021) is an excellent rebuttal of this notion.

Puritanism is no more an acceptable position for orthodox Christians than aesthetic permissivism.  The premise that all artistic depictions break the commandment against idols can be answered in the same way as can the premise that killing in self-defense or defense of others, in war, and as the execution of a sentence for death passed for the commission of a capital crime are forbidden by “thou shalt not kill”, i.e., with “turn the page.”  Exodus 21:14-17 and 29 prescribe the death penalty for various offences in the chapter after “thou shalt not kill” or more literally “thou shalt not do murder” in Exodus 20:13.  Only a few chapters later in Exodus 25 comes the instructions on building the ark of the covenant, with the mercy seat, with two golden cherubim (images of heavenly – in the sense of the heaven where God dwells – beings) (vv. 18-20).  The candlestick was to have representations of almonds on it (Ex. 25:33-34).  The ephod of the high priest was to have depictions of pomegranates on it (Ex. 28:33-34).  The Puritan interpretation of Exodus 20:4 as forbidding all artistic depictions cannot hold up within the context of its own book.  It cannot hold up in the context of the next verse which provides the criteria which distinguishes an idol from something that is merely a work of art.  As for depictions of God, the ruling of the Second Council of Nicaea (787 AD) against iconoclasm maintained, Scripturally, that the Incarnation had changed things, He Who as the eternal Son of God is the perfect Image of the invisible God His Father (Col. 1:15, Heb. 1:3) became Man and in doing so revealed God that He might be seen in Him (Jn. 1:18, 14:9), and so since in the Incarnate Son God and Man are forever united in Hypostatic Union, God can be depicted because Man can be depicted.  The Second Council of Nicaea was a general council of the Church prior to the East-West Schism, received by the whole Church and both sides of the later Schism, as the seventh truly ecumenical council.  Protestantism’s reasons for rejecting it as such are insufficient in my opinion.  The attitude that manifested itself in the iconoclasm against which Nicaea II pronounced judgement and then later again in Puritanism goes back prior to the coming of Christ to the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids.  Zealous lay leaders of Israel, recognizing from the prophets that the Assyrian and Babylonian Captivities had come upon Israel because of idolatry, determined that Israel would not only not practice idolatry again but would not be allowed to get close, and “hedged” the second commandment, and all the other commandments of the Mosaic Law, with extra commandments making the burden of the Law that much heavier.  These became the sect of Second Temple Judaism known as the Pharisees with whom Christ interacted in His ministry.  The spirit of Pharisaism is evident in the way the English Puritans responded to the efforts of Archbishop Laud and the other Carolinian Divines to maintain the “beauty of holiness” (Ps. 29:2, 96:9) in the English Church within the limits of the rubrics of the Protestant Elizabethan Prayer Book with accusations of papist conspiracies, armed revolt against Church and King, regicide, and a tyrannical regime that stripped the Churches of everything of aesthetic value.

While the Roman Church’s handling of the Paolo Veronese “incident” demonstrates that a mean can be found between these two extremes it does not necessarily illustrate what the proper mean should look like.  Let us return to the incident that prompted this discussion.  A better Christian response to the blasphemous mockery of the Last Supper than to rely solely on the liberal principle that one religion should not be singled out and targeted for the kind of mockery to which other religions would not be subjected is to stand on the Christian moral and theological principle that the true and living God will not be mocked.  To this moral and theological condemnation, however, must be added aesthetic condemnation.  The performance was bad not just on moral and theological grounds but aesthetic as well.  It was a display of ugliness not beauty.  Performances of this nature, even when they are not desecrating events from sacred history, generally are.  The spirit of mockery in which they are conducted, even when not directed explicitly against God, is directed against standards that are wrongfully considered to be oppressive, which in the arts means especially beauty.  Mockery of beauty is ultimately mockery of God, of course, because beauty like the other transcendentals (properties of being), goodness and truth, finds its ultimate expression in Him in Whom Being and Essence are one and Whose very name translates as “He Who Is.”

St. Peter commanded us to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15) and to give such a response as discussed in the previous paragraph to “artistic” assaults on the faith, Christians should familiarize themselves with basic theological aesthetics.  Although more has probably been written in the last hundred years on this subject than in all the rest of Christian history put together it is much more of a niche subject than its counterpart philosophical aesthetics, the field of the aforementioned Sir Roger Scruton.  Hans Urs von Balthasar’s seven volume The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (published in German from 1961 to 1967, English translation published by Ignatius Press in San Francisco from 1983 to 1990)is a good place to start.  For anyone wanting to learn more about how in God Being and Essence are the same thing read St. Thomas Aquinas, or if you are looking for a shorter treatment E. L. Mascall’s He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism, originally published in 1943, just republished last year by Angelico Press in Brooklyn.  Don’t mistake St. Thomas and Mascall as starting with being as possessed by created things and equating it with God.  This would be both idolatry and pantheism.  It is God’s Being, of which created being is merely analogous, that is one with His Essence, as no created being and essence are one.  For a warning against the idolatry of equating God with anything in creation, including our idea of Him, see the first chapter of Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002) but with the caveat that Eastern theology often takes its apophaticism to the extreme of denying the possibility of natural theology, a denial that is difficult to reconcile with the first chapter of Romans.  One final recommendation is Benjamin Guyer’s The Beauty of Holiness: The Caroline Divines and Their Writings (London: Canterbury Press, 2012), from the Canterbury Studies in Spiritual Theology Series.

Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 7:57 AM

Labels: 2024 Olympics, Benjamin Guyer, E. L. Mascall, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Paolo Veronese, Paul A. F. Castellano, Sir Roger Scruton, St. Thomas Aquinas, theological aesthetics, Vladimir Lossky, William Laud

Hier Stehe Ich! (“Here I Stand (I Can Do No Other”) — Martin Luther http://cafe.nfshost.com/?p=9316

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The Canadian Red Ensign

Monday, January 1, 2024

Hier Stehe Ich! (“Here I Stand (I Can Do No Other”) — Martin Luther

 Every year since I started Throne, Altar, Liberty I have, on the kalends of January which is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ on the Church Kalendar and New Year’s Day on the civil calendar, posted an essay summarizing where I stand on matters political, religious and cultural, the subjects on which I write.  It is a custom I adopted from one of my own favourite writers, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel.   I have often used Dr. Luther’s famous “Here I Stand” as the title in one language or another.   This year it is the German original.  Each year it is a challenge to write this anew because, while I hope my views have matured they have remained basically the same.   Each year I have to resist  the temptation to  just point to T. S Eliot’s “Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, classicist in literature” and say ditto.   I usually do make reference to Eliot’s famous self-description, which I read as a twentieth-century update of the definition of Tory that Dr. Johnson wrote for his dictionary, because it provides a handy frame on which to organize my thoughts.

Before getting into my views I will provide as usual some basic background information about myself.  I am a patriotic citizen of Commonwealth Realm that is the Dominion of Canada and a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III as I was all my life prior to his accession of his mother of Blessed Memory, our late Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth II. I love my country’s traditional institutions, Loyalist history, and basically everything about Canada that the sniveling twit who currently occupies the Prime Minister’s Office either wishes we would forget or is endlessly apologizing for.  I have lived all my life in the province of Manitoba, where I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, where I studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College – at the time it was Providence College and Theological Seminary – in Otterbourne which is a small college town south of the provincial capital, Winnipeg, where I have lived for the almost quarter of a century since.

Am I, like T. S. Eliot an “Anglo-Catholic in religion”?  If by Anglo-Catholic you mean holding the theology expressed in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, the admirable collection published by John Henry Parker in the nineteenth century of the writings of the classical Anglican divines of the centuries previous including Lancelot Andrewes, the martyred King Charles I’s martyred Archbishop William  Laud and the other Caroline Divines, the scholarly apologist for Trinitarian orthodoxy Bishop George Bull and the Non-Juror George Hickes, I would say yes.     If you mean embracing the views of the Oxford Movement I would be more hesitant.   I think that the most important thing Keble, Newman, Pusey et al.  got right was that the truest and most important establishment of the Church was that by Christ through His Apostles rather than establishment by the state.   I have far less sympathy for the tendency that  manifested itself in some, not all, of them to look Romeward, to regret the Reformation for reasons other than that all schism that harms the visible unity of the Church is regrettable, and to regard the Anglican formularies with a “this will have to do for now” type attitude.   

The Vincentian Canon, “that which is believed everywhere, at all times, and by all”, and its tests of antiquity (does it go back to the Apostles), universality (is it held throughout the Church in all regions and ages rather than particular to one time and place), and consent (was it affirmed by the Church’s leadership in a way that was subsequently received as authoritative throughout the Church) is in my view the right way of determining what is truly Catholic, not whether it has been declared dogma by the Patriarch of Rome or one of the Councils that his adherents have held since the Great Schism between East and West.   I come from a family in which most of my relatives were either United Church (Presbyterian/Methodist) or Anglican, became a believer with an evangelical conversion when I was 15, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church while a teenager and confirmed in the Anglican Church as an adult.  As my theology matured I came to realize and respect the Symbols handed down from the ancient Church – the Apostles’ and Nicene (Constantinopolitan) Creeds and the Athanasian Symbol – as the basic definitions of Scriptural orthodoxy, to recognize that episcopalian Church government is not adiaphora but clearly established in the New Testament (the Apostles governed the whole Church, while it was localized in Jerusalem they exercised the authority Christ gave them to establish the order of deacons, after the Church was scattered they appointed presbyters or elders over the local Churches which seems to be something they borrowed from the synagogues, and as their ministries closed they passed on to others, Scriptural examples of which include SS Timothy and Titus  their government over the Church including the power to ordain the lower  orders), and that the ministers of the Church are priests (St. Paul explicitly states this of himself in the Greek of Romans 15:15) charged not with offering new sacrifices but with feeding the people of God with Christ’s One Sacrifice through the Sacramental medium of bread and wine. 

Thus I am basically a High Anglican of the pre-Oxford type, with a  Lutheran soteriology, and a fundamentalist-minus-the-separatism approach to basic orthodoxy who regards every article of the ancient Symbols taken literally as fundamental and the Bible as God’s written Word, by verbal, plenary inspiration, infallible and inerrant, which we are to believe and obey rather than to subject to “criticism” based on the false notion that because God used human writers to write the book of which He is the Author that it is a human book rather than a divine book.   Criticism based on that false notion makes fools out of those who engage in it, whether it be the higher critics who think that the fact that Moses varied which name for God he used means that his books were slapped together by some editor after the Babylonian Captivity from previously separate sources despite the total lack of anything such as examples of these “sources” in a pre-“redaction” state of the type that would logically constitute actual evidence or the lower or textual critics who think that the most authentic text of the New Testament is not to be found in that that has been handed down in the Church as evidenced by the thousands of manuscripts she has used (these are of the Byzantine text type) but either in small handful of old manuscripts that were not in general use and were particular to one region (the Alexandrian text) or in something slapped together by text critics in the last century which can be found in no manuscript whatsoever (the eclectic text).  Someone who makes the false idea that the Bible is a human book rather than God’s book the basis of his study of it will end up drawing unsubstantiated conclusions about it that no competent scholar would similarly draw about actual human books and will end up sounding like a blithering idiot.  So expect me to thump the Authorized (1611) Bible as I tell you that salvation is a free gift that God has given to all us sinners in Jesus Christ, that the only means whereby we can receive it is faith,  that faith is formed in us by the Holy Ghost through the Gospel brought to us in the Word and Sacrament ministered to us by the Church whose Scripturally established governors under her Head, Jesus Christ, are the bishops in whose order the ordinary governing office of the Apostles has continued to this day.

That I am a “royalist in politics” should already be evident from the second paragraph if it is not sufficiently evident from the title of my website.   I will add here that I am also a monarchist.   For some that will be a redundancy, the two terms being for them interchangeable.   It is for the sake of others who distinguish between the two that I add that I am both.   I am a much stronger monarchist than those Canadian conservatives are who are basically liberal democrats but who defend our monarchy because it is our tradition and make its non-interference with their real political ideal the sole basis of their argument.   I have been instinctually a monarchist all my life.   While C. S. Lewis famously said that monarchy is an idea easily debunked but those who debunk it impoverish and bring misery upon themselves (I am paraphrasing from  memory, Lewis said it better than that) I have found as I have studied the matter over the years that monarchy is rationally defensible.   Plato and Aristotle argued that the rule of true kings is the best of simple constitutions and I think their arguments still stand, just as I think that in our age the divisiveness, partisanship, and other evils that attend upon democratically elected government make an ironclad case for hereditary monarchy that makes the unifying figure at the head of the state one who does not owe his office to partisan politics.  Thus I would say that we should be arguing that our monarchy is essential not that it is merely acceptable.   The Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown, makes a strong case for monarchy’s essential role in our constitution similar to that frequently made by Eugene Forsey. 

I am grateful to Ron Dart for drawing my attention to these men and their books years ago.   I find little to admire in the Modern ideal of democracy and defend instead the institution of Parliament for while Parliament is, of course, a democratic institution it is also a traditional one, a concrete institution that predates the Modern Age and has long proven its worth, which to me outweighs all the flimsy arguments Moderns make for democracy.   Ultimately, I have found a sure and certain foundation for monarchism in orthodox Christianity.   God is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the absolute Sovereign Ruler of His Creation, i.e., all other than Himself that exists.  In the governance of the universe, we find the ideal form – think Plato here – of government, of which temporal earthly governments are imperfect representations and to which, the greater their conformity, the more their perfection will be.   This is why the most orthodox forms of Christianity – traditional Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional Roman Catholicism, and the better kind of Lutheranism – saw Christian monarchy as the highest form of earthly civilization, and the least orthodox forms that can still be seen as  Christian in some recognizable sense, Puritanism and Anabaptism, are the ones that contradicted the obvious implication of the title “King of Kings” by saying “no king but King Jesus”.   

It is in the sense of someone who holds the views expressed in the previous two paragraphs and not in the common partisan sense of the word that I call myself a Tory.   The words “conservative” and “right-wing” as they are used today, even by most who self-apply them, have had their meaning defined for them by the very liberalism and the Left they purport to oppose.   Liberalism is the spirit of the Modern Age.   It consists of the demand for ever increasing liberty (in the sense of individual autonomy) and equality, despite the fact obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that these two cannot be maximized at the same time.   The universal homogeneity that it demands would if actualized be the ultimate form of totalitarian tyranny in which freedom, the real human good and not liberalism’s false ideal of liberty/individual autonomy, would be eliminated entirely.   The Left also worships liberalism’s false gods and historically has differed from liberalism primarily in its notion of how to achieve their goal.   A century ago the Left was identified primarily with socialism, the idea that all of man’s problems can be traced to economic equality arising out of the private ownership of property and are solvable by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with public ownership.   From the standpoint of orthodox Christianity this is utterly repugnant because it misdiagnoses the human condition (the correct diagnosis is sin), prescribes the wrong medicine (the right medicine is the grace of God freely given to man in Jesus Christ), and is basically the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, disguising itself with the mask of the highest of the Christian virtues, charitable love.   

Today, the Left is identified primarily with an expression  arising out of American racial grievance politics, “wokeness”.   “Wokeness” is like socialism in that it claims (generally falsely) to be the mouthpiece for the oppressed, but differs from socialism in that it it does not divide people into oppressor/oppressed by economic status (Marx’s “haves” and “have nots”) but by a legion of personal identities based on such things as race, sex, gender, etc.   Some, such as Dr. Paul Gottfried, have argued on the basis of specific content that today’s Left is something totally different from the Left of a century ago, from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity there is a discernable continuity in the Left.   Whether it speaks in terms of economics or in the terms of race and sex, the Left is an entirely destructive movement, driven by hatred of civilization as it historically has existed for not living up to the false and self-contradictory ideals of liberalism, that, whenever it has succeeded in tearing something down, has never been able to build anything good let alone better on the ashes of the good if not perfect that it destroyed.   The orthodox Christian must condemn this utterly because it clearly displays the spirit of Satan who operates out of the same hatred directed towards God.   Therefore I describe my orthodox Christian monarchist views as Tory and reactionary (in John Lukacs’ sense of the term, basically someone willing to think outside the Modern box, not by embracing the nihilism of post-Modernism but rather the good in the pre-Modern), preferring these terms over conservative which for the most part denotes a false opposition to liberalism and Left defined entirely by liberalism and the Left.

As for being a “classicist in literature” I think that if we take this to  mean someone who seeks to learn from Matthew Arnold’s “the best that has been thought and said” this is a goal that someone with the views expressed above can recognize as most worthy to pursue with regards not just to literature and reading, but to the other elements of culture such as music and the visual arts as well.   It is also a difficult one to consistently follow as many are the enticements, more so today than ever before, to distract one from the classical heights of the Great Books and the Great Tradition into the murky swamps of corporate, mass-manufactured, pop culture.   I have striven to follow this goal on and off again – it makes an excellent resolution for those who do that sort of thing today – with varying degrees of success at resisting the distractions.   Perversely, I have found stubborn contrariness has often been a great motivator in this regards. 

 I read Mark Twain’s remark that a “classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read” years ago and thought to myself “Sez you, Sam Clemens” and set out to read nothing but classics, persisting in this for several months.   Similarly, Thomas Fleming, the former editor of Chronicles Magazine several times enriched my reading habits with remarks about about books nobody was familiar with today prompting a “Sez you, Tom Fleming” response.   Today, as the Left in its “woke” form as described in the previous paragraph has laid siege to the Great Books and the Great Tradition it is more important than ever to reacquaint ourselves with “the best that has been thought and said”.   This is a far better and ultimately more effective way of resisting wokeness than generating and posting any number of anti-woke internet memes could ever be.   So I resolve today once again to seek to elevate my reading, listening and viewing habits in 2024 and  encourage you to do the same.

Happy New Year!

God Save the King! — Gerry T. Neal

An English Rose not a Dutch TULIP

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The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, August 18, 2023

An English Rose not a Dutch TULIP

The Church of England and the other national Churches descended from her is a Reformed Catholic Church.   From the English Reformation on Anglicans have disagreed among themselves as to which word should be stressed.   High Churchmen stress the Catholic, Low Churchmen stress the Reformed.  I am a High Churchman and stress the Catholicity of the Anglican Church.   By this I do not mean that I stress what the Anglican Church has in common with the Roman Church, but what the Anglican Church shares with all the Churches organically descended from the first Church in Jerusalem – the Catholic faith confessed in the ancient Creeds especially the Nicene-Constantinopolitan, the Apostolic government and priesthood, the Gospel Sacraments, liturgical worship, and the doctrines, practices, customs and traditions that are the heritage of all Christians in all Churches.    Now Anglican High Churchmanship underwent a change in the nineteenth century due to the Oxford or Tractarian Movement of the 1830s.   The pre-Tractarian High Churchmen generally called themselves “Orthodox”, did not regard the English Reformation as a regrettable mistake, had no problem identifying as Protestant as well as Catholic, and had little to no interest in reintroducing practices jettisoned in the English Reformation, let alone new ones that Rome had introduced in the Council of Trent.   After the Oxford Movement many High Churchmen preferred the term “Anglo-Catholic”, saw the English Reformation as something to be regretted, avoided the term Protestant, and introduced liturgical reforms based on Rome’s Tridentine model.   Although my own High Churchmanship is far closer to that of the older pre-Tractarian model, I don’t agree with the judgement that a certain school of Low Churchmen have been making as of late that the Oxford Movement was a disastrous betrayal of Anglicanism.   I think that despite a tendency among some of the Tractarians to embrace as Catholic what was merely Roman, the reverse error of the Hyper-Protestants who reject as Roman what is truly Catholic, the Oxford Movement was overall more for the good than otherwise.

In saying that the Anglican Church is Reformed Catholic I do not mean that it is a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism, a middle ground that is neither the one nor the other, which is the image that the familiar expression via media unfortunately tends to conjure up.   The Anglican tradition is both fully Protestant and fully Catholic.   It is however a via media within both Protestantism and Catholicism.   The Anglican expression of Catholicism is not entirely that of the Roman Church nor that of the Eastern Orthodox but is somewhere between the two.   Our Episcopal hierarchical structure is closer to that of the Eastern Orthodox, for example, but we confess the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed with the filioque clause.   As a via media within Protestantism, it is often said that Anglicanism is a via media between Wittenberg and Geneva, meaning between the Lutheran and Calvinist expressions of Protestantism.   I don’t think anybody would be foolish enough to think us closer to Zurich.  


That brings me to the topic of this essay, which is another claim made by the same school of Low Churchmen referred to in the first paragraph.   In my last essay which was on the topic of Hyper-Protestantism I addressed certain similarities between this school and the Hyper-Protestants.   Here I wish to address their claim that true Anglicanism is not just Protestant generally, but Reformed in the sense of the specific form of Protestant theology that the word Reformed denotes in denominational titles such as Dutch Reformed or Reformed Baptist.   That type of theology is often called Calvinist, although this is misleading, and it is usually contrasted with Arminianism, which is even more misleading, and most misleading of all it is claimed that Arminianism is a close relative of Romanism.   Why these things are misleading will become clear when I give some background history to Reformed theology.   First, however, I clarify that what I will be arguing against is the claim that the Articles of Religion, which in their final form were adopted by the Church of England in 1571 as part of the Elizabethan Settlement, are distinctly Calvinist, not as opposed to Arminianism which did not exist in 1571, but as opposed to Lutheranism.    While this claim has some validity when it comes to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, it is completely false when it comes to soteriology which is where our focus will be, and is utterly laughable when it comes to any other topic.

Thomas Cranmer, who was consecrated and installed as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533 during the reign of Henry VIII was the principal leader of the English Reformation until the reign of Mary in which he was removed from office and executed.   An even more conservative Reformer than Dr. Luther, at the beginning of the English Reformation he was a Christian humanist of the same type as Erasmus and his reforms took the Patristic period rather than what was going on in continental Protestantism as their model.   Over the course of his career he became more influenced by the continental Protestants, at first the German Lutherans, then towards the end of his life, the Calvinists.   When, after the brief interruption of the English Reformation during the reign of Mary, Elizabeth I acceded the throne, the English Reformation took an even more conservative turn.   In 1559 she ordered the Black Rubric excised from the Book of Common Prayer.   This had been inserted into the Order for Holy Communion in the second Edwardian Prayer Book (1552) as an attempt at compromise between Scottish Calvinist Reformer John Knox’s argument that Communion should be received sitting and Cranmer’s conservative defence of kneeling, but it ended up more radical than either Cranmer or Knox, by asserting the Zwinglian view of the Sacrament (mere memorialism).   When it was eventually re-inserted into the Prayer Book it was in the Restoration edition (1662) and with the Zwinglian language excised.   In 1563, Archbishop Matthew Parker led Convocation in revising the Forty-Two Articles of Religion that Cranmer had drafted towards the end of Edward’s reign.   After a few more tweaks they become the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571.   The Article on the Lord’s Supper excludes both the Roman doctrine of Transubstantiation and Zwinglian memorialism.   While what it affirms sounds closer to Calvin’s view than any other continental Reformer, it needs to be compared with how the same Article read in the Forty-Two Articles.   Language that specifically excluded the Lutheran view was omitted from the final version.   That language reads:

Forasmuch as the truth of man’s nature requires that the body of one and the self-same man cannot be at one time in diverse places, but must needs be in some one certain place, the body of Christ cannot be present at one time in many and diverse places. Because (as Holy Scripture does teach) Christ was taken up into heaven, and there shall continue unto the end of the world, a faithful man ought not, either to believe or openly to confess the real and bodily presence (as they term it) of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

These words explicitly state the Calvinist position and include the reasoning that is the basis of the Lutheran accusation that Calvinists are crypto-Nestorians.   They were excised from the final version that became cemented as the official Anglican doctrine in the Elizabethan Settlement.   In their place was put the following:

The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.

The result was that in the Thirty-Nine Articles, Article XXVIII  (it was Article XXIX in the Forty-Two Articles) either a) affirmed a milder, more watered down, version of the Calvinist doctrine or b) was deliberately made ambiguous enough to allow for both Lutheran and Calvinist interpretations and exclude only the Roman and Zwinglian.   The overall tenour of the Elizabethan Settlement, which was to minimize divisive stances so as to maintain peace in the realm and Church, and the fact that if Parker et al. wished the Article to endorse the Calvinist position over the Lutheran they could have left it unedited, suggests that b) is the correct understanding here.

It was during the reign of Elizabeth that a decidedly Calvinist element arose in the English Church that called for reforms that greatly exceeded those of the Settlement.   These are historically remembered as the Puritans and towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign Richard Hooker provided an Anglican answer to their arguments, especially as expressed by Thomas Cartwright, in his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie.   In the Jacobean and Carolinian reigns, the next generation of Puritans became more extreme both in their Calvinism and their demands.   They accused Orthodox Churchmen like Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, who oversaw the translation of the Authorized Bible in King James I’s reign, and Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, of Arminianism for opposing their excessive preaching of predestination although it is highly unlikely that either man, both of whom tended to ignore contemporary theologians of narrow schools in favour of the Church fathers, was influenced much or at all by Jacob Arminius and his followers.   They also accused the same of being closet papists.   Here we see the first instance of this Calvinist linking of Arminianism with Romanism that has resurfaced in the contemporary school that I am addressing.   The second accusation was also ludicrous.   Andrewes, in his responses to Cardinal Bellarmine, and Laud in his published Conversation with the Jesuit Fischer, were the closest thing the Church of England had to the scholastics who had arisen in the Lutheran and Reformed Churches (think Johann Gerhard and Martin Chemnitz for the Lutherans, Zacharias Ursinus and Francis Turretin for the Reformed) to answer the new arguments from a new generation of Roman apologists such as said Cardinal Bellarmine who were armed with the re-articulation of Roman doctrine that had come out of the Council of Trent.   At any rate, the Puritans became so extreme that they, having taken control of Parliament, fought a civil war against King Charles I, captured, illegally tried, and murdered him, then established an interregnum under the protectorate of the tyrannical Oliver Cromwell who in his quest to rob the English people of all joy cancelled Christmas and Easter, shut down the theatres, outlawed games, sports, and other amusements outside of religious services on Sundays (the only day of the week people weren’t working), stripped the Churches of artwork and organs, imposed a legalism that out-Phariseed the Pharisees, and basically did everything in his power to prove H. L. Mencken right when he defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.   Their revolt against their king would become the inspiration towards the end of the next century of the French Revolution which in turn became the model for all subsequent Communist revolutions.   Since the Puritanical party in Parliament became the Whigs after the Restoration and Puritanism in North America developed into the Yankee culture of New England, Puritanism can be said to be the source of the major evils of the Modern Age – liberalism, Americanism, and Communism.   Whether consciously or not, the Puritan revolt against King Charles I was itself modelled after an earlier such revolt.   As Dr. Johnson put it “the first Whig was the devil”.

After the Restoration, which was when the British, sick to death of Puritanism, restored Charles II to his rightful throne, and restored the Church of England to the pre-Puritan status quo, the Puritan Calvinists divided among themselves into the Nonconformists, those unwilling to accept the restored Church of England who left and formed schismatic sects, and those for whom the restored Church of England was acceptable, who became the first Low Churchmen or as they were called at the time, Evangelicals (this was one of the first, if not the first, use of this term with a narrower sense than “Protestant”).   In the eighteenth century, Arminian Low Churchmen first began to appear due to the influence of John Wesley, and these introduced a new emphasis on experience into Evangelicalism.   The embrace of strict, academic, Reformed theology by many evangelicals in the Twentieth Century is, perhaps, a reaction to what became an over-emphasis on experience in the revivalist heritage of evangelicalism, and what we are seeing in this new school of Low Church Calvinism may be the Anglican expression of this phenomenon.

Their claim that Anglicanism in her Articles of Religion is specifically Reformed in the sense of Calvinist is not born out by an examination of the Articles.   It is also rather anachronistic because what they mean by Reformed theology or Calvinism had not yet been formulated in the way we know it today at the time the Articles received royal assent.   This may seem a strange thing to say, since John Calvin died in 1564, but what is called Calvinism today was formulated over sixty years after his death in response to a dissenting movement that had arisen within the Reformed tradition.   Theodore Beza, Calvin’s prize pupil and his successor in Geneva, had articulated a version of the doctrine of predestination that anyone with an ounce of humanity had to reject.   Impiously inquiring into the secret counsels of God, which is arrogant and forbidden to humanity, he had come up with the doctrine of supralapsarianism.   That is a big word that basically means that God first chose people to damn to hell, then decided to let them fall into sin so He would have grounds to damn them.  In 1582 – eleven years after the Articles of Religion – a Dutch Reformed student by the name of Jakob Hermanszoon, better known by the Latin version of his name Jacob Arminius, came to Geneva to study under Beza.   Later that decade he was ordained a pastor in Amsterdam and was asked by the Ecclesiastical Council there to defend Beza’s doctrine of supralapsarianism against Dirck Coornhert who had rejected it.   Arminius attempted to do this but found that he could not honestly do so and began to develop a modified form of Reformed theology that emphasized free will rather than predestination.   He died in 1609 and the following year, the year before the Authorized Bible was published in England, his followers published The Five Articles of Remonstrance, stating their views on election, predestination, and free will.   In 1618, the Dutch Reformed Church convened the Synod of Dort to answer this document and the following year published its Canons, of which there were five, one for each Article of Remonstrance.   These have ever since been called the Five Points of Calvinism and are usually placed in a slightly different order than they appear in the Canons of Dort so as to make the acronym TULIP – Total Depravity (or Inability), Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints.

Just in case you failed to pick up on that, the five points regarded as definitive of Calvinism today, were formulated in 1618-1619 in response to Arminianism, itself a response to supralapsarianism, a doctrine first taught by Calvin’s successor rather than Calvin himself.   Arminianism, therefore, rather than being a “sister of Romanism”, is most closely related within the various schools of Christian theology, to Calvinism itself.   Calvinism versus Arminianism, is an in-the-family dispute within the Reformed branch of Protestantism.   Calvinism and Arminianism disagree on all five points – that is kind of the point – although in other areas, they are closer to each other, than to any other form of Christianity, including the other Protestant traditions.   The five points also separate Calvinism from the other Protestant traditions.

Before looking at our Anglican Articles note how Lutheranism and Calvinism, agree and disagree on these matters.   Lutheranism and Calvinism are both monergistic (salvation is entirely the work of God not a cooperative effort between God and the one being saved) and Augustinian, and so both can affirm the first point of Calvinism at least if it is understood as the Augustinian concept of Original Sin, that the Fall so affected human nature as to make man utterly helpless in the matter of his own salvation and dependent utterly on the Grace of God.   Calvinists sometimes elaborate this in ways other Christians cannot affirm, such as claiming that the Image of God was wiped out by Original Sin.  Lutherans can also affirm unconditional election, but they reject double predestination which includes the concept of reprobation (predestination to hell) which Calvinism affirms.   So there is agreement between Lutheranism and Calvinism on one and a half points of Calvinism.   On the other points there is disagreement.   Lutherans most definitely do not believe in Limited Atonement – it conflicts with their understanding of the Gospel as a proclamation of Objective Justification accomplished for all human beings in Christ, that each human being must receive by faith for it to be validated as his own Subjective Justification.   Nor do they believe in Irresistible Grace.   God’s will, when worked through His Own power directly, is irresistible, but when God works through intermediate means, other wills can resist His own.   In the case of salvation, the salvation God accomplished for the world in Jesus Christ is brought to individuals through the intermediate means of the Gospel, which in both forms, Word and Sacrament, has in itself sufficient Grace to produce faith in the human heart, but because that Grace is conveyed through intermediate means, it is resistible rather than irresistible.   If someone believes it is entirely due to the Grace in the Gospel, he adds nothing of his own to it, if someone remains in unbelief, this is entirely due to his own resistance, and there is no answer, no simple one at any rate, to the question of cur alii, alii non (why some, not others).   On Perseverance both Lutherans and Calvinists affirm that the elect will persevere to the end and receive final salvation, but Calvinists combine this with the concept of perpetual justification – that after one is initially justified, this justification persists and is not lost through subsequent sin, a doctrine that among Baptists and Plymouth Brethren is often affirmed without Perseverance – and Lutherans do not, teaching that someone who commits Mortal Sin after initial justification loses it until he repents and is forgiven.

So where do our Articles stand on all of this?

Well, unsurprisingly the only points directly addressed are the first two, on which Lutherans and Calvinists mostly agree.   Articles IX and X, “Of Original or Birth Sin” and “Of Free-Will” respectively, affirm the Augustinian view of these things against the Pelagian.   Article XVII is entitled “Of Predestination and Election”.   Here it is in its entirety:

Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour. Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God be called according to God’s purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they through Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God’s mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.

As the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s Predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation.

Furthermore, we must receive God’ s promises in such wise, as they be generally set forth to us in holy Scripture: and, in our doings, that Will of God is to be followed, which we have expressly declared unto us in the Word of God.

Note there is no affirmation of Reprobation in this Article.   Lutherans as well as Calvinists can confess it.   Indeed, the second paragraph can almost be taken as an affirmation of the Lutheran understanding of the doctrine against the Calvinist.   Compare what it says about the doctrine being a comfort for the godly and not something to be excessively and indiscriminately preached because it can have a deleterious effect on the ungodly with Article XI of the Formula of Concord.   Paragraph 89 of the Solid Declaration of that Article reads:

Moreover, this doctrine gives no one a cause either for despondency or for a shameless, dissolute life, namely, when men are taught that they must seek eternal election in Christ and His holy Gospel, as in the Book of Life, which excludes no penitent sinner, but beckons and calls all the poor, heavy-laden, and troubled sinners [who are disturbed by the sense of God’s wrath], to repentance and the knowledge of their sins and to faith in Christ, and promises the Holy Ghost for purification and renewal, 90 and thus gives the most enduring consolation to all troubled, afflicted men, that they know that their salvation is not placed in their own hands,-for otherwise they would lose it much more easily than was the case with Adam and Eve in paradise, yea, every hour and moment,-but in the gracious election of God, which He has revealed to us in Christ, out of whose hand no man shall pluck us, John 10:28; 2 Tim. 2:19.

Limited Atonement (or Particular Redemption), the idea that Jesus died only for the elect is not affirmed in the Thirty-Nine Articles, and indeed, Limited Atonement contradicts both Articles II and XXXI.   Article II, which is about the “Word or Son of God, which was made very Man” ends with the affirmation that He “truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men” and Article XXXI, “Of the one Oblation of Christ finished upon the Cross” reads:

The Offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is none other satisfaction for sin, but that alone. Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said, that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits.

There is no affirmation of Irresistible Grace (or Effectual Calling for Calvinists who are allergic to TULIPs) in the Articles and it is not consistent with the language used of the Sacraments in Article XXV:

Sacraments ordained of Christ be not only badges or tokens of Christian men’s profession, but rather they be certain sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace, and God’s good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him.

Remember, Grace that is conveyed through intermediate means is Grace that can be resisted.    Now, for the final petal in the TULIP, let us turn to Article XVI “Of Sin After Baptism”.  This Article reads:

Not every deadly sin willingly committed after Baptism is sin against the Holy Ghost, and unpardonable. Wherefore the grant of repentance is not to be denied to such as fall into sin after Baptism. After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and by the grace of God we may arise again, and amend our lives. And therefore they are to be condemned, which say, they can no more sin as long as they live here, or deny the place of forgiveness to such as truly repent.

The language here strongly suggests the Lutheran position without explicitly affirming it against the Calvinist.   Note the words “deadly sin willingly committed after Baptism”.   This is the concept of Mortal Sin as it is understood in Lutheran theology.   Calvinist theology does not allow for a concept of Mortal Sin which is probably why the expression is avoided.   The possibility of departing from grace is affirmed, although in such a way that it is only the heresy of those who say that once you become a Christian you cannot sin again that can be definitely said  to be denied here rather than the Calvinist doctrine of perpetual justification.   What is most strongly affirmed, that repentance and forgiveness are available to those who sin after Baptism, is believed by all orthodox Christians, and what is condemned, earthly sinless perfectionism and the unavailability of forgiveness, are ideas asserted only by the looniest of wing-nuts.   Overall, the Article reads as a statement of the Lutheran view, worded carefully so as not to offend Calvinists.

From what we have just seen, those who would say that the Articles of Religion are Reformed in the sense of Calvinist as opposed to Lutheran, are clearly in the wrong when it comes to soteriology.   The Articles lean Lutheran, but in such a way as to not exclude Calvinists.  On the Lord’s Supper, they lean Calvinist, but in such a way as to not exclude Lutherans.   On Church government they are clearly not Calvinist – they affirm the Episcopal government shared by every Church everywhere before the sixteenth century, retained by the Anglican Church and by some Lutherans.   On the very matter of deciding what from the pre-Reformation tradition can be retained and what must be jettisoned they affirm in Article XX the normative principle which they share with the Lutheran Augsburg Confession rather than the regulative principle of the Calvinists and Anabaptists.

Those Low Churchmen who think the only true Anglicans are Five Point Calvinists clearly haven’t got a clue what they are talking about. — Gerry T. Neal