Lives of Great Religious Books

A Biography

Alan Jacobs

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400848027
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire du Christianisme

How The Book of Common Prayer became one of the most influential works in the English language While many of us are familiar with such famous words as, "Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here..." or "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, " we may not know that they originated with The Book of Common Prayer, which first appeared in 1549. Like the words of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, the language of this prayer book has saturated English culture and letters. Here Alan Jacobs tells its story. Jacobs shows how The Book of Common Prayer --from its beginnings as a means of social and political control in the England of Henry VIII to its worldwide presence today--became a venerable work whose cadences express the heart of religious life for many.The book's chief maker, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, created it as the authoritative manual of Christian worship throughout England. But as Jacobs recounts, the book has had a variable and dramatic career in the complicated history of English church politics, and has been the focus of celebrations, protests, and even jail terms. As time passed, new forms of the book were made to suit the many English-speaking nations: first in Scotland, then in the new United States, and eventually wherever the British Empire extended its arm. Over time, Cranmer's book was adapted for different preferences and purposes. Jacobs vividly demonstrates how one book became many--and how it has shaped the devotional lives of men and women across the globe.

One Book for One Country

CHAPTER 1

The Book of Common Prayer came into being as an instrument of social and political control. There will be much else to say about its origins, but here we must begin: the prayer book was a key means by which the great lords who ruled on behalf of the young King Edward VI consolidated English rule of the English church. In making one book according to which the whole country would worship, Cranmer and his allies were quite consciously dismantling an immense and intricate edifice of devotional practice. They had both theological and political reasons for doing this, but the immediate effect was political and was widely seen as such.

Only the barest outlines of this ever-branching network of conflicts can be traced here. The story effectively begins with Henry VIII, though Henry was not the first to insist on English rule of the English church: throughout the fourteenth century Parliament had passed laws limiting the scope of papal power in England, culminating in the great Statute of Praemunire, enacted as law at the very end of that century, during the reign of Richard II. Such laws had been prompted by royal resentment of the pope’s power to appoint non-Englishmen to highly profitable ecclesiastical offices, but Henry VIII drew on these precedents to argue that the pope had no right to determine whether Henry was legally married to Catherine of Aragon, whom he had wed in 1509. After a series of miscarriages and infant deaths—Prince Henry, the longed-for heir to the throne, died in 1511 after just a few days of life—King Henry came to believe that his marriage to Catherine was unlawful and displeasing to God. Catherine had been married to Henry’s older brother, Arthur, and according to the notions of consanguinity then followed she and Henry could not marry after Arthur’s death. This prohibition had been lifted by Pope Julius II, but by 1527 Henry was openly arguing not only that Julius had been wrong to permit the marriage—in direct violation of Leviticus 20:21, as Henry interpreted the text—but also, and more important, that Julius had never possessed legitimate authority in the matter. The legal tradition embodied in the praemunire laws made it clear, Henry said, that no pope could make such determinations about the marriage of an English king. So he wanted his marriage annulled, and moreover demanded that the current pope, Clement VII, agree that Julius had exceeded his authority in proclaiming lawful Henry’s marriage to Catherine.

Of course, Henry also wished to marry Anne Boleyn.

Assisted by his leading minister, Cardinal Wolsey—and later, after Wolsey’s fall from grace due to his failure to resolve the king’s “Great Matter,” by Thomas Cromwell—Henry sought to convince English churchmen that the king was “the only protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy,” and that the church itself could only hold such powers “which do not disparage the regal authority and laws.”¹ The churchmen resisted, to varying degrees, as did Parliament when its prerogatives were involved, though Henry’s warning to them in 1532 had been blunt: “I assure you, if you will not take some reasonable end now when it is offered, I will search out the extremity of the law, and then will I not offer you so much again.” And indeed, eventually Henry got what he wanted. The key year for resolving the Great Matter, and for many future matters also, was 1533. On March 30, Thomas Cranmer—strongly supported by the Boleyn family—was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury, swearing an oath that he would not allow his loyalty to the church to trump his loyalty to the king, and pledging that he would do nothing to interfere with “reformation of the Christian religion, the government of the English Church, or the prerogative of the Crown or the well-being of the same commonwealth.” Soon thereafter Parliament passed a law allowing ecclesiastical suits to be tried in England, by English clergy, and on May 23, Cranmer, having heard the evidence in the case, declared King Henry’s marriage to Catherine null and void. This would have paved the way for Henry to marry Anne, except that, anticipating all these events, Henry had already done so in January. In September Anne gave birth to Elizabeth, the future Virgin Queen.

All the pieces were in place for the emergence of an English Reformation, the establishment of the Church of England, and the creation of the Book of Common Prayer, but none of these events was clearly foreseen by anyone. Some of the thinkers Henry had relied on to consolidate his case were closely associated with the nascent Protestant Reformation: as early as 1528 Anne Boleyn had lent Henry a copy of The Obedience of a Christian Man by William Tyndale, a radical theologian in exile on the Continent and the first great translator of the Bible into modern English. Of Tyndale’s Obedience Henry is alleged to have said, “This is a book for me, and for all kings to read,” but about the Reformation project as a whole he wavered, doubtful.

Henry practiced theology long before he anointed himself head of the English Church; in 1521 he had written Assertio septem sacramentorum (Defense of the Seven Sacraments), a refutation of Martin Luther that led Rome to proclaim him “Defender of the Faith,” and some of his later theological interventions also revealed a traditionalist bent. But not all. As his reign progressed Henry’s theological proclamations became more forceful and more incoherent. He passionately defended transubstantiation—the conversion during the Mass of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ—but with equal passion denounced the worship of images and denied the power of relics. He thought of the priesthood more as an administrative position than a divine vocation, yet demanded that priests remain celibate, on penalty of death. (When this insistence became law in 1539, as part of the so-called Six Articles, Thomas Cranmer felt the need to smuggle his wife and children out of the country.) Henry may have venerated Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, but in 1536 he at least acquiesced in Tyndale’s execution, despite Thomas Cromwell’s pleas on the reformer’s behalf. Henry consistently despised what he believed to be the pernicious doctrine of justification by faith alone, a point on which, perhaps surprisingly, Cranmer ventured to argue with the king. The Ten Articles, published by Cranmer in 1536 at the king’s insistence, defended the cult of the saints, but two years later, as part of the dissolution and despoliation of the English monasteries, Henry destroyed the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, disinterred and destroyed the saint’s bones, and forbade the very mention of the man’s name. (Thomas, as an exemplar of pious resistance to an overreaching king, and as the most famous of all English saints, represented a greater threat to Henry’s program than any other holy figure.) By 1545, in the King’s Primer, whose authorship Henry claimed, prayers for the dead were mocked: “There is nothing in the Dirge taken out of Scripture that maketh any mention of the souls departed than doth the tale of Robin Hood.” One may discern in these assertions—wildly varying in their theological tendencies but unanimous in their dictatorial tone—a slow drift toward the Reformers, but that is the most that can be said.

However, throughout the last fifteen years of Henry’s reign the evangelical party gradually consolidated its hold on the English church and on some of the nation’s leading aristocratic families.² When Henry died in 1547, leaving his throne to nine-year-old Edward, the son his third wife, Jane Seymour, had borne him, the evangelicals found themselves with free rein to reshape the English church. They took full advantage of the opportunity.

For our purposes here, the key role played by the council of regents, who ruled England on behalf of young King Edward, was to leave Thomas Cranmer the freedom to make such changes to the doctrine, worship, and structure of English Christianity as he saw fit to make. And he saw fit to make many. Henry may have insisted on the reassertion of many traditionalist positions in the Ten Articles of 1536 and the Six Articles of 1539, but throughout the latter part of Henry’s reign Cranmer was at work, quietly and slowly, implementing countervailing changes.³

It was actually Thomas Cromwell in 1538 who authorized, on behalf of the king, the printing, distribution, and use of an English Bible—what would come to be called the Great Bible—as translated by Miles Coverdale. Coverdale, working on the Continent as Tyndale had and drawing heavily on Tyndale’s work, had published a complete English Bible in 1535 and several updated versions since. (Coverdale knew little Hebrew or Greek, and relied on the Latin Vulgate and on Luther’s German Bible to finish Tyndale’s work.) He oversaw the printing of the Great Bible in Paris and had the copies shipped across the Channel. By the king’s order, a copy of the Great Bible was displayed in every parish church in England, chained to a desk so it might be read by any and all—or, since most parishioners were illiterate, so it could be seen. Priests were required to read the biblical passages appointed for any given service in Coverdale’s English.

So by the time Cranmer’s English version of the Litany came to be used in 1544, English Christians were getting used to English accompanying Latin in their worship services. There was no overnight replacement of Latin by English, but rather a gradual process by which Latin receded and English became more dominant. That was how Cranmer preferred to get things done. He worked on English versions of a revised breviary (a book containing the Daily Office, the prayers priests say at various times each day) and a primer (a book adapted from the breviary for the use of laypersons in their private prayers). When these did not gain immediate acceptance, he set them aside and turned to other tasks. Concerning the most explosive matters he simply remained silent: though scholars now believe that by Henry’s death he had come to disbelieve that Christ was corporeally present in any way in the Mass, he knew that Henry’s commitment to the doctrine was so absolute that debate was futile at best and mortally dangerous at worst. He bided his time.

He served the king obediently even in matters that must have wounded his conscience. Although he protested the execution of Thomas Cromwell, he dared not deny the charges made against Henry’s longtime chief minister. In 1542 he interrogated Henry’s fifth queen, Katherine Howard, and secured her confession to the capital crime of adultery; this could not have given him any real satisfaction, much less pleasure. But by obedience, and by keeping a remarkably low profile when traditionalists hunted (sometimes successfully) for heretics among his fellow evangelicals, he kept the cause of reform alive and always moving, however imperceptibly, forward. In 1545 Cranmer commissioned a portrait of himself by a German artist, Gerlach Flicke. It shows him sitting, holding open a book of the epistles of St. Paul. On the table before him lies a book by St. Augustine, De fide et operibus—On Faith and Works. Paul and Augustine were of course the prime authorities on whose thought the Reformation was built, and more specifically were the chief articulators of the gospel of justification sola fide, by faith alone. On this point Cranmer staked not only his reputation but also his whole public identity. He could wait as long as necessary to bring this point home to the English people. He bided his time and when Edward came to the throne he could at last act swiftly and decisively.

On January 28, 1547, as Henry lay dying, Cranmer sat with him and held his hand. The archbishop did not conduct any of the familiar Catholic prayers for the dying, but asked the king to make some sign that he placed his trust in Jesus Christ. Henry squeezed Cranmer’s hand, and then died.⁴ At the coronation of Henry’s young son, Edward, Cranmer delivered a homily encouraging the new king to be like Josiah, King of Judah, who also came to the throne as a boy but then went on to lead a revival of true religion in his country (as described in 2 Kings 22). Having so exhorted his new sovereign, Cranmer set to work.

One can understand a good deal of what Cranmer would seek to achieve in making a prayer book by noting one of his first major actions under Edward: overseeing the creation of a Book of Homilies. For Cranmer, traditional religion in England had been more concerned to demonstrate the sacerdotal power of the priesthood than to instruct the people in Christian doctrine and practice. Sermons were rarely preached, and when preached were rarely doctrinally sound or useful. The Book of Homilies was meant to remedy that deficiency. Moreover, one can see Cranmer’s chief concerns by the order of the Homilies, especially the first four, which he almost certainly composed:

A Fruitful exhortation to the reading of holy Scripture.

Of the misery of all mankind.

Of the salvation of all mankind.

Of the true and lively faith.

Of good works.

Of Christian love and charity.

Against swearing and perjury.

Of the declining from GOD.

An exhortation against the fear of death.

An exhortation to obedience.

Against whoredom and adultery.

Against strife and contention.

It is the reading of the Bible that Cranmer first wants to ensure. (He had already emphasized the same point in his 1540 preface to the Great Bible.) The principles of evangelical theology are laid out in neat sequence here: Read the Bible and you will learn of “the misery of all mankind,” that all since Adam’s fall suffer under the power of sin; you will also learn that God has made one plan for “the salvation of all mankind” in the death and resurrection of his son Jesus Christ; and you will further learn that the only way to grasp this salvation is by having a “true and lively faith” in Christ as your Savior. Moreover, “good works” do not lead to this faith, they follow from it: a genuine faith will “break out and shew itself by good works,” but salvation is by God’s grace alone (sola gratia) and again, this grace is appropriated by the believer through faith alone (sola fide). It was necessary, thought Cranmer, that this plan of salvation be universally understood, and the first requirement of that understanding was the reading of Scripture. The commissioning, writing, and promulgating of these homilies occupied much of Cranmer’s time in 1547.

Meanwhile, he pursued a more obviously momentous task that he must have been contemplating—and probably had been privately working on—for some years: “The Order of the Communion,” that is, an English liturgy for the part of the traditional Mass during which laypersons receive the bread and wine. Or rather, the bread: it had for centuries been customary for laypersons to receive Communion rarely, perhaps once a year, and in “one kind,” but Cranmer was determined to make Communion much more frequent, to have it administered “in both kinds,” and to create an English liturgy that would explain to laypersons what precisely they were and were not doing when they consumed the elements. On Easter Sunday 1548, by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury, this English order for Communion became mandatory throughout England. The Latin Mass that had, in its various forms, been the only Mass in England for nearly a millennium was at that one stroke abolished.

Over the past quarter-century a great deal of scholarly work has been done on the devotional world of late medieval England, most notably by Eamon Duffy in his brilliant, polemical, and influential study The Stripping of the Altars. Duffy and a number of other scholars have given us a vivid picture of ordinary late medieval English folk at prayer, and it is only by taking at least a brief glance at that picture that we will be able to understand just how dramatically Cranmer and the other evangelical leaders of England changed the country’s r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Chronology
• List of Figures
• Introduction: The Archbishop in His Library
• Chapter 1: One Book for One Country
• Chapter 2: Revision, Banishment, Restoration
• Chapter 3: Becoming Venerable
• Chapter 4: The Book in the Social World
• Chapter 5: Objects, Bodies, and Controversies
• Chapter 6: The Pressures of the Modern
• Chapter 7: Many Books for Many Countries
• Appendix: The Prayer Book and Its Printers
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index