Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of
England
By Roger
Scruton
(Atlantic Books, 224 pages,
$32.95)
When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not
only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not
only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.
Thus Rev. Thwackum, the schoolmaster in Tom
Jones. That was the 1730s, or about halfway through
Roger Scruton’s Our Church. The Rev. Thwackum
is drawn satirically, but his smugness was well
justified.
The religious passions of the previous century had subsided or
been pushed off to inconsequential border territories in Ireland
and the North American colonies. The Church of England had been
incorporated into England’s unwritten constitution. Her—the gender
of that pronoun is explained by Scruton—bishops sat in Parliament.
Her clergy, typically younger sons of aristocrats or landed gentry,
were comfortably knitted into the English class system. (“The
Church or the Army” was the rule for those drawing short straws in
the primogeniture lottery.)
The Church’s core documents, the King James Bible and the Book
of Common Prayer, were known at least in part to all educated
Englishmen and had lent innumerable phrases to the common language.
She coexisted peacefully with numerous Nonconformist sects and with
remnant patches of Roman Catholicism. (That “Roman” prefix is
necessary in this context: Reciting the Nicene Creed in their
Eucharist service, Anglicans declare their belief in “one holy
catholic and apostolic Church.”)
Roger Scruton’s book sufficiently covers the 200 years of the
Church’s history previous to Rev. Thwackum, and the following 280.
Our Church is not really a history, though. Scruton keeps
to a chronological sequence, but takes off on long diversions into
theology, literature, hymnology, architecture, and entirely
personal reflections. The book is, as Scruton says of the Church
herself, “a creative muddle.” Possibly some readers will dislike it
on that account. For myself, I found it charming, very English.
The Church of England is easy to mock. The English themselves
have never taken her very seriously, as that Tom Jones
quote illustrates. The silly vicar has been a stock character in
English comedy and satire through Jane Austen and Trollope to P.G.
Wodehouse, Benny Hill, and Beyond the Fringe. (“Life is
rather like opening a tin of sardines: We’re all of us looking for
the key…”) Not just silly either, but also sexually eccentric:
Choirboy jokes were a staple of playground humor in my own English
schooldays.
Not all the mockery is well founded. Roman Catholics jeer that
the Church only exists because Henry VIII wanted a divorce. There
is much more to be said than that. Henry’s father had become king
after decades of strife over who should succeed to the throne.
Henry wanted to ensure a clear succession for the peace of the
nation, but his wife was barren. Scruton: “The refusal of the Pope
to grant an annulment of Henry’s first marriage was experienced by
the King as a threat to his sovereignty.” Henry was driven by
rational statecraft, not—or not only—by sexual boredom.
Henry’s break with the papacy was, in any case, only the last
act in a centuries-long record of restlessness against Roman
authority among England’s political elites. The English barons,
pushing back after King John’s groveling to Innocent III in 1213,
made John sign the Magna Carta, in which the Church is referred to
as Ecclesia Anglicana. A half century before that, there
had occurred the colorful dispute between Henry II and Thomas à
Becket, his archbishop of Canterbury, centering on clerical
immunity to the king’s laws. (Having mentioned Becket, I want to
thank Scruton for including the “à,” which is nowadays usually
dropped for reasons of footling pedantry.)
Henry’s reforms did not go unchallenged. Among the common people
of England there was still much devotion to the Roman religion,
which they perceived in terms of relics, images, pilgrimages,
fasts, and the doctrine of Purgatory. Eamon Duffy’s The
Stripping of the Altars describes all this in superb detail.
It also, however, supports Scruton’s point that “the parish priest,
rather than the wealthy bishop” was seen as the true representative
of the Church. “Heaven is high, the Emperor far away,” murmured the
Chinese of old; 16th-century Englishmen seem to have felt the same
about the pope. Given the great piety of the medieval English,
noted by many foreign visitors, the surprising thing is how
little resistance Henry met. This was, remember, a regime
with no standing army or police.
A key point of difference at the intellectual level was the
doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserts that the Communion
bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ.
Anglican authorities were still thundering against this in Queen
Anne’s time (early 18th century). Scruton makes much of the
dispute, arguing that:
The revulsion that the doctrine aroused among the
Elizabethan divines derived not from any rejection of sacraments
but, on the contrary, from a desire to retain them—to establish a
sacramental church that honestly explained itself to its members.
This, in a nutshell, was the Anglican mission, and it began with
Wyclif [an Oxford theologian, late 14th century], long before the
Reformation had turned the order of Christendom upside
down.
I am not sure why transubstantiation is less “honest” or
harder to explain than its Anglican competitor, the “real presence”
doctrine. As with those centuries of aristocratic restlessness,
though, it is useful to be reminded that revolutions, including
religious revolutions, are usually culminations of a long process,
not thunderbolts from blue sky.
And when Scruton returns to his point about a sacramental
church, as he does several times, he clarifies it with each
returning. Thus 80 pages later we read of Scruton in the organ loft
of the 15th-century English country church whose instrument (it
“has one manual, three stops, and no pedals”) he plays. He is
musing on the institution for which he is “pumping out” hymns.
The Anglican communion is a form of sacramental
religion…in which anathemas and excommunications long ago ceased to
have a point. And I rejoice that the Church to which I belong
offers an antidote to every kind of utopian thinking. The Church of
England is the Church of somewhere. It does
not invoke some paradisal nowhere; nor does it summon the
apocalyptic destruction of everywhere in the manner of the
seventeenth century Puritans.
That is all very well; but does the somewhere that the
Church of England is the Church of, still exist? It is poignant to
read Scruton, early in his book—he is writing about the Norman and
Plantagenet kings—say this: “Our common law is inimical to laws
made outside the kingdom.” Not anymore it isn’t, pal. England is
currently bracing itself for a flood of immigrants from Romania and
Bulgaria, who from January 1, 2014, under EU rules, cannot be
denied entry, common law be damned.
THE CHURCH HERSELF has been losing market share for
decades. Entire large districts of English cities and towns are
under occupation by foreign immigrants who give not a fig for the
Church, nor indeed for Christianity. News stories about the
installation of the new archbishop of Canterbury are decorated with
gloomy asides about dwindling church membership.
Part of the problem, Scruton notes, has been the Empire, which
diffused the Church over vast territories, but whose English
inhabitants later melted away, taking their Englishness with them;
or in the case of the North American colonies, rebelled…but then
again, American Episcopalianism was birthed in Scotland, not
England—an offshoot of an offshoot. The Church of Somewhere became
the Church of Everywhere, and therefore, of course, of Nowhere. As
Scruton writes glumly, “Its most important controversies
today—those over women priests and homosexuality—are being fought
out between American liberals and African conservatives, with the
old English establishment looking on in mild astonishment at the
fuss.”
Our Church is full of good things. Scruton writes
fluently, with many memorable touches. I especially liked his
recollection of his teenage self at Communion, listening to the
organist’s improvised sequences: “It was as though the Holy Ghost
himself were present, humming quietly to himself in an English
accent.” He has provocative insights, too, as when he writes of
“the pagan heart of the Roman Catholic liturgy.” He is only
occasionally tedious, mostly when writing about theology, a subject
in which I, along with most Anglicans (admittedly lapsed, in my
case), have zero interest.
I liked this book. However, I was raised, like Scruton, in
mid-20th century England, in a culture now as comprehensively
extinct as that of the Moabites. Whether Our Church will
find favor with, or even be comprehensible to, readers of different
nativity, I would not venture to speculate.
