The destruction of most of the libraries, music and art of England was not a religious breakthrough but a cultural calamity.
Prof Eamon Duffy in The Telegraph not so long ago:
For five centuries England has been in denial about the role of Roman Catholicism in shaping it. The coin in your pocket declares the monarch to be Defender of the Faith. Since 1558 that has meant the Protestant faith, but Henry VIII actually got the title from the Pope for defending Catholicism against Luther. Henry eventually broke with Rome because the Pope refused him a divorce, and along with the papacy went saints, pilgrimage, the monastic life, eventually even the Mass itself – the pillars of medieval Christianity.
To explain that revolution, the Protestant reformers told a story. Henry had rejected not the Catholic Church, but a corrupt pseudo-Christianity which had led the world astray. John Foxe embodied this story unforgettably in his Book of Martyrs, subsidised by the Elizabethan government as propaganda against Catholicism at home and abroad. For Foxe, Queen Elizabeth was her country’s saviour, and the Reformation itself the climax of an age-old struggle between God, represented by the monarch, and the devil, represented by the Pope.
Fear of Catholic Spain, the greatest power in Europe, gave Foxe’s story urgency. That fear escalated under the Stuart kings, for all of them married Catholics, and were suspected of favouring their wives’ religion. The prospect of a persecuting Catholicism imposed by an apostate monarchy fuelled Protestant anxiety. It led to Civil War, and the execution of King Charles I. Ironically, Charles was a loyal Anglican, but both his sons, Charles II and James II, did eventually embrace Catholicism.
In 1679 fear of Catholicism triggered a last orgy of persecution. The so called Popish Plot, to murder the king and seize the throne, was a paranoid fantasy concocted by Titus Oates, but it unleashed a wave of gruesome executions, including the judicial murder of the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett.
At the height of the hysteria, Protestant mythology achieved definitive form in a book that would shape the writing of Tudor history down to our own day. In 1679 Gilbert Burnet, a Scottish cleric, published the first volume of a massive History of the Reformation, an anti-Catholic narrative given scholarly credibility by the inclusion of dozens of documents gathered from public and private archives. Burnet would be the chief propagandist for the “Glorious Revolution” which deposed James II and set the Protestant William of Orange on the throne. His history rammed home the message that Catholicism and Englishness were utterly incompatible: Catholicism was tyranny, Protestantism liberation. “They hate us,” he wrote, “because we dare to be freemen and Protestants.”
It was a message the nation wanted to hear: Burnet was thanked by a special vote of Parliament. His work was supplemented by John Strype, another ardent “Orange” cleric, in a stream of biographies and collections of Reformation documents, many of them gathered from Foxe’s archives. Till well into the 20th century, historians of the English Reformation would rely on Burnet and Strype for their source materials, in the process perpetuating their late-Stuart take on the Tudor age.
The creation of the Public Record Office in 1838 made accessible thousands of documents from Tudor England, but didn’t radically alter this traditional spin on the Reformation story. The greatest Victorian historian of Tudor England was James Anthony Froude, who eagerly explored the archives, but read them through inherited spectacles. A Protestant to his fingertips, he hated clergy, doctrine, religious mystery and, above all, Catholicism. He saw the break with Rome as the beginning of Britain’s rise to imperial greatness, and the Reformation as a confrontation between two incompatible civilisations. Froude knew that the Reformation had been imposed to begin with on a reluctant nation, but he rejoiced that this had happened.
A disciple of Thomas Carlyle, he thought history was not for the little people, but was made by heroes. “Up to the defeat of the Armada,” he wrote, “manhood suffrage in England would at any moment have brought back the Pope.” Happily, there was no democracy in Tudor England, and the country had been saved from itself by the tyrannical Henry VIII, and if the abbeys were unroofed, and a few hundred priests butchered in the process, that was a small price for imperial greatness and the march of progress. Shorn of its more blatant jingoistic rhetoric, Froude’s Protestant version of the Reformation would be recycled in the writing of academic history late into the 20th century.
Historians no longer take that venerable Protestant version for granted, but it is still alive and well in the wider culture. It underpins, for example, Shekhar Kapur’s biopic Elizabeth. It was reiterated recently by the journalist Simon Jenkins when he wrote that “most Britons had, by the late 15th century, come to regard the Roman church as an alien, corrupt and reactionary agent of intellectual oppression, awash in magic and superstition. They could not wait to see the back of it.”
But in multicultural England, the inherited Protestant certainties are fading. It is time to look again at the Reformation story. There was nothing inevitable about the Reformation. The heir to the throne is uneasy about swearing to uphold the Protestant faith, and it seems less obvious than it once did that the religion which gave us the Wilton Diptych and Westminster Abbey, or the music of Tallis, Byrd and Elgar, is intrinsically un-English. The destruction of the monasteries and most of the libraries, music and art of medieval England now looks what it always was – not a religious breakthrough, but a cultural calamity. The slaughtered Popish martyrs look less like an alien fifth column than the voices of a history England was not allowed to have.
Oh, this time the “Reformers” exist in the form of “intellectual” atheists, people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens (God have mercy on his soul as his brother Peter hopefully prays for him.) and the like. I shudder to think of the future if an atheist is in charge… One has only to look at the Killing Fields of Cambodia, at the Cultural Revolution, the Holodomor, North Korea and many more within the space of less than 100 years, when atheists were at the rein of power and men had forgotten about God. Yet now we have young, hedonistic pseudo-intellectual “philosophes” calling for the abolishment of religion. Who is to blame but their teachers? Their parents? Idolizing technology and innovation and call it “progress”? The good men and women who did and still do nothing about it?
The Catholic Church – Builder of Civilization, Episode 12: Anti-Catholic Atrocities
In this video, the story of St. John Fisher is examined, and it states that the entire Oxford movement was influenced by a massive influx of Catholic priests who fled to England from the Atheist French Revolution, real men who did not conform to centuries of anti-Catholic propaganda. Perhaps, this time, it is people of tradition who will reform the “reformers”
There are many good history’s of the Reformation, which I will not list here, if people really have an open mind, they can see and find these. Btw, if one really wants to see perhaps the best of the so-called modern Protestants and Protestantism, they should see and read the great theologian Karl Barth! His CD will keep one busy for years!
And we should also note that Barth was Roman Catholic friendly, having many friends there, especially Von Balthasar! And as I have mentioned, he was invited to the Second Vatican Council, itself.
And btw, Dawkins and Hitchens certainly do not represent one wit of the true “Reformation”! I wonder Ioannes if you have read any of Martin Luther? As I have said, he related Holy Scripture to personal existence, this was his “hermeneutic” in the teaching of Scripture, of course with his Pauline “theologia crucis”! And here we have come to see (from himself and others) the great doctrine of the biblical ideas of “existentialism”! And perhaps this was the very basis of St. Paul’s doctrine of his Pauline Mysticism? Certainly here are the great dialectical theolog’s!
Are we doing our homework?
Fr Rober I wish to respectfully remind you that the article in question was not of the Reformation as a whole, but of the English Reformation. How many medieval churches still have their images from medieval times even after over 400 years of Lutheran worship and think of the Lutheran churches built in the Baroque style over a century after the Reformation in Germany and current day Poland. Crucifixes and statues weren’t considered popish things and contrary to the Reformation. When UVA over a century ago put a mere cross in their chapel it was viewed by some as a sign of Popery. There are plenty of evangelicals who would be horrified to worship in the churches Lutherans themselves built
@edmond: I am not sure of your point with me, since I am an Irish Brit and an Anglican? And both of these men are English. And whether we want to admit it or not certainly Luther affected the English Reformation, especially Cranmer! And btw I have a large Crucifix in my study, and most the time use a Crucifix in my Anglican worship, when I can.
Btw, as I have always said, I am a rather eclectic Anglican certainly, but here I am an Augustinian and somewhat a Reformed Calvinist in soteriology or salvation. And yet I am certainly an Anglican in liturgy (BCP) and in ecclesiology! And yet, I love the man and basic theology of Luther also! I like to think I am an Anglo-Irish “Catholic”! How’s that for eclectic?
Just another point, chatting with a young man from the OC Anglican Ordinariate (BJHN), here in So. Cal. he tells me there are several who are still inclined to the Augustinian and reformed doctrines of grace and salvation within this so-called Ordinariate.
My point was that the things specifically mentioned – the destruction of altars, statues, etc – most certainly cannot be blamed on Luther. The fact that such were later undone by Anglicans is not a sign of Romanism as I mentioned about the Lutherans and their churches. However Luther influenced Cranmer, it was not in such things as chopping all the heads off those figures in the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral or over the front entrance of Rochester Cathedral. That was not Luther’s influence. And there always were those in the CofE who did not agree with such. Neither Andrewes or Laud or the other Caroline divines or the non-jurors or the Oxford movement came our of nowhere. The times between 1549-1554 and 1559-1603 were not times when the bishops somehow obtained infallibility in their actions concerning reform of the Church. That puritan paranoia infected quite a sizable section of the American christian population. The whole point was whatever good they did – I would be going to a 28 parish if I thought otherwise, the iconoclasm was not one of them, and one Anglicanism wisely undid. It is in other denominations or non-denominational places where such is maintained.
I have no objection to such an attachment to Augustinian/reformed notions as you put it. Good for them! I am pleased you have your crucifix and combine Anglican liturgy with Lutheran theology. I don’t object. However, how does this reflect on the merits of an iconoclasm Luther did not advocate? And one Anglicanism wisely woke up from? What was good? Getting rid of the chaining of theology to Aristotilian philosophy, a renewed look at scripture and church fathers were accomplished in the post-reformation time of English time, along with a liturgy that has been able to develop and grow to one that is second to none, not to mention the KJV. They accomplished much. Duffy was not discussing that, only the one aspect he objected to. I merely pointed out how it was never universally accepted, Luther did not, and now wacky Americans get to export it elsewhere, even though Anglicans do not agree with it.
Even in England iconoclasm became the moment with Henry the 8th. Say how did we get on just iconoclastism in this discussion, and the Puritan’s? I am quite aware of American Reformed forms here. I have been in the USA few several years now. Without something of the balance of Anglican ecclesiology, Reformed doctrine and theology certainly gets out of round!
That is the problem in English speaking countries, particularly the US. Anything with the least association in their minds with things Catholic are opposed, even things the very founders of the Reformation in Germany did not condemn. You get plenty of people who are anti-image, anti-crucifix,anti-liturgical because these are Catholic things. I have no comment about British atheists, however there are people in the US who have ceased to believe anything but have held on that bizarre phobia to anything possibly related to things Catholic, in their own minds that is. The restoration of the altars of 1633 and the return of statues to empty niches in Victorian times only makes the churches as those churches Lutheran in Germany and Poland have always been, as well as Scandanavia and the Baltic states.
Cue Satan’s shock troops in the form of mass media, movies, novels, disinformation, strawmen, and so forth.
Oh, and don’t forget the sort of campaign that made ALL priests pedophiles, and ALL form of religion to be superstitious, and ALL form of belief to be stupid.
You can reason, and reason, and teach, and explain your point of view until you’re blue in the face, but it would be futile with some people! (I’d like to think myself as one of these stubborn people). And violent conflict would become inevitable. Will people be prepared for such an event? Some people bury their heads in the sand, others prattle on, thinking ‘everything is fine’ when everything is in fact falling apart.
It is always a spiritual war Ioannes, but always biblical and too theological. Btw, I think the Anglican Ordinariate will last, there are literally Anglicans in the ground that waited for this day. And though I will not go with the Ordinariate myself, I do wish them ALL well!
Sometimes, I wonder if it will stay spiritual… The temptation is great to resist with violence and disguise it as substantial action. (I mean, in many occasions, it makes sense to not do nothing when there is injustice that can be prevented or ceased by ‘substantial action’) On the other hand, if you’ve won the spiritual war, everything else is won.
Indeed the spiritual war is caught in the eschatological tension of the already-but-not-yet, but the Christian is ‘In Christ’…Indeed a Federal Vision!
Oh, yeah. Let’s all hate ourselves for being Anglican. Sorry, but one of the costs of the English Reformation is that the culture that produced Byrd and Tallis, et al, was cut off from the (Roman) Catholic world. So our patrimony seems to have been perverted into things it never was–lace, birettas, Bruckner and Palestrina. Not that I’m against Bruckner and Palestrina.
Well for me, it boils down to this; if you’re good enough for the Pope, you’re good enough for me. If orthodox Anglicanism does or doesn’t work, then the consequences would speak for themselves.
I wonder if the Eastern Orthodox churches are waiting for this entire Ordinariate business to fail as a “take that!” to the Papacy?
Who said about Anglicans and self-hate? Look at the Cathedrals in Bristol, Southwark, and Litchfield, not to mention of course St Pauls and naturally Liverpool. Saying they never should have gotten rid of all those treasures is not saying it because them Anglicans were cut off from Rome thats why. Various churches such ended getting them empty places refilled by later generations. In St Davids Cathedral, they pieced together a smashed up altar and reset it. They obviously thought the original decision was a mistake. They restored. Anglicans did so. Nor does it discount the liturgical developments of the last 400 years. Was Bishop Bennison’s treatment of the Philadelphia Cathedral a mistake? There are many who would say yes. The 1637 Scottish BCP is just as much the product of Anglican thought as the 1662 and the Caroline divines and non-jurors are part of that patrimony too. I suggest the Stones of Venice. It shows the decline of a church not cut from Rome. Its been a while. I forget who wrote it. Churches with fat naked cherubs and goofy little violens and harps for the main ornacmentation is hardly a positive development. Nor is merely copying past styles very badly because youve got no one who can do better. Being with Rome would have guaranteed nothing. I recall Victor Hugo had his opinion on the past changes to Notre Dame and not flattering. However, the point he made was what was lost was just as much a part o the heritage of English speaking christians as the Caroline divines or Sir George Gilbert Scott or Sir Ninian Comper. Some day people will say that about Bennison’s destruction. They already do. Hardly self-hating.
We go onto thay subject based on the headline that started it all, the one about the destruction of various religious art and treasures being a calamity. That is how. And who but people like Cromwell and the Puritans carried such paranoia over candles and a cross on an altar. The image of Cromwell angerly sweeping them off the altar come to mind. Duffy’s works seem focused on the iconoclasm.
After reading about Drogheda, I don’t think Oliver Cromwell is in Heaven.
This is a very good, and more positive than negative, assessment of Cromwell by an English Historian, and a convert to Catholicism (in 1974):
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=morrill&bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&recentlyadded=all&sortby=17&sts=t&tn=cromwell&x=70&y=6
Many of the copies are available for less than $5.00. Morrill shows how radical, religiously, Cromwell was, so much so that apparently when he wanted to emigrate to New England in the mid-1630s the colonial authorities wouldn’t have him. Curiously, there is no evidence that he ever rec’d Holy Communion once he became a “public figure,” although there is evidence that in the late 1620s and early 1630s he regularly preached at “conventicles.”