Reformed Churchmen

We are Confessional Calvinists and a Prayer Book Church-people. In 2012, we remembered the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer; also, we remembered the 450th anniversary of John Jewel's sober, scholarly, and Reformed "An Apology of the Church of England." In 2013, we remembered the publication of the "Heidelberg Catechism" and the influence of Reformed theologians in England, including Heinrich Bullinger's Decades. For 2014: Tyndale's NT translation. For 2015, John Roger, Rowland Taylor and Bishop John Hooper's martyrdom, burned at the stakes. Books of the month. December 2014: Alan Jacob's "Book of Common Prayer" at: http://www.amazon.com/Book-Common-Prayer-Biography-Religious/dp/0691154813/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417814005&sr=8-1&keywords=jacobs+book+of+common+prayer. January 2015: A.F. Pollard's "Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation: 1489-1556" at: http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Cranmer-English-Reformation-1489-1556/dp/1592448658/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420055574&sr=8-1&keywords=A.F.+Pollard+Cranmer. February 2015: Jaspar Ridley's "Thomas Cranmer" at: http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Cranmer-Jasper-Ridley/dp/0198212879/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422892154&sr=8-1&keywords=jasper+ridley+cranmer&pebp=1422892151110&peasin=198212879

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Thomas Cranmer: "Burning Sincerity" by David Starkey

An exquisite review of MacCulloch's Thomas Cranmer by the ever-vibrant, if not a bit racy (for a Brit), David Starkey.

Starkey, David. "Burning sincerity." New Statesman 125.4288 (1996): 46. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 7 Nov. 2010.

THOMAS CRANMER: A LIFE
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Yale University Press, £29.95

When my students are told about the fantastical twists and turns of Reformation theology, their reaction is: "Did they really believe all that?" For them-nice, secular, animal-loving humanists to a (new) man-it's almost impossible to comprehend how different interpretations of the sacrament of the altar (that the bread and wine become the physical body and blood of Christ; or that the body and blood were present really but spiritually; or that the communion was only a commemoration) became literally a matter of life and death.

"How would you measure sincerity?" I reply. "Would being burned alive be a suitable test?" Everyone grimaces with distaste; then one of the more hard-headed points out that burnings were fairly commonplace. "Well, would being burned alive and thrusting your right hand into the flames so that it's burned first be more convincing?" I ask.

The man who did that was Thomas Cranmer, Henry VIII's Archbishop of Canterbury, who began his public career in 1533 by dissolving the king's marriage with Catherine of Aragon and declaring their daughter Mary a bastard. It ended 23 years later in 1556, when he was burned at the stake at the personal insistence of Mary, who was then queen.

Cranmer is the subject of an important new life by Diarmaid MacCulloch. And by and large MacCulloch confirms my crude little sincerity test. He does so at huge length (ten pages for each of Cranmer's 67 years) and with vast learning, He also uses all the new tricks of the historical trade: he blazons Cranmer's coat of arms; discusses his building works and analyses his magnificent portrait by Gerlach Flicke (though Yale's cheapskate reproduction reduces the painting to an inky blur). His style is also lively and direct. But for all his right-on anachronisms ("Cranmer filed an invoice") his subject remains obstinately and irreducibly alien to the 20th-century mind.

MacCulloch does, nevertheless, offer two keys to unlock the character of this inhabitant of the "other country" of Tudor England. Cranmer was a university don and a passionate hunter and horseman. He rode the bucking bronco of Tudor politics with a horseman's skill.

He had, on the one hand, a huntsman's patience and, on the other, an ability to do the utterly unexpected-such as to marry twice. But it is as an intellectual in politics that he really comes alive.

By an intellectual I mean a man with an idea. Cranmer was a humanist-not in the vulgar sense of a believer in man as the measure of all things, or in the high one of a practitioner of scientific history, which (as MacCulloch observes) is the final flower and inheritor of the humanist tradition. Instead, his humanism was theory about language.

In the Middle Ages, the language of scripture had four senses: literal, topological, allegorical and anagogical (or mystical). The least of these was the literal but for Cranmer, as for his fellow-humanist William Tyndale (whose analysis this is), there was only one sense: the literal. Words meant what they said, neither more nor less. The whole of Cranmer's career, from the throne of St Augustine to the fire in the Oxford town-ditch, derives from this insight.

Cranmer came to believe that the "literal and grammatic sense" meant that Christ's words at the last supper "this is my body . . . this is my blood" were a metaphor. He thus journeyed from the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation towards a view of the presence which was spiritual or commemorative. He also persuaded himself, much more quickly and decisively, that Paul's words in the Epistle to the Romans, "The powers that be are ordained of God", meant that Henry VIII and not the Pope was the chosen vehicle of God's purpose on earth. This was the foundation of his lifelong defence of the royal supremacy over the church.

Cranmer's methods were as academic as his logic. Like those later positivists the Webbs, he believed that the accumulation of data was the way to prove a point. So by careful note-taking and source-quarrying, he built up a series of great source collections or commonplace books, carefully classified according to the principal controversies of the day.

Henry VIII had been attracted to Wolsey by the speed with which he carried out his wishes; Cranmer impressed him by the speed with which he could supply information.

Finally, Cranmer's attitude to language had major literary implications. It made him committed to prose rather than verse. And it made his prose plain, masculine and mercifully free from neo-Latin ornament. This mattered because the prose he wrote entered the language through the Book of Common Prayer. When you say "peace in our time", you are quoting not Neville Chamberlain but Thomas Cranmer.

So Cranmer was much more substantial than the Prufrock figure-"Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous"-of MacCulloch's epigraph. He was the chief theoretician of the English Reformation and one of the prime shapers of the English language. His enemies did not underestimate him. For Mary, his and the Duke of Northumberland's execution evened the score with the deaths of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher under Henry VIII.

Cranmer and More indeed stand as opposites and equals. More was the supreme ironist, dying with a joke on his lips for an England that might have been: Catholic, Latin and European. Cranmer, positivist to the last, burned rather than cut off the hand that had offended by signing his recantation, and by this gesture helped bring about the England that was to be: Protestant, English and insular.

Loving a loser as we do, it is More who has captured our imagination. But, as Cranmer's England also dies at the end of the 20th century, perhaps we can begin to grasp his stature too.

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By DAVID STARKEY

David Starkey teaches history at the London School of Economics

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