Some notes from Mr. (Prof.) Dickens about the dominant theme of Purgatory, works-salvation, and commercialization. This is probably difficult for a Western Protestant to imagine; this gets much press with Bruder Martin. (By the way, I've seen but don't have immediately at hand "detailed charts" that look like actuarial or arithmetic tables with complex charts of deeds that can be done/effected with corresponding reductions in Purgo-time. I need to find those in the library here.) "Justification by faith alone" cuts this nerve. In this sense, the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England "dewinded" and "bagged" Purgatory, invocation of saints and other schemes of justification and piety (pilgrimages, relics, etc.). Against this background, one can see the "biblical, pastoral and wise dimension" of the Heidelberg Catechism's first two questions and answers, a potent and grand Catechism...then, like now. What is probably needed is a much larger vision and review of medieval piety. Here are a few notes from Mr. Dickens.
Late medieval manuscripts of “popular and devotional life” in Papal Roman Anglicanism (1.0) reveal:
• “Efforts to attain salvation through devout observances, its fantastic emphasis on saints, relics and pilgrimages, its tendency to allow the personality and teaching of Jesus to recede from the focus of the picture” (4)
• A wide appeal to all socio-economic levels—poor, illiterate, but also rich, educated, nobility and kings
• Many “shrines,” including “St. Mary of Walsingham,” attracted “the highest born” as well as Henry VIII. We would add the attraction of Canterbury’s shrine of Thomas Becket. These were by no means a “mere cult of the vulgar” (5)
• Commercialization of the shrines
• “Dogmatic and detailed emphases on the horrors of Purgatory and the means whereby sinners could mitigate them”
• The average man could could anticipate a “long prison-sentence” in Purgatory” (6). The medieval man was “faced by quite terrifying views of punishment in the life to come”
• Tyndale viewed it all as a “world-wide plot” aimed at “fleecing the poor and rich alike”
• Edward VI forbad “organized intercessions for their dead parents and benefactors”
Mr. Dickens’ offers a grueling and long, but exemplary, quote from Sir Thomas More’s "Supplication of Souls" wherein the “suffering dead cry out to the living for more prayer and more masses:”
"If ye pity the blind, there is none so blind as we, which are here in the dark, saving for sights pleasant, and loathsome, till some comfort come. If ye pity the lame, there is none so lame as we, that neither can creep one foot out of the fire, nor have one hand at liberty to defend our face from the flame. Finally, if ye pity any man in pain, never knew ye pain comparable to ours; whose fire as far passeth in heat all the fires that ever burned upon earth, as the hottest of all those passeth a feigned fire that ever burned on earth, as the hottest of all those passeth a feigned fire on a wall. If ye every lay sick, and thought that night long and longed sore for day, while every hour seemed longer than five, bethink you then what a long night we will souls endure, that lie sleepless, restless, burning and broiling in the dark fire one long night of many days, of many weeks, and some of many years together…You have your physicians with you, that sometime cure and heal you; no physic will help our pain, nor plaister [sic] cool our heat. Your keepers do you great ease, and put you in good comfort; our keepers are such as God keep you from—cruel, damned sprites, odious, envious and hateful, despiteous [sic] enemies and despiteful tormentors, and their company more horrible and grievous to us than is the pain itself: and the intolerable torment that they do us, wherewith top to toe they cease not to continually tear us” (5-6).
No comments:
Post a Comment