Another good quote from Alan Jacobs on Cranmer, the Book of Common Prayer (indirectly), idolatry, the Romish Mass,
transubstantiation & its correlative liturgical pieties (genuflecting to the
host, reserving the host or bowing to it like TFOs, the reprobatish Laud, and/or
some unfortunate Lutherans), the advocacy of continued ignorance (by the Romanists)
and the dueling historians (Dickens v. Duffy). Jacobs captures it well.
Jacobs, Alan (2013-09-30). The "Book of Common Prayer": A
Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books) (p. 22). Princeton University Press.
Kindle Edition.
"It was long commonplace to think of the Middle Ages as a period of
collective, communal experience, and the rise of modernity in the sixteenth
century as heralding a new era of individualism. But in terms of public prayer
, something like the opposite was true. The High Mass in particular was
generally understood as an opportunity for private devotion. It was true that
the priest celebrated the Mass in a language the common people did not
understand, but in practice his performance of the rite on behalf of the
congregants left them free to engage, if they wished, in deep silent or
whispered prayer. The priest’s gestures and intonations were sufficient for
people to understand the major transitions in the rite and adjust their
devotions accordingly. But throughout most of the Mass, the people were allowed
and encouraged to lose themselves in prayer, often with assistance from their
rosary beads.
“Cranmer’s great nemesis, the traditionalist bishop Stephen Gardiner,
called special attention to these habits: `In times past, when men came to
church more diligently than some do now, the people in the church took small
heed what the priest and the clerks did in the chancel, but only to stand up at
the Gospel and kneel at the Sacring,' that is, the moment of transubstantiation
of bread into Christ’s flesh. For Gardiner and other traditionalist bishops, it
seemed evident that celebrating the Eucharistic rite in English would only
distract people from their prayers. John Christopherson, the dean of Norwich,
wrote in 1554 that the congregation should 'travail themselves in fervent
praying, and so shall they highly please God . … It is much better for them not
to understand the common service of the church, because when they hear others
praying in a loud voice , in the language that they understand, they are
[hindered] from prayer themselves, and so come they to such a slackness and
negligence in praying, that at length as we have well seen in these late days,
in manner pray not at all.' So also the Catholic controversialist Thomas
Harding: `as the vulgar service'— that is, the service in English— `pulleth
their minds from private devotion to hear and not to pray, to little benefit of
knowledge, for the obscurity of it; so the Latin giveth them no such motion.' 5
For Cranmer and his fellow evangelicals, these traditional practices turned
what should have been an experience of communal devotion, a shared experience
of gratitude for God’s mercies, into a kind of magic show. In 1543, when
Cranmer had experimented with an English liturgy in parishes in Kent, the
people were deeply dubious that the Lord’s Prayer said in English would work:
their feeling was that the incantation had to be said precisely, and in Latin.
6 Likewise, many historians have surmised that the phrase `hocus pocus' is a
corruption of Hoc est corpus meum, `This is my body': Christ’s words instituting
the practice of Communion, and the words uttered by the priest at the Sacring.
The common practice at High Mass was for the priest to 'elevate' the Host at
this moment, so that people might 'see their Lord'— especially important since
they were unlikely to be receiving the bread. (As Eamon Duffy has pointed out,
in a low Mass, conducted daily and perhaps in a side chapel of the parish
church, the experience was much more intimate: people crowded close to the
altar, drawing as near as possible to the consecrated elements, which they
nevertheless did not touch or taste. 7 ) Cranmer found all this deeply
exasperating and alien to genuine Christian devotion. In his book Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of
the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ (1550, though written in
1548), he writes,
[Cranmer] `What made the people to run from their seats to the altar, and
from altar to altar, and from sacring (as they called it) to sacring, peeping, tooting and gazing at
that thing which the priest held up in his hands, if they thought not to
honour the thing which they saw? What moved the priests to lift up the
sacrament so high over their heads? Or the people to say to the priest, `Hold up! Hold up!'; or one man
to say to another `Stoop down before'; or to say `This day have I seen my
Maker”; and “I cannot be quiet except I see my Maker once a day”? What
was the cause of all these, and that as well the priest and the people so
devoutly did knock and kneel at every sight of the sacrament, but that they worshipped that
visible thing which they saw with their eyes and took it for very God?'
8
For Cranmer there was no
transubstantiation, hence no Lord to be seen in the bread; instead, the traditional Mass offered at best a series of distractions
from the real business of understanding and giving thanks for the grace offered
to the faithful believer in Christ; at worst—and he was inclined to believe the
worst— it was the sheerest
idolatry. Of course, the parishioners themselves rarely entered such
debates; they just knew that a structure of devotional experience they had
known all their lives, as their ancestors had before them, was being pulled
down around their heads.
It is impossible to guess how many of them regretted this demolition. The
standard view for many years— as exemplified in A. G. Dickens’s venerable The
English Reformation (1964)— was that while some traditionalists complained, and
the ecclesiastical powers wished to preserve their reputations as powerful
magicians, the majority of English Christians welcomed the English liturgies as
a deliverance from priestly domination and as an opportunity for deeper
devotion. By contrast, Duffy argues in The Stripping of the Altars that only a
few radicals welcomed the changes, while the majority grieved at being deprived
of their familiar spiritual comforts. 9"
Jacobs, Alan (2013-09-30). The "Book of Common Prayer": A
Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books) (p. 22). Princeton University Press.
Kindle Edition.
