"Not lacking in decency": Eliot and Anglicanism's native piety

Yesterday I referred to Eliot's essay 'Lancelot Andrewes'.  The essay is a celebration of Anglicanism's native piety, made all the more significant by Eliot describing himself in the preface as "anglo-catholic in religion".  Contrasting the literary, devotional and architectural styles of the "English Church" and Roman Catholicism, Eliot admits that Anglicanism has "no building so beautiful as the Cathedral of Modena or the basilica of St Zeno in Verona".  However, he continues:

But there are those for [Wren's] City churches are as precious as any of the four hundred odd churches in Rome ... and for whom St. Paul's, in comparison with St. Peter's, is not lacking in decency.

Those words, "not lacking in decency", bring to mind Roger Scruton's description of the typical Anglican parish church:

The architecture is noble but bare and quiet, without the lofty aspiration of the French Gothic, or the devotional intimacy of an Italian chapel.

St. Paul's is "bare and quiet" when judged by the norms of, for example, Italian piety.  Similarly, Wren's City churches embody a quite different spirituality to, for example, 17th century Spanish churches.  One might think that a writer who identifies as "anglo-catholic in religion" would feel more at home in the churches of Modena or Verona, with their images, tabernacles, and many side altars.  But, no, Eliot is at home in the decency of St Paul's and the City churches, a decency described in the 'Homily for Repairing and Keeping Clean of Churches':

For, like as men are well refreshed and comforted when they find their houses having all things in good order and all corners clean and sweet, so, when God's house, the church, is well adorned with places convenient to sit in, with the pulpit for the preacher, with the Lord's table for the ministration of his Holy Supper, with the font to Christen in, and also is kept clean, comely, and sweetly, the people is the more desirous and the more comforted to resort thither, and to tarry there the whole time appointed to them.

We should not be surprised, then, when Eliot "taking the route you would be likely to take/From the place you would be likely to come from" finds himself "on a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel".  It was not All Saints, Margaret Street.  It was not the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. It was not even Westminster Abbey, with its long pre-Reformation history.

At Little Gidding, "prayer has been valid".

But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

This "secluded chapel" was the embodiment of Anglicanism's native piety, fitted for - in Cranmer's words - "only ... those Ceremonies which do Serve to a decent Order and godly Discipline". Little Gidding was "noble but bare and quiet", "not lacking in decency": it could not be mistaken for an expression of Counter-Reformation piety. And its associations with "a broken king" point to that most dinstinctively Anglican of saints, the Royal Martyr.

It was here that Eliot knew home, "the intersection of the timeless moment", beginning and end.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Eliot's celebration of Anglican 'decency' captures the quiet beauty of this native piety and its ability to sustain, renew, and deepen the experiences of prayer, place, and presence.  Perhaps it took a poet with an anglo-catholic sensibility to see this, to see what others take for granted and thus overlook or dismiss.

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.