Against "the over hallowed seale": the Church and the peace of the commonwealth
From all sedition, privy conspiracy, and
rebellion ...
Good Lord, deliver us - from The Litany, BCP 1662.
Taylor's 1638 Gunpowder Plot sermon, referenced yesterday, has an interesting section rejecting the seal of confession as "inviolable". It is not the case that Taylor is rejecting the private confession and absolution. In the sermon he states:
The Church of England ... observes the seale of confession as sacredly as reason or religion it selfe can possibly permit.
Decades later, Taylor would echo this in his insistence that "our Priests absolve the penitent". What he does challenge in the Gunpowder Plot sermon is "the Over hallowed seale of confession". He describes the dilemma forced upon priests if the seal is inviolable:
A considerable matter! On the one side wee are threatned by sacriledge, on the other by danger of Princes and common-wealths, for the case may happen, that either the Prince and whole State may be suffered to perish bodily and ghostly, or else the Priest must certainly damne himselfe by the sacrilegious breach of the holy Seale of confession.
But, argues Taylor, the seal "is convenient to be observed, not simply and absolutely in all cases necessary". Here he is echoing the provisions of the Church of England's 1604 Canons (repeated in the Irish 1634 Canons):
if any Man confess his secret and hidden Sins to the Minister for the unburdening of his Conscience, and to receive spiritual Consolation and Ease of Mind from him: We do not any way bind the said Minister by this our Constitution, but do straitly charge and admonish him, that he do not at any time reveal and make known to any Person whatsoever, any Crime or Offence so committed to his Trust and Secrecy (except they be such Crimes as by the Laws of this Realm, his own Life may be called into question for concealing the same) under pain of Irregularity.
Taylor notes from the Roman tradition the ability of a penitent to release a confessor from the obligations of the seal. Taylor thus states:
if a private man may licence his Consessor to reveale his confession, then the seale of confession is not founded upon any divine commandement, for if it were, the penitent could not give the Priest license to break it.
As Taylor continues, he provides a significant insight into the political theology central to his critique of an inviolable seal:
But if the penitent may give his Confessor leave, because the tye of secrecy is a bond in which the Priest stands bound to the penitent, & he giving him leave, remits of his own right, then much rather may a whole State authorise this publication, for what ever personall right a private man hath, that the whole State hath much rather, for he is included in it as a part of the whole, and in such cases as concerne the whole commonwealth (as this of treason doth most especially) the rule of the Law holds without exception.
This concern for the welfare of the commonwealth is also seen when Taylor considers what he interprets as two other exceptions to the seal in the Roman tradition. To prove the validity or otherwise of a marriage, he says the Roman practice allows the seal to be broken. Taylor comments:
Now if for the proofe of marriage the seale may be broken up, that man and wife might live contentedly and as they ought, strange it should be unlawfull to reveale confessions in case of Treason, for the safety of a Prince or State!
Similarly, Taylor says that Roman practice regards the seal as not applying in the context of confession by a heretic:
Now I would fain learn why Treason is not as revealeable as Heresy? Is heresy dangerous to soules? Then surely, so is Treason, unlesse it be none, or a very small crime. May heresy infect others? So may Treason, as it did in the present. It may then as well be revealed as heresy. Now that it may something rather, I have these reasons. 1. Because it is not so certaine that such an opinion is heresy as that such is Treason. 2. Because although both Treason and reall heresy be damnable and dangerous to soules, yet heresy killes no Kings as treason doth.
What - if any - relevance this has for contemporary Anglican practice concerning private confession and absolution, I am not sure. That said, it is at least interesting that in the Anglican Catholic Future and Forward in Faith statements on the seal, there appears to be no reference to the relevant provision of the 1604 Canons and to the teaching articulated by Taylor. Indeed, if the the ACF statement is referring specifically to the seal when it says that at the Reformation the Church of England "continued in the established tradition of interpretation and ecclesiastical polity", it is - as Taylor exemplifies - inaccurate.
The point of this post, however, is not contemporary discipline regarding private confession. Rather, it is the importance in classical Anglican political theology of the peace and well-being of the commonwealth. For example, Taylor's insistence that the interests of "the whole commonwealth" are of greater significance and weight than the "personall right" of a "private man" embodies the communitarian, common good emphasis that runs throughout and shapes classical Anglican political theology.
the Church no longer becomes the crown of man's longings as a social being but a moral policeman superimposed from the outside. The Church, instead of strengthening and supernaturalizing man's natural loyalties becomes in turn a source of division.
In an age of bitterly divided and deeply unsettled polities, of ideologies of Left and Right committed to rending asunder the bonds of civility, of a desiccated, uninspiring, empty Centre, there is much to value in a classical Anglican political theology which draws the commonwealth and our lives as citizens of the commonwealth into the realm of Love.
(The painting is Andrew Gifford, 'Streatham Church' - the Church in the midst of, and sanctifying the life of, the commonwealth. The photograph is of the state flags of the United States, before the Rose Window of Washington National Cathedral, an image of how natural loyalties are sanctified in the communion of the Church: grace perfecting, not destroying, nature.)
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