"His being Lord made her a Lady": the Prayer Book collect for the Annunciation and Anglican reverence for the Blessed Virgin
It was an act of liturgical genuis when Cranmer took the Sarum post-Communion for the Annunciation and made it the BCP's collect for the feast. To use words from Herbert's 'Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling on one day', the collect gathers into a few short lines the mystery of salvation:
Th'abridgement of Christ's story, which makes one ...
Of the angel's Ave, and Consummatum est.
The collect also embodies how the reformed ecclesia Anglicana approached the issue of - to use a title from a John Henry Newman sermon (while an Anglican) - 'The Reverence Due to the Blessed Virgin Mary'.
To begin with, the collect, of course, recognises the feast. While critiquing and rejecting the late medieval Latin cultus of the Virgin, the reformed ecclesia Anglicana retained and preserved due reverence to the Blessed Virgin. The celebration of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary - 'Annunciation of our Lady', as the 'Lessons Proper for Holy-Days' states in 1662 - was a significant expression of this ("we therefore begin our ecclesiastical year with the glorious annunciation", Hooker, LEP V.70.8), as was the continued cultural significance of 'Lady Day'. As Jeremy Taylor makes clear, the feast was one of the "great festivals":
Let every Preacher in his Parish take care to explicate to the people the Mysteries of the great Festivals, as of Christmas, Easter, Ascension-day, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday, the Annunciation of the blessed Virgin Mary; because these Feasts containing in them the great Fundamentals of our Faith, will with most advantage convey the mysteries to the people, and fix them in their memories, by the solemnity and circumstances of the day.
Put bluntly, this illustrates how wrong Eamon Duffy is when he alleges that the Blessed Virgin disappeared from the life of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana, leaving it with "a male religion". Contrary to this rather silly suggestion, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary remained a key feature of both the ecclesiastical and cultural year.
That said, the collect does not actually mention the Blessed Virgin. Considering, however, the source of the collect - the pre-Reformation Sarum rite - this can hardly be invoked as proof of the Blessed Virgin excluded from the life of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana. Instead, it points to a concern to ensure that due reverence to the Blessed Virgin serves, rather than obscures, the Church's Christological centre. In the words of a sermon for the feast by Caroline Divine Mark Frank, "Christ is the main business":
his being incarnate of her, and her blessedness by him, and all our blessedness in him with her, make it as well our Lord's as our Lady's day. More his, because his being Lord made her a Lady, else a poor carpenter's wife, God knows; all her worthiness and honour, as all ours, is from him.
Here is the Augustinian reserve which shapes how Anglicanism's native piety reverences the Blessed Virgin. As Newman would later state in the sermon already mentioned:
following the example of Scripture, we had better only think of her with and for her Son, never separating her from Him, but using her name as a memorial of His great condescension in stooping from heaven, and not "abhorring the Virgin's womb." And this is the rule of our own Church, which has set apart only such Festivals in honour of the Blessed Mary, as may also be Festivals in honour of our Lord; the Purification commemorating His presentation in the Temple, and the Annunciation commemorating His Incarnation. And, with this caution, the thought of her may be made most profitable to our faith; for nothing is so calculated to impress on our minds that Christ is really partaker of our nature, and in all respects man, save sin only, as to associate Him with the thought of her, by whose ministration He became our brother.
This "caution", Newman says, reflects the tenor of Scripture, for "it is in mercy to us that so little is revealed about the Blessed Virgin": Scripture's reserve and reticence should be reflected in the Church's life and the reverence it gives to the Blessed Virgin, for "Scripture was written, not to exalt this or that particular Saint, but to give glory to Almighty God".
Alongside the daily celebration of the Blessed Virgin's role in the Incarnation in Te Deum at Mattins and Magnificat at Evensong, the yearly celebration of this role in the collect and proper preface of Christmas, and her place in the three creeds of the BCP, the feasts of the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin and the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary provided focal points for understanding the reverence paid to her by the reformed ecclesia Anglicana. Anglicanism's native piety - with its blend of Augustinian reserve and robust recognition of her blessedness - offered an alternative to both Tridentine excess and hyper-Protestant reaction. In the words of Frank:
both our Lord and the mother of our Lord, most vilely spoken of by a new generation of wicked men, who, because the Romanists make little less of her than a goddess, they make not so much of her as a good woman: because they bless her too much, these unbless her quite, at least will not suffer her to be blessed as she should. To avoid both these extremes, we need no other pattern but the Angel's. Who here salutes and bless her indeed; yet so only salutes and blesses her, so speaks of and to her as to a woman here, though much above the best of them; one highly favoured, it is true, yet but favoured still; all her grace, and blessedness, and glory still no other, mere favour and no more; and Dominus tecum, the Lord's being with her, the ground, and source, and sum of all.
Following "no other pattern but the Angel's", the native piety of Anglicanism conforms to the Angel's Ave - avoided by the hyper-Protestants (despite Calvin, in his commentary on Luke 1, using the term "the holy virgin" twelve times) and distorted by Tridentine piety, for, in Frank's words, "It was never made for prayer or praise":
Nor would that humble handmaid, if she should understand the vain and the fond, and almost idolatrous styles and honours that are given her somewhere upon earth, be pleased with them; she is highly favoured enough that her Lord and Son is with her and she with him: she would be no higher sharer. You may see it in the last particular, the bounds and limitations of her titles and blessedness.
Here we sense how the reserve with which this native piety reverences the Blessed Virgin Mary is not coldness but awe in the presence of the Most Holy Trinity, "the ground, and source, and sum of all". It is reserve in reverencing the Blessed Virgin ('due reverence') which allows us to discern the meaning of Dominus tecum and thus to rejoice that her blessedness is pure gift, wholly grace. It is this which is animates the collect for this day: thy grace ... incarnation ... his cross and passion ... his resurrection.
My soul doth magnify the Lord.
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