"I am only for the Angel's Ave": Laudians, Reformation and the Blessed Virgin

Above all, in England, the clerical party fostered by Lancelot Andrewes - the 'avant garde conformists' who were being nicknamed 'Arminians' by the 1620s - gathered up Mary in their enterprise of rewriting the history and the theology of the English Church - Diarmaid MacCulloch, 'The Virgin Mary and Protestant Reformers' in All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation.

A new openness to things Marian was, so MacCulloch insists, evidence of how the avant garde and the Laudians were part of "another story", contrasted with the sensibilities of the Reformation as they had taken root in the reformed ecclesia Anglicana in the reigns of Edward and Elizabeth.  This is part of his wider assertion (in the conclusion to the otherwise excellent The Tudor Church Militant) that the Laudians represented something akin to the Oxford Movement: "They saw what they were doing as recovering the Catholic character of the Church".

The avant garde and the Laudians, then, were the rupture, tearing the Reformed fabric of the English Church.

What this reading almost entirely ignores, however, is how the theology of the avant garde and Laudians was characteristically Reformed, not least in the fundamental points of contention between the ecclesia Anglicana and the Roman church.  For example, whereas MacCulloch insists that "Andrewes and his fellows affirmed a view of eucharistic real presence which Thomas Cranmer would have strenuously opposed", the fact is that Andrewes himself held to a conventionally Reformed eucharistic understanding, the eucharistic spirituality of the avant garde did not differ from other conformists, and even 'advanced' Laudians held to the norms of the sacramental teaching of the Elizabethan Settlement.

This is also the case when it came to honouring the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mark Frank's sermon on the feast of the Annunciation is one of the best examples of Laudian Marian teaching, indeed a rather advanced Laudian example. Frank counsels that we should imitate the angel's "reverence" for the Mother of our Lord: "We are not to speak of the blessed Virgin, the Apostles, and Saints, as if we were speaking to our servants, Paul, Peter, Mary or the like".  This, of course, is to merely conform to the usage of the Book of Common Prayer and the title it consistently gives to the Lord's Mother.  It conforms to the Articles of Religion, with Article II's reference to "the blessed Virgin".  And it is no to the Helvetic Confession's use of "Blessed Virgin".

Frank is, therefore, correct to highlight that the rupture with mainstream Reformed thought is found not in the Laudian insistence on Mary being referred to as "Blessed Virgin" but, rather, amongst those unwilling to follow Prayer Book, Articles, and Helvetic Confession:

It is a new fashion of religion, neither taken from saints, nor angels, nor any of heaven or heavenly spirits, to unsaint the saints, to deny them their proper titles, to level them with the meanest of our servants. 

Alongside this, Frank freely repeats classical Reformed critiques of Roman devotional practices, of "all superstitious and profane abuses".

The salutation here, except the titles given her by the angels, is not much more than what he gave to Gideon, or what Boaz to his harvesters. Enough to make the Papists afraid, one would think, of those extravagant, at least, if not blasphemous, title they give her ... I am sure they learned not this from the Angel; he brings no divine but human titles and salutations to her. 

What can be more thoroughly Reformed than Frank's declaration, "I shall not give her other titles than the Scripture gives her"?

Frank also echoes Calvin in denying that the Angel's Ave can be used by us a prayer:

Indeed, I cannot myself but wonder at it, as they use it now, to see it turned into a prayer. It was never made for prayer or praise, a mere salutation. The Angel's here to the blessed Virgin never intended it, I dare say, for other, either to praise her with, or pray unto her. And I shall not consider it as such. I am only for the Angel's Ave, not the popish Ave Maria; I can see no such in the text - Frank;

With extraordinary ignorance have the Papists, by an enchanter's trick, changed this salutation into a prayer, and have carried their folly so far, that their preachers are not permitted, in the pulpit, to implore the grace of the Spirit, except through their Hail, Mary - Calvin (Commentary on Luke 1).

In other words, this (advanced) Laudian sermon is a defence of - not a rupture with - the norms of the Elizabethan Settlement and the magisterial Reformation.  Those departing from these norms, as Frank states, are to be found elsewhere:

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.

Contrary to MacCulloch, the avant garde and Laudians did not use Marian teaching to 'rewrite' the history and theology of the ecclesia Anglicana.  A rewriting was indeed taking place. Its authors, however, were not the avant garde and the Laudians but those participating in an agitation against the norms of Elizabethan Settlement, inspired by an increasingly narrow Calvinist scholasticism, and abandoning aspects of the more vibrant, and richer, earlier Reformed theologies.  By contrast, the avant garde and Laudians embodied the humanism and ease with patristic sensibilities that had often characterised those earlier theologies.

What is more avant garde and Laudian ease with a piety which recognised the Blessed Virgin Mary was no outlier.  As MacCulloch himself, somewhat ironically, notes, "in the 1630s, the French Reformed pastor and popular devotional writer Charles Drelincourt was able to write a tract and a substantial follow-up book concerning the honour which was appropriate to the Blessed Virgin Mary".  Not only, then, did avant garde and Laudian piety reflect an earlier Protestantism, it also reflected trends in contemporary Protestant thought (and therefore was not as insular as MacCulloch seems to imply).

Some years ago, N.T. Wright declared:

I am sorry to think that there are people out there whose Protestantism has been so barren that they never found out about sacraments, transformation, community or eschatology. 

We might say something similar about MacCulloch's insistence that the avant garde and Laudians were a rupture with the Reformation settlement.  It is a barren view of Protestantism which thinks that the Laudian vision of sacrament, liturgy, Blessed Virgin and visible Church was not thoroughly and richly Protestant and Reformed.

(The picture is of the Annunciation window in Belfast Cathedral.  It is a good example of a Laudian sensibility: a Scriptural, Reformed recognition of the Blessed Virgin.)

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