Is Old High the New Low?

Recently on Twitter I came across pictures of a small Suffolk church - King Charles the Martyr, Shelland.  The fine Suffolk Churches site says of this church:

This dear little building is so far from a major road that you will not come across it, except by accident. It sits beside a tiny lane between Woolpit and Stowmarket, a lane so narrow that it seems designed for horses and bikes more than cars.

There is perhaps an echo here of famous words regarding another "dear little building":

It would be the same, when you leave the rough road, 
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone ...
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same ... - T.S. Eliot, 'Little Gidding'.

And, of course, Little Gidding had been visited by "a broken king", to whom the little church at Shelland is dedicated.

The similarities, however, are not restricted to geography and a shared link to the Royal Martyr.  Both Little Gidding and Shelland embody the spirit of an Anglicanism evoked by T.S. Eliot in his essay on Lancelot Andrewes: "not lacking in decency".  Or as the late Sir Roger Scruton described 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.

This is the decency celebrated by George Herbert in 'The British Church':

A fine aspect in fit array,
Neither too mean nor yet too gay,
Shows who is best.
Outlandish looks may not compare,
For all they either painted are,
Or else undress'd.

To consider Little Gidding, Shelland, or - to give another example "where prayer has been valid" - the Middle Church, Ballinderry (constructed by Jeremy Taylor), is to encounter the dignified simplicity and reserve of this Anglicanism.  To many contemporary Anglicans, such places may seem to be plain, bare, 'low'.  And yet, all three of these churches have significant links to the High Church tradition.  Each has a connection to the Royal Martyr, reverence for whom was a High Church characteristic.  The altar rails in each are a reminder of a High Church piety.  Each witnesses to lives hallowed by the rites and ceremonies, patterns and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer.

The fact that we regard such churches as having a 'Low' appearance suggests the loss of a modesty, decency, and reserve which the Old High Church tradition embodied and valued.  We might also point to other ways in which this tradition was given expression but which are now regarded as 'Low': the wearing of the surplice; the place of Sunday Mattins; ordinary bread (of the finest quality) at the Holy Communion; the abLence of elevation and reservation (alien to Old High Church sacramental doctrine and piety).  Here too Old High Church reserve has been lost.

What is the significance of such reserve and modesty?  Perhaps three reasons might be suggested, reasons which point to the theological rationale in an Old High Church aesthetic.

Firstly, it gives expression to a Reformed Catholicism at the heart of the ecclesia Anglicana.  The Reformed concerns in Old High Church reserve and modesty are self-evident.  Rejection of "the excessive multitude of Ceremonies" - to quote Cranmer - is characteristically Reformed: "Christ's Gospel is not a Ceremonial Law".  Secker, defending the use of liturgical signs "to express a good meaning", gave voice to a characteristic Old High Church concern:

such marks as these, which we commonly call ceremonies ... ought to be laid aside, whenever they grow too numerous, or abuses are made of them, which cannot easily be reformed: and this hath frequently been the case. 

This pruning, however, ensures that those "old Ceremonies [which] are retained still" edify and shape "a common order and discipline" (Cranmer).  As Dean Comber said regarding the signing with the Cross at Baptism:

Upon the whole, the ceremony is exceeding proper, and very, innocent; used by most Christians; approved by all the ancients, and by some of the most eminent reformed divines expressly; and condemned by no church.

The retained ceremonies, then, give expression to conformity to a catholic order, rooted in the patristic witness.  As Canon XXX of the 1604 Canons declared of the use of the Cross at Baptism, it is "evident by many Testimonies of the ancient Fathers".  Likewise, Hooker saw precedent for the use of the surplice in comments by Jerome and Chrysostom, referring to "the honesty, dignity and estimation of white apparel" (LEP V.29.1-3).  While there was recognition that kneeling to receive the Sacrament was of more recent origin, Comber notes that "all the well ordered churches in the world practise it", and Wheatly states, "though anciently they stood in the east, yet, as St. Cyril says, it was “with fear and trembling, with silence and downcast eyes, bowing themselves in the posture of worship and adoration".

Old High Church modesty and reserve in ceremony, then, embodies the coherence of Anglicanism as an expression of a Reformed Catholicism, helping to address some of the incoherence that blights contemporary Anglican witness and formation.

Secondly, this modesty and reserve hints at the sanctification of the ordinary. Challenging those accounts which accuse the Reformation of disenchanting common life, Marilynne Robinson has said:

Protestants acknowledge only Baptism and Communion as sacraments, using ordinary water in the first and ordinary bread in the second - which implies the holiness of the ordinary, of all bread and all water. This seems to me to broaden the sphere of the sacramental and to give every holy - that is, loving or generous - use of the ordinary things of life a sacramental character.

The reserve and modesty of the High Church tradition is suggestive of this vision.  The "noble but bare and quiet" character of the parish church ensures that it is reverenced but not in a manner which obscures the ordinary: the absence of the garish allows it to become an icon of God's presence and working in ordinary places and routines.  The wearing of the surplice at prayer desk for Mattins and Holy Table for Communion, at chancel steps for weddings and at the graveside is a sign of the unity of these rites, and thus of all of life enfolded by the presence and purposes of God.  Sunday Mattins itself is witness to the truth that our feeding upon and communion with God is not limited to the holy Sacrament.

Of course, other traditions within and beyond Anglicanism recognise the truth that the world is filled with the glory of God.  To use words from Marilynne Robinson, they "simply respond to the fact differently". But Old High Church reserve and modesty can be a sign of what John Milbank celebrates as a key part of the Anglican legacy: the rejection of "any facile separations between the sacred and the secular or between faith and reason, grace and nature".  Such "facile separations" can be facilitated by an absence of reserve or modesty which leads to an enthusiastic focus on the extraordinary.

Thirdly, this reserve and modesty expresses a piety which can have resonance in a cultural context rightly suspicious of 'enthusiasm' while yet seeking meaning and order, desiring an authentic beauty but bored of the ostentatious, distracted by near constant "visual noise" overwhelming the ordinary and the real.  As Andrew Sullivan has urged:

If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.

Old High Church modesty and reserve, then, is no stuffy anachronism.  Alongside other Anglican traditions, it has a place in the Church's mission and witness to contemporary culture.  The renewed appeal and attraction of Choral Evensong (a liturgy marked by modesty and reserve) is perhaps one of the most obvious indications of this, testifying to what Milbank has described as Anglicanism's "hidden coherence":

sturdily incarnated in land, parish and work, yet sublimely aspiring in its verbal, musical and visual performances.

So is the Old High Church tradition the New Low Church?  In very many ways the answer is 'no', mindful that 'Low' has historically been associated with Latitudinarianism's impoverished approaches to Doctrine, Church, Liturgy, and Sacraments, the "heterodox and worldly-compromising notions of ... whiggery" (Milbank).  When, however, Anglicanism or Episcopalianism is routinely seen as 'smells and bells' minus the inconvenient demands of Roman teaching, there is something to be said for regarding Old High Church modesty and reserve as 'Low', embodying a coherent Reformed Catholic witness, pointing to the sanctification of the ordinary and offering the potential of a culturally resonant piety.

(The photographs are, from top to bottom, of Shelland Church, Little Gidding, and the Middle Church, Ballinderry.)