Jeremy Taylor Week: Laudianism, wars of religion, and eirenicism
As we approach the commemoration of Jeremy Taylor on 13th August, laudable Practice again marks Jeremy Taylor Week. Last year, Jeremy Taylor Week explored one of Taylor's most controversial works, Unum Necessarium, and his non-Augustinian understanding of Original Sin. This year will be something of a preface to later consideration of another Taylor work which causes controversy of a different kind, The Liberty of Prophesying (1647). Conventionally, it is regarded as a work which sits apart from the rest of the Taylor canon, contradicting his Laudian commitments and his post-Restoration ministry as a bishop in Ulster. 'What happened to the eirencism of The Liberty of Prophesying?' is often asked by Taylor critics.
This series of posts for Jeremy Taylor Week will seek to demonstrate that the eirenicism Taylor demonstrated in The Liberty of Prophesying was a significant theme throughout many of his works and is evident across his thinking. A deeply rooted eirenicism is evident throughout Taylor's works.
To begin with, however, can we really regard Taylor the Laudian as committed to eirenicism? The conventional caricature of Laudianism, of course, declares otherwise. What the conventional caricature fails to grasp is the Laudian self-understanding. For the Laudians, defence of Conformity was a defence of an eirenic understanding of the ecclesia Anglicana in the face of determined, ideological attempts to reorder the English Church upon a much narrower doctrinal, pastoral, and liturgical basis: Lambeth Articles, renouncing episcopacy, a pastoral approach which rejected the parish community for the 'godly', a rejection of well-established liturgical norms known to East and West, to Roman, Lutheran, and many Reformed churches. Against such a radical narrowing of the English Church, Laudians such as Taylor understood themselves to be defending an eirenic - indeed, a Hookerian - vision, not limited to the narrow confines of the school of Geneva. Taylor, in other words, exemplified that to be Laudian was to be eirenic.
Compare, for example, the Articles of Religion which Laud and Bramhall encouraged the Church of Ireland to adopt in place of the 1605 Irish Articles of Religion. The Irish Articles were characterised by narrow, scholastic speculations on the mystery of predestination and an inflammatory insistence that the Bishop of Rome was the Antichrist. These Articles, said Taylor in his sermon at Bramhall's funeral, "made this Church lisp too undecently". By contrast, having the same Articles of Religion as the Church of England allowed both churches to be "of one heart and one lip, building up our hopes of heaven on a most holy Faith".
Taylor did, of course, robustly defend episcopacy. In doing so, he was thoroughly Hookerian, defending the ancient form of governing the church, upheld in all places over centuries. Episcopacy was one of those inherited practices which united Christians, as he declared in his sermon at the 1661 consecration of archbishops and bishops for Ireland:
If ever Vincentius Lirinensis's rule could be us'd in any question, it is in this: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus; That Bishops are the Successors of the Apostles in this Stewardship; and that they did always rule the Family, was taught and acknowledged always, and every where, and by all men that were of the Church of God: and if these evidences be not sufficient to convince modest and sober persons in this question, We shall find our faith to fail in many other articles, of which we yet are very confident. For the observation of the Lords day, the Consecration of the Holy Eucharist by Priests, the Baptizing Infants, the communicating of Women, and the very Canon of the Scripture it self rely but upon the same probation.
Episcopacy, then, was one of those generally accepted norms of Christian churches which served their faith and unity. And the recent experience of the 1640s and 1650s had proven what happened to the churches when episcopacy was removed:
I could reckon that the Episcopal order is the principle of Unity in the Church; and we see it is so, by the innumerable Sects that sprang up when Episcopacy was persecuted.
Likewise, the rites and ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer were derived, as Taylor noted, from "the primitive and ancient formes of Church service". To defend the authorised liturgy was to promote an eirenic vision:
it is the greatest instance of union in the world; for since God hath made Faith, Hope, and Charity, the ligaments of the communion of Saints, and Common prayer, which not onely all the Governours have propounded as most fit, but in which all the people are united, is a great Testimony of the same Faith, and a common hope, and mutuall charity.
Taylor's Laudianism, therefore, was not opposed to his eirenicism: they were one and the same. The Laudians were encouraging, nurturing, and defending an eirenic vision of the Church of England, not confined to the narrow proclamations of Dort and the practices of the school of Geneva. The Articles of Religion exemplified his teaching on "formes of confession" in Ductor dubitantium (1660). Thus the Articles did not go "beyond what is necessary or very usefull" and "the Sons of the Church ought to subscribe them for public peace". Episcopacy and the liturgy served an eirenic vision, ensuring the church's peace and unity.
If Laudianism provided the intellectual core of Taylor's eirenicism, it was to find experiential confirmation and further motivation in the bitter years of the 1640s and 1650s. As George Rust said in Taylor's funeral sermon:
This Great Man had no sooner launch'd into the World, but a fearful Tempest arose, and a barbarous and unnatural War, disturb'd a long and uninterrupted Peace and Tranquillity; and brought all things into disorder and confusion.
Taylor's adult life was overshadowed by that bitter, bloody conflict. He received orders in 1633: a mere six years later, the so-called Bishops' Wars erupted in Scotland, beginning that series of conflicts which would become the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. He was in orders less than a decade before rebellion engulfed Ireland and England collapsed into civil war.
As Rust noted, Taylor took "his Prince's side, whose Cause and Quarrel he alwayes own'd and maintain'd with a great courage and constancy". A chaplain to the Royalist forces, he was held as a prisoner of war, then harrassed by the Commonwealth authorities. As a "Champion" of Church and King, he knew - as Rust stated in the funeral sermon - "pains and sufferings ... in the defence of their Cause and Honour".
He would die in 1667, a mere seven years after the Restoration ended "the late unhappy confusions", but with the divisions occasioned by the conflicts still afflicting his dioceses in Ulster.
Like many of his contemporaries - and, increasingly, historians of the 21st century - Taylor understood the Wars of the Three Kingdoms to be wars of religion. The opening words of the dedication of Holy Living (1650) powerfully demonstrate this in a rather moving manner:
I have lived to see Religion painted upon Banners, and thrust out of Churches, and the Temple turned into a Tabernacle, and that Tabernacle made ambulatory, and covered with skins of Beasts and torn Curtains, and God to be worshipped not as he is the Father of our Lord Jesus (an afflicted Prince, the King of sufferings) nor, as the God of peace (which two appellatives God newly took upon him in the New Testament, and glories in for ever:) but he is owned now rather as the Lord of Hosts, which title he was pleased to lay aside when the Kingdom of the Gospel was preached by the Prince of peace. But when Religion puts on Armor, and God is not acknowledged by his New Testament titles, Religion may have in it the power of the Sword, but not the power of Godliness.
There is a significant Hookerian echo here. The title which Taylor gives to God as distinctive of the New Testament, "the God of peace", is the title Hooker invoked at the beginning and the end of the Preface to his Lawes:
But our hope is that the God of peace shall ... inable us quietlie and and gladly to suffer all things, for that worke sake which we covet to performe (LEP, Preface, 1.1);
... the blessings of the God of peace both in this world and the world to come (Preface, 9.4).
The God of peace was not served, as Taylor had declared in the dedication of Holy Living, by taking up arms against the King in order to achieve a more thorough reformation of the Church. This, in the phrase used by Rust in the funeral sermons, overturned the realm's "Peace and Tranquility". Both themes - his fidelity to the King's peace and rejection of holy war - were found in Taylor's discussion of Saint Peter's use of the sword in Gethsemane, in The Great Exemplar, published in the fateful year of 1649:
But now be used it in an unlawful war: he had no competent authority; it was against the ministers of his lawful prince; and against our prince we must not draw a sword for Christ himself, himself having forbidden us. As his kingdom is not of this world, so neither were his defences secular ... Fighting for religion is certain to destroy charity, but not certain to support faith.
How this was given expression in Taylor's works will be explored in following posts.
(The second picture is of remains of Cardigan Castle, Pembrokeshire, Wales. It was here that Taylor was captured by Parliamentarian forces in December 1644, after the defeat of a Royalist force to which he ministered as a chaplain.)
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