Jeremy Taylor Week: 'the prudent and learned Cassander'

That prudent and pious Moderator of Controversies, George Cassander, who did much for the peace of Christendome ...

So said Taylor in the Preface to his 1644 work The Psalter of David. The thought of the Flemish Catholic humanist George Cassander (d.1566) was clearly highly esteemed by Taylor. Committed to the reunion of the churches, and regarded by Papalist critics as much too favourable to Reformation theologies, "the excellent Cassander" exemplified an eirenicism which recognised the need for significant reform while also promoting reconciliation. As Taylor was to say in The Liberty of Prophesying of these efforts, "George Cassander was design'd to this great work, and did something towards it". 

Amidst the violence and bloodshed of the Thirty Years' War, the ruin brought by the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and the bitter sectarianism which contributed to these conflicts, it is not at all difficult to understand the appeal to Taylor of Cassander's thought. Here was a vision of the unity of the churches charitably, prudently, graciously restored, an alternative to the times of division and conflict. As Archbishop Laud prayed in his private devotions:

O merciful God, since thou hast ordered me to live in these times, in which the rents of thy Church are grievous; I humbly beseech thee to guide me, that the divisions of men may not separate me either from thee or it, that I may ever labour the preservation of Truth and Peace, that where for and by our sins the Peace of it succeeds not, thou wilt yet accept my will for the deed, that I may still pray, even while thou grantest not, because I know thou wilt grant it when thou seest it fit. In the mean time bless, I beseech thee, this Church in which I live, that in it I may honour and serve thee all the days of my life, and after this be glorified by thee, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Cassander also pointed to a generous, reformed catholicism which Taylor the Laudian saw in the reformed ecclesia Anglicana. In A Dissuasive from Popery (1664) and The Second Part of the Dissuasive from Popery (1667), Taylor consistently quotes from "the excellent Cassander", defending the reformed catholic belief and practice of "our Churches", those of England and Ireland. Consider some of the characteristics of the reformed Churches of England and Ireland: Communion in both kinds, clerical marriage, not requiring private confession, prohibiting worship of images, worship in the vernacular. Cassander is invoked by Taylor in defence of Communion in both kinds:

Cassander affirms, "That, in the Latin church, for above a thousand years, the body of Christ, and the blood of Christ, were separately given, the body apart, and the blood apart, after the consecration of the mysteries ... about the year 920, the order of Cluniac monks did communicate with the bread dipped in the chalice, as Cassander reports.

Taylor likewise points to Cassander on clerical marriage:

And I remember that Cassander, speaking of the intolerable evils that fell upon the Church by the injunction of single life to priests and bishops ... the testimony of Cassander will not so easily be rejected , saying, "If ever there was a time for changing of an old custom, certainly these times require it" ...

Defending the discipline of the Churches of England and Ireland not requiring private Confession, again Taylor turns to Cassander:

that the consciences of penitents, which should be extricated and eased, are (by this means) catch'd in a snare, and put to torments, said Cassander; so that although Confession to a Priest prudently manag'd, without scruple, upon the case of a griev'd and an unquiet conscience, and in order to Counsel and the perfections of Repentance, may be of excellent use; yet to enjoyn it in all cases, to make it necessary to salvation, when God hath not made it so; to exact an Enumeration of all our sins in all cases, and of all persons; to clog it with so many questions and innumerable inextricable difficulties, and all this, besides the evil manage and conduct of it, is the rack of Consciences, the slavery of the Church, the evil snare of the simple.

Cassander's recognition of the patristic critique of images was also quoted by Taylor:

and Cassander says, that all the ancients did abhor all adoration of images; and he cites Origen as an instance great enough to verifie the whole affirmative.

On worship in the vernacular, Taylor invoked Cassander alongside Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyra:

and besides that these doctors affirm, that in the primitive church the priest and people joined in their prayers, and understood each other, and prayed in their mother-tongue.

While it might, understandably, be suggested that Taylor's Dissuasive from Popery is not the work to which we might immediately turn in order to be enriched by his eirenicism, its use of Cassander is very significant. Defending characteristic practices of the reformed Churches of England and Ireland by invoking Cassander placed these churches in the context of the Catholic humanist's eirenic ecclesial vision. The practices, therefore, were not divisive protests but, rather, a wise, prudent restoration of catholic, patristic norms. And the recognition of such norms would aid the unity of the churches of the West.

This also applied to a particular characteristic of the reformed Churches of England and Ireland, the Book of Common Prayer. In Clerus Domini (16xx), Taylor rejected the notion that the Words of Institution in "in the most mysterious solemnity of Christianity in the holy Sacrament of the Lords Supper" are consecratory as a formula rather than as part of a wider invocation in the liturgy, as understood by "the Greek Doctors". To defend this understanding, Taylor turns to Cassander:

they are excellent words which Cassander hath said to the purpose; "Some Apostolical Churches from the beginning used such solemn prayers to the celebration of the mysteries; and Christ himself, beside that he recited the words (of Institution) he blessed the Symbols before and after, sung an Ecclesiastical hymn". And therefore the Greek Churches which have with more severity kept the first and most ancient forms of consecration, than the Latin Church; affirm that the Consecration is made by solemn invocation alone, and the very recitation of the words spoken in the body of a prayer are used for argument to move God to hallow the gifts ... The Church of England does most religiously observe it according to the custom and sense of the primitive Liturgies; who always did believe the consecration not to be a natural effect, and change, finished in any one instant, but a divine alteration consequent to the whole ministery: that is, the solemn prayer and invocation.

The whole Prayer Book rite, therefore, is eucharistic, consecratory, sacrificial, as opposed to merely the repetition of a short formula. Here Cassander becomes a means of confirming the patristic nature of the Book of Common Prayer's Eucharistic rite, following after what was understood to be the East's view of consecration. Again, in other words, a characteristic practice of the Churches of England and Ireland - in this case, the Prayer Book liturgy - gives expression to the eirenic vision of Cassander, of a reformed catholicism, rooted in patristic practice, and celebrating the rich insights of the Christian East.

Taylor clearly drunk deeply from Cassander, rejoicing in the Catholic humanist's vision of a reformed catholicism bringing healing peace and unity to "the rents of thy Church". It was in the national, episcopal Churches of England and Ireland that Taylor saw this eirenic vision embodied and held out to Christendom. The Episcopalian commitments maintained by Taylor throughout the dark years of the 1640s and 1650s, therefore, were understood by him to be an outworking of Cassander's vision, to be maintained precisely because those decades saw the outworking of a very different vision, sharing nothing of the grace and wisdom of "the prudent and learned Cassander".