laudable Practice

Many thanks to The Anglican Way for publishing my essay ' George Herbert, Anglican Modesty, and the Season of Lent '. Below, an excerpt in which I offer something of a defence of the oft-misunderstood and misused words of Fisher: "We have no doctrine of our own. We only possess the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church enshrined in the Catholic Creeds, and these creeds we hold without addition or diminution". I understand Fisher's words as a "sober minimalism" regarding any distinctive Anglican claims, defining the church by a reliance upon the Christological centre, on  solus Christus : In ‘Love (III)’, as [Rowan] Williams states, "the point is that acceptance of the divine love simply requires the abandonment of all effort at assessing my own worth, negatively or positively". It is the action of the Triune God in Christ that is the Church's foundation, centre, and life: an over-active, loud, argumentative, zealous proclamation of some...

The moment when I realised that I could not become a Roman Catholic took place in a restaurant in Islington, when we were arguing about the Roman view of Anglican orders being ‘null and void’. It shot in upon me, with terrible force, that I could not join a church that taught that George Herbert was no true priest. The words are those of Caroline Moore , in debate with her journalist husband Charles Moore (now Baron Moore of Etchingham), when the latter crossed the Tiber following the Church of England's ordination of women to the priesthood in 1992. Caroline Moore's words capture something of the significance of George Herbert for many of us. Herbert exemplifies something that is to be particularly cherished in the Anglican way. Ronald Blythe hints at what might lie at the heart of this in his perceptive comment: Lent was Herbert's season. He was born in Lent, married in Lent, and died in Lent.  Lent is the season when grandiose, exalted claims are to wither. When peniten...

The Laudians, says Diarmaid MacCulloch stood "aloof from most Protestants as well as from the Church of Rome".  It is a statement which summarises MacCulloch's view of Laudianism as rupture, a fundamental break with the Protestantism of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana . He continues: Thus in July 1624 one of the most uninhibited spokesmen of the movement, Richard Montague, said that he sought a Church of England that would 'stand in the gapp against Puritanisme and Popery, the Scilla and Charybdis of antient piety'.  This was the beginning of the via media discussion, which would have a major future in the Anglican tradition. This, to say the least, seriously misunderstands Laudianism.  To begin with, Montague's famous A New Gagg (1624) was, as the text makes abundantly clear throughout, an explicit defence of Protestantism: Against Protestants your Gag is directed, not Puritans: and yet all your addresses, well-neer, are against Puritan Positions, malitious...

I recently noticed in Essays Catholic and Critical (1926) a superb description of Laudianism and its antecedents.  The particular essay in question - 'The Reformation', by A. Hamilton Thompson - begins by pointing to Herberts' poem ' The British Church ', seeing in it a celebration of the order, belief, and piety that Laudianism would promote and defend, "scriptural, primitive and truly Catholic".  Here we see the attraction and meaning of what  Eamon Duffy has described as "the mellow light that plays over the church of George Herbert". To put it another way, here is why we should be affirming Laudianism: from the doctrine and rites of the Church of England, as organised under the Elizabethan Settlement, Herbert derived the spiritual nourishment which satisfied his soul and quickened his pious imagination.  Born in 1593, when Whitgift was prosecuting the struggle between episcopacy and puritanism, he died in 1632, the year before the translati...