laudable Practice

With the dark days now upon us (it will be sunset at 6:25pm in Jeremy Taylor country today), we continue to consider sermons from Bishop Bull (d.1710) on the angels. The first of these sermons is entitled ' The Existence of Angels ', on the text Hebrews 1.14. In this extract, Bull points to words of Origen on the holy angels, rooting the Reformation refusal to countenance prayers to angels in patristic teaching. It also represents a continuation of what Sarah Hutton has termed the " Origenist moment in English theology ", a movement particularly associated with Cambridge Platonist circles, especially Taylor's friend George Rust. In other words, contrary to those who portray the Reformation understanding of the ministry of the holy angels as 'disenchantment', Bull's turn to Origen emphasises it as a richly theocentric and Christocentric vision: For Origen, speaking the sense of the Christians in his time, in answer to Celsus, objecting the neglect of wo...

In Section XI of The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654), Taylor's use of Fathers of the Eastern Churches continues. He invokes them in the context of affirming that - in the words of the so-called Black Rubric - "the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here" (emphasis added). The first Eastern father to whom Taylor turns in this section is Theodoret of Cyrus: Christ as man according to the body is in a place and goes from a place, and when he comes to another place is not in the place from whence he came ... So Theodoret, Domini corpus incorruptibile resurrexit & impatibile & immortale, & divinâ gloriâ glorificatum est, & à coelestibus adoratur potestatibus; corpus tamen est, priorem habens circumscriptionem. Christs body even after the resurrection is circumscribed as it was before. And therefore as it is impious to deny God to be invisible: so it is profane, not to believe and professe...

In Section IX of The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654), we see further evidence of Taylor's commitment to 'breathing with both lungs' by again turning to Origen.  The key part of this Section is a commentary on Origen's eucharistic theology: we might regard it as part of Taylor's contribution to the ' Origenist moment in English theology '. He sees in Origen an understanding of the Eucharist which coheres with that of the English Church - "say we too" - in which heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material realities are affirmed, with the Lord's body "eaten in a spiritual sense", for "this is the plain and natural sense of the words of Origen": he plainly distinguishes the material part from the spiritual in the sacrament, and affirms, that "according to the material part, that meat that is sanctified by the word of God and prayer, enters into the mouths, descends into the belly, an...

In Section V of The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654), we continue to see Taylor quote extensively from theologians of the Christian East and point to the liturgies of the Eastern Churches. The opening paragraph of this Section quotes from Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret, to demonstrate the reality of the bread and wine in the Eucharist: St. Cyril of Alexandria; "called bread his flesh." Theodoret saith that "to the body he gave the name of the symbol, and to the symbol the name of his body. The pairing is, of course, interesting, as Theodoret challenged Cyril's Christology. This in itself is suggestive of how Taylor generously viewed the Christian East as embracing both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian theologians and churches. Another extract from Theodoret - "In the exhibition of the mysteries he called bread his body, and the mixture in the chalice he called blood" - appears, as do words from the Byzantine John M...