The Church of England never provided itself with a process whereby it could add to the calendar of Saints. Saints were too controversial at the Reformation and as a result we lost one of those slender chains that tie us into our past. Our new service books have, however, invented a series of ‘commemorations’ so that we can remember significant voices from the Anglican and Protestant past.
“Touching musical harmony whether by instrument or voice such … is the force thereof, and so pleasing effects it hath in that very part of man which is most divine, that some have been thereby induced to think that the soul itself by nature is or hath in it harmony. A thing which delighteth all ages and beseemeth all states; a thing as seasonable in grief as in joy; as decent being added unto actions of greatest weight and solemnity, as being used when men most sequester themselves from action. The reason hereof is an admirable facility which music hath to express and represent to the mind, more inwardly than any other sensible mean, the very standing, rising and falling, the very steps and inflections every way, the turns and varieties of all passions whereunto the mind is subject; .there is that draweth to a marvellous grave and sober mediocrity, there is also that carrieth as it were into ecstasies, filling the mind with a heavenly joy and for the time in a manner severing it from the body. “
In the month in which we remember St Cecilia, the patron saint of music it is good that we can also remember on November 3rd, one of the great patrons of Anglicanism, Richard Hooker. This description of the effects of music comes from the fifth book of his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the founding document of the Anglican way, the middle way in which ‘mediocrity’ meaning the measured, moderate, middle ground, can even so still leave room for ecstasy. Hooker was born c. 1554, and via an education and fellowship at Corpus Christi, Oxford was appointed Master of the Temple in 1585, where he became embroiled in a long debate on Calvinism with the reader, William Travers. Subsequently rector of Boscombe Wilts and Bishopsbourne in Kent he died in 1600, the first of Anglicanism’s great pastor theologians.
He is the master of what Rowan Williams has called ‘contemplative pragmatism’ ‘a mood that embraces a fair degree of clarity about the final goal of human beings and the theological conditions for getting there, but allows room for a good deal of reticence as to how this ought to work itself out and scepticism as to claims that we have found comprehensive formulations.’ (Anglican Identities p.26) Thus, unlike some of his contemporaries, Hooker, did not think that the primary point of worship was ideological instruction within strictly formulated liturgical arrangements (usually saying what you shouldn’t do such as singing psalms). Music in worship is permissible because it is part of our humanity assumed by Christ. Music ‘shows us how our affections can be clarified and educated, made plainer to us and converted or confirmed or both.’ (Williams) Music has its part to play in the sacramental renewing from within – which is what worship is truly about. It helps us to dispose ourselves to the hidden processes of grace. Knowledge of God cannot be too exactly prescribed (Hooker thought that even Catholics could be saved when they were working from the same basic Christian foundations as their Protestant neighbours). God is divinely free to work with us in his own way we do not earn his favour even by theological let alone moral correctness. We endeavour to put ourselves in his way, to subdue our kinds and hearts and wills to his working but there will always be a provisionality about what we say and do. ‘Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and joy to make mention of his name; yet our soundest knowledge is to know that we know him not as he is, neither can know him; and our safest eloquence concerning him is our silence, when we confess without confession that his glory is inexplicable, his greatness above our capacity and reach.’
Hooker’s writing is often obscure and weighed down by detailed refutation of arguments that no longer concern us, but he is an important witness to the possibility of steering a course between authoritarian fundamentalism and un-self-critical liberalism.
With my love and prayers,
Father Stephen
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker