Anglican history, part III: Who founded Anglicanism?

The following completes my series on Anglican history. Part I can be found here, and Part II can be found here. The text of this was originally posted on Quora in answer to a question there.

As I alluded to in Part II of this series, the common misconception is that Henry VIII “founded” Anglicanism (or at least the Church of England). That is actually completely false. The true founder — if we discount St. Augustine of Canterbury founding the English Church in 597 — was not Henry, but his daughter, Elizabeth. This is something of a pet peeve of mine…

Elizabeth I was formally the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, technically the first to hold that title. (Her father, Henry VIII, and her brother, Edward VI, had been Supreme Head, but many loyal English Catholics were offended by it and Elizabeth changed the title to appease them.) All British monarchs ever since Elizabeth have held that title.

The pet peeve is that it is commonly (and wrongly) said that Henry VIII “founded” the Church of England. He did not. The existing English Church simply cut ties to Rome. These ties were restored by Mary I, and again cut under Elizabeth.

It is also commonly (and wrongly) assumed that Henry dramatically reformed the Church of England, and that he left a lasting mark on it. Actually, Henry stoutly resisted any attempts at reforms, and feuded with Luther and the Reformers on the Continent. Priests were still required to be celibate, the Mass was still usually in Latin (though an English Bible was published), belief in transubstantiation was required by law (see Six Articles), prayers for the dead were still said. And anyway what little he did change was restored by Mary. (She was unable to reverse the Dissolution of the Monasteries for political reasons, but otherwise wiped out the few small changes Henry did allow.)

The Church of England — and with it the Anglican Communion as a whole — was reformed not by Henry, but by Elizabeth. The hallmarks of Anglicanism are not to be found in Henry’s church, but in Elizabeth’s, and broadly speaking, the essentials of the Elizabethan Settlement are still what makes Anglicanism unique in uniting Catholicism and Protestantism in a single body.

So if anyone could be said to have founded Anglicanism (besides Jesus Christ and St. Augustine of Canterbury), it would be Elizabeth — not Henry VIII. Her vision of a single church uniting all Christians regardless of denomination is what makes Anglicanism what it is today.

Hence I would argue that the only real service Henry VIII did for Anglicanism is fathering Elizabeth. She is the true central figure in Anglican history, and really should get a lot more credit for it.

Word choices, or how to find your inner Anglo-Saxon

The following was originally written for my English for Scientists course that I taught at the Leibniz Institute in Potsdam.

The English language has a complex and fascinating history. That history affects how certain words are perceived. Therefore it affects your word choices when writing in English.

A brief history of the English language

The “Heptarchy” of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
From Wikimedia Commons

English ultimately is derived from Anglo-Saxon (sometimes called “Old English”), a language closely related to Low German (Plattdeutsch), Dutch, and Frisian. In the late 5th century AD, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from northern Germany and Denmark invaded and colonized what became England — “Angle-Land” — which until then had been Roman and Celtic. Almost no words of Latin or Celtic survive from that period in English, making it clear that the Romano-British population was completely displaced by the Anglo-Saxons. (Their descendants are the modern Welsh and Cornish.) The Anglo-Saxons then formed into several kingdoms like Kent, Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria, which gradually formed into one kingdom of England.

Here is the Lord’s Prayer in Anglo-Saxon from about the year 1000. The “þ” is called “thorn” and is the “th” sound in “this”; the “ð” is called “eth” and is the “th” sound in “thin”.

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;
Si þin nama gehalgod
to becume þin rice
gewurþe ðin willa
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum
and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfele soþlice.¹

By way of comparison, here it is in the English of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

Our father, which art in heaven,
hallowed by thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done,
in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive them that trespass against us.
And lead us not into remptation,
but deliver us from evil.

Starting around the year 800, Vikings began to attack the British Isles. After 865, they started an all-out conquest of England — which nearly succeeded. While they were beaten back and defeated by King Alfred the Great in 886, Alfred had to accept their control over the northern and eastern parts of England, which became known as the “Danelaw”. To this day, many place names in northern England have the Danish “-by” ending (like Derby) alongside the Anglo-Saxon “-ham” ending (like Grantham). Many Viking words were added to Old English and used alongside Anglo-Saxon words, like heavens (Anglo-Saxon) and sky (Old Norse). Words like bash and skull and give and take all came from the Vikings.

From 1016 to 1035, England was ruled by a Danish king, Canute (or Cnut), and was briefly part of a Scandinavian empire. This brought more Danish colonists, which left its mark on the language. Titles like earl (jarl) came into English at this time alongside the English thegn/thane.

In 1066, the Normans led by William the Conqueror invaded England and took the crown. The Normans were originally Vikings who colonized northern France, but by the time of the Norman Conquest, they spoke a dialect of Old French. They replaced nearly the whole upper class of Anglo-Saxon society all at once. Thus to this day legal and high culture terms in English are generally French in origin. Until the 19th century, legal proceedings in England were still largely conducted in Norman French. In many cases French words were used alongside Anglo-Saxon ones: kingly (Anglo-Saxon) and royal (French), for example. Even the word “government” is French.

After 1066, English went into a kind of long sleep, barely surviving as the language of simple peasants and farmers. For almost 300 years, the English noble class spoke French and ignored English. It wasn’t until King Edward III (reign 1327-1377) that an English king spoke English in Parliament.

Because of the steady immigration of different language groups and the lack of an elite to maintain standards, English became much simpler — like a créole or patois in the Caribbean or Africa simplifies English today. Inflections and genders (der/die/das/die, dem/der/dem/den…) like you see in German nearly vanished, though a few examples remain: who/whom, he/him/his, or calling a ship her.

English also shifted from the German habit of making compound words to the French manner of stringing words together separately. Germanic compound words like handbook, highway, townsfolk gave way to phrases. Where German or Old English would form a compound word like Hochschule, English prefers to leave the words separate: high school. Note the lack of a hyphen as well.

In spite of all this change, throughout history, the bedrock of English remained firmly Anglo-Saxon. Of the 100 most commonly used words in English,² nearly all are of Anglo-Saxon origin: words like the, this, I, and, by, for, two, and so on. For most common things, there is an Anglo-Saxon word that can be used and is often preferred.

Thanks to the constant input of new words from Danes, Normans, and the Church, English gained a huge vocabulary filled with synonyms taken from Old Norse, Norman French, and Latin. Instead of just “red”, an apple in English can be “crimson”, “ruby”, “carmine”, “maroon”, “scarlet”, “vermillion”, “russet”, “claret”, and more besides.

Then came Shakespeare (1564-1616), who almost singlehandedly transformed the language. Shakespeare is said to have coined over 1700 words,³ and many common phrases we use today were invented by him. Phrases like the be-all and end-all, put your best foot forward, brave new world, to breathe his last, crack of doom, and hundreds more were all from Shakespeare.

This richness of language in English is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because it makes it possible for poets and writers to have greater shades of meaning than is possible in other languages, but it is also a curse, because the temptation is always there to abuse that privilege.

What is language for?

This matters in your writing because you are not writing poetry or art, you are writing to be understood. Language in this case is for a very specific purpose: giving information as efficiently and easily as possible.

Let’s talk about the King James Bible, a translation in English that was completed in 1611. Like you, the translators wanted to reach as wide an audience and communicate as clearly as possible. The reason was their Protestant zeal to bring the Bible to all people so that anyone could understand it, not just priests. To this day the King James Bible ranks as one of the best-written English texts of all time. It is loved for its clarity and simplicity. Along with Shakespeare — who lived at about the same time the King James Bible was translated — it ranks as the strongest influence on the English langauge of any single work. Hundreds of common phrases and idioms we use today come from that Bible — ashes to ashes, a broken heart, a drop in the bucket, a labor of love, flesh and blood — these and many more come from the King James Version.⁴

The biggest reason it is considered to be so clear and precise is because its translators preferred to stick to simple Anglo-Saxon words. They only coined Latinate or Greek words only where absolutely necessary and where the meaning of those words is “crystal clear” (that is a term coined by the King James Bible, by the way).

Somehow, through all the centuries, English speakers have kept a preference for those ancient words, and people who overuse French, Latin, Greek or other “foreign” words still come across to many as elitist, opaque, distant, snobbish, even aggressive — all negative words that come from Norman French, by the way. Perhaps this gut feeling is also an echo of the feelings the defeated Anglo-Saxons must have felt toward their Norman overlords.

This is helpful to remember when trying to understand how words are perceived by native speakers of English. It happens on a deeply subconscious level; most people would not know why it sounds better or worse. The reader almost certainly won’t think much about why they feel the way they do about the text, but they will still have those feelings. Those feelings in turn can change how your writing is perceived in subtle, yet important ways.

The only rule in English: There are no rules

It may sound strange, but English has no commonly agreed rules. German has Duden, the French have the Academie française, but English has many competing sets of rules. Even within individual countries, there are multiple dictionaries and rule sets to choose from. One dictionary may say a word is spelled “cookie”, another may insist it is “cooky”.

Furthermore, since there never was a central authority deciding what the rules are, English never went through a complete reform like German has done. Where a word’s spelling from one dialect became the preferred one, a totally different pronunciation from a different dialect would also become the choice. Hence English spelling often has no rhyme or reason. Cough, though, thought, and rough all use the combination ough, but sound totally different from each other. Then there are differences between American, British, Canadian, and Australian English — is it center or centre, honor or honour, tyre or tire, while or whilst?

The answer to this problem is the rules are whatever the group you are in says they are. If you are in America or are in contact with Americans, use American English. If in contact with British people, use British English. Then decide which style guide you need to use, if you need it. But the main thing is, don’t worry about it too much — even native speakers get things like this wrong all the time!

---

¹ Retrieved from http://www.lords-prayer-words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html, February 19, 2015.

² See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English

³ Retrieved from http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html, February 20, 2015

⁴ See http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/bible-phrases-sayings.html

The myth of Galileo, Copernicanism, and the Catholic Church

The following was posted on Quora in response to the question What are some common misconceptions about the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages?:

One of the worst misconceptions about the Middle Ages is that the Church deliberately tried to limit knowledge and keep people stupid and uneducated. The most common example taken to illustrate this — which was in the Renaissance, but still applied to the Middle Ages — was that of Galileo’s conflict with the Church over heliocentrism.

In reality, the Church actively supported the dissemination of knowledge. The liberal arts were actively supported by the Church throughout the Middle Ages, even celebrated in church architecture. The major universities of the Middle Ages like the Sorbonne, Oxford, Cambridge, and Heidelberg, were generally supported strongly by the Church and used to teach both the sciences and theology as well as the liberal arts in general. The major scientific thinkers of the age were generally priests and/or monks — like Roger Bacon — and the Church strongly supported the copying and dissemination of learned texts to further those ends. Once Greek philosophical texts like Aristotle became generally available in the West starting with the fall of Constantinople — having been lost in the chaos of the fall of the Western Roman Empire — it was the Church that made sure they were copied and passed around.

Which leads us to Galileo. The irony of the modern commonly held perception is that the Church was reluctant to approve Copernicus not so much because they held it to be in conflict with the Bible, but the stronger reason was that they held it to be in conflict with Aristotle and Ptolemy. While they were still mistaken for doing so, the Church leaders were utterly convinced the ancient Greek philosophers must have been right — from their perspective Europe was just recovering from a long night (the word “Renaissance” itself means “rebirth”) and rediscovering the ancient learning that had given the world the glory of Rome. Anything contradicting that was suspect, because how could a modern person, a product of all that decay, possibly be more right than the Romans and Greeks were?

Furthermore, the Church’s initial objection to Galileo was not that he was not right, but that they were concerned about the wider social impact his writings may have and whether Copernicanism was proven without a doubt. They wanted him to publish his works amongst the learned community at the time to let the debate take place in a smaller circle while the Church decided how to adapt to this new learning. Hence the Church, led by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, suggested various compromise positions, like stating the Copernican model was mathematically accurate and useful for predictions while still notionally sticking to Aristotle and Ptolemy. Tycho Brahe was one vocal proponent of this compromise, proposing a hybrid model with the other planets orbiting the Sun, while the Sun and Moon orbited the Earth. Other leading Church figures like Paolo Antonio Foscarini published attempts to reconcile Copernican ideas with Biblical passages that previously had been used to buttress Aristotle and Ptolemy.

Cardinal Bellarmine made this clear by writing, “then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary; and say rather that we do not understand them, than that what is demonstrated is false” — in other words, he did not reject the new ideas out of hand, but wanted to find a way to let the Church adapt to the new knowledge and re-interpret Scripture to match. Again, this was still wrong, but also quite understandable and very different from the idea that the Church wanted Copernicanism banned. The Church also wanted to be absolutely sure that Copernicanism was indeed proven beyond a shadow of a doubt before going public with it and asked various scientists and philosophers for their opinions — in other words, peer review, a hallmark of the scientific method.

Instead, Galileo went public and went out of his way to insult his opponents. In a modern context, it would be like a scientist refusing to publish his works in a peer-reviewed journal and instead put his ideas on Facebook while insulting his colleagues in the process. Even then, he had powerful protectors in the Church, including Pope Paul V, who had been a personal friend; it was only when Galileo insulted the Pope that he lost that protection and was tried for what were really political, not religious reasons (the religious ones were just a convenient excuse). Had Galileo been less bullheaded and gone through the peer review that the Church wanted, things would have gone very differently.

This was picked up by Protestant propagandists, who were only too happy to portray the Catholic Church as being beholden to “superstition” (a word they frequently used to deride Catholic teachings). That meme still goes on today in various guises, but it is still a distortion of what really happened.

I should point out that I’m not Roman Catholic, but Anglican, so it’s not like I take much pleasure in defending Rome. :P

The not-so-new victim politics

A friend sent this link to me — an interesting (if thoroughly depressing) read. It is an article entitled “Rock, Paper, Scissors of PC Victimology: Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews”. Please do go have a read.

The thought that keeps going through my mind about this is that human beings are intensely social creatures obsessed with hierarchy. As soon as one tool for creating and enforcing such a hierarchy passes away — feudalism, say — we come up with another one to replace it. For all the rhetoric of our modern society claiming to be egalitarian and democratic, we are anything but, and things like this are nothing more than schoolyard bullying in an ongoing struggle for greater social status, whatever the cost.

Thus I don’t see it as a “new” victim politics, but rather something very old indeed, as old as humanity itself. In the 20th century, there were plenty of such examples of people framing others as heterodox and heaping abuse on them, like within Communism (the Cultural Revolution was a major example, as were Stalin’s purges). Contrary to the article’s claim that this is a thing of the left, the right was and is quite capable of the same thing. Witness the outrage you see on Fox News for anything “un-American” or McCarthyism. Going further back, Muslims and Christians were quite happy to denounce each other — Sunni vs. Shia, Catholic vs. Orthodox vs. Protestant, orthodox Christian vs. “heretics” of various stripes — over trivialities. Quite often these denouncements ended in outright mass murder. And as the manifold examples of the 20th century make clear, religion had little to do with it. It is just one label amongst many that can be seized upon to beat up on someone else. Take away religion, people will find something else — anything to make your identity better than someone else’s in the eyes of others.

Take away religion, politics, sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and sports, and people will seize on the color of a dress to beat each other up with.

Maybe we’re not resorting to physical violence as much as we once did (duels, brawls, catfights, wars, genocides), but we’re becoming that much more adept at psychological violence to replace it. Progress of a sort, I suppose, but deep down little if anything has changed.

The final irony is that by framing this phenomenon as something “new” and mocking it as “victim politics”, the author is himself engaging in this very sort of hierarchical power politics without realizing it.

TL;DR — people suck.

Breaking the silence: Potsdam’s Garrison Church and the history of Brandenburg-Prussia

You may have noticed the cobwebs beginning to collect on this blog. That is mainly because I’ve moved to lovely Potsdam, capital of the German state of Brandenburg and former residence of the kings of Prussia (and later the Kaiser). Been busy with our new home and getting settled in. I have to say I love it here, because as you may have noticed, I have a thing for history, and Potsdam is loaded with it…or perhaps “burdened” is a better term. The following story is a good example of this.

Burdened by history and controversy

A major controversy is raging in Potsdam and has been for some years. It revolves around the old Prussian Garrison Church in the center of Potsdam. You can read up on that church and its overshadowed history at Wikipedia, but here some more thoughts about it. I would also highly recommend the book “Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia” by Christopher Clark (link to Amazon here).

The Church of Holy Paranoia

The Garrison Church was the parish church of the Prussian royal family, which of course later became the Imperial family headed by the Kaiser. You must understand that this church was intricately interwoven into Prussian history, and that history was one defined by paranoia fed by invasion and persecution from outside and within. (As the saying goes, you’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you.)

Prussia — which began as the Mark of Brandenburg, the eastern march of the Holy Roman Empire — was a place of poor farmland (much of it swamp) and little natural resources. It also had practically no natural borders and thus was more or less defenseless. As a march or borderland it was constantly under threat of invasion or attack from the east, which in the early Middle Ages was still largely pagan and very hostile. That almost certainly shaped the Prussian mentality.

Later on during the Renaissance, Brandenburg was a major scene of the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, in which Swedish and Austrian troops swept back and forth plundering and destroying, regardless of whether the townsfolk who got in the way were themselves Protestant or Catholic. While the Thirty Years’ War was on the face of it a religious war, in reality it was just a war of conquest and plunder, and the people of Brandenburg bore the brunt of it. Whole towns were wiped off the map, entire cities like Magdeburg destroyed. That this was in the name of Jesus was all the more grotesque.

Add to this the peculiar path the Protestant Reformation took in Brandenburg. It went Lutheran fairly early on, and the great mass of the people remained so until the formation of the GDR. After the Augsburg Settlement in 1555 ending the War of the Schmalkaldic League (a settlement later reinforced by the Peace of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years’ War), effectively only two churches were legal in Germany: Lutheran and Catholic. Technically after Augsburg it was now allowed to be Protestant, but only if you were Lutheran — Calvinists or Nonconformists need not apply. Meanwhile the treaties also stipulated that each local prince would determine his territory’s church as “summus episcopus” or “head of the church”, with only those two options on the table, Lutheran or Roman Catholic. Things went awry when the Elector and Markgrave of Brandenburg, Johann Sigismund, converted to Calvinism in 1613. From then on it was a constant source of conflict in Brandenburg and its successor Prussia, as the royal family stuck to Calvinism, while the people remained Lutheran (and largely High Church Lutherans at that).

Thus the Prussian royal family developed a paranoid streak a mile wide thanks to repeated invasion and desolation and also thanks to constant challenges to their faith from all directions, Lutheran and Catholic. Their response was on two fronts. The first was to develop and maintain a huge and efficient military to defend itself. Prussia was, as the adage went, not a country with an army, but an army with a country. There was a lot of truth to that, as Prussia became a thoroughly militarized society — while this was nothing unique for the time, Prussia was notable for being an extreme case. The second front was this: After many decades of constant trouble because of their insisting on staying with Calvinism and trying to convince their people and other princes to accept that, the royal family eventually came up with its own solution — forcing the Calvinist and Lutheran churches in Brandenburg-Prussia to merge into a single united Protestant Church in 1817. Thus the Prussian royal house and the church in Prussia were intricately linked, arguably far more so than in any other European state, with the monarch taking an extremely active role in shaping the religious life of his subjects.

The result was a potent — and ultimately fatal — mixture with the King of Prussia at the head of one of Europe’s premiere armies and also at the head of its United Church. The Garrison Church was thus the physical representation of that fusion of military and church as manifested in the Kingdom of Prussia. If any building was a symbol of Prussian religious militarism, that was it.

Thing is, the Prussian nobility kept its distance from the Nazis in the interwar period. While the former Kaiser and his supporters certainly liked the idea of Germany rising again and were in theory allies of the Nazi’s revanchist and irredentist nationalism, the nobility and Prussian military officers viewed the Nazis with a great deal of disdain (and in some cases outright worry…but all too few). In the end, however, Hitler and the Nazis convinced a number of old Prussian nobility to join forces with them, and that team-up was celebrated in the so-called “Day of Potsdam” at the Garrison Church — where, ironically enough, many old Prussian noble and military families worshipped, whose members formed the backbone of the Stauffenberg conspiracy that would later try to assassinate Hitler.

The end of the church — against the people’s will

Fast forward to 1968 and East Germany. Potsdam was mostly spared from the war, and the Garrison Church was still intact. It still had a parish using it. However, the GDR leadership was determined to wipe out any traces of Prussian militarism and drive home their view that East Germany was a “New Germany” freed from the chains of its past. So the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, decreed that the church must go — over the very vocal opposition of the people of Potsdam. And it was torn down, replaced by a (rather ugly) computer center in the typical Commie style.

Fast forward again to today, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moves have been afoot for some time to rebuild the church as a true copy of the original. The EKD, Germany’s mainline Protestant church (to which the successor to the Prussian United Church belongs), and various — in some cases quite nationalistic — groups have joined forces to do so. Yet this has been extremely controversial, precisely because of the church’s powerful symbolism and attachment to the Prussian military regime. What’s more, many people in Potsdam simply don’t want the church back for a lot of reasons — besides the problematic symbolism and worries about a rebirth of nationalism, there is also the point that many other churches around Potsdam are falling apart and in dire need of cash, so the money could surely be better spent there, saving what still exists rather than making a copy.

The rebirth of the church — against the people’s will?

One argument supporters in the EKD make is that the new copy would (if they have their way) be dedicated as a “church of peace and reconciliation” to try and atone for the Day of Potsdam and all that resulted from it. They have enlisted various politicians to support their cause, such as Sigmar Gabriel from the Social Democrats. There is definitely a great deal of national interest in this church being rebuilt, and lots of donors across Germany have given substantial funds for it to be done.

Yet the level of opposition in Potsdam itself is intense, and from what I gather, it is growing. Earlier this year, opponents of rebuilding the church succeeded in collecting over 10,000 signatures from Potsdam residents on a petition to block the project, and in a city-wide plebiscite about the city budget, Potsdam residents also overwhelmingly called for blocking funding of the project, well ahead of all other budget propositions on the ballot.

Thing is, I am a big fan of historical buildings and love Potsdam for its wealth of them. (Some sneer at it and call it Prussian Disneyland. Oh well.) When there is a groundswell of broad support, rebuilding landmarks can go a long way to supporting reconciliation — like the Frauenkirche in Dresden, which was supported by Coventry, whose cathedral was also destroyed in the war. However, in this case something seems seriously wrong — a great mass, possibly a majority, of the local people absolutely don’t want it, and it seems to be a bad joke that a “church of reconciliation” can’t reconcile with its opponents and just keeps steaming ahead regardless of any opposition. That the church was torn down over the objections of its parishioners and the townspeople was a crime in and of itself, but why compound it by stomping all over local feelings a second time?

Reconcile, not divide

This is not to say I am myself totally against rebuilding it (though I do think the money could be better used elsewhere). If I were calling the shots in the city and state governments, I’d probably build it while making sure it is used to instruct and warn about its dark past. But I do think the rebuilding campaign needs to do far, far more to try and get more people on board, especially if they are serious about the church’s mission to be a place of reconciliation. Simply shrugging off criticism and blaming opponents for not being reasonable is not the answer. If they fail in that attempt at reconciliation, then frankly I think the whole project deserves to fail. There is no point to a place of reconciliation that is itself divisive.

Announcing Millard Fillmore Day, Nov. 5th. Now go get drunk and blow stuff up.

I think we Americans should take a cue from the Limeys and have a holiday to celebrate a forgotten and irrelevant historical figure by getting drunk and blowing stuff up. I suggest turning the Fifth of November into Millard Fillmore Day in the US, with lots of drinking, explosives and NASCAR.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
Let's party for old historical bunk.
With Fillmore our President we shall not be hesitant
To blow up stuff and get drunk.

Bonus for years in which the US election lands on Nov. 5th.

Remember, remember the…sixth?…of November

I would like to encourage all Americans to vote third party tomorrow. Belay that, vote fourth party to be sure.

Meanwhile…over in dear old Blighty…

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I know of no reason that the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot!

*BOOM*sparklesparkle

Now get out there and vote, patriotic citizens of Amerrrrrica.

Ze GERMAN Technology Museum is GERMAN

Yesterday, I was with the kids at the German Technology Museum in Berlin-Kreuzberg. On the whole, the exhibitions were well made, but I was irked at the strangely Germanophile emphasis of the things on display.

There were many examples of teutocentric stuff:

• In the aviation section, Hannover's Karl Jatho and Berlin's Otto Lilienthal are lavishly represented, in particular Lilienthal's gliders are all over the place, but the Wright Brothers get barely a mention (and a small scale model of their flyer) in spite of their critical role in the development of controlled aviation.
• In rocketry, no mention of Goddard, but plenty about the Nazi V2 and Saturn rocket engine used in the Apollo moon program (which of course was also from von Braun and a descendant of the V2's engine).
• In computing, you could easily get the impression Konrad Zuse singlehandedly invented computing - but barely a mention of Charles Babbage, nothing about Turing or ENIAC that I saw, no Apple I or II or Mac or IBM or UNIX, but Zuse machines everywhere.

Yet the museum is mostly bilingual and had lots of international visitors, and had an extensive display about the Berlin Airlift, emphasizing the positive role Americans played. Indeed the museum is topped by a "raisin bomber", one of the aircraft used by the US military to fly goods into West Berlin during the Soviet blockade and still fondly remembered here.

I'm used to American museums being very America-centric, but to have a German museum behave that way – where Germans in my experience are usually much more circumspect about being nationalist and are more prickly about not focusing too much on one country – is a little jarring.

One personal note was that the lobby has a Cessna plane hanging there. I immediately guessed that it was a very certain plane, and was right – the very plane that Mathias Rust flew and landed in Moscow in 1987, embarrassing the Soviet military. I remember it well, because at the time I had to write an essay in high school about what I would do with a million dollars. I found the topic dull beyond belief and didn't take it too seriously. Whereas the other kids wrote things like they'd buy an awesome car or donate it to the poor or whatever, I said I'd buy 100,000 pairs of Levi's at bulk discount and hire Rust to fly them into the USSR for sale at a huge markup, then use the proceeds to buy more Levi's and sell them in the USSR, and so on until I had gained economic control over the Soviet Union and would bring it to its knees. Then I'd seize control of the Soviet Union and use nuclear blackmail to take over the world. (I got an A. And probably ended up on some FBI watch list.)

On the whole I'd highly recommend the museum, in spite of its flawed emphasis on German achievements to the expense of other, historically more important figures. Kudos for the interactivity of the exhibits, but a big minus for historical context and scope.

Sola scriptura vs. apostolic succession, Church vs. Bible

Over on HuffPo (full disclosure: I don't normally read HuffPo, but for this article I made an exception) there is an interesting article by Marcus Borg, a leading Biblical scholar and well-known liberal serving as canon theologian of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon. I'm not normally a fan of Canon Borg, but this article is indeed thought-provoking and highlights why a belief in the Bible being the "inerrant Word of God" is at best a mirage and at worst downright heretical.

Historically, it's clear that the Bible was very much a work in progress for centuries. The same is true whether we look at the Old Testament or the New, and the familiar order of the books of the NT is actually historically misleading. The Epistles came first, the Gospels later, and the Bible wasn't even canonized until the fourth century. Thus rather than the Church being a creation of the Bible, it's the other way around, with the Epistles clearly documenting the evolution of the early Church. By the time the Bible as we know it existed, the Church's foundation had been outlined for many generations.

So to insist on sola scriptura – Scripture alone – being the basis of the Church literally puts the cart before the horse. The Bible is a creation of the Holy Church, acting in the name of Christ Who founded it. The Bible is a document of the Holy Church, recording her early history, and therefore can't define it any more than an autobiography defines its subject's life and destiny.

Meanwhile, a friend is a Lutheran pastor who is also a fan of high church liturgy and especially of Anglicans. My friend was raised in and educated by the Lutheran church in northern Germany, which is low church to a fault. To my surprise, given her fascination with and enthusiasm for High Anglicanism, she boldly claimed that the Apostolic Succession and historic episcopate – something which is firmly anchored in Anglicanism and which separates it from nearly all Protestants – is a fiction.

The Apostolic Succession and historic episcopate simply says that bishops have been in an unbroken line of succession ever since the days of the Apostles. Jesus laid His hands on the Apostles, who laid their hands on their successors the early bishops, and so on down the line to today's Catholic, Old Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican bishops. Luther initially tried to get bishops in the Succession to join his reform movement, but failed – and thereupon the early Lutherans rejected the Succession as not being necessary for the good order and efficacy of the sacraments of the Church, referring instead to the Word of God (i.e. the Bible). In other words, the historic episcopate, for Lutherans, is at best "nice to have" and at worst a fiction used and abused by Rome to deny Lutheran Christianity any legitimacy.

But hold on. Once again we have to ask, which came first, the Church or the Bible? If the Church came first, and through her councils defined the priesthood and episcopate while also defining the Bible, then how can one throw away the Church's early doctrine while also insisting on the Bible the Church created?

To me the conclusion is clear: You either have to accept the historical Church and the Bible, or neither. If you accept the historical Church, you have to accept her decisions made in council as binding, and that includes the basic threefold order of bishops, priests and deacons. We clearly see that order documented and defined by the Church Fathers long before the Bible was canonized. In particular the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of Rome is quite clear on the workings of this threefold order, and it was written in 215 AD, long before we find the first complete list of 27 books of the New Testament in a letter by St. Athanasius from 367 AD, and far longer than before that list was ever formally defined as being the canon of the New Testament.

So while it is impossible to historically document the Apostolic Succession and historic episcopate – who ordained whom as bishop and when – that does not mean it does not exist. There are many things in history which we can infer from the available documentation, and it is clear that quite early on, the Church placed great store in the concept of the personal succession of bishops from Peter and ultimately from Jesus Himself.

We see this all over the place in the writings of the Church Fathers in the first four centuries of the Church, not least Hippolytus' Tradition, so it makes no sense to doubt that that principle was carried forward even if no detailed lists of succession were maintained. In particular, the practice of always having at least three bishops participate in the consecration of a new bishop ensured that at least one of those bishops would pass on a valid line of succession.

Of course, I don't want to give the impression that the Succession is of paramount importance to what makes a church or denomination legitimate. In fact it isn't – the true belief in God is what matters, and the Succession is only a tool to try and ensure the correctness of that belief. Just because someone is "validly" ordained doesn't mean that they are truly doing the work of God, and just because a Lutheran or other pastor isn't "validly" ordained doesn't mean their sacraments or spiritual life is meaningless. (For the record, I do in fact receive Communion from Lutheran pastors on occasion.) But if we're talking about the proper order of the Church and how it should be defined, then I think we have to accept the entirety of its history when acting in consensus – and that clearly includes the historic episcopate as viewed by the early Church.

Charlemagne's gay capital?

The thought occurred to me – Charlemagne's capital is today called Aachen in German (and is in Germany), but is called Aix-la-Chapelle in French, and the French like to claim old Chuck for themselves.

What I want to know is how the Frogs got from "Aaaaaaachen" to "Aix-la-Chapelle". I mean, Aaaaaaachen sounds like something old Chuck Da Great would have said in a bad mood as he was about to "convert" hordes of Saxons in the name of a loving God at the point of a sword, but "Aix-la-Chapelle" sounds totally, outrageously gay and not at all like the name of the capital of a really butch conqueror of half of Europe. I mean, call it "La Cage aux Folles" while you're at it, why don't you.

Just a random thought about European history. Never mind me.

Shocking news: Rome sacked…and historical maps

On 24 August 410, the Eternal City of Rome was sacked by Alaric the Goth. (What his tastes in dress and music were are a matter of speculation, but I doubt Alaric wrote bad poetry or listened to The Cure.) This event is generally considered to be the beginning of the so-called Middle Ages, my favorite period in history to study. It's also a good reason to link to a fascinating resource online, Euratlas, which offers detailed historical maps like the one above.

Accents in English: All aboat moases in my hoases

Over on Slate, there is a fascinating article about how local accents in North American English are still on the move. Meanwhile I'm always amused when people ask me if I'm Canadian when I let a Virginian "aboat", "hoase" and "moase" slip out. But then again I'm probably a dying breed. And if anyone claims to not have an accent, I will smack you with a dead ghoti.

Design: I'm back in the GDR, don't know how lucky you are, boy

Over on this page you can see a fascinating collection of photos from the former East Germany or GDR. It really shows how the GDR was almost obsessed with "modern" design – and only supports my suspicions that Ikea designers just go raiding old GDR material for ideas.

Be sure to post in the comments about your favorite photos.

Gospel of St. Cuthbert to return home

Cuthbert of Lindisfarne:
Fresco in Durham Cathedral

I am delighted by the news that the Gospel of St. Cuthbert is returning home to Durham Cathedral.

Rather ironically, I was just reading about this very book in "In Search of England" by Michael Wood – an excellent book, by the way, for anyone interested in English history and heritage.

I would love to see Cuthbert's Gospel in person – it is said to be remarkably beautiful, and was worn by St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (my favorite saint, pictured at right) around his neck while on his travels around Northumbria. So I'm delighted to see the book returning home to Durham, and hope to someday see it in person in the world's most beautiful cathedral, which is home to the shrine of Cuthbert. It would be a return trip for me as well, having visited the cathedral and shrine in 1994, and I've been wanting to go back for a long time – now I have an even better reason to do so.

[Cuthbert] was wonderfully forbearing and his courage in bearing hardship in body and mind was unsurpassed [...] . Such was his zeal for prayer that sometimes he kept vigil for three or four nights in a row without ever sleeping in his bed. Whether he was praying alone in some hidden place or reciting the psalms, he always did manual work to fight off the heaviness of sleep.

From the "Life of St. Cuthbert", The Venerable Bede

On All Saints’, we are all saints

Note
This sermon was originally written for All Saints' Day in 2008, but since the liturgical year A is back, this is as good a time as any to repost it.

Sermon for All Saints’ Day, Year A

Revelation 7:9-17, Psalm 34, 1 John 3:1-3, Matthew 5:1-12

This being All Saints’ Day, the obvious question is, “what is a saint?” Most people probably think of saints being guys running around with halos around their heads. After all, that’s what you see in icons and paintings like the ones of Jesus and Mary hanging on the wall behind me.

So I brought my own halo tonight. Just some tinfoil, doesn’t look like much, but it’ll do. It looks much like the one in this picture:

Of course, I notice some of you giggling a little. A ring of tinfoil doesn’t make a saint, does it? The halo itself as a ring around someone’s head looks a little ridiculous. Did the saints of old really run around with rings around their heads?

So let’s do a little bit of art history here. The idea of the halo-as-ring is actually relatively new. A halo is more properly called a nimbus, and the original purpose of the halo in art was not to represent something like this ring of tinfoil, but this:

...a candle, or more particularly its radiant glow. Early artists, and indeed the authors of the Gospels or even Jesus Himself, tended to speak in symbols and metaphor, and the halo itself is a metaphor for the inner light.

Jesus is portrayed in the Transfiguration as being a figure of radiant light. In early hagiographies, saints are described as having faces shining, as if they themselves were lamps or lanterns. The artists of the Middle Ages weren’t interested in literal portrayals of people, so they made symbolic portrayals of an idealized, stylized world. Rather than try to paint a radiant glow, they resorted to painting gold disks or just circles, like this:

If you’ve ever seen the ring around the Moon on a wintry night, you’ll know exactly where they got that from. There’s the origin of the halo.

Fast-forward to the Renaissance, and artists like Giotto and da Vinci were slowly “rediscovering” perspective. Realism, rather than symbolism, was the order of the day. The problem is that in the course of time, artists – indeed everyone – had forgotten what the reasoning behind the icons was, and thought that the symbol was to be taken literally. So when they began to paint in perspective, they tried to paint the halo in perspective, as a disc attached to the back of the person’s head, like in this painting by Giotto:

...then later as a ring, like in this painting, where da Vinci is showing off his talent by painting softly glowing rings in perfect perspective.

The problem is only that they didn’t know what it was they were painting. In the passing of the centuries, the original purpose of the halo was forgotten, the whole mentality of the people had changed. The point had been lost with time.

The irony is that the quest for realism stunted our sense of reality as badly as those people of the Dark Ages ignorant of science. Today we are very literal in our way of thinking – a product of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, when we learned to use logic and science to achieve great things. The result is that our metaphors for people change as our environment changes. We are surrounded by machines and computers, and thus we compare ourselves to machines and computers. We don’t think in animalistic terms very well anymore. We don’t think in symbols well anymore, either. We have unwittingly degraded ourselves to machines. Modern medicine arguably treats people as a machine as well. A pain in your leg means your leg is broken and needs to be fixed. A pain in your heads means…well, we won’t go there.

So we need to not just be logical and rational, but to reconnect with more ancient ways of thinking, to rediscover how people thought in those days, as an additional tool to understand. That tool is symbolism.

The symbol we have here today in church is a powerful one. The symbol is the ultimate sacrifice by Jesus Christ for us. We celebrate that symbol in the form of the Eucharist, in the partaking in bread and wine that we believe become the Body and Blood of Christ – not in a literal mechanical sense, that is, you can’t take the consecrated bread and wine and put them under a microscope and see blood cells or skin cells. But in a symbolic sense. The reality behind those things is changed. Mere bread and wine become powerfully precious to us, representing God Himself and the sum of His Creation in our midst.

It is a serious mistake to say “well, it’s not literally true”. Symbols have power, because they explain things that other methods of communication can’t achieve. In the same way our bodies are more than mere machines, so too is this Universe of ours something more than mere molecules. It’s more than the sum of its parts. Symbols give us a glimpse of something else, of the inner light that infuses every particle of our world. The Universe itself lives and breathes, and we with it.

The letter of John that we read today says it in a very straightforward way. “We should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. […] When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” Holiness, or seeing God, is thus about seeing the totality of reality. Each of us alone is blind to the vast majority of reality. Each of us casts only a tiny bit of light into the darkness, because we only see just that tiny bit of truth. We don’t see the whole truth. And light is the essence of enlightenment.

God is revealed to us when we open our eyes wide, as wide as we can, fearless of the consequences of the truth. Each of us can share our little bit of light. Each of us carries with us a halo, our own nimbus – some brighter than others, but still, each one of us has it within us. Even though each of us may be little more than a small candle, our light put together – our shared Truth – makes the world ever brighter. We see more as we not only open our own eyes, but we learn to see with the eyes of others. Reality itself is transformed. All of that is communicated by the symbols of the Eucharist. Communion is God revealed.

In the Beatitudes we heard in the Gospel, Jesus reels off a list of all the people who are blessed. It is not an exclusive list. What Jesus is doing is reminding us that even the most downtrodden, pain-ridden, suffering, poor leper of a person carries blessings and truth within them. Every human being has value, no matter how low their station. We need to see through the eyes of everyone, not just through our own. No exceptions.

In the end, each and every one of us is a saint, or has saintliness within us. We celebrate All Saints’ to celebrate the limitless potential of our own sainthood, by remembering those who went before us.

So rather than look at things merely in literal terms, I’d like you to look at the world in symbolic terms. That’s when the poetry of Creation takes shape and begins to sing, with each of us a voice in the chorus. Then the vision expressed in Revelation will come true: For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Amen.

Brace yourselves for Roman Catholic girls on the throne of England

According to the Beeb, the Commonwealth nations – more or less the successor to the British Empire and mostly made up for former British colonies, many of whom still have the King or Queen of England as their head of state – have agreed to change the succession rules for the throne, allowing the first-born child of either sex (rather than the first-born son) to inherit the throne in his or her own right.

Interestingly, they also undertook to allow the spouse of the future monarch to be Roman Catholic. This was banned under the Act of Settlement in 1701, which essentially cemented Parliament's role in confirming the and controlling the succession and gave legal backing to the overthrow of the Roman Catholic James VII & II* of the House of Stuart, and to the replacement of the (Catholic) House of Stuarts with the (Protestant) House of Hannover. It also ensured that future monarchs could never be Roman Catholic again, nor be influenced by their spouses, who might try to raise their children Catholic and therefore circumvent the law.

This has some significance for the Church of England and thus for all Anglicans. The reason is that the ruling monarch of England is also the supreme head of the Church of England, thanks to Henry VIII (as covered here and here). To clarify, however, the monarch is only the head of the C of E, not of all Anglicans, and while he or she influences the Communion as a whole by virtue of selecting the Archbishop of Canterbury, he (for now likely to only be a he) in practice merely chooses whomever the C of E in synod recommends.

The oddity of the law until now, however, was that in theory a future king or queen could have had a non-Anglican spouse – just not a Roman Catholic one. Atheist, Buddhist, Flying Spaghetti Monster, all these were possible, just not Papists. So in one sense it does clear up something that was difficult to justify in 1701, and is downright anachronistic today.

Just for a little Hannover-related trivia, this is why the current head of the House of Hannover, Prince Ernst August, disqualified himself from the succession by marrying Princess Caroline of Monaco, who is Roman Catholic. His children and younger brother still qualify and took his place in line. Since he was only 385th in line to the throne, I don't think he lost much sleep over it.

That said, in theory, there could now be a strange setup coming in the future – a future king or queen who is head of the Anglican church, but whose consort is Roman Catholic, poses legal problems as well. Roman Catholics are required to raise their children Roman Catholic as well, so even if a future Anglican monarch was not him or herself Roman Catholic, presumably the children would be. Then what? How could a Roman Catholic, or for that matter an atheist or Buddhist, be supreme head of the Church of England, Defender of the Faith** and all that?

I think the only logical solution to this legal issue, but also to resolve many others, is to disestablish the Church of England, that is, to no longer have it be the state church. You may be surprised by this, considering my discussion about the issues around Henry and his wives, but in the modern age, I am convinced that separation of church and state is not only rational and fairer to other religious (or non-religious) groups, it is also beneficial to the church in the long run.

I would argue that the strict separation of church and state in the US is one contributing factor to why religion is still so vibrant there compared to Europe. Admittedly, disestablishment would hurt the C of E in the short term – the loss of tax support, while presumably still having to pay the considerable costs of maintaining public buildings, like all those churches and cathedrals – in the long run I think it would healthy. An example can be found right next door – the Church in Wales, the Welsh counterpart to the C of E (and yes, it's "in" Wales, but "of" England). The C in W was separated from the C of E, and disestablished and disendowed (i.e. stripped of property) by Act of Parliament, namely the Welsh Church Act of 1914. Disestablishment and disendowment only took effect in 1920 due to the war. This was highly controversial at the time, not least among high churchmen such as yours truly. But I would argue that the Church in Wales is now far better off than its counterpart in England, with attendance actually increasing and with the C in W doing well compared with the stronger Nonconformist churches.

I believe this is because the Church in Wales isn't beholden to Parliament and can reform itself as it pleases. A good example of the C of E's farcically being tied down by Parliament is the attempted liturgical reform in 1928, which failed because Parliament voted it down – and was voted down mainly by non-Anglicans who objected to the content of the reform. Even today, the C of E officially uses the 1662 Book of Common Prayer for the same reason, and the de facto standard liturgy, Common Worship, is officially the "alternative", even though few if any parishes use the 1662 BCP as their main liturgy anymore. This is something straight out of Monty Python, not the New Testament. Surely it would be better for the C of E to no longer be beholden to a Parliament that simply has no expertise in questions of theology, and is substantially made of non-members who aren't affected by the C of E anyway. Today there are atheists and Muslims in Parliament. Nothing wrong with that at all, in fact I welcome it – but really, should they have a say in how the Church of England is run?

Additionally, thanks to disestablishment and disendowment, the Church in Wales is not burdened with the upkeep of ancient buildings, and can rebuild and refocus. To put it in economic terms, the feedback loop between the church's actions and its financial health is thus far smaller and faster, so the church is better equipped to adjust and prepare for changes in economic conditions, and thus manage its resources more wisely. The shorter the information has to travel, the more efficient and constructive the response. This is also critically lacking in the Church of England, and these are all reasons why the C of E is so moribund compared to other Anglican churches around the world. If the C of E is to return to the missionary zeal that spread Anglicanism around the globe and made Anglicanism the third-largest church in the world, then it has to break free of the ballast that is holding it back, and I believe disestablishment is the only answer that will have a lasting positive effect.

I think the time has come to not just allow the British monarch and his or her consort to be Roman Catholic. The time has come for the Church of England to stand on its own collective feet. The short-term pain is well worth the long-term gain.

* - While most sources today speak of "James II", that is technically incorrect. James was the second king named James in England – but was the seventh in Scotland. Hence it is more appropriate to number both successions, since at the time the thrones were not actually united, merely occupied by the same monarch. In theory the current Queen should therefore be "Elizabeth II & I", but since the thrones were more or less united under the Act of Union in 1707, it is unnecessary and was abandoned at the accession of Her Majesty. Now the English or Scottish number of succession is taken, whichever is higher.

** - Another little historical trivia bit: The title "defender of the faith" has been claimed by English monarchs ever since Henry VIII – yes, him again. But the real irony is that he was granted the title by the Pope at the time, Leo X, because of his orthodox Catholicism and anti-Lutheran positions. Henry just kept using it after the split with Rome, and passed it on to his successors.

Anglican history, part II: Royal supremacy and the English Church

For the first installment of this series, about Henry VIII and his reasons for wanting to annul the marriage with Catherine of Aragon, please click here. Part III, about the “founding” of Anglicanism, can be found here.

In the previous installment, we examined the series of events surrounding Henry VIII's marital and dynastic problems that led to the break with Rome. In this installment, we shall look at the break itself and dismiss the common claim that Henry "founded" a new church, while also examining historical precedents for Henry's action in breaking off relations with Rome.

The decline of Empire, the rise of the Church

Today, many Christians, Roman Catholics in particular, tend to think of the Roman Catholic Church as always having been the way it is now – with a strong Papacy dominating the global church, independent of any national or temporal interference. But historically, this is actually something quite new, arguably as recent as the 1870s and the First Vatican Council.

Before the Great Schism of 1054, when what are now the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches were still nominally united, the Church was in fact organized at a national or regional level. Indeed, the very structure of the church quite intentionally mirrored boundaries and structures of the civil authorities. For example, the word diocese originally was simply a political subdivision of the Roman Empire that had nothing to do with the Church. A presbyter (which in Catholic terminology is a more technical term for a priest) was simply the title of someone who was a local leader, and simply means "elder", hence the Methodist use of the latter term.

This is also the reason Protestant churches generally use different vernacular words for the equivalent offices in the Roman Catholic church, such as "superintendent" instead of "dean", since the reformers wanted to get rid of the Roman influence on their respective churches. Similarly, vestments (clerical clothing) in the Western Church are generally adapted from Roman Imperial badges of office, and were not originally religious at all.

By way of analogy, suppose in some distant future a new religion were to arise in the United States just as America's government was falling apart, and this religion set itself up subdivided in church states and counties, with each church state led by a governor, perhaps wearing a suit and tie or police uniform on formal occasions. Then the United States crumbles and disappears from the scene entirely, but the new religion's leaders are still called governors, the church is still divided in states, and the leader of each local club still wears early 21st century business clothing during religious observances, even though it has long been obsolete and is no longer worn in daily life. Services are still celebrated in early 21st century English, even though that language is long gone and few understand it any more, in spite of it once having been the people's language. That's pretty much what happened in the Western Church in the late Roman and early medieval periods.

The evolution of East and West after 1054

When the Empire began to crumble, the Church did its best to maintain the old structures, but eventually adapted to the new situation by erecting churches within each of the emerging kingdoms, each having its own metropolitan (i.e. chief bishop for that kingdom) and council of bishops. You can still see vestigial signs of this in the Roman Catholic Church today: Each country has its own conference of bishops, and each country has one bishop or archbishop who is considered the lead bishop for that country, called a metropolitan. However, these subsidiary levels of the Roman church were gradually weakened and reduced in importance, so that today they are little more than talking shops with barely any authority of their own, at least when compared to their counterparts in the Orthodox and Anglican communions. Once we examine the issues around royal supremacy in the West, we will see why.

You can see this original structure most clearly in the Orthodox Church today, since there it was preserved from the pre-Schism Church more or less unchanged. This is why people speak of "Greek Orthodox", "Serbian Orthodox", "Russian Orthodox" and so on. The various respective Orthodox churches are in fact one big church, but they are fully autonomous from one another, each led by its metropolitan. Each of these only accords the Orthodox Church's formal leader, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, a place of honor without being subordinate to him. Think of the Patriarch as being a kind of chairman who sets the agenda, but doesn't have any authority to enforce decisions and has to seek consensus. This is essentially how the Papacy was originally conceived and put into practice, but as time went on, Rome's claims of authority over the others became ever stronger, and West and East were ever more alienated from each other as a result.

Precedents for royal supremacy in the late Roman and early medieval periods

The aspect of the Orthodox Church that is most relevant to our discussion, however, is the fusion of church and state that took place once Constantine the Great made Christianity the state religion in 313 AD. This fusion existed in the East right up to the end of the Byzantine Empire (i.e. the last remnant of the Roman Empire) in the late 15th century. There are numerous examples of the Byzantine Emperor appointing and deposing bishops and patriarchs practically at will. If there was ever a sign that royal (or imperial) supremacy of the Church was normal, the Church in the Byzantine Empire is it.

In the West, too, this fusion existed, albeit in a somewhat different form. The Holy Roman Emperors in Germany – who saw themselves as a reconstituted Roman Empire in the West – freely interfered in affairs of the Western Church, with Emperors often appointing or imposing Popes and bishops as they saw fit. But Popes sometimes returned the favor, appointing and deposing Emperors. On the one hand, Charlemagne, arguably the first non-Roman Western emperor, was crowned and given the title of Emperor by Pope Leo III. On the other, at least before 1059, Popes were just as often chosen and appointed by the Emperor, sometimes as an arbiter, or sometimes making the choice independently. Some of the many Popes who were appointed by the Byzantine or Holy Roman Emperors are Vigilius and Pelagius I, Eugene II, John XIII, and Benedict VI. In all these cases, it demonstrates just who was really in control. Not the Pope, but the supreme secular ruler.

As the Western Empire split up into numerous kingdoms, this was carried forward under the new kings in their respective realms. Each new kingdom generally had its own council of bishops, led by a primate bishop or metropolitan, with bishops also acting as secular lords and thus feudal vassals of the king. A last remnant of this still exists in the UK today, the Lords Spiritual, who are the senior bishops in England and therefore automatically are part of the House of Lords.

The royal involvement in the local church was a lucrative business for the monarchs, who generally sold bishoprics (technically termed simony) to the highest bidder. This was a major source of income. Of course, there was an ongoing power struggle between the Pope and the various kings and emperors, which came to a head in the Investiture Contest, whereby the Pope attempted to claim the right to choose bishops without outside interference. This still did not put a stop to the practice, only making it somewhat more difficult, and the various bishops still had to swear fealty to the local king as his vassal when taking office. So even after the Contest ended with the Concordat of Worms in 1122, kings still had considerable rights regarding the church in their realm, and formally at least the church's bishops were subordinate to him.

In addition to this royal prerogative, the Popes were not even masters of their own house like they are today. Right up to the eve of the Protestant Reformation, the bishops and kings across Europe generally believed the Pope should be subordinate to a general council, a movement which we call today Conciliarism. The defeat of the Conciliarists at the Fifth Lateran Council in 1517 was one of the sparks that led to Luther's 95 Theses that same year.

There are many other such examples of royal supremacy from the various countries of Europe, but one particularly interesting one for our discussion is the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, which was issued by the French King Charles VII (who was the king Joan of Arc helped to expel the English in the Hundred Years' War) in 1438, a mere 53 years before Henry VIII was born. This was very similar to the First Act of Supremacy of 1534 that Henry and the English Parliament passed, in that it essentially made the Gallican Church (i.e. the Church of France) independent from Rome and subject to royal authority, while also cutting off payments to Rome.

Papal reaction to royal supremacy, crisis and centralization of power

In reaction against all this, over the centuries the Popes tried to combat royal control over the various churches by asserting the right to appoint bishops, to claim jurisdiction, and receive donations from the local churches. In the early Middle Ages, the Pope was little more than the Bishop of Rome, and compared to the other four Patriarchs, relatively insignificant aside from its formal place of honor. Many of the early councils of the patriarchs were not even attended by the Pope. The Popes were totally dependent on the Emperors for protection, who in turn used the Church as their own tool.

It took centuries for the Papacy to develop an independent identity, and progress was extraordinarily slow, punctuated by controversies such as the Invetiture Contest noted above.

Historically, each time the Roman church was in conflict with temporal powers, the Papacy used the occasion to cement and strengthen its position within the Roman communion as a defensive measure, accumulating more power and weakening local churches and chapters, until the final coup de grâce: the twin dogmas of papal supremacy and infallibility. These were promulgated at the First Vatican Council in 1870, and were themselves a reaction in part against the loss of the Papal States to Garibaldi's Italian unification war and the loss of papal influence in Italy. The true irony is that the Pope at the time, Pius IX, claimed that these were not new doctrines at all, but always were so from the beginning – almost Orwellian in its inversion of the actual history.

Royal supremacy in England prior to Henry VIII

This concept of royal supremacy was not new in England at all. In 1350, Edward III enacted a law, the Statute of Provisors, which forbade the English church from paying money to the Pope or other foreign church institutions.

A little later, Richard II enacted a law in 1392, the Statute of Praemunire, which essentially declared the English church free from papal interference, again long before Henry. There are numerous other examples of this in English history.

So we can see that Henry not only had ample precedent for his actions regarding Catherine of Aragon as we discussed in the previous article, he had ample precedents to call upon throughout the history of Christendom and within England herself to support his decision to cut ties to Rome.

So what did Henry found?

Strictly speaking, Henry did not found a church at all. The Church of England existed ever since the Irish missionaries from the north and Roman missionaries under St. Augustine from the south merged their churches at the Synod of Whitby in 664. So if any date could be given for the "founding" of the Church of England, it would either be 664, or 597, the year St. Augustine came to England to begin the Roman mission.

Some readers might argue that the English church had no identity of its own until Henry, but even that is highly unlikely. If we look at the Statute of Praemunire from 1392 mentioned above, there the church is specifically called (in Norman French) seinte eglise d'Engleterre – in English, that literally means the "Church of England", and that 200 years before Henry's crisis. The Pragmatic Sanction also spoke of a national church, the Church of France or Gallican Church, with its own identity. For that matter, even as far back the 8th century, the Venerable Bede refers to the ecclesia anglorum, which means the same. So the name "Church of England" was not new at all – in fact it was the logical name based on custom.

Ultimately, what Henry's Act of Supremacy of 1534 did was simply to tie together the existing law and customs his predecessors and counterparts had established – the two Statutes mentioned above – and formalize what had been claimed for centuries, that the already existing Church of England was independent of the Roman Pontiff, just like the various Orthodox churches in the East. Henry's actions fit squarely with centuries of precedent across Christendom, and we can comfortably state that the Church of England was not founded in 1534, 1559, or 1662, but rather 597 AD – or, through the apostolic succession, right back to Jesus Christ Himself.

In the next article, we'll explore the claim that Henry created a Protestant church and was most important in defining the Church of England. Click here to read it. Hope you're enjoying the reading so far, and I look forward to comments and discussion.

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by...

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Today is the Feast of St. Crispin, 25 October, the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt almost 600 years ago. A good time as ever to trot out my favorite scene of my favorite adaptation of my favorite Shakespearean play.

Do we all holy rites;
Let there be sung 'Non nobis' and 'Te Deum;'
The dead with charity enclosed in clay:
And then to Calais; and to England then:
Where ne'er from France arrived more happy men.

Monty Python on religion

I somehow managed to be a Python fan for as long as I can remember and not have heard about this debate before. As a deeply religious person, I can't tell you how saddened I am by the way the two "offended" Christians, one of whom was Bishop of Southwark at the time, reacted to the movie and to the (quite sensible) arguments presented by Cleese and Palin. It is also amazing to see Palin in particular clearly frustrated and angry, and I can't blame him: In the same situation I'd have either gotten up and left or started to go for the jugular far more than Cleese and Palin did. It seems the good bishop and Mr. Muggeridge had nothing substantive to offer except cheap shots and feigned offense. The closing remark about thirty pieces of silver was blatant in just simply grandstanding and trying to play to the audience, which clearly had sided with the Pythons – and of course it didn't work because of how transparent and juvenile it was.

The truly most ironic moment was when Muggeridge claimed that Jesus had inspired the greatest art, while "Life of Brian" was the lowest form of art. I would actually agree with the first part of his statement – but also say that "Life of Brian" is some of the greatest art of its kind, a beautifully done satirical movie, one for the history books. Few if any remember Muggeridge, but "Life of Brian" is as popular and well-known as ever. And it carries Jesus' message in a way no other film or book has done, highlighting our flaws as human beings while encouraging us to think for ourselves and make an informed decision to follow Christ, rather than blind faith.

As many have said elsewhere, and as Palin said in the debate, if your faith is that easily offended and challenged by a movie, then it's not much of a faith. Not only that, I think "The Life of Brian" is actually a profoundly religious and insightful movie, in that it does not make fun of Christ one bit – it makes fun of the folly of some of His followers who think they have all the answers, something which Christ Himself criticized every time He ran into the Pharisees and Sadducees. In fact I would even suggest showing it as part of Confirmation class.

When heresy really is heresy: The Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta and a bizarre draft resolution

As mentioned before, I would generally place myself on the liberal side of the middle of the Anglican spectrum. That said, it may come as a surprise to those who are more conservative and who disagree with me on things like women's ordination that I do, in fact, place great value in Tradition and ecumenical councils – I merely come to different conclusions on some issues. I'm quite willing to use the H word when I see it – heresy.

Jansenism

This is one reason I am so uncomfortable with our parish's choice of a patron saint, as mentioned previously. (I decided I can at least live with it, since she was chosen for her reforms and personal spirituality and not for her doctrine or associations, but I'm still not very happy about it.) While the Jansenists generally were maltreated and persecuted, and I certainly don't approve of any of that, I also agree quite firmly with the verdict that Jansen's teachings were in fact heretical.

I was particularly irked at our church's consecration in September by the speech of a professor of theology at the end of that service, who basically ignored the entire content of Jansen's or his supporters' writings and described the Jansenists (without naming them as such) merely as a persecuted minority. She also claimed that theologists today are reappraising Jansenism, that the verdict at the time was overly harsh, and so on.

Dunno, but the doctrine of free will so central to what it means to be Christian for anyone of a Catholic bent (that includes the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches) that I can't get my head wrapped around the idea that someone denying free will, claiming that God predestines some (indeed most) of us to suffer eternal damnation with no chance to do anything about it, isn't a major problem for the faith.

Gnosticism

I feel the same way about the Gnostics. For some time it has been in vogue to view the Gnostics as misunderstood proto-hippies and kinda-sorta-feminists as portrayed in The Da Vinci Code. Yet I think all you need to know about the Gnostics and their view of women (and thus of humanity) can be summed up in the Gnostic so-called Gospel of Thomas:

Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females don't deserve life." Jesus said, "Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven."

I don't see how you can remotely think of the sexes being equal while believing something like that. Yet it is precisely in some of the more extreme liberal circles where the very same people who ardently support women's ordination also want to reappraise Gnosticism. The cognitive dissonance is mind-boggling.

Mind you, I have no problem with someone believing Jansenism. That is anyone's right. I would even happily go to the altar with them if they did and receive Communion, nor would I do anything to exclude them from the Church. Dissent is always allowed, and even should be protected and welcomed: Dissent is a necessary part of the dialectic to seek the Truth. But once that person starts to push to change long-held and explicit teachings of the Church as defined in ecumenical councils, even if only by implication, my alarm bells start ringing. Loudly.

Pelagianism

So you can imagine my disquiet when I read Resolution R11-7, a piece of proposed legislation (!) for the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta. The text reads in its entirety:

Whereas the historical record of Pelagius’s contribution to our theological tradition is shrouded in the political ambition of his theological antagonists who sought to discredit what they felt was a threat to the empire, and their ecclesiastical dominance, and
whereas an understanding of his life and writings might bring more to bear on his good standing in our tradition, and
whereas his restitution as a viable theological voice within our tradition might encourage a deeper understanding of sin, grace, free will, and the goodness of God’s creation, and
whereas in as much as the history of Pelagius represents to some the struggle for theological exploration that is our birthright as Anglicans,

Be it resolved, that this 105th Annual Council of the Diocese of Atlanta appoint a committee of discernment overseen by our Bishop, to consider these matters as a means to honor the contributions of Pelagius and reclaim his voice in our tradition. And be it further resolved that this committee will report their conclusions at the next Annual Council.

Wait, what...?!

I could hardly believe my eyes – that anyone could submit such a resolution with a straight face. It sounds like something The Onion would publish as satire, not a serious proposal. What next, reappraise Aleister Crowley?

It is true that, based on some of my thoughts and positions on free will and grace, many Western Christians, in particular Protestants of a Calvinist or Lutheran hue, would accuse me of being Semipelagian. Then again the same people generally like to accuse the Orthodox Church of the same, so I feel I'm in good company. (See the Orthodox concept of theosis.)

But here is why I think Pelagianism is such a danger for the Church and for belief in general: It essentially teaches that we are not hard-wired to sin, and that it is possible on one's own to achieve spiritual perfection without the action or support of God, or of anyone else for that matter. If these things were true, then there would essentially be no purpose to the Church at large – why bother if we don't need to try in order to free ourselves from sin? If we are already free from sin, what is the point of Jesus' sacrifice on the Cross?

The heresies of the unloving God and of hubristic humanity

Orthodox teaching on the subject of justification and sin is really quite simple to understand and, I think, common sense. I think it could be summed up with two words: "Nobody's perfect". (Well, except for Jesus, of course.)

I strongly disagree with extreme Calvinist views where humanity is described as being "depraved", not least because that implies that God somehow created something that He either wasn't able to improve or control, or never intended to improve in the first place, both of which are impossible for me to swallow. I cannot believe that a loving God would create a living thing expressly for it to suffer the fires of Hell, without giving him or her a chance to turn oneself to God and accept Jesus in their hearts so that they really can change things with God's help. That just sounds incredibly cruel. And pointless, too.

At the same time, the opposite extreme of Pelagianism seems equally implausible – it implies that we began spotless and only choose to do bad or good things based on circumstance. Yet I think that anyone who studies the human condition will come to the conclusion that we are at heart intrinsically prone to be selfish, greedy and cruel when left to our own devices – all you have to do is observe how children act in a kindergarden towards each other to prove that we aren't little angels from the beginning. Without some firm and loving guidance, children generally turn into little monsters. That's really all orthodox doctrine is saying, that we need that firm guidance as well, throughout our whole lives. Compared to God, we are all children, no matter how old we are. It's hubris to think otherwise.

Walking in love as Christ loved us

The thing is, Jesus repeatedly emphasized our collective responsibility to aid one another in our spiritual journey, and described Himself as The Way – not a goal, but a path with no end, and one with a heavy burden: to take our Cross and follow Him. As mere human beings, we cannot and will not ever achieve true perfection in this life, but we can still walk that path towards perfection. To do that we need Christ to guide us, and we need each other to support one another along that path. This is precisely why the Church exists as a gift from God, to support, encourage and sustain us along that difficult and arduous path to the end of Time. Like it says in Ephesians, we must walk together in love as Christ loves us. It is our only hope of saving ourselves from war, disease, hunger, greed, injustice and all the other ills that afflict humanity from its earliest days.

Mind you, I am quite happy to entertain the idea that Pelagius himself was misunderstood. In fact what few of his writings I am aware of, he seems to have felt just that, while (to my knowledge) the things he was accused of teaching or claiming are not documented in his extant writings, so it is quite possible that he as a person was unjustly accused of the doctrine that bears his name. But in any such examination of the history involved, we have to also be incredibly careful to continue to stay away from the doctrine of Pelagianism, whether its name is justified or not, and most certainly not to legislate such change before the case has been made and accepted by consensus.

I hope that this resolution is shot down, or at least amended in dramatic fashion to distance the church from the doctrine of Pelagianism. I can only shake my head in disbelief that anyone felt it necessary to even submit it. It's one thing for Anglicanism to be comprehensive and inclusive. I think it's part of the beauty and strength of Anglicanism that we generally don't try to define every aspect of faith in detail. But It's another thing entirely to effectively say "anything goes" and challenge what few standards we do have. No matter how expansive or inclusive the faith, it still will have boundaries at some point.

An appeal

In closing, I would like to address an appeal to the people of the Diocese of Atlanta: Please consider what you would be saying with this resolution if it passes. Please think of what signals you would be sending by accepting it, and how you would be cutting yourself loose from the conciliar church just for the sake of rehabilitating one man, no matter how noble the motive behind that wish my be. Please remember the three Anglican pillars of Scripture, Tradition and Reason – and that this resolution challenges Tradition by definition. With all due respect and Christian love and charity, this resolution is simply wrong, pointless, a waste of time (what does it do to help people in need or to further Jesus' message?) and should be defeated.