Courtney McGrailAll Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation
by Diarmuid MacCulloch
(Allen and Lane, £25.00)
Robert Marshall
Eamonn Duffy at Cambridge and Diarmuid MacCulloch at Oxford are the leading historians on the Reformation writing in English. Together with the historical novelists Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory, they have brought the intricacies and consequences of the Reformation in Tudor England before the wider public.
Their success in different genres is a tribute not only to the fascination and drama of the period, but to the quality of their works.
MacCulloch’s latest offering is a collection of 22 of his writings assembled from articles, papers and book reviews to stand beside his biography of Cranmer, his History of Christianity: The First 3,000 years, and of the Reformation – the latter sub-titled “Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700”. It runs to 450 pages with some 14 colour plates.
Collection
In this collection MacCulloch seeks to reflect on Reformation scholarship of recent years and to interpret it for a wider audience. Here there is something for everyone, as he probes such topics as ‘Christianity: the Bigger Picture’; the Virgin Mary and Protestant Reformers; the Council of Trent; William Byrd; the latitude of the Church of England, and of specifically Irish interest, ‘Forging the Reformation’, a cautionary tale concerning the fictions created by Robert Ware of Dublin (1639-97) which have deceived historians over the last 300 years.
These writings elucidate for the general reader how and why so many things happened and in the process many misconceptions on all sides are rebutted, often uncomfortably. Reflection on his writings provokes many questions.
The churches which grew out of the English Reformation are now described as Anglican, but MacCulloch does not permit the use of that term before the Restoration Settlement of Charles II in 1662.
Then the re-established episcopacy with minimal change to Cranmer’s liturgical prose moved the Church of England into an orbit of its own, closer to Luther’s Wittenberg, but distinct from Bucer’s Strassburg, Calvin’s Geneva, and Zwingli’s Zurich.
It was not just episcopacy that marked the difference: other factors were at work. The understanding of the Eucharist and attitudes to predestination were differentiated theologically, while the senses were engaged when worship was set amidst the beautiful architecture of retained cathedrals with their acoustics and music – the legacy of Queen Elizabeth I – all so at odds with the worship and tenets of Protestantism.
MacCulloch’s review of Kerry McCarthy’s biography of William Byrd (1539/40-1623) is one of the shorter pieces. In it, MacCulloch highlights how the double helix of Protestantism and Catholicism entwined as Byrd’s public and private life prefigured “a similar paradoxical but indestructible strand in the Church of England”.
While continuing to compose for the Protestant church, Byrd composed many musical settings of the fragments which make up the varying propers of the Mass, producing only three settings of the ordinary and those during the 1590’s.
In a lifetime from the reign of Henry VIII to James I and VI, Byrd collaborated with composers from Thomas Tallis to Orlando Gibbons. Leaving Lincoln Cathedral for the Chapel Royal in 1572, Byrd enjoyed the patronage of Elizabeth and James despite the conflicting halves of his confessional repertoire. On his death after over 50 years’ service in the Chapel Royal, its records noted this pugnacious musician as a “father of music”.
MacCulloch sees the struggle of Reformation and Counter-Reformation settling into a new status quo at the beginning of the 18th Century.
His general European perception may not apply to Ireland, where the success of the Counter-Reformation on the mainland (reclaiming states including Poland-Lithuania, Hungary, Moravia and Bohemia for Roman Catholicism) informed the prejudices and fears of the new elite which emerged from the War of the Two Kings.
The victories of Winston Churchill, ancestor of the eponymous prime minister, from Blenheim to Malplaquet which prefaced the peace of Utrecht of 1715 stabilised the position, but left Ireland as an outlier, where an insecure Protestant elite ruled a Catholic population whose leaders both Gaelic and Old English had been defeated.
Was it only then, as the Church was rebuilt in the era of the penal laws that a counter-reformation began in Ireland? It is outside MacCulloch’s brief, but perhaps that Counter-Reformation continued in Ireland (the Plan of Campaign of the mid 1880’s aside) until its final flowering when religious orders purchased so many otherwise redundant properties in the first decade following establishment of the Irish Free State.
The breadth of MacCulloch’s sweep provokes another question. The conversations of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) began in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and received an impetus from the accession of Britain and Ireland to the then European Economic Community.
On the Anglican side, the first Joint Chairman of ARCIC during those heady days of ecumenism was Archbishop McAdoo of Dublin and much progress was made exploring differences and finding common ground.
MacCulloch calls into question the Anglo-Catholic version of the English Reformation on which the discussions were founded. By implication this provokes a wider question: whether after the Brexit vote the goal of an organic union between the two communions is either wise or possible?
This is not to say that ecumenism should not progress, but that the model should be questioned so that ecumenism resonates in the benches and pews of our churches as Christians continue to explore and enjoy what they hold in common, while respecting that on some issues their perspectives differ.
Altogether this is an informative and thought provoking book for all traditions, of which individual pieces can be read at a sitting.
Robert Marshall is a priest ordained for the Church of Ireland auxiliary ministry. The views expressed are personal.