TRINITY · 25 SEPTEMBER & TRINITY · 3 NOVEMBER Priests & Bishops · Doctors of the Anglican Church
Richard Hooker & Lancelot Andrewes
Priests & Bishops · Doctors of the Anglican Church · d. 1600 & 1626
Hooker — HOOK-er · Ecclesiastical Polity — eh-KLEEZ-ee-as-tih-kul poh-LIT-ee · Andrewes — AN-drooz · Preces Privatae — PRAY-sez prih-VAH-tay · Cartwright — KART-rite · via media — VEE-a MED-ee-a · Winchester — WIN-ches-ter
O God, who by thy servants Richard and Lancelot didst give to thy Church in England both the architecture of its reason and the interior life of its prayer; Grant that we may think about thee as carefully as Hooker and pray to thee as intimately as Andrewes, knowing that the mind’s work and the heart’s work are one service; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Reformation gave the Anglican Church its martyrs and its scriptures; the generation that followed gave it its mind. Richard Hooker (HOOK-er) and Lancelot Andrewes (AN-drooz) are the two supreme architects of classical Anglicanism — the theologian who defined what the Church of England is and why, and the bishop-preacher who showed what it looks like when it prays and preaches at the height of its powers. They are exact contemporaries — Hooker born in 1554, Andrewes in 1555 — and they die within twenty-six years of each other, Hooker in 1600 before the Caroline golden age fully arrived, Andrewes in 1626 at its height. Hooker’s feast falls on 3 November deep in Trinity-tide, Andrewes’s on 25 September in the same season. Both White, both Confessors, both foundational: Hooker gives Anglicanism its intellectual skeleton and Andrewes gives it its devotional flesh, and together they constitute what the tradition understands by the Anglican theological method — the three-legged stool of scripture, tradition, and reason, held in living tension within a Church that is simultaneously Catholic, reformed, and English.
Richard Hooker wrote the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (eh-KLEEZ-ee-as-tih-kul poh-LIT-ee) in response to the Puritan challenge of Thomas Cartwright (KART-rite), who argued that the Church of England must conform in every detail to the pattern of the New Testament church as Calvinist theology reconstructed it. Hooker’s response is one of the most important works of political and theological philosophy in the English language: a sustained argument that law — natural law, divine law, human law, ecclesiastical law — is the fabric of all ordered life, and that the Church is a society embedded in a particular history and a particular nation, not a pure institution dropped from heaven with its government predetermined. He defends episcopacy, the prayer book, the ceremonies, and the establishment not as absolutes but as reasonable and lawful arrangements appropriate to the English Church in its historical situation — and in doing so he invents the Anglican method: not proof-texting from scripture, not submission to a confessional system, but the patient exercise of reason within the bounds of scripture and tradition. The Laws is unfinished — three of the eight books were published posthumously and two survive only in disputed texts — but what was published established the intellectual framework within which Anglican theology has worked ever since. T. S. Eliot called him one of the great prose writers of the English language, and he is that — but he is more than that. He is the man who gave the Anglican via media (VEE-a MED-ee-a) its intellectual foundations.
Lancelot Andrewes was the greatest preacher of his generation — perhaps of any generation in the history of the English Church — and the author of the Preces Privatae (PRAY-sez prih-VAH-tay), the Private Prayers, a devotional manual compiled from his personal prayer notebooks and published after his death, which is one of the most extraordinary documents of private spirituality in the Christian tradition. The Preces draws on scripture, the Eastern liturgies, the Latin Fathers, and the Jewish prayer tradition simultaneously — Andrewes read Hebrew as fluently as English, and his prayers move between languages and traditions with the ease of a man for whom the whole of the Church’s prayer life is a single inheritance. His Christmas and Easter and Whitsuntide sermons, preached before the court of James I, are exercises in a kind of concentrated verbal theology that has no parallel in English: he takes a single text, often a single word, and turns it in the light with such precision and such imaginative energy that the word becomes inexhaustible. T. S. Eliot used a passage from the Nativity sermon as the epigraph for Gerontion and wrote a celebrated essay on Andrewes that helped rescue him from two centuries of neglect. Bishop of Winchester (WIN-ches-ter) from 1619 until his death, he lived the life he preached: his household was a model of liturgical order, his private prayers occupied the first five hours of every morning, and he was known throughout his diocese as a man of transparent holiness.
Hooker and Andrewes together define what the Anglican theological method looks like in practice. Hooker establishes that Anglican theology is done within a tradition — the tradition of scripture, the Fathers, the Councils, and the history of the English Church — and that reason is the instrument by which the tradition is applied to the present. Andrewes demonstrates that this kind of theology, at its best, does not remain in the study but flows out into the chapel, the sermon, and the private prayers of the bishop who has spent his morning on his knees. The Laws and the Preces Privatae belong together on the same shelf — one is the architecture of Anglican thought and the other is the furnishing of Anglican devotion — and the man who has read both understands something essential about what Anglicanism is that cannot be learned from either alone. They are the Caroline divines par excellence, the figures who stand between the martyrs who founded the tradition and the poets who expressed it, giving it the intellectual and devotional substance that makes it capable of sustaining five centuries of Christian life.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant Richard didst give to thy Church in England the gift of reason ordered by scripture and tradition, and by thy servant Lancelot didst show that such reason, when it kneels, becomes the most intimate of prayers; Grant that we may hold together the mind that thinks and the heart that adores, after the manner of those two great servants of the English Church; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.