Ecclesia Anglicana et ego Pt. I

In search of the English faith

Advent and Christmastide have been and gone, and in all that time I barely wrote a page. The reasons for this ought to become clear in the course of this (two part) piece, so please bear with me.

I’ve always found it fascinating that the civil calendar begins with lengthening days, fireworks and merriment, whereas the ecclesiastical calendar begins as the nights draw in and darkness gathers. We begin our year not with the light, but with a sojourn in the darkness. I think this can be no accident. After all, as C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity (which I reread during Advent):

‘The Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in [dismay], and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth — only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.’¹

The Christian life as a whole begins in darkness, with trust in the invisible God, who reveals himself to the eyes of faith, in many cases, his light only breaking through when the darkness seems impenetrable. And even then, when he does finally reveal himself, what is revealed is the divine mystery, fathomless and incomprehensible to the human mind. So, like the turning of the wheel of the year, the mind striving towards God comes again and again into darkness, the earnest seeker forced to fall repeatedly back on trust, on faith. He returns to that same seed with which he began his life in Christ, yet now having been humbled, prepared to entertain that hope which is essential to growth in godly love. But all of this necessarily begins in the dark, in the practice of faith. As St Augustine puts it, ‘Love is not without hope, hope is not without love, and neither hope nor love are without faith.’² And as St Paul writes, ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ (1 Cor. 13:12).

This time around, at least for those of us who live in the United Kingdom and have been paying attention in recent months, the new year really did come at a time of darkness and one could have been forgiven for feeling a certain dread of what 2025 might bring. On Wednesday 16 October, Adam Smith-Connor, having done nothing except engage in silent prayer for his deceased son in a public place, was convicted of breaching a Public Space Protection Order (PSPO) established around a BPAS abortion facility in Bournemouth. Then, on 31 October a change in law saw the rollout of ‘buffer zones’ of 150 metres around all abortion providers the length and breadth of the country, effectively cancelling the rights to freedom of thought and speech across miles of British soil. And it didn’t end there. Less than a month later, the House of Commons passed the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at its first reading with 330 votes for and 275 against, paving the way for the legalisation of assisted suicide in Great Britain.

Yes, as 2024 drew to a close, blow after blow were struck against the life-affirming Christian values which made our country great and godly in past eras. This, combined with certain personal setbacks, left me feeling somewhat despondent as we began again our pilgrimage through the seasons of the Church year. And from what I gathered speaking with Christian friends, I wasn’t the only one feeling a touch of melancholy.

I would be lying if I said all this didn’t have something to do with my recent lack of output – I haven’t been that busy in the months since I last published a blog post, I simply haven’t had the heart to write. But I am slowly shaking off the blues, thanks in no small part to the healthy diet of prayer and scripture provided by the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) 1662, a prayer book I have owned since long before I was baptised and which after years of neglect I have picked up again in recent months.

Another reason for my hesitance to write was the sense of needing to say something personal but being as yet unready to do so. I have been on quite the spiritual journey over the past eighteen months and I think it’s about time I wrote something about it.

Rome, Constantinople, … Canterbury?

The summer before last, a disillusioned Roman Catholic, I set out to investigate the Orthodox Church and her liturgical tradition. I was struck by the mystic beauty of the divine services, hymns and chants flowing into one another, stitched together with doxologies so that one has the sense of floating atop a sea of sound, in the depths of which is hidden a great and divine mystery. I worshipped with the Orthodox for over a year and even became an Orthodox catechumen.

Yet, beautiful as it was, the Byzantine rite simply wasn’t mine. As I grew accustomed to the language and patterns of Orthodox worship, I noticed myself being formed in new ways by the liturgy, just as I had been by the new Roman rite during my Latin catechumenate. Comparing the two ‘formation experiences’ (for want of a more elegant phrase), Orthodoxy comes out pretty well in my estimation. But here’s the thing: it turns out that I don’t really want to be formed a Byzantine any more than I want to be formed a Latin.

I came to this conclusion in part due to my engagement with ‘western rite’ Orthodoxy, particularly the liturgical texts made available by US publisher Lancelot Andrewes Press (LAP). As I say, I have always loved the BCP, and, whether we like it or not, the 1662 prayer book – the service book of anglophone Christianity for centuries – stands together with the King James Bible as one of the most formative texts in English history and in modern Christian worship. LAP’s Common Prayer is based on the American BCP 1928, but with many traditional elements of the English prayer book reinstated, the crucial differences between Common Prayer and the Anglican service books on which it is based being the Eucharistic rite and the creeds, which are adapted to conform to Orthodox theology. In some cases, the alterations are understandable, in others they are to my mind less so (e.g. the removal of the ‘filioque’ clause from the Quicunque Vult, an ancient creed which has always contained the controversial clause, a fact that was never at issue in the undivided Church of the first millennium).

‘Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith. Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.’

– Quicunque Vult

My thought was that it would be lovely to be Orthodox but also retain something of what Pope Benedict XVI called ‘the Anglican patrimony’. But the deeper I went with these adapted liturgies, the less satisfied I was with them. Could I really be Orthodox and an authentically English Christian in continuity with the tradition of my forebears? Didn’t becoming Orthodox mean passing up whatever makes Anglicanism distinctively Anglican as opposed to anything else?

I had the growing sense that in their attempts to salvage what they saw as Orthodoxy’s long lost western expressions, the well-meaning editors of such western rite service books were actually decontextualising liturgical uses to create new bastardised forms, western in flavour yet divorced from their theological and spiritual frameworks. This is essentially what Orthodox critics often accuse Rome of in her unia, which celebrate eastern rites yet require their clergy and members to assent to modern Roman dogmatic claims, including some explicitly rejected by the great theologians of the traditions from which these rites emerged. And just as uniate liturgies have often been latinised – the inclusion of the ‘filioque’ clause in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, for example, or the insertion of prayers for the pope of Rome where prayers for one’s bishop and/or patriarch would traditionally go – so too western rite Orthodox liturgies tend to be subtly byzantinised.

I had been searching for ancient, authentic and deep-rooted Christianity, but I realised that at the same time I was searching for an expression of the faith which was my own as an Englishman, a tradition which could be mine not only by adaptation to certain modern doctrinal standards, nor even by wholesale adoption, but by inheritance. In short, I was looking for Anglicanism proper, for membership of the Ecclesia Anglicana. But could today’s Anglicanism be deep, could it be rooted and apostolic?

Two Approaches

I have come to the conclusion that there are two possible approaches to this question, that is, to the pursuit of an authentic English expression of the catholic faith.

The first approach begins with the view that England at some past time fell away from the true faith, meaning that if we want the faith of our forefathers or membership of their church – the church of Bede, Alfred and Anselm – we must restore the faith as it was prior to this falling away and enter into visible communion with the ecclesial bodies with which they enjoyed visible communion.

For the Orthodox, this falling away occurred sometime after the Great Schism of the eleventh century, when the bishop of Rome (under whose jurisdiction the English Church found herself) broke with the eastern churches. For this reason, Orthodox icons of the Saints of the British Isles contain only pre-Schism Saints, and western rite liturgies must be adapted to remove the innovations and accretions of subsequent centuries.

For Roman Catholics, this falling away occurred in the sixteenth century during the English reformation, when the English Church broke with Rome and embraced protestantism; in fact, the sense among Roman Catholics tends to be that the Church of England as it exists today is actually not the same as the English Church of pre-reformation times, but a distinct institution founded by King Henry VIII ( a view I myself accepted for a number of years).

King Henry VIII, founder of the Church of England (according to Google)…

This conception of Church history in some ways mirrors protestant primitivism, the main difference between the two views being the somewhat arbitrary choice of ‘cut-off point’. For the protestant primitivist, the true and authentic faith and practice of the early Church was lost in a ‘great apostasy’ sometime between the completion of the New Testament and the legalisation of Christianity. For them, only a return to something resembling the fledgling Church as portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles will do. For the Orthodox or Roman Catholic primitivist, this falling away occurred sometime later, but the solution is essentially the same – a restoration of sorts, re-evangelisation and the rejection of recent ecclesiastical history.

But does not this mentality, regardless of when and why we reckon things went awry, betray a certain lack of confidence in the Holy Spirit, sent to guide the Church on her pilgrimage through history towards her final end and the end of all things in Christ? Of course, there are very many Roman Catholics and Orthodox who do not see things this way, but are nonetheless bound to assent to this conception, at least implicitly, when they accept the teaching that the Church militant is identical with the body of believers living within the canonical boundaries of the communion to which they belong.

The second approach admits the possibility of such a falling away in a given local church, that a nation might well swerve from the fullness of the faith or else apostatise altogether, but points to the deep roots of the Church of England and her continuity with the ancient English Church to show that, despite much controversy and corruption, by the grace of God, no such apostasy occurred here, neither in the middle ages, nor during the reformation.

And that’s where I’ll leave it today. For Anglo-Catholics who observe such festivals, today happens to be the commemoration of Charles, King and Martyr, who, so the story goes, suffered execution rather than accept a deal in which he would abolish the episcopacy throughout England in exchange for his life. King Charles I, we are told, preferred to die rather than deprive the English nation of her shepherds and the holy Mysteries.

In a few days I’ll publish Part II, which outlines the history of the Church of England, situating her in continuity with the ancient insular churches, and traces the development of the English prayer book and the Anglican way as I understand it.

Read Part II here:

1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book I, Ch. 5.

2. Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love, Ch. II.