C of E- A Civil Service?
The Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, a campaign implemented by the thugs of his court, had nothing but expediency at root. Setting aside the king’s dispute with Pope Julius II concerning his divorce from Catharine of Aragorn, the sole motive was the grasping of monastic wealth for the coffers of the crown. This ending of the power of the Roman Church had the effect of ensuring that the secular would now always triumph over the spiritual. England’s most odious monarch had successfully removed any vestige of the transcendental from English Christianity.
England, or more precisely Great Britain, had embraced a singular kind of Catholicism from the beginning, one that differed greatly from that of Europe. The Synod of Whitby in 664 A.D. attempted to unify tenet and practice in the Church, but probably did not have as much influence as has been previously assumed by historians. Ireland, annexed from Rome geographically and in temperament, carried on in its own merry way for the next three centuries.
For the English peasant, miracle plays - dramatisations of the Christian message from the Virgin birth to the resurrection - were tremendously popular. More ambitious productions, depicting angels, devils and illustrations of vice and virtue, followed. All seems to have been a dress-rehearsal for what was to follow - the highly orchestrated celebration of Mass.
Conducted by gloriously costumed dignitaries, amid clouds of pungent incense, in an imposing space decorated with colourful pennants - a grandiose spectacle it must have been. Not that the congregation actually engaged with the subtleties of the liturgy, most wandered about the nave in a state of blissed-out ignorance.
Come the Reformation, countless works of art, many of staggering beauty, were destroyed, and places of worship trashed. The Anglican Church is much the poorer for that act of vandalism. The popular notion of worship – one that contained an aura of magic and mystery, even superstition - disappeared with the Protestant onslaught. By Victorian times, with its ‘muscular Christianity, all had become false piety, and dullness – ‘the Tory Party at prayer’.
England had avoided the bloody conflicts - ‘The Religious Wars’ - that racked Europe, and in the tireless spirit of compromise embraced the Oxford movement and the Anglo – Catholics. But the Tudors had ensured that the Holy Spirit would no longer flow from the Scared Vessel. From then on it would be so filled with doctrinal dust as to be permanently dry.
~o00o~