Lecture reproduced by kind permission of Professor Nicholas
Lossky and the Very Revd Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark. Fr Deacon Nicholas was delivered the Lecture at the
November 2005 celebration at Southwark Anglican Cathedral to commemorate the
450th Anniversary of Lancelot Andrewes’ consecration as a Bishop in the Church of England.
Lancelot Andrewes, bishop, theologian, liturgist
I must begin with a confession. Although
I have worked most of my life on Lancelot Andrewes, this is my very first visit
to this Cathedral which contains his tomb and it is all the more memorable for
me as this Cathedral celebrates the centenary of the Diocese of Southwark. It
is a great honour to be here.
It
seems appropriate, in celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the Episcopal
consecration of the Right Reverend Father in God Lancelot Andrewes, to begin
with recollecting his conception of episcopacy, (also in view of this
coincidence with the centenary of the diocese). The first thing to bear in mind is Andrewes’s
conviction that episcopacy is of divine origin. Jesus Christ appointed the Apostles
and the Apostles appointed Bishops. Given the context, it is not surprising
that Lancelot Andrewes reacts vigorously against those of his contemporaries
who held an egalitarian view of the clergy. In his view, Bishops are successors
of the Apostles and priests (he does not hesitate to use the word) are
successors of the seventy disciples.
Bishops concentrate in their hands
the responsibility for ordination to all forms of ministry. Andrewes is severe
with regard to those who denied the necessity of ordination and who were
self-appointed preachers (“the voluntaries of our age” as he calls them in one
of his Whitsun sermons). He clearly suggests that ordination may well be
considered to be a sacrament. In this, as we see, he does not exactly follow Article
XXV of the 39! In view of Andrewes’s conviction concerning the divine origin of
episcopacy, it is obvious that as far as he is concerned, bishops are of the esse
of the Church and not the bene esse. Bishops are part of the very nature
of the Church. Of course, we all remember that he did not wish to unchurch the
continental reformed communities that had no bishops. Yet as Canon Welsby quite
rightly writes: “The refusal to unchurch non-episcopal bodies on charitable
grounds is not the same thing as saying that it is a matter of complete
indifference whether a body has episcopacy or not” (Lancelot Andrewes,
p. 187, n. 2).
The divine origin of episcopacy is,
for Andrewes, to be found in John 20, 22-23: “He breathed on them and saith
unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are
remitted unto them…”. Two points deserve to be emphasized concerning the use of
this quotation. One is the fact that the breath of Christ is the “matter” which
will be replaced by the laying on of hands, a change which tempts some to
refuse the sacramental character of ordination. Yet, says Andrewes, we say
these words about the Holy Ghost in our ordination service, however not in our
name but in the name of Christ. Andrewes clearly distinguishes between this
particular “johanine” gift of the Holy Spirit which confers ecclesial authority
on ordinands and the tongues of fire on the day of Pentecost which represent
the gift of the Spirit to all human beings for growing in sanctity.
We remember of course the famous
“scandalous” sermon preached by Andrewes at Whitehall on the Sunday after
Easter 1600. “Scandalous”, because it was on Jn 20, 23 “whose soever sins…” and
it was all about absolution. In a letter of Rowland White to Sir Robert Sydney
we read that “he was with Mr Secretary about it, it may be to satisfy him” (Library
of Anglo-Catholic Theology, vol. 11, p. lxii) “Mr Secretary” was Lord Burleigh.
The Queen quite obviously was not shocked: Andrewes was invited to preach after
the “scandal”. Bishop Kenneth Stevenson who unfortunately is unable to be with
us tonight, has written about this sermon (‘”Human Nature Honoured”: Absolution
in Lancelot Andrewes’ in Martin Dudley (ed.), Like a Two-edged Sword: The Word
of God in Liturgy and History: Essays in Honour of Canon Donald Gray,
Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1995, pp. 113-137). What seems clear is that
confession-absolution for Andrewes is undoubtably a sacrament. As for the
number of sacraments, we know what Andrewes wrote in his Answers to Cardinal
du Perron : “it is nothing but a logomakhia (logomaci¢a) “. We Orthodox share this view, except those
of us who are scolastically minded and
insist on the “sacred “ number seven, forgetting that this was brought back
from the Council of Ferrara-Florence! The council was rejected by the Orthodox,
but the number has been kept by many. In authentic Orthodoxy, that is faithful
to itself, there is one Sacrament :
Baptism-chrismation/confirmation-Eucharist, and a vast number of others all
related to the one.
To come back to ordination, it is obviously
understood as a sacramental act when Lancelot Andrewes says about Christ’s
institution of it :
“An outward ceremony He would have,
for an outward calling He would have. For if nothing outward had been in His,
we should have had nothing but enthusiasts — as them we have notwithstanding;
but then we should have had no rule with them; all by divine revelation: into
that they resolve. For sending, breathing, laying on of hands, have they none.
But if they be of Christ, some must say, mitto vos ; sent by some, not
run of their own heads. Some say accipite ; receive it from some, not
find it about themselves; have an outward calling, and an outward accipite
, a testimony of it” (Whitsun, Sermon 9, p. 273).
Here there is no doubt that “breathing” and
“laying on of hands” are placed on one and the same level. Through the
ceremony, priests and bishops receive the authority of their ministry from the
Church. They thus become guarantors of the grace of sacraments performed by the
Holy Spirit, not by the minister.
Lancelot Andrewes is firmly
attached to the threefold ecclesiastical ministry and he remains faithful to
the early church conception of the bishop as the minister who presides in every
sense of the word. He presides over his diocese, the local Church, naturally in
communion with all the other dioceses or local churches and with all the
presbyters and faithful. This communion is of immense importance because the
bishop should not be understood as a man of power placed as it were “above” his
diocese. Authority, yes, but not power which is a category of this world. The
authority is that of the Holy Spirit to whom the bishop is constantly
accountable. We should never forget the terms in which Andrewes describes the
ecclesial community : “What is then to be done that Christ be not neglected and
His call? That everyone betake himself to some calling or other. In the
Ministry, all: all Ministers; Ministers either of the Church, or of the state
and commonwealth; but all Ministers” (Whitsun, Sermon 15, p. 389). Just before,
our preacher says about Priests, Deacons and Bishops: “All these three here go
under the name of Diakoniai (Diakoni¢ai), the proper term of the lowest of the three”
(ibid. p. 388). Thus the Bishop, in his ministry, is a deacon who “serves” in
the image of the Good Shepherd and not in the sense of the categories of this
world which unfortunately, so often tend to infiltrate the Church.
One more word about ordination.
Andrewes insists that it is a grace and yet : “none is either the holier, or
the learneder, by his ordination” (Whitsun, Sermon 9, p. 277) and a little
further he adds “Good it were, and much to be wished, they were holy and
learned all; but if they be not, their office holds good though. He that is a
sinner himself, may remit sins for all that, and save others he may, though
himself be not saved” (ibid.). Consequently, one who has been ordained in
particular to preach, must work hard to deepen his learning in biblical and
patristic studies.
According to Lancelot Andrewes,
preaching is the duty of both priests and bishops. However bishops are
particularly responsible for preaching since their primary task is to watch
over the purity of doctrine. That is why they must study and be theologians.
Not necessarily in the academic sense of “systematic” theologians but rather in
the Evagrian sense : “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; if you pray
truly, you are a theologian” (Evagrius Pontikos, On Prayer, text n° 61).
This is particularly emphasized by Andrewes in the sermon he preached in Latin
to the bishops of the Province of Canterbury for Convocation in 1593. It is
interesting to remember that he preached to bishops about their duties with
regard to preaching good theology when he himself was not a bishop. His text
was Acts 20, 28. In the English version the word “overseers” is used, but in
Latin (and of course in Greek) it is “in quo vos Spiritus Sanctus posuit
episcopos”. It is also interesting to remember that, although Andrewes’s
conception of the Church is as profoundly episcopal as that of Metropolitan
John Zizioulas’s, and most probably because of this conception, he refused the
sees of Salisbury in 1596 and of Ely in 1599 on account of the alienation of
revenues demanded by Queen Elizabeth. Andrewes accepted when, with King James,
such practise was abandoned. He was consecrated bishop of Chichester on 3
November 1605, exactly 400 years ago.
We must now consider why preaching
is the first duty of the bishop, and by delegation that of the priest. The
reason is clearly expressed in the sermons for Pentecost, “Of the sending of
the Holy Ghost”. Through the hearing of a sermon, and the active hearing, for
there should be no passive members of the Church, the Christian is invited to
“acquire” the Holy Spirit. (This notion of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit
in terms of the Stock Exchange is common to Lancelot Andrewes and Saint
Seraphim of Sarov. Naturally, the two men could not have known each other, but
both were sons of merchants and used this commercial language about the Holy
Spirit.) Here is one example of how a sermon offers the Holy Spirit:
“The Holy Ghost is ‘Christ’s
Spirit’ [Rom. 8, 9], and Christ is ‘the Word’. And of that Word, ‘the word that
is preached’ to us [1 Peter 1, 25] is an abstract. There must then needs be a
nearness and alliance between the one and the other. And indeed, but by our
default, ‘the word and the Spirit’, saith Esay [Isa. 59, 21], shall never fail
or ever part, but one be received when the other is. We have a plain example of
it this day, in St. Peter’s auditory [Acts 2, 37-38], and another in Cornelius
and his family; even in the sermon-time, ‘the Holy Ghost fell upon them’ [Acts
10, 44], and they so received Him” (Whitsun, sermon 5, p. 198).
This is about the reception or “acquisition”
of the Holy Spirit. But as far as the preacher’s duty is concerned, Andrewes
denounces the temptation to substitute one’s own “private” spirit for the Holy
Spirit. Here is an example :
“’There came a sound’ [Acts 2, 2],
and not any sound. It will not be amiss to weigh what kind of sound is
expressed in the word here used, ή̉̉̉́coV. You know what sound an echo is; a sound at
the second hand, a sound at the rebound. Verbum Domini venit ad nos ;
‘The Word of the Lord cometh to us’ [cf. Isa. 2, 1, LXX and Vulgate]: there is the first sound, to us;
and ours is but the echo, the reflection of it to you. God’s first, and then
ours second. For if it come from us directly, and not from Him to us first, and
from us then to you, echowise, it is to be suspected. A sound it may be, the
Holy Ghost cometh not with it; His forerunner it is not, for that is ή̉̉̉́coV.” (Whitsun, Sermon 1, p. 117).
Thus, we are made aware of what true theology
in preaching is to be. It is profound attention paid to what the Holy Spirit is
saying to the preacher. Therefore the preacher must necessarily lead a truly
spiritual life in the etymological sense of “spiritual” (spiritualiter),
attentive to the Holy Spirit, inseparable from the Word, that is Christ, to the
glory of the Father. The preacher’s inspiration is therefore trinitarian. This
trinitarian character is also to be found in Lancelot Anrdewes’s insistence on
the necessity to be called to any ministry by the Church with the three
indispensable conditions: the gift of the Holy Spirit, the vocation or call of
Christ and the capacity given by the Father (see Whitsun Sermon 15, one of the
very best of Andrewes’s sermons).
Preaching, as we see, is one of the
most important vehicles of grace, provided of course that it proceeds from the
calling of the Church and a life of asceticism in constant attention paid to
the Holy Spirit. And yet, Andrewes also insists on the limit of preaching as a
vehicle of grace. Preaching for him is by no means an end in itself, far from
it. In 1618, preaching on Saint Peter’s sermon in Acts 2, in which Peter quotes
Joel, Andrewes grows vehement about his contemporaries :
“For what ? is the pouring of the
Spirit to end in preaching ? and preaching to end in itself, as it doth with us
? a circle of preaching, and in effect nothing else, — but pour in prophesying
enough, and then all is safe ? No; there is another yet as needful, nay, more
needful to be called on, as the current of our age runs, and that is, ‘calling
on the Name of the Lord’.
And then Lancelot Andrewes continues more
severely :
“This, it grieveth me to see how
light it is set; nay, to see how busy the devil hath been, to pour contempt on
it, to bring it in disgrace with disgraceful terms; to make nothing of Divine
service, as if it might be well spared, and invocaverit here be stricken
out.
But mark this text well, and in
this invocation we make so slight account of sticks close, is so locked fast to
salvabitur, closer and faster than we are aware of.”
Andrewes now introduces one of his witty
expressions of his sense of humour :
“Two errors there be, and I wish
them reformed: one, as if prophesying [that is preaching] were all we had to
do, we might dispense with invocation, let it go, leave it to the choir.
That is an error. Prophesying is not all, invocaverit is to come in too;
we to join them, and jointly to observe them, to make a conscience of both. It
is the oratory of prayer poured out of our hearts shall save us, no less than
the oratory of preaching poured in at our ears.
The other is, of them that do not
wholly reject it, yet so depress it, as if in comparison of prophesying it were
little worth. Yet we see, by the frame of this text, it is the higher end; the
calling on us by prophesy, is but that we should call on the name of the Lord.
All prophesying, all preaching, is but to this end.” (Whitsun, Sermon 11, p.
318).
When Andrewes says “leave it to the
choir”, and a little further that it is “the stream of our times […] to make
religion nothing but an auricular profession, a matter of ease, a mere
sedentary thing, and ourselves merely passive in it; sit still, and hear a
sermon and two Anthems and be saved; as if by the act of the choir, or of the
preacher, we should so be” (Ibid. p. 319), we should bear in mind that he is
addressing the people who are in front of him : the King and the court and, as
we can see, he is very severe with them. We must remember that the court at the
time was not limited to the nobility and the intellectuals. The members of the
households were present too.
Preaching, not being an end in
itself must needs lead to prayer and prayer is to be active. It demands an
effort on the part of every Christian. This active prayer leads to the very
summit of prayer which Lancelot Andrewes, together with many Fathers of the
Church, believes to be the Eucharistic prayer. The Eucharist, inseparable from
Baptism, is the climax of the Sacraments which are all related to the one
Sacrament of the Eucharist. Andrewes
unites the three main vehicles of grace and presents them as absolutely
inseparable from one another when he says :
“To the final attainment whereof [=salvation],
by His holy word of prophecy [=preaching], by calling on His name [=prayer], by
this Sacrament of His blood poured out, and of His Spirit poured out with it,
He bring us.” (Ibid. p. 322)
Anyone who has read what Bishop
Buckeridge at Lancelot Andrewes’s funeral called his “solemn Sermons” will have
noticed how insistently the Preacher invites his congregation to partake of the
Sacrament of the Eucharist. Here again we find the close relation between the
word preached and the Sacrament. The Word (Logos) “was made flesh” and
therefore, edified by the word preached, necessarily leading to prayer, the
climax of which is the Eucharistic prayer, the actualizing memorial
(“anamnesis”) of the Passion-Resurrection by which, as Canon Donald Allchin
often says, we are made contemporaries of these events, it is impossible not to
partake of communion to the Body and Blood of Christ. This is where we
encounter Andrewes the liturgist.
We know that when he celebrated the
Eucharist in his private chapel, he used a rite which corrected or completed
what he thought was missing in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer. Also, when we
use his Private Devotions (Preces Privatae) we cannot miss the numerous
quotations and additions to the Eucharistic prayers, particularly the liturgies
of St Basil, St John Chrysostom, St James, also books of Hours, Greek and
Latin, quotations from the Fathers, also Eastern and Western. This is where we
see that he puts into practise the fact, as he says in one of his sermons, that
the authority of the Church is still there sixteen centuries after the
Apostles, and so his conception of “primitivity” is certainly not limited to
the first five centuries. In this sense, the great liturgist F.E. Brightman’s
translation of the Preces Privatae of 1903 is invaluable with all its
marginal notes identifying the sources. We note that Andrewes takes the source
as a model and continues in the same vein.
This brings us to a point which in
my opinion deserves to be mentioned. We remember that Lancelot Andrewes was
consecrated on 3 November 1605, two days before the discovery of the Gun Powder
Plot. This impressed him deeply and each year he preached on 5 November (as
well as on 5 August, the day of the Gowries’ Plot). I have called these
“Political Sermons” and “Political Festivals”. Many people dislike these
sermons because they deem them to be too subservient to the King. However, they
present two qualities which redeem them in my view. One is the reason why the
Plot seemed so horrible to Lancelot Andrewes: in his view, this unexpected
mass-murder through an explosion – which we today are unfortunately so familiar
with – meant for Andrewes that people were going to die without being prepared
for death through repentance and prayer. In a war, you know that you may die at
any time and so you are prepared. This is not the case when you are sitting in
the Houses of Prliament and are suddenly killed by the explosion of gun powder.
The second quality of these
“Political Sermons” is the fact that in them we find Andrewes the liturgist at
work: he composes prayers, starting from Psalms or other existing prayers and
composing exactly in the same manner as that which he uses in his Private
Devotions. In this manner, it seems to me that he succeded in transforming
these clearly political festivals into festivals of the Church, in his time at
least. The Gun Powder Plot, he did not denounce as a Roman Catholic act. He was
not anti-Catholic theologically or ecclesiologically speaking. His reproach was
“political” : the transformation of the dove into an eagle (Peter, son of Jona,
which is dove, St Gregory the Great, Andrewes’s favourite pope and Pope Gregory
VII). But spiritually, he was clearly a precursor of the Ecumenical Movement
and in his Private Devotions, he prayed for all. Sir John Harington, in his
“Memoir of Bishop Andrewes” written in 1608, was quite right in aying that
“this reverend prelate will be found one of the ablest […] to set the course
for composing the controversies” (LACT, vol. 11, pp xxxvii-xxxviii). It seems
to me that this is particularly true today, when we, in the Ecumenical
Movement, in bi-lateral as well as multi-lateral dialogues, are all concerned
with ecclesiology at various levels, espacially the question af “authority”,
episcopacy and the practice of “episcopé”.
deacon
Nicholas Lossky