Sing the chiefest joys of Mary

The Prayer Book

The veneration of the Blessed Virgin in Roman Catholicism is, perhaps, widely know, so we start instead with the Reformation, in respect of which Anglo-Catholics suffer from two opposite temptations. One temptation is to stress the continuity of the English Church too much: reading some Anglo-Catholic historical writing one could be forgiven for wondering whether the Reformation actually happened at all! The other temptation is to stress the discontinuity of the Reformation, and the Protestantism of the church life that flowed from it, to such an extent that it is hard to see what claim we as Anglo-Catholics could have to a legitimate place within the Church of England.

1549 saw a radical pruning of Marian devotion in the liturgy of the English Church, but vestiges of honour to Our Lady remained which could, and in time did, give rise to new growth. Indeed it was not merely a case of vestiges – remnants that a more thorough reform might have removed. Both the Collect and the Proper Preface of Christmas Day were new compositions, and both of them mention the Blessed Virgin whereas the Sarum texts that they replaced (like the equivalent texts in the modern Roman liturgy) did not. The Collect of Christmas Day begins thus:

‘Almighty God, who hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin’.

The 1549 Prayer Book’s Calendar was very limited indeed – all the non-biblical saints were excluded, as were what we now regard as the Marian feasts – but 2 February and 25 March were treated as feasts of Our Lady, called ‘The Purification of St Mary the Virgin’ and ‘The Annunciation of the Virgin Mary’. It is interesting to note that Mary is always described as ‘the Virgin’. In 1559 a table of Proper Lessons at Morning and Evening Prayer on Sundays and holy days was added, and in it, 25 March is called ‘Annunciation of our Lady’. As a quarter day it retained its popular name ‘Lady Day’, just as Lady Chapels continued to be so called. So Mary was always referred to as ‘the Virgin’, the liturgy emphasized her purity, and she continued to be called ‘Our Lady’. This is not much, but it meant that the Church of England continued to be a church in which Our Lady was honoured, not one in which she was treated as if she had never existed. That provided the basis for a future growth of devotion.

Perhaps in some ways the most important feature of the Prayer Book, as far as the Church of England’s honouring of Our Lady is concerned, is Cranmer’s composition, from Vespers and Compline, of the office of Evening Prayer (or ‘Evensong’, as the Prayer Book sometimes calls it). The climax of that office is Mary’s song, the Magnificat. As Roger Greenacre wrote, ‘It was a stroke of genius on the part of Archbishop Cranmer to make the Magnificat the point of transition, the bridge, between the Old and New Testaments at Evening Prayer.’So, over the centuries since 1549 many Anglican clergy and indeed laypeople have said or sung the Magnificat every day, and in doing so they have been reminded every day of Our Lady’s words, ‘For behold, from henceforth: all generations shall call me blessed.’

I have referred to the Prayer Books of 1549, 1552 and 1559, but arguably one of the most important dates for the identity of the Church of England was another year – 1561. I mentioned that in 1549 the holy days had been reduced to a minimum – the ‘red letter days’ that have their own propers. That there were still propers for Holy Communion on eighteen biblical saints’ days was not insignificant. The Church of England’s celebration of the Christian Year, with a collect not only for each Sunday but also for the red-letter saints’ days, marked it out from most of Continental Protestantism and, as we shall see, became a defining feature of the Anglican tradition. But 1549 made no mention of non-biblical saints, and 1552 included only George, Lawrence and Clement (along with Lammas) as black-letter days without propers. In 1561, however, 59 non-biblical saints were restored to the Calendar. For four years, from 1549 to 1553, and – after the interval of Queen Mary’s reign – for a further two years, from 1559 to 1561, most of the saints had been out of sight, but now they were brought back into view. ‘O Sapientia’ came back too, marking the first day of the Advent Antiphons – one day earlier than in the Roman Calendar, because England had an additional Marian antiphon at the end of the series: ‘O Virgin of Virgins’. By the restoration of these black-letter saints’ days to the Calendar the Church of England’s liturgy was re-connected with the life of local communities and especially those in the countryside. Whatever motivated it, this was an important re-establishment of continuity with the pre-Reformation church. The dedication of churches to the saints, including St Mary the Virgin, had been retained of course, but now the calendar recognized many of the parishes’ feast days too. The pendulum had begun to swing back in 1559, but it swung significantly further in 1561.

For our theme the Calendar of 1561 is of crucial importance because it saw the return, after those brief breaks that I mentioned, of three of the Marian feasts. From 1561 onwards the Church of England again marked Our Lady’s Conception on 8 December, her Nativity on 8 September, and the Visitation on 2 July. Only the Assumption remained excluded. And that daily saying of the Magnificat was beginning to have its effect. In the list of holy days the Purification and the Annunciation were now ‘of the Blessed Virgin Mary’. In 1662 ‘Blessed’ was inserted into the title of the Propers for 25 March as well.

Belief and Devotion in the Seventeenth Century

The fourth Ecumenical Council (Ephesus, 431), affirmed that Mary is Theotokos (the Mother of God), while the fifth (Constantinople II, 553), spoke of Mary as ‘Ever-Virgin’. Both of these doctrines were accepted by Luther and Calvin. We have already noted Augustine’s unwillingness to ascribe sinfulness to Mary, and the Anglican Reformers’ similar avoidance of doing so.

But theology will only take us so far: devotion is also important, and in the seventeenth century we see a renewed warmth towards Our Lady. Roger Greenacre writes:

‘This change of mood is heralded by John Donne, who… died as Dean of St Paul’s in 1631… A poem of his on the Virgin Mary, entitled ‘A Litanie’ shows a tender love for Our Lady and a very firm belief in the efficacy of her prayers.

The most developed piece of seventeenth-century Marian devotion that I have seen comes from the pen of Thomas Traherne, who was ordained as a minister during the

Commonwealth, ordained priest in 1660, and died, in his later thirties, in 1674. It comes from

‘The Church’s Year Book’ (note the importance of the Christian year for Anglican piety). This manuscript book of meditations on the festivals from Easter to All Saints remained unpublished until the twentieth century. The meditation for All Saints begins by honouring Our Lady:

‘And first O Lord I praise and magnify thy Name

For the Most Holy Virgin-Mother of God, who is the Highest of thy Saints.

The most Glorious of all thy Creatures.

The most Perfect of all thy Works.

The nearest unto Thee, in the Throne of God. Whom Thou didst please to make Daughter of the Eternal Father.

Mother of the Eternal Son.

Spouse of the Eternal Spirit.

Tabernacle of the most Glorious Trinity.’ Traherne praises Mary as a model of Christian virtues:

‘Mirror of Humility and Obedience. Mirror of Wisdom and Devotion.

Mirror of Modesty and Chastity.

Mirror of Sweetness and Resignation.

Mirror of Sanctity.

Mirror of all virtues.

The most Illustrious Light in the Church, Wearing over all her Beauties the veil of Humility to shine the more resplendently in thy Eternal Glory.’24

So then, we have prominent Anglican divines of the seventeenth century for whom Mary is ‘the allholy, immaculate, more than blessed mother of God and ever-virgin Mary’, the Queen of Heaven and Star of the Sea, ‘the Tabernacle of the most Glorious Trinity’ and ‘Mirror of All Virtues’.

What we have not found so far is the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception or that of the Assumption. Mary was sinless, pure, immaculate, spotless, but how did she come to be so?

Answering that question perhaps involves a degree of theological speculation to which Anglicans are often somewhat resistant, preferring the poetical or the practical to the scholastic or philosophical. Significantly, it is not in a dogmatic work but in the poetry of Thomas Ken that we at last find the immaculate conception. Ken was born in 1637 and became Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1685. In 1691 he was deprived of his see at the age of just 53 because, as Roger Greenacre put it, ‘he paid the Cost of Conscience and refused to accept the received wisdom of the day and the pressure to conform to the politic and the expedient’.25 Thereafter he lived in retirement, mainly at Longleat as the guest of Thomas Thynne, the first Viscount Weymouth. He died in 1711. His works, published in 1721, include an extended poem entitled ‘Sion: or, Philothea’, some lines from which were included in the English Hymnal as the hymn ‘Her Virgin Eyes saw God incarnate born’ (New English Hymnal, 182).

The Eighteenth Century

In quoting verses published in 1721 we have already entered the eighteenth century. Interestingly, it was in the Oxford Almanack for 1721 that the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was first added to the Oxford University Calendar (which is otherwise largely the Prayer Book Calendar). It has remained there ever since.

Generations of lay Anglicans, especially perhaps children and young people, sat in the pews studying their Prayer Books in the less scintillating moments of the lengthy sermons.

Central to the whole logic of the Prayer Book, as we have seen, is the Christian Year, and that therefore provided the framework for devotional writing for lay Anglicans. Probably the most important example of this was A Companion for the Feasts and Fasts of the Church of England: with collects and prayers for each solemnity, by the layman Robert Nelson (165-61715), first published in 1704. Nelson was a Nonjuror when he wrote it. Though he later returned to the worship of the Established Church, he never resiled from his Nonjuring views. None the less, the book was distributed by the SPCK and read very widely throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth (my copy, published in 1795, is the 27th edition; the 36th was published in 1826). This demonstrates the influence of the Nonjurors on the large number of high-church Anglicans who stayed within the Established Church.

In his section on the Annunciation, Nelson first answers the question ‘Why is the blessed

Virgin styled the Mother of God?’ Then he goes on to say this of her perpetual virginity:

‘The peculiar Eminency, and unparalleled Privilege of that Mother; the special

Honour and Reverence due unto that Son, and ever paid by her; the Regard of that Holy Ghostthat came upon her; the singular Goodness and Piety of Joseph, to whom she was espoused; have persuaded the Church of God in all Ages to believe that she still continued in the same Virginity, and therefore is to be acknowledged The Ever Virgin Mary.’

That is what lay Anglicans were taught about Our Lady in this most popular eighteenth century Anglican devotional work. Those words were in fact a quotation from An Exposition of the Creed, published in 1659 by John Pearson (1613-1686), later Bishop of Chester – a standard guide to the doctrines of the Creed that was republished, in full or in an abridgement, right through to the end of the nineteenth century. Pearson summarized the Anglican doctrine on this point thus: ‘We believe the mother of our Lord to have been not only before and after his nativity, but also for ever, the most immaculate and blessed virgin’. Behind that formulation we can hear Andrewes’ translation from the Orthodox

Liturgy: ‘the allholy, immaculate, more than blessed mother of God and ever-virgin Mary’. These, I suggest, are the classical themes of Anglican Marian devotion: purity, motherhood, and above all blessedness and perpetual virginity, summed up in the most typical Anglican designation: ‘the Blessed Virgin Mary’.

Blessedness and virginity come together in the beautiful hymn (NEH 187) by Reginald Heber, who was born in 1783 and died as Bishop of Calcutta in 1826, not yet 43 years old. It appeared in his ground-breaking Anglican collection of hymns for the Christian Year (the importance of which for Anglican piety we note once again), which was published posthumously in 1827:

Virgin-born, we bow before thee:

Blessed was the womb that bore thee; Mary, Mother meek and mild, Blessed was she in her Child.

Blessed was the breast that fed thee;

Blessed was the hand that led thee;

Blessed was the parent’s eye

That watched thy slumbering infancy.

Blessed she by all creation,

Who brought forth the world’s salvation, And blessed they, for ever blest,

Who love thee most and serve thee best.

Virgin-born…, we bow before thee…’

Heber was a middle-of-the-road Anglican who if anything inclined towards evangelicalism, so his hymn tells us something about mainstream Anglican attitudes to Our Lady at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The hymn is very cleverly written: it is addressed to Christ, but its subject is Mary and its first word is ‘Virgin’. In sixteen lines the word ‘blessed’ or ‘blest’ occurs ten times. No one reading this hymn could doubt that before the Oxford Movement Anglicans honoured the Blessed Virgin.

John Keble

The Tractarians did not introduce into the Church of England a body of catholic doctrine and practice that was wholly alien to it. Rather, they built on the existing high-church tradition. Indeed John Keble’s friend and first biographer Sir John Taylor Coleridge tells us, ‘When he meant to accord strongly with some statement of doctrine, he would say, “That seems to me just what my father taught me.” ’ However, in re-invigorating the high-church tradition the Oxford Movement also transformed it.

We see this in the work of John Keble. What could be more Anglican than his best-selling book of devotional poems for the Sundays and red-letter days of the Prayer Book Calendar, published in 1827, entitled The Christian Year? But because he was writing poetry (rather than liturgy, prayer or even the new genre of Anglican hymnody represented by the publication of Heber’s hymns in the same year), Keble was able to address the Blessed Virgin, something that – other than in poetry – was absolutely taboo. The poem for

Candlemas (‘The Purification’), beginning ‘Blest are the pure in heart’, includes this verse:

‘His throne, thy bosom blest,

O Mother undefil’d –

That throne, if aught beneath the skies,

Beseems the sinless child.

The Twentieth Century: the Influence of the Catholic Movement

The development of devotion to Our Lady in the Catholic Movement in the century and a half since Keble’s death is a subject in itself, and not one on which I can embark so close to the end of my allotted time. What I do want to do in this final section of my Lecture is to look at four ways in which devotion to Our Lady within the Catholic Movement has influenced the wider Church of England and indeed become part of the general Anglican tradition.

The first means whereby this happened was the English Hymnal, published in 1906. It contained all of the hymns that have already been mentioned, including Ken’s ‘Her Virgin eyes’, Heber’s ‘Virgin born’, and Keble’s ‘Ave Maria! blessed Maid!’, together with four translations of Latin office hymns of Our Lady, and ‘Ye who own the faith of Jesus’ by the Principal of Pusey House, Stuckey Coles. Of these eight hymns, only Heber’s and one of the office hymns (‘The God whom earth and sea and sky’) had previously appeared in Hymns Ancient and Modern. (That hymn book, itself originally a catholic publication, had also included Sir Henry Baker’s ‘Shall we not love thee, Mother dear’ – which, admittedly, is not among Anglo-Catholicism’s greatest contributions to the canon of hymnody, its first verse at least struggling to rise above the level of Victorian sentimentality). Two of the office hymns in the English Hymnalwere addressed to Our Lady. One of them, ‘Hail, O Star that pointest’, translated by Athelstan Riley, asked for her supplication and aid; and the refrain of ‘Ye who own the faith of Jesus’ is, of course, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace’. These and some other hymns prompted a storm of protest from a number of bishops, including Archbishop Davidson. The committee cleverly appeased them by publishing an abridged edition omitting some hymns and verses and altering others. The abridged edition sank without trace and the English Hymnal was very widely used.45 Through it, hymns to Our Lady became a standard part of the Anglican tradition. In 1986 the New English Hymnal added to the repertoire ‘For Mary, Mother of the Lord’ and ‘Sing we of the blessed Mother’, each with a splendid final verse.

A second way in which Anglo-Catholicism has re-introduced the Church of England to Our Lady is by making statues of the Blessed Virgin, often in association with a Lady Chapel, a normal feature of our parish churches.

Thirdly, and equally briefly, I must mention the restoration of the Shrine in Walsingham in 1931, and the influence that it has had over the last eighty years – an influence that has increasingly been felt well beyond the bounds of the Catholic Movement.

And fourthly, Anglo-Catholics have been able to ensure that Our Lady is once again fully present in the Calendar and liturgy of our church. The 1928 Prayer Book included a collect, first reading and gospel for the Visitation and collects for the Nativity and Conception. The Alternative Service Book 1980 made 8 September a red-letter day as the Festival of the Blessed Virgin Mary, gave the Visitation a set of three readings as a Lesser Festival, made Our Lady the subject of the Collect of Advent 4 and gave her a Proper Preface. Then finally, the Common Worship Calendar made the Purification and the Annunciation (now, of course, understood as feasts of Our Lord) Principal Feasts, restored 15 August as the Festival of the Blessed Virgin Mary, raised the Visit to the status of a second Festival, and made both the Birth and the Conception Lesser Festivals. In the Common Worship Festivals volume the Annunciation and the Visit have full sets of propers, and there is another full set for use on 15 August, on the two Lesser Festivals, and on other occasions when Our Lady is commemorated.

All of this – hymns in the New English Hymnal, statues of in parish churches and lady chapels, pilgrimage to shrines, be it Our Lady of Pew in Westminster Abbey, Our Lady of Walsingham or Our Lady of Glastonbury, the high profile of commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Common Worship Calendar, and a wealth of liturgical provision for such commemoration in the Common Worship Festivals volume – all of this is no longer something exotic and marginal but firmly part of the mainstream of the Anglican tradition.

I thought it appropriate to finish today by quoting one of my favourite Marian hymns. It brings together many of the themes of which I have been speaking and exemplifies the richness of the Anglican tradition of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary:

‘Sing the chiefest joy of Mary

When on earth her work was done,

And the Lord of all creation

Brought her to his heavenly home:

Virgin Mother, Mary blessed,

Raised on high and crowned with grace,

May your Son, the world’s redeemer,

Grant us all to see his face.’

Amen