The Catholicity of Common Prayer (Pt. 2)
To claim (as I did in the first part of this essay) that when Cranmer’s reform seems most Protestant, it is simultaneously most Catholic, is undoubtedly paradoxical but not merely a rhetorical flourish. The revival of extensive sequential reading of the Scriptures in the daily office is not only a return to earlier Catholic tradition but also an intrinsically “Catholic” act—one that makes normative the reading of Scripture in the context of the church’s historic public liturgy. It is to say that the Word of God and the Catholic Church are correlative, that Christ speaks to the faithful Church alone, and that the faithful Church alone hears and receives the Word of God. It is a reminder that the Scriptures held by Christians to be “canonical” are authoritative in establishing the canon or rule of the Catholic faith. They are Catholic scriptures, acknowledged by the Catholic Church in its earliest struggles against heresy as authoritative witnesses to the truth of the Catholic faith. There is no Catholicity of faith without a deep immersion in the Catholic Scriptures, and no fruitful immersion in the Catholic Scriptures apart from the common faith and prayer of the Catholic Church. The Scriptures are rightly read—to the glory of God and the edification of his church and people—when they are read with and in the assembly of the church Catholic and in the context of the Catholic faith of the creeds.
For this reason, “that the people (by daily hearing of holy Scripture read in the Church) should continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God and be the more inflamed with the love of his true religion,” Cranmer was ready to make drastic reforms to the inherited Catholic tradition of daily prayer. The eight daily hours of prayer were reduced to two; the texts were translated from Latin to English; and the complexity of its rules and its devotional enrichments were dramatically simplified. As the original preface noted, “the number and hardness of the rules called the pie, and the manifold changing of the service, was the cause, that to turn the book only, was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times, there was more business to find out what should be read than to read it when it was found out.” The rules were drastically simplified, and the only seasonal element to be retained, apart from proper psalms and lessons on major holy days and the reading of Isaiah in December, was the use of the collect of the day. The anthems, hymns, responses, and other elements proper to the time, day, and season of the church’s year were scrapped because they “did break the continual course of the reading of the Scripture.”
Cranmer’s liturgy was undoubtedly austere, and since his time that austerity has been modified. Though Cranmer seems to have experimented with translations of office hymns, he did not pursue this project—a wise decision, to judge from his clumsy translation of the Veni Creator. Yet the practice of singing metrical psalms caught on very quickly and became a standard part of liturgical practice, if not of the Prayer Book text. In the 19th century, this in turn gave way to the singing of metrical hymns, including a rich provision for the church’s year. Moreover, in the cathedral and collegiate foundations, a tradition of Anglican chant and anthem was cultivated, along with a degree of dignified ceremonial, so that however austere the liturgy, it was not without popular appeal or aesthetic beauty. In the 19th century Anglo-Catholics revived the breviary tradition in English translations but with all its other defects intact; and in the 20th century, the liturgists sought to reinvent it at the expense of a return to a late-medieval complexity of rules and a brevity of Scripture reading—“more business to find out what should be read than to read it when it was found out.”
There is a place for the musical, ceremonial, and devotional enrichment of Cranmer’s liturgy: but these are adjuncts to its proper function, not replacements of it: the public reading of the Catholic Scriptures in the church through which the Spirit works repentance and faith in the hearers. Ironically, it was evangelical Anglicans, once firm in their adherence to the daily office, who in the 19th century abandoned it for the pietist practice of “quiet time”—unstructured individual study, meditation, and prayer divorced from the public worship of the church. It fell to Catholic-minded Anglicans to maintain the spiritual discipline of the daily office, though not always with the evangelical readiness to hear and receive their teaching. There is room here for Catholics to hear more deeply the Scriptures as the Word of God; and for evangelicals to hear that Word in the communion of the Catholic Church. As Psalm 95 says, “we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand… today, if ye will hear his voice…”
GGD