Antecedentes internacionales

On 13 April, 1613, Andrewes preached a sermon in Latin before King James I that explained the theological methodology he used when seeking to frame his

understanding of the Eucharist.

Walk about Zion and reflect upon her. One Canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the succession of Fathers in that period—the centuries, that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the boundary of our faith.64

This title to authority was noted above in Andrewes’ sermon ‘Of the Worshipping of Imaginations.’ For Andrewes, the first five centuries were the authority and final court of appeal in all matters pertaining to the teaching of the Catholic faith. Novelties, then, were those doctrines introduced by Rome as de fide which were clearly not articles of the faith. He rejected the Magisterium of the papacy and vehemently argued for the divine right of kings in his answer to Robert Bellarmine.65 What is

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Marianne Dorman, Lancelot Andrewes…( 2005): ‘Just as Christ was clearly visible to all whilst on earth, so is the Church, and just as He was present to His disciples so is He still through the sacraments. As these in turn are the “only visible part of religion,” by their very nature they should be administered publicly when the people join the priest in their offerings. Indeed for Andrewes the celebration of the Eucharist not only assures the continual presence of Christ in this world, but the existence of the Church.’164,165.

64 _{Andrewes, Concio Latine Hatita, Coram Regia Majestate XIII, Aprilis, A.D. MDCXIII.} (London: 1629) L.A.C.T. IX, (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1852), 91. Circumdate vero Sion et lustrate eam. [Rom. 11.24] Nobis Canon unus in Scripta relatus a Deo, Duo Testamenta, Tria Symbola, Quatuor Priora Concilia, Quinque sæcula, Patrumque per ea series, trecentos ante Constantinum annos, ducentos a Constantino, regulam nobis Religionis figunt.

65 _{Andrewes, Works, Tortua Torti, VII; See also Lancelot Andrewes, Of Episcopacy. (London,} 1647). Andrewesparticularly makes the point that the Pope may have spiritual authority over his people but he does not have temporal authority over the king of a nation. Andrewes rejected the claim

found when reading the works of Andrewes, and particularly seen in his Preces Privatae, is that here was a man deeply grieved by the reality of ecclesial division. It was the ecumenical Andrewes that becomes most evident in these private devotions where he pours out his sincere desires for God to heal the divisions of East and West, together with those present within his own Church in England. It is within this framework of ecumenism that he develops his theology as a whole. Ultimately, for Andrewes, authority does not reside within the individual’s interpretation of scripture but what was believed and taught when the Church was without division. He was committed to a deeper and more careful study of Tradition and relied upon the interpretation of the early Fathers. Nicholas Lossky describes what that approach meant in Andrewes’ theology.

As for Andrewes, he forms a link between the two centuries [16th and 17th ] . He was in fact one of the first Western theologians not simply to have read the Fathers. He truly re-established contact with them, essentially by his conception of theology, which he shared with them: theology understood as being at the service of

the deification of man. It is in this sense that one can speak, in connection with his theology, of a veritable patristic renaissance. He integrated into his teaching the essence of what the Fathers had in common, because he shares with them the

experience of relationship to the personal God as constituting the essential component of humanity. And this theocentrism, this 'theotropism' one might say, in man created after the image and likeness of God informs his whole understanding of the entirety of human existence.66

The focus on the primacy of the Pope over against Andrewes’ conception of what Lossky described as ‘breathing with both lungs’, a view to look equally at the East and West for Catholic authority, manifested itself by the continual debates with Rome about what it meant for Andrewes to be Catholic. One of Bellarmine’s claims

of Rome that the Pope had the right to excommunicate kings from the Church and that it was the prerogative of the king to assemble Church councils. He also rejected the abuse of the Pope’s power to justify violent rebellions against the crown. The thrust of his argument for the divine right of kings is found in the Old Testament and the manner in which they held rule over Israel as the Church of the Old Testament. He argued that if there are no bishops there is no king. So we find a very close political connection to hierarchy for Church and State together. Against papal supremacy, he also argued historically from the councils of the Church of the first five centuries where these assemblies were called by princes. Yet Andrewes made it clear, numerous times that the king was not to make spiritual decisions for the Church as that was left to the hands of those gifted by God to shepherd the Church, namely bishops.

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concerning the lack of catholicity of the English Church was its denial of

Transubstantiation. According to Bellarmine, one could not be Catholic and deny the doctrine of Transubstantiation.67 Naturally, this went against Andrewes’ own defence of the English Church as being Catholic. Welsby is correct that when one compares the writings of Andrewes to Hooker, it is Hooker that maintained the claims of reason against the narrow Puritan method of private interpretation of Scripture. Yet it was Andrewes who went further and maintained that the catholicity of the English Church was due to its links with the primitive Church. Yet, both Rome and Geneva would have repudiated that this was true of the English Church as claimed by Andrewes.68

Andrewes consistently returned to his methodology of authority by returning to the Church of the first five centuries. It is important to note, as I did earlier, that the Church in England was undergoing transformation during the early days of

Andrewes’ labours, especially noticeable in some of the significant events taking place at Cambridge University. One of the major issues that brought on this turning point was the Nine Articles sent to Cambridge by William Whitaker, the Regius Professor of Divinity, which he wished Cambridge University to accept as the standard of Church teaching. These articles reflected a high Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and it was precisely this move that provoked the need for a more mature conception of the English Church. Walter Frere acknowledged this

transformation from high Calvinism and Puritanism and spoke of Andrewes as one of the leaders of this change. It is important to note Frere’s reference to Andrewes’ theological methodology as being instrumental in that change.

Theology had taken a new turn, with Hooker at Oxford and Andrewes and Overall at Cambridge as its leaders. These men not only led the revulsion against dominant Calvinism, but introduced a more mature conception of the position of the English Church, based upon the appeal to Scripture and the principles of the undivided

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This will be further considered in Chapter 3 on presence. 68

Church. The earlier theologians had been able to recognise in principle the soundness of this appeal, but they had not hitherto been able to work out in practice its detailed results.69

The struggle that remained within the Church of England was seen clearly in the rule of Archbishop Bancroft70 (1554-1610) and the shift that was beginning to take shape during that time. The Church was without a John Jewel (1522-1571) to defend the Church’s justifications for its directions.71

This may have been in no small part due to the fact that there was no consensus as to what was required to be

defended. What developed during Andrewes’ time was an innovative churchmanship that had not been as prominent under the reign of Elizabeth I as it was beginning to be in the reign of James I. This growth of influence was due to the growing political power of the Puritans in Parliament. That power allowed for the success of the rebellion in 1640 but it was their weak churchmanship subsequently that allowed for the success of the Restoration in 1660.72 It was the churchmanship of the Puritans that was the driving-force behind Andrewes’ return to a patristic catholicity within his Eucharistic theology. Frere noted Andrewes’ enlightened difference in being able to make a critique of the English Reformation, something not evident among churchmen of the sixteenth century English Church.

How Andrewes came to determine the place of authority in the Church was a combined appeal to Scripture and to the authority possessed by the Church, with a present-day valuing of that past experience, particularly with reference to the

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Walter Frere, The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James, 284.

70 _{Richard Bancroft was Archbishop of Canterbury under James I from 1604 until his death in} 1610. He was responsible for setting forth arguments to the government on behalf of the King and believed that Puritanism, if successful, would destablilise the country and hence he sought to supress it.

71 _{There are some who would argue that Hooker took the place of Jewel and there is some} truth to that claim. Yet, when one reads Hooker’s defence of the nature of episcopacy over against Andrewes’ defence of his churchmanship, the former is based upon reason and good order and the latter was based upon the conviction demands derived from scripture and tradition. See Jewel’s Work

The Apology of the Church of England, (London, 1562).

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experience of an undivided Church.73 As he saw it, this undivided Church was the Church of the ‘Fathers’ formed in a conciliar character with authority. This authority was not the result of the authority, personal or otherwise of any particular Church Father but rather because of what these Fathers in council upheld to be the Apostolic faith.74 It was this type of churchmanship of Andrewes that, I submit, began to take shape, even as early as his time at Pembroke Hall as a student and Catechist. As a result, this made him the founder of an English Catholic theology, which until then had not emphasised sufficiently the fullness of Eucharistic catholicity now being expressed in this way; yet could be read in the English Church’s formularies, notably the Book of Common Prayer. Andrewes’ English Church, at least in his mind, was Catholic and founded upon the Vincentian canon Quod semper, quod ubique quod ab omnibus.75 Andrewes always appealed to the example of primitive antiquity. This was the general rule for distinguishing the truth of the Catholic Faith from falsehood or heresy. Andrewes’ claim made to Bellarmine and du Perron (1556-1618)76

was that the English Catholic Church, to which he and his king belonged, was part of the united Catholic Church that held to the faith that had been believed everywhere, always, and by all.77

73 _{Walter Frere, The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James, (1904) 342.} 74 _{Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, (1991), 339-340.}

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The title “Vincentian canon” is derived from the work of St. Vincent of Lerins (written 434) A Commonitory, in the series The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF), Vol. XI, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, reprint 1991), 132-133. St. Vincent writes there in Chapter II what Andrewes was to adopt as his own methodology of theological discourse: ‘I have often then inquired earnestly and attentively of very many men eminent for sanctity and learning, how and by what sure and so to speak universal rule I may be able to distinguish the truth of Catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity; and I have always, and in almost every instance, received an answer to this effect: That whether I or any one else should wish to detect the frauds and avoid the snares of heretics as they rise, and to continue sound and complete in the Catholic faith, we must, the Lord helping, fortify our own belief in two ways; first, by the authority of the Divine Law, and then, by the Tradition of the Catholic Church.’

76 _{Jacques Davy du Perron was a Calvinist who converted to the Roman Catholic Church and} who wrote against the teachings of the Church of England. Andrewes interacted with du Perron by answering and refuting certain accusations from du Perron. See Andrewes Works, XI.

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