The Formal Cause of Justification

The question of what is the “formal cause” of justification is often said to be the real, fundamental difference between the soteriologies of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) and Protestants by theologians on both sides. We can find this assertion made by theologians such as the Anglican Richard Hooker in the 16^th Century, all the way down to the Anglican C. Fitzsimons Allison and the Jesuit Robert W. Gleason in the 20^th, among many others.

A number of theologians on both sides have noted that the Protestant principles of sola gratia (salvation “by grace alone”) and sola fide (“by faith alone”) are not the real difference, since both are effectively asserted in traditional Roman Catholic (RC) doctrinal sources. The Council of Trent affirms that both the forgiveness of sin and the gift of new life (which together make up “initial justification” in Tridentine terms, but justification plus initial sanctification in Protestant terms) cannot be earned, but are gratuitously given in response to living faith, that is, faith informed by love. Both sides agree that forgiveness and renewal are distinct but cannot be separated, and are given simultaneously by God.

The difference of terminology abovementioned rests upon the apparent disagreement over the “formal cause”, not merely upon how broadly one takes the connotations of the word “justification”, nor how one differentiates it from “sanctification”. There is a logomachy here, but that is not the only problem. That is shown by the fact that Protestants such as Hooker have been quite willing to call sanctification “second justification” sometimes, and so have Roman Catholic theologians in the past.

No, the essential problem is indeed the understanding of what exactly constitutes the “just-ness” of the justified, that is, the “formal cause” of justification. To better comprehend what we mean by this, we need to remind ourselves of the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophical categories of causality being used. A “substance”, a real entity, has to be actually produced by something or someone. We would simply call that the “cause” these days. Scholastically, it is the Efficient Cause. The substance normally has to be made from something pre-existing which is changed as to its nature. That is the Material Cause (where the “matter” is not limited to what scientists call matter). The reason it is produced, the purpose for which it exists, is the Final Cause. The “plan” or “shape” or “set of qualities” that make it what it is, that render the matter “such”, are the Formal Cause. Other causes can be listed, but these will do for now.

So, the Formal Cause of something is that which inheres in it to make it what it is. For a building, the formal cause might be roughly equivalent to the set of architectural plans used to build it. The material cause will be the bricks, mortar, wood and other sources used to build it. The efficient cause will be the builders themselves. If the building is a Fire Station, for example, the final cause will be the need to house firefighters and their equipment.

For justification, the RCC said in the Council of Trent that the sole formal cause is sanctifying grace imparted to and thus inhering in the Christian, that is, the objectively cleansed and renewed state of the human nature within that Christian. Protestants like Hooker, on the other hand, have claimed that the sole formal cause of justification (or at least of “first justification”) is the righteousness of Christ imputed to us as an external “covering” of our sin and guilt.

The Protestant criticism of the RC position is that it makes our acceptance with God dependent on our degree of goodness or works, thus denying the Gospel of grace and the bold access to God provided for us through the Cross alone (Galatians 6:14, Ephesians 2:8-9, Hebrews 10:19-22). The RC criticism the other way is that the imputational definition reduces salvation to a legal fiction, a mere whitewashing of sepulchres (cp. Matthew 23:17). One purpose in this essay is to show that both criticisms are unfair and based on misunderstandings. The other is to show how both perspectives can be integrated without either side denying its doctrine.

The first obstacle that must be overcome is a category error. The problem with the Protestant insistence upon extrinsic imputation of Christ's merits or righteousness as the formal cause of justification is that it cannot be so according to Scholastic definitions, and “formal cause” is after all a Scholastic term borrowed from Aristotelian analysis. Forms inhere in matter (unless we are referring to purely spiritual beings) and subsist substantially. Sanctifying grace, insofar as it involves a change in the nature of the redeemed person, inheres in that person. (As an aside, sanctifying grace could be said to be an “accidental form” to the person as a human being, but a “substantial form” to the person as a Christian in a state of grace.)

Imputational justification does not have, therefore, properly speaking, a formal cause because it is not in the Aristotelian categories of Substance or Quality but that of Relation. Aristotle recognised 10 categories, which can be reduced to 4: Substance, Quality, Quantity, Relation. Going back to our Fire Station as an example, the Station itself is a substance. Whether or not it is north or south of the nearest Police Station does not affect it intrinsically, and so is a matter of Relation. If one of its resident fire-fighters comes to view it with great affection as a second home, that is also a relational attribute of the Fire Station. Standing/status/position, the very words commonly used by Protestants to describe what imputational justification involves instead of “state”, are to do with how something or someone is “located” with respect to, or “viewed” by, another entity. Imputational justification is extrinsic to us in itself, hence the other Protestant term, “justitia aliena”. While this term was a novum at the Reformation, the concept can be found in the Fathers. (For example, the anonymous letter to Diognetus says, “For what other thing was capable of covering our sins than His righteousness? By what other one was it possible that we, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God? O sweet exchange ! O unsearchable operation! O benefits surpassing all expectation! that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!” Similarly, St Ignatius of Antioch in his letter to the Philadelphians says, “His cross, and his death, and his resurrection, and the faith which is through him, are my unpolluted muniments; and in these, through your prayers, I am willing to be justified.” And St Ambrose, “I have nothing, therefore, whereby I may glory in my works; I have nothing to boast of, and, therefore, I will glory in Christ. I will not glory because I am righteous, but because I am redeemed. I will not glory because I am free from sin, but because my sins are pardoned. I will not glory because I have done good to any one, or any one has done good to me, but because Christ is my advocate with the Father, and because Christ’s blood was shed for me.”)

This claim of a category error has effectively been put before by the Jesuit theologian Joseph Devine. Anglican Martin Foord objected to it on the basis that justification is “the action of God acquitting a person”, so that imputation can be internal in that act as a formal cause. But even if we grant that this term can be applied to an act as well as a substance or a quality of it, Foord's objection (which he roots in Hooker) misses the point. The word translated “justification” from the Council of Trent is, as far as I can see, always the noun and never the gerund or infinitive form in the Latin. In other words, it most naturally refers to justification as the resulting “justified-ness” of the Christian, not as the “justify-ing” process applied to the Christian. The same can be said of all the related words in chapter VII of the Sixth Session: e.g., renovatio (renewal), remissio (remission). This subtle point is important because it means that there was no way the Tridentine fathers could have made imputation a formal cause of justification without affirming the impossible: that an extrinsic relation to a person was an inherent characteristic of them.

I suggest that Protestants accept that imputed justice is not strictly a formal cause of justification qua “justified-ness”, but what can be rightly called a “relational cause”. There is no reason why they cannot stretch the term “formal cause” to cover imputation within justification qua “justify-ing”. They can proclaim Christ's merits “covering” our sin (and God declaring and treating us as not-guilty) as a formal cause sensu lato within salvation-as-relation-and-divine-act without contradicting Trent at all, which was addressing something different.

It is worth noting that putting imputation into the category of relation does not belittle it. Let us not forget that St Augustine elevated the Aristotelian concept of relation to something like equality with substance when he used it to “describe” the Trinity. Each member of the Trinity he sees as “subsistent relation” within the Divine “Substance”. As imperfect as this conception may be, it allows us to speculate that the relational aspect of our salvation is ontologically richer than purely forensic metaphors might suggest at first.

The second obstacle to overcome is the nominal difference in the use of the word justification. The RCC defines justification as God not only calling but also making us righteous or just. Protestants define justification as God declaring us righteous or “not guilty”, and so treating us as innocent of sin. Both say this is all done on account of Christ's work on the Cross. More to the point, both are utilising definitions consistent with biblical usage.

The reference to men having “justified” God in Luke 7:29, Jesus' Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18:9-14) and Romans 4:5-8 fit best with the “Protestant” declarative, imputational definition, for example.

But the same dikaio- family of words as used in Romans 5 cannot be limited this way. For example, verses 16 to 19 connect the whole family of these words together and assert that the end result is to be “made righteous” (v. 19). That this is not merely imputational is shown by the deliberate parallelism between “made sinners” and “made righteous”. Nobody claims that Adam's sin only made his descendants sinners nominally or by judicial declaration without the reality behind it. No, as Adam's sin really constituted mankind as sinful by affecting our nature, so Christ's saving act really re-constituted man's nature. Even part of Romans 4 points in this direction when it refers to God calling into existence the things that do not exist (v. 17), which would make his declaration simultaneously an impartation of righteousness anyway. That this verse is relevant to justification is clear from its associated mention of God bringing life from the dead when compared to verse 25, which associates resurrection and justification. Similarly, Ephesians 4:24 makes righteousness a quality of the new creation in us. So, both definitions or connotations are permissible.

The problem, then, is that when the formal cause is being discussed RC and Protestant theologians are trying to answer different questions. The RCC is asking: “What is the nature of the righteousness that is imparted to and inheres in us, i.e., what is it that 'informs', in the technical sense, the nature of the saved person?” Protestants are asking instead: “What renders us as innocent or not guilty of sin in God's sight and therefore in a right (legal) relationship with him?” The irony is that, bracketing the word justification, the RC and Protestant answers to each of these questions are the same: sanctifying grace and free forgiveness, respectively. Protestants (like Hooker) accept that there is an imparted righteousness in the sanctification (sanctifying grace) of the Christian. RCs say the remission of sins occurs “gratuitously by divine mercy for Christ's sake” (Chapter IX, Sixth Session), with no mention of a meritorious basis in sanctifying grace. Indeed, remission and renewal/sanctification are clearly distinguished at the beginning of chapter VII of the same Session, but all are considered parts of justification.

If, as I claim, RC justification = imputation + impartation, remission + renewal, the Tridentine bishops still had to give the (sole) formal cause as they did (see above). If we exclusively and strictly limit justification to imputation, on the other hand, the only thing approaching a formal cause is what quality is imputed or what God chooses to “see” instead of our sin, so to speak. Then the Protestant answer is almost inevitable, as is its dogmatic rejection of the Roman position, partly on the assumption that the Roman position denies imputation and bases our acceptance into God's favour on “how good he makes us”, so to speak.

The third obstacle therefore is the belief, shared among many Protestant and Catholic theologians, that Trent does not allow for any imputational aspect to justification. This belief is false. What Trent denies, in its own words, is “that men are justified, either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost” (Canon 11 on Justification, emphasis added).

Nevertheless, despite the absence of substantial dogmatic incompatibility in this area, there remain practical difficulties. The RC doctrine of salvation as enunciated at the Council of Trent exhibits three deficiencies (as distinct from errors).

First, as seen above, while it allows for imputational and relational aspects to justification, it does so apparently only implicitly, grudgingly and in passing.

Second, it gives the impression that salvation is earned by saying that Christians can merit Heaven. This tends to be misleading even when all the traditional RC qualifications of the word “merit” are taken into account. Briefly, these qualifications are: That there is no strict right in equity for humans to any reward based on their good deeds, since these deeds are imperfect, finite, and assume a prior unmerited forgiveness of sins. That what reward is owed human beings is owed because of gratuitous divine promise rather than natural equity. That the only element of human action truly worthy of such reward (and thus able to be attributed with “condign merit”) is the inspiration by the Holy Spirit that caused the action. (These traditional qualifications may be found in Aquinas and other authoritative sources, such as the Catechism of the Catholic Church.) So, when the RCC says a Christian merits heaven, they mean no more than what St Paul means in Galatians 6:7-10 and 2 Timothy 4:7-8. That is, good works done in the power of the Holy Spirit lead to eternal life because God is faithful to his gracious promise. That promise includes both an acquittal from the Divine Judge for Christ's true disciples, and a reward for them also based on their works. (Apart from the misleading nature of the word merit in this context, we also find that there is another problem related to the first part of the promise being ignored in the key part of the Tridentine decrees, as discussed next.)

Third, in the same section dealing with the reward of eternal life (Chapter XVI, Sixth Session) there is no direct mention of our reliance on Christ's blood covering our sins for entry into Heaven. Yes, there is mention on the reliance on Christ to do the good works, and there is a general mention of eternal life being “a grace mercifully promised”, but nothing about the fact that bad deeds, that is, sins, have to be remitted and not imputed as a fundamental condition of entry into Life, before good deeds performed by living faith are even considered. Now, a RC might note that the fact that entry into heaven depends on forgiveness is treated as “assumed knowledge” by this Chapter, having been discussed in Chapters VII, VIII and XI. But it is hard to deny that a complete omission of it when it comes to the specific teaching about entering eternal life gives a dangerous impression. That impression is that we really can simply earn heaven, and, worse still, that we cannot enter it unless we do. This does undermine the Gospel. And there is plenty of evidence that the sola gratia core of the Gospel is also often missed in popular RC teaching as well, as recorded by not only the Reformers within and outside of the RCC in the Sixteenth Century, but by RCs even today, as I have quoted before in other essays.

One way for the RCC to deal with these deficiencies would be to release a doctrinal clarification that brought together the necessary qualifications, which are already found anyway in various parts of their theological tradition, into one soteriological decree. This would include strong affirmation of the imputational and relational aspects of justification, the analogical and limited use of the word merit, and the necessary and perpetual dependence of final salvation on imputational justification. It would also note that when considering “justification” as the process of justifying in the act of forgiveness, rather than as the result of justifying, it is legitimate to speak of Christ's righteousness covering our sins as a “formal cause” in some sense. It would be beneficial if such a clarification admitted the fact that “justification” is used at times in Scripture with a basically imputational emphasis, as authoritative modern RC exegetes admit. Finally, an official enunciation of the common RC theological opinion that Christians can and should acquire “moral certainty” regarding their salvation (even though they cannot have absolute certainty without private revelation) would counterbalance the solely negative statement at Trent, and would, along with the features above, increase the benefits of healthy Christian “assurance” and peace for its flock.

Bibliography

Armstrong, D. (2010) “Do Catholics Believe in Imputed Justification, External Righteousness, and Justification by Faith Alone? Yes (!), With Proper Biblical Qualifications”, Web Address: http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2010/09/do-catholics-believe-in-imputed.html

Foord, M. (2000) “Richard Hooker's Doctrine of Justification” Churchman 114(4). Web Address:

http://www.churchsociety.org/churchman/documents/Cman_114_4_Foord.pdf

Kirby, T., ed. (2008) A Companion to Hooker, Leiden: Brill. Web Address:

http://books.google.com/books?id=HB0UMC2m8nwC&printsec=frontcover&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://frjeffreysteel.blogspot.com/2008/01/grand-question.html

As well as the Council of Trent and Aquinas' Summa Theologica, of course.

"...Anon we fall into our self..."

It’s my firm belief that the neglect of sacramental confession is one of the great causes of spiritual lukewarmness and of the lack of dynamic spiritual growth we often witness in our parishes.  The old bromide that “all may, none must, and some should” really doesn’t help us at all.  Who should?  If you’re not going to confession and receiving spiritual counsel and direction, how do you know if you should?  How do we address the reception of the grace of this sacrament in a way that doesn’t leave us dependent upon our own feelings about it?  I’d amend it to say that “all may, none must, and all should”, for reasons which I’ll set forth.

First, “all may”:  this seems fairly uncontroversial.  Any baptized person may receive the sacrament.  No one is foreclosed from the regenerative action of grace which is found in it.

It’s also clear, I think, that “none must” if we remember that perfect contrition brings perfect forgiveness.  It is possible to have full remission and forgiveness of even the most serious or habitual post-baptismal sins if perfect contrition is present.  Strictly speaking, in such cases, the sacrament is not necessary.

What about “all should”?  First, because we are not the best judges of our own motives and spiritual condition.  How do we know whether our contrition is perfect?  Isn’t one in danger of presumption if one assumes that one’s contrition is perfect?  Without some private revelation, any reasonable Christian should be immediately suspicious of an inclination to view his own contrition as sufficient.  And looking to the lives of the saints, who are our roadmap for spiritual growth, we find fairly consistently, not only that these saints find the sacrament to be indispensable, but that they immediately report in its context of confession and direction any private revelations or extraordinary experiences.  They do this, of course, because they have learned through hard experience that their own estimation of things is very often unreliably self-interested, and that we are all very subject to spiritual delusion.

There is a very real connection between the regularity of sacramental confession and the objective quality of one’s reception of Christ in the Eucharist.  St. Paul warns the Corinthians that one of the main causes of sacrilegious reception of Holy Communion is lack of appropriate self-examination, and the confessional is the nexus where self-examination meets objective testing, questioning, and the aid of counsel and direction.  

One of our greatest problems is the imagination.  This has always been true, but I’m tempted to say that in an age of unparalleled sensual stimulation, our imaginations have become more unruly than in the past.  For most of mankind’s history, sensual stimulation came from the natural world only, or from the natural world and from human arts and artifices which were closely tied to the natural world.  In our times, much of our sensual stimulation comes from auditory noise and from visual images which are not closely tied to the natural world.  Our imaginations don’t have to work very hard to supply us with an overwhelming supply of images.  The Fathers whose work is represented in The Philokalia are very keen to point out that the imagination is an important point of contact between the mind and the spiritual world, and one which is especially susceptible to demonic influence and manipulation.  We can see echoes of this in The Cloud of Unknowing and in The Revelation of Divine Love, in which Lady Julian warns us that “anon we fall into our self”.  

We “fall into our self” because the will very often follows the imagination.  Certainly the imagination is a mark of the image of God in us, making us (as J.R.R. Tolkien wrote) “sub-creators”, and its disciplined use energized by grace provides us with a remarkable capacity for showing forth the good, the beautiful, and the true.  But for most people, even for most Christians, the imagination is not disciplined (and the ascetic practices for its discipline are not generally taught) and is confined to presenting the mind with fears or longings for the past or future in forms culled from stored sense-impressions.  It does this whether we want it to or not.  In this way, we “fall into our self” and our powers are scattered and diffused.

This is especially dangerous in the spiritual life:  we tend to love and worship the God of our imaginations rather than God who Is; we approach the Altar with emotions and imaginations of what is happening, or with thoughts of what happened earlier or what will happen later.  We do not, in St. Paul’s words, “judge ourselves”, because the self that we see is an illusion made up of emotional attachments, images, and associations.  Our capacity for self-examination is clouded because our will is not able to reject the presentations of the imagination. 

Sacramental confession does not address just the sins we confess:  it strikes at the very root of pride, which is the source of all our ills.  It loosens the grip of our pervasive imaginative illusions.  At its best, it provides a place for ascetic instruction which becomes a cornerstone for spiritual growth.  At any rate, it certainly provides us with the continuing, covenanted cure for post-baptismal sin.  As these problems afflict everyone, so the sacrament should be sought out by all, regularly and as frequently as possible.

Plato on Realism

Before we descend into the Medieval debate between Realists and Nominalists, I want to write a brief overview of Plato & Aristotle’s understanding of something called universals. Due to length, I suspect it will take about two posts.

A universal is, more or less, an abstract idea of a quality or property shared by a group of things. For example, three cans of coke are all probably red. That is, they share the common property of redness. Folks in the Medieval period are in constant debate whether those abstract properties – redness, for example – exist on a universal plane, or if they are simply arbitrarily labeled into categories.

We derive our understanding of Plato’s sense of Realism from the Republic, which I described in an earlier post. Succinctly stated, the physical world, because it is fleeting and changing, is less real, less true than the realm of universals. Universals do not change – that is, they are eternal inasmuch as they do not change. The physical world is in constant flux, and our perception of things in them is subjective and relative. We have mere opinions about physical objects; we know truths about the abstract and universal.

If you’re scratching your head a bit, I’ll try to take a stab at how to explain this concept. Mathematical concepts like, say, a triangle, are eternally true in the abstract. We might define a triangle as a three sided figure whose angles add up to 180 degrees. That abstract triangle is true, unchanging, universal. Now, if I were to draw a triangle, it would be limited by my skill and subject to change. I could have crooked lines or tear the piece of paper up. In that sense, it is less real than the abstract triangle.

So, here’s a key distinction about platonic realism. A given object’s realism is not based on my ability to interact with it using my various senses. Rather, a given object’s realism is based on how closely it adheres to the abstract idea of that object and how much it is affected by time and change.

To return to our red coke cans, if you’ve ever seen really old coke cans that have been left out in the sun, the redness will often fade until it appears more pink than red. It is not, therefore, as truly red as the idea of redness, which does not change. The allegory of the Cave in The Republic is probably the most famous way of thinking about this concept. In that allegory, several people are chained to a wall, and they may only see the shadows of objects passing in front of a fire behind them. The shadows are not the objects themselves, and they are fleeting and subject to change. We might consider the things which you and I see as similar to these shadows on the wall – not the objects themselves, but rather, imperfect manifestations of the true object. To borrow the language so often found in the New Testament, “If a shadow is less real than the object which creates it, how much more real are the unchanging ideas of those objects!” As I mentioned in an earlier post, Christians have asserted that these universals reside in the mind of God. That is, they exist in the transcendent, eternal plane where God is.

Now, let’s think about Platonic Realism as regards Biblical thought. Hebrews 8:1-6a is one classic sort of passage which requires knowledge of Hellenistic philosophy for it to make any real sense.

"Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens; A minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man. For every high priest is ordained to offer gifts and sacrifices: wherefore it is of necessity that this man have somewhat also to offer.For if he were on earth, he should not be a priest, seeing that there are priests that offer gifts according to the law: Who serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things, as Moses was admonished of God when he was about to make the tabernacle: for, See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount. But now hath he obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much also he is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises."

There are two concepts at play here. First, there is a temple with its sanctuary, and second there is the High Priest. As the passage makes clear, the heavenly temple is more real than a physical temple; likewise, the sacrifices of the high priest in the heavenly temple are more real than the sacrifices of a high priest in an earthly temple. Put simply, let us think of the earthly temple at Jerusalem. It was destroyed multiple times and rebuilt. The sacrifices there had to be repeated because they were not permanent and not unchanging.

Our true high priest is, of course, Jesus Christ. His sacrifice of himself, made at the Heavenly Temple and manifested here in time on earth, was more true, more real, more perfect than any earthly sacrifice. It was so real, so perfect, so true that it did not need to be repeated. Christ’s sacrifice of himself was an eternal and unchanging sacrifice; it was therefore in strictly Platonic terms more real than any sacrifice we might accomplish here.

This Realism applies to us on a regular basis whenever we celebrate communion. When the Christian Platonists say that the Bread and Wine are now the Body and Blood of Christ, they are not suggesting that the bread molecules and the wine molecules (if you’ll pardon my imprecision with regard to chemistry) are now Body molecules and Blood molecules. Rather, what they are – their essence, the abstract universal which they now indicate – what they are – are the Body and Blood of Christ. The Body and Blood of Communion do what Christ’s Body and Blood do because in their innermost being, they are the Body and Blood of Christ. What Body and Blood are made out of never enters into the argument, nor does the process by which bread and wine becomes the Body and Blood. It simply is. Platonic Realism, unlike Aristotelian Realism, isn’t especially concerned about what a physical manifestation of an object or idea is made out of, but rather what they are in their form and essence.

As I’ve said before, and which others may like to confirm, the Eastern Orthodox have favored this Platonic view of Realism over the Aristotelian view which has dominated the Western Church (but notably not St Augustine’s own writings on the Eucharist, for example). The Platonic view has a number of immediate benefits. We obviate entirely any sort of discussion about transubstantiation, consubstantiation, virtualism, spiritual presence, etc. We also do not get into a morass of semantic debate about what things are made out of.

My next post, on Aristotelianism, will address those very concerns at length.  

EP Rides Again

After a brief respite from posting it looks like the anonymous blogger known as the Embryo Parson is back at it, blasting away at Retro-Church with both barrels.  In three new posts over at The Old Jamestown Church blog, he takes us to task for synergism, sophistry, and an inability to use thefreedictionary.com (I don't always use the dictionary, EP, but when I do, I prefer the OED).  It's nice to have him back at it because he keeps things interesting, but as his first post shows, he just can't seem to leave the old "Newman went to Rome so Anglo-Catholics must necessarily follow suit" hobby horse alone.  Having seen the collective "meh" that went up among Continuers in response to Anglicanorum Coetibus, I'd say EP's horse exists mostly in his imagination, but as of now, it looks like he's going to keep riding it--Parson Style! 

We see this also in a more recent post, which looks to be a response to my observation about Classical Anglican™ historiography being stuck in the nineteenth century.  There he provides a link to a pretty good summary of where Reformation Studies stood in 1997.  We're getting closer here, but EP has now left us with the impression that we're living in the world of oversized coffee cups, concerns about Y2K, and the Spy vs Spy mentality of "Revisionist" against "Whig."  This is the situation that Norman Jones satirizes in the opening paragraph of his insightful study of English religious culture and generational change, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaption (Oxford:  Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 2002).  

"Once upon a time the people of England were happy medieval Catholics, visiting their holy wells, attending frequent masses and deeply respectful of Purgatory and afraid of hell. Then lustful King Henry forced them to abandon their religion. England was never merry again. Alternatively, once upon a time the people of England were oppressed by corrupt churchmen.  They yearned for the liberty of the Gospel. Then, Good King Harry gave them the Protestant nation for which they longed."  

By the time Jones wrote this, revisionism had pretty much run its course.  That said, most people agree that revisionism provided a necessary corrective to the Whig-derived narrative that dominated mid-twentieth century scholarship.  Few people now think of "The Reformation" as historically limited, monolithic, and largely inevitable.  Instead, folks are working with the concept of a long reformation, or even multiple reformations, and I would argue that this shift in perspective is a good thing.  It provides, for example, a safeguard against scholarship falling into patterns of thought that arose out of the process of nation building in the early modern era.  This makes for a cleaner, less partisan approach to the period in question.  

It also allows us, as Anglicans, to adopt a more comprehensive view of where we come from.  Facts may be stubborn things, but does this mean that we must define ourselves by the decisions of a secular body trying to stave off insurrection at home and invasion from abroad?  I don't think so.  As I pointed out before, I'd rather start with the catholic faith and work outward from there.  This is neither being dishonest about our origins, nor is it indicative of a desire to be something other than what we are.  In fact, I would say that it comes from a sense of security in our Anglican identity.  I've been in the ACC for over 20 years and am happy with where I am.  I think my parishioners (quite a few of whom actually came from Rome) feel the same way.  We are "continuing" Anglicans in that we're part of a great tradition of the Ecclesia Anglicana and we can talk to anyone without forgetting who we are. 

My hope is that EP will recognize that his horse is actually dead and put him to rest.  The internet already has one imaginary rider; I'm not sure there's room out there for any more.

Classical Anglicanism™

In the two weeks since Archbishop Robinson's statements on the Joint Appeal to the ACNA, I've noticed the presence of a certain group of bloggers and commentators who advocate a return to what they are calling “Classical Anglicanism.” Though it's difficult to tell with any precision what “Classical Anglicanism” might be, it seems to have something to do with what that notably catholic and ecumenical body, known as the English Parliament, came together to ratify in 1559 (that would be the Act of Supremacy, which made Elizabeth I Supreme Governor of the Church, and the Act of Uniformity, which was meant to establish a certain standard of worship throughout the realm). To this we could add the elevation of the Articles to confessional status, a view of Augustine that is defined by the anti-Pelagian perceptions of the Magisterial Reformers, and, oddly enough, a deep suspicion of tidiness.

Whatever one might think about these defining characteristics, the term does have a nice ring to it. It conjures up visions of a golden age—the kind that existed before Anglo-Catholics messed up the virtuous and solid English Protestantism that Good Queen Bess bestowed upon her grateful subjects—and this is what it’s meant to do. The word “classical” has its origins in the early-modern era, when it was used to denote Greek and Latin writers of acknowledged merit. From there it was only a short semantic skip to expressing a general sense of highest, purest, or best.  Five hundred years later, we get things like “Classical Anglicanism,” a term that has proven useful for those who seek to delegitimize the notion that our Anglican patrimony should be situated within the wider context of catholic Christendom. Things like the ACC's appeal to the Central Tradition (as laid out by Archbishop Haverland here and here) are characterized as “Western Orthodox” or “Old Catholic” but not really “Anglican” in any valid sense. This is curious, because the term “Anglicanism,” which didn’t exist prior to the Tractarians, was originally employed precisely to emphasize the continuity of doctrine and practice that existed within the Church of England as it went about the process of reform. 

With this in mind, I would like to introduce into our discussions a new term: Classical Anglicanism™. This will help differentiate those such as Father Hart (who so far as I can tell sees no discontinuity between the faith of the English Reformation and the faith of the Affirmation) from those who would restrict Anglican identity to a “classical” age, which in its purity is distinct from the English Christianity of the past (and for that matter, much of the future as well). This idea of a "Reformational" rupture within the English Church is unsurprising given what one reads in the sort of old-fashioned Protestant historiography to which the Classical Anglicans™ seem to subscribe. In the words of J.C. Ryle, whom I’ve seen recommended with approval by Classical Anglicans™ elsewhere, the process of reforming the English Church was like taking “down an old, decayed house, and rebuild[ing] it from the very ground.” 

To view the religious change of the early-modern era in this light is to see it in terms of “revolution” rather than “reform.” This is a topic I will deal with more fully in a later post, but for now I will say that in cultural terms, revolution is used to signify an abrupt and significant break with the past, while reform suggests a process that is patient of perceived imperfection and is ameliorative, rather than destructive, in its remedies for the same. The preference of the Classical Anglicans™ for viewing the period in terms of revolution rather reform is evident from the manner in which they tend to dismiss Henrician Catholicism as ephemeral and of little value. What I think they miss is the fact that Henrician Catholicism is in many ways the culmination of processes and ideas that can be traced to the beginning of the fifteenth century and the response of the English Church to the revolutionary program of the Wycliffites. In fact, if we can do away with the assumption that “medieval” is antithetical to “reform,” a sense of continuity between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries begins to emerge. 

Led by men such as Robert Hallum, Bishop of Salisbury, we see the English Church taking an active role in the conciliar movement, which for a time, was able to impose real limitations on papal power. The writings of Hallum’s protégé, Richard Ullerston, reveal a serious and positive engagement with the issue of vernacular Bible production. The recruitment of Oxford scholars for parochial work by Philip Repingdon, Bishop of Lincoln, is emblematic of a commitment to sound preaching and catechesis, largely through the sacrament of confession. And while it’s unlikely that Archbishop Henry Chichele would ever have gone so far as to advocate “catholicism without the pope,” he was firm in his assertion of the traditional liberties of the Ecclesia Anglicana. This is just scratching the surface, but even so, the similarity between the goals of these fifteenth-century bishops and what one sees developing within Henrician Catholicism suggests to me not only a continuity of purpose, but also that much of what we understand as “Anglicanism” (in the original sense) can be found right at home. In fact, one could argue that the problem with those who guided religious policy under Edward VI is that they abandoned a native tradition of reform and replaced it with revolutionary foreign models. 

I was discussing these ideas the other day with a friend, who brought to my attention a passage in Eamon Duffy’s book, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven & London: Yale, 2009). He followed up on our discussion with the following email: 

"Duffy seems to be an agnostic papalist, reminding one of George Santayana, who was said to believe that ‘There is no God, and Mary is His Mother!’ But Duffy’s biases are not the point at the moment. The extract below is cited for its primary material, not for Duffy’s interpretation thereof. It is sufficient to know that by ‘catholic’ and ‘orthodox’ Duffy means papalist or Roman Catholic. In this passage Duffy notes the relative lack of executions in the diocese of Durham during the Marian reaction: 

…from 1556, the aged Bishop Tunstall’s right-hand man there was his archdeacon and great-nephew, Bernard Gilpin. Despite having spent part of Edward’s reign in Paris to oversee publication of Tunstall’s defence of the catholic doctrine of the Mass, Gilpin was a waverer between catholic and reformed beliefs, orthodox on the real presence, but decidedly shaky on papal primacy, the English Bible and the marriage of priests. He was sufficiently suspect among hardliners in the diocese to have set aside a ‘long and comely’ shirt, in case he himself should be brought to the stake.’ (Page 130) 

What Duffy is describing in Bernard Gilpin is an Henrician Catholic: a man who rejected the ‘modern’ papacy, accepted the positive value of vernacular Bibles, and was open to the reform of post-patristic developments such as mandatory clerical celibacy. But Gilpin was within the central tradition of the universal Church concerning the Eucharist and other doctrinal matters that were left untouched by Henry’s reforms."

In light of this observation, one could also argue that the Marian reaction represented the flip side of the Edwardian coin. It too was confessional in its approach, and as such, it reflected the hardening of Roman attitudes that were characteristic of the Tridentine era. The tragedy of religious developments under both Edward and Mary is that they cut off what could have been the natural development and reform of English Catholicism as something that was neither Calvinist nor Lutheran nor Roman, but if one has to put a label on it, Erasmian; that is, reformed, learned, and not discontinuous in essentials with either the Church of the Fathers or of the Middle Ages. Movement back in this direction resumed with Hooker, but that involved undoing damage done by religious revolutionaries of an earlier age. 

Classical Anglicans™ have recently been suggesting that the ACC is attempting to transform Anglicanism into something that it was not. I think the real question is whether Continuing Anglicans are prepared to historicize our identity down to a few decades within the early modern era. I'm guessing this is something that most are not willing to do. Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est, combined with an understanding of English Christianity over the longue durée gives us a better guide to the future of Anglicanism than a return to the polemical and politically charged perspectives of the mid-sixteenth century. And as the example of the Henrician Catholics illustrates, we have more in the way of authentically English models from which to draw inspiration than today's Classical Anglicans™ would like us to think.

Prayers for Father Wells

We ask your prayers for Fr. Laurence Wells, one of the main contributors to the Continuum blog and a frequent interlocutor here.  Fr. Wells had a stroke last night and is currently in hospital.  Please keep Fr. Wells and his family in your prayers.

"O FATHER of mercies and God of all comfort, our only help in time of need; We humbly beseech thee to behold, visit, and relieve thy sick servant Laurence, priest, for whom our prayers are desired. Look upon him with the eyes of thy mercy; comfort him with a sense of thy goodness; preserve him from the temptations of the enemy; and give him patience under his affliction. In thy good time, restore him to health, and enable him to lead the residue of his  life in thy fear, and to thy glory; and grant that finally he may dwell with thee in life everlasting; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen."

Metaphysics and the Pursuit of Truth

Events on the ground occasionally require us to shift focus; the Anglican Catholic Church has a host of very succinct articles on worship and sacramental acts, and so I believe it is more pressing to address a problem of metaphysics beginning in the Middle Ages and continuing up through the Reformation. 

Which is the real chair?

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Modern Art up in New York City, where I came across an exhibit which immediately became my favorite in the entire museum. The exhibit is entitled “One and Three Chairs,” and as the picture I’ve included demonstrates, it contains a three dimensional chair, a picture of a chair, and the dictionary entry for a chair. The implicit question is, of course, “Which one is actually a chair?”

Now, that may seem like an idiotic sort of thing to ask nowadays. Most people would consider the three dimensional chair – one we could actually sit in – to be the real chair. But for the ancient world – the context in which scripture was first written, interpreted, and canonized – such a question was a very real debate. The two principal positions in our debate were the Nominalists, on the one hand, and the Realists on the other. 

Let us stick with our example of a chair and explore how each of these schools of thought considers the question. A Realist would say that a chair has a Form and a Function, without which we cannot have a chair. The form and the function which constitutes a chair are derived from the universal Idea of a Chair. That is, an idea exists which has the form and function of a chair, and we simply have a word that describes that universal ideal. Put another way, there are lots of different words for chair, and there are lots of different types of chair, but really, when we get right down to it, there’s only one type of chair: an object of a certain shape that is designed for us to sit in it. Each individual chair that exists is really only an attempt to recreate that Idea of a Chair.

 In The Republic of Plato, for example, Socrates relates an earlier conversation with Glaucon: “We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name…” “In the present case, then, let us take any multiplicity you please; for example, there are many couches and tables.” “Of course.” “But these utensils imply, I suppose, only two ideas or forms, one of a couch and one of a table.” “Yes.” “And are we not also in the habit of saying that the craftsman who produces either of them fixes his eyes on the idea or form, and so makes in the one case the couches and in the other the tables that we use, and similarly of other things? For surely no craftsman makes the idea itself. How could he?” “By no means.” (Republic 596a-b)

So, where do these ideals exist? Plato's dialogue suggests an alternate realm of reality where the universals do exist – a spiritual plane of existence. Now, that may seem a bit odd to us, but I propose a different solution. I’m hardly the first to do so – you’ll find it in Augustine, who was a thorough-going Realist. Those ideals exist in the mind of God; we, being made in His image, are able to divine only a glimpse of those truest ideals, and so we attempt to create and synthesize chairs and beds and things, however imperfectly, in a way that tries to fashion the Ideal. Without the Idea of a Chair, there could be no chair.

The Nominalist believes a chair is a chair mostly because we’ve gotten together and decided, as a society, what chairs are, and so where that label applies, it applies. A chair is a chair in name – that is, nominally. No abstract ideal exists which helps us understand what chairs are. Now, many will ask, “So, what?” So let us investigate a more practical example.

In, say, a baseball game, a runner slides into the home plate. The umpire cries, “Out!” And he is out. But the Realist and the Nominalist have different understandings of why. The Realist says if a runner is out, he objectively is out, regardless of what the umpire says. Based on the reality of the game, the runner either is out, or is safe, with no in between. The Nominalist says the runner is only out because the umpire observes him to be out – even if in actuality he was not. Objectivity does not matter, so much – only what is perceived, called, labeled, named.

Now, let us consider a moral question. We might ask whether, for example, infanticide is morally wrong. The Realist says that an act is moral or immoral based on whether it comports to the Ideal of Goodness. The Realist, based on his understanding of Goodness, would then reach a conclusion. Now, that conclusion may be correct or incorrect, but infanticide itself is either moral or immoral. Our thoughts, our feelings, our circumstances do not alter its morality. Either an instance of infanticide is a moral act, or it is not.

The Nominalist has a different understanding of the event. He will ask whether the act comports with a given group or party’s understanding of morality, or if it resembles other immoral acts. Based on that conclusion, the nominalist will then decide whether the act is immoral. The trouble with nominalism is, of course, that definitions will shift over time and in differing contexts, and very little exists to prevent this shift from happening and the disastrous results that follow.   

From Plato, writing in the 4th century BC, until Peter Abelard, writing in the 12th century AD, Realism dominated the thoughts of the Greeks, from whom the Diaspora Jews and the Romans acquired it as they came into contact with Hellenistic thought. Realism has endured, as far as I am aware, until the present day with little trouble among Eastern Orthodox.  In Western Christianity, it was the dominant philosophy and mostly uncontested until the 12th century, when Peter Abelard argued in favor of a Nominalist understanding of reality. It’s in the 12th century, therefore, that I will begin tracing this new debate between Realists and Nominalists. I will argue how those debates in no small part influenced the theological tension in that time period which led directly into the Reformation. 

(Edited a bit to provide additional clarity on the bits about Plato's Republic.)