Prayer is attractive enough when it is considered in a context of good food, and sunny joyous country churches, and the green English countryside. And, as a matter of fact, the Church of England means all this. It is a class religion, the cult of a special society and group, not even of a whole nation, but of the ruling minority in a nation. That is the principal basis for its rather strong coherence up to now. There is certainly not much doctrinal unity, much less a mystical bond between people many of whom have even ceased to believe in grace or Sacraments. The thing that holds them together is the powerful attraction of their own social tradition, and the stubborn tenacity with which they cling to social standards and customs, more or less for their own sake. The Church of England depends, for its existence, almost entirely on the solidarity and conservatism of the English ruling class. Its strength is not in anything supernatural, but in the strong social and racial instincts which bind the members of this caste together; and the English cling to their Church the way they cling to their King and to their old schools; because of a big, vague, sweet complex of subjective dispositions regarding the English countryside, old castles and cottages, games of cricket in the long summer afternoons, tea-parties on the Thames, croquet, roast-beef, pipe-smoking, the Christmas panto, Punch and the London Times and all those other things the mere thought of which produces a kind of warm and inexpressible ache in the English heart.
I got mixed up in all this as I entered Ripley Court, and it was strong enough in me to blur and naturalize all that might have been supernatural in my attraction to pray and to love God. And consequently the grace that was given me was stifled, not at once, but gradually. As long as I lived in this peaceful hothouse atmosphere of cricket and Eton collars and synthetic childhood, I was pious, perhaps sincerely. But as soon as the frail walls of this illusion broke down again - that is, as soon as I went to a Public School and saw that, underneath their sentimentality, the English were just as brutal as the French - I made no further effort to keep up what seemed to me to be a more or less manifest pretense.
...Perhaps one explanation of the sterility and inefficacy of Anglicanism in the moral order is, besides its lack of vital contact with the Mystical Body of the True Church, the social injustice and the class oppression on which it is based; for, since it is mostly a class religion, it contracts the guilt of the class from which it is inseparable. But this is a guess which I am not prepared to argue out.
- from The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton, which my wife has been reading of late.
This passage is obviously dated in certain respects, but there are aspects of the insight here that might still inform us about current socio-religious postures.
[To fully "unload" the above passage you must also read Merton's description of his father's family friends he stayed with in France, who were poor farmers - this description of bourgeois Anglicanism is meant to contrast his previous description of rural French subsistence farming Catholicism, and one should read both descriptions as a whole, but my fingers got tired of typing today.]
Ah. Not sure how Merton isn't just narcissistic bullshit. Anglicanism turns out to be a class thing? Who knew? I am reminded of the old joke of the Jew, the Catholic, and the Anglican at the last judgment, and the Anglican condemned to the fires of hell for eating a pork chop with a salad fork. But wait, Merton left that all behind to find a "real religion of the heart" that cares for the poor (not too much, you can feed them, but they shouldn't actually seize power or anything or you'll have a Polish finger wagged in your face), that means something deep inside of you, that makes you feel better about yourself, etc. Nothing like slumming it with the plebs to give you street cred and allow you to sell books. Just be careful of electric fans near bathtubs.
ReplyDeleteThis stuff got started with Newman, and evolved into the women in yoga pants reading spirituality books in between trips to Whole Foods. Some, like the alleged conservatives of all confessions, just like their religion a little more on the "M" side of the S & M equation. As long as they're consenting adults is my only stipulation.
Well of course the later Merton (without the stingy religious editors this book was subject to) didn't fling the supernatural word around so much, and he did get it on with a cute little nurse in his later years, but I'm not so sure anything in his writing corresponds to the "real religion of the heart" as one generally finds that phrase manifested today.
ReplyDeleteI like this passage because it reminded me of the cult of Lewis/Tolkien/Chesterton loving Christians one encounters at certain Paschal feasts who get their panties wet over sentiments that very much correspond to the English sentiments Merton describes here. Some people think that by getting "dogma" in an apostolic church they somehow override the fact that their religion is little more than collections of sentiments like these. I'm also reminded of a conversation some years ago I listened to - a former ECUSA priest, now a well known Orthodox priest, talking with some other ex-ECUSAites about the good old days, who they knew, who they golfed with, how lovely this and that was, all with that tea&crumpets air and missing that 6 figures a year priest's salary from back in the days when you had the parish with the red front doors. That priest was convinced he had found the religion of the heart thing, but it was pretty clear to me what his religion would always really be about.
the Church of England ... is a class religion, the cult of a special society and group, not even of a whole nation, but of the ruling minority in a nation.
ReplyDeleteWhile I have no doubt that this reflects Merton's experience of the Church of England in his relatively brief acquaintance with it, I do not think that it was generally true. Perhaps if Merton had spent some time with English tenant farmers or factory workers, he might have found them just as devoted (in their own way) to the Church as were those in the upper-middle-class milieu Merton found himself in at Cambridge. He might even have found a piety comparable to that which he experienced among the poor in France.
Personally I have no experience of the Church of England itself. But growing up as an Episcopalian I spent far more time in struggling inner-city ECUSA parishes than I did in comfy suburban ones (like the one I belong to now). It didn't seem like the Tory party on its knees to me.
Chris,
ReplyDeleteAfter reading Chadwick's masterful 2 Volume The Victorian Church I am impervious to such lines of thought regarding the CofE. There were generations in which we can say that there were essentially no servant/working class persons in Anglican parishes, or at least their numbers were so small as to be statistically and culturally meaningless. When in the 20th century you see an increase of lower middle class and some working class folks in Anglican parishes, this can be explained by the fact that class consciousness was in the water - aristocrats were benefactors to Anglo-Catholic parishes in the slums when they weren't Fabians, and also to the rise in bourgeois aspirant lower middle and better off (foreman, supervisors, etc.) working classes. But these 20th century movements away from strict class rigidity in the church were superficial and greatly overstated in literature - in actuality the working classes were never a significant or even substantial sidekick role in the 20th century CofE. As the politics within the CofE changed from more often than not conservative to almost completely bourgeois liberal in the 20th century, working class people were occasionally paraded in a token manner, but this means nothing with regard to the culture Merton describes. Those sentiments transcend dogmatic changes, political or religious.
As for ECUSA in urban settings, I'll take your word for it. I've been in maybe a dozen ECUSA parishes in my lifetime, some suburban some rural some urban, and most of them have to quite varying degree displayed the skeleton of what Merton describes here. Where I have seen Merton's description most explicitly, however, has been with encounters with ex-Anglican and ex-ECUSA priests who have converted to Orthodoxy. Ironically, if this spirit lives today in America, I think it lives in the Continuum more than it does in what remains of ECUSA. And Orthodoxy serves for some as a branch (or The branch, as the case may be) of the Continuum with apostolic street cred.
Well, I won't argue with you, Owen. I haven't read Chadwick's Victorian Church, but I am prepared to give more credence to the history of Chadwick than the subjective impressions of Merton.
ReplyDelete"I'm also reminded of a conversation some years ago I listened to - a former ECUSA priest, now a well known Orthodox priest, talking with some other ex-ECUSAites about the good old days, who they knew, who they golfed with, how lovely this and that was, all with that tea&crumpets air and missing that 6 figures a year priest's salary from back in the days when you had the parish with the red front doors. That priest was convinced he had found the religion of the heart thing, but it was pretty clear to me what his religion would always really be about."
ReplyDeleteI've overheard the same conversation; I didn't realize you were at the same dinner? If I recall correctly, one got the impression that one of them (a certain PHR) became Orthodox primarily because the ECUSA didn't make him a bishop. Who knew you could make sacramental wine out of sour grapes...
"I like this passage because it reminded me of the cult of Lewis/Tolkien/Chesterton loving Christians one encounters at certain Paschal feasts who get their panties wet over sentiments that very much correspond to the English sentiments Merton describes here."
ReplyDeleteGenerally such people are deracinated, middlebrow, middle-class nerds -- which I suppose explains their longing for a 'traditional' English, pseudo-intellectual, upper-class sentimentality. It lets them pretend they aren't vapid moderns like the rest of us and furnishes them with a substitute personality. Unfortunately too many parishes are full of such 'personalities'.
In all interdenominational fairness, most of the "middlebrow, middle-class nerds" who fit the above description that I've known were evangelical-types at Yale. They'd convert to Episcopalianism upon discovering sex and then would go Catholic when they got admitted to law school ...
ReplyDelete