Читать книгу A Following Holy Life - Kenneth Stevenson - Страница 6

Introduction

Jeremy Taylor – Life, Writings and Theology

Taylor’s life – a snapshot[1]

Jeremy Taylor was born in Cambridge in 1613 and died in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1667. Into those fifty-four years he managed to pack a great deal, and not just in all his writings, which are contained in no fewer than ten volumes. He was a Cambridge scholar, an Oxford don, a parish priest in Rutland and then in Northamptonshire. Coming into prominence as a young preacher, he became a chaplain to the King and served later as a chaplain in the Royalist army. The victory of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) over King Charles I (1600–49) cost Taylor his career in the Church, and he lived a kind of internal exile from 1655 as a personal chaplain to an aristocrat in Carmarthenshire which was from a literary point of view the most prolific of his life. Imprisoned on three occasions for his views, another chaplaincy was eventually found for him in 1658, this time in Lisburn, not far from Belfast. At the Restoration in 1660, when Charles II came home as King, Taylor probably hoped he would be given an English bishopric, but he was made Bishop of Down and Connor, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin.

His life and writings in context[2]

Cambridge, London, Oxford, rural parish ministry, Civil War, imprisonments, domestic chaplaincy in Wales, parish chaplaincy in Ulster and a rural Irish bishopric: in some ways, this is a story of achievement nipped in the bud, and triumph prevailing over tragedy. But Taylor’s voice and personality keep coming through, and they explain why he emerges from the turbulent mid-seventeenth century as one of the most formative Anglicans of his time. Before we look at the main aspects of his theological works, we need to see his life and writings in a wider context. The published works of any author have an ‘occasional’ quality to them, for the obvious reason that they emerge at a particular time, arising from circumstances as much to do with the development of the author’s thinking as the era in which they live. Taylor’s writings all have something that responds to a particular context while reflecting an overall maturing theology that is practical rather than systematic.

Taylor’s background was neither impoverished nor well-to-do. His father, Nathaniel, was a Cambridge barber, who sent him to the Perse Grammar School, when he was six years old. Stephen Perse was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and Taylor went there at the age of fifteen in 1628. We do not know the details of his course of studies, but we can be sure that they involved being steeped in the classics, an experience from which Taylor would have emerged fully accomplished in Latin and Greek. In many respects, a mind-frame shaped by the Renaissance in this way suited him well. In 1633 he was appointed to a Fellowship. Such a move required him to be ordained, in his case at the tender and technically uncanonical age of twenty (he should have been twenty-three).

In the following year, Taylor had what would nowadays be called a lucky break, when he had to stand in for a friend who was supposed to preach in St Paul’s Cathedral. Someone with his talents in language and communication was bound to attract notice. It began with William Laud (1573–1644), Archbishop of Canterbury, who appointed him as one of his chaplains, and it led to being noticed by the King as well, and a move to Oxford, where Laud engineered a Fellowship for him at All Souls. There was some opposition to this, which may have been as much about Laud’s way of working as about Taylor himself. One of the more influential Fellows was Gilbert Sheldon (1598–1677), who was to develop a somewhat cautious attitude towards Taylor, which probably explained why as Archbishop of Canterbury after the Restoration he did nothing to secure him an English diocese.

Among other contacts in Oxford, Taylor met William Chillingworth (1602–44) and the ‘Great Tew Circle’, whose theological views were for more ‘latitude’ in dealing with religious controversy, a recurrent theme in Taylor’s later writings. Chillingworth did not doubt Taylor’s ability but observed an unfortunate opinionated streak: ‘he slights too much many times the arguments of those he discourses with’.[3] This may have been another cause for reserve in some quarters about him, perhaps added to by his suave style and good looks. But in that remark can be seen something else in Taylor: the makings of a man who sometimes needed to clear his mind while speaking and then express it primarily by writing.

The next stage in Taylor’s life saw him appointed to the livings of Uppingham, Rutland (1638), and then Overstone, near Wellingborough (1643). Uppingham, according to John Evelyn (1620–1706) the diarist, whom Taylor was soon to befriend, was a poverty-stricken parish where he put into practice the liturgical customs of the ‘Laudian’ school, with a fully appointed chancel, altar-table, an organ, and more frequent (probably monthly) celebrations of the Eucharist; and he will have relished its elegant Elizabethan pulpit. He married his first wife Phoebe Landisdale there in 1639. He does not seem to have spent much time at Overstone, where he was presented after being extruded from Uppingham as the Civil War gathered momentum and his association with the Royalist cause made him unacceptable.

His Gunpowder Day Sermon delivered in Oxford in 1638, a workmanlike performance but no more, had allied him to the King; and this was even more the case with ‘Episcopacy Asserted’ (1642), written at a time when Presbyterians and Independents were renewing their attacks on the office of bishop, so that figures like Taylor and Henry Hammond (1605–60), another staunch and open defender of the episcopal office, whose influential ‘Practical Catechism’ first appeared in 1644, were bound to meet with decisive opposition. ‘Episcopacy Asserted’ is a notable, thorough work. While lacking some of the inspiring qualities of Taylor’s later output, it expounds the biblical and patristic evidence for episcopacy, in succession to the apostles, and separate from the presbyterate; he also makes a strong link between king and bishop – and Charles I is supposed to have encouraged his being made an Oxford DD for it.

When the Parliamentary forces took Cardigan Castle on the Pembrokeshire coast in 1645, Taylor was among those taken prisoner. This was probably because he was a Royalist army chaplain, but it may have been that he was in Wales already, seeking a livelihood away from Oxford, where he no longer felt welcome. Taylor was now to all intents and purposes about to enter a spell of living as an internal exile, not far from Cardigan. Initially, he helped run a school at Newton Hall in Llanfihangel-Aberbythych, to the west of Carmarthen in the Tywi valley. In the vicinity was Golden Grove, the large residence of Richard Vaughan (?1600–86), Earl of Carbery, Royalist commander in Pembrokeshire, in whose household Taylor soon went to serve as chaplain. In the comparative peace and tranquillity of this base, and with the friendship of Lady Frances Carbery, Taylor embarked on the most fruitful phase of his writing career. Had history turned out otherwise, he might have been given higher office in the Church at this stage in his life. So the works – and they are many and varied – kept flowing from his pen. It was a case of turning adversity into creativity, and it made his reputation for future generations.

Confined from the outer world, but aided by his teeming brain and amazing memory for facts and quotations, Taylor set to work in a way that could not be interpreted as trying to curry favour with his oppressors. In 1646, ‘Prayer Ex Tempore’ appeared, intended as a counter-blast to the official ‘Westminster Directory’ (1644/45), which both outlawed and superseded the Book of Common Prayer in a Reformed direction. With quiet but firm courtesy, Taylor rehearses the arguments against ‘free prayer’ in public and those in favour of a set liturgy, as the possession of the whole Church; he expanded it into a much larger work three years later, ‘Apology for Authorised and Set Forms of Liturgy’ (1649), the year of the King’s execution. But his first really major work was ‘The Liberty of Prophesying’ (1647), in which he argued against any kind of persecution for religious reasons, a liberal approach that may well have owed something to his friendship with Chillingworth and his circle. It is Taylor at his most judicious and fair, setting out the views of Anabaptists and Roman Catholics, refuting them where necessary, but pressing for generosity and liberality in an age that on the whole did not find such an approach congenial. The King was said not to be over-impressed by it. It was but one example among others where Taylor was ahead of his time.

Taylor was also working on a major project that had a less ‘occasional’ flavour, which embodies Taylor’s whole theology – ‘The Great Exemplar of Sanctity and Holy Life’ (1649). The ‘exemplar’ in the title is, of course, Christ himself. It was a bold venture; while devotional books of various kinds were frequent best-sellers in the seventeenth century, this one was far more lengthy and complex. In genre, it is a kind of extended variation of the late mediaeval tradition, well-known through the ‘Imitation of Christ’ of Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471). It does, however, have the unique distinction of being the very first of its kind to appear in English that is based throughout on a narrative of the life of Christ, and Taylor leaves his own stamp on it. The starting-point is not where it might have been for the time: the human condition, our sinfulness, our need for salvation, and the ways to deal with that through faith and forgiveness, or rather (to use more theological language) justification and sanctification. Taylor instead places us within the narrative that the Gospels provide, and he enfolds it with discussions on baptism, Eucharist, repentance, hints of his view on original sin, and much else, including the practical application of the faith to daily life. ‘Great Exemplar’, partly because of its subject, scope and length, contains the main features of Taylor’s theology, which re-appear and become developed in his later works.

Unwieldy as the book is, it succeeds through the constant sequence of narratives, reflections (which he calls ‘considerations’), and discourses – these last probably based on sermons preached from his time in Uppingham, and possibly even earlier. According to Jessica Martin, this threefold, almost Trinitarian pattern is derived from Bernard of Clairvaux’s ‘Memory’ (Father), ‘Understanding’ (Son) and ‘Will’ or ‘Love’ (Holy Spirit), and is intended to give shape to the reader’s approach to the work as a whole, helping to make Christ’s life accessible to us. She sees the same three processes appear in the ‘Discourse’ on Meditation, where memory is about instruction, understanding directed to consideration, and will concerns reception. There are also copious prayers, christologically focused, which are appropriate for this kind of work, and a feature of Taylor’s liturgical compositions to come. McAdoo likes to summarize Taylor’s description of the work near the opening dedication as ‘practical divinity’. It ran into several editions, the eighth in 1694. Taylor’s free use of all four Gospels as a basis for his theological and devotional reflections obviously pre-dates biblical criticism, so that a book of this genre in our time would be difficult to write.[4] But it is still a remarkable achievement. What holds it together is its threefold structure: from the Annunciation to the Temptation; from Cana to the second year of Christ’s preaching (reflecting here the shape of John’s Gospel); and from then onwards to the crucifixion, death and resurrection. He has so much to say, but there is no ‘slowing down’ at the conclusion, with the result that the Ascension is not perhaps milked for its full meaning and significance.

Although Taylor incorporated a lot of his teaching about baptism elsewhere in this work, such as at the baptism of Christ, and in the lengthy ‘Discourse’ on Repentance, he took the opportunity to insert an additional ‘Discourse on Baptism’ (1653), and, a few years later, an early Syriac prayer which in those days was attributed to Christ at his own baptism (1657). This has the effect of placing Baptism more prominently in his theological scheme, with a starting-point of an almost iconographical kind based on the Jordan scene (Matt. 3.13–17) as a manifestation of the Trinity; this is a patristic motif that first appears in one of Augustine’s earliest sermons, and also used by Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1624) earlier in the century.

‘Great Exemplar’ was overshadowed by the death of Lady Carbery, which launched Taylor in another new direction, the funeral sermon crafted along the conventional lines of such preaching, first on the Gospel text, and then giving reflections on the deceased – a tendency that could be followed in our own time. Around 1650 Taylor lost his wife Phoebe, a tragedy which merely added to his deprivations. Hemmed in as Taylor may have been by life’s difficulties, he kept his pen in his hand and wrote copiously, perhaps even as a kind of therapy from it all. In 1650 came what is probably his best-known book of all – ‘the Rule and Exercises of Holy Living’, which was followed in 1651 by ‘the Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying’. Both works were dedicated to Carbery, for it was Lady Carbery who apparently had encouraged him to write them. Both reflect the troubled times in which they were written – the ‘epistle dedicatory’ to the first work hits the nail on the head when near the start Taylor observes that ‘men are apt to prefer a prosperous error to an afflicted truth’. Both books were best-sellers and reached their seventeenth editions in 1695. Although written separately, and (understandably for their subject-matter) in different styles, they were often bound together. The first proper combined edition appeared in 1700.

In the period since, they have frequently been reprinted and sometimes adapted and abbreviated. Although not as popular in our time as they once were, they probably remain Taylor’s most lasting legacy to the Catholic Church. Both books take the reader on a journey which is interspersed with reflections and prayers, a medium in which Taylor excelled. In contrast to ‘Great Exemplar’, which starts with the life of Christ, Taylor now reaches more directly (and more accessibly) to the human soul. For example, ‘Holy Living’ begins with our use of time, and ends with teaching about the Eucharist and prayers in preparation for communion; there is even a prayer for the anniversary of one’s baptism. He seems to cover everything in a ‘holy life’, including the physical side of marriage. He was the first devotional writer to do so, without any of the Augustinian baggage in that regard that has hampered Western Christianity for so long. For Taylor, sex could be a good thing, and therefore was to be enjoyed. Perhaps this was another area where he upset the more conventional minds of his time.

The next few years saw the appearance of some smaller works. These included collections of his sermons (1651 and 1653), with the two issued together as ‘Eniautos’, for the whole year. Surprisingly for someone of his Prayer Book views, these were not arranged in a strictly liturgical way to correspond with the Church Year. Among them were two on marriage, which have a strongly lyrical as well as practical quality, as well as one condemning death-bed confession, a recurring theme in Taylor, already explored in ‘Great Exemplar’, which rings a somewhat sour note for modern Christians, as it may well have done then. These sermons were probably preached at Golden Grove, though opinions differ on whether they were delivered in exactly the same form as they were printed.

There are hints that at this stage he spent time on visits to London. John Evelyn notes in his diary that he travelled there to hear Taylor preach on 15 April 1654 at St Gregory’s Church, near St Paul’s Cathedral, a small building, one of the few places where Oliver Cromwell permitted the Prayer Book services to be used. What a contrast from twenty years earlier, when he preached as an aspiring twenty-two year-old in the Cathedral itself! In that year appeared ‘Real Presence’, a serious exposition of eucharistic theology, directed against Transubstantiation (named in the characteristically lengthy title), as well as some of the Reformed views of the sacrament. It goes without saying that one of the challenges facing Anglicans (often more accurately described nowadays as ‘Prayer Book Conformists’), particularly in the first part of the seventeenth century was along these lines. Transubstantiation was anathema for them and all the churches of the Reformation. Taylor was by no means alone in refuting it at the time. John Cosin (1594–1672), Restoration Bishop of Durham, was doing the same from the vantage-point of his self-imposed exile in Paris. We shall look at this question in more detail later. Taylor comes through this tricky exercise, backed up as it is with copious quotations from the patristic, mediaeval, Reformation and Counter-Reformation writers, with his stress on mystery and sacramentality – the devotional rather than the systematic writer.

Whatever people thought of ‘Real Presence’, Taylor’s next publication irritated the authorities sufficiently to have him imprisoned again, at Chepstow. ‘Golden Grove’ (1655) is a small book of prayers and devotions, with a preface openly bemoaning the barren character of the Church in his time, and going so far as to say that ‘the people have fallen under the harrows and saws of impertinent and ignorant preachers’. It reached its twentieth edition in 1700, which speaks for itself. On release from prison, Taylor went to Mandinam, not far from Golden Grove, where Joanna Bridges lived, whom he married around this time. There doesn’t seem to have been a formal break with Carbery, but Cromwell had just decreed that Royalists were not allowed to keep private chaplains.

The real bombshell of his career, however, came in a book also published in 1655 on which he had obviously been working for some time, ‘Unum Necessarium, or the Doctrine and Practice of Repentance’. Taylor wrote it as a general but probing devotional work, and most of it passed without comment. The one exception was chapter six, on original sin. He must have known that he was walking on theological egg-shells, since he had tested some of it out on Brian Duppa, Bishop of Salisbury (1588–1662). The book nonetheless unleashed a storm that made Taylor suspect in many peoples’ minds for the rest of his life. What he said about original sin conflicted with the traditional tough Augustinian approach that held sway, with some variation, throughout the Catholic and Protestant world. It elicited from Taylor a ‘Further Explication’ (1656), which became chapter seven in subsequent editions, as well as correspondence with interlocutors after that.

To put it at its briefest, Taylor believed that we do not inherit Adam’s guilt, but only the consequences of Adam’s fall, which leaves us naturally sinful, but left us with the choice of ‘holy living’. It was perhaps not the best time in the Church’s history to propound a less pessimistic view about human nature. But although this debate rumbled on, it is clearly an area where Taylor was too far from public religious opinion. He was not undermining the reality of sin, the need for repentance, or, for that matter, the pastoral strength of private confession. But he was enough of a scholar of the Reformation to know that Article IX of the Thirty-Nine was not hard-line Calvinism, but was couched in carefully nuanced language. Taylor’s approach would nowadays be called ‘ecclesial’, with sin and forgiveness placed in the sacramental context of baptism and Eucharist, something earlier Anglican divines such as Andrewes propounded. But the emphasis on free will that he taught and which may be regarded as a consequence of his emphasis on human freedom, left him stigmatized by his detractors with Semi-Pelagianism. The controversy emboldened him, and strained a number of friendships in consequence.

* * *

Then, in 1657, Taylor published a ‘Discourse on Friendship’, which was a letter to Katharine Phillips, a prominent young playwright married to an aged Roundhead. On the face of it, all Taylor is doing is defining the nature of Christian friendship, with its pitfalls and possibilities, as well as drawing out the particular characteristics of the female gender in this regard. And that is how successive writers in the period since have interpreted it. But Katharine Phillips, known in her literary circle as ‘the matchless Orinda’, had a very strong relationship with another woman, Anne Owen, about which she wrote a poem that – certainly to modern eyes – could (some would say should) be interpreted in lesbian terms, as Reginald Askew has shown.[5] Taylor’s prose can be delightfully elusive at the best of times, but it is hard not to agree with such a fresh reading of Taylor’s line. Homosexuality had been part of the court life of King James I, so that it was not a subject that could be avoided altogether. Writers like the Puritan leader Richard Baxter (1615–91) condemn it. Taylor on the other hand takes what would nowadays be called a ‘pastoral’ approach. We shall return to this later. But it is yet another area where Taylor, if the more – encoded – specific interpretation is accepted, was ahead of his time, and could therefore have been the subject of muted controversy.

Taylor’s London trips seem to have been on the increase at this stage. John Evelyn, one of the few to stand by him in the furore over original sin, used him as what we would nowadays call a spiritual director. Indeed, Evelyn’s diary refers to services conducted by Taylor, including a Eucharist on 7 February 1658. At some stage, Taylor was imprisoned in the Tower of London, either in 1657 or, more likely, 1658. He had just published his ‘Collection of Offices’, the first Anglican to write his own liturgy. It is a rich series of services for all the occasions (and more as well) which are covered by the officially outlawed Book of Common Prayer, the only exception being the marriage service, which would have been excluded for legal reasons; Taylor defended the view that marriage was a sacrament. In these liturgies, Taylor’s prose can at times be lavish, the prayers frequently more Trinitarian in scope than Cranmer’s, and the sources often from the Greek liturgies of St Basil and St James. Consistent with his stress in ‘Great Exemplar’ on Christ’s baptism as the prototype of ours, he has Jesus at the River Jordan as one of the lections in his baptismal office, unique in his time, but more familiar now in our day. Although Taylor could – just! – defend his book as within the flexible, anti-specific bounds of the Westminster Directory (1644), it may not have done him many favours with the authorities, and, on a wider front, may well have been the cause of his time in the Tower.

It probably became clear to his supporters that Taylor needed to be got out of the way, and a solution came through another aristocratic friendship, this time with Edward Conway, a strong Royalist who owned estates in Ulster. It took the form of a parish lectureship, to be shared with a Presbyterian. Taylor at first turned it down, but was persuaded to accept. He thus came to Lisnagarvey (from 1662 referred to as Lisburn) south-west of Belfast, a small town built around the castle where the Conways resided. He soon settled at Portmore, nor far away, and his main work was looking after the Conway household. It provided him with some respite, but hardly total seclusion from religious troubles, as the local population was divided between Scots Presbyterians colonized there and the Irish community who were Roman Catholics, and who had no desire to embrace Anglicanism.

In these last days, months, and years of the Commonwealth, Taylor completed his largest book of all. He had been working on it for some time. He used to refer to as his ‘cases of conscience’, and it appeared in 1660 as ‘Ductor Dubitantium or the Rule of Conscience’. Twice as long as ‘Great Exemplar’, it represents a considerable amount of learning, and Taylor would have been justified in hoping that it would establish his reputation as a really major writer in his time. Casuistry as a field of what we would nowadays call social and pastoral theology was at its apogee in the Roman Catholic Church, partly as an aid to priests in the confessional, but it also figured among some Protestant theologians as well. It is long, thorough, and at times repetitive, but it shows Taylor as the pastoral theologian that he always was, responding to dilemmas that people might have over their faith, how they were to live the Christian life, and how society should be ordered in the best possible way for all this to happen.

With Oliver Cromwell dead in 1658, the hopes for a new régime had arisen. Taylor travelled to London in 1660 for the return of Charles II, to whom he wrote the dedication of his ‘magnum opus’. Although others before him like Lancelot Andrewes had written on casuistry, it was the sheer length, scrupulous detail, and exhaustive breadth that marked it out but also limited its readership (a fourth edition appeared in 1698). It comes in four books, which deal with conscience and its definitions, divine laws, human laws, and the nature of good and evil. Book III has some observations about Church and State that are now dated, but what he has to say about free will in Book IV can be seen as a necessary corrective to popular piety at the time. A key throughout this complex work is the relationship between the givenness of revelation and the working of human rationality; for Taylor, faith and reason have to go hand in hand, not just in making sense of belief, but in applying it to everyday life.

In the same year he brought out ‘Worthy Communicant’, which was the last of his devotional works and which he dedicated to Princess Mary of Orange. Set in a wider context, it forms part of the Restoration drive towards proper teaching about the Eucharist and more frequent celebrations of the sacrament, of which the ‘Mensa Mystica’ of Simon Patrick (1625–1707) is another example, published in the same year.[6] There is a directness and a solemnity about the work, which sums up Taylor’s theology in a readable and deep manner, and one of my treasured possessions is a first edition.

All this might well have given Taylor the hope of an English bishopric in the newly restored Established Church, with Prayer Book and episcopacy re-established alongside the monarchy. But perhaps Taylor’s reputation among those in power in the Church was still tarnished by his plea for toleration in ‘Liberty of Prophesying’, the disputes over original sin in the aftermath of ‘Unum Necessarium’, and one might hazard a guess over other matters as well, including his liturgical project, the ‘Collection of Offices’. Sheldon was now Bishop of London, a key player soon to move to Canterbury as the successor of the ailing William Juxon (1582–1663).

So it was back to Ulster that he went, but this time as Bishop of Down and Connor, the diocese in which he had lived as chaplain to the Conways, and to which Dromore was subsequently added as a responsibility. His consecration was a great occasion, the re-establishment of Anglicanism in Ireland. He was consecrated alongside two archbishops and nine other bishops in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, on 27 January 1661, and he himself was chosen as the preacher, a mark of the confidence placed in him by the Restoration Church in Ireland. The sermon, subsequently published along with some others – including that preached at Lady Carbery’s funeral – in 1663 as a supplement to the ‘Eniautos’ collection ten years earlier, is predictably a strong defence of episcopacy. Taylor was enough of a realist to know that he himself was not going to have an easy time in a diocese where the majority of the clergy were Presbyterians. It was already a country where the religious ethos was more Calvinist in leanings than England, doubtless partly due to the need to define itself more clearly over against the preponderantly Roman Catholic population.

Denied preferment in England, Taylor became the main theological driving force of the new Irish Bench, along with William Bramhall (1594–1663), Archbishop of Dublin, at whose funeral he preached in 1663. His largely Presbyterian clergy did not take kindly to the ways of their new bishop, perhaps hoping for a policy inspired by ‘Liberty of Prophesying’ that had been shaped by the needs of a different era. He was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dublin in 1661. This entailed a certain amount of time in residence there and it was a task that involved him in a great deal of financial and administrative work, at which he was well-skilled. A small university, it was nevertheless an important post, where he said he ‘found all things in a perfect disorder’. But Taylor had a strange knack of seeing things whole, and it is interesting to observe that the sermon he preached before the University in 1661 (published as ‘Via Intelligentiae’) was based largely on a Visitation Charge to his diocese, two somewhat different contexts!

In the same year, he produced his ‘Rules and Advices to Clergy’, which went into its fourth edition in 1678. Short and simple, it speaks of the importance of prayer, self-knowledge, and decorum in worship. The demands of his new twin responsibilities and the pressures he was under to fulfil them led to a diminishing in the flow of his pen. But in 1663 he was able to produce his ‘Discourse on Confirmation’, which, though short by his own standards, is nonetheless probably the first and the most comprehensive treatment by an Anglican of the subject. The Restoration had brought to a head the need to defend Confirmation by the Bishop to its Reformed critics, because so many people had not been confirmed at all. Taylor entered the fray with a blend of biblical exegesis, patristic learning, and argument from tradition. Not all these grounds would pass muster today, for example his treatment of the New Testament evidence, but it was a valiant attempt, and a milestone in the long sequence of works on the subject written since then.

But Taylor still yearned for a job in England, and (perhaps unwisely) wrote to Sheldon in 1663 pleading his case, though indicating he was aware that he himself might be the main barrier to such a move. This might refer solely to the controversies of his writings, but it doubtless also echoed something along the lines of that personality trait noted years earlier by Chillingworth, a lack of courtesy with his interlocutors. Whatever was the case, no reply came, and in Ireland Taylor was to remain for the rest of his days.

He was encouraged by his episcopal colleagues to write the last main publication of his life, ‘A Dissuasive against Popery’ (1664), a challenge he took up with reluctance. It is not difficult to see the background to this particular work, given the deeply embedded character of Irish Catholicism. But from it emerges the kind of broad-based, tradition-centred Anglicanism that is the hallmark of much of Taylor’s theology. There is, understandably for the times, a negative edge of polemic that the modern reader, in more ecumenical times, finds hard to take. But the heat of Reformation controversy was still intense, and Taylor’s answer to the perennial question, ‘Where was your Church before the Reformation?’ is strong, confident, lucid, and unyielding, as he argues against the doctrinal innovations, moral weaknesses and political subversions, as he sees them, of the Roman Catholicism of the time.

We cannot, however, simply leave Taylor there. His last years, though tough going, were spent on visiting his parishes, rebuilding churches, and caring for those who would allow him to do so. After Bramhall’s death, he was without doubt the key theological figure in Irish Anglicanism. But his health was declining. Of his two sons, one was killed in a duel, and the other died of a fever. It was shortly after his second son’s funeral that he himself took ill after visiting a sick person, and he died at Lisburn on 13 August 1667. He was buried in Dromore Cathedral, which he himself had built, and the funeral sermon was preached by his old friend, George Rust (+ 1670), who was to succeed as bishop – a bold preaching of the gospel of hope and a fine account of Taylor’s life, personality, and ministry.

When Sheldon heard of his death, although he had helped secure him financial assistance when he needed it, he still described him as ‘a man of dangerous temper, apt to break into extravagance’.[7] Quite a lot may lie behind this verdict, both personal and theological. Fortunately, however, that is not the overall view of history. Taylor may have got across people in authority through his personal style – many great men do that to some extent or another. And he certainly rocked the theological boat over a few matters at a time when the anxiety level in the Church was understandably high. But he did, said and wrote many things that badly needed doing, saying and writing, and we in posterity are indeed the richer for it.

The main aspects of Taylor’s theology

Style

There are two ways of approaching Taylor’s style. One is to appreciate the sheer breadth of the reading-audiences he has in mind. Like other writers of his time and before and since, he recognizes the importance of the medium in communicating the message. Thus, ‘Worthy Communicant’ (1660) is written for the devout layperson, whereas ‘Real Presence’ (1654), for all its lively, sharp style, is intended for a more scholarly audience. While the ‘Discourse on Friendship’ (1657) has the inevitable format of a personal letter, ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ (1660), his longest work, reads like a resource to be consulted, and – unlike most of his works, which were published in octavo or, increasingly later in his life, in quarto – this one appeared in folio form. And while some of the earlier works, such as ‘Episcopacy Asserted’ (1642) show signs of an aspiring author still coming to terms with how to write clearly and fluently, by the time we reach ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649) and ‘Holy Living’ (1650), he seems to have mastered his trade. Reginald Askew has some of his quotations from Taylor’s writings laid out in a kind of blank verse. At times it seems a little contrived, but it certainly brings out some of the linguistic devices in Taylor’s use of words.

On the other hand, as many others have shown, while the verve and imagery of Taylor’s prose at times seems unstoppable, there is a considerable amount of light and shade, with contrasts between the lengthy sentence and the pithy oneliner. ‘His language comes with a rush . . . the style swoops and soars with the freedom of a bird.’[8] Some of the purple passages in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649), with those repeated references to ‘the holy Jesus’, and the constant use of the imprecise plural, for example in ‘eucharists’ (which must have non-sacramental as well as sacramental references), keep carrying the reader along. And his dramatic, almost ‘off-stage’ passages capture the imagination, whether he is indulging in a gentle flight of fancy (the Virgin Mary’s ‘burden’ in the young child in her womb is a light one, because it is Christ himself), or articulating a vivid understanding of the Trinity (as in the Baptism of Christ at the Jordan).

Taylor as the pastoral theologian comes across powerfully in the funeral sermon for Lady Carbery (1650). Product of the age as it is, it manages to express a depth of emotion that avoids a too overt display of it. The handsome man who was perhaps a passionate lover was someone who appreciated beauty both in other people and in the art of prose. And here, unsurprisingly but doubtless to his disappointment, while he could write prose that had poetic resonances, he was not himself a gifted creator of poetry! His efforts at hymn-writing were not successful.

Some of those long sentences that occasionally slip into anacoluthon, when he loses the thread of what he is trying to say as he presses on with the ideas he is trying to convey eventually give birth to a short and memorable ‘bon mot’. A good example is in his ‘Discourse on Prayer’ in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649): ‘He [God] measures us by our needs, and we must not measure him by our impatience’; and in the accompanying exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, equally full of one-liners, he follows the Syriac text at ‘daily bread’, which helps him produce the sequence, food for today, forgiveness for yesterday, protection in the future.[9] But although Taylor knew and thought deeply about what is often called the spiritual life, it did not give him the same kind of inside knowledge of sin as other writers such as John Donne (1571/72–1632), who perhaps had more direct personal experience of living torridly on the edge of Christian practice. At times, Taylor – by any standards – ‘overdoes things’, but the underlying repetitions of important themes have the cumulative effect of bringing the reader along, and keeping their attention.

Theological position

Taylor’s overall place in the Anglican spectrum can best be described for his own times as ‘Laudian’ and ‘Latitudinarian’, or what would nowadays be described as ‘liberal Catholic’.[10] This comes across in the sacramental and ecclesiological slant in his theology and the amount of attention he gives to baptism and Eucharist and the controversies of his age that surrounded them. He will quote Augustine and John Chrysostom. But he is very much his own man, writing and preaching for his own age, and in a much plainer style, and the questions and questionings of his time are often uppermost in his mind. His Trinitariansm is deep-rooted, coming across in a number of contrasting ways, from his treatment of the baptism of Christ to his assertion that God dwells among mortals, making us ‘cabinets of the mysterious Trinity’ – in a strong passage near the start of ‘Holy Living.’ That in turn produces an equally strong pneumatology, not just in his sacramental theology, but in the Christian life.

This trait must have made him a congenial (if talkative!) companion at the Great Tew Circle, with William Chillingworth. Towards the end of his life, in the ‘Dissuasive from Popery’ (1664), he can lace his discussion with patristic references, but can still assert boldly that ‘it is false that the testimony of the fathers . . . is infallible’. These are hardly the words of a patristic romantic. They do, however, come from someone who relied heavily upon them but who was prepared to take theological risks as well. This stemmed from a firm conviction about the use of reason, as an imaginative, God-given faculty, both in theological and moral discourse. So the parallel with later Anglicanism is probably more with the Liberal Catholic Charles Gore (1853–1932) than with the Tractarian Edward Pusey (1800–82). At a time when Anglicanism was experiencing acutely the need for self-definition, Taylor proved to be an uncomfortable (and even prophetic) figure. In the period since, those who have tried to combine the love of tradition and an openness to new questions have not always been easy to live with. But they have frequently stood the test of time.

Platonism

Like many of his generation, such as Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), John Smith (1618–52) and others, Taylor was strongly influenced by Platonism.[11] This was part and parcel of his classical education as an undergraduate and it spilled over into his theological writings as well. This manifests itself in two particular ways. One concerns the way in which God’s self-revelation is perceived. In order to illustrate this, Taylor frequently uses the image of the ‘cloud’, to draw out the mysteriousness of the deity and the uncertainty of human life, with repeated references to the ‘cloud’ that reveals the truth partially, as mystery. This is vintage Taylor, as it demonstrates both the theologian and the pastor of souls at work. It also shows how his ‘holy living’ theology of following Christ can embrace the whole of life, moments of revelation, in preaching and sacraments, as well as the many moments and experiences of disorientation and confusion.

The other main area where this Platonist influence is apparent is in his teaching about the Eucharist, and it comes across in both the main controvertial areas of the time – presence and sacrifice. For any seventeenth-century Anglican of Taylor’s persuasion, living at the particular time he did, this whole area was a bit of a theological minefield. Following in the steps of Richard Hooker (c. 1554–1600) and Lancelot Andrewes, Taylor refuses neat definitions of either aspect of the Eucharist, especially that of presence, bringing in instead a firm but non-evasive reticence.

It is easy for theologians of a later generation, who were not immersed in the polemics of Taylor’s age, to underestimate his subtlety, and to suggest (like Stranks) that he was not sure of his ground, and that his view was receptionist, and no more. For McAdoo, however, Taylor ‘skims the cream off virtualism’, the view that the consecrated elements, by being given and received in the sacrament, bring the virtue or efficacy of Christ’s Body and Blood to the Church.[12] This also comes through in Taylor’s strong view of the role of the Holy Spirit, coming from above to consecrate the elements on earth. In a particularly powerful passage in ‘Worthy Communicant’ (1660), he affirms that ‘only the Spirit operates by the sacrament and the communicant receives it by his moral dispositions, by the hand of faith’. In comparative terms, this distances Taylor from the ‘receptionist’ view, where the presence of Christ is not in the consecrated elements, but the minds and souls of faithful communicants.

Taylor holds that both baptism and Eucharist are ‘mysteries’. In ‘Real Presence’, he contends that ‘as there [in baptism] natural water becomes the laver of regeneration, so here bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ; but there and here too the first substance is changed by grace, but remains the same in nature’. Later on, he discusses the patristic evidence to support this view, including Augustine’s definition of sacraments as ‘visible words’. He had already hit the nail on the head in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649) with a brilliant one-liner: ‘I suppose it to be a mistake to think whatsoever is real must be natural.’

For Taylor, above all a theologian of discipleship, sacraments and life are so closely connected that he articulates movement from one to the other. That same process can be seen in how he expresses the Eucharist as a memorial-sacrifice. Following Andrewes and others, he avoids an entirely mental approach. But his particular way is to do so by linking the Eucharist on earth with the heavenly intercession of Christ (Heb. 7.25, 8.1), a constant theme of his. Calvin himself had used this exegesis, and other writers followed him here. But it was honed considerably by Taylor, who – with others − handed it on to later Anglican (and other) writing, including in the hymns of Charles Wesley.[13] ‘Worthy Communicant’ (1660) puts it in characteristic language that combines the doctrinal with the devotional: ‘to represent [Christ’s] death, to commemorate this sacrifice, by humble prayers and thankful record; and by faithful manifestation and joyful Eucharist . . . the Church being the image of heaven; the priest, the minister of Christ; the holy table being a copy of the celestial altar; and the eternal sacrifice of the Lamb slain from the beginning of the world, being always the same; it bleeds no more after the finishing of it on the cross; but it is wonderfully represented in heaven, and graciously represented here; by Christ’s action there, by his commandment here’. Such a perspective makes the Eucharist transcend both space and time. The ‘heavenly altar’ is without doubt a central plank in Taylor’s understanding of the sacrifice.

It is no wonder, therefore, that McAdoo, Anglican Co-Chairman of the first Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, should see in Taylor an anticipation of the ecumenical agreements of recent years, with those repeated periphrases that try to express ‘anamnesis’ such as ‘representment’, ‘memorials’, ‘exhibiting’ and ‘consigning’. And from these, we gain a picture of the Eucharist as an action of the Church in history that is effected by Christ himself in heaven. It has elicited from Boone Porter and McAdoo the description of ‘pleading’ the sacrifice, which appears in the 1897 ‘Response’ to the Vatican Condemnation of Anglican Orders. Although Taylor does not actually use the term, it began to appear in other writers at the time, including Henry Hammond, Simon Patrick, and the Puritan leader, Richard Baxter; and it has had a noble history in eucharistic discourse in the period since, including in the eucharistic rites both of the Church of Scotland (1940) and the Church of England (2000). All this helps to bring two necessary correctives for eucharistic faith and practice at the time: a sense of the transcendent and reverence, and a sense of the corporate nature of the Eucharist, rather than a collection of individuals hovering before the cross. But the close relationship between the earthly priest and the heavenly Saviour, in a semi-mediatorial role, can come across as too much of a hangover from mediaeval rather than patristic theology.

Covenant

It is all too easy to enter into discussions about sacramental theology in a vacuum, and throughout our treatment of Taylor, we have tried to set his writings in their context, and to do the same with how he writes about baptism and Eucharist. The same themes recur; the circumspect way he handles controversial areas, his Platonism in the dialectic between the earthly and the heavenly, and the devotional frame of reference, what McAdoo used to call the ‘moral-ascetic theology’ of much later seventeenth-century Anglican writing, that holds together the challenges of the gospel and the life of public worship and private prayer. It is all of a piece.

There is one important motif that Taylor uses to explain how the two dominical sacraments work and how they are different from each other – covenant. This has been explored, alongside Taylor’s baptismal and eucharistic liturgies, by Bryan Spinks.[14] Although it does not figure in the language of the Prayer Book, it was a prominent feature of Reformed theology, and someone like Taylor would have to address it in some way, because by the middle of the seventeenth century it was common coin. Taylor’s strategy is best described as softening the severity of the more Puritan approach, which could use the term to make the sacraments more restrictive (children of believing parents only) and exclusive (public debarring from communion). In this he resembles other writers of his time such as Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672) and Simon Patrick.

The covenant of grace is embarked upon by our surrender to God and a desire to glorify him, and God on his part pardons what is past and will assist us in our life of discipleship in the future. We enter that covenant sacramentally at the font and renew it at the altar; covenant figures a number of times in his baptism rite; in his eucharistic liturgy, it appears (as usual) in the words of Christ at the Last Supper, but nowhere else. Taylor likes to describe baptism as ‘the laver of regeneration’, where the Holy Spirit blesses the waters, as he did at the River Jordan, and where the believer is filled with heavenly blessing, to lead a ‘holy life’. Taylor has a high view of baptism. It draws us into the Kingdom of God; it adopts us into a new covenant, with a strong view of obedience; it brings us into a new birth; it confers the remission of sins, including those yet to be committed; and brings us sanctification. ‘By water we are sacramentally dead and buried, by the Spirit we are made alive . . . Baptism does also consign us to a holy resurrection.’ Taylor’s approach differs, however, from Thorndike’s in that while the two dominical sacraments are foundational, Taylor fits baptism into Christian living – as a ‘birth to grave’ process – rather than into a more systematic ‘theology of the Church’, in the way of someone like Herbert Thorndike.

Taylor goes on to defend the practice of infant baptism, as the opening of the door to God, ‘the first ordinary current in which the Spirit moves and descends upon us’, requiring godparents (the traditional practice), not parents, as the Reformed-minded wanted. We come across the same balance that we saw in the Eucharist between sacrament and experience – ‘baptism and its effect may be separated, and do not always go in conjunction . . . the Church gives the sacrament, God gives the grace of the sacrament’. Both here, in the Discourse on Baptism in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649), and in his baptism liturgy are to be found references to the gift of the guardian angel, a notion which he clearly likes, but will not require as a belief.[15] His overall understanding of baptism, however, has been described by Boone Porter as more Johannine (rebirth) than Pauline (dying and rising), with a strong emphasis on re-birth (John 3.5). It is certainly iconographic, as we have already suggested, by the way he uses the narrative of Christ’s baptism as the place near which the Discourse is placed in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649), and the way he (uniquely for his time) uses that narrative in his baptism rite.

For Taylor, the key to his thinking about baptism and Eucharist is the strong relationship between mystery and sacramentality. They are God-given mysteries, yet are sacraments that operate in our lives. Like many other writers down the ages (not just post-Reformation), he holds in tension divine act and human experience in what he teaches both about baptism and Eucharist. In his study of the eucharistic theology of John Calvin (1509–64), Brian Gerrish offers three models: symbolic memorialism, which locates the sacrament in the heart of the faithful recipient (which he associates with the Swiss Reformed Ulrich Zwingli, 1484–1531); symbolic parallelism, where the sacramental event is in parallel with the work of Christ (which he associates with Zwingli’s successor, Heinrich Bullinger, 1504–75); and symbolic instrumentalism, where the sacraments are instruments of God’s grace (which he associates with John Calvin). These terms are, of course, approximations, but they were certainly around in England (and elsewhere) from the Reformation onwards. Taylor, like other seventeenth-century writers, seems to move beyond these views to what has been described as ‘effectual instrumentalism’, which places a stronger emphasis on what the sacrament does, without underplaying human appropriation of the gifts of God, expressed by the strong role of the Holy Spirit as the means of consecration.[16]

Where does Confirmation fit in? He wrote learnedly on the subject, and saw it as a way of bringing Christians from other churches into the Anglican fold: he knows (and favours) communion for the young (and even their Confirmation) as an ancient practice in his early years as a priest, yet, as a bishop, requires the Prayer Book position on the matter; ‘Worthy Communicant’ (1660) concludes that infant communion is ‘lawful’ but not ‘necessary’. And his reading of history enables him to see the laying-on of hands by the bishop as a way of reconciling or drawing in Christians to the Church. But he still highlights the radically distinct functions of baptism as the start and the Eucharist as the renewal. That basic approach also enables him to be demanding but unrestrictive about who and how he baptizes, yet firm and searching in the recommendations he makes in all his writings on Holy Communion about due and proper preparation. In a line going back to Hooker, baptism is the start and Eucharist is the continuing of sacramental life. This could speak volumes to an age like ours, far more fragmented in human experience than many previous generations, that at times leans too heavily on different sorts of baptismal renewal.

Social and personal living

Taylor is a theologian of the whole human life-cycle, where it is difficult to distinguish between the public and the private. Otherwise we would not have had either ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649), ‘Holy Living’ (1650), or ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ (1660). ‘Holy Living’ opens on a note that could – mutatis mutandis – have been written for a modern personal organizer: ‘he that is choice of his time will also be choice of his actions’. From that starting-point, he expounds the virtues of discipleship, prayer (‘we are cabinets of the mysterious Trinity’), sobriety, temperance, chastity, humility, modesty, and contentedness. On chastity, he is more explicit than any Christian writer so far, on the basis that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit: ‘in their permissions and licence, they must be sure to observe the order of nature, and the ends of God . . . with a desire of children, or to avoid fornication, or to lighten and ease the cares and sadnesses of household affairs, or to endear each other’.

Taylor is talking openly about sex as something good, fulfilling the design of human bodies. But saying these things was not always welcomed.[17] Sexual union can stem from a number of unexpressed motives: children, physical need, release from domestic tension and sheer delight in each other. This is a far cry from the traditional Western nervousness about reproductive fluids and when it is the right time and when it is not. It is also an advance on the three reasons for marriage in the Prayer Book – procreation, a remedy against sin, and companionship. Chastity, however, takes its place alongside the other virtues in stemming human desires and directing them aright. This is not part of our contemporary culture but we could be the better for at least some of it.

It is against this background that he deals with Christian justice, making the distinction between commutative (contracts and agreements between equals) and distributative (the command of God, or a relationship not between equals), and the importance of restitution as a social responsibility. Taylor, man of his time, is more deferential about authority than he would be today, but he nevertheless balances this with a definite emphasis on the responsibilities, moral and economic, of the one who wields power over the one who doesn’t. This comes through in what he has to say about the State, and the place of the Church within it, in ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ (1660). When a civil contract is being negotiated, ‘use not many words: for all the business of a bargain is summed up in few sentences; and he that speaks least means fairest, as having fewer opportunities to deceive’ (‘Holy Living’, 1650). He condemns excessive profit-making, and the exploitation of the poor, and crippling others with excessive debt. In ways reminiscent of the mediaeval penitentials, manuals for priests when dealing with sinners, he makes recommendations about adultery resulting in offspring (pay for their upkeep) and murder of another man (ensure the widow is looked after properly).

Never one to play down the role of the entrepreneur, Taylor nonetheless cautions against greed and dishonesty, stressing again and again the importance of good human relationships. He does not go as far as Thomas Traherne (c. 1636–74) in condemning the trend from exchange-value to use-value, but he comes near it. Many more of these themes recur, and in more detail, in ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ (1660), which he begins with the story of a hungry child who had run away from home and wanted to be fed: what was the right course of action, because to refuse him by telling him to go back might mean he would die of hunger, and to feed him might indulge his desire to escape further? In the end, he decides to feed him, enough and no more, and rebukes him for leaving home, on condition that he will indeed return. Taylor’s quaint habit of making a serious point from a homely image can be incisive, even if a touch sentimental. This is ‘moral-ascetic’ theology at its best. It is about real life, where faith in God, the virtues, and above all attention to the Word and the sacraments are seen to change not just individuals but society as a whole. That is why ‘Holy Living’ ends with teaching about prayer, the Eucharist, and preparation for and receiving the holy communion.

Then in ‘Holy Dying’ (1651), a book which carries echoes in many of his other writings, Taylor shows his reluctance to leave untouched any human predicament.[18] For a man who had suffered tragic bereavement himself, dying was an experience close to home, and in his time more social than it is today, where clinical medicine has been able to deal – however temporarily – with many of the diseases for which people in those days would have died more quickly. The dying person should meditate on the Ten Commandments, on God’s grace, and the strength that can be derived from receiving the sacrament, and the spiritual counsel of a priest. Taylor also provides prayers that can be used by a layperson in the presence of a very sick and probably dying person.

This could reflect the times: clergy may not have been accessible. It may also reflect a suspicion of priestcraft born of Reformation sensibilities. But his concern with the passage from this life to the next is real, palpable, and insufficiently dealt with in pastoral writing today. Taylor must have been well aware of the ‘Ars Moriendi’ tradition of late mediaeval Catholicism, and writings in this area from the sixteenth century such as Thomas Becon (c. 1511–67) and William Perkins (1558–1602). But he is starting from scratch, and while some of the soul-searching may ring a shade lugubriously on modern ears, his association of sin and suffering clearly dated, and his opposition to death-bed repentance unacceptable today, it is a book that could, if abbreviated and presented in a fresh manner, provide a great deal of comfort to people who are afraid when their lives are drawing to an end.

Main areas of controversy

Controversy is the meat and drink of every creative theological writer or preacher down the ages. Taylor lived in an age of acute religious differences, and although we in our time are not without our controversies, it is sometimes hard for us to understand fully the religio-political reasons that led to the Civil War and the execution of King Charles I. Taylor wrote at a particularly nervous time in the Church’s life. While many of the areas of conflict were part and parcel of living at the time, there are four in particular that stand out from the point of view of an early twenty-first century reader.

The first concerns original sin. We need to see this in the context of Taylor’s theology, rather than isolate it as a ‘problem’ that he suddenly had to face with the publication of ‘Unum Necessarium’ in 1655. We also need to see Taylor as a moral theologian, with an edifice shaped by the materials we have observed in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649) and ‘Holy Living’ (1650) published only half a decade before. For Taylor, to live a ‘holy life’ must be the starting-point, whether we are looking in the first instance at Christ’s life or our own. It is then necessary to reflect either on the narrative and meaning of Christ’s life and ministry or on the key virtues of godly living by faithful disciples. Once these foundations are in place, as the openings for the life of grace, then we are ready to confront ourselves and the world in the raw, aided by the sacraments, by prayer, by godly wisdom, applied to daily living.

At a time when the choice in moral theology seems to have been between neat Catholic distinctions between different sorts of sin (which Taylor rejects) and an overly Calvinist view of imputed righteousness, Taylor saw the weakness of both approaches, and courageously sought a middle line. So when ‘Unum Necessarium’ (1655) appeared, it was only a detailed outworking of what Taylor had already written in a different context, and what he was to go on to apply in an even wider one in ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ (1660) five years later. No wonder Taylor could not believe original sin was an inherent evil, but the effect of one sin, which does not destroy our liberty, and it cannot damn an infant eternally. Assessments of Taylor here vary. For Spinks, it still leaves him – and his baptism rite – open to the criticism of being too strong on obedience, and insufficiently weighted towards justification. It is the old balance between divine initiative in the gift of grace and forgiveness, and human response in repentance and good works, or as he would say, ‘holy living’. For others, like Stranks and McAdoo, he has had the courage to challenge an Augustinian–Calvinist establishment that was unable to accept a different Christian anthropology. McAdoo goes so far as to contend that here, again, he was ahead of his time.[19] This is clearly an area that has been open to considerable theological debate in the period since.

The second controversy concerns toleration. Once again, we in our time find it hard to understand a very different world, in which people could take up arms to fight for one religious and political system only. So for Taylor to write ‘Liberty of Prophesying’ in 1647, well into the Civil War, was something of a risk, given his Royalist sympathies and Laudian liturgical convictions. He didn’t pull his punches with the intolerant, to say nothing of those who would use coercion to get their own way. We have already described its main intentions, and hinted at potential contradictions in the tough line he found himself having to take as a bishop nearly twenty years later in Ulster. Taylor used his considerable grasp of history to bring out the best case for variation and breadth, looking for an irreducible minimum for an orthodox faith, liturgically lived. As Boone Porter has observed, Taylor was one of the few writers of his time who saw the voluntary character of Anglicanism – it was destined to live a life alongside other Christian communities, because of the sheer impossibility of imposing one, unifying Christian Church on the entire populace. That is one of the reasons why he details the views of those whose opinions he rejects, whether it is the Anabaptists or the Roman Catholics. When, for example, televised services are broadcast nowadays to celebrate national events and tragedies that are so overtly ecumenical, we can discern how far-sighted Taylor was in this respect; this kind of view would not have been welcome to those of more stolid minds, for whom the religious controversies of their time were about winners and losers.

The third concerns death-bed repentance. This is a theme that recurs in Taylor’s writings, and it is something that jars with an age like ours, just as it could also be said to be inconsistent with Taylor’s universal view about the love of God. He devoted a whole sermon to the ‘invalidity of a late of death-bed repentance’, and ‘Holy Dying’ (1651) has some chilling words on this matter, cautioning against ‘a repentance not to be repented of’, because of its superficiality. Once again, this needs to be seen in the context of Taylor’s age, when sickness could more easily lead to death, confronting the sufferer sometimes with a sudden fear of death. The other context is Taylor’s criticism of Roman Catholic practice at the time, which he probably saw as too easy and insufficiently sincere.

And the fourth concerns sexuality. We have already discussed Taylor’s ‘Discourse on the Nature and Offices of Friendship’ (1657), in effect the letter he had written to Katherine Philips, known to be a lesbian. There will be those who may well question that Taylor’s intentions are as open and tolerant as we have suggested, and every age that has to grapple suddenly with something apparently new (and therefore deeply controversial) can try to find a precedent in an overlooked corner of the past. But my own view, for what it is worth, is that Taylor was well aware of the homosexual underworld that existed in seventeenth-century England, and wanted to take a ‘pastoral’ approach to it rather than the more usual censorious one of his time. Of course Taylor is dealing with friendship in general, but the way he writes in open code to Katherine Philips at the start is its own admission that Taylor knows exactly what he is doing and that the recipient knows as well. The fact that the ‘Discourse’ went into its eighth (and last) edition in 1686 – less than thirty years later – probably indicates that this item from Taylor’s pen had a market. The man who wrote in such an open way about heterosexual love in ‘Holy Living’ (1650) only seven years before could – just possibly – be writing now in a more circumspect manner about another form of love. But even if such an interpretation is rejected, the basic tenor of what Taylor has to say about Christian friendship strikes a strong chord with an age like ours, where it scarcely figures in religious discourse, and often languishes from neglect – and suspicion – in popular culture.

Liturgical theologian – and ordination

We have mentioned on a number of occasions so far Taylor’s proclivity at writing prayers. These are clearly not intended as mere intermissions. They are an essential part of Taylor’s intentions. So it is not just ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649) that is littered with them. They appear as an integral part of ‘Holy Living’ (1650) and ‘Holy Dying (1651), as well as in his other works. ‘Holy Living’ even includes a prayer for a debtor himself to use to be apprised of the importance of restitution. Admittedly, they are devotional prayers for the individual to use. But as a phenomenon, not by any means unique to Taylor, they do have the effect of showing him to be what would nowadays be called a ‘liturgical theologian’, as Boone Porter has suggested.

But liturgical theology is about public prayer as well, and in this connection we must mention his ‘Collection of Offices’ (1658). When set alongside his ‘Apology for authorized and set forms of Liturgy’ (1649) and ‘Golden Grove (1655), it is clear that how people pray when they gather for worship was for him a self-defining aspect of the Church. How we pray expresses what we believe – or, according to the old theological adage, ‘lex orandi lex credendi’, ‘the rule of prayer is the rule of belief’. And that is borne out in the firm line he takes on ordination in ‘Episcopacy Asserted’ (1642), as well as in ‘Clerus Domini’ (1651) and his ‘Rules and Advices to Clergy’ (1661). He may not be interested in the diaconate, but he has a high view of the priestly office, ordination being required for the two dominical sacraments as well as the other five, which he clearly regards as sacramental. They function within a pastoral setting, and a set liturgical context, in which prayer, symbolic action and preaching have a central place. Bishops, moreover, Taylor sees as the successors to the apostles, even naming the ‘angels of the Churches’ (Rev. 2 and 3) as the local bishops, for which he has some support in certain early Christian writings. And in his own consecration sermon, he went so far as to suggest – citing the early theologian Origen, a great lover of angelology – that when bishops are consecrated, they receive an extra guardian-angel, in addition to the one they receive at their baptism. Many a bishop since would relish such a notion!

In the ‘Collection of Offices’ is a somewhat unusual eucharistic rite, with the Christian East forming an interesting part. These include the Beatitudes at the start of the Eucharist, as in the Byzantine Liturgy (replacing the Prayer Book’s Ten Commandments), and the invocation of the Spirit in consecration. But his style was so different from Cranmer that his influence on the 1662 Prayer Book was at best minimal. The Beatitudes have continued to be used devotionally in the period since, and they re-appeared in the Church of England’s Common Worship (2000) both as a canticle and in preparation for Holy Communion. His baptism rite, however, resembles the Prayer Book structure more closely, but carefully crafted to include covenant theology, the blessing of the water by the Holy Spirit, and a softer line on original sin. Someone with Taylor’s artistry might have hoped to have been involved in the work of liturgical revision at the Restoration. It could be that his ‘Collection of Offices’ was under suspicion among those looking for the restoration of the Prayer Book and nothing more, even though it was only meant as a temporary substitute for it. But his liturgical projects, interesting and innovative as they are, are not where his greatness is really to be found.

How do we see Taylor now?

The best way to understand Taylor, as with any other theological writer, is to read him – and that is the main reason for this collection of extracts, long after his works have been out of print. In his funeral sermon, George Rust described him, with some understandable hyperbole, as having ‘the acuteness of a school-man, the profoundness of a philosopher . . . and the piety of a saint’. Certainly, he had something of the mediaeval theologian (the ‘school-men’), in being able to argue a case on the basis of mastery of detail; and like others of his time, he was an orientalist, with his knowledge – and use – of Syriac. He also had something of the philosopher, with a mind that could see the relationship between principles and issues, and draw them together. And he could see into the souls of those for whom he cared, with a prayerfulness that could only have been born of prayer and sharp observation. His memory lived on in Ireland in a special way, and it still does, and rightly so.[20] But his overall impact on the wider world was considerable, for example in the profound effect of reading ‘Holy Living’ and ‘Holy Dying’ on the young John Wesley (1703–91).[21] Not surprisingly, the works that have been most read are those that are the least controversial, perhaps because he was more comfortable authoring them.

Can we discern signs of development in his thought? ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649) does seem to embody the main features of his theology, which was subsequently honed by the dual experience of living through the Commonwealth and the need to respond to the reactions to some of his controversial views. Perhaps he became more conscious of the need to have a more critical use of the Fathers. He seems more confident about them in ‘Episcopacy Asserted’ (1642) than nearly twenty years later in ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ (1660).

Those characteristics, even in the atmosphere of a funeral oration, paint the picture of the man who emerges from these writings. His uniqueness stems from his ability to see through inadequacies, and to try to draw together the separate threads of theological life that were in danger of falling apart – a feature not unknown in any age, especially at a time of deep controversy. McAdoo, one of his great admirers, persistently regarded him as a great ‘moral-ascetic’ theologian, and with that we entirely agree. Taylor took the risk of drawing together these two aspects of the Christian enterprise. His stress on the importance of free will always stood in tension with his view of God as a moral Being. In some areas, he paid the price for such a risk, writing perhaps too frequently and too candidly, and in ways that could be disturbing.

With whom should we compare him? Of his near-contemporaries, Robert Sanderson (1587–1663), Restoration Bishop of Lincoln, stands out as a moral theologian with similar instincts and aspirations, who undoubtedly left his mark on him.[22] But the two figures he most resembles are contrasting figures, whom we have encountered already, and whom Taylor must have influenced. One is Simon Patrick, Bishop of Ely from 1691, another Cambridge Platonist, a pastorally minded theologian with a flowing pen, who wrote on the sacraments and published many sermons, but who was a less creative and comprehensive thinker than Taylor, yet a more adept ecclesiastical statesman.[23] The other is a different figure altogether, Thomas Traherne, a priest-poet many of whose writings have been recovered, identified and published only in the past hundred years, but who shared many of the features of Taylor’s theology, mystical as well as social, his talkative nature and angular frame of mind, yet who shared none of Taylor’s concerns over church order or sacramental theology.[24]

We do not write like this today, and nor should we. But Taylor would be baffled by the fragmentation of knowledge that is such a feature of our own age, not helped by the lamentable gap that exists between church and academy. First, his contribution to the evolution of seventeenth-century moral theology was unique, because he was able to ground the exercise in reason and revelation, thus making natural law more accessible to new situations, and rescuing it from the control of a church hierarchy, or the personal whim of the individual’s fervent faith. ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ (1660), after all, ends with a strong warning against legalistic religion.

Then his contribution identified by McAdoo to what we would nowadays call ecumenical theology is shown in the method he brings to such areas as baptism and Eucharist, where ecclesial act and human experience are seen not as irreconcilable contrasts but as a complementary whole, powerful without being wooden, yet personal without being wholly subjective. Taylor’s reading of the Fathers attuned him to the importance of baptismal catechesis, and the significance of ancient symbolism lost at the Reformation, such as chrism; and he saw in the patristic notion of ‘anamnesis’ the true heart of the eucharistic action.[25]

Finally, however, it is his contribution to devotional theology that is without question immense. If he has a theological starting-point it is in life lived – hence the significance of ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649) and ‘Holy Living’ (1650) – the life of Christ into which we are called, and the life of the believer redeemed by the grace of discipleship. Taylor may be verbose at times in his determination to cover as much as he possibly he can. But he always has the praying, thinking, self-disciplined believer in his sights, precisely because he believes that prayer, reflection, and practical living have the potential to be transformative, not just for the individual but for society as a whole. Like so many of the seventeenth-century writers, Taylor’s aim was to give theology to the laity and to ensure the proper interplay of scripture, tradition and reason in the process. For Taylor, faith and reason have an intrinsic relationship – which is a lesson that badly needs learning again in our time, in a world where the two are frequently driven apart, and the believer and the non-believer – and half-believer − suffer in consequence. For Taylor, such a relationship needed to be worked out in the day-to-day task of Christian discipleship. ‘A following holy life’ sums up all his teaching in the ‘Discourse on Repentance’, by far the lengthiest in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649). That’s not a bad place to locate it.

[1]Based on various sources, principally: C. J. Stranks, The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor, Church Historical Society, London: SPCK, 1952; P. G. Stanwood (ed.), Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living and Holy Dying, vol. I: Holy Living, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989; Thomas Carroll, Wisdom and Waterland: Jeremy Taylor in his Prose and Preaching Today, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001; H. Boone Porter, Jeremy Taylor – Liturgist, Alcuin Club Collections 61, London: SPCK, 1979; and the ‘Life’, in Reginald Heber and Charles Eden (eds), The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, vol. I, London: Longmans, 1847, pp. ix–ccl.

[2]See Reginald Heber and Charles Eden (eds), The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, vols I–X, London: Longmans, 1847–54; which should be read with Robert Gathorne-Hardy and William Proctor Williams, A Bibliography of the Writings of Jeremy Taylor, Dakelib IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971.

[3]Quoted, for example, in Gathorne-Hardy and Proctor Williams, A Bibliography of the Writings of Jeremy Taylor, p. 17.

[4]H. R. McAdoo, First of Its Kind: Jeremy Taylor’s Life of Christ, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1994; see also Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, Oxford: University Press, 2000, pp. 173–4; I am particularly grateful to Jessica Martin for the analysis in her paper, ‘Jeremy Taylor’s Life of Christ’.

[5]Reginald Askew, Muskets and Altars: Jeremy Taylor and the Last of the Anglicans, London: Mowbrays, 1997, pp. 182–90.

[6]Kenneth W. Stevenson, Covenant of Grace Renewed: A Vision of the Eucharist in the Seventeenth Century, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994, pp. 111–27.

[7]Quoted in C. J. Stranks, The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor, Church Historical Society, London: SPCK, 1952, p. 216.

[8]Stranks, Life and Writings, pp. 289–96.

[9]Perhaps the most difficult area of interpretation; see general Kenneth W. Stevenson, The Lord’s Prayer: A Text in Tradition, London: SCM and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005, and esp. pp. 182–3, on Taylor, who, like other seventeenth-century Anglican writers, deals with the prayer in seven petitions (the Latin tradition), but structures it round six, merging temptation and evil, and commends the doxology (the Greek – Erasmus – Calvin tradition), not added to the Prayer Book version, and only in certain services, till 1662.

[10]Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Historical Perspective, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989, pp. 121–7.

[11]See Charles Taliaferro and Alison J. Teply (eds), Cambridge Platonist Spirituality, Classics of Western Spirituality, New York: Paulist Press, 2004.

[12]H. R. McAdoo, The Eucharistic Theology of Jeremy Taylor Today, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1988, pp. 143, 189; this is the definitive study of all aspects of Taylor’s eucharistic theology.

[13]See Daniel B. Stevick, The Altar’s Fire: Charles Wesley’s Hymns on the Lord’s Supper, 1745: Introduction and Exposition, Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2004, p. 22; cf. a similar view on Taylor’s view of consecration, p. 17.

[14]Bryan D. Spinks, ‘Two Seventeenth-Century Examples of Lex Credendi, Lex Orandi: The Baptismal and Eucharistic Theologies and Liturgies of Jeremy Taylor and Richard Baxter’, Studia Liturgica 21.2 (1991), pp. 165–89; see also Kenneth W. Stevenson, The Mystery of Baptism in the Anglican Tradition, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1998, pp. 96–111.

[15]See B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin, Minneapolis IL: Fortress Press, 1993, p. 167.

[16]I owe the term ‘effectual instrumentalism’ to Jeffrey Steel and his work on Lancelot Andrewes; for more on Taylor’s liturgy, see W. J. Grisbrooke, Anglican Liturgies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Alcuin Club Collections 40, London: SPCK, 1958, pp. 19–36, 183–99; also Porter, Jeremy Taylor, pp. 71–82.

In addition to its appearance in the Heber–Eden edition (vol. VIII), pp. 631–8, see Porter, Jeremy Taylor, for text of rite in facsimile between pp. 40 and 41.

[17]Criticized by Edmund Gosse, Jeremy Taylor, London: Longmans, 1903, p. 75.

[18]P. G. Stanwood (ed.), Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living and Holy Dying, vol. II: Holy Dying, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

[19]See Bryan D. Spinks, Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From Luther to Contemporary Practices, Liturgy Worship, Society Series, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 74–6; Stranks, Life and Writings, pp. 145–51; McAdoo, Eucharistic Theology, pp. 25–34.

[20]F. R. Bolton, The Caroline Tradition of the Church of Ireland with particular reference to Jeremy Taylor, London: Longmans, 1958.

[21]L. Tyerman, The Life and Times of John Wesley, vol. 1, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1870, p. 36.

[22]A point made by H. R. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology, London: Longmans, 1949, pp. 67ff.

[23]Stevenson, Covenant of Grace Renewed, pp. 149–63 and The Mystery of Baptism in the Anglican Tradition, pp. 125–38; on encouragement for increased frequency of the Eucharist at the Restoration, to which Taylor and Patrick (among many others) contributed, see John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1690, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991.

[24]Denise Inge (ed.), Happiness and Holiness: Thomas Traherne and His Writings, Canterbury Studies in Spiritual Theology, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2008 and Wanting Like a God: Desire and Freedom in Thomas Traherne, London: SCM Press, 2009.

[25]See Thomas K. Carroll, ‘Jeremy Taylor: Liturgist and Ecumenist: a study of Taylor’s sacramental theology and its ecumenical implications’, doctoral dissertation, Angelicum University, Rome, 1970.