Читать книгу In Tuneful Accord - Trevor Beeson - Страница 5
Оглавление1. The Changing Pattern of Anglican Worship
Music, in common with the spoken word, silence, ceremonial, furnishings and architecture, is always a servant of the liturgy. That is to say, it is an aid to a community seeking to respond to God in worship and adoration. It follows therefore that changes in liturgical understanding and application will always influence the use, and often the content, of the music.
Until about 1840 there had been no significant change in the Church of England’s use of the Book of Common Prayer since its introduction in 1662. Music played little part in the worship of the parish churches and in the cathedrals its performance had declined in quality to a point where it was more of a hindrance than a help. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, this changed, partly as a consequence of a deepening of understanding, particularly of the place of the Eucharist, and partly because of the Victorian zest for ‘improvement’ in all things.
A serious attempt to revise the Book of Common Prayer failed in 1928, though some changes in the content of some services were permitted. But it was not until the 1950s that the constraining floodgate was breached and during the next 50 years the Church of England experienced more changes in its forms of worship, as indeed in many other aspects of its life, than it had during the whole of the previous 400 years.
The music of the church was inevitably affected by this New Reformation, as it has been called, and any study of the development of this music during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries requires awareness of the development of the liturgy itself.
The state of the Church of England during the early decades of the nineteenth century continues to divide historians. In some respects the evidence is, as might be expected, varied and furthermore not always entirely reliable, having been transmitted by partisan messengers. Certain facts are nonetheless reasonably clear. The bishops were scandalously negligent in the performance of their episcopal ministries and had more in common with the aristocracy of their time than with their apostolic ancestors. Inasmuch as the Church of England was, and remains, essentially a parochial church this lamentable state of affairs was much less significant than it would have been in a more centralized institution. The parishes relied on their bishops only for the ordination of a sufficient supply of clergymen and possibly for an occasional Confirmation, though even this was often regarded as an optional extra.
The congregations attending church were still large. Attendance at worship was no longer enforced legally, but the social pressure to conform remained strong and the parish church had the central place in a closely knit community life. It was ‘natural’ to share in the worship on Sundays and the church’s teaching was regarded as an infallible guide to daily living. The clergy were, as always, of mixed ability and conscientiousness. There were far too many absentees from parishes, as many as three-fifths were said to be elsewhere. Pluralism, caused sometimes by sheer avarice, but more often by the need to combine several parishes in order to produce a reasonable income for one priest, was a serious problem. But by and large the clergy, many of them poorly paid curates, were diligent in carrying out their duties – in the conducting of worship, albeit it often slovenly, careful preparation of sermons, teaching of children, pastoral care of every soul in the parish and administering a mini-welfare state for the benefit of the poor and needy.
There was, however, a major deficiency almost everywhere, the existence of which can hardly be denied. The parish churches and cathedrals were places of formal conformity to a prescribed religion rather than centres of corporate holiness in which the mystery of the divine could be frequently experienced by the individual believer. Much of this was due to the prevailing theology which for the previous 100 years had been predominantly rationalist and ethical. But even more was due to lack of awareness of the true nature of the church as a worshipping community caused by slavish conformity to the Book of Common Prayer which had been demanded by Act of Parliament in 1662, and become a lifeless routine in which congregations had only a passive part with little to excite the religious imagination.
In 1843 Joseph Leech, the owner and editor of the Bristol Times began a series of weekly visits to the parish churches of the city and its surrounding districts, and later extended this to the villages of South Gloucestershire and North Somerset. Candid reports of what he found in these churches appeared week by week under the pseudonym ‘The Churchgoer’ and for some time he went undetected at the Sunday morning services. Eventually however he was identified in many places and, although some of the clergy welcomed a visit, many lived in dread of his appearances and what might be published the following week.
Unsurprisingly, he encountered some variations in the style of the worship and its setting, but these were quite limited. Most of the churches were crowded with box pews and galleries and, as a visitor, he normally sat in one of the four free benches allocated to the poor. At the east end of the nave, sometimes forming a barrier to the chancel, was a three-deck pulpit – the lower desk of which was allocated to the parish clerk, the next desk to the minister responsible for conducting the service and, above both, the pulpit for the preacher. A simple, unadorned table served as the altar but was given no prominence and sometimes used for mundane non-sacramental purposes such as a place for hats and coats. In a gallery at the west end there was, by this time, often a small organ, which had replaced an earlier band, and also a group of singers of varied accomplishments.
The service itself was Morning Prayer followed by the Litany, the Ante-Communion, and a sermon lasting at least 30 minutes and often much longer. Holy Communion was celebrated only infrequently and after due notice had been given the previous Sunday. The congregation played little vocal part in the worship – many of its members were unable to read – and were content to leave everything, except perhaps a metrical psalm, to the minister and the parish clerk, and, if there was one, the choir. In those parishes where the priest was negligent, or possibly depressed, the worship was a long way from edifying – as it can be today. At Bleadon, a small village not far from Weston-super-Mare, Leech found:
The worshippers were few, and the worship was cold. The priest delivered his part in a tone of apathy, and the replies of the people were faint and languid; the reading of the clergyman was not good, that of the poor clerk barbarous; the pews were dusty and yellow damp-stains disfigured the walls of the chancel; there was no altar screen or reredos of any kind, and a rude railing enclosed a ruder communion table; some windows in the chancel had been roughly stopped up and in fact nothing was wanting to make an originally good parish Church, a poor, wretched desolate structure. It has a fair tower and a very fair specimen of a stone pulpit; the former was struck, some twelve or fourteen years ago, by lightning, but I question if the stroke of neglect has not since proved more ruinous to the edifice at large.
On the other hand he was much more impressed by what he discovered at Lympsham, another village near Weston:
I do not know when I have been in a country church with so large a congregation: it was not merely the pews that were filled, but the forms placed in the aisles were closely occupied also. I could not help thinking it was some special occasion. Indeed, several, I could see, were strangers like myself, for they looked about, uncertain where to go, and more than that, when they got a place they seemed uncertain what to do. The Rector is one of the most active men I have ever seen in the reading-desk or pulpit, and, from what I learn, out of it too: he not only read the service and preached, but he led the singing and chanting, both of which they did, and did well, without an organ: indeed, I never before heard such hearty general congregational singing – everyone took their share, and a man with a bass voice somewhat more than his share.
Most churches fell somewhere between these extremes and this was as true of the city churches as of those in rural areas. Leech, himself a well-informed churchman, did not hesitate to suggest improvements. There were nevertheless signs of a new spirit showing here and there. Methodists, who often attended their parish church, might well leave before the end of the service to share in more lively worship, with loud hymn singing, in a nearby room. There were rumours of suspicious forms of doctrine and a special emphasis on the Eucharist being promoted by a Dr Pusey and a Dr Newman in Oxford.
John Keble’s Assize Sermon in the University Church on 14 July 1833 marked the beginning of what became known as the Oxford Movement. This would transform the Church of England’s life. It sought to get behind the arid, rationalist, Erastian religious thought that, in spite of the small-scale Evangelical revival, was still in vogue, to the High Church theology and worship of the early seventeenth century when Archbishop Laud was at Canterbury. This involved the revival of the doctrines concerning the nature of the church and of the sacraments that characterized Laud’s Primacy and went back to the earliest Christian centuries. The Oxford reformers did not however require a revision of the Book of Common Prayer. On the contrary they emphasized the importance of retaining it, and recovering the use of some neglected parts of it as a defence against those who were pressing for modifications in what today would be described as a liberal direction.
John Henry Newman, one of the Movement’s founding fathers, who later caused a national sensation by becoming a Roman Catholic and eventually a cardinal, urged the clergy to petition their bishops to resist any moves in the direction of Prayer Book revision. After a decade of influential preaching and writing it soon became apparent, however, that the new emphasis of the Tractarians, particularly their high doctrine of the Eucharist, would require some changes in the way in which this central sacrament of the church was celebrated. What this might involve was demonstrated at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, in 1846 where the vicar had introduced a weekly celebration of Holy Communion, following Sunday Morning Prayer, with a surpliced choir, two lit candles on the Holy Table, separated readings of the Epistle and Gospel and a few small parts of the service sung – all conducted with precise dignity, and with the entire congregation receiving communion. At the end of the following year a visitor to the Margaret Street Chapel, later replaced by All Saints’ Church, Margaret Street, in London’s West End, reported what he described as ‘a complete musical Mass’ in which substantial parts of the service were sung. He added, ‘I venture to assert that there has been nothing so solemn since the Reformation.’ The reporter was a founder member of the Cambridge Camden Society, which had been established to complement the Oxford Movement by research into the traditional furnishings and vestments prescribed by the Prayer Book in a rubric that referred to those in use ‘in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI’, that is, 1549. These were essentially those of the late medieval church, though the detail is often disputed.
By this time the aims of the Movement were becoming more widely accepted, but following the conversion of Newman and some others among its leadership to Roman Catholicism the old High Church ideals were replaced in some parts of the Church of England by Roman Catholic understandings of the Eucharist and the accompanying liturgical practices, largely imported from the continent. Ritualism, as it came to be called, formed a sub-group within the Oxford Movement and was to be found mainly in the poorest parishes of the inner cities. There devout and gifted priests were often exercising heroic ministries among people long alienated from the life of the church. The forms of worship adopted in these parishes were based on high doctrines of the church and sacraments but they were also a response to the belief that the services and ceremonial of the BCP were now quite unsuited to the missionary situations in which they were ministering. Movement, drama, colour, symbols and scent all had a part to play in the Eucharist.
This development caused considerable alarm in still sensitive Protestant circles where the establishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy of bishops in 1851 had already aroused fears of a return to papal jurisdiction. They complained that the new forms of worship were not only doctrinally unsound but also illegal inasmuch as they contravened the provisions of the Prayer Book, which had behind it the authority of Parliament. Having failed to secure disciplinary action by the bishops, who were in any case severely limited in what they could impose upon a clergy who enjoyed the security of a freehold office, they had recourse to law. Much unedifying public controversy ensued and, incredible and shameful as it now seems, a small number of priests were sent to prison for refusing to comply with the judgement of the courts.
The bishops were themselves not exempt from the law’s demands and in 1888 the saintly Edward King of Lincoln was arraigned before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council to answer a series of charges – allowing lighted candles on the altar, mixing wine and water in the chalice at the Eucharist and ceremonially washing the vessels afterwards, permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration, and absolving and blessing with the sign of the cross. The Council eventually remitted the matter to the Archbishop of Canterbury who found largely in King’s favour.
By the end of the century there was no sign of agreement on what forms of worship might or might not be permissible in the Church of England. There were in fact four separate traditions operating in the parish churches. The Evangelicals, untouched by the Oxford Movement or much else in the liturgical field apart from the revival of hymn singing, still worshipped in austere churches in which Bible reading and preaching dominated the Prayer Book services, and Holy Communion was celebrated infrequently. At the other extreme the churches influenced by Ritualism offered worship that hardly differed from that of the Roman Catholics, apart from the use of English rather than Latin. They were now known as Anglo-Catholics. Another, rapidly growing, section of the church accepted the doctrines of the Oxford Movement, rejected Ritualist developments and, instead, remained faithful to the Prayer Book, accompanying it with dignified ceremonial as well as the vesture and furnishings believed to be prescribed by the ornaments rubric. A guild of craftsmen was created to produce appropriate items and during the twentieth century the dignified, colourful ceremonial of Westminster Abbey became the leading example of this worship, which there owed as much to good taste as it did to doctrine.
These three groups represented, however, only a quite small part of the Church of England’s life. The overwhelming majority of parishes continued largely unchanged. Morning and Evening Prayer remained the mainstay of Sunday worship, albeit with a robed choir in chancel and some dignity of movement, more music and shorter sermons. Holy Communion was celebrated more frequently, usually at 8 a.m. and, perhaps, once a month after Morning Prayer. Inclusive Protestantism was still alive and well, ‘C of E’ was a badge of national as well as religious identity. Many new church buildings, almost all in Gothic style, had been erected in urban areas since 1850, and on the whole congregations were large, peaking in about 1900, though the buildings were, contrary to later mythology, rarely filled to capacity and in the large towns and cities most people did not attend church, except for baptisms, marriages and funerals.
It was because religion retained an important place in the national consciousness that so much concern was expressed at the unlawful deviation from the provisions of the Book of Common Prayer. Thus in 1904 the government decided to set up a Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline to investigate the situation, especially the alleged breaches of the law. During the next two years the Commission received evidence from 164 witnesses and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, occupied three days of its time. A good deal of useful information was gathered and the Commission’s report offers an interesting picture of worship in the Church of England at the end of the nineteenth century, but the number of serious complaints lodged with the Commission was comparatively small and it stated that ‘in most parishes the work of the Church is being quietly and diligently performed by clergy who are entirely loyal to the principles of the English Reformation as expressed in the Book of Common Prayer’. Nonetheless it concluded, in words that became the official basis for liturgical reform for much of the remainder of the century, ‘the law of public worship in the Church of England is too narrow for the religious life of the present generation’.
That they should have continued to be quoted for so long is the clearest evidence that the Church of England’s response to the Commission’s labours was not hasty. The Convocations of Canterbury and York discussed the matter from time to time without deciding anything significant, until the 1914–18 war intervened. An advisory committee of liturgical scholars appointed in 1911 lacked the wholehearted support of the Northern Convocation and was also frustrated by the outbreak of war.
The war did, however, stimulate the demand for reform. Chaplains ministering in the horrific circumstances of the trenches found the BCP virtually unusable for soldiers’ services and the burial of the fallen. Even as traditional and fastidious a liturgist as Eric Milner White, who had gone to France from King’s College, Cambridge, and returned to the college for another 13 years before becoming Dean of York, confessed in characteristically elegant language, not frequently heard in the trenches:
Suddenly it became apparent to all that the 1662 Book was out of date. It was plain, especially to chaplains in the field, that the country had no semblance of a popular familiar devotion … The Prayer Book did not seem able to reflect the lineaments of the Lord Jesus Christ, therefore failing to minister the love of God to souls desperately wistful.
Furthermore, the close encounters with soldiers, especially the other ranks, confirmed what the best of the chaplains already knew, namely, that most expressions of Christian faith and worship were more or less meaningless to the overwhelming majority of Britain’s working-class population. The chaplains returned to their parishes therefore firmly determined to demand substantial revision of the church’s services and to work for the restoration of the Holy Communion to that central place in the church’s life which it had held from the earliest Christian centuries until the early seventeenth century. There could be no prevarication, no delaying tactics. There proved to be many.
During the immediate post-war years many suggestions for revision were made by groups of liturgical scholars and other interested parties, and between the autumn of 1925 and the beginning of 1927 the House of Bishops held 45 day-long meetings to devise a revised prayer book. This was intended to be an alternative to the 1662 book, not a substitution for it. The proposed changes were nothing if not conservative, but although the new book was accepted by the Church Assembly later that year, this was in spite of strong opposition from some Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. When it was presented to the House of Commons on 15 December it was rejected by 238 votes to 205, and, in spite of some intensive lobbying, the margin of defeat was slightly larger when it was re-presented in 1928.
The opposition in the church was, as is often the case in controversial matters, united by opposing convictions. The Evangelicals believed that some aspects of the proposed book would take the Church of England in a Rome-ward direction, whereas the extreme Anglo-Catholics believed it would inhibit the liturgical freedom they had already seized and now enjoyed, and would be used by the bishops as an instrument of discipline. The proposals were, in any case, nowhere near to solving the acute problem delineated by the wartime chaplains. Had the church been more united in its enthusiasm for the new book it seems likely that the House of Commons would have voted differently. But there was another division of which many MPs were aware: there was no enthusiasm for liturgical change among ordinary churchgoers (there rarely is) and it seemed that the professionals, including the laity in the Church Assembly, were seeking to impose new ways of worship on reluctant congregations.
Whatever the explanation, however, the leadership of the Church of England was left in some disarray. There were calls for disestablishment. These were not pursued, though the implications for church–state relations of what had happened would never be forgotten. The bishops restored calm, rather cleverly and, it turned out, very helpfully, by consulting their diocesan conferences, then announcing that ‘during the present emergency and until further order be taken’ they would ‘not regard as inconsistent with loyalty to the principles of the Church of England the use of such additions or deviations as fall within the limits of the “Deposited Book”’.
Thus what became known as the 1928 Prayer Book went into widespread use. Or at least, parts of it did. The minor changes proposed for Morning and Evening Prayer, and for the Baptism, Marriage and Burial services, were generally welcomed but a more substantial change to the Prayer of Thanksgiving at the Eucharist did not win much support and was firmly rejected by Evangelicals. Among the war-veteran reformers there was deep disappointment that the new book did nothing to bridge the gap between the church and its absentee artisan members and offered no encouragement to those who wished to make the Holy Communion the central focus of parish life.
The ‘emergency’ lasted for 27 years and embraced another catastrophic world war. During this time the bishops made no serious attempt to impose liturgical discipline, except in a few extreme instances, and the clergy were left free to order the worship of their churches as they thought best. Lacking liturgical skill and much imagination, most of them were happy to accept the limitations of the new, alternative book, and, although members of the travelling public sometimes complained that no two churches had the same forms of worship, everything on offer was clearly derived from the Book of Common Prayer, which was still regarded as the distinctive, unifying expression of the Church of England’s doctrine and devotion.
There emerged, however, during the 1920s and 30s a small number of priests who were determined that the Holy Communion should become the chief act of Sunday worship in their churches, and this without turning to an 11 a.m. High Mass with no communicants – the standard practice of the extreme Anglo-Catholics. In several industrial parishes, often where the clergy were Christian Socialists, a celebration of Holy Communion was held at about 9.30 a.m., usually with the Prayer Book rite. Hymns were sung, Merbecke or the Martin Shaw Folk Mass was used as the setting, a sermon was preached, all the confirmed received communion, and families and young people were encouraged to attend. There was a strong corporate emphasis and in some places the congregations remained after the service to share breakfast in the church hall. ‘The Lord’s people, gather on the Lord’s day, for the Lord’s own service’, became a descriptive slogan.
In 1935 Father Gabriel Hebert, a priest of the Society of the Sacred Mission, published Liturgy and Society, a seminal work which emphasized the vital importance of relating the Eucharist to the life of the secular world. At the same time, he advocated ‘The Parish Eucharist with the communion of the people as the central act of worship every Sunday’. The book was widely read and its liturgical emphasis proved to be influential. Two years later Hebert edited a volume of essays, The Parish Communion, in which several clergy explained how such a service might be introduced in town and country parishes. Essays demonstrating the links with the practice of the early church were also included, and in the dioceses of Chichester and Newcastle the number of parishes moving in this direction became significant.
The 1939–45 war produced another generation of ex-service chaplains and ordination candidates who regarded the reformation of the church as an integral part of the creation of a better world and saw the Parish Communion as the key to the reform of worship. At a conference held in Birmingham in January 1948, an organization, ‘Parish and People’, was launched to promote the Parish Communion, along with the parish breakfast and the parish meeting. Its membership (mainly clergy) grew rapidly and during the next two decades the Parish Communion replaced Morning Prayer and High Mass as the chief Sunday service in most parishes.
The speed of this development became a matter of concern to the leaders of Parish and People, who were in touch with a parallel liturgical movement in the Roman Catholic Church on the continent. The theological foundation of the change and its social implications were being ignored and the Parish Communion was being adopted as ‘a nice service at a convenient time’. This greatly worried Michael Ramsey who was at the time Bishop of Durham. Nevertheless the movement was powerful enough to stimulate a period of intense liturgical experiment and revision that began with the appointment by the archbishops in 1955 of a Liturgical Commission. During the next 25 years many different versions of all the services were produced in booklet form and tried out, and in 1980 what were deemed to be the best, or at least the most widely acceptable, forms of these were published in a 1,293-page Alternative Service Book. Some were in modern English, though the gain in intelligibility was offset for many lay users by the complexity of the range of choice on offer to those conducting the services. Again, the emphasis was on the experimental and it was explained that another 20 years would be needed for the creation of texts that could be regarded as fixed for a reasonably settled period of time.
Change was, however, by no means confined to the structure and words of the liturgy; it extended to its ceremonial presentation. The insight that in the Eucharist priest and laity are engaged in a shared action, each with a distinctive role, required all to be in reasonably close proximity to the altar; preferably gathered around it. The same insight required the laity to have a more active role in the liturgy itself, expressed in the reading of the Bible, the leading of intercessions, the presentation of the bread and the wine at the Offertory, and the administration of communion. It led also to a reconsideration of the place of music and the function of a choir, with emphasis on congregational participation and sometimes the introduction of instruments to augment or even replace the organ. Back to the church band.
Such a liturgical reformation could not easily be arranged in medieval buildings designed for eucharistic worship in which the priest alone had a significant part to play and the laity were banished to a nave distant from the altar, even screened from it. The 1960s therefore saw the beginning of what would become a widespread reordering of church interiors, including the many Victorian buildings erected on Gothic principles. Nave altars were installed and fixed pews replaced by mobile chairs. In order to create a more corporate atmosphere the priest faced the congregation across the altar and a number of laypeople were located close by in the sanctuary.
Even with the most imaginative use of space and furnishings, however, this proved to be quite a long way from ideal, especially in large churches where many members of the congregation were, of necessity, still disposed in formal ranks and far from the focus of the eucharistic action. The need for a considerable number of new church buildings went some way to solving the problem in new housing developments where buildings of circular, octagonal and trapezoid shape began to appear.
The establishing of an Institute for the Study of Worship and Religious Architecture at Birmingham University offered the church an opportunity to match its buildings with its worshipping needs. But unlike France, Germany and other continental European countries, Britain was lacking in first-class, innovative architects, as well as wealthy churches, and by the end of the century most of the new buildings seemed sad, shabby even. Nonetheless the worship offered in the overwhelming majority of parishes at about ten o’clock on Sunday mornings was significantly different from anything previously experienced in Britain and closer in pattern to that of the earliest Christian communities of the Mediterranean world.
Meanwhile steps had been taken to ensure that there could be no repeat of the 1927/28 debacle. In 1970 Parliament accepted a Worship and Doctrine Measure which allowed the Church of England to make its own decisions in these areas without political approval. A change of outlook in liturgical studies also led to the abandonment of uniformity as an ideal and to the acceptance of a considerable degree of variety. Thus, in the sensitive area of eucharistic doctrine and its expression, both Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics were offered liturgies they could use. They were themselves also more open to change than ever before.
The long period of experiment ended in 2000 with the publication and authorization of Common Worship, which included eight different eucharistic rites. This was followed by several more volumes which covered the remainder of the services – all attractively printed and costing in total about £75. The Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London complained that a wheelbarrow was needed to carry them all to church. The policy enunciated in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, ‘And whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm … now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one use’, had been turned on its head.
The revival of Evangelicalism, particularly in its charismatic form, had by this time, moreover, raised new and difficult issues. A Pentecostal movement, sweeping like fire through many parts of Latin America and Africa, eventually reached Britain, and immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa added their own spontaneous forms of worship – all far removed from the traditions of the long-established churches. Their style was not dissimilar to that of the nineteenth-century revivalist movements, with a strong emphasis on worship – hymns, songs and choruses – as a tool of evangelism and the saving of souls.
The number of Anglican churches embracing the charismatic tradition in its fullness was, and remains, relatively small. But elements of it exist in a large number of fairly typical Evangelical congregations and the effect on their worship has often been sharply divisive. The introduction of songs and choruses of an exuberant sort, accompanied by guitars and percussion instruments, represents a radical change, both of form and underlying spirituality, for traditional churchgoers. Those attending only at the great festivals have often been surprised, and sometimes distressed, to find the much-loved Christmas hymns and carols replaced by unknown revivalist hymns and choruses. The end of the century therefore found the Church of England with the widest possible variety of forms of worship and, although the virtues of diversity, rather than those of uniformity, were now extolled, serious issues relating to underlying unity remained unresolved.
