The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford-Warburg Studies)

OXFORD-WARBURG STUDIES General Editors CHARLES HOPE and IAN MACLEAN

Oxford-Warburg Studies comprise works of original research on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe, with particular reference to the transmission and reception of ideas and images originating in the ancient world. The emphasis of the series is on elite rather than popular culture, and the underlying aim is to foster an interdisciplinary approach based on primary sources, which may be visual as well as written, and may extend to materials in a wide range of vernaculars and ancient languages. Among the topics addressed by past authors in the series are the relationship between classical scholarship and the Christian tradition, the influence of modes of transmission on the uptake of ideas, the contributions of leading scholars to the learning of their day, and the manifestations of humanism in Italy and Northern Europe and their aftermath.

OXFORD-WARBURG STUDIES The Apocryphal Apocalypse The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment ALASTAIR HAMILTON Children of the Promise The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence 1427–1785 LORENZO POLIZZOTTO Machiavelli—The First Century Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance SYDNEY ANGLO History of Scholarship A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship held annually at the Warburg Institute Edited by CHRISTOPHER LIGOTA and JEAN-LOUIS QUANTIN Transmitting Knowledge Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modem Europe Edited by SACHIKO KUSUKAWA and IAN MACLEAN The Copts and the West, 1439–1822 The European Discovery of the Egyptian Church ALASTAIR HAMILTON Commonplace Learning Ramism and its German Ramifications 1543–1630 HOWARD HOTSON

The Church of England and Christian Antiquity The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17 th Century J E A N - LO U I S QUA N T I N

1

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Jean-Louis Quantin 2009

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–955786–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements To write a book on a foreign country is something of an adventure; to write it in a foreign language looks like recklessness. I was fortunate in having mentors, colleagues, and friends who not only advised me, but gave me help in doing so. Jean-Pierre Poussou, then president of the University of ParisSorbonne and the supervisor of my doctoral thesis on the use of the Church Fathers in seventeenth-century France, suggested that my next research should be on the Church of England. He arranged for me to spend two years as a junior research fellow at the Maison Franc¸aise in Oxford, in 1993–5. I had been a rather unhappy assistant in a fairly typical French provincial ´ university, feeling that the training I had been given at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure, and for which I shall otherwise always be grateful, had very little connection with the realities of undergraduate teaching. The beauty of Oxford changed my life for ever. For someone used to the Biblioth`eque Nationale, moreover, it was quite a shock to discover a major library which actually welcomed scholars and did all it could to make their life easier. I enjoyed ideal conditions, first to complete my dissertation and then to start working on seventeenth-century England. After my return to France, to become a lecturer at the University of Versailles, my progress in this new field was much slower. Apart from the usual lecturer’s woes, it proved very difficult to access primary materials. The Biblioth`eque Nationale was in the process of moving to its new accommodation and, as a result, worked even less well than usual. I therefore tended to devote most of my free time during the academic year to further research on the history of Roman Catholicism and to keep the Church of England for the vacations, as a labour of love in the Bodleian Library. It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to those who befriended me during my Oxford years and who have since assured that my Oxford summers were not all work: Dr Robert Beddard, Dr Elizabeth Livingstone, Professor Ian Maclean, Dr David Parrott, Dr John Walsh. Scott Mandelbrote should take pride of place among them and he has also, more recently, been my host and guide in the other place. But I owe to him a special debt, to which I will turn presently. When I lived in Oxford, Christopher Ligota’s seminar on the history of scholarship at the Warburg Institute in London became almost a second home for me. Christopher then offered me the chance to co-edit with him a volume of papers from the seminar and taught me a great deal in the process. His generous hospitality in Ealing whenever I needed to work in London has been a great help in recent years.

vi

Acknowledgements

A Yates Fellowship at the Warburg from April to July 2001, and then a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls during Trinity Term 2002, thanks to a sabbatical from Versailles, at last enabled me to start writing. In the course of a long discussion, Scott Mandelbrote persuaded me to write in English by generously offering to correct my mistakes. Just at that critical stage, ´ ´ my appointment at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes allowed me much more freedom to conduct my research. A first version of my work could thus be included in my dossier d’habilitation, ‘Historical and philological scholarship, religious orthodoxies, and dissent, 16th–18th century’, which I defended at the Sorbonne on 25 November 2003. The present book is the greatly revised version of part of that dossier. I should like to thank my examiners, Irena Backus, Yves-Marie Berc´e, Robin Briggs, and Franc¸ois Dolbeau. Jean-Pierre Poussou again acted as my supervisor and, with benevolent authority, overcame my scrupulosity to make me deliver my dossier in time, just as he had done for my doctoral thesis. Given the experience I had of both Oxford and the Warburg, I feel keenly the honour of being published in their joint series. I am grateful to both editors, to the anonymous reader, and to the staff at the Press, especially Sarah Holmes. True to his word, Scott Mandelbrote reread my entire typescript and saved me from a great many mistakes, not all of them stylistic. Scott’s friendship is one of the many gifts I received from Bruno Neveu, the most Oxonian of French historians, whom I had the honour to succeed at ´ ´ the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes on his retirement in 2002. Bruno Neveu presided at the board of examiners for my habilitation, a few months before his untimely death in Lebanon, on 24 March 2004. I considered dedicating this book to his memory but eventually decided to wait until I could complete something more directly related to his own work. I like to think, though, that he would have recognized in these pages the echoes of our discussions over many years, in Oxford, Paris, and Rome.

Contents Abbreviations Introduction 1. The English Reformation and the Protestant View of Antiquity 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Protestant appeal to the Fathers from Cranmer to Jewel Sola Scriptura Patristic orthodoxy ‘Unwritten traditions’ and the ‘consensus of the Fathers’ Witnesses to the truth: the Fathers and the Protestant view of church history 6. Augustine, Calvin, and Reformed orthodoxy 2. Becoming Traditional? The Appeal to Antiquity in Jacobean Controversies 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

ix 1 22 24 31 39 50 68 79

88

Primitive episcopacy Puritanism? Christ’s descent into Hell The cessation of miracles From distinctiveness to singularity

88 105 114 130 139

3. Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

155

1. Theological method 2. Augustinism and Calvinism 3. The authority of tradition 4. The Fathers Assaulted 1. 2. 3. 4.

The survival of Elizabethan theology Theological liberalism and the Fathers: the Great Tew circle An anti-patristic breviary: Jean Daill´e’s Use of the Fathers The first English fortune of Daill´e’s Use of the Fathers

159 170 191 203 203 209 228 238

viii

Contents

5. A Patristic Identity 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Puritan scripturalism The extinction of the Great Tew spirit? The Restoration Church between Dissenters and papists History versus enthusiasm Winning the patristic argument

6. The Case for Tradition 1. Defending the Fathers 2. Hierarchical tradition: the solution of Herbert Thorndike 3. Historical tradition: the solution of Henry Dodwell Conclusion Chronology Bibliography Index

252 252 267 284 299 312 327 327 352 366 396 412 417 489

Abbreviations ACDF Allison–Rogers

Alum. Cant.

Alum. Oxon. Aquinas, edit. leonina Arber

ARG BAV BL BNF Bodl. BSG CC CERS CH The Collegiate University

Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Rome A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640: An Annotated Catalogue, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 1989–94) John and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, part I: From the Earliest Times to 1751, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1922–7) Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses 1500–1714, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1891–2) Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera omnia, iussu impensaque Leonis XIII. P.M. edita (Rome, 1882–) E. Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640, 5 vols. (London, 1875–94) Archiv f¨ur Reformationsgeschichte Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana British Library, London Biblioth`eque Nationale de France Bodleian Library, Oxford Paris, Biblioth`eque Sainte-Genevi`eve Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina (Turnhout, 1953–) Church of England Record Society Church History J. McConica (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iii: The Collegiate University (Oxford, 1986)

x

Abbreviations CPG

CPL

CR CSEL

CSPD CUL Denz.–Sch¨on.

DNB DTC E&R

EHR Friedberg GCS HE

Clauis Patrum Graecorum: Qua optimae quaeque scriptorum Patrum Graecorum recensiones a primaeuis saeculis usque ad octauum commode recluduntur, 5 vols. (Turnhout, 1974–87) Clauis Patrum Latinorum qua in Corpus Christianorum edendum optimas quasque scriptorum recensiones a Tertulliano ad Bedam commode recludit E. Dekkers (3rd edn., Steenbrugge, 1995) Corpus Reformatorum (Brunswick) [CR 29–87 = Ioannis Caluini Opera quae supersunt omnia, i–lix, 1863–1900] Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum: Editum consilio et impensis Academiae Litterarum [Caesareae] Vindobonensis (Vienna, 1866–) Calendar of State Papers, Domestic series Cambridge University Library H. Denzinger and A. Sch¨onmetzer (eds.), Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum (36th edn., Freiburg im Br., 1976) Dictionary of National Biography Dictionnaire de th´eologie catholique, 15 vols. in 30 (Paris, 1899–1950) G. E. B. Eyre and C. R. Rivington (eds.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, from 1640–1708, 3 vols. (London, 1913–14) English Historical Review E. Friedberg (ed.), Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1879–81) Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten [drei] Jahrhunderte (Leipzig, then Berlin, 1897–) Historia Ecclesiastica (of Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen)

Abbreviations HJ HMC JBS JEH LACT LPL Madan

Mansi

MGH ODNB PG PL PLS PS RK SC SCH SCJ Seventeenth-Century Oxford

STC

xi

Historical Journal Historical Manuscripts Commission Journal of British Studies Journal of Ecclesiastical History Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology Lambeth Palace Library F. Madan, Oxford Books: A Bibliography of Printed Works Relating to the University and City of Oxford or Printed and Published there, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1895–1931) J. D. Mansi, J. B. Martin, and L. Petit (eds.), Sacrorum Conciliorum noua et amplissima collectio, 53 vols. (Paris, 1901–27) Monumenta Germaniae Historica Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series graeca (Paris, 1857–1912) Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina (Paris, 1844–64) Patrologiae Latinae Supplementum (Paris, 1958–74) Parker Society Amsterdam, Universiteitsbiblioteek, Remonstrantsche Kerk Sources Chr´etiennes (Paris, 1942–) Studies in Church History Sixteenth Century Journal N. Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1997) A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave (comps.), A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640 (2nd edn., London, 1976)

xii TC TCD TU WA Wing

Wood, Athenae Wood, Fasti

Abbreviations E. Arber (ed.), The Term Catalogues, 1668–1709, 3 vols. (London, 1903–6) Trinity College, Dublin Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur (Leipzig, 1882–1943; Berlin, 1951–) D. Martin Luther’s Werke, Weimar Donald Wing (comp.), Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, 4 vols. (New York, 1982–98) Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss, 4 vols. (London, 1813–20) Anthony Wood, Fasti Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss, 2 parts, appended to Wood, Athenae, ii and iv (1815–20)

Unless otherwise stated, translations in the text are my own. I have provided references for every patristic text. Where there are no significant textual divergences and no critical problems (that is in most cases), I have cited standard modern editions only. These editions are not listed in the bibliography since they are easy to find in either CPG or CPL. Original spelling has been retained but i/j and u/v have been harmonized according to modern usage (i.e. distinguished in English and French, but not in Latin). Capitalization and punctuation have been occasionally corrected. Abbreviations, especially in Latin, have been silently expanded. Dates are old style throughout, but the year has been deemed to begin on 1 January.

Introduction Today, the statement that Anglicans are fond of the Fathers and keen on patristic studies looks like a platitude. Like many platitudes, it is much less obvious than one might think. It has a long and complex history. The notion certainly belongs to the oldest id´ees rec¸ues about Anglicanism. It is much older than that name itself, which, as is well known, did not come into common use until the nineteenth century. ‘Anglicanism’ was then favoured by Tractarians to stress the singularity of the English episcopal variety of Reformed Christianity, as a middle course—or even the middle course, the via media—between the symmetrical excesses of Rome and Geneva.¹ At the end of the seventeenth century, the Maurist scholar Dom Denys de Sainte-Marthe, who was well informed about English religious controversies, pointed out that ‘those of the English people that are called Episcopalians, and who compose the greatest part of the State … profess to hold the Fathers in much greater respect than other Protestants do’.² In 1710, another Frenchman, the Jesuit Ignace de Laubrussel, though he was a quite different kind of Churchman from the Gallican SainteMarthe, made the same point: ‘the Episcopalians of that learned nation have shown a respectful love for the Fathers, whom they have taken pains either to defend by learned writings, or to explain by notes, or to adorn with beautiful editions’. Laubrussel instanced several English writers, one of them (Henry Hammond) a Caroline divine, the others Restoration scholars: John Pearson, John Fell, George Bull, Henry Dodwell, William Beveridge, William Cave.³ ¹ See e.g. John Henry Newman, ‘True mode of meeting Mr. Kingsley’ [28 Apr. 1864], in Apologia pro vita sua, ed. M. J. Svaglic (Oxford, 1967), 400–1. ² Denys de Sainte-Marthe, Histoire de S. Gregoire le Grand, Pape et Docteur de l‘Eglise (Rouen, 1697), 383: ‘la foi des anciens Peres, pour lesquels ils [Ceux des Anglois qu’on ´ appelle Episcopaux, lesquels composent la plus considerable partie de l’Etat] t´emoignent avoir beaucoup plus de respect que le reste des Protestans’. For Sainte-Marthe’s interest in English affairs, see his R´eponse aux plaintes des protestans touchant la pr´etendu¨e Pers´ecution de France (Paris, 1688), 175, 229–31. ³ Ignace de Laubrussel, Trait´e des abus de la critique en matiere de Religion, 2 vols. (Paris, 1710), i. 118: ‘On a mˆeme remarqu´e dans les Episcopaux de cette sc¸avante nation,

2

Introduction

The problem is to trace the origins of this distinctiveness. The novelty or continuity within the English Protestant tradition of the appeal to the Fathers was already much debated in the seventeenth century. Laudian, and later Restoration, divines were charged with having deviated from their Elizabethan predecessors. They countered such accusations with lists of authorities.⁴ John Jewel’s 1559 challenge to Roman Catholics to show any precedent for their doctrines from the first six centuries, and the canon of 1571 that forbade preachers to teach anything but ‘that which is agreeable to the doctrine of the olde Testament, and the new, and that which the catholike fathers, and auncient Bishops have gathered out of that doctrine’, were regularly quoted in this context. Remarkably, eighteenth-century critics of High Church divinity tended to agree. Conyers Middleton considered an excessive veneration for the Fathers one of the most unfortunate tendencies of the Church of which he was a nominal member. He therefore decided to enquire ‘from what particular motives and circumstances, so inconsistent a practice should happen to prevail more remarkably in this, than in any other Protestant Church’.⁵ He went as far back as the Reformation. In the time of Henry VIII, he noted, the English Reformers were not at liberty to discard rites and doctrines which had no other foundation than the authority of the Fathers.⁶ Things had changed under Edward VI, but then the bishops, ‘for the sake, either of their former conduct, and prejudices; or to preserve a character of constancy, and to give the less scandal’ to the conservative clergy, continued ‘tho’ sometimes by forced and unnatural constructions, to justify all their proceedings, by the example and usages of the ancient Fathers’.⁷ After the Marian interlude, Middleton argued, Elizabeth broke yet again with Rome but she deliberately left the Reformation incomplete, for the sake of the traditionalist clergy: hence the continuous appeal to the primitive Fathers and councils.⁸ Under the first Stuarts, leading Churchmen were even keener to cite the Fathers, as they nourished plans for a reconciliation with Rome, and also because Christian antiquity helped them to argue their case against Protestant un respectueux attachement pour les Peres, qu’ils se sont appliquez ou a` justifier, par de sc¸avans e´crits, ou a` e´claircir par des nottes, ou a` orner de belles e´ditions.’ ⁴ On the importance of doctrinal pedigrees in the Restoration Church, see J. Spurr, ‘ ‘‘A special kindness for dead bishops’’: The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68/1–2 (2005) [The Uses of History in Early Modern England ], 327–34. ⁵ [Conyers Middleton], An Introductory Discourse to a larger Work Designed hereafter to be Published, concerning the Miraculous Powers, which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church, from the Earliest Ages, through Several Successive Centuries (London, 1747), 48. ⁶ Ibid. ⁷ Ibid. 49. ⁸ Ibid. 49–50.

Introduction

3

Dissenters. Middleton believed that this spirit was still alive in his own times.⁹ William Warburton, who wrote a qualified defence of patristic testimony against Middleton, agreed with him that the authority of the Fathers was one of the ‘prejudices’ that the Reformers had carried with them when they departed from the Roman Church.¹⁰ Things only changed with Jean Daill´e’s Traict´e de l’employ des Saincts Peres, a French Calvinist book thanks to which English Protestants at last began to ‘emancipate themselves from the general prejudice’.¹¹ Veneration for the Fathers thus appeared to eighteenth-century critics as a relic of popery. Sainte-Marthe and Laubrussel also considered that it was something that Englishmen shared with the Roman Catholic Church and which, had they been consistent, should have brought them back to it.¹² Nineteenth-century Tractarians had an entirely different perspective. They thought that the Fathers provided the Church of England with its natural and proper foundations, of which it had only lost sight in the eighteenth century, partly for circumstantial reasons but also, in Henry Liddon’s words, because of ‘the shallowness which was characteristic of the time, and which only too readily persuaded itself that a large and exacting study was, after all, needless and unfruitful’. English divines, Liddon maintained, had then come under the fatal influence of continental Protestants like Daill´e.¹³ The sacrilege that Dean Gaisford allegedly committed when showing a visitor round Christ Church library (‘he walked rapidly past all the Fathers. Waving his hand, he said ‘‘sad rubbish’’, and that was all he had to say’) was taken to epitomize the situation at Oxford on the eve of the Oxford Movement.¹⁴ The Tractarians therefore aimed at bringing back the Church of England to what they held to be its native devotion to the Fathers. Most of their authorities came from the seventeenth century but they gladly produced some earlier texts. In 1838, in their prefaces to the first and second volumes, respectively, of the ‘Library of the Fathers’ ⁹ Ibid. 51–4. ¹⁰ William Warburton, Julian, or a Discourse concerning the Earthquake and firey Eruption, which defeated that Emperor’s Attempt to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem (2nd edn., London, 1751), pp. iv–v. ¹¹ Ibid., pp. vi–vii. See R. G. Ingram, ‘William Warburton, Divine Action, and Enlightened Christianity’, in W. Gibson and R. G. Ingram (eds.), Religious Identities in Britain (Aldershot, 2005), 97–117. ¹² Laubrussel, Abus de la critique, i. 118; Sainte-Marthe, Gregoire le Grand, 383. ¹³ Henry Parry Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 4 vols. (London, 1893–7), i. 413–14. ¹⁴ Thomas Mozley, Reminiscences, chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, 2 vols. (London, 1882), i. 356. The episode is quoted from Mozley by Liddon, Life of Pusey, i. 434, and more recently by R. D. Crouse, ‘ ‘‘Deepened by the study of the Fathers’’: The Oxford Movement, Dr. Pusey and Patristic Scholarship’, Dionysius, 7 (1983), 138.

4

Introduction

(their great undertaking to make the Fathers widely available in English translations), both Pusey and Newman appealed to the canon of 1571.¹⁵ Tract 78, which appeared in February 1837, was a compilation, prepared by Charles Marriott and the then Archdeacon Henry Manning, on ‘the duty of maintaining, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est’ (the criteria for a ‘catholic’ doctrine that had been laid down by the monk Vincent of L´erins in fifth-century Gaul). Tract 78 opened with Jewel’s challenge and the canon of 1571.¹⁶ This, in the Tractarians’ eyes, was not Roman but Anglo-Catholicism, indeed it was the bulwark of the Church of England against Rome. When Pusey was attacked as a Romanizer, his defence was ‘to show that in his loyalty to Christian Antiquity, he had only taken the Church of England at her word’.¹⁷ Newman always believed this, even after he had left the Church of his birth: ‘taking Antiquity, not the existing Church, as the oracle of truth’ was one of those ‘Anglican principles’ that are ‘the firmest, strongest ground against Rome—that is, if they can be held ’.¹⁸ The appeal to the Fathers did not bring Newman to Rome: he went over to Rome because he had come to the conclusion that traditional appeals to the Fathers represented a dead end.¹⁹ Many Roman Catholics (all those who now believed with Pius IX that Tradition and the Pope were one,²⁰ and who regarded seventeenth-century Gallican ecclesiology as little less than a heresy) even thought that the appeal to the Fathers had better be suppressed altogether. In 1866, Manning, now Archbishop of Westminster, famously ¹⁵ Pusey’s preface to his revised translation of The Confessions of S. Augustine (Oxford, 1838), pp. ii–iii; Newman’s preface to The Catechetical lectures of S. Cyril, archbishop of Jerusalem, trans. R. W. Church (Oxford, 1839), p. xx. On the Tractarians’ invention of Anglican tradition, see the excellent overview by P. Nockles, ‘Survivals or New Arrivals? The Oxford Movement and the Nineteenth-Century Historical Construction of Anglicanism’, in S. Platten (ed.), Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition: Continuity, Change and the Search for Communion (Norwich, 2003), 144–91 and notes, 240–64. ¹⁶ John Keble, A Postscript to the Third Edition of the Sermon, Entitled, ‘Primitive tradition recognised in Holy Scripture’: To which is subjoined Catena Patrum. no. III. being ◦ n LXXVIII of the ‘Tracts for the Times’ (London, 1837). For authorship of the Tracts, see appendix to Liddon, Life of Pusey, iii. ¹⁷ Liddon, Life of Pusey, ii. 514. ¹⁸ Newman, Apologia, 144. ¹⁹ See O. Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1987), esp. 139–63; R. Williams, ‘Newman’s Arians and the Question of Method in Doctrinal History’, in I. Ker and A. G. Hill (eds.), Newman after a Hundred Years (Oxford, 1990), 263–85. ²⁰ ‘La tradizione son’io!’: see Y. M.-J. Congar, La Tradition et les traditions: essai historique (Paris, 1960), 223–58.

Introduction

5

expressed his fear of Newman’s influence: ‘it is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church’.²¹ Four years later, at the first Vatican council, Manning denounced ‘the appeal from the living authority of the Holy Catholic Church to the unanimous consensus of the Fathers’ as a constant feature of Anglicanism, from Jewel down to Pusey’s just-published Is Healthful Reunion Impossible?²² In that, Manning was faithful to his Tractarian years. A continuous line, only temporarily troubled by the vagaries of eighteenth-century Latitudinarians, was supposed to have run from the beginnings of the English Reformation to the Oxford Movement. This scheme has been deeply influential ever since. The relation of the Church of England to the Fathers has been regularly considered from the perspective of the Oxford Movement, as a key component, if not actually the foundation, of that Church’s ‘Catholicism’, in the special Tractarian sense of the word. Newman, as is well known, has himself become a modern ‘Father of the Church’, and his pronouncements have acquired an authoritative status in many theological circles in both the Anglican and Roman communions. An article entitled ‘The rediscovery of the Fathers in the seventeenth-century Anglican tradition’ deals almost entirely with Newman.²³ There have been significant differences of opinion with regard to the sixteenth century. The most outspoken Anglo-Catholics denounced the 1552 revision of the Book of Common Prayer as a piece of ‘unhistoric’ Puritanism.²⁴ Sabine Baring-Gould’s overtly xenophobic history of the survival of ‘Catholic faith and tradition’ stated that the Church of England had been ‘submerged’ by evil continental influences under Edward and Elizabeth. It was only with the advent of men like Andrewes, Hooker, Bancroft, Overall, Laud, Montagu, Cosin that one ²¹ Letter of 25 February 1866, quoted in D. Newsome, The Convert Cardinals: John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning (London, 1993), 257. ²² Manning’s speech at the Council on 28 March 1870, in Mansi, li, cols. 165–6: ‘Nemo est qui ignoret, id esse fundamentum falsae istius apologiae pro anglicano schismate a Iuello ferme adhinc tribus saeculis euulgatae. Eodem modo etiam in hisce diebus ab anglicanis fit appellatio ab auctoritate uiua sanctae catholicae ecclesiae ad consensum unanimem patrum.’ ²³ T. M. Parker, ‘The Rediscovery of the Fathers in the Seventeenth-Century Anglican Tradition’, in J. Coulson and A. M. Allchin (eds.), The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium (London, 1967), 31–49. ²⁴ Herbert Mortimer Luckock, Studies in the history of the Book of Common Prayer (2nd edn., London, 1882), 79 and 90. For divergent attitudes towards the English Reformers, see P. B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1837 (Cambridge, 1994), 122–7; id., ‘Survivals or New Arrivals?’, 150–2.

6

Introduction

could see the ‘red thread’ clearly again. ‘Whence did these men derive their definite orthodoxy? … from Catholic tradition and the study of the Fathers.’²⁵ High Churchmen of a drier cast felt no qualms about enrolling Cranmer in their list of witnesses for ‘the Anglican appeal to antiquity’, ‘however protestant [his] language may at times have been’: ‘Beneath the broad aegis which Cranmer threw over us who in subsequent ages have been on his side, the church of England has developed freely, making always the same appeal to the unalterable testimony of antiquity.’²⁶ Then came Jewel’s challenge and the canons of 1571.²⁷ That appeal to the Fathers was part of an English exceptionalism, which the Elizabethan settlement had preserved against continental extremist influences. It was no accident that Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of Canterbury had been a great student of the Fathers.²⁸ In the twentieth century, continental Roman Catholic writers have gladly repeated this insular thesis, in many cases with quite obvious arri`ere-pens´ees. In contrast to Manning, they did not now mean to warn against Anglican patristics but rather to hint that these had been a natural preparation for conversion. Whereas the continental Reformation was a brutal break with the past, Anglicanism had consistently cultivated ‘conservatism’. Cranmer, Jewel, the canons of 1571 expressed a wholly different attitude from Daill´e’s ‘sneaking’ attempt to discredit the Fathers. Despite ‘Puritanism’ and then the ‘patristic decay’ of the eighteenth century, there remained a ‘red thread’ which, ‘from the Reformation up to the nineteenth century, continued to trace the way of tradition among the weakened positions of Protestantism’.²⁹ The ecumenical movement that has developed since the second Vatican council has modified to some extent this confessional agenda: it certainly has not suppressed it.³⁰ To present the role of patristics ‘in Anglicanism ²⁵ Sabine Baring-Gould, The Church Revival: Thoughts thereon and Reminiscences (London, 1914), 54–5 and 75. ²⁶ A. J. Mason, The Church of England and Episcopacy (Cambridge, 1914), 3. ²⁷ Ibid. 3–10. ²⁸ J. Bass Mullinger, s.v. ‘Parker’, DNB, xv. 254: ‘To these patristic studies, indeed, we may fairly attribute that greater moderation of spirit which he exhibited in questions of doctrine in after life and his dislike of the intolerance which characterised the Marian exiles on their return to England.’ ²⁹ D. Gorce, ‘Les P`eres et le Mouvement d’Oxford’, in K. Aland and F. L. Cross (eds.), Studia patristica, i: Papers Presented to the Second International Conference on Patristic Studies Held at Christ Church, Oxford, 1955 (Berlin, 1957), 621–32 (‘sournoise’, 622). The image of the ‘red thread’ is borrowed from Baring-Gould. ³⁰ G. H. Tavard, The Quest for Catholicity: A Study in Anglicanism (London, 1963) thus undertook ‘to investigate the notion of Catholicity as it has developed in Anglicanism, from the Reformation to the beginning of the twentieth century’ (p. vii: note the implied

Introduction

7

since its beginning’ as a model for the reconciliation of Churches³¹ may be more congenial to present feelings than Manning’s intransigent tirades: it is no more conducive to a historical understanding of the appeal to the Fathers in the seventeenth century.³² The remarkable persistence of the Tractarian perspective was again attested in 2001 by Fathers and Anglicans, a book of haute vulgarisation written by Arthur Middleton, an Anglican clergyman, with a preface by the current Bishop of London. Part I is devoted to ‘Fathers and Reformers’, then come ‘Fathers and Carolines’, then ‘Objections and Responses’—mostly (in 2001!) a confutation of Daill´e —and lastly ‘Rediscovering the Fathers’, from the Tractarians to the present. The central thesis is that ‘the appeal to the Fathers has been a seminal feature of the Anglican theological tradition since the sixteenth century’ and gives Anglicanism its ‘peculiar character’.³³ The book is chiefly interesting as a compendium of AngloCatholic historiographical commonplaces. It has a wholly unhistorical conception, not only of ‘Anglicanism’, but of ‘the Fathers’ as well, as if there were a single, unambiguous, undisputed set of beliefs and attitudes which could be labelled ‘patristic’—‘a patristic mind’.³⁴ The phrase may be no bad summary of what the Oxford Movement was primarily looking for in its study of the Fathers: ‘their great fundamental principles, and their peculiar character and spirit, or what is sometimes called their ethos.’ Newman contrasted this approach to a merely historical one, which used ‘the writings of Christian antiquity as historical records’, and which he considered sadly deficient.³⁵ Restoration divines, however, consistently considered the Fathers in that light, as reliable witnesses whose credit was no different from, say, that of profane writers when they tell us teleology). The ecumenical perspective (see ibid.) was stressed even more strongly in the preface to the French edition, La Poursuite de la catholicit´e: ´etude sur la pens´ee anglicane (Paris, 1965), 7–9. ³¹ F. Frost, ‘Patristique et œcum´enisme’, in L’Influence de la patristique sur la pens´ee religieuse anglaise (Paris, 1983), 36. ³² For useful warnings against neo-confessional ‘irenical’ history, see e.g. M. Carbonnier-Burkard’s review of J. Delumeau and T. Wanegffelen, Naissance et affirmation de la R´eforme (Paris, 1996), in Bulletin de la Soci´et´e de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Franc¸ais, 145 (1999), 210; C. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986), 196–7 n. 5. ³³ A. Middleton, Fathers and Anglicans: The Limits of Orthodoxy (Leominster, 2001), 6–7. ³⁴ See Bishop Chartres’s preface, ibid., p. vii. As far as I can see, this ‘patristic mind’ is identified with a particular modern interpretation of Eastern Orthodox theology. The notion has been taken up by J. Pinnington, Anglicans and Orthodox: Unity and Subversion 1559–1725 (Leominster, 2003), passim. ³⁵ Newman’s review of Edward Burton’s History of the Christian Church (1836), as quoted by Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 113.

8

Introduction

of the events of their time. Newman himself, when he was concerned to stress the continuity of the appeal to the Fathers in the Church of England, took care to present it in a thoroughly historical manner (though he maintained that the aim of such an historical enquiry was to determine not merely the beliefs but also ‘the spirit and temper of Apostolic Christianity’).³⁶ Newman’s claim that the Fathers ought to be consulted ‘not separately, but as our Reformed Church ever has done, together’, begged many questions.³⁷ It needed an elaborate discursive construction to turn, in Milton’s famous phrase, ‘whatsoever time, or the heedlesse hand of blind chance, hath drawne down from of old to this present, in her huge dragnet, whether Fish, or Sea-weed, Shells, or Shrubbs, unpickt, unchosen’ into ‘the Fathers’.³⁸ There were fierce debates during the early modern period as to the reality, or at least the practical possibility of ascertaining the reality, of a ‘unanimous teaching of the Fathers’ which, as opposed to their individual opinions, might be considered authoritative. The very notion of ‘the Fathers’ changed over time. The working definition on which scholars have agreed since the nineteenth century (and which restricts the name to the Christian writers of the first six centuries) more or less coincides with the chronological boundaries drawn by early modern Protestants but leaves aside the theological implications that these had, which amounted to nothing less than an overall interpretation of church history. Even when one limits oneself to the writers of the first six centuries, there is no historical instance of a theological system that pays equal attention to all. Syntheses are bound to differ greatly, depending on which authors are given special attention. Hardly anything could be more palpably wrong than Pusey’s claim that, contrary to continental Reformers, the Church of England had a record of undivided attention to all the Fathers.³⁹ The Tractarians privileged the fourth century, as is clearly shown by the list of authors selected for translation in the ‘Library of the Fathers’, among whom Augustine and Chrysostom took pride of place. Pusey himself declared the Fathers of the ³⁶ See Newman’s preface to Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical lectures, pp. xv–xvi: ‘It seems hardly conceivable that a fact so public and so great as the religion of the first Christians, should be incapable of ascertainment, at least in its outlines … Under a sense of this improbability, in other words with an expectation that historical research would supply what they sought, our Divines at and since the Reformation have betaken themselves to the extant documents of the early Church.’ On the ambiguity of this text, see the perceptive analysis by S. Thomas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge, 1991), 200–1. ³⁷ Newman’s preface to Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical lectures, p. xvii. ³⁸ John Milton, Of Prelatical Episcopacy [June or July 1641], in Complete Prose Works, i (New Haven, 1953), 626. ³⁹ Pusey’s preface to The Confessions of S. Augustine, p. xvii.

Introduction

9

fourth century more ‘Catholic’ than their ante-Nicene predecessors.⁴⁰ The later ‘Ante-Nicene Christian Library’ was a Scotch Presbyterian initiative.⁴¹ Seventeenth-century English scholarship, by contrast, was heavily biased towards the ante-Nicene Fathers: witness the series of editions printed in Oxford from Patrick Young’s prima Clementis (1633) to Johann Ernst Grabe’s edition of Irenaeus (1700)—the preference for the fourth century as ‘the golden age of the Church’ was then typical of French Gallicans. In his 1845 Cambridge lectures On the Right Use of the Early Fathers, John James Blunt, a ‘moderate High Churchman’ of the old cast, still stressed ‘the importance of reading, not all the Fathers of every age, so much as the Fathers of the first three centuries’.⁴² He quoted at length Henry Dodwell’s complaint, in his 1689 Dissertationes in Irenaeum, that ‘the old ante-Nicene Fathers’, who should have been the true ‘rule of orthodoxy’, had been supplanted by the Fathers of the fourth and subsequent centuries.⁴³ The appeal of ‘our reformers’ to such later Fathers Blunt attributed to ‘early habit as Romanists, and … a disposition to meet their antagonists on their own grounds’.⁴⁴ Even better-informed writers than the Reverend Arthur Middleton have tended to approach the early modern appeal to the Fathers in a retrospective manner, in quest, if not of a model, at least of an inspiration for their own times. The institutional survival within the English academic system, as opposed to countries like France, of ‘ecclesiastical history’, that is of history written within a theological framework and with a theological perspective, may have been one of the reasons. To twentieth- or twentyfirst-century Anglicans struggling to define their religious identity, the Caroline divines have often provided a much-needed anchorage. Archbishop McAdoo thus looked to the seventeenth century as the era of a distinctly ‘Anglican approach’, based on a balance between Scripture, antiquity, and ⁴⁰ Liddon, Life of Pusey, i. 435–6; R. W. Pfaff, ‘The Library of the Fathers: The Tractarians as Patristic Translators’, Studies in Philology, 70 (1973), 329–44. The recent study of the ‘Library of the Fathers’ by B. Horne, ‘Church and Nation: Newman and the Tractarians’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 5 (2005), 25–40, which ignores Pfaff ’s work, contributes nothing new. ⁴¹ Though the editors did not seek to impose any Presbyterian orthodoxy: see R. W. Pfaff, ‘Anglo-American Patristic Translations 1866–1900’, JEH 28 (1977), 39–44. ⁴² J. J. Blunt, On the Right Use of the early Fathers: Two Series of Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge (2nd edn., London, 1858), 1st series [1845], 51. ‘Moderate High Churchman’ is how Blunt is described by J. D. Pickles, ODNB, vi. 355; he opposed attempts to admit Dissenters to Cambridge degrees. ⁴³ Blunt, Right Use of the Early Fathers, 101–2, translating Henry Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum (Oxford, 1689), 408–9. ⁴⁴ J. J. Blunt, Two Introductory Lectures on the study of the early Fathers delivered in the University of Cambridge (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1856), 1st lecture [1840], 33.

10

Introduction

reason.⁴⁵ The thesis was lucidly and attractively put, and it has been very influential—I succumbed to its charms in a youthful essay.⁴⁶ It was echoed by Gareth Vaughan Bennett in his survey on ‘patristic tradition in Anglican thought’.⁴⁷ For Bennett, the genuine Anglican method had been distorted by High Church divines like George Bull, who used antiquity in a rigid, dogmatic way and who later exercised an unhappy influence on the Tractarians: who knows but that poor Newman would have remained in the established Church, had he chanced to read Taylor instead of Bull?⁴⁸ It was left to Charles Gore to restate the true Anglican position, though the fight was still going on.⁴⁹ The entire history of the English appeal to the Fathers was thus made to converge into a trend of Anglo-Catholicism—a segment within a segment. It is obvious that—here as in the rest of his historical work—G. V. Bennett had in mind his own position within the Church of England.⁵⁰ In the famous text that set in chain events that led to his taking his own life, Bennett deplored ‘the decline of a distinctive Anglican theological method’, which was ordered to the needs of the living Church. Instead, ‘new theologians’ now ‘wish to study both Scripture ⁴⁵ H. R. McAdoo, The Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1965): on the appeal to antiquity, see 316–414. The author had already advanced this view in John Bramhall and Anglicanism: 1663–1963 (Dublin, 1964)—note the revealing title. He was a clergyman in the Church of Ireland and ended his career as Archbishop of Dublin from 1977 until 1985. ⁴⁶ J.-L. Quantin, ‘The Fathers in Seventeenth-Century Anglican Theology’, in I. Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists (Leiden, 1997), ii. 987–1008. ⁴⁷ G. V. Bennett, ‘Patristic Tradition in Anglican Thought 1660–1900’, in G. Gassmann and V. Vajta (eds.), Tradition in Luthertum und Anglikanismus [OEcumenica 1971/2] (G¨utersloh, 1972), 63–85. On the author’s tendency to award good and bad marks to past divines, see e.g. 76: ‘Waterland’s works were sound and judicious.’ It is significant that S. L. Greenslade’s contribution on the sixteenth century in the same volume, ‘The Authority of the Tradition of the Early Church in Early Anglican Thought’, 9–33, is much less theologically oriented. ⁴⁸ Bennett, ‘Patristic Tradition’, 82: ‘Perhaps in coming so late to a study of the Caroline divines Newman had failed to grasp their distinctive theological method, and he had laid hold of George Bull as a true representative of the Anglican use of antiquity.’ Compare the high value ascribed to Bull in P. E. More and F. L. Cross (eds.), Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1935), 247–56. ⁴⁹ Bennett, ‘Patristic Tradition’, 85: ‘His [Gore’s] assumptions were questioned in his own day, and are even more obviously in peril in ours. The appeal to antiquity remains very much a part of the Anglican position, but the basis and validity of that appeal remains a topic of debate—not least among Anglicans themselves.’ ⁵⁰ See B. W. Young, ‘Religious History and the Eighteenth-Century Historian’, HJ 43 (2000), 853–4.

Introduction

11

and the patristic age without reference to the apologetic patterns of later Christianity’.⁵¹ It is no accident that writers of the Anglo-Catholic school had more interest in the theological principle of the appeal to the Fathers than in the history of patristic scholarship—relation to historical and philological scholarship was indeed a major difference between seventeenth- and nineteenth-century theology. They commonly took it for granted that patristic studies were of their very nature ‘Catholic’ and contented themselves with quoting Bishop Hall’s phrase Stupor mundi Clerus Britannus, ‘the British clergy is the amazement of the world’.⁵² At most, they wrote sketches like Owen Chadwick’s: ‘As the sixteenth century drew towards its end, patristic scholarship became more effective. The Lutherans held the way; the Catholics followed.... In short, it may be repeated, the advance of patristic scholarship befriended the conservative and traditionalistic elements everywhere in Protestantism; and nowhere more significantly than within the Church of England.’⁵³ This summary is not only very general. Inasmuch as it appears to imply that there could be no such thing as Calvinist patristics, it is patently misleading. At the end of the sixteenth century, Heidelberg was much more significant than Oxford as a centre of patristic studies. Canon Frank Cross’s 1948 survey of Oxford patristics was an exception. It was sparing in overt confessional statements (it insisted rather on the practical necessity for a modern scholar to have ‘some understanding of the history of his subject’ in order to avail himself of ancient editions).⁵⁴ The conclusion, however, was religious, suggesting that ‘the same spirit’ of the Fathers that influenced Newman ‘may perhaps have a message for us in Oxford also today’.⁵⁵ This was an announcement of Cross’s major achievement, the International Conferences on Patristic Studies that have taken place in Oxford every four years since 1951. Their success has been alleged in its turn as an instance of ⁵¹ G. V. Bennett, ‘Preface to Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1987–1988’, in id., To the Church of England (Worthing, 1988), 199–200. ⁵² So e.g. Baring-Gould, Church Revival, 55; T. A. Lacey, Herbert Thorndike, 1598–1672 (London, 1929), 5. ⁵³ O. Chadwick’s introduction to The Mind of the Oxford Movement (London, 1960), 17. ⁵⁴ F. L. Cross, ‘Patristic Study at Oxford: Presidential Address (read in substance, Oct. 21 1948)’, Oxford Society of Historical Theology: Abstract of Proceedings for the Academic Year 1948–1949 (Oxford, for private circulation), 5–26. This is still the only overall view in print, though very difficult to meet with. ⁵⁵ Ibid. 26. The concluding paragraphs of L. W. Barnard, ‘The Use of the Patristic Tradition in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century’, in R. Bauckham and B. Drewery (eds.), Scripture, Tradition and Reason: A Study in the Criteria of Christian Doctrine. Essays in Honour of Richard P. C. Hanson (Edinburgh, 1998), 202–3, are quite in the same vein.

12

Introduction

the special relation to the Fathers characteristic of Anglicanism.⁵⁶ Cross belonged to the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England. In 1933, while librarian of Pusey House, he published in the Oxford Movement Centenary Series a little book on the Movement and the seventeenth century: The seventeenth century was an epoch in which the Fathers had been widely read and respected.... Consequently, to appeal immediately to the seventeenth century was to appeal mediately to the Fathers, and thus the Tractarians, in advocating a return to the theology of the seventeenth century, were but reiterating in another form their demand for a return to the Primitive Church.⁵⁷

Two years later, Cross co-edited a large volume of extracts from seventeenth-century divines, arranged so as to give an impression of harmony and coherence, under the title ‘Anglicanism’.⁵⁸ In the historical introduction, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, is labelled ‘a great friend of Laud’s’ and readers are reminded that ‘his defence of prayers for the Dead [more exactly, his historical demonstration that praying for the dead, as it was practised in antiquity, had nothing to do with the doctrine of purgatory] was reprinted in 1836 as one of the Tracts of the Times [sic]’.⁵⁹ But the Tract in question added an account of the suppression of petitions for the dead in the second Edwardian Prayer Book, excerpted from the highly sacerdotalist Ecclesiastical History of the Nonjuror Jeremy Collier: the change was largely blamed on ‘Calvin, who thought himself wiser than the Ancient Church, and fit to dictate religion to all countries in Christendom’.⁶⁰ Such an animus against Calvin and such longing for the first Book of Common Prayer were foreign to Ussher, who studied the ancient Church in a spirit very different from both the Nonjurors and the Tractarians. In making Calvin’s nefarious interference responsible for the alteration of the Prayer Book, Collier was actually following ⁵⁶ See Middleton, Fathers and Anglicans, 11–12. ⁵⁷ F. L. Cross, The Oxford Movement and the Seventeenth Century (London, 1933), 8. ⁵⁸ More and Cross (eds.), Anglicanism. The work was announced at the end of The Oxford Movement and the Seventeenth Century, 79. ⁵⁹ F. R. Arnott, ‘Anglicanism in the Seventeenth Century’, in More and Cross (eds.), Anglicanism, p. lvii. See ‘Tracts for the Times no. 72. Archbishop Ussher on prayers for the dead’, in Tracts for the Times: By members of the University of Oxford. Volume III. for 1835–6 (new edn., London, 1839), reproducing James Ussher, An Answer to a Challenge made by a Jesuite in Ireland. Wherein the iudgement of Antiquity in the Points Questioned is Truely Delivered, and the Noveltie of the now Romish doctrine Plainly Discovered (Dublin, 1624), 182–252. ⁶⁰ ‘Tracts for the Times no. 72’, 57, quoting Jeremy Collier, An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, chiefly of England, ii (London, 1714), 309.

Introduction

13

the ultra-Laudian controversialist Peter Heylyn⁶¹—who had been highly critical of Ussher as ‘a professed Calvinian’.⁶² The historian who studies the uses and deformations of Christian antiquity in the seventeenth century can hardly complain that seventeenthcentury authors should in their turn have been appropriated by later generations of divines for their own purposes. ‘The study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present’ may well be what Christian theology at all times has been all about. For historians, however, since Herbert Butterfield, that practice has a name: it is called whig history, and it is our corporate belief that its results are bound to be unhappy. ‘The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history, starting with the simplest of them, the anachronism.’⁶³ The early modern appeal to the Fathers cannot be understood unless it is studied for its own sake and in its own terms, as an intellectual and religious trend which had some significance at the time—which mobilized a great deal of energy, occasioned passionate controversies, and had a number of consequences. The seventeenth-century Church of England claimed to be the most faithful to antiquity, and to the beliefs and practices of the primitive Christians, of all the Christian Churches in the world. Increasing emphasis on the authority of the Fathers was an important factor in the construction of a distinct confessional identity in England. It is for this reason (and not because such a study might be of help to the present Church of England or to any other denomination), that it deserves to be studied. The last decades have been marked by a general reaction against the Tractarian reconstruction of the Anglican past.⁶⁴ The ‘marginalization of ecclesiastical history’ which had been going on in English historiography, and indeed everywhere in the Western world, since the 1960s, helped to clear the way.⁶⁵ At one end, historians of the English Reformation have overwhelmingly rejected the exceptionalist thesis. Henry VIII certainly ⁶¹ Peter Heylyn, Ecclesia Restaurata: or, the History of the Reformation of the Church of England (London, 1661), i. 65 and 107. ⁶² Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus: or, the History of the Life and Death, of the most Reverend and Renowned Prelate William by Divine Providence Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1668), 215–16. ⁶³ H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York, 1965: 1st edn. 1931), 11 and 31–2. ⁶⁴ See e.g. the introduction of N. Yates, Building, Faith, and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600–1900 (rev. edn., Oxford, 2000), 2–11. ⁶⁵ Young, ‘Religious History’, 862–3. For a similar trend in France, see B. Neveu, ‘Histoire religieuse et spiritualit´e dans XVIIe si`ecle (1949–1997)’, XVIIe si`ecle, 203 (1999), 261–2.

14

Introduction

spoke the language of the middle way to legitimize his religious policies, most famously in his address to Parliament on Christmas Eve 1545, when he blamed both conservatives and reformers for religious hatreds in England (‘some be to styff in their old Mumpsimus, other be to busy and curious in their newe Sumpsimus’).⁶⁶ Such rhetoric had been part of the traditional representation of orthodoxy from the patristic period,⁶⁷ but its very popularity cautions against taking it at face value.⁶⁸ The Henrician settlement has often been characterized as ‘Catholicism without the Pope’, though it could perhaps as well be called ‘Lutheranism without justification by faith’, and it included aspects, especially selective iconoclasm, that went beyond Luther.⁶⁹ Its precarious balance was the result of a trial of strength, as conservatives and reformers attempted to manipulate (and at the same time were manipulated by) the King, and it was significantly determined by diplomatic considerations, that is, ultimately, by the changing politicomilitary scene on the Continent.⁷⁰ The settlement was so fraught with contradictions as to become unsustainable as soon as the King was no longer there to impose it. Religious traditionalists discovered this to their cost under Edward VI.⁷¹ Archbishop Cranmer was then able to promote his own version of the via media, which differed much from that of Henry.⁷² This was basically what Elizabeth restored in 1559, though in an idiosyncratic way—she re-established the Church of England as it had stood in September 1552, ignoring the developments of Edward’s last months.⁷³ There remained therefore a large amount of continuity with pre-Reformation times, primarily in ecclesiastical structures. Theology was ⁶⁶ See P. Marshall, ‘Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus: The Intellectual Origins of a Henrician bon mot’, JEH 52 (2001), 512–20. ⁶⁷ For patristic descriptions of orthodoxy as via media, particularly on the doctrine of the Trinity (the Church standing between Arius and Sabellius), see e.g. John Chrysostom, De sacerdotio, 4. 4 (SC 272, 258); Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio II (apologetica), 36 (PG 35, 444); id., Oratio XX, 5 (PG 35, 1072). ⁶⁸ Compare e.g. the language of the via media in Gallican writers, studied by A. Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe si`ecle (Paris, 2002), esp. 159–61. ⁶⁹ See A. Ryrie, ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, JEH 53 (2002), 64–92. ⁷⁰ See G. Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford, 1990). ⁷¹ D. MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (Harmondsworth, 2001: 1st edn. 1999), 4–6 and 116–19. For a not wholly convincing claim that Henry VIII was indeed following a coherent programme, see G. W. Bernard, ‘The Making of Religious Policy, 1533–1546: Henry VIII and the Search for the Middle Way’, HJ 41 (1998), 321–49, now fully developed in id., The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven, 2005). ⁷² See D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, 1996), in the index, s.v. ‘Via media’. ⁷³ Ibid. 620–2.

Introduction

15

nonetheless firmly Protestant and the latent contradiction was slow to appear in its full implications. Although there were divergencies of approaches within the Church, with so-called ‘Puritans’ advocating a closer alignment to continental Reformed models, it would not do to conceive ‘Anglicans’ and ‘Puritans’ as two well-defined cohesive groups with opposed doctrines. The Elizabethan Church rested on a broad Reformed consensus, which, together with a shared anti-Romanism, helped to preserve its coherence despite conflicts and crises. The great majority of Puritan ministers rejected separation and continued within the established structures with some degree of inner dissent and the tacit connivance of quite a number of bishops, who preferred to let sleeping dogs lie.⁷⁴ The moot point is how and why this Elizabethan consensus collapsed in the times of Charles I and Archbishop Laud, but the lesson is clear: one should guard against the tendency to read seventeenth-century High Churchmanship back into the Reformation period. At the other end, Newman’s ‘last miserable century, which has given us to start from a much lower level and with much less to spare than a Churchman in the 17th century’⁷⁵ has proved under close scrutiny, if not without serious weaknesses, at least more religiously intense and pastorally efficient than its dark legend.⁷⁶ In 1833, when Keble preached his sermon on national apostasy, the Church of England was no latitudinarian wilderness. A powerful High Church tradition was still alive. Its exponents’ relations with the Oxford Movement were at best ambiguous and, as time went on, often became frankly hostile. The approach to antiquity was one of the points of disagreement. The Fathers were not ‘rediscovered’: they had never been forgotten, but the Tractarians now appealed to them in a new, more systematic way. In so doing, old High Churchmen complained, the Tractarians departed from the pattern set by seventeenth-century divines.⁷⁷ ⁷⁴ P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967); id., Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983); id., ‘England and International Calvinism 1558–1640’, in M. Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985), esp. 213–22; id., ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’, in O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel, and N. Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), 51–76; P. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982). For a lucid summary, see D. MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England 1547–1603 (New York, 1990). ⁷⁵ Newman to R. W. Church, 25 December 1841, quoted by himself in Apologia, 148. ⁷⁶ See J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (eds.), The Church of England c.1689– c.1833. From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), esp. J. Walsh and S. Taylor’s introduction, 1–64. For warnings against too rosy a picture, see M. F. Snape, The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2003). ⁷⁷ Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, esp. 104–45.

16

Introduction

The historiography of the seventeenth-century Church of England has definitely broken with the Anglo-Catholic vulgate. The very idea of an ‘Anglican principle’, ‘spirit’, or ‘method’ has been exposed as unhistorical.⁷⁸ The via media, moderation, irenicism have been convincingly analysed as rhetorical strategies.⁷⁹ ‘Orthodoxy’ has been deconstructed. That elusive notion, and its inseparable foil, ‘heterodoxy’, came to the fore in theological discourses as a direct consequence of ‘confessionalization’ and of the building of exclusive Churches, for which, in the seventeenth century, inner dissent—the snake in the grass—became the major worry.⁸⁰ The way the pair was made to operate is encapsulated in Laud’s famous note in his diary for April 1625, concerning the drawing up for Buckingham (and via Buckingham for Charles I) of a list of ‘clergymen marked with the Letters O and P’, that is, ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Puritan’.⁸¹ The boundaries were periodically shifted as rival versions of the orthodoxy of the Church of England struggled for prominence.⁸² For the Puritan William Prynne, Laud’s ‘Orthodox’ clergymen were only ‘orthodox in his sence, to wit ⁷⁸ The point has been ably made by J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991), 394–6. ⁷⁹ The theme runs through much of the work of Peter Lake. For exemplary case studies see P. Lake, ‘Robert Some and the Ambiguities of Moderation’, ARG 71 (1980), 254–78; id., ‘Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson’, JBS 27 (1988), 81–116; id., ‘The Moderate and Irenic Case for Religious War: Joseph Hall’s Via Media in Context’, in S. D. Amussen and M. A. Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), 55–83. See also L. A. Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625 (Stanford, Calif., 1998), 70. ⁸⁰ See A. Dupront, ‘R´eflexions sur l’h´er´esie moderne’ (1967), repr. in id., Gen`eses des temps modernes: Rome, les R´eformes et le Nouveau Monde (Paris, 2001), 113–21; M. de Certeau, ‘L’histoire religieuse du XVIIe si`ecle: probl`emes de m´ethode’, Recherches de science religieuse, 57 (1969), 232–5; J. Le Brun, ‘Orthodoxie et h´et´erodoxie: l’´emergence de la notion dans le discours th´eologique a` l’´epoque moderne’, in S. Elm, E. Rebillard, and A. Romano (eds.), Orthodoxie, christianisme, histoire (Rome, 2000), 333–42; B. Neveu, ‘Orthodoxie et innovation’, ibid., esp. 386–7; I. Maclean, ‘Introduction’ to J. Brooke and I. Maclean (eds.), Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion (Oxford, 2005), pp. x–xxi. ⁸¹ Laud’s diary for 5 April 1625, in The History of the troubles and tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God, and Blessed Martyr, William Laud, Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury. Wrote by Himself, during his Imprisonment in the Tower. To which is prefixed the Diary of his own Life faithfully and entirely Published from the Original Copy, ed. Henry Wharton (London, 1695), 16: ‘Schedulam exhibui, in qua Nomina erant uirorum Ecclesiasticorum sub Literis, O & P.’ See D. Brautigam, ‘Prelates and Politics: Uses of ‘‘Puritan’’, 1625–40’, in L. L. Knoppers (ed.), Puritanism and its Discontents (Newark, Del., 2003), 49–66, esp. 63 n. 7. ⁸² See esp. K. Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Politics: Archbishop Abbot’s Defence of Protestant Orthodoxy’, Historical Research, 61 (1988), 36–64; A. Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’, HJ 41 (1998), 625–51;

Introduction

17

Arminians, or persons addicted to Popish Errors and Superstitions’, that is in effect ‘unorthodox’.⁸³ The new religious trends that have been variously labelled Arminianism, Laudianism, or Carolinism indeed attempted a major and aggressive reconstruction of orthodoxy.⁸⁴ As a result the very identity of the Church of England was reinvented.⁸⁵ The importance of Christian antiquity as an inspiration and a caution for these trends, and later for the re-establishment of an exclusive episcopalian Church, has often been noted, but no comprehensive treatment has been attempted.⁸⁶ It is as if historians had been so used to theological hegemony in the field that they did not dare to enter it. It has also to be said—and this would seem today to apply to theologians as well—that the subject cannot be adequately treated without a working knowledge of Latin and Greek. Not only—as some recent sad examples testify—is it impossible to understand P. Lake and M. Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000). ⁸³ William Prynne, Canterburies Doome: Or the first part of a compleat History of the Commitment, Charge, Tryall, Condemnation, Execution of William Laud, late Arch-Bishop of Canterbury.... Wherein this Arch-Prelates manifold Trayterous Artifices to usher in Popery by Degrees, are cleerly detected, and the Ecclesiasticall History of our Church-Affaires, during his Pontificall Domination, faithfully presented to the publike View of the World (London, 1646), 367. ⁸⁴ N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (paperback edn., Oxford, 1990; 1st edn. 1987); J. Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism (Oxford, 1992); A. Milton, ‘The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach’, in T. Cogswell, R. Cust, and P. Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), 162–84. The major attempt to deny this and to resurrect the Anglican via media has been P. White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992), but (though some of his points against too simple a Calvinist/Arminian model are valid) his general interpretation has been convincingly refuted. See P. Lake, ‘Predestinarian Propositions’, JEH 46 (1995), 110–23; N. Tyacke, ‘Anglican Attitudes: Some Recent Writings on English Religious History, from the Reformation to the Civil War’ (1996), repr. in id., Aspects of English Protestantism c.1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), 176–202, esp. 180–9. ⁸⁵ A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995). ⁸⁶ See e.g. H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Archbishop Laud in Retrospect’ (1978), repr. in id., From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (London, 1992), 137 and 141; D. D. Wallace, Jr., Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), 98; Davies, Caroline Captivity of the Church, 51–4; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 272–7; P. Lake, ‘The Laudians and the Argument from Authority’, in B. Y. Kunze and D. D. Brautigan (eds.), Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early Modern British History in Honour of Perez Zagorin (Rochester, 1992), 149–75; Spurr, Restoration Church, 129–30, 139–40, 158; G. S. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2005), 156–7; R. A. Beddard, ‘Tory Oxford’, in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 874–5.

18

Introduction

early modern theological controversies on the basis of a purely English corpus, but it is necessary, even when dealing with English texts, to trace and check precisely their patristic quotations. The theological culture of the time was profoundly textual. As Bassanio observed: ‘In religion, | What damned error, but some sober brow | Will bless it and approve it with a text’⁸⁷—from Scripture, primarily, but also from the Fathers. All debates, including that on the authority of the Fathers, involved a limited number of patristic proof-texts, which recurred again and again. What changed was the way these texts were applied and combined. Indeed, the early modern appeal to the Fathers was not only, and perhaps not primarily, a doctrine. It was an art of manipulating authorities, as part of what might be termed a technology of truth.⁸⁸ Philology, rather than being an independent discipline, became a set of tools for theologians: to declare a text apocryphal, interpolated, or corrupted was one of the standard ways to neutralize it. To keep citing as Cyprian’s a work that most critics had declared to be much later than Cyprian, or to quote a passage of Chrysostom in a Latin translation only, without referring to the Greek original, was not culturally neutral. Present historians who eschew such discussions because of their technical character, and who attempt to write the history of theological controversies with no reference at all to the history of patristic scholarship, are bound to be superficial. The present study has attempted to fill this lacuna. Considerations of feasibility made a choice necessary. Either one could concentrate on a coherent period—the space of a generation, say the Restoration—and consider the reception of the Fathers under as many dimensions as possible, including their role in sermons, devotional literature, pastoral work. This was the option taken in a previous work on late seventeenth-century France.⁸⁹ Or one could settle for a longer stretch and a more focused perspective. When and how did the appeal to the Fathers become central to the apologetics of the Church of England? Since Tractarian historiography had been so bent on presenting Anglicanism as a monolith throughout the centuries, the second option appeared to be potentially the more helpful. The terminus ad quem appeared obvious: by 1689, as far as principles were ⁸⁷ The Merchant of Venice, . ii. 77–9 (ed. M. M. Mahood, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (2003), 128). ⁸⁸ On technologie de la v´erit´e, see Michel Foucault’s ‘short history of truth’ in Le Pouvoir psychiatrique: cours au Coll`ege de France, 1973–1974, ed. J. Lagrange (Paris, 2003), 235–47, summarized in id., ‘La Maison des fous’ [1975], in Dits et e´crits, 1954–1988, ii (Paris, 1994), 693–8. Foucault distinguishes between ‘truth-knowledge’ and ‘truth-event’. Theological controversy, especially when conducted through public conferences, had many traits of the second mode. ⁸⁹ J.-L. Quantin, Le Catholicisme classique et les P`eres de l’Eglise: un retour aux sources (1669–1713) (Paris, 1999).

Introduction

19

concerned, the case for tradition in the Church of England had reached its final form. Later divines, especially among Nonjurors, drew many new and controversial consequences, departing ever further from what had been Protestant orthodoxy, but they brought hardly any new argument to justify the appeal to the Fathers. As for the terminus a quo, seventeenth-century divines referred so often to sixteenth-century figures and texts that it was hardly possible not to begin with Cranmer. My perspective, however, has been throughout that of a seventeenth-century historian. A study of Elizabethan theology for its own sake, and at greater length than was possible here, would no doubt give a more complex picture. Moreover, this is a work on the established Church. Although I have systematically read both sides in every controversy, I am well aware that I have not done full justice to recusants or Dissenters. The choice of an extended chronology entailed no small difficulty of vocabulary. To speak of ‘Anglicans’ appears no major anachronism for the Restoration, when many champions of the Church of England unambiguously claimed for it a unique position in Christendom.⁹⁰ An important recent study has interpreted the religious history of the period as largely a conflict between ‘Anglicans’ and ‘Reformed Protestants’, that is those, whether Dissenters or more or less regular conformists, whose theology and ecclesiology were still informed by the European Reformed tradition.⁹¹ This dichotomy is much less true of earlier periods, and most historians of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church now avoid the word ‘Anglican’. Since to introduce it suddenly in the last chapters of this book would have been tantamount to prejudging its conclusion, I preferred to exclude it altogether. I have used indifferently ‘Roman Catholic’, ‘Roman’, and ‘popish’ to describe the See of Rome after the council of Trent, its doctrines, and its adherents. As to ‘Catholic’ as opposed both to ‘Protestant’ and to ‘Roman’, though there are occasional instances in the seventeenth century of people using it to describe a religious identity defined by the appeal to antiquity,⁹² the word has since acquired so many overtones, and ⁹⁰ See e.g. Spurr, Restoration Church, pp. xiii–xiv. ⁹¹ De Krey, London and the Restoration, esp. 5 n. 5, 156–7, 274 n. 5, 377. ⁹² For an explicit statement, see Peter Heylyn, Theologia ueterum (London, 1654), sig. B2r–v : ‘And as old Pacian [ep. 1 ad Sympronianum, 4, PL 13, 1055] used to say, Christianus mihi nomen est, Catholicus cognomen; so I desire it may be also said of me, that Christian is my name, and Catholick my surname. A Catholick in that sense I am, and shall desire by Gods grace to be alwayes such a true English Catholick. And English Catholick I am sure is as good in Grammar, and far more proper in the right meaning of the word, then that of Roman Catholick is, or can be possibly, in any of the Popish party.’ On Heylyn’s reading of the identity of the English Church, see A. Milton, Laudian and royalist polemic in seventeenth-century England: the career and writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007), 228–33. The reference to Pacian was commonplace,

20

Introduction

is today so ambiguous,⁹³ that it seemed better to discard it. It has already been seen why ‘patristic’, as a label for a specific group of early modern Churchmen, was either meaningless or ideological.⁹⁴ ‘Words of distinction’ (as Sir Philip Warwick put it⁹⁵) like ‘Puritans’, ‘Arminians’ or ‘Laudians’, later ‘Latitudinarians’, or High and Low Churchmen, which were used by contemporaries, entail the same difficulties I previously experienced with ‘Jansenists’ or ‘Rigorists’ while working on seventeenth-century Roman Catholicism. They are potentially misleading if they are taken to essentialize fixed identities, to denote coherent doctrinal systems or even organized parties. They may rightly be used to express trends, ‘movements’,⁹⁶ or even better ‘styles’⁹⁷—a style having been well defined as ‘a synthesis of positions, opinions and modes of affect, constructed by a variety of contemporary groups always in polemical struggle the one with the other’.⁹⁸ It is true in a way that ‘so complex is the psychology of religious belief ’ that classifications are bound to be unsatisfactory,⁹⁹ but the argument, pursued logically, would forbid us from writing religious history at all. I have searched discourses, not hearts and bowels. The French academic exercise (m´emoire d’habilitation) from which this book proceeds had a second part on the growth of patristic scholarship in seventeenth-century England. I hope to rewrite and publish it in its turn.¹⁰⁰ Even thus I am well aware that I shall not have told the full even among Presbyterians: see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 407–8 and cf. 150–7 on various uses of the word ‘Catholic’. ⁹³ See W. S. F. Pickering, Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity (London, 1989), 141–7. ⁹⁴ B. D. Spinks, Sacraments, Ceremonies and the Stuart Divines: Sacramental Theology and Liturgy in England and Scotland 1603–1662 (Aldershot, 2002), 81, thus suggested calling Laudians ‘Patristic Reformed Churchmen’. ⁹⁵ Philip Warwick, Memoirs of the reigne of King Charles I with a continuation to the Happy Restauration of King Charles II (London, 1701), 89. ⁹⁶ C. J. Sommerville, ‘Interpreting Seventeenth-Century English Religion as Movements’, CH 69 (2000), 749–69. ⁹⁷ See e.g. P. Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in K. Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Houndmills, 1993), 161–85. ⁹⁸ Lake and Questier, ‘Introduction’ to eid. (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy, p. xviii. ⁹⁹ White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, p. xiii. ¹⁰⁰ Some results have been published in J.-L. Quantin, ‘Du Chrysostome latin au Chrysostome grec: une histoire europ´eenne (1588–1613)’, in M. Wallraff and R. Br¨andle (eds.), Chrysostomosbilder in 1600 Jahren: Facetten der Wirkungsgeschichte eines Kirchenvaters (Berlin, 2008), 267–346; id., ‘Les J´esuites et l’´erudition anglicane’, XVIIe si`ecle, 237 (2007), 691–711; id., ‘L’Orthodoxie, la censure et la gloire: la difficile e´dition princeps de l’´epître de Barnab´e, de Rome a` Amsterdam (1549–1646)’, in M. Cortesi (ed.), ‘Editiones principes’ delle opere dei Padri greci e latini: atti del Convegno di studi … Firenze, 24–25 ottobre 2003 (Florence, 2006), 103–62; id., ‘Anglican Scholarship gone Mad?

Introduction

21

story of the reception of the Fathers. Their role in shaping and nourishing personal spiritualities, which, for the truly religious mind, would be the most important, has not been considered. I have devoted many pages to the way people argued about the Fathers; none to the way they prayed with them. For someone like Lancelot Andrewes, Christ’s descent into Hell in the literal sense, as taught by the Fathers, was not merely a topic of controversy: it was also a subject of private meditation.¹⁰¹ My study is also clearly biased towards ‘higher’ culture at the expense, for instance, of vernacular translations and devotional literature.¹⁰² I have not tried to discuss to what extent ‘theory informed practice’ and the doctrines considered here could be claimed to be ‘intellectual underpinnings of popular religious observance’.¹⁰³ Some might argue that these limitations reflect my own status as an academic historian, living in a metropolis and enjoying little contact with ‘ordinary people’ or ‘average Christians’.¹⁰⁴ Of my hero Henry Dodwell, it was said in his time that he would have written differently but for his ‘conversing with few but Scholars, and Studying Books more than Men’.¹⁰⁵ Books and scholars, though, have a history too and, partial as this is (but what history is not?), it is hoped that it may shed a new light on some hitherto neglected facets of seventeenth-century England. Henry Dodwell (1641–1711) and Christian Antiquity’, in C. Ligota and J.-L. Quantin (eds.), History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute (Oxford, 2006), 305–56. ¹⁰¹ See The Preces Privatae of Lancelot Andrewes Bishop of Winchester, trans. F. E. Brightman (London, 1903), 186–7. Ancient Christianity was also a major influence on the spiritual life of Little Gidding: see R. Van der Weyer, ‘Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding: A Reappraisal’ and P. Tudor-Craig, ‘Charles I and Little Gidding’, in R. Ollard and P. Tudor-Craig (eds.), For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History (London, 1986), 152–72 and 175–87. On the relationship between theological doctrines and ‘ways-of-being-religious’, see e.g. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, pp. ix, 43–55, 182–90, 194–6. ¹⁰² On which see the thorough study by M. Vessey, ‘English Translations of the Latin Fathers, 1517–1611’, in Backus (ed.), Reception of the Fathers, ii. 775–835. For the latter half of the seventeenth century, see Spurr, ‘ ‘‘A special kindness for dead bishops’’ ’, 319–24. ¹⁰³ Tyacke, Aspects, 13. On the problem of lay appropriation of theological doctrines, see B. Donagan, ‘The York House Conference Revisited: Laymen, Calvinism and Arminianism’, Historical Research, 64 (1991), 312–30. ¹⁰⁴ To use expressions which were fashionable in French historiography of the 1970s. ¹⁰⁵ [Francis Lee], Memoirs of the Life of Mr John Kettlewell (London, 1718), 318.

1 The English Reformation and the Protestant View of Antiquity When Conyers Middleton attempted to reconstruct the genealogy of the appeal to the Fathers in the Church of England, he was especially scornful of Cranmer’s and Ridley’s attempts to defend their faith through patristic testimonies under Queen Mary: ‘it grieves us after all, to see them laboring and gravelled, at a passage of Chrysostom, or Ambrose, or Hilary, etc.’¹ It is still too common an assumption, even among present-day scholars, that the willingness to support one’s case with patristic quotations necessarily implies a commitment to tradition. The interest in the Fathers and the readiness to quote from them which are unmistakable features of sixteenthcentury England, and are confirmed both by the book-buying activities of Oxford and Cambridge colleges and by the surviving inventories of scholars’ libraries,² hardly constituted an original theological position. They were partly a legacy of the medieval style of argumentation from authority, partly manifestations of the new humanist spirit imported from the Continent. Moreover, early modern discourse on all topics, not merely on theology, constantly appealed to the past.³ When Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1533, the young Matthew Parker, later to be Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of Canterbury, had already completed his five-year study of ‘the orthodox ¹ Middleton, Introductory Discourse, 49–50. ² N. R. Ker, ‘Oxford College Libraries in the Sixteenth Century’, Bodleian Library Record, 6 (1959), 480–7, 493–4, 498–9, 506; id., ‘The Provision of Books’, in The Collegiate University, 448–50, 459–61; S. Bush, Jr., and C. J. Rasmussen, The Library of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1584–1637 (Cambridge, 1986), 139–58; P. Gaskell, Trinity College Library: The First 150 Years. The Sandars Lectures 1978–9 (Cambridge, 1980); E. S. Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-Lists from ViceChancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986) (see vol. ii, under the names of individual Fathers). All those editions were continental ones (usually the Basle editions rather than the new Counter-Reformation ones) and had to be imported at considerable cost (see below, 110). ³ See D. R. Woolf, ‘In Praise of Older Things: Notion of Age and Antiquity in Early Modern England’, in A. T. Grafton and J. H. M. Salmon (eds.), Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY, 2001), 123–53 (130–1 on theology).

The English Reformation

23

Fathers and the councils’.⁴ There was nothing specifically English in that. Across Europe, it did not do for a divine to appear to be a stranger to patristic learning, and conformity to antiquity was too valuable an argument for Protestants to abandon to papists. One should not judge continental attitudes from Luther’s controversy with Henry VIII. In the Assertio septem sacramentorum, which he wrote in 1521 with the assistance of a brilliant team of theologians, the King repeatedly produced patristic testimony to confute Luther’s tenets, reflecting ironically on the Reformer’s pretence of finding in the Gospel what ‘so many holy Fathers’ for ‘so many centuries’ had failed to see.⁵ Luther did not mince words in his reply: For, in their perpetual madness they produce against me nothing but statutes of men, glosses of Fathers, practices or rites of past ages, that is the very things that I deny and reject.... I dispute about right and they answer me about fact.... So it happens that I shout: The Gospel, the Gospel, Christ, Christ, and they answer: Fathers, Fathers, usage, usage, statutes, statutes. And when I say that Fathers, usage, statutes are often mistaken, that there is need to arm yourself with a stronger and more reliable authority and that Christ cannot err … they merely reply: ‘Ambrose says so, are you more learned than Ambrose? Are you the only one to have any sense’, as if we were disputing of Ambrose’s learning and mine, or as if I could not myself say: ‘You do not understand Ambrose and you distort his meaning.’⁶

Generations of Roman Catholic divines seized upon such outbursts as evidence of Protestant contempt for antiquity.⁷ The assertion of the principle of sola Scriptura by continental Reformers, if need be in the ⁴ ‘Matthaeus’ in [Matthew Parker], De antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae et priuilegiis Ecclesiae Cantuariensis, cum Archiepiscopis eiusdem 70 ([Lambeth], 1572), as preserved in the Bodl. copy, shelfmark 4◦ Rawl. 593, sep. pagination, 4: ‘In qua [theologia] inuestiganda tanta ardore et studio ferebatur, ut Patrum Orthodoxorum, et conciliorum uolumina, quinque annis diligenter euoluerit [after he had proceeded MA in 1528].’ On variant copies of Parker’s De antiquitate, see below, n. 311. ⁵ Henry VIII, Assertio septem sacramentorum aduersus Martinum Lutherum, ed. P. Fraenkel (M¨unster in West., 1992; Corpus Catholicorum 43), 155. See also 158–61, 182–3, 228–9, 237. ⁶ Martin Luther, Contra Henricum regem Angliae [1522], WA 10/2, 182–3: ‘Nam ipsi perpetua insania perciti contra me nihil mouent nisi statuta hominum, glossas patrum et facta seu ritus saeculorum, ea ipsa sicilicet, quae nego et impugno … Ego de iure disputo, et ipsi de facto mihi respondent.... Ita fit, ut ego clamem: Euangelia, Euangelia, Christus, Christus, ipsi respondeant: Patres, Patres, usus, usus, statuta, statuta, ubi uero dico patres, usum, statuta saepius errasse, oportere eiusmodi firmiore et certiore authoritate munire, Christum uero non posse errare … mihi reddunt: ‘‘Ambrosius sic dicit, Tu ne doctior es Ambrosio? Tu solus sapis?’’ ac praeterea nihil, quasi disputatio nostra sit de doctrina Ambrosii et mea, aut quasi et ego non possim dicere: Tu Ambrosium male intelligis et deprauas.’ ⁷ See e.g. Antonio Possevino, Bibliotheca selecta qua agitur de ratione studiorum in Historia, in Disciplinas, in Salute omnium procuranda (Rome, 1593), l. VII, 474–5; Summa conciliorum omnium, ed. Louis Bail (Paris, 1645), 333–4; Daniel Concina, Ad

24

The English Reformation

most uncompromising terms, should not, however, obscure the fact that, in practice, they all cited the Fathers. Differences of attitudes are to be explained by tempers, intellectual tastes, and also circumstances rather than by rigid dogmatic boundaries. Humanistically trained Reformers like Oecolampadius and Melanchthon were steeped in patristic learning. Even Luther appealed to the Fathers when he thought it necessary.⁸ 1. THE PROTESTANT APPEAL TO THE FATHERS FROM CRANMER TO JEWEL It would require a whole book to examine all the disputes in Reformation England that discussed patristic texts. Theologians of all sides had been trained to argue with testimonia, proof-texts taken from the Fathers. A ‘testimony’ was a textual unit, of varying length, deemed to be unequivocal on a single doctrinal issue. Each side produced its own series (‘proofs’) and then attempted to explain away those of its adversary (‘objections’). The method scarcely changed until the end of the seventeenth century. In no debate did patristic texts play a greater role than in that on the eucharist. The eucharist had been the central symbol that organized religious culture on the eve of the Reformation. There was nothing more sacred than the consecrated host, Christ’s very own body hidden under the species of bread. To repudiate that belief was to challenge an entire world-view. It was the ultimate, most unforgivable heresy in the eyes of traditionalists.⁹ Henry VIII, as is well known, never swerved from his faith in the corporal presence and persisted to the last in burning those who denied it.¹⁰ It was also the point over which unity among Protestants fragmented. Defenders of Theologiam Christianam dogmatico-moralem apparatus, 2 vols. (Rome, 1751), i. 269. See also below on Edmund Campion. ⁸ In the wake of such pioneering works as P. Fraenkel, Testimonia Patrum: The Function of the Patristic Argument in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon (Geneva, 1961), an abundant, if uneven, bibliography, often more theological than historical in character, is now available on the use of the Fathers by continental Reformers. Useful surveys and references are to be found in Backus (ed.), Reception of the Fathers, ii. Subsequent publications include D. C. Steinmetz (ed.), Die Patristik in der Bibelexegese des 16. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1999); L. Grane, A. Schindler, and M. Wriedt (eds.), Auctoritas Patrum (Mainz, 1993), Auctoritas Patrum II (Mainz, 1998). ⁹ See M. Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), 347–54; E. A. Macek, The Loyal Opposition: Tudor Traditionalist Polemics, 1535–1558 (New York, 1996), 64–110. ¹⁰ See recently D. Loewenstein, ‘Writing and the Persecution of Heretics in Henry VIII’s England: The Examinations of Anne Askew’, in id. and J. Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 11–39.

The English Reformation

25

a spiritual notion of the eucharist countered charges of heresy by producing evidence from the Fathers. This was not just a tactical move. One could scarcely overestimate the psychological difficulties of a complete change in eucharistic belief for a priest of Cranmer’s generation. Although Cranmer himself apparently abandoned transubstantiation at quite an early stage, until 1546 or even 1547 he clung to a doctrine of the Real Presence in a Lutheran sense. He saw patristic tradition as a decisive argument, firmly protesting in 1537 that Swiss Reformers were ‘infringing the authority of the ancient doctors and first writers in the Christian Church’. If the Real Presence was an error, ‘it is certainly one which has been handed down to us from the very beginning of the Church by the Fathers themselves and by apostolic men’. Christ would never have left his Church in darkness for such a long time.¹¹ Cranmer’s final conversion to Reformed eucharistic theology was brought about by Nicholas Ridley, at the time his chaplain, whose arguments included ‘authorities of doctors’.¹² Cranmer appealed in turn to ‘the consent of the most ancient doctors of the Church’ in his 1550 Defence of the True and Catholike Doctrine and in his subsequent response to Stephen Gardiner.¹³ Patristic texts played a great part in the disputation held at Oxford in April 1554, when Cranmer and Ridley were already under arrest.¹⁴ Ridley declared that he was willing to risk everything for his claim that the doctrine of transubstantiation was opposed to ‘the sayings of the orthodox Fathers’: he only needed his books to produce all the relevant passages.¹⁵ He must indeed have got access to them ¹¹ Thomas Cranmer to Joachim Vadian [June 1537], in Die Vadianische Briefsammlung, v, ed. E. Arbenz and H. Wartmann (St Gallen, 1903), 463: ‘si error est [the Real Presence], iam inde a primordio ecclesiae ab ipsis patribus et uiris apostolicis nobis fuit propinatus; quod quis pius sustinuerit uel audire, nedum credere—ut ne quid interim dicam—quod bonus dominus noster unice dilectam sponsam suam in tam pudenda caecitate tam diu nunquam dereliquisset?’ For dating, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, 180. The phrase ‘apostolici uiri’, to describe those who were taught and ordained by the Apostles (such as Polycarp or Clement of Rome), comes from Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum, 32 (CC 1, 212–13); De uirginibus uelandis, 2. 1 (CC 2, 1210). ¹² See the evidence for Cranmer’s change of belief in MacCulloch, Cranmer, 354–5, 357, 378–83, 390–2. ¹³ Thomas Cranmer, A Defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our saviour Christ, with a confutation of sundry errors concernyng the same, grounded and stablished upon Goddes holy woorde, and approved by ye consent of the moste auncient doctors of the Churche (London, 1550); An Answer … unto a crafty and sophisticall cavillation devised by Stephen Gardiner doctour of law, late byshop of Winchester, agaynst the trewe and godly doctrine of the moste holy Sacrament of the body and bloud of our Saviour Iesu Christe (London, 1551). ¹⁴ See MacCulloch, Cranmer, 564–7. ¹⁵ ‘Praefatio et protestatio Nicolai Ridlei, habitae XX Aprilis in scholis publicis Oxonii, anno M.D.LV. [sic]’, in Nicholas Ridley, De Coena Dominica assertio, contra sceleratam

26

The English Reformation

at some point since the treatise on the Lord’s Supper that he wrote during his imprisonment dwelt at length on testimonies from the Fathers, which he rescued from Gardiner’s interpretations.¹⁶ Cranmer’s discussions with the Spanish Dominican Juan de Villagarcia, in December 1555 and January 1556, again centred on patristic evidence for Roman Catholic doctrines (although the eucharist was not among the points discussed). Cranmer did not come out well from that debate, which may have contributed to weakening his morale and helped to pave the way for his recantation.¹⁷ This obviously does not imply that Middleton was right or that the appeal to the Fathers was indeed ill suited to the defence of Protestant positions. Cranmer was alone and diminished, in hostile surroundings. And Ridley went to the stake without having ever doubted that his eucharistic doctrine was the faith of the Fathers.¹⁸ There was a medieval dimension to Cranmer’s use of the Fathers, a hangover from the school practice of his formative years. Throughout the Defence, he systematically called the Fathers ‘authors’ and their texts ‘authorities’ according to the best scholastic fashion.¹⁹ He took a number of passages from that most traditional of collections, Gratian’s Decretum,²⁰ and the overall impression is that, although he owned the new humanist editions,²¹ he did not really use them to enlarge his patristic corpus but merely to check passages taken from anthologies.²² As to the authority of the Fathers, though, his position was unmistakably Protestant. ‘The consent of the most ancient doctors of the Church’ was not meant to establish doctrine but only to confirm the correct interpretation of Scripture.²³ On illam transsubstantiationis haeresim (Geneva, 1556), sig. ∗ viir – v : ‘falsificat [transsubstantiatio] dicta patrum orthodoxorum … quorum omnia loca in hanc sententiam scio me legisse, et librorum meorum concessa copia posse commonstrare, idque sub periculo capitis mei, et amissione omnium quae in hoc mundo amittere possum.’ ¹⁶ Ridley, De Coena Dominica, 72–109. ¹⁷ MacCulloch, Cranmer, 586–7. ¹⁸ Note that Middleton could not know Cranmer’s unhappy discussions with Villagarcia since these are only related by a Roman Catholic source, Bishop Cranmer’s Recantacyons. The text is preserved in a single manuscript in the Biblioth`eque Nationale de France and was only printed in 1885 (MacCulloch, Cranmer, 584–5). Middleton’s sole source for Cranmer’s and Ridley’s appeal to the Fathers must have been Foxe, according to whom, of course, the Protestant martyrs easily outmatched their opponents. ¹⁹ K. J. Walsh, ‘Cranmer and the Fathers, especially in the Defence’, Journal of Religious History, 11 (1980), 237–8. On the medieval notion of auctoritas, see M.-D. Chenu, ‘Authentica et Magistralia’, in id., La Th´eologie au XIIe si`ecle (3rd edn., Paris, 1976), 351–65. ²⁰ Walsh, ‘Cranmer and the Fathers’, 229–30 and 243. ²¹ See D. G. Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1996), pp. lxxvi–lxxxii. ²² Walsh, ‘Cranmer and the Fathers’, 242; Selwyn, Library, pp. lxxxiii–lxxxiv has a somewhat more generous appreciation of Cranmer’s patristic learning. ²³ Walsh, ‘Cranmer and the Fathers’, 236; Selwyn, Library, pp. lxxxii–lxxxiii.

The English Reformation

27

the Continent as well, the battle over the eucharistic presence was fought by all sides with an array of patristic proof-texts. In Basle, Oecolampadius had pioneered this method for the Reformed side as early as 1525, in his De genuina uerborum Domini expositione. The work had an impact all over Europe. In England, John Fisher wrote a response.²⁴ Oecolampadius again appealed to the Fathers in his 1530 Dialogus against Melanchthon.²⁵ The texts he had quoted turned up in every subsequent debate. In the conference on the eucharist which was organized in London in December 1551, Sir John Cheke produced several ‘arguments from the Fathers’, almost all from Augustine.²⁶ Augustine wrote, for instance: ‘the Lord did not doubt to say: ‘‘This is my body’’, when he gave the sign of his body.’²⁷ He explained elsewhere that it is proper to sacraments to have ‘some resemblance to the things of which they are the sacraments’ and of which, on that account, they often take the name. ‘The sacrament of the body of Christ is thus in a way the body of Christ.’²⁸ Both of these texts had already been put to use by Oecolampadius.²⁹ The sacramentarian dossier was enlarged by Peter Martyr, the Italian Reformer and keen student of the Fathers whom Cranmer settled in England during Edward VI’s reign and who did much to confirm both the Archbishop and Ridley in their rejection of the corporal presence. His appointment as Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford was an essential ²⁴ Joannes Oecolampadius, De genuina uerborum Domini, Hoc est corpus meum, iuxta uetustissimos authores expositione liber (Basle, 1525); John Fisher, De ueritate corporis et sanguinis Christi in Eucharistia aduersus Iohannem Oecolampadium (Cologne, 1527). See E. Staehelin, Das theologische Lebenswerk Johannes Oekolampads (Leipzig, 1939), 267–330; R. Rex, ‘The Polemical Theologian’, in B. Bradshaw and E. Duffy (eds.), Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher (Cambridge, 1989), 109–30; id., The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1991), 129–47; J.-L. Quantin (with P. Petitmengin and others), ‘Ir´en´ee de Lyon entre humanisme et R´eforme: les citations de l’Aduersus haereses dans les controverses religieuses de Johann Fabri a` Martin Luther (1522–1527)’, Recherches Augustiniennes, 27 (1994), 143–56. ²⁵ Joannes Oecolampadius, Quid de Eucharistia ueteres tum Graeci, tum Latini senserint, Dialogus in quo Epistolae Philippi Melanchthonis et Ioannis Oecolampadii insertae (n.p., 1530). ²⁶ John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke (London, 1705), 109–12. ²⁷ Ibid. 109. See Augustine, Contra Adimantum Manichaei discipulum, 12 (CSEL 25, 140): ‘Non enim Dominus dubitauit dicere, Hoc est corpus meum; cum signum daret corporis sui.’ ²⁸ Strype, Cheke, 109–10. See Augustine, letter 98 (23 in 16th-century editions) to Bonifacius (CSEL 34, 531): ‘Si enim sacramenta quamdam similitudinem earum rerum quarum sacramenta sunt, non haberent, omnino sacramenta non essent. Ex hac autem similitudine plerumque etiam ipsarum rerum nomina accipiunt. Sicut ergo secundum quemdam modum sacramentum corporis Christi corpus Christi est, sacramentum sanguinis Christi sanguis Christi est, ita sacramentum fidei fides est.’ ²⁹ See respectively Oecolampadius, Dialogus, sig. n8r and De genuina expositione, sigs. K2v –K3v .

28

The English Reformation

aspect of the Edwardian attempt to protestantize that still overwhelmingly traditionalist university. There was hardly a place where Martyr’s patristic learning could have been more useful. To support his spiritual notion of the eucharist, he produced a long series of extracts from the Fathers, first in his lectures and then in the public disputation which was held in their wake in May 1549.³⁰ Martyr gathered all his materials in a Latin Treatise of the eucharist, which he published soon afterwards and which was translated into English the following year.³¹ There, he quoted at length from the newly published dialogues of Theodoret, ‘who was bishop of Cyrrhus’ and ‘manifestly opposes transubstantiation’. In order to confute ‘Eranistes’ (the heretic), who claimed that Christ’s body had been absorbed by his divinity, ‘Orthodox’, Theodoret’s mouthpiece, argued from the eucharist, where the bread and wine did not disappear: Christ called the bread his body and the wine his soul ‘without changing their nature but adding grace to nature’; ‘after the sanctification the mystical symbols do not depart from their own nature’.³² Martyr had already appealed to Theodoret in the ³⁰ See J. Loach, ‘Reformation Controversies’, in The Collegiate University, iii. 369–73; M. Anderson, ‘Rhetoric and Reality: Peter Martyr and the English Reformation’, SCJ 19 (1988), 451–69; J. A. L¨owe, ‘ ‘‘The bodie and bloude of Christ is not carnallie and corporallie in the bread and wine’’: The Oxford Disputation Revisited: Zwinglian Traits in the Eucharistic Theology of Pietro Martire Vermigli’, in A. Schindler and H. Stickelberger (eds.), Die Z¨urcher Reformation: Ausstrahlungen und R¨uckwirkungen (Bern, 2001), 317–26; D. MacCulloch, ‘Peter Martyr and Thomas Cranmer’, in E. Campi (ed.), Peter Martyr Vermigli: Humanism, Republicanism, Reformation (Geneva, 2002), 173–201; A. Schindler, ‘Vermigli und die Kirchenv¨ater’, ibid. 37–43; A. Ganoczy, La Biblioth`eque de l’Acad´emie de Calvin: le catalogue de 1572 et ses enseignements (Geneva, 1969), 22. ³¹ Peter Martyr Vermigli, Tractatio de sacramento eucharistiae, habita in celeberrima uniuersitate Oxoniensi in Anglia. Ad hec. Disputatio de eodem eucharistiae sacramento, in eadem Uniuersitate habita (London, 1549); A Discourse or traictise of Petur Martyr Vermilla Florentine, the publyque reader of divinitee in the Universitee of Oxford wherin he openly declared his whole and determinate iudgemente concernynge the Sacrament of the Lordes supper in the sayde Universitee (London, n.d. [1550]). French and Italian translations were published on the Continent ( J. P. Donnelly and R. M. Kingdon, A Bibliography of the Works of Peter Martyr Vermigli (Kirksville, Mo., 1990), nos. I.5 and I.6, 8–9), the latter one ‘ad utilit`a e consolac¸ion de gli idioti fratelli Italiani’ (Discorso di M. Pietro Martire Vermiglii Fiorentino, huomo dottiss. fatto ne l’honoratissima scuola Ossoniese in Inghilterra intorno al Sacramento de l’Eucaristia (Geneva, 1557), 3). See J. McLelland’s introduction to the English translation, in The Life, Early Letters and Eucharistic Writings of Peter Martyr, ed. id. and G. E. Duffield (Abingdon, 1989), 111–23, and for a general view of Martyr’s eucharistic theology, S. Corda, Veritas Sacramenti: A Study in Vermigli’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper (Zurich, 1975). ³² Martyr, Tractatio, fos. 22r –26r , quoting … Theodoriti episcopi Cyri Dialogi tres contra quasdam Haereses (Rome, 1547), Dialogue I, fo. 8v (οὐ τὴν φύσιν μεταβαλὼν, ἀλλὰ τὴν χάριν τ˜ῃ φύσει προστεθεικώς) and Dialogue II, fo. 38r (οὐδὲ γὰρ μετὰ τὸν ἁγιασμὸν τὰ μυστικὰ σύμβολα τη˜ ς οἰκείας ἐξίσταται φύσεως) [=Theodoret, Eranistes, ed. G. H. Ettlinger (Oxford, 1975), 78–9 and 152]. Martyr gave a series of Greek extracts and then his own Latin translation.

The English Reformation

29

Oxford disputation.³³ His Roman Catholic antagonist, William Tresham, was taken unawares and reduced to claiming that Theodoret was ‘a rather obscure author’ and that nobody had a copy of his work except Martyr.³⁴ Martyr’s patristic proof-texts quickly became Protestant classics.³⁵ Cranmer reused them in his Defence and they featured prominently in his subsequent controversy with Stephen Gardiner.³⁶ At the London disputation of October 1553, which the new Marian regime meant to witness revenge for the Oxford disputation, the Protestant champions laid considerable stress on Theodoret’s quotations—indeed, according to Foxe’s account, most of the sessions were devoted to discussing them.³⁷ Aptly, it fell to Martyr to write the last word. Having returned to the Continent during the Marian reaction, he prepared a full reply to Gardiner, which he was able to bring out just at the right time in 1559, with a dedication ³³ Martyr, ‘Disputatio de sacramento eucharistiae habita publice Oxonii’, in Tractatio, sep. pagination, fos. 9v –10r . ³⁴ Ibid. 11r : ‘satis obscurus est author, et eum praeter te nemo habet.’ Other key passages of Martyr were Origen, Commentary on Matthew, 11. 14 (GCS 40, 58), available since 1527 in Erasmus’ Latin translation (Fragmentum Commentariorum Origenis in Euangelium secundum Matthaeum, Erasmo Roterodamo interprete. Opus antehac non excusum [Basle, 1527], 155–6; repr. in Origenis Adamantii Operum pars secunda (Basle, 1536), 28); Gelasius, De duabus naturis (PLS 3, 773) first published in 1528 (in Antidotum contra diversas omnium fere saeculorum haereses, ed. Ioannes Sichardus (Basle, 1528), fo. 233v ); the letter to Caesarius ascribed to John Chrysostom, a Latin translation of which Martyr had found in a manuscript of the Dominicans’ library in Florence (PG 52, 758; P. G. Nikolopoulos, ,ἱ εἰς τὸν ’Ιωάννην τὸν Χρυσόστομον ἐσφαλμένως ἀποδιδόμεναι ἐπιστολαί (Athens, 1973), 523). For debates on Origen and Gelasius, see J.-L. Quantin, ‘Philologie et th´eologie: les textes patristiques dans les controverses religieuses (e –e si`ecles)’, Studia Borromaica, 21 (2007), 102–10; on the letter to Caesarius, see below, n. 40. ³⁵ See e.g. John Hooper’s proof-texts against transubstantiation, which include Origen, Commentary on Matthew, Chrysostom’s letter to Caesarius, Theodoret’s Dialogues, Gelasius’ De duabus naturis, in Henry Joliffe, Responsio uenerabilium sacerdotum, Henrici Ioliffi et Roberti Ionson, sub protestatione facta, ad illos articulos Ioannis Hoperi, Episcopi Vigorniae nomen gerentis, in quibus a Catholica fide dissentiebat: Una cum Confutationibus eiusdem Hoperi, et Replicationibus … Stephani Gardineri, Episcopi Vintoniensis, tunc temporis pro confessione fidei in carcere detenti (Antwerp, 1564), fos. 124v –126v . This dispute between Hooper and two traditionalist prebendaries of his diocese of Worcester took place in October 1552 (see J. A. Muller, Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction (London, 1926), 314–15). For other examples, see Anderson, ‘Rhetoric and Reality’, 468. ³⁶ For Cranmer’s works, see above, n. 13. Gardiner wrote first An explication and assertion of the true Catholique fayth, touching the moost blessed Sacrament of the aulter with confutation of a booke written agaynst the same [Rouen, 1551] and then Confutatio Cauillationum, quibus sacrosanctum eucharistiae sacramentum, ab impiis Capernaitis, impeti solet, Authore Marco Antonio Constantio, Theologo Louaniensi (Paris, 1552). ³⁷ John Foxe, The Second Volume of the Ecclesiasticall history, conteyning the Actes and Monuments of Martyrs … from the tyme of K. Henry viii. to Queene Elizabeth (London, 1570), 1571–8.

30

The English Reformation

to Queen Elizabeth.³⁸ It became the standard patristic sourcebook for the Reformed position. Cardinal Bellarmine later singled it out for confutation in his Disputationes.³⁹ Since Martyr reproduced Gardiner’s answers in order to confute them, his work also had the paradoxical result of giving them wide currency among Roman Catholic theologians. On the whole, the importance of the English debates of the 1550s for all subsequent controversies about the eucharist all over Europe can scarcely be overestimated.⁴⁰ Although Martyr died in November 1562 without having set foot in England again, he had a lasting influence there.⁴¹ According to John Jewel, the new Bishop of Salisbury, Martyr’s Defensio of 1559 was an unprecedented success among ‘all good people’ in England.⁴² To counter charges of innovation and heresy was indeed as important for champions of the Elizabethan Settlement as it had been for Cranmer ³⁸ Peter Martyr Vermigli, Defensio Doctrinae ueteris et Apostolicae de sacrosancto Eucharistiae Sacramento … aduersus Stephani Gardineri, quondam Wintoniensis Episcopi, librum … [Zurich, 1559]. The dedication to Elizabeth is dated 1 March 1559. The work was reprinted in 1562 together with the acts of the Oxford dispute of 1549. See Donnelly and Kingdon, Bibliography, nos. V.1 and V.2, 32–5. ³⁹ See Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes de controuersiis christianae fidei, aduersus huius temporis haereticos (Ingolstadt, 1601), iii. 3a controuersia generalis, De sacramento eucharistiae, l. II, cols. 548–657, passim. This section of Bellarmine’s Controuersiae was first published in 1588. ⁴⁰ A case in point is Chrysostom’s letter to Caesarius. Martyr’s quotations, Tractatio, fo. 26r – v , and again Defensio, 390, provided the only access to the text until the ´ end of the 17th century. Emery Bigot, who had rediscovered it in Florence in 1660, attempted to publish it in Paris in 1680 but his edition was suppressed by Louis XIV’s censorship. It was first made generally available when William Wake, who had got hold of the cancelled sheets, reprinted them in A Defence of the Exposition of the Doctrine of the Church of England, against the Exception of Monsieur de Meaux, Late Bishop of ´ Condom, and his Vindicator (London, 1686), 127–63. See L. E. Doucette, Emery Bigot: Seventeenth-Century French Humanist ( Toronto, 1970), 27, 40–3, 65–75. For continental discussions on the epistle to Caesarius, see e.g. Francisco Torres, Contra Andream Volanum Polonum Caluini Discipulum de sanctissima eucharistia tractatus (Rome, 1576), 104; Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay, De l’institution, usage, et doctrine du sainct ´ Sacrement de l’Eucharistie, en l’Eglise Ancienne (2nd edn., La Rochelle, 1598; 1st edn. in the same year), 862; Jacques Davy Du Perron, Traitt´e du sainct sacrement de l’Eucharistie (Paris, 1622), 381–3. ⁴¹ As testified e.g. by the simultaneous publication in London in 1583 of an edition and an English translation of his Loci communes (the translation, quoted below, n. 48, had a dedication to Elizabeth and many additional materials, including a new translation of the Tractatio de sacramento eucharistiae). See Donnelly and Kingdon, Bibliography, nos. XIII.4 and XIII.5; G. Jenkins, ‘Peter Martyr and the Church of England after 1558’, in F. A. James III (ed.), Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations: Semper Reformanda (Leiden, 2004), 47–69. On a project to bring Martyr back to Oxford in 1561, see also C. M. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford, 1983), 25. ⁴² Jewel to Martyr, 5 November 1559, in Works, ed. J. Ayre, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1845–50), iv. 1222.

The English Reformation

31

and his episcopal colleagues under Edward. In a sermon at Paul’s Cross in 1559, and again the following year, Jewel set out a list of Roman tenets (most of them related to the mass) and promised to concede if any of them could be proved by ‘any one clear or plain clause or sentence, either of the scriptures, or of the old doctors, or of any old general council, or … any example of the primitive church’ during the first six centuries.⁴³ The ensuing controversy centred on the sense of the Fathers, whom both parties agreed to take as their ‘weights and balance’.⁴⁴ Jewel’s challenge and his subsequent Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae of 1562 had a huge influence in the Church of England.⁴⁵ Retrospectively, they have appeared as a landmark. Seventeenth-century High Churchmen looked back approvingly to the Bishop as having stated the proper case of the Church of England.⁴⁶ There is however no indication that Jewel considered the position of the Church of England to be different from that of continental Reformed Churches. He had just come back from his exile on the Continent and his interest in the Fathers had been much influenced by Peter Martyr.⁴⁷

2. SOLA SCRIPTURA Could it be that there were divergences among English divines and that some, who were more strictly attached to the principle of sola Scriptura, were reluctant to argue their case from the Fathers? It has been claimed that his ‘use of the Fathers set Martyr a little apart from the usual reformed practice’ and that Richard Cox was more typical when, at the end of the Oxford disputation of 1549, he contrasted ‘the lively fountaines of the word of God’ to ‘the ‘‘puddle’’ of the fathers and councils’.⁴⁸ Cox was at the time Chancellor of the University. He later became Bishop of Ely ⁴³ John Jewel, ‘The copy of a sermon preached by the Bishop of Sarisbury at Paul’s Cross, the second Sunday before Easter [31 March], in the year of our Lord God 1560’, in Works, i. 20–1; J. E. Booty, John Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England (London, 1963), 27–32; Loach, ‘Reformation Controversies’, 385–6. J. C. Sladden, ‘The Appeal to the Fathers in John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, 1560–1571’, Studia patristica, 9 (Berlin, 1966), 594–9, is disappointing. ⁴⁴ See ‘Doctor Cole’s Second Letter to the Bishop of Sarum’, in Jewel, Works, i. 30, and Jewel’s answer, ibid. 34. ⁴⁵ For an interesting example, see J. R. Brink, ‘ ‘‘Fortress of Fathers’’: An Unpublished Sixteenth-Century Manuscript Relating to Patristic Writing on the Eucharist’, SCJ 10/1 (1979), 83–8. ⁴⁶ See for instance Heylyn, Ecclesia restaurata, 129–31. ⁴⁷ Loach, ‘Reformation Controversies’, 369–73. ⁴⁸ Ibid. 370, quoting the English translation of Cox’s speech in The Common Places of the most famous and renowned Divine Doctor Peter Martyr, trans. Anthonie Marten (London, 1583), 249 of the additions (sep. pagination).

32

The English Reformation

under Elizabeth. Were his divergence with the continental Reformer, Peter Martyr, real, it would be a striking inversion of common assumptions. But there was no real disagreement. The ‘puddle’ Cox denounced was not the Fathers and councils as such but the shameful errors of which they had been guilty. Those errors, Cox insisted, did not allow that Fathers and councils should be the ‘principles of disputes’.⁴⁹ Scripture alone should be the touchstone of all controversies and students should make it the centre of their studies.⁵⁰ Martyr himself had insisted, in Cox’s very words, that the ‘first and main principle’ of the Reformed was neither the Fathers nor reason but Scripture alone:⁵¹ he had only put such a stress on the Fathers to answer Roman Catholic claims to have them on their side.⁵² Conversely, after he had protested that the Fathers were not of infallible authority, Cox hastened to add that evangelicals did not reject their testimonies but ‘venerated them as rays of the Holy Spirit which illuminated in some way the darkness of our eyes’.⁵³ Jewel took the same stand during the challenge controversy that he faced a decade later. Taken literally, some passages of his sermon, especially his invocation, in reverse chronological order, of the fourth- and fifth-century doctors of the Church, the (supposedly) Apostolic Fathers, Paul, and Christ, would seem to put antiquity on a very high level indeed.⁵⁴ But, even apart from the rhetorical nature of such utterances, Jewel’s move was tactical. His express aim was to counter Roman claims to antiquity.⁵⁵ He always maintained that the prime authority belonged to Scripture alone. The Fathers were only an aid towards an understanding of it.⁵⁶ Certainly Jean Daill´e in 1632 made no difference between Bucer, Martyr, and Jewel on ⁴⁹ ‘Disputatio de sacramento eucharistiae habita publice Oxonii’, in Martyr, ‘Disputatio’, fo. 93v : ‘Quam turpiter in multis lapsi sunt patres? quam foede errarunt concilia. Errorum hic nolo meminisse, nolo hanc mouere camarinam. Et tamen patres atque concilia debent esse principia disputationum?’ Camarina is a swamp in Sicily (see Thesaurus linguae Latinae. Onomasticon, s.v. ‘Camerina’). For the proverbial expression Mouere Camarinam, see Erasmus, Adagia, ed. M. L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk, M. Mann Phillips, and C. Robinson, in Opera omnia, ii/1 (Amsterdam, 1993), no. 64, 174. ⁵¹ Ibid., fos. 47r and 60v . ⁵⁰ ‘Disputatio’, fo. 94r . ⁵² Ibid., fo. 47r . For a lucid summary of Martyr’s position on the authority of the Fathers, see J. P. Donnelly, Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace (Leiden, 1976), 55–6. ⁵³ ‘Disputatio’, fo. 93v : ‘Interim tamen, Ecclesiae et piorum patrum saluberrima testimonia non reiiciunt, imo amplectuntur et uenerantur, tanquam radios spiritus sancti, caliginem oculorum nostrorum aliquo pacto illustrantes.’ ⁵⁴ Jewel, ‘The copy of a sermon’, Works, i. 20: ‘O Gregory! O Augustine! O Hierome! O Chrysostom! O Leo! O Dionysie! O Anacletus! O Sixtus! O Paul! O Christ! If we be deceived herein, ye are they that have deceived us. Ye have taught us these schisms and divisions, ye have taught us these heresies.’ This echoes Richard of Saint-Victor’s exclamation: ‘Domine, si error est teipso decepti sumus’ (De Trinitate, 1. 2, PL 196, 891). ⁵⁵ Jewel, ‘The copy of a sermon’, Works, i. 22. ⁵⁶ See Booty, Jewel, 135–7.

The English Reformation

33

this point. He cited all three as pioneers of the Protestant use of the Fathers, ‘but (if you but mark it) it is only by way of Confutation, and not of Establishing anything: They do it only to overthrow the Opinions of the Church of Rome, and not to strengthen their Own.’⁵⁷ Cox and Martyr were both members, together with Cranmer, of the drafting committee of eight which prepared a Reformed code of canon law for the Church of England (later called by John Foxe the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum) in 1551–2; Martyr’s role appears to have been specially important.⁵⁸ Section one included a detailed account of the sources of the Christian faith, which stated that ‘the authority of the divine Scripture is supreme in the Church’.⁵⁹ Councils should be granted ‘great honour’ but ought nevertheless to be ‘placed far below the dignity of the canonical Scriptures’,⁶⁰ and the same applied to the Fathers: Finally, we consider that the authority of the orthodox fathers is also not at all to be despised, for a great many things are said by them in a most clear and helpful way. Yet we do not allow that the meaning of Holy Writ can be determined by their opinion. For Holy Writ must be our rule and judge for all Christian teaching. Moreover, the fathers themselves refused to accept so great an honour, often warning their readers to accept their opinions and interpretations only so far as they found them to be agreeable to Holy Writ.⁶¹

The code failed to be approved by Parliament in March 1553 and never gained statutory character. Its clause on the Fathers (contrary to that on councils) is not to be found in the Forty-Two Articles—the first Protestant formulary of the Church of England—which Cranmer had been preparing at the same time and which were officially issued in May 1553.⁶² Nevertheless these, inasmuch as they stated that ‘Holie Scripture conteineth all thinges necessarie to Salvation’ (article V) and that the Church ought ⁵⁷ Jean Daill´e, Traict´e de l’employ des Saincts Peres, pour le jugement des differends, qui sont aujourd’huy en la Religion (Geneva, 1632), 443, according to the English translation, A Treatise concerning the Right Use of the Fathers, in the Decision of the Controversies that are at this day in Religion (London, 1651), book II, 132. ⁵⁸ G. Bray (ed.), Tudor Church Reform: The Henrician Canons of 1535 and the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum (Woodbridge, 2000; CERS 8), pp. xli–lxxiii; J. F. Jackson, ‘Law and Order: Vermigli and the Reform of Ecclesiastical Laws in England’, in James (ed.), Peter Martyr and the European Reformations, 267–90. See also the introduction by J. C. Spalding, The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws of England, 1552 (Kirksville, Mo., 1992), 37–9. ⁵⁹ I follow the translation provided by Bray, Tudor Church Reform, chapter 10, 179. ⁶⁰ Ibid., chapter 14, 181. ⁶¹ Ibid., chapter 15, 183. ⁶² The text (of both the Latin and the English version) is to be found e.g. in E. C. S. Gibson, The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (2nd edn. rev., London, 1898), 70–89. The article on councils is no. XXII, 80 (‘thinges ordeined by theim, as necessarie to salvation, have neither strength, nor auctoritie, onlesse it maie be declared, that thei be taken out of holie scripture’).

34

The English Reformation

not to enforce anything besides it ‘to bee beleved for necessitie of salvation’ (article XXI), clearly implied the same position on patristic authority.⁶³ These two articles were reissued in 1563 among the Thirty-Nine, of which they make respectively the sixth and twentieth. Some dispositions of the Reformatio legum bore a strong Protestant mark. The reprinting of the text by John Foxe in 1571 was part of a campaign for further reformation of the Church, which eventually came to nothing.⁶⁴ The Reformatio legum surfaced again seventy years later in John Williams’s bill on church Reform, which was part of a plan to save a reduced episcopacy through concessions to Puritans.⁶⁵ The advanced character of the code itself should not however be exaggerated: it was primarily designed to improve the efficiency of church courts, a perennial concern in sixteenth-century England.⁶⁶ While it is doubtful that Foxe’s edition was brought out at the instigation of Matthew Parker, it was at least based on a manuscript supplied by him. The Archbishop, who had been a member of the canon law commission under Edward, had certainly no objection against the Reformatio, although he may have been suspicious of the real aims of Foxe and his friends.⁶⁷ The Reformatio’s chapter on the Fathers was no more than a corollary of the principle that convocation officially reaffirmed in the same year 1571, when it drew up the final version of the Thirty-Nine Articles: that of the sufficiency of Scripture. ⁶³ Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 71 and 79. ⁶⁴ Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum, ex authoritate primum Regis Henrici 8 inchoata: Deinde per Regem Edouardum 6 prouecta, adauctaque in hunc modum, atque nunc ad pleniorem ipsarum reformationem in lucem aedita, ed. John Foxe (London, 1571): see fo. 4r , for the chapter on the Fathers. J. E. Neale’s notion of a Puritan campaign (Elizabeth I and her Parliaments 1559–1581 (London, 1953), 63, 89, 194–7) has been proved faulty but there is good evidence that the attempt to revive the Reformatio was part of a reformist agenda: see T. S. Freeman, ‘ ‘‘The Reformation of the Church in this Parliament’’: Thomas Norton, John Foxe and the Parliament of 1571’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), 131–47, and the thorough discussion by Bray, Tudor Church Reform, pp. lxxvi–xcix. Note also the appeal to the Reformatio by John Rainolds in 1586 (Dent, Protestant Reformers, 140). ⁶⁵ ‘An Act for the better regulating of Archbishops, Bishops …’, in S. R. Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660 (3rd edn., Oxford, 1906), no. 33, 179, where the Reformatio legum is called ‘the form begun by Doctor [Walter] Haddon’. On the context, see C. Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), 249–52. ⁶⁶ G. R. Elton, ‘Lex Terrae Victrix: The Triumph of Parliamentary Law in the Sixteenth Century’, in D. M. Dean and N. L. Jones (eds.), The Parliaments of Elizabethan England (Oxford, 1990), 29–30. Cf. R. Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation 1520–1570 (Oxford, 1979), 17–18. ⁶⁷ John Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker (London, 1711), 323–4, should be corrected by Freeman, ‘Reformation’, 138, 140, 143.

The English Reformation

35

Yet again, this did not preclude references to the Fathers for apologetic purposes, especially on the mode of Christ’s presence in the eucharist, still the most sensitive of all questions. It is significant that one of only two explicit patristic quotations in the Articles⁶⁸ should be in article XXIX, added by Parker in 1563 (it did not appear among the earlier Forty-Two), ‘Of the Wicked which do not eat the Body of Christ in the use of the Lord’s Supper’: ‘The wicked and such as be void of a lively faith, although they do carnally and visibly press with their teeth (as S. Augustine saith) the Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ; yet in no wise are they partakers of Christ, but rather to their condemnation do eat and drink the sign or Sacrament of so great a thing.’ Jewel later used it to confute the Roman Catholic distinction between ‘real receiving’ in the wicked and ‘effectual receiving’ in the godly.⁶⁹ In the initial revision of the Articles, Parker had inserted another quotation from Augustine in article XXVIII, ‘Of the Lordes Supper’. It aimed specifically at the doctrine of ‘ubiquity’ (that the humanity of Christ, by virtue of its union with the divinity, was everywhere), which Lutheran divines were propounding to maintain the Real Presence. The choice of this quotation was probably influenced by Peter Martyr, who had used it for the same purpose and who had urged the English bishops to oppose ubiquity. Such a clause would have been too offensive to German princes and it was struck out in convocation.⁷⁰ ⁶⁸ Leaving aside, that is, the general reference in article XXIV to ‘the custom of the primitive Church’ and the unacknowledged borrowing from Augustine in article X (see below, n. 318). The other quotation, in article VI, is from Jerome (prologus in libros Salomonis, in Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. R. Weber (3rd edn., Stuttgart, 1983), ii. 957) on the Apocrypha: it is also an addition of 1563 (compare article V of 1553 in Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 71). The ‘Declaration of doctrine offered and exhibited by the protestants to the Queen at the first coming over of them’ of 1559, which makes the link, as it were, between the Forty-Two Articles and the Thirty-Nine, quoted Augustine to justify the treating of Predestination and Election, but the development was eventually omitted (the text was never printed but is extant among Parker’s papers in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; see the extract in R. W. Dixon, History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction, v (Oxford, 1902), 109–10 n.). ⁶⁹ Augustine, In Ioannis euangelium tractatus 26. 18, according to Erasmus’ edition, Nonus tomus operum D. Aurelii Aug. Hipponens. episcopi, continens illius tractatus, hoc est, expositiones ad populum factas in nouum testamentum (Basle, 1529), 156. See below, n. 77 on textual problems. Cf. John Jewel, A Defence of the Apology of the Church of England [1567], part V, in Works, iv. 895. ⁷⁰ ‘Quum igitur Christus in caelum sublatus, ibi usque ad finem seculi permansurus, atque inde, non aliunde (ut loquitur Augustinus) uenturus sit, ad iudicandum uiuos et mortuos, non debet quisquam fidelium, carnis eius, et sanguinis, realem, et corporalem (ut loquuntur) praesentiam in Eucharistia uel credere, uel profiteri’ (first published from Parker’s manuscript, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 121, by J. Lamb, An Historical Account of the Thirty-Nine Articles from the first promulgation of them in M.D.LIII. to their final establishment in M.D.LXXI. with exact copies of the Latin and

36

The English Reformation

Article XXIX, though approved in convocation, was withdrawn before publication for the same reason,⁷¹ but it resurfaced in 1571. It attracted the opposition of Edmund Guest, Bishop of Rochester, who held at that point semi-Lutheran views⁷² and was moreover anxious to make subscription as easy as possible for traditionalists.⁷³ Guest believed for his part that Christ’s body was received by all communicants who were members ‘of the Church and of the profession of Christ’, whether good or bad. He warned Burghley that, if the article received royal assent, ‘it will cause much business, because it is quite contrary to the Scripture and to the doctrine of the Fathers, for it is certain that Judas as evil as he was did receive Christ’s Body’—a point for which Guest alleged a text of Theodoret, who was doing service on both sides.⁷⁴ Parker succeeded in pushing the article through by stressing its English manuscripts (Cambridge, 1829), sep. pagination, 12), and then by C. Hardwick, A History of the Articles of Religion, 3rd edn. revised by the Rev. F. Procter (London, 1876), 329–30 n. 6; H. Horie, ‘The Lutheran Influence on the Elizabethan Settlement, 1558–1563’, HJ 34 (1991), 532. The clause was substantially taken over from the Forty-Two Articles (article XXIX) but the reference to Augustine (ep. 187 ad Dardanum [57 in editions prior to the Maurists], 3. 10 [CSEL 57, 89]), was an addition. See Peter Martyr Vermigli, Dialogus de utraque in Christo natura, quomodo coeant in unam Christi personam inseparabilem, ut interim non amittant suas proprietates: ideoque humanam Christi naturam propter personalem unionem non esse ubique (Zurich, 1561), dedication to Jewel, sigs. ∗ 4v – ∗ 7r , and fo. 102r – v (for other quotations of the letter to Dardanus, see fos. 3r , 22v , 25r –26v , 39r , 54r , 103r ). The text was also constantly quoted by Beza in his anti-Lutheran writings: see Theodore Beza, K ρεωφαγία, siue Cyclops, Dialogus de uera communicatione corporis et sanguinis Domini [1561], in id., Volumen tractationum theologicarum (Geneva, 1570), 266, 300, 305; Ad Ioannis Brentii argumenta, et Io. Andreae theses, quibus carnis Christi omnipraesentiam nituntur confirmare … Responsum [1565], ibid. 521, 545, 548, 552, 565, 582, 586. On Martyr’s appeal to the English bishops against ubiquity and the bishops’ response, see W. B. Patterson, ‘The Anglican Reaction’, in L. W. Spitz and W. Lohff (eds.), Discord, Dialogue and Concord: Studies in the Lutheran Reformation’s Formula of Concord (Philadelphia, 1977), 151–4. ⁷¹ Horie, ‘Lutheran Influence’, 533–7. ⁷² See G. F. Hodges, Bishop Guest, Articles Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine (London, 1894), a study which provides useful information but has a strong Anglo-Catholic slant. Despite its arguments, I remain unconvinced that Guest held consistently throughout his career the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. See also W. P. Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation: The Struggle for a Stable Settlement of Religion (Cambridge, 1968), 253–5; K. Fincham and N. Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford, 2007), 77–8; P. E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998), 95–6, with further references. ⁷³ See Guest’s letter to Burghley, May 1571, in Hodges, Bishop Guest, 25, suggesting a change to article XXVIII for the sake of Bishop Cheyney of Gloucester (on whom see below, 50–1). ⁷⁴ Ibid. 26, quoting Theodoret, Interpretatio in epistolas Pauli, on 1 Cor. 11: 27, in the Latin translation of Gentien Hervet (Beati Theodoreti Cyrensis episcopi in quatuordecim Sancti Pauli epistolas Commentarius, nunc primum Latine uersus, Gentiano Herveto Aurelio interprete (Florence, 1552), 96–7 [PG 82, 317–18]).

The English Reformation

37

conformity to patristic teaching.⁷⁵ The choice of the sentence of Augustine seems to have emanated from the Archbishop himself, who was careful to insert the exact reference in his copy.⁷⁶ This is a nice instance of divines’ ability to distort patristic texts to suit their own theology. As Richard Porson was later to point out, the words quoted in the article are certainly not Augustine’s but were interpolated to make him easier to reconcile with the doctrine of the Real Presence as understood in the Middle Ages.⁷⁷ Augustine’s text thus ‘corrected’ made one of the lessons for the office of Corpus Christi in pre-Reformation breviaries and was kept in that form in the breviary of Pius V.⁷⁸ The importance attached to patristic evidence on the eucharist was confirmed in 1581 during the conference staged in the Tower prior to the execution of the Jesuit Edmund Campion. Not only did Campion’s opponents quote all the usual proof-texts for the Reformed doctrine of the eucharist,⁷⁹ but they systematically endeavoured to expose the deficiencies of his patristic learning. They deliberately instanced the Fathers in Greek so as to charge Campion with ‘the note and blemish of ignorance in the Greeke ⁷⁵ Parker to Burghley, 4 June 1571, Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne (Cambridge, 1853; PS), no. 288, 381. See Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 661–2 and 669. V. J. K. Brook, A Life of Archbishop Parker (Oxford, 1962), 273, did not understand the significance of the episode. ⁷⁶ Strype, Parker, 331–2; Lamb, Historical Account, sep. pagination, 13. ⁷⁷ The text given by all manuscripts omits the words in brackets: ‘qui non manet in Christo, et in quo non manet Christus, procul dubio nec manducat [spiritualiter] carnem eius, nec bibit eius sanguinem, [licet carnaliter et uisibiliter premat dentibus Sacramentum corporis et sanguinis Christi:] sed magis tantae rei Sacramentum ad iudicium sibi manducat et bibit.’ See PL 35, 1614 with the note of the Maurists ad loc. (which is merely copied by CC 36, 268 n. 2); additional note 65, ‘Le texte de Tract. 26, 18’, in M.-F. Berrouard’s edition, Biblioth`eque Augustinienne, lxxii. 526; Richard Porson, Letters to Mr. Archdeacon Travis, in answer to his defence of the three heavenly witnesses, I John V. 7 (London, 1790), 229 and xxxiii. Although the origins of the additions are still unclear, there can be no doubt as to their theological purpose. ⁷⁸ See Breuiarium ad usum insignis Ecclesiae Sarum, ed. F. Procter and C. Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1879–86: a reprint of the edn. of Paris, 1531), i, col. mlxxi (8th lesson for matins). The text has the same place in the Tridentine breviary. ⁷⁹ See A true report of the Disputation or rather private Conference had in the Tower of London, with Ed. Campion Iesuite, the last of August, 1581. Set downe by the Reverend learned men them selves that deal therein. Whereunto is ioyned also a true report of the other three dayes conferences had there with the same Iesuite. Which nowe are thought meete to be published in print by authoritie (London, 1583), esp. sigs. S1r , X4v –Y1v , Y2r ( Theodoret), U1r – v (Origen, Commentary on Matthew), U2v –U3r (Augustine, letter 98 to Bonifacius), X2v (Augustine, Contra Adimantum), Y3r – v (Gelasius). This is of course the official account but the same texts appear in the Roman Catholic one published (without identifying patristic quotations and with many faults in the Latin) by J. V. Holleran, A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion’s Debates at the Tower of London in 1581 (New York, 1999).

38

The English Reformation

tongue’.⁸⁰ He could not ever have read Augustine’s Contra Adimantum, as he was ‘so ignorant of the argument of it’. At the most, they argued, Campion had read ‘that place noted out by some other’, but not ‘the whole worke of the author’.⁸¹ When he offered two rather weak explanations of a passage of ‘Chrysostom’, Fulke told him scornfully, and not without some justification: ‘al men see how unable you are to answere. I could helpe you with a better answere my selfe.’⁸² Considering the circumstances, the entire exercise strikes us today as a particularly unpleasant display of theological nastiness, but it was clearly considered essential at the time to explode, not only the doctrine, but also the scholarly credentials of a man who had publicly challenged the Elizabethan regime.⁸³ Campion did his best to retort, telling Fulke, who had quoted a passage of Augustine out of Gratian’s Decretum: ‘You bewray your slender reading of Augustine, in citing this as Gratians authoritie.’⁸⁴ How would Campion have rejoiced ⁸⁰ True report, sigs. F4r –G2r , M3r , Q1v –Q2r , CC3r . ⁸¹ Ibid., sig. X3v . See also sig. X4r . ⁸² Ibid., sig. R1r . The text was Pseudo-Chrysostom, Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, hom. 11 (PG 56, 691): ‘si ergo haec uasa sanctificata ad priuatos usus transferre sic periculosum est, in quibus non est uerum corpus Christi, sed mysterium corporis eius continetur: quanto magis uasa corporis nostri’; it had been quoted by Oecolampadius, Dialogus, sig. l4r , and by Martyr, Tractatio, fo. 19r . Campion’s first solution, that Chrysostom was speaking of Belshazzar’s (i.e. the temple’s) vessels, had been used by Gardiner, Confutatio Cauillationum, fo. 132r ; Campion’s alternative solution, that they were the empty vessels after mass, seems his own invention. It is striking that (even according to the Roman Catholic account, Jesuit Challenge, ed. Holleran, 128–9) he did not make the obvious response that the text was not by Chrysostom. Erasmus had not only declared the Opus imperfectum spurious but had pointed out its Arianism: see Tertius tomus operum Diui Ioannis Chrysostomi Archiepiscopi Constantinopolitani, in quo Homiliae in Matthaeum et Ioannem: praeterea commentarii digni lectu in Matthaeum incerto autore (Basle, 1530), 473. This had not escaped Gardiner, Confutatio Cauillationum, fo. 132r . The passage on the eucharist had subsequently been expurgated as an Arian interpolation in Roman Catholic editions. See CPL 707; J. van Banning, Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum: Praefatio, CC 87 B, esp. pp. cccxxxi–cccxlviii; Quantin, ‘Philologie et th´eologie’, 122–4. ⁸³ See T. M. McCoog, ‘ ‘‘Playing the Champion’’: The Role of Disputation in the Jesuit Mission’, in id. (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits. Essays in Celebration of the First Centenary of Campion Hall, Oxford (1896–1996) (Woodbridge, 1996), 119–39; P. Lake and M. C. Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists, and the ‘‘Public Sphere’’ in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), 587–627, esp. 620–2; eid., ‘Prisons, Priests and People’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London, 1998), 195–233, esp. 205–6. A Roman Catholic ballad circulated during Campion’s trial claimed: ‘Their wives and their wealth have made them [the Protestant clergy] so mute, | They cannot nor dare with Campion dispute’ (S. Pilarz, ‘ ‘‘Campion dead bites with his friends’ teeth’’: Representations of an Early Modern Catholic Martyr’, in C. Highley and J. N. King (eds.), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, 2002), 222 n. 19). ⁸⁴ True report, sig. R3v , after Fulke, sigs. R2v –R3r , had quoted the PseudoAugustinian canon Hoc est, quod (Gratian, Decretum, c. 48, dist. II De cons., Friedberg, i. 1327, 1328, 1331–2).

The English Reformation

39

if he had known that the text in question was not by Augustine but by Lanfranc, and had been expressly written to defend transubstantiation!⁸⁵ 3. PATRISTIC ORTHODOXY Both the publication of the Reformatio legum at Parker’s instigation and the reissuing of the Thirty-Nine Articles by the convocation of 1571 put the canon Concionatores in its proper perspective. This was passed in the same convocation to enjoin preachers to ‘take heed, that they teach nothing in theyr preaching, which they would have the people religiously to observe, and beleve [teneri et credi], but that which is agreeable to the doctrine of the olde Testament, and the new, and that which the catholike fathers, and auncient Bishops have gathered out of that doctrine [ex illa ipsa doctrina collegerint]’.⁸⁶ The canons of 1571 experienced the same fate as the Reformatio legum and never acquired any legal force.⁸⁷ Their reception was however quite different, and they were popular with seventeenth-century anti-Puritans. They were reprinted in Oxford in 1636 at the time of the Laudian ascendency⁸⁸ and afterwards by Anthony Sparrow at the beginning of the Restoration.⁸⁹ Jeremy Taylor recommended them (together with the Book of Common Prayer and the canons of 1604) as essential authorities for those ‘that would improove in the understanding of the doctrine of the Church of England’.⁹⁰ ⁸⁵ See J.-L. Quantin, ‘L’Augustin du XVIIe si`ecle? Questions de corpus et de canon’, in Augustin au XVIIe si`ecle: actes du colloque organis´e par Carlo Ossola au Coll`ege de France les 30 septembre et 1er octobre 2004 (Florence, 2007), 58–60. ⁸⁶ W. E. Collins (ed.), The Canons of 1571 in English and Latin (London, 1899), 76–7. ⁸⁷ The canons were signed by all the bishops of the province of Canterbury and also, apparently, of the province of York. There is ‘no positive evidence’ that they were ever placed before the Lower Houses of convocation for their assent and they certainly never received royal assent, though ‘there is no doubt that they were regarded as authoritative and acted upon in the dioceses of the Southern province’. See Collins (ed.), Canons of 1571, introduction, 4–7, and also G. Bray (ed.), The Anglican Canons 1529–1947 (Woodbridge, 1998; CERS 6), pp. xlviii–l. Because they had no legal value, they did not appear in Edmund Gibson, Codex iuris ecclesiastici Anglicani (London, 1713; 2nd edn. Oxford, 1761). ⁸⁸ ‘Liber quorundam Canonum disciplinae Ecclesiae Anglicanae. Anno 1571’, after Articuli de quibus conuenit inter Archiepiscopos, et Episcopos utriusque prouinciae, et Clerum uniuersum in Synodo, Londini An. 1562 (Oxford, 1636), sep. pagination (see 19 for the canon Concionatores). ⁸⁹ A Collection of Articles, Injunctions, Canons, Orders, Ordinances, and Constitutions Ecclesiastical, with other Publick Records of the Church of England, ed. Anthony Sparrow (London, 1661), 2nd pagination, 30 (Latin only). ⁹⁰ Letter of 13 January 1660 to Thomas Graham, published by C. McKelvie, ‘Jeremy Taylor’s Recommendations for a Library of Anglican Theology (1660)’, Irish Booklore, 4 (1980), 100.

40

The English Reformation

Retrospectively, the clause on the Fathers came to be regarded in the same light as Jewel’s challenge, as an instance of the Church of England’s unique reverence for them.⁹¹ Peter Heylyn claimed that it had been ‘a counterballance’ to the requirement made by the same convocation that Foxe’s Acts and Monuments —a work deeply obnoxious to Heylyn on account of both its Calvinism and its ‘factious and seditious passages’—should be placed in all cathedral churches.⁹² Restoration apologists made it almost their motto, driving Richard Baxter, the great champion of the presbyterian cause, to protest that ‘the Church of England’s Sence is better expounded’ in the Reformatio legum.⁹³ The Tractarians later used the canon to restrict the import of the sixth article on the sufficiency of Scripture.⁹⁴ Twentieth-century AngloCatholics thought that it implied a notion of ‘the ancient fathers and godly bishops of the primitive times as the best interpreters of the Scriptures’, that is, in effect, Tridentine teaching.⁹⁵ In some extreme cases, it has been so grossly mistranslated as to express a theory of patristic tradition as the necessary complement of Scripture, which would go beyond the Tridentine decrees.⁹⁶ ⁹¹ See e.g. Respondet Petrus: or, the Answer of Peter Heylyn D.D. To so much of Dr. Bernard’s Book Entituled, The Judgement of the late Primate of Ireland, etc. As he is made a Party to by the said Lord Primate in the Point of the Sabbath, and by the said Doctor in some others (London, 1658), 77; William Saywell’s preface to Jean de Launoy, Epistolae Omnes … Cum Praefatione Apologetica, pro Reformatione Ecclesiae Anglicanae … in qua agitur de Authoritate et Usu Catholicae Traditionis et Oecumenicorum Conciliorum, eorumque cum Sacris Scripturis Consensu, prout in Epistolis Launoii fusius explicatur (Cambridge, 1689), sig. a2r ; Edward Wells, Remarks on Dr Clarke’s introduction to his Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1713), 35; Blunt, Right Use of the Early Fathers, 6–7; and more recently Middleton, Fathers and Anglicans, 53–4. ⁹² Peter Heylyn, Historia Quinqu-Articularis: Or, a Declaration of the Judgment of the Western Churches, and more particularly of the Church of England, in the five controverted points, reproched in these last times by the name of Arminianism (London, 1660), part III, 58–60. See Collins (ed.), Canons of 1571, 30–1; D. Nussbaum, ‘Whitgift’s ‘‘Book of Martyrs’’: Archbishop Whitgift, Timothy Bright and the Elizabethan Struggle over John Foxe’s Legacy’, in D. Loades (ed.), John Foxe: An Historical Perspective (Aldershot, 1999), 135–53, esp. 147. ⁹³ Richard Baxter, Against the Revolt to a Foreign Jurisdiction, which would be to England its perjury, Church-ruine, and Slavery (London, 1691), 164. ⁹⁴ Keble, Postscript to ‘Primitive tradition recognised in Holy Scripture’, 16; Newman’s preface to Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical lectures, p. xx: ‘the Convocation of 1571, which imposed it [the sixth article], at the same time, as is well known, ordered all preachers to teach according to the Catholic Fathers’ (note the distortion of the original text). For contemporary critics of the Tractarian use of the canon, see Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, esp. 118–19. ⁹⁵ A. S. Duncan-Jones, Archbishop Laud (London, 1927), 13–14. On the Tridentine decrees see below. The assimilation is explicitly made by H. E. Symonds, The Council of Trent and Anglican Formularies (London, 1933), 10. ⁹⁶ According to Gorce, ‘Les P`eres et le Mouvement d’Oxford’, 622: ‘Les canons de 1571 donnent comme directive aux pr´edicateurs d’enseigner ‘‘ce que les p`eres catholiques ´ et les anciens e´vˆeques ont pu amasser, en plus de l’Ecriture’’.’

The English Reformation

41

The canons were however of an essentially practical character.⁹⁷ They were meant to be a ‘Book of Discipline’⁹⁸ in contrast to the articles of doctrine, together with which they were first printed. That the clause on the Fathers was not regarded as a fundamental statement is confirmed by its being dropped from the canons of 1604: reference to the Bible, the Articles, and the Book of Common Prayer was then considered sufficient to regulate preaching.⁹⁹ Again, the canons of 1571 were drawn up by Parker, very probably with the assistance of Cox.¹⁰⁰ There is no evidence to suggest that their view of patristic authority had changed since the time of the Reformatio legum and the Oxford disputation. The canons of 1571 made subscription to the Articles compulsory in order to be granted a licence to preach.¹⁰¹ It is remarkable that this obligation was justified in the very same words used in the case of the Fathers a few lines earlier in the text: ‘those articles of Christian religion, agreed upon by the Bishoppes, in the lawfull, and godly convocation … undoubtedly are gathered out [collecti sunt] of the holy bookes of the olde, and new Testamente.’ Colligere had a specific meaning in contemporary theological debates. It was a major Roman Catholic contention, in order to counter the Protestant doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture, that several fundamental Christian dogmas could only with great difficulty, or even not at all, be ‘deduced’ and ‘proved’ from Scripture, and that recourse to tradition was therefore necessary. This was especially true, they held, of Trinitarian postNicene tenets.¹⁰² The thesis was all the more dangerous for mainstream Protestants as they were confronted with a radical Reformation, which they were anxious to crush and which often manifested heterodox views of the Trinity.¹⁰³ Protestant divines maintained therefore that Nicene dogmas were scriptural ‘since they are necessarily gathered out of Scripture well ⁹⁷ See Brook, Parker, 267–71. ⁹⁸ Parker to Burghley, 4 June 1571, Correspondence, no. 288, 382. ⁹⁹ See canon 51 of 1604 in Bray (ed.), Anglican Canons, 339: ‘And if any in his sermon shall publish any doctrine, either strange, or disagreeing from the Word of God, or from any of the articles of religion agreed upon in the convocation house, anno 1562 or from the book of common prayer’, he shall be reported to the bishop. ¹⁰⁰ Collins (ed.), Canons of 1571, introduction, 6. ¹⁰¹ Ibid. 24–5. On the anxiety to control dissident preaching, be it Roman Catholic or Protestant, see ibid. 78. ¹⁰² See e.g. Ioannes Cochlaeus, De Canonicae Scripturae, et Catholicae Ecclesiae authoritate, ad Henricum Bullingerum (Rome, 1544), fos. 33v –35v , and later Thomas Stapleton, De principiis fidei doctrinalibus [1579], in Opera omnia, 4 vols. (Paris, 1620), i. 410; Bellarmine, Disputationes, i. 1a controu. generalis, l. IV, ‘De uerbo Dei non scripto’, c. IV, col. 215. On the Roman Catholic doctrine of tradition, see below. ¹⁰³ See G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (3rd edn., Kirksville, Mo., 2002), esp. 1196; C. Davies, A Religion of the World: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester, 2002), 67–86.

42

The English Reformation

explained and understood’.¹⁰⁴ The recantation imposed by the Edwardian authorities on the traditionalist Richard Smyth—who had published a defence of ‘unwritten traditions’ early in 1547—was already explicit: Where I dyd say, that there are dyverse thynges not expressed in the scripture which we are bounde to beleve egally with those thynges which arr written in Scripture … I affirme and say to be … trew only in those Doctrines which necessaryly may be gathered, and consequently doo folow too the wordes and sentences in Scripture, so that in effect they may be iustly counted to be in scripture, though the very fourme of woordes be not there.¹⁰⁵

Although the word homoousios, ‘consubstantial’, was not to be found in the Bible, the Fathers, so Jewel and Rainolds reminded their Roman Catholic opponents, had taught that its sense and meaning were.¹⁰⁶ The canon of ¹⁰⁴ William Whitaker, Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura; contra huius temporis papistas, in primis Robertum Bellarminum … et Thomam Stapletonum [1588], in Opera theologica, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1610), i, q. VI, c. 9, 377: ‘quia ex scripturis recte expositis ac intellectis necessario colliguntur.’ Thomas Bilson, The true Difference betweene Christian subjection and Unchristian rebellion (Oxford, 1585), 593 (on which more below), argued similarly that ‘the sense and consequents [of the Scriptures] are scriptures as well as the wordes’. ¹⁰⁵ A godly and faythfull Retractation made and published at Paules crosse in London, the yeare of oure Lorde God 1547. the 15. daye of May, by Mayster Rychard Smyth Doctor of divinitye, and reader of the Kynges Maiestyes lecture in Oxford. Revokyng therin certeyn Errors and faultes by hym commityed in some of hys bookes (London, 1547), sig. B4r – v ; and again A playne Declaration made at Oxforde the 24. daye of July, by Mayster Rycharde Smyth … (London, 1547), sigs. C2v –C3r . On Smyth’s book, see below. This very important part of the recantation is strangely passed over by J. A. L¨owe, Richard Smyth and the Language of Orthodoxy: Re-imagining Tudor Catholic Polemicism (Leiden, 2003), 34–40. ¹⁰⁶ Jewel, Defence of the Apology, part II, in Works, iii. 440, quoted Athanasius, De Decretis Nicaenae synodi, 21. 2 (Werke, ed. H.-G. Opitz, ii/1 (Berlin, 1935–40), 18), and Epiphanius, Panarion, 73. 12. 1 (GCS 37, 284). The latter text raises a complex problem. There was a fault in the Greek manuscript used both by Ianus Cornarius for his Latin translation (D. Epiphanii episcopi Constantiae Cypri, contra octoaginta haereses opus, Pannarium, siue arcula, aut capsula Medica appellatum (Paris, 1544; 1st edn. Basle, 1543), 255), and by Oporinus for the Greek editio princeps, which was published shortly afterwards (… D. Epiphanii episcopi Constantiae Cypri, contra octoginta haereses Opus eximium, Panarium siue capsula Medica appellatum (Basle, 1544), 366). As a result, the text appeared to be by Epiphanius himself, though it is actually a letter of the semi-Arians Basil of Ancyra and George of Laodicea. The error was first pointed out in Denis Petau’s edition, … Sancti Patris nostri Epiphanii Constantiae, siue Salaminis in Cypro, Episcopi, opera omnia (Paris, 1622), i. 859, and ii, ‘Animaduersiones’, ad loc., sep. pagination, 321–3: ‘Quare frustra hactenus omnes arbitrati sunt, haec Epiphanii esse, quae sunt Basilii ac Semiarianorum.’ See K. Holl, Die handschriftliche ¨ Uberlieferung des Epiphanius (Ancoratus und Panarion) (Leipzig, 1910; TU 3rd series 6/2), 1–11; Fr. Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen (Basle, 1992), online at:<www.ub.unibas.ch/kadmos/gg>, nos. 441–2. John Rainolds, The Summe of the Conference betwene John Rainoldes and John Hart: touching the Head and the Faith of the Church (London, 1584), 86–7, quoted to the same effect Augustine, ep. 238 [174

The English Reformation

43

1571 echoed the prescription which was already present in the Ordinal of Edward VI, in which ordinands had to swear ‘to teach and maintain nothing as required of necessity to Eternal Salvation, but that which [they] shall be perswaded may be concluded and proved by’ holy Scriptures.¹⁰⁷ The reference in 1571 to the ‘catholic fathers and ancient bishops’ merely specified which conclusions were primarily meant. These were encapsulated in the ancient creeds, to which the Church of England referred in the first code of doctrine that it promulgated after the break with Rome, the Ten Articles of 1536.¹⁰⁸ This reference was repeated in the Forty-Two and again in the Thirty-Nine Articles: the Apostles’ Creed (its apostolic origin had already been questioned and the formulation of the Articles expressed some doubt about it),¹⁰⁹ the Nicene Creed, and ‘the Creed of St Athanasius’ (the symbol Quicunque uult), the genuineness of which was accepted almost universally in the sixteenth century, apart from a handful of persecuted anti-Trinitarians.¹¹⁰ The eighth of the Thirty-Nine Articles stated that the three creeds ‘ought thoroughly to be received and believed [omnino recipienda et credenda]: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.’ The book of canons that convocation began to draw up in 1606 (which remained uncompleted and was not published until 1690) was even more definite: the Creeds were ‘Summaries’ of the true doctrine of the Trinity which ‘the Apostles and Churches of God … have, long since, in editions prior to the Maurists] ad Pascentium, 1. 4 (CSEL 57, 535–6), and Contra Maximinum Arianum, 2 [numbered 3 in editions prior to the Maurists]. 3 (PL 42, 760). ¹⁰⁷ Gibson, Codex, 2nd edn., vol. I, tit. XV, 318. In his 1551 Visitation articles, John Hooper required of his clergy that ‘they should not teach or preach any manner of thing to be necessary for the salvation of man other than which is contained in the book of God’s holy word, called the Old and New Testament’; in his subsequent Injunctions, he forbade them ‘to teach … any other doctrine, faith, prayer or religion unto the people necessary for salvation than such as they can duly, justly and manifestly prove out of the word of God’ (E. W. Hunt, The Life and Times of John Hooper (c.1500–1555) Bishop of Gloucester (Lewiston, 1992), 228–9). The two formulas were clearly meant to be equivalent. ¹⁰⁸ Text in Hardwick, History of the Articles, 241–2. ¹⁰⁹ See J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink’s introduction to Erasmus, Explanatio symboli apostolorum [1533], in Opera omnia, v/1 (Amsterdam, 1977), 196–9. ¹¹⁰ The short sketch by J. N. D. Kelly, The Athanasian Creed: The Paddock Lectures for 1962–3 (London, 1964), ‘The Beginnings of Criticism’, 3–5, should be supplemented to include anti-Trinitarian writers. Their works are now extremely scarce, and in some cases seem to have entirely disappeared, but they are known at least through their orthodox confutations: see esp. Gilbert G´en´ebrard, De S. Trinitate libri tres contra huius aeui Trinitarios, Antitrinitarios et Autotheanos (Paris, 1569), 179–88: ‘Sitne Symbolum, Quicunque uult salvus esse, Athanasii Alexandriae Episcopi.’ Jewel, Defence of the Apology, part II, in Works, iii. 254, spoke guardedly of ‘the Creed called Quicunque Vult, written, as some think, by Athanasius, as some others, by Eusebius Vercellensis’, but this caution was exceptional at the time among ‘mainstream’ theologians.

44

The English Reformation

most faithfully and learnedly deduced’ from Scripture.¹¹¹ Their importance for the Elizabethan episcopate is shown by the words ‘and believed’, which were added in 1563.¹¹² Nineteenth-century High Churchmen claimed that the object was ‘to assert the catholic and conservative character of the English Reformation’,¹¹³ but reference to the three Creeds was a regular feature of sixteenth-century Protestant confessions of faith, both Lutheran and Reformed.¹¹⁴ Calvin famously refused to subscribe to the three Creeds when his conservative opponent, Pierre Caroli, required him to do so at the Lausanne Synod of 1537, probably because he objected to being tied to their very words. Later, though, when he confronted the anti-Trinitarians, he insisted on the traditional formularies.¹¹⁵ All over Europe the ancient creeds were instruments of doctrinal control and tests of religious acceptability. The ‘Articles prescribed to Ministers’ in 1561 specified that ‘those who do not believe [the three Creeds] should not be received among true Catholics’.¹¹⁶ On the other front, reference to ancient creeds enabled English Protestants to reject the charge of heresy that was levelled at them by Roman Catholics. In the 1559 ‘Declaration of doctrine’ presented to Elizabeth, Reformed divines insisted on their full acceptance both of Scripture and of the ancient creeds: ‘We condemn all old heresies of the Ebionites, Cerinthians, Marcionites, Valentinians, Arians, Manichees, Eunomians, Sabellians, Macedonians, Nestorians, Eutychians, and all such like, which withstand any article of these Creeds.... And therefore according to the ancient laws of the Christian emperors Gratianus, Valentinianus, and Theodosius, we do justly vindicate and challenge to ourselves the ¹¹¹ Bishop Overall’s Convocation-Book, M DC VI concerning the governement of God’s catholick Church, and the Kingdoms of the whole World (London, 1690), book II, 96. ¹¹² Compare article 7/42 in Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 72. ¹¹³ Hardwick, History of the Articles, 395. ¹¹⁴ See the Formula of Concord (1576), art. II; the French confession of faith of 1559 (‘Confession of La Rochelle’), art. V; the Confessio belgica of 1561, art. IX, in P. Schaff (ed.), The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches (London, 1877), 94–5, 362, 393; Confessio Doctrinae Saxonicarum Ecclesiarum Synodo Tridentinae oblata, Anno Domini M.D.LI. (Basle, 1552), 14. The words used (‘nos illa amplecti’, ‘nous avouons’, ‘nous recevons volontiers’, ‘constanter amplexi sumus’) were admittedly less strong than the English ‘thoroughly to be received and believed’, but the difference was of emphasis, not of doctrine. ¹¹⁵ See W. Nijenhuis, ‘Calvin’s Attitude towards the Symbols of the Early Church during the Conflict with Caroli’, in id., Ecclesia Reformata: Studies on the Reformation (Leiden, 1972), 73–96, and below, Chapter 6 n. 132, for more on this episode. ¹¹⁶ ‘Articles prescribed to Ministers’, in Resolutions concerning the Injunctions, published by W. M. Kennedy, The ‘Interpretations’ of the Bishops and their Influence on Elizabethan Episcopal Policy (London, 1908), 34: ‘Qui istis [symbolis] non crediderint inter ueros catholicos non sunt recipiendi.’

The English Reformation

45

name of Christian Catholics.’¹¹⁷ The ancient Church was used as the criterion for redefining the limits of heresy, which had undergone a very large extension in the Middle Ages and had come to encompass potentially every form of dissent from church authority. This was the canonists’ view, reflected in contemporary inquisitorial practice, but it had largely permeated school divinity as well and it was fully espoused by the Counter-Reformation.¹¹⁸ Against such a hierarchical approach, the first four general councils (Nicaea, 325; Constantinople, 381; Ephesus, 431; Chalcedon, 451), in which the Trinitarian dogma had been defined,¹¹⁹ helped to delineate a core of Christian belief. They are expressly mentioned to that purpose in the 1559 Act of Supremacy.¹²⁰ The Queen’s Declaration of 1570, after the suppression of the Northern Rebellion, stressed that nobody would suffer for their beliefs under her reign except those who gainsaid the authority of Scripture and the creeds.¹²¹ To this extent, the appeal to antiquity might be liberating, and it contributed to giving the Church of England a broad and inclusive character. This acceptance of inner differences was supposed, however, to draw sharp boundaries against what was definitely beyond the pale: such was the function of compulsory subscription. English Protestants gladly took over from the early Church what may be called the heresiological tradition, ¹¹⁷ Dixon, History of the Church of England, v. 113–15. On the purpose of this text, see John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion. And other various Occurrences in the Church of England; During the First Twelve Years of Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign [=i] (London, 1709), 114–17. ¹¹⁸ See e.g. T. Shogimen, ‘William of Ockham and Conceptions of Heresy, c.1250–c.1350’, in I. Hunter, J. C. Laursen, and C. J. Nederman (eds.), Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2005), 59–70. For the age of the Counter-Reformation, the notion of ‘inquisitorial heresy’ has been clarified by B. Neveu, L’Erreur et son juge: remarques sur les censures doctrinales a` l’´epoque moderne (Naples, 1993), esp. 386–96. ¹¹⁹ H. Chadwick, ‘The Status of Ecumenical Councils in Anglican Thought’, in D. Neiman and M. Schatkin (eds.), The Heritage of the Early Church: Essays in Honor of the Very Reverend Georges Vasilievich Florovsky (Rome, 1973), 393–408, esp. 407–8. ¹²⁰ 1 Eliz. c. 1, art. XX, in Statutes of the Realm, iv/1 (London, 1819), 354: ‘[ecclesiastical commissioners] shall not in any wise have Aucthoritie or Power to order determine or adjudge anny Matter or Cause to bee Heresie but onely suche as heretofore have been determined ordred or adjudged to bee Heresie by thaucthoritee of the Canonicall Scriptures, or by the first fowre generall Councelles, or any of them, or by any other generall Councell wherein the same was declared Heresie by thexpress and playne woordes of the sayd Canonicall Scriptures.’ This was included in Gibson, Codex, tit. XVI, c. IV, 352, under the remarkable heading ‘Heresie and Hereticks, in the Protestant Sense’. ¹²¹ ‘A Declaration of the Queen’s Proceedings since her Reign’, in W. E. Collins, Queen Elizabeth’s Defence of her Proceedings in Church and State (London, 1899). Cf. Brook, Parker, 256.

46

The English Reformation

with its dualistic model of orthodoxy and heresy, its long catalogues of condemned heretics, and its appeal to the civil power to repress them. Orthodoxy was conceived as the original true doctrine against which upstart heretics had periodically plotted, thereby obliging its defenders to declare it ever more clearly (Augustine had explained that such was the providential reason for heresies¹²²). The convocation of 1606 repeated the medieval view that the Nicene Creed was only ‘the further Declaration’ of the Apostles’ Creed against heretics.¹²³ Similarly, the Athanasian Creed was said to have been ‘made a little after the Council of Nice, against such blasphemous Opinions, as in those times were either directly or indirectly, published in Corners, and spread here and there to the seducing of many’.¹²⁴ Positive teaching could not be dissociated from the condemnation of error. Imposition of formularies was a major preoccupation of all the main Churches. Continental Protestants also appealed to the definitions of the first councils and to the heresiological tradition.¹²⁵ What was more original was the importance that the Church of England conferred in this context on the Athanasian Creed, which it inherited from before the Reformation. Whatever the origins of the Quicunque uult (on which there is still no scholarly consensus today) it had acquired great authority in the Middle Ages and had come to be recited daily at the canonical hour of prime.¹²⁶ Cranmer inserted it in the first Book of Common Prayer and gave it an enhanced place in the second, in which its recitation was prescribed for Morning Prayer on thirteen different occasions (originally as a complement to the Apostles’ Creed but in effect, at least in the seventeenth century, as a substitute for it).¹²⁷ There is no parallel to that move in continental ¹²² See Augustine, En. in ps. 54, 22 (CC 39, 672–3). ¹²³ Bishop Overall’s Convocation-Book, book II, 96. Compare Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIa IIae, q. I, art. 9, ad 2um (ed. leonina, viii. 23). This was also Erasmus’ idea: see Bakhuizen van den Brink’s introduction to Explanatio symboli, 198–9. ¹²⁴ Bishop Overall’s Convocation-Book, book II, 97. ¹²⁵ For the Lutherans, see the Augsburg Confession (1530), pars I, art. I, in Creeds of the Protestant Churches, 8; Confessio Doctrinae Saxonicarum Ecclesiarum, 15; Confessio piae doctrinae, quae nomine Illustrissimi principis ac domini D. Christophori Ducis Wirtembergensis … die XXIIII mensis Ianuarii, Anno MDLII congregationi Tridentini Concilii proposita est ( T¨ubingen, n.d.), sig. A4v ; the Formula of Concord, art. II, in Creeds of the Protestant Churches, 95. For the Reformed, see the French confession of faith of 1559, art. VI, in Creeds of the Protestant Churches, 363, and art. XIV, 368. ¹²⁶ Breuiarium ad usum insignis Ecclesiae Sarum, ed. Procter and Wordsworth, ii, cols. 46–8. The Quicunque uult was confined to Sundays in the new Breviary of Cardinal Qui˜nones (1535) and later in the Tridentine breviary promulgated by Pope Pius V. ¹²⁷ F. E. Brightman, The English Rite: Being a Synopsis of the Sources and Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer, 2 vols. (London, 1915), i, pp. lxxxviii–lxxxix, ccxiv–ccxv, 168–9. Cf. MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, 141.

The English Reformation

47

Reformed liturgies.¹²⁸ In later periods, the Athanasian Creed, with its damnatory clauses, became an emblem of an exclusive orthodoxy which, for many, was no longer palatable. At the time, however, ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘exclusiveness’ were the very characters that made the Quicunque, and Christian antiquity in general, so important for the newly reformed Church of England. It was this notion of orthodoxy, not the authority of the Fathers as interpreters of Scripture, that the canon Concionatores intended to assert. The clearest point on which England seemed to depart from the continental Reformed standard concerned the Canon of Scripture. Roman Catholics regarded this as the most obvious instance on which the Bible had to be supplemented and were fond of quoting Augustine’s saying ‘I would not believe the Gospel, if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so’.¹²⁹ Calvin countered that Scripture was known as such to the faithful by ‘the inner witness of the Holy Spirit’, and the doctrine was duly entered in continental Reformed confessions of faith.¹³⁰ The Articles made no reference to it and stated instead (in a paragraph which was added in 1563) that ‘In the name of holy Scripture we do understand those Canonical books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church.’¹³¹ The claim was rather audacious even by the standards of Tudor historical knowledge. Eusebius and Jerome testified that the Apocalypse had been rejected by many in the first centuries, especially in the Eastern Church. Erasmus had pointed this out in a highly controversial passage of his Annotations.¹³² This ¹²⁸ Things are less clear for the Lutheran Churches. The ecclesiastical ordinance for Brandenburg-N¨urnberg of 1533 assured the recitation of Quicunque on Sundays (Brightman, English Rite, i, p. xxxix). In the 18th century, though, at a time when the Athanasian Creed was being much debated in the Church of England, Bishop Gibson wished to know whether it was used in the public services of other Protestant Churches. He asked Daniel Waterland, who was unable to find any instance and could only send him two certificates from Lutheran ministers to the effect that the Creed was received as a rule of faith but not used in the liturgy (see letters of Waterland to Gibson, 30 August, 4 September, and 22 November 1730, LPL, MS 1741, fos. 65r –66r , 67r –68r , 81r –83r ). ¹²⁹ ‘Ego uero Euangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae Ecclesiae commoueret auctoritas’ (Contra Epistolam Manichaei quam uocant Fundamenti liber unus, 5. 6 [CSEL 25, 197]). ¹³⁰ Jean Calvin, Institutio (1539–54), CR 29, 293–6; Institutio (1559), I. 7, CR 30, 56–61. Cf. the French confession, art. IV, and the Confessio belgica, art. V, in Creeds of the Protestant Churches, 361 and 386–7. See R. A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, ii: Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology (2nd edn., Grand Rapids, Mich., 2003). ¹³¹ Article 6/39. The clause and the list of canonical books were missing altogether in the original (article 5/42). See Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 71, and commentary 250–2. ¹³² Eusebius, HE, 3. 24. 18 (SC 31, 133), 3. 25. 4 (SC 31, 134), 7. 25 (SC 41, 204–10); Jerome, ep. 129 ad Dardanum, 3 (CSEL 56, 169); I. Backus, ‘The Church Fathers and the Canonicity of the Apocalypse in the Sixteenth Century: Erasmus, Frans

48

The English Reformation

may be the reason why the last paragraph of the article was more guarded: ‘All the bookes of the new Testament, as they are commonly received, we doe receive and account them for canonicall.’¹³³ What should be stressed is that, on this question, the Church of England aligned itself with Lutheran rather than with Calvinist views. The definition of holy Scripture was borrowed from the Confessio Virtembergica, which had been drawn up in 1551 by Johannes Brenz, one of the fathers of Lutheran orthodoxy, for presentation at the council of Trent and which then became the official confession of the W¨urttemberg Church.¹³⁴ This definition appears to have later offended some Calvinistic susceptibilities since it was dropped from the Irish Articles of 1615, which took care explicitly to ground the authority of Scripture on its being divinely inspired (inspiration was not mentioned in the Thirty-Nine Articles).¹³⁵ Titelmans, and Theodore Beza’, SCJ 29 (1998), 651–65. For modern research on the history of the Canon, see A. Le Boulluec, ‘Le Probl`eme de l’extension du Canon des ´ Ecritures aux premiers si`ecles’, Recherches de science religieuse, 92 (2004), 45–87. ¹³³ This is how the article was defended by the Dean of Salisbury, John Bridges, A Defence of the government established in the Church of Englande for ecclesiasticall matters (London, 1587), 1304: ‘divers bookes of those which the articles name and understand for the holie and canonicall Scripture, have bin doubted of: I graunt it, and the articles doe confesse as much.... Do they not here plainly enough inferre, that there had bene some doubt and not receiving of some of them, when they say, as they are commonly received, so doe we receive them, though some doe not so receive them?’ ¹³⁴ Confessio piae doctrinae, fo. H1v : ‘Sacram Scripturam uocamus, eos Canonicos libros ueteris et noui Testamenti, de quorum authoritate in Ecclesia nunquam dubitatum est.’ The clause seems peculiar to this text (there is nothing to the purpose in the Confessio Saxonica, to which it is otherwise much indebted). See M. Brecht, Theologische Realenzyklop¨adie, vii (Berlin, 1981), s.v. ‘Brenz’, 170–81; J. M. Estes, Christian Magistrate and Territorial Church: Johannes Brenz and the German Reformation ( Toronto, 2007), 40; M. A. Deuschle, Brenz als Kontroverstheologe: Die Apologie der Confessio Virtembergica und die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Johannes Brenz und Pedro de Soto ( T¨ubingen, 2006). The same doctrine was defended by Martin Chemnitz, Examinis Concilii Tridentini, opus integrum: quatuor partes, in quibus praecipuorum capitum totius doctrinae Papisticae, firma et solida refutatio, tum ex sacrae scripturae fontibus, tum ex orthodoxorum Patrum consensu, collecta est; uno Volumine complectens. Ad ueritatis Christianae, et Antichristianae falsitatis cognitionem, perquam utile et necessarium (Frankfurt, 1574), 1a pars, 53–4 and 70. The influence of the W¨urttemberg Confession on the Thirty-Nine Articles was first pointed out by Richard Laurence, An Attempt to illustrate those Articles of the Church of England, which the Calvinists improperly consider as Calvinistical, in eight sermons preached before the University of Oxford, in the year MDCCCIV (new edn., Oxford, 1820), 45 and 240–3. See subsequently Hardwick, History of the Articles, 124–6. ¹³⁵ Hardwick, History of the Articles, appendix VI, ‘Of the holy Scripture and the three Creeds’, §2, 371–2: ‘By the name of holy Scripture we understand all the Canonical Bookes of the Old and New Testament … All which wee acknowledge to be given by the inspiration of God, and in that regard to be of most certaine credit and highest authority.’ See A. Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in early-modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007), 85–103.

The English Reformation

49

It would be going too far, however, to argue that this appeal to continuous ecclesiastical teaching reintroduced the authority of tradition.¹³⁶ Borrowings from the Confessio Virtembergica probably had more to do with European diplomacy than with deep theological thinking.¹³⁷ Moreover, Lutherans insisted that the reception of Scripture as having been transmitted by the Church by no means pledged them to accept traditions other than the Bible.¹³⁸ In the context of the Articles, in any case, the clause on the Canon was specifically directed against the Tridentine reception of the Apocrypha as a part of Scripture.¹³⁹ The teaching of Elizabethan divines on the Canon reveals in what sense the Article was understood at the time. William Whitaker, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, conceded that ‘it belongs to the Church to approve, receive, promulgate the Scriptures, and commend them to all its members’. He denied that the testimony of the Church was the ground for our belief in Scripture: ‘there is a nobler and more certain witness, which persuades us that these books are sacred, the inner witness, that is, of the Spirit, without which the approval of the Church would have no weight or importance among us.’ Scripture was αὐτόπιστος; it derived its credit from itself.¹⁴⁰ With regard to Augustine’s saying, Whitaker adopted the response of continental Protestants (both Lutheran and Reformed): Augustine had been speaking of himself before his conversion, when he was still a Manichee, and had meant that ‘he would not then have believed the Gospel if he had not been moved by the authority of the Church’.¹⁴¹ In ¹³⁶ As argued e.g. by Symonds, Council of Trent and Anglican Formularies, 3. ¹³⁷ Horie, ‘Lutheran Influence’, 530–2. ¹³⁸ See Chemnitz, Examen, 1a pars, 71; Deuschle, Brenz als Kontroverstheologe, 157–61. ¹³⁹ It is significant that only the canonical books of the Old Testament were listed, whereas those of the New Testament, which did not pertain to the controversy with the Roman Church, merely received a brief general mention. See Hardwick, History of the Articles, 297 n. 2, and compare the Irish Articles, 371. ¹⁴⁰ Whitaker, Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura, q. III, c. 1, 314–15: ‘non negamus, ad Ecclesiam pertinere, ut scripturas approbet, agnoscat, recipiat, promulget, commendet suis omnibus … Sed negamus, nos tantum ob illam Ecclesiae commendationem scripturis fidem adhibere. Esse enim dicimus certius ac illustrius testimonium, quo nobis persuadeatur hos libros sacros esse, testimonium nempe internum Spiritus sancti, sine quo Ecclesiae commendatio nullius apud nos ponderis aut momenti futura esset.... Summa nostrae sententiae est, esse scripturam αὐτόπιστον, id est, ex se suam omnem authoritatem et fidem habere.’ ¹⁴¹ Ibid., q. III, c. 8, 325. Compare Calvin, Institutio (1559), . vii. 3 (CR 30, 57–8), to whom Whitaker refers, but also Chemnitz, Examen, 1a pars, 70–1. The same response was later made by William Crompton, Saint Austins Summes: or, the Summe of Saint Austins Religion: Collected Verbatim from his owne undoubted Writings, wherein the Reader may plainely and evidently see this Conclusion proved, that S. Austin (who lived neere Twelve Hundred Yeeres before the time of Luther) agreed with the Church of England in all the

50

The English Reformation

his handbook of controversies, William Perkins considered the problem of the Canon in a chapter on traditions: ‘It will be said, where is it written that scripture is scripture? I answer, not in any one particular place or book of scripture, but in every line and page of the whole bible to him that can read with the spirit of discerning, and can discerne the voice of the true pastour, as the sheep of Christ can doe.’¹⁴² Elsewhere, in less directly polemical works, Perkins’s position was more uncertain (partly since he was discussing at one point the Church ‘since the Apostles daies’, and at another the Church as ‘distinct from the Apostles’). He was ready to admit that the ‘assent of the Church’ could ‘move us’ to believe the authority of Scripture, though not ‘make us’ believe it.¹⁴³ On the whole, the position of English divines was more balanced than that of Calvin. Hostility to the Anabaptist appeal to individual illumination and its potentially radical consequences probably led them to tone down the doctrine of the inward witness.¹⁴⁴ This did not amount, however, to a recognition of the necessity of tradition to supplement Scripture. 4. ‘UNWRIT TEN TRADITIONS’ AND THE ‘CONSENSUS OF THE FATHERS’ There was at least one member of the Elizabethan episcopate who did hold the doctrine that later writers mistakenly ascribed to the compilers of the code of 1571. Richard Cheyney, Bishop of Gloucester, who also held the diocese of Bristol in commendam, maintained in three sermons in 1568 that Scripture alone could not determine controversies in matters of faith and that ‘the Consent of Fathers’ (as opposed to their individual maine Poynts of Faith and Doctrine. In Answer to Mr. Iohn Breerely, Priest (London, 1625), 39. Cf. R. Dodaro and M. C. Questier, ‘Strategies in Jacobean Polemic: The Use and Abuse of St Augustine in English Theological Controversy’, JEH 44 (1993), 437–8. ¹⁴² William Perkins, A Reformed Catholike (Cambridge, 1598), 145. ¹⁴³ See ‘A Godly and Learned Exposition upon the whole Epistle of Jude, containing threescore and sixe Sermons’, in William Perkins, Workes, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1608–9), iii, 2nd pagination, 479–80. But compare the much more radical affirmation that the authority of Scripture is independent from the Church, ibid. 541, and ‘A Commentarie or Exposition upon the five first chapters of the epistle to the Galatians’, ii. 195–6 (all these texts were only published after Perkins’s death, from notes taken down by auditors, which may also account for discrepancies). See also William Perkins, Problema de Romanae Fidei ementito Catholicismo. Estque Antidotum contra Thesaurum Catholicum Iodoci Coccii. Et ;ροπαιδεία Iuventutis in Lectione omnium Patrum (Cambridge, 1604), 54. ¹⁴⁴ Cf. I. Breward’s introduction to The Work of William Perkins (Appleford, 1970), 36 and 39.

The English Reformation

51

opinions) ought to be the rule.¹⁴⁵ The source is a denunciation sent by a group of citizens of Bristol to the Privy Council and one should therefore allow for some degree of misrepresentation, but it seems that the substance of Cheyney’s preaching was faithfully reproduced. In a letter that he sent to Cecil in justification of himself, Cheyney spoke of ‘Orthodox Writers consenting’,¹⁴⁶ and another source tells us that he believed in the inerrance of general councils and made bishops ‘the Interpreters of Scripture’.¹⁴⁷ He was, however, an isolated figure. The doctrines for which he claimed the consensus of the Fathers (the Real Presence in the eucharist and the freedom of the will) made him completely at odds with his episcopal brethren, and his teaching on patristic authority provoked an outcry.¹⁴⁸ He was briefly excommunicated in April 1571 by the same convocation that passed the final version of the Thirty-Nine Articles and compiled the canons.¹⁴⁹ What was at stake in the conflict brought about by Cheyney’s sermons was not the legitimacy of quoting the Fathers as such (everybody did so) but the Roman Catholic doctrine of tradition. The Council of Trent had decreed in 1546 that truth was to be found ‘in the written books and in the unwritten traditions which, received by the apostles from Christ’s own word of mouth, or transmitted by the apostles themselves, by the dictation of the Holy Ghost, as it were from hand to hand, have come down to us’.¹⁵⁰ These traditions were said to concern both faith and mores —by which it is not clear whether the council meant morals or disciplinary and liturgical usages.¹⁵¹ The council did not explain how traditions were to be known ¹⁴⁵ Strype, Annals, i, c. 52, 525. ¹⁴⁶ Ibid. 527. ¹⁴⁷ Ibid., c. 25, 247–8, from Campion’s undated letter to Cheyney in Edmundi Campiani Societatis Iesu Martyris in Anglia, Opuscula omnia nunc primum `e M. S. edita (Paris, 1618), 318–20. On Campion’s relations with Cheyney, see also below, 120. ¹⁴⁸ For Cheyney’s defence of the Real Presence as ‘the antient Faith’ see Strype, Annals, i. 248; for his appeal to the ‘Primitive Church’ for evidence of free will, see 528. See C. Litzenberger, ‘Richard Cheyney, Bishop of Gloucester: An Infidel in Religion?’, SCJ 25 (1994), 567–84, esp. 579–82; on the Tractarians’ revealing interest in him, Nockles, ‘Survivals or New Arrivals?’, 153–4. ¹⁴⁹ Synodalia, ed. E. Cardwell, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1842), ii. 529–31; Strype, Annals, i. 247. ¹⁵⁰ Denz.–Sch¨on. 1501: ‘in libris scriptis et sine scripto traditionibus, quae ab ipsius Christi ore ab Apostolis acceptae, aut ab ipsis Apostolis Spiritu Sancto dictante quasi per manus traditae ad nos usque peruenerunt.’ ¹⁵¹ Many Roman Catholic theologians since Vatican II have argued that ‘fides et mores’ at Trent meant ‘faith and discipline’: see esp. J. Beumer, ‘Res fidei et morum: Die ¨ Entwicklung eines theologischen Begriffs in den Dekreten der drei letzten Okumenischen Konzilien’, Annuarium historiae conciliorum, 2 (1970), 114–18; P. F. Fransen, ‘A Short History of the Meaning of the Formula ‘‘Fides et mores’’ ’ (1978–9), repr. in id., Hermeneutics of the Councils and Other Studies (Leuven, 1985), 287–318 (note however the caution of Congar, Tradition et traditions: essai historique, 225 n. 7). But more evidence should be considered. See e.g. A. Clerval (ed.), Registre des proc`es-verbaux de la

52

The English Reformation

and whether, in matters of faith, they should be understood as materially supplementing Scripture (and therefore amounting to a second, parallel, source of revelation), or only as illuminating its obscurities. Contemporaries were not unaware of this distinction, which was to absorb Roman Catholic theologians at the time of the second Vatican council, but they did not elaborate on it.¹⁵² It was negligible in the Tridentine perspective, which was first and foremost to exclude the Protestant plea for sola Scriptura. The council insisted therefore that written books and unwritten traditions should be paid ‘equal respect’.¹⁵³ In the same session, ‘in order to restrain unruly minds’, it forbade the interpretation of Scripture against the sense of the Church ‘or also against the unanimous agreement of the Fathers’.¹⁵⁴ In his defence of ‘unwritten traditions’ Richard Smyth—still at that time a schismatic from the Roman point of view—also treated promiscuously ceremonies, doctrines without any foundation in Scripture, Facult´e de Th´eologie de Paris, i: 1505–1523 (Paris, 1917), 232, 268, 271; J. K. Farge (ed.), Registre des proc`es-verbaux de la Facult´e de Th´eologie de l’Universit´e de Paris de janvier 1524 a` novembre 1533 (Paris, 1990), 177 and 285: in all these cases, J. K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden, 1985), 41, 127, 164, 194, 201, translates ‘faith and morals’ and he seems right to do so. The Faculty’s Articles of Faith of 1543 stated that the universal Church could not err ‘in fide et moribus’ (Charles Du Plessis d’Argentr´e (ed.), Collectio iudiciorum de nouis erroribus, ii/1 (Paris, 1728), 323), which was rendered ‘en la foy, et bonnes mœurs’ in the official French version (F.-A. Isambert et al. (eds.), Recueil g´en´eral des anciennes lois franc¸aises, xii (Paris, 1827), 823). The Tridentine decree should also be compared to the Articles of Faith issued by the Faculty of Theology of Louvain in 1544, article 44: ‘Certa fide complectenda sunt siue quae scripturis expresse sunt prodita, siue quae per traditionem Ecclesiae catholicae quasi per manus credenda accepimus, siue quae per cathedram Petri uel concilia generalia legitime congregata super fidei et morum negociis definita sunt’ (in H. De Jongh, L’Ancienne Facult´e de Th´eologie de Louvain au premier si`ecle de son existence (1432–1540): ses d´ebuts, son organisation, son enseignement, ´ sa lutte contre Erasme et Luther. Avec des documents in´edits (Louvain, 1911), 87∗ ). ¹⁵² See H. A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 365–412; Rex, Theology of John Fisher, 96–100; id., ‘Polemical Theologian’, 117; Macek, Loyal Opposition, 116–24 and notes. For Roman Catholic works concerned with this problematic, see Congar, Tradition et traditions: essai historique; J. Beumer, La Tradition orale (Paris, 1967), esp. 127–204; G. H. Tavard, The Seventeenth-Century Tradition: A Study in Recusant Thought (Leiden, 1978: French original 1969). ¹⁵³ Denz.–Sch¨on. 1501: ‘pari pietatis affectu ac reuerentia’. As already observed by Congar, Tradition et traditions: essai historique, 211 and notes ad loc., the phrase ‘par pietatis affectus’ comes from the old Latin translation of Basil of Caesarea’s De Spiritu Sancto, chapter 27, on which see below, n. 218. A minority tried in vain to have ‘par’ changed into the weaker ‘similis’: see H. Jedin, Girolamo Seripando: Sein Leben und Denken im Geisteskampf des 16. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (W¨urzburg, 1937), i. 322–5. ¹⁵⁴ Denz.–Sch¨on. 1507: ‘ad coercenda petulantia ingenia decernit [Synodus], ut nemo … contra eum sensum, quem tenuit et tenet sancta mater Ecclesia … aut etiam contra unanimem consensum Patrum ipsam Scripturam sacram interpretari audeat.’

The English Reformation

53

and patristic interpretations of Scripture.¹⁵⁵ Stapleton later claimed that counciliar decrees such as the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son were ‘dogmas of the Church which are not written, but are either interpretations of Scripture, or definitions of faith transmitted without the help of Scripture’. The distinction was clearly immaterial for him: what mattered was that such dogmas were not in Scripture.¹⁵⁶ Counter-Reformation divines indeed built on the Tridentine decrees to elaborate a full doctrine of the ‘unwritten word of God’. They distinguished between the assertions of individual Fathers (which had no binding authority) and the doctrines that all had agreed to teach and which ought therefore to be absolutely received. According to the Spanish Dominican Melchior Cano, in his very influential De locis theologicis, ‘all the saints (Cano’s usual name for the Fathers, as opposed to the Schoolmen) cannot err together in a point of faith’.¹⁵⁷ Not only was the Fathers’ unanimous interpretation of Scripture ‘the very sense of the Holy Ghost’,¹⁵⁸ but their consensus provided two reliable ways of knowing apostolic traditions. First, when all the Fathers believed a point of faith with no scriptural basis, then the Church must have received it from the tradition of the Apostles. Secondly, when they all witnessed that a doctrine or a custom came from the Apostles, their testimony was ‘a certain argument to believe so’.¹⁵⁹ The Commonitorium by the fifth-century Gallic monk Vincent of L´erins had already suggested that one should have recourse to universal tradition to rebut the appeal of heretics to Scripture, since ‘what has been believed always, everywhere and by all, that is truly and properly Catholic’.¹⁶⁰ Vincent’s treatise was published for the first time in 1528 and, ¹⁵⁵ Richard Smyth, A brief treatyse settynge forth divers truthes necessary both to be beleved of chrysten people, and kepte also, whiche are not expressed in the scripture but left to ye church by the apostles tradition (London, 1547). Smyth was writing at the beginning of Edward VI’s reign (sig. D5v ) and, for obvious reasons, made no mention of the council of Trent, though his doctrine was fully Tridentine. See P. Marshall, ‘The Debate over ‘‘Unwritten Verities’’ in Early Reformation England’, in B. Gordon (ed.), Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, i: The Medieval Inheritance (Aldershot, 1996), 60–77. ¹⁵⁶ Stapleton, De principiis fidei doctrinalibus, 410: ‘Iam uero, tot et tanta contra tot haereticos, in sacris Conciliis de fide decreta et tradita, et ad salutem imprimis necessaria, quid aliud sunt quam dogmata Ecclesiae non scripta, sed uel ipsarum Scripturarum interpretationes, uel absque Scripturae auxilio traditae fidei definitiones.’ ¹⁵⁷ Melchior Cano, De locis theologicis libri duodecim (Salamanca, 1563), 260: ‘Sancti simul omnes in fidei dogmate errare non possunt.’ ¹⁵⁸ Ibid. 250. ¹⁵⁹ Ibid. 109–10. ¹⁶⁰ Vincent of L´erins, Commonitorium, 3. 4 (CC 64, 149): ‘In ipsa autem catholica Ecclesia magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. Hoc est etenim uere proprieque catholicum, quod ipsa uis nominis ratioque declarat, quae omnia fere uniuersaliter comprehendit.’

54

The English Reformation

though Protestants occasionally claimed it for themselves, its reception was heavily tilted in a Roman Catholic direction.¹⁶¹ Ultimately, postTridentine theologians grounded the certainty of the patristic consensus on the infallibility that Christ had promised to his Church, so that, in effect, the appeal to the Fathers amounted to an appeal to the present Roman Church.¹⁶² The Roman doctrine of tradition provided the background for all Protestant discussions of the authority of the Fathers, whether in England or on the Continent.¹⁶³ Here again, the distinction between the interpretation of Scripture through tradition and the appeal to unwritten traditions, though it was not ignored, was treated as inessential.¹⁶⁴ Protestant controversialists rejected both together, as they rightly saw that both were meant to impugn the sufficiency of Scripture.¹⁶⁵ It was not unusual for them to appeal to the ‘consent of Fathers’.¹⁶⁶ But this was a rhetorical agreement, so to speak, which had its roots in Aristotle’s definition of ‘generally accepted opinions’ as ‘those which commend themselves to all or to the majority or to the wise—that is, to all of the wise or to the majority or to the most famous and ¹⁶¹ ‘Vincentii Lirinensis Galli pro catholicae fidei antiquitate et uniuersitate aduersus profanas omnium haereseon nouationes’, in Sichardus, Antidotum, fos. 202v –214r . See Quantin, Catholicisme classique, 76–8, for the Roman Catholic reception of the work, and Vessey, ‘English Translations’, 801–4 and 815–16, for the series of English Roman Catholic translations, starting under Queen Mary; see, for its Protestant use, W. P. Haugaard, ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship and Theology in Sixteenth-Century England’, SCJ 10/3 (1979), 41 n. 15. ¹⁶² This has been perceptively observed by M. C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), 25–7. ¹⁶³ Since I do not propose to study 16th-century divinity per se, a few examples will be enough. Many other texts of a similar doctrine could easily be produced using H. Gough, A General Index to the Publications of the Parker Society (Cambridge, 1855), 322–3, s.v. ‘Fathers of the Church’. See also Questier, Conversion, 20 n. 33. The overall picture that emerges exactly mirrors continental Reformed positions. ¹⁶⁴ On the differences between Roman Catholic authors, see a lucid discussion in Richard Holdsworth, Praelectiones Theologicae, habitae in Collegio Greshamensi apud Londinenses (London, 1661), 87. On these lectures, delivered in the 1630s but only published after the Restoration, see the preface of the editor, Holdsworth’s nephew, Richard Pearson; John Ward, The Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (London, 1740), 56–65; S. Hutton, ‘Plato in the Tudor Academies’, in Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Aldershot, 1999), 122–3; H. Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen: Universities and Society in Pre-industrial Britain, 1500–1700 (London, 1970), 86. ¹⁶⁵ See e.g. Perkins’s chapter ‘Of Traditions’, A Reformed Catholike, 134–51. The necessity of tradition to interpret Scripture is discussed, 149–50, as a popish objection. ¹⁶⁶ For Cranmer’s use of the phrase, see above. Cf. e.g. the title of Chemnitz’s famous treatise, quoted above, n. 134. For an explicit distinction between what ‘all the olde fathers did consent upon’ and what ‘some of the olde fathers did allowe’, see William Fulke, A Retentive, to stay good Christians, in true faith and religion, against the motives of Richard Bristow (London, 1580), 51.

The English Reformation

55

distinguished of them’.¹⁶⁷ It was not the consensus Patrum of Tridentine theology. Protestant authors maintained that, on most or all questions in dispute, it was impossible to determine a consensus in accord with the Vincentian rules, and that anyway, even if it were possible, this consensus would not be binding.¹⁶⁸ Three kinds of arguments were used: from the Fathers themselves, from popish divines, from reason. First, it was argued that the Fathers had stressed the difference in authority between their writings and the Word of God. Standard quotations included Augustine’s De Trinitate (‘do not attach yourself to my writings as if they were the canonical Scriptures’) and his letter to Vincent.¹⁶⁹ Such texts, which were readily to hand in Gratian’s Decretum, had already been much used in the medieval schools.¹⁷⁰ Secondly, some popish divines had confessed that ‘learned men in our dayes may give a right sense of sundrie places thereof [Scripture] which the Fathers saw not, yea against the which perhaps they consent’.¹⁷¹ The author most regularly quoted was Cajetan, a pre-Tridentine divine, who had attempted to comment the Bible literally, according to the hebraica ueritas rather than the Latin Vulgate, so as to meet Lutherans on their own ground.¹⁷² The ¹⁶⁷ Aristotle, Topica, I. 1. 100b 21–3 (trans. E. S. Forster, Loeb Classical Library). Cf. the case of law, in which communis opinio provided a probable, not a necessary interpretation (I. Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge, 1992), 91–5). ¹⁶⁸ It has been rightly pointed out that a fundamental contribution of sixteenthcentury Reformed students of the Fathers was ‘the recognition that there was no such thing as a patristic consensus’ (Haugaard, ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship’, 58 n. 71). ¹⁶⁹ Augustine, De Trinitate, 3, prooemium, § 2 (CC 50, 128); ep. 93 ad Vincentium, 10. 35 (CSEL 34/2, 480). See e.g. James Calfhill, An Aunswere to the Treatise of the Crosse: wherin ye shal see by the plaine and undoubted word of God, the vanities of men disproved: by the true and Godly Fathers of the Church, the dreames and dotages of other controlled: and by lawfull Counsels, conspiracies overthrown (London, 1565), fo. 22r – v . On Calfhill, see B. Usher, ODNB, ix. 528–30, s.v.; McCullough, Sermons at Court, 78–9. ¹⁷⁰ Gratian, Decretum, c. 3 (Noli meis litteris) and 9 (Noli frater), dist. IX (Friedberg, i. 17). ¹⁷¹ Rainolds, Conference with Hart, 72–4 (referring to Cajetan). ¹⁷² Thomas de Vio Cajetan, Commentarii illustres planeque insignes in Quinque Mosaicos libros (Paris, 1539), preface, sig. AA6v : ‘Et siquando nouus sensus textui consonus, nec a sacra scriptura, nec ab ecclesiae doctrinae dissonus, quamuis a torrente doctorum sacrorum alienus, aequos [lectores] se prebeant censores.’ See G. Bedouelle, ‘L’Humanisme et la Bible’ in id. and B. Roussel (eds.), Le Temps des R´eformes et la Bible (Paris, 1989; Bible de Tous les Temps V), 111–14. Bedouelle, 113, argues that ‘ ‘‘other’’ does not necessarily mean ‘‘contrary’’ ’ but Cajetan, preface, sig. AA6v , also writes: ‘Nullus itaque detestetur nouum sacrae scripturae sensum, ex hoc quod dissonat a priscis doctoribus.’ Rainolds’s translation, Conference with Hart, 73, ‘though it go against the streame of the Fathers’, seems therefore justified. See also U. Horst, ‘Der Streit um die hl. Schrift zwischen Kardinal Cajetan und Ambrosius Catharinus’, in L. Scheffczyck, W. Dettloff, and R. Heinzmann (eds.), Wahrheit und Verk¨undigung: Michael Schmaus zum 70. Geburtstag (Paderborn, 1967), 551–77, esp. 558. On Cajetan’s biblicism as

56

The English Reformation

Roman Church had chosen a different path at Trent and Cajetan’s exegetical principles had earned him a severe rebuke from Cano.¹⁷³ As for rational arguments, the most obvious was that the Fathers were fallible men and that ‘imperfections’ were to be found in all of them, ‘from the very first after the Apostles time’.¹⁷⁴ The standard instance was the error of millenarianism into which so many had fallen.¹⁷⁵ John Rainolds made a number of more subtle points in the discussions that he held with John Hart and which he published in 1584. Hart was a Roman Catholic priest, trained in theology at the University of Douai (he subsequently became a Jesuit). He was arrested on landing at Dover, in 1580, and, according to a quite usual practice, brought to confer with a Protestant divine.¹⁷⁶ When Hart claimed that Scripture should be interpreted according to the consensus of the Fathers, Rainolds asked him who indeed had read all the Fathers. Hart answered that ‘we meane of the Fathers which are extant commonly, and may be had and read’. Rainolds in turn retorted that, more likely than not, there had been different interpretations in those patristic writings that were now lost.¹⁷⁷ Later in the conference, he insisted on the corruptions suffered by patristic texts and on the many forgeries committed when popery was dominant.¹⁷⁸ Such a position seems prima facie impossible to reconcile with Jewel’s challenge. Jewel’s biographer, Laurence Humphrey, indeed argued that his hero had made ‘too large a concession’ to Roman Catholics. ‘Rejecting the means by which he could have at easiest and best defended his cause, he robbed in a way both himself and the Church.’¹⁷⁹ It would have been sufficient to tell his opponents: ‘Your doctrines are contrary to the Scriptures.’ But he wanted to turn their own weapons against them.¹⁸⁰ Humphrey then attacked the very notion of an appeal to antiquity.¹⁸¹ The Life of Jewell came an anti-Lutheran tactic, see G. Hennig, Cajetan und Luther: Ein historischer Beitrag zur Begegnung von Thomismus und Reformation (Stuttgart, 1966), 120–1. ¹⁷³ Cano, De locis, 250–7. Hart pointed this out but Rainolds, Conference with Hart, 73–4, countered that Cajetan had been defended against Cano by Andradius [Diego Payva d’Andrada], Defensio Tridentinae fidei catholicae, et integerrimae (Ingolstadt, 1580), fos. 260r –263v . ¹⁷⁴ Calfhill, An Aunswere to the Treatise of the Crosse, fos. 22v –23r . ¹⁷⁵ Rainolds, Conference with Hart, 472–3. ¹⁷⁶ See G. Anstruther, The Seminary Priests, i: Elizabethan 1558–1603 (Ware, 1969), 153–5; G. Martin Murphy, ODNB, xxv. 583–4, s.v.; Questier, Conversion, 159. ¹⁷⁷ Rainolds, Conference with Hart, 71. ¹⁷⁸ Ibid. 196–214. ¹⁷⁹ Laurence Humphrey, Ioannis Iuelli Angli episcopi Sarisburiensis uita et mors, eiusque uerae doctrinae defensio (London, 1573), 212: ‘tamen nimium largitus est, et uobis plus aequo concessit … quod reiecto medio, quo causam suam facilius et firmius sustentare potuisset, et seipsum et Ecclesiam quodammodo spoliauit.’ ¹⁸⁰ Ibid.: ‘Satis erat opposuisse: Vestra dogmata scripturis aduersantur.’ ¹⁸¹ Ibid. 214–16.

The English Reformation

57

out in 1573 and Roman Catholics seized upon these passages.¹⁸² Edmund Campion amalgamated Humphrey’s words with other harsh judgements passed on the Fathers (in many cases, actually on pseudo-patristic texts) by Luther, the Magdeburg Centuriators, Calvin, and other continental Protestants. It all amounted to a confession that the Fathers were the natural buttresses for the Roman Catholic cause. Jewel’s ‘hypocrisy’ in appealing to them had produced a triumph for his opponents. As long as patristic works were available, it was useless for the English government to prohibit recusant literature: the Fathers did the job of recusant writers for them.¹⁸³ The Ten reasons remained a classic of Roman Catholic apologetics for three centuries, both in England and on the Continent. In several cases, Campion’s work was reprinted together with Vincent of L´erins’s Commonitorium, to form a handbook against heretics.¹⁸⁴ The first and most influential Protestant rejoinder came from Whitaker. He denied any contradiction between Humphrey and Jewel. The latter’s challenge is ‘what we all profess’¹⁸⁵ and it had been managed victoriously. Humphrey only blamed Jewel for having brought to the Fathers a problem already judged by Scripture.¹⁸⁶ Jewel had done so ‘to put an end to that impudent and perfectly false calumny’ that the Church of England opposed antiquity, ‘which had taken hold of many people’.¹⁸⁷ Continental Protestants had been right to warn against the errors of the Fathers.¹⁸⁸ Irenaeus thus pretended that Christ died at 50,¹⁸⁹ and ¹⁸² See Fulke, Retentive against Bristow, 55 (Fulke only makes a minimal answer). Bristow’s ‘Motives’ had been first printed in 1574. See Allison–Rogers, ii, no. 67. ¹⁸³ Edmund Campion, Rationes decem quibus fretus, Certamen Anglicanae ecclesiae ministris obtulit in causa fidei (first printed secretly in England in 1581), fifth reason, as reprinted in Possevino, Bibliotheca selecta, l. VII, 493–5. Campion’s full text is also reprinted in William Whitaker, Ad rationes decem Edmundi Campiani Iesuitae, quibus fretus certamen Anglicanae ecclesiae ministris obtulit in causa fidei, Responsio (London, 1581): see 86–90. ¹⁸⁴ For editions and translations up to 1640, see Allison–Rogers, i, nos. 135–93; for later ones, C. Sommervogel, Biblioth`eque de la Compagnie de J´esus, 11 vols. (Brussels, 1890–1932), ii, cols. 586–97. ¹⁸⁵ Whitaker, Ad rationes Campiani Responsio, 114. This was the standard Protestant answer, reprinted several times on the Continent (see Allison–Rogers, i, nos. 139, 145, 154, 156, 167). Whitaker wrote at the request of Bishop Aylmer of London: McCoog, ‘ ‘‘Playing the Champion’’ ’, 133. On the importance of Whitaker as an anti-papal polemicist, see Lake, Moderate Puritans, esp. 93–7. ¹⁸⁶ Whitaker, Ad rationes Campiani Responsio, 114. ‘Iuellum vero doctissimus Humfredus in eo minime reprehendit, quod nimium prolixe de patribus promiserit, aut minus quam dixit, praestiterit: sed quod plus uobis, quam erat opus, concesserit, et causam a scripturis ipsis iudicatam ad patrum calculos reuocarit.’ ¹⁸⁷ Ibid. 115: ‘ut illam insolentem et falsissimam de antiquitate calumniam, quae multos tenuit, iugularet.’ ¹⁸⁸ Ibid. 101–2. ¹⁸⁹ Ibid. 95. See Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 2. 22. 5 (SC 294, 224). The assertion was so embarrassing, especially as Irenaeus claimed to have received it from tradition,

58

The English Reformation

‘many’ writers reckoned him among the millenarians.¹⁹⁰ But Roman Catholics only followed the very worst of each author, ‘as if your religion and faith were a collection of all the mistakes of all the Fathers’—Calvin had made the same charge in almost identical terms.¹⁹¹ Humphrey, who later entered the fray to vindicate himself, protested that he had never meant to criticize Jewel, who had fully made good his challenge against his Roman Catholic opponents.¹⁹² Campion further claimed that Tobie Matthew, Dean of Christ Church, had confessed to him in private that one could not study the Fathers and remain a Protestant, ‘if one believed them as well as read them’.¹⁹³ Matthew had been Humphrey’s pupil at Oxford and had become one of the most prominent divines in the university. He was to become Bishop of Durham and eventually Archbishop of York—a model of the evangelical, that Baronius dismissed it as an interpolation (Annales, ad ann. 34, n. CXXXVII [Lucca edn., 1738–59, i, 161]: 1st edn. 1588). ¹⁹⁰ Whitaker, Ad rationes Campiani Responsio, 95. Whitaker gives no reference. Rainolds, Conference with Hart, 472, made the same point with a reference to Jerome, Commentarii in Esaiam, XVIII, prol. (CC 73A, 741) (he could also have referred to Jerome, Commentarii in Hiezechielem, 11. 36, CC 75, 500). Neither seemed aware that the millenarian section (i.e. the end of book V) of Irenaeus’ Aduersus haereses had recently been published by the French Franciscan Franc¸ois Feu-ardent (Diui Irenaei episcopi Lugdunensis, et martyris, aduersus Valentini et similium Gnosticorum Haereses, Libri quinque: Iam denuo diligenti editorum codicum facta collatione, et uetustissimi praesertim cuiusdam manuscripti, ab innumeris erroribus repurgati, multisque locis et capitibus aucti (Paris, 1575), 368–79). This aggressively Roman Catholic edition, which is today very rare, must scarcely have circulated in England, in contrast both to Erasmus’ editio princeps (1526) and to the Calvinist edition by Nicolas des Gallars, Diui Irenaei, Graeci Scriptoris eruditissimi, Episcopi Lugdunensis, libri quinque Aduersus portentosas haereses Valentini et aliorum, accuratius quam antehac emendati, additis Graecis quae reperiri potuerunt ([Geneva], 1570), which was dedicated to Edmund Grindal. On Des Gallars, who had been minister of the French congregation in London from June 1560 to June 1563 and had turned it into an orthodox Calvinist community, see P. Collinson, Archbishop Grindal 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979), 130–4; A. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986), 150–64. Both Erasmus’ and Des Gallars’s editions omitted the millenarian section, which had been suppressed in most manuscripts. See the introductions by B. Hemmerdinger, SC 100∗ , 16–38, and by L. Doutreleau, SC 152, 28–30; I. Backus, ‘Franc¸ois Feu-ardent ´ e´diteur d’Ir´en´ee: le triomphe de la grande Eglise et le rejet du mill´enarisme’, in L. Deitz (ed.), Tempus edax rerum: le bicentenaire de la Biblioth`eque nationale de Luxembourg (Luxembourg, 2001), 11–26. ¹⁹¹ Whitaker, Ad rationes Campiani Responsio, 98: ‘quasi religio fidesque uestra ex uniuersis omnium patrum erroribus conflata esset.’ Compare Calvin, Institutio (1536), dedication to Francis I, CR 29, 16: ‘eorum [Patrum] tantum lapsus et errores adorant.’ ¹⁹² Laurence Humphrey, Iesuitismi Pars Secunda: Puritanopapismi, seu doctrinae Iesuiticae aliquot Rationibus ab Ed. Campiano comprehensae, et a Ioan. Duraeo defensae, Confutatio: et ex iisdem Fundamentis Reformatae nostrae Religionis Assertio (London, 1584), 646–9. ¹⁹³ Campion, Rationes decem, 495.

The English Reformation

59

preaching bishop.¹⁹⁴ He hastened to answer Campion at length in a Latin sermon. His doctrine was no different from that of Whitaker.¹⁹⁵ True antiquity Matthew defined as Christ, and the Fathers properly so-called as Scripture. The scriptural injunction (allegorically applied to tradition by Roman Catholic divines) ‘not to remove the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set’ was to be understood of Scripture.¹⁹⁶ ‘Other Fathers who followed the Apostles, be they the more ancient and the ecclesiastical ones, from whom we have not much departed, or the more modern and the scholastic ones, whom we consider much inferior’, were only to be valued to the extent that they agreed with Scripture.¹⁹⁷ A range of metaphors was brought to illustrate the point: the ‘later Fathers’ were to the earlier ones (that is Scripture) like the woman to the man, the servant to the Lord, the moon to the sun, ‘the chaff of men to the wheat of God’.¹⁹⁸ Then came the usual arguments.¹⁹⁹ But papists abandoned the Fathers when they agreed with Scripture and only adopted their ‘blemishes and deformities’.²⁰⁰ Campion’s charge was repeated tirelessly by subsequent Roman Catholic controversialists and, up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, it met with virtually identical answers.²⁰¹ Whitaker championed the strictest Calvinism and Rainolds may fairly be labelled a Puritan. In his Life of Jewel, Humphrey insisted that Scripture, not antiquity, was the proper test, not only of the Reformation already ¹⁹⁴ See K. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), esp. 254 and 265–7. ¹⁹⁵ Piissimi et eminentissimi uiri, D. Tobiae Matthaei Archiepiscopi olim Eboracensis Concio apologetica aduersus Campianum (Oxford, 1638). This is the first edition. The sermon was preached on 9 October 1581 and was widely circulated in manuscript (see W. J. Sheils, ODNB, s.v. ‘Matthew’, xxxvii. 345). ¹⁹⁶ Concio, 14 (Proverbs 22: 28). For the Roman Catholic use of the text, see Quantin, Catholicisme classique, 72–3. ¹⁹⁷ Matthew, Concio, 18–19: ‘Nam quod ad alios Patres attinet qui subsequuti sunt Apostolos, siue uetustiores illi fuerint et Ecclesiastici, a quibus non multum defecimus; siue recentiores, et Scholastici, quos multo minores aestimamus, neminem quenquam nec horum, nec illorum quicquam facimus, nisi quousque Patrum illorum Veteris et Noui Testamenti, et sequantur scripta, et sensus assequantur.’ ¹⁹⁸ Ibid. 20–1. ¹⁹⁹ Ibid. 21–39: the Fathers themselves (especially Augustine) owned that they were of no authority compared to Scripture; popish divines like Cajetan confessed it; the Fathers disagreed between themselves (see for instance the conflict of Pope Victor and Polycarp on the date of Easter) and made errors ( Tertullian’s montanism, Cyprian’s teaching on rebaptism, the ‘heresy of the millenaries’). ²⁰⁰ Ibid. 52. ²⁰¹ See e.g. Thomas Hill, A Quartron of Reasons of Catholike Religion, with as many briefe reasons of refusall (Antwerp, 1600), 45–7, and the answer by George Abbot, The Reasons which Doctour Hill hath brought, for the upholding of Papistry, which is falsely termed the Catholike Religion: Unmasked, and shewed to be very weake, and upon examination most insufficient for that purpose. The first part (Oxford, 1604), 364–438.

60

The English Reformation

accomplished by separating from Rome, but also of the further and purer Reformation for which some were still hoping. This last comment clearly points to a distinctive position within the Church of England.²⁰² But opposition to the principle of consensus Patrum was by no means confined to Puritans.²⁰³ William Alley, Bishop of Exeter, was certainly no advocate of further reformation in the Elizabethan Church of England. He nevertheless considered, just as continental Reformed theologians did, that Peter’s admonition against ‘private interpretation’ (2 Peter 1: 20) forbade one ‘to trust and to leane to’ patristic interpretations of Scripture.²⁰⁴ The papists’ distinction between the opinion of one Father alone and ‘the interpretation of many, and especially of generall Councelles’ he declared ‘foolishe and ignoraunte’.²⁰⁵ Rainolds’s Conference with Hart was a semiofficial performance. It was translated into Latin by Henry Parry, at the time a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who became a bishop under James I. This translation was published in 1610 at the request of none other than Archbishop Bancroft, to allow Rainolds’s work to reach a European audience.²⁰⁶ Rather than a clear-cut division between divines, one should differentiate circumstances. The same authors who quoted the Fathers against ²⁰² Humphrey, Iuelli uita, 213. See Dent, Protestant Reformers: it may be that Humphrey’s reforming zeal had already begun to cool by this time, although that development was not obvious until two or three years later. ²⁰³ For more on this point, see below, Chapter 2, 105–10. ²⁰⁴ William Alley, ;τωχομουσε˜ι ον. The poore mans Librarie. Rapsodiae G. A. Byshop of Exceter upon the first Epistle of S. Peter, read publickely in the Cathedrall Church of Saint Paule, within the Citie of London 1560 (London, 1571; 1st edn. 1565), i, fo. 59r . Compare the second Helvetic Confession (1566) in Creeds of the Protestant Churches, 239. The same interpretation was given by Rainolds, Conference with Hart, 81. ²⁰⁵ Alley, Poore mans Librarie, i, fo. 59r . ²⁰⁶ Summa colloquii Iohannis Rainoldi cum Iohanne Harto de Capite et Fide Ecclesiae … A Iohanne Rainoldo conscripta … ante quatuor et uiginti annos ex Anglico sermone in Latinum uersa, nunc autem primum iussu, curaque Reuerendissimi atque uigilantissimi Praesulis, Richardi Bancrofti, Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi (qui non domesticarum modo, quibus praeest, sed etiam exterarum Ecclesiarum bono impense studet,) e situ et puluere euocata, et in lucem emissa. Henrico Parraeo, Gloucestrensi Episcopo, interprete (Oxford, 1610; Madan, i. 77–8, no. 7), translator’s dedication to Christian IV, King of Denmark, sig. ¶2r . Sale abroad was entrusted to John Norton, the only English bookseller seriously involved in the continental trade (see J. Barnard, ‘Politics, Profit and ?Idealism: John Norton, the Stationers’ Company, and Sir Thomas Bodley’, Bodleian Library Record, 17 (2002), 392–4): the BNF copy, shelfmark D2-172, has a cancel title page, ‘Londini, Iohannes Norton, 1611’ (STC 20631). This folio edition was successful enough to be reprinted (pirated) as an octavo in the Calvinist Palatinate: Oppenheim, typis Hieronymi Galleri, sumtibus uiduae Leuini Hulsii, 1613. The BNF copy, shelfmark D2-10464, belonged to the Sorbonne, to which it had been bequeathed by Nicolas Ysambert, Regius Professor of controversial Divinity from 1616 to 1642. On Parry, see W. Richardson, ODNB, xlii. 873 (he was translated to Worcester in July 1610).

The English Reformation

61

transubstantiation were eager to repudiate their authority when the debate turned to tradition. Moreover, mainstream Protestant divines were aware that they needed patristic orthodoxy as a bulwark against radicals. Humphrey was a keen reader and student of the Fathers.²⁰⁷ When an exile in Basle under Mary, he had translated into Latin the Dialogue against the Marcionists ascribed to Origen. He added a carefully balanced preface on the right use of the Fathers and other interpreters of Scripture. Scripture might be its own interpreter but one should not despise true interpretations given by ancient, or even modern authors. To reject them in order to interpret Scripture according to one’s own fancy was proper to ‘Libertines, Anabaptists, Arians, heretics, arrogant and proud men deceived by their fanatical spirits’.²⁰⁸ The ancients should be revered, especially those who fought for truth against the errors of their time. One should however take care to give first place to Scripture and to read the Fathers ‘as divine men, but men all the same’.²⁰⁹ On his return to England after Elizabeth’s accession Humphrey became Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. ‘In all his Lectures, Disputations and Sermons he was most copious in citing and alleaging the old Fathers.’²¹⁰ When he wrote against Campion in 1584, he quoted at length the preface that he had written in 1557, as still expressing his views on the right use of the Fathers.²¹¹ Sixteenth-century theology was of an essentially polemical character.²¹² It did not do to leave any argument of an opponent unanswered, and the safest course was to answer it more than once. Only by keeping this in mind can we make sense of the apparent contradictions of Elizabethan divines, who quoted the Fathers, while arguing at length against the reliability of patristic testimonies. When controversialists were confronted with a problematic ²⁰⁷ S. L. Greenslade, ‘The Faculty of Theology’, in The Collegiate University, 321–2; J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990), 224–5. ²⁰⁸ ‘Ad generosissimum uirum et clariss. equitem D. Antonium Cauum, dominum et patronum suum, Laurentii Humfridi, in Origenem auctum Praefatio’ (dated from Basle, 6 August 1557), in Origenis Adamantii magni illius et uetusti Scripturarum interpretis Opera quae quidem extant omnia (Basle, 1557), sig. a2v : ‘Non audiendi proinde sunt Libertini, Anabaptistae, Arriani, haeretici, spiritosi homines, uere μέγα πνέοντες, qui suis fanaticis decepti spiritibus, fratrum suorum spiritus audire non sustinent, maiorum placita conculcant, neminem bonum interpretem, nisi se, nisi suum caput et cerebrum ac suas reuelationes existimant.’ ²⁰⁹ Ibid., sig. a3v . On Humphrey’s work as a patristic editor and translator, see E. Welti, Der Basler Buchdruck und Britannien: Die Rezeption britischen Gedankenguts in den Basler Pressen von den Anf¨angen bis zum Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts (Basle, 1964), esp. 44–5 and 222. ²¹⁰ Matthew, Concio, 75; Abbot, Hill’s Reasons Unmasked, 417. ²¹¹ Humphrey, Iesuitismi Pars Secunda, 651–2. ²¹² On the style of polemical theology, see Questier, Conversion, 12–39.

62

The English Reformation

quotation, it was usual for them to reject it as spurious, and then to explain at length how it should be interpreted. Gardiner gave such double-barrelled answers to several of the texts adduced by Martyr on the eucharist.²¹³ This should not be ascribed to the legal training of ‘wily Winchester’, since Martyr himself did just the same in other cases.²¹⁴ Once a text was printed and had entered the arena of theological disputation, it acquired a cultural authority that meant that it could no longer be ignored. It had to be dealt with. Similarly, when confronted by adversaries who claimed to have antiquity on their side, Protestant divines began by answering that antiquity was unfit to decide the cause. Then, in order that this first answer should not be turned into an admission of weakness, they argued that antiquity was on their side anyway.²¹⁵ It is remarkable that the authority of tradition, like every other point in dispute, was discussed through patristic testimonies.²¹⁶ Key texts for the Roman Catholic position were Augustine on infant baptism and Basil of Caesarea’s De Spiritu Sancto, chapter 27. Augustine wrote that ‘the custom of the Church in baptizing infants … should not at all be believed if it were not a tradition of the Apostles’.²¹⁷ Basil stated generally that ‘of those doctrines and predications which are kept in the Church, we have some from written teaching, some from the tradition of the Apostles’, and both kinds have ‘the same strength for piety’.²¹⁸ Alley ²¹³ See e.g. Gardiner, Confutatio Cauillationum, fos. 115r – v (on Origen’s commentary on Matthew), 132v –133r , and 167v (on the epistle to Caesarius). See also above, n. 82, on the Opus imperfectum. ²¹⁴ See e.g. Martyr, Defensio, 12–13 (on the commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews by Pseudo-Ambrose [Alcuin?]) and 717–22 (on Pseudo-Clement of Rome). ²¹⁵ A very clear instance is Calfhill, An Aunswere to the Treatise of the Crosse. See esp. sig. B2v , fos. 23r , 30v , 31r , and the discussions of Chrysostom, 26r – v and Origen, 30v –32v . ²¹⁶ See for instance Whitaker, Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura, q. VI, c. 17, 409–16. ²¹⁷ Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, 10. 23 (PL 34, 426), quoted e.g. in Smyth, Brief treatyse, sigs. G6v –G7r ; The New Testament of Iesus Christ, translated faithfully into English, out of the authentical Latin … With Arguments of bookes and chapters, Annotations, and other necessarie helpes, for the better understanding of the text, and specially for the discoverie of the Corruptions of divers late translations, and for clearing the Controversies in religion of these daies: In the English College of Rhemes (Rheims, 1582), 559; Stapleton, De principiis fidei doctrinalibus, 410. ²¹⁸ Basil, De Spiritu Sancto, 27, in En amice lector, Thesaurum damus inaestimabilem, D. Basilium uere magnum sua lingua disertissime loquentem quem hactenus habuisti Latine balbutientem (Basle, 1532: this is the editio princeps, prepared by Erasmus), 491: των ˜ ἐν τ˜ῃ ἐκκλησίᾳ πεφυλαγμένων δογμάτων καὶ κηρυγμάτων, τὰ μὲν ἐκ τ˜ης ἐγγράφου διδασκαλίας ἔχομεν, τὰ δὲ ἐκ τ˜ης των ˜ ἀποστόλων παραδόσεως …, ἅπερ ἀμφότερα, τὴν αὐτὴν ἰσχὺν ἔχει πρὸς τὴν εὐσέβειαν [= PG 32, 188]. This chapter was already well known in the Middle Ages since it had been included in Greek canonical collections (P. P. Joannou, Discipline g´en´erale antique (IVe–IXe s.), ii:

The English Reformation

63

explained that Basil had written ‘disputatiously’, not dogmatically, and had been anxious to use every argument against his adversary, the heretic Eunomius.²¹⁹ Most Protestant divines rejected the text straightforwardly. Jewel stated that ‘St Basil wrote those words rather of zeal than of judgement’, since most of the traditions he instanced had long been abolished even in the Church of Rome.²²⁰ Others, like Thomas Bilson, followed Erasmus, who had esteemed that part of De Spiritu Sancto interpolated on account of alleged stylistic differences and compositional weaknesses.²²¹ As to the baptism of children, Protestants responded that it was commanded by God in Scripture. Richard Smyth (at that stage a recusant exile in the Spanish Low Countries) protested vainly in 1562 that the alleged scriptural proofs for the practice were ‘inept’.²²² Bilson argued at length that infant baptism was scriptural and not an unwritten tradition.²²³ To Augustine’s saying that the custom of the Church on that Les Canons des P`eres grecs (Grottaferrata, 1963), 179–81) and then, in a rather loose translation, in Latin ones, beginning with Regino of Pr¨um at the beginning of the 10th century (H. Hoffmann and R. Pokorny, Das Dekret des Bischofs Burchard von Worms. Textstufen—Fr¨uhe Verbreitung—Vorlagen (Munich, 1991; MGH. Hilfsmittel 12), 195). In Gratian’s Decretum, c. 5 (Ecclesiasticarum), dist. XI (Friedberg, i. 24), it was bizarrely ascribed to Augustine ‘ex dictis Basilii’. Cardinal Cervini still quoted the text out of Gratian at Trent in 1546 (Concilium Tridentinum. Diariorum, actorum, epistularum, tractatuum noua collectio. Edidit Societas Goerresiana, i (2nd edn., Freiburg im Br., 1963), 492). It was repeatedly quoted, under Basil’s name, by Smyth, Brief treatyse, sigs. G4r , H3v –H4r , H5r , I3r , K1v , K3v , R6v –R7r , S2v –S3r . See later New Testament (Rheims), 559; Stapleton, De principiis fidei doctrinalibus, 405 and 412. For other Roman Catholic authorities (Tertullian’s De corona militis and the condemnation of Helvidius for denying the perpetual virginity of Mary), see below, 90–1. ²¹⁹ Alley, Poore mans Librarie, i, fos. 43v and 60r . ²²⁰ Jewel, Defence of the Apology, part II, in Works, iii. 436. ²²¹ Bilson, Christian subjection, 495 and 595–6. Same answer by William Whitaker, Ad Nicolai Sanderi demonstrationes quadraginta … quibus Romanum Pontificem non esse Antichristum docere instituit, responsio (London, 1583), 257; Robert Abbot, The Second Part of the Defence of the Reformed Catholicke (London, 1607), 919–20. On the Continent, see e.g. Chemnitz, Examen, 1a pars, 92–3. Erasmus had stated his suspicion in his dedication to Joannes Dantiscus, Bishop of Culm, of his Latin translation (published the same year as his edition), Diui Basilii Magni Episcopi Caesareae Cappadociae, opus argutum ac pium De Spiritu sancto, ad Amphilochium, Des. Erasmo Roterodamo interprete. Nunc primum et uersum et excusum (Basle, 1532), sig. A3r – v [Opus Epistolarum, ed. Allen, x (Oxford, 1941), no. 2643, 14]. See I. Backus, Lectures humanistes de Basile de C´esar´ee: traductions latines (1439–1618) (Paris, 1990), 110–14. ²²² Richard Smyth, De infantium baptismo, contra Ioannem Calvinum, ac de operibus supererogationis, et merito mortis Christi, aduersus eundem Calvinum, et eius discipulos (Louvain, 1562), fos. 18v –24v . For an overview of Smyth’s career, see L¨owe, Richard Smyth. ²²³ Bilson, Christian subjection, 582–9.

64

The English Reformation

point ‘should not at all be believed if it were not a tradition of the Apostles’ (nec omnino credenda nisi Apostolica esset traditio),²²⁴ he replied that the text was corrupted and one should read nisi Apostolica esse traditio, ‘nor at all to bee thought to bee any other than an Apostolike tradition’.²²⁵ Augustine had written elsewhere to the same effect that infant baptism ‘is most rightly beleeved to be none other than a tradition of the Apostles’.²²⁶ And this tradition was written in the Scriptures, since it could be ‘fairely deduced from them and fully proved by them’.²²⁷ Even with the reading esset, Augustine’s meaning would only be that ‘the custome of the Church in (a matter of so great weight as) the baptizing of infants were not to be trusted if the tradition were not Apostolike’.²²⁸ These answers were typical of the way theologians dealt with patristic objections. There was little difference here between Protestants and Roman Catholics. The school practice of the Middle Ages had evolved a whole set of rules to interpret ‘authorities’ and to explain away potentially embarrassing assertions.²²⁹ Many of those rules went back to the Fathers themselves. William Perkins gave a lucid summary of the usual hermeneutic principles in his last work, Problema de Romanae Fidei ementito Catholicismo, which was published after his death by a young disciple, Samuel Ward, and which aimed at introducing students to the right way of reading the Fathers.²³⁰ Some assertions had been made ‘in the heat of disputation’: Basil thus excused Gregory of Neocaesarea as having spoken on the Trinity ‘not dogmatically but in dispute’.²³¹ The Fathers indulged in rhetoric, as Jerome confessed at the end of a vibrant tirade on the superiority of virginity, in which it sounded as if he had condemned marriage.²³² But Theodoret rightly stated that ‘what is said in the Church panegyrically and rhetorically’ could not ²²⁴ Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, 10. 23 (PL 34, 426). For quotations of this text, see above, n. 217. ²²⁵ Bilson, Christian subjection, 582–3. Bilson’s solution was adopted by Crompton, Saint Austins Summes, 48. This astute emendation is not confirmed by any manuscript. ²²⁶ Bilson, Christian subjection, 583. Augustine, De baptismo contra Donatistas, 4. 24. 31 (CSEL 51, 259). ²²⁷ Bilson, Christian subjection, 589. Bilson’s position here is the same as Chemnitz, Examen, 1a pars, 78–9. ²²⁸ Bilson, Christian subjection, 585. ²²⁹ Chenu, ‘Authentica et Magistralia’, 360–5. ²³⁰ Perkins, Problema. See Ward’s dedication to James I, sigs. ¶2r –¶3r , and his preface, dated 2 January 1604, sigs. ¶3v –¶4v . An English translation of the work was subsequently included in Perkins, Workes, ii. 553–687. All references are to the Latin original. ²³¹ Perkins, Problema, 4. See Basil, ep. 210, 5 (PG 32, 776). ²³² Jerome, De perpetua uirginitate aduersus Heluidium, 22 (PL 23, 206): ‘Rhetoricati sumus.’

The English Reformation

65

be held as a rule of faith.²³³ Language had been less guarded before the growth of heresies. Augustine accounted in this way for some expressions of John Chrysostom which appeared to deny original sin: Chrysostom had lived before Pelagianism and therefore ‘spoke more securely’.²³⁴ When writing against heretics, the Fathers had been liable to fall into contrary excesses, like gardeners who might bend a crooked tree backwards to straighten it. Perkins quoted on this point the Dominican Sixtus of Siena, a prominent Counter-Reformation divine, but the simile itself was of patristic origin. It had been used by Basil in a famous letter on Dionysius of Alexandria (who sowed the seed of Arianism in his eagerness to confute Sabellianism), and later by Theodoret.²³⁵ On other occasions, the Fathers spoke merely ‘historically’, not ‘positively’, or they conformed themselves to popular prejudices, or they allowed themselves to be carried away by superstitions.²³⁶ A very similar set of rules had been collected by Chemnitz, who professed to derive them from his own reading of the Fathers.²³⁷ They were again expounded in influential handbooks of patristics by continental Reformed divines like Abraham Scultetus, whose Medulla Patrum was prior to Perkins’s work,²³⁸ and Andr´e Rivet, whose Criticus sacer made ²³³ Perkins, Problema, 4, quoting Theodoret in Gentien Hervet’s Latin translation: ‘Non ego dogmatum et decretorum regulam ea duco, quae in Ecclesia panegyrice et declamatorie dicuntur’ (Theodoriti episcopi Cyri Eranistes.... Quae omnia nunc primum in lucem exeunt, a Gentiano Herveto Aurelio latine versa (Venice, 1548), dialogue 3, fo. 107v ) [= ed. Ettlinger, 208]. This is actually an assertion of Eranistes, and ‘Orthodox’ confutes it. ²³⁴ Perkins, Problema, 4, quoting Augustine, Contra Iulianum Pelagianum, l. 6. 22 (PL 44, 656). ²³⁵ Ibid. 6, quoting Sixtus of Siena, Bibliotheca sancta, ex praecipuis catholicae Ecclesiae authoribus collecta, 2 vols. (Venice, 1566), ii, l. V, 517. Sixtus was himself quoting Basil of Caesarea, epistle 9 to Maximus the philosopher, 2 (PG 32, 269), on Dionysius of Alexandria (not directly but through the quotation in Nicephorus Callistus, Historia ecclesiastica, 6. 25, PG 145, 1180, which was then extant only in Latin). See also Theodoret, Eranistes, dialogue 3, ed. Ettlinger, 247. ²³⁶ Perkins, Problema, 5. ²³⁷ Chemnitz, Examen, 1a pars, 81–2. ²³⁸ Abraham Scultetus, ‘Breues et perspicui aphorismi de fructuosa lectione Patrum’, prefixed to Medulla Theologiae Patrum: qui a temporibus Apostolorum ad Concilium usque Nicenum floruerunt. Methodo analytica et synthetica expressa, in gratiam eorum, qui uel ob Codicum temporisue defectum Patres ipsi legere non possunt, uel eosdem cum fructu euoluere uolunt (Amberg, 1598), unnumbered. The compilation of the book dated from about 1590. See Abraham Scultetus, De curriculo uitae [suae], inprimis uero de actionibus Pragensibus … narratio apologetica (Emden, 1625), 23; G. A. Benrath, Reformierte Kirchengeschichtschreibung an der Universit¨at Heidelberg im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Speyer am Rhein, 1963), 21–7; I. Backus, ‘The Fathers and Calvinist Orthodoxy: Patristic Scholarship’, Reception of the Fathers, ii. 842–55; ead., ‘Irenaeus, Calvin and Calvinist Orthodoxy: The Patristic Manual of Abraham Scultetus (1598)’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 1 (1999), 41–53; ead., Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden, 2003), 218–27.

66

The English Reformation

use of Perkins and enjoyed European success, with five editions being published between 1612 and 1652.²³⁹ Many of the theological lectures on the Fathers that Richard Holdsworth gave at Gresham College in the 1630s were devoted to recapitulating the distinctions made by sixteenth-century divines. He argued that one should carefully discriminate between what the Fathers said figuratively and what they said dogmatically, as well as between what they said in passing and what on purpose, or maturely and in the heat of disputation, or dubiously and confidently, or on their own knowledge and on the faith of others, or constantly and inconstantly.²⁴⁰ Throughout the seventeenth century, patristic texts were expounded according to such hermeneutic rules.²⁴¹ As Perkins’s reference to Sixtus of Siena shows, principles were not themselves contentious. Holdsworth illustrated all his rules with quotations from Roman Catholic writers. Controversy began when it came to application. For Sixtus of Siena, Stapleton, and Bellarmine, Chrysostom spoke ‘with a hyperbole’, ‘popularly, in the manner of an orator’, when he exhorted all lay people to read the Scriptures, or when he preached that it was better not to attend the eucharistic sacrifice than to attend it without taking communion.²⁴² For Martyr and Holdsworth, it was rather when he extolled the eucharist as Christ’s very own body that Chrysostom was hyperbolical.²⁴³ Both sides had to admit that some expressions of the Fathers could not be taken at face value. ²³⁹ Andr´e Rivet, Critici sacri specimen. Hoc est, Censurae Doctorum tam ex Orthodoxis quam ex Pontificiis, in Scripta quae Patribus plerisque priscorum et puriorum seculorum, uel affinxit incogitantia, uel supposuit impostura: Collectae, expensae, defensae, uel explosae [Heidelberg, 1612], 79–89. ²⁴⁰ Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 343. Each distinction is then developed and illustrated. See below, 74, and Chapter 4, 205–9 for more on Holdsworth’s work, which may be considered a recapitulation of Protestant patristics. ²⁴¹ See e.g. Overall’s address to the University of Cambridge on 30 June 1606, CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fo. 89r – v , quoting Basil on Gregory of Neocaesarea; Lancelot Andrewes, ‘An Answer to the XX Chapter of the fifth Booke of Cardinal Perron’s Reply written in French, to King James—his Answer written by Mr Casaubon to the Cardinall in Latine’, in Reuerendi in Christo Patris, Lanceloti episcopi Wintoniensis, opuscula quaedam posthuma (London, 1629), sep. pagination, 46–52, quoting Theodoret and Jerome; Daniel Featley, Cygnea Cantio: or, Learned Decisions and most Prudent and Pious Directions for Students in Divinitie; Delivered by our late Sovereign of Happie Memorie, King James, at White Hall a few weekes before his Death (London, 1629), 30–2. See also Richard Montagu, quoted below, Chapter 3 n. 28. ²⁴² Sixtus of Sienna, Bibliotheca sancta, ii, l. VI, 719; Thomas Stapleton, Relectio scholastica et compendiaria principiorum fidei doctrinalium, controversia V, q. 3, art. 4, in Opera omnia, i. 782; Bellarmine, Disputationes, iii, 3a controu. generalis, l. VI, ‘De sacrificio Missae II’, c. X., col. 1083. ²⁴³ Martyr, Tractatio, fos. 37v and 39v –41r , and ‘Disputatio’, fo. 57r ; Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 345.

The English Reformation

67

The major hermeneutical problem, especially concerning the eucharist, was to decide whether a text was to be read literally or figuratively. The distinction, of course, originated from biblical interpretation, and Martyr explicitly referred to the exegetical rules of the Donatist Tychonius, which Augustine had adopted in his treatise Of Christian doctrine. Indeed, Martyr claimed that Tychonius’ and Augustine’s work on Scripture justified his own work on the Fathers: ‘If there is a risk of making mistakes in the Scriptures, is there not also a risk—and it may be as grave a risk—of making mistakes in the Fathers?’²⁴⁴ The same general method held for the Fathers as for the Bible: ‘the best interpretation is to explain a passage by a clearer one from the same Scripture.’²⁴⁵ But what was clear and what was obscure? John Fisher complained that, when a text clearly taught the Real Presence, Oecolampadius attempted ‘to darken it with another, more obscure, text from the same author’.²⁴⁶ Gardiner made a similar charge against Martyr.²⁴⁷ Many disputes revolved around the question which of two passages, or which set of passages, was to be used as the key to the other. For Roman Catholics, the Fathers spoke clearly on the eucharist when they called it the body and blood of Christ, but obscurely when they called it bread and wine; for Protestants, this distinction was reversed.²⁴⁸ The Roman scholars who—after considerable heart-searching—published the editio princeps of Theodoret’s Dialogues reassured readers that, despite some difficult passages, there were many others to show that ‘Theodoret was of a right doctrine’ on the eucharist.²⁴⁹ Martyr protested that Theodoret nowhere spoke ‘so highly of the eucharist as to contradict our doctrine, ²⁴⁴ Martyr, Defensio, 597: ‘Si periculum est, ne erretur in sacris literis, an non etiam periculum, idque aeque graue esse potest, ne erretur in patribus?’ See Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 3. 30. 42–37. 56 (CC 32, 102–16). ²⁴⁵ Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 403: ‘Locum unum exponere per alium eiusdem Scripturae clariorem, optima interpretatio est’, with a reference to Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 3. 26. 37 (CC 32, 99): ‘Ubi autem [res] apertius ponuntur, ibi discendum est, quomodo in locis intellegantur obscuris.’ Compare e.g. Laurence Chaderton’s rules for the study of Scripture, quoted by Lake, Moderate Puritans, 36–7. ²⁴⁶ Fisher, De ueritate corporis et sanguinis Christi, sig. 2B6r : ‘Nonnunquam ubi quid dilucide dictum sit, hoc ipsum obtenebrare nititur, per obscurius aliud, ab eodem proditum authore.’ ²⁴⁷ Gardiner, Confutatio Cauillationum, fo. 216v . ²⁴⁸ See esp. Martyr, Defensio, 623 and 638–9. ²⁴⁹ Theodoriti Dialogi tres, sigs. A1r –A2r . This sheet (which is separately signed) may be a last-minute addition: it is missing in the copy in Lyon, Biblioth`eque Municipale, shelfmark 328521. On the hesitations of Roman scholars, see S. Merkle, ‘Ein patristischer Gew¨ahrsmann des Tridentinums’, in A. M. Koeniger (ed.), Beitr¨age zur Geschichte des christlichen Altertums und der Byzantinischen Literatur: Festgabe Albert Ehrhard (Bonn, 1922), 350–2; A. Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente (1518–1563) (Rome, 1997), 747.

68

The English Reformation

which he has already established’.²⁵⁰ Despite confessional divisions, then, theologians shared similar styles of argumentation. It might be suggested that this de facto agreement contradicted their official principles. Roman Catholics were tacitly accepting that tradition was as obscure and difficult as Scripture. Protestant divines, it would seem, should not have been prepared to extend to purely human writings the complex hermeneutics that had originally been evolved for the Word of God—were not Augustine’s rules to explain obscure places of Scripture by clear ones quoted in other contexts to prove that Scripture was its own interpreter?²⁵¹ The result in any case was to make religious truth the preserve of trained theologians, who alone had the ability and time to find their way in the maze of patristic writings.

5. WITNESSES TO THE TRUTH: THE FATHERS AND THE PROTESTANT VIEW OF CHURCH HISTORY Patristic testimonies were not used to attest to a continuous ecclesiastical tradition. Instead, they made sense within the framework of a discontinuous view of church history. Truth of doctrine and purity of worship had been progressively adulterated, as the new dogmas, ambitious claims, and superstitious practices of popery had settled in. These had at last given way and, in Protestant countries at least, the teaching of the gospel had been recovered. Such a scheme made the Reformation the most important event since the Apostles’ times. The identification of the Pope (or, more exactly, of the papacy) with Antichrist, which nobody seems to have openly challenged in the Protestant Church of England up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, anchored this representation of history in the Bible and gave it its apocalyptic dimension.²⁵² It also entailed a comparative devaluation of the patristic age, if only because the Fathers had failed to recognize the true nature of Antichrist—they thought that he would be an individual man (a Jew, of the tribe of Dan) and that his birth would occur at the end of the world. Indeed Roman Catholics used patristic (or pseudo-patristic) testimonies to deny that Antichrist could be the succession of popes in the ²⁵⁰ Martyr, Tractatio, fo. 22v : ‘Addunt eum de Eucharistia honorificentius, interdum loqui in hoc eodem libro, sed omnibus inspectis nusquam tam honorifice loquitur ut constitutae iam nostrae sententiae aduersetur.’ ²⁵¹ See e.g. Rainolds, Conference with Hart, 81–2. ²⁵² See C. Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971); P. Lake, ‘The Significance of the Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist’, JEH 31 (1980), 161–78; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 92–104; A. Penny, ‘John Foxe, the Acts and Monuments and the Development of Prophetic Interpretation’, in D. Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 1997), 252–77.

The English Reformation

69

see of Rome.²⁵³ Whitaker replied that ‘one should not pay much attention to the Fathers on this question, since they reported so many uncertain, futile, and absurd stories about Antichrist’. Most of them had lived and died before Antichrist arrived at adulthood and revealed himself.²⁵⁴ The major objection to this view of history, and one which Roman Catholic controversialists never tired of rehearsing, was that it made the Church invisible for centuries. Protestants answered that original truth had never been entirely forgotten. A number of the faithful had always remained, even at the worst times of popery: the disciples of Berengarius, who refused transubstantiation, the Waldenses, Wycliffites, or Hussites. They were testes ueritatis, witnesses to the truth. They built, if not a hierarchical regular succession in the Roman sense, at least a chronological series, which Protestant writers did their best to reconstruct.²⁵⁵ The Lutheran Flacius Illyricus’ Catalogue of 1556 provided the pattern of these apologetics. ‘The primitive Church for about two hundred years after Christ’ agreed on every point with Protestants; ‘the seeds’ of popish errors began afterwards to be sown in the Church but, until approximately 600, religion was still closer to Protestantism than to popery. Errors multiplied after 600 but faithful witnesses always remained ‘against the errors and furors of Antichrist’.²⁵⁶ This scheme received a wide currency in England, especially when John Foxe adopted it in the 1570 enlarged edition of his Acts and Monuments (the first edition only began with the year 1000).²⁵⁷ There had been five periods or ‘times’, of more or less equal duration, in the history of the ²⁵³ New Testament (Rheims), 556–7 (2 Thess. 2: 3). See J.-R. Armogathe, L’Ant´echrist a` l’ˆage classique: ex´eg`ese et politique (Paris, 2005). ²⁵⁴ Whitaker, Praelectiones in Controuersiam de Romano Pontifice, in Opera theologica, ii. 683 (‘Patribus hac in re non multum esse tribuendum, qui tam incerta, tam futilia, tamque absurda de Antichristo tradiderunt’) and 691; id., Ad Sanderi demonstrationes responsio, 92–4, 97–101, 146–7. See also Fulke, ‘A discoverie of the daungerous rocke of the Popish Church, lately commended by Nicholas Sander D. of Divinitie’, in Retentive against Bristow, 289–92. ²⁵⁵ There is a great deal of secondary literature on the way medieval heretics were turned into forerunners of the Reformation. See esp. E. Cameron, ‘Medieval Heretics as Protestant Martyrs’, in D. Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies (Oxford, 1993; SCH 30), 185–207; M. Benedetti, Il ‘santo bottino’: circolazione di manoscritti valdesi nell’Europa del Seicento ( Turin, 2006). ²⁵⁶ Mathias Flacius Illyricus, Catalogus testium ueritatis, qui ante nostram aetatem reclamarunt Papae. Opus uaria rerum, hoc praesertim tempore scitu dignissimarum, cognitione refertum, ac lectu cum primis utile atque necessarium (Basle, 1556), sig. a3r – v . See M. Hartmann, Humanismus und Kirchenkritik: Matthias Flacius Illyricus als Erforscher des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 2001); Backus, Historical Method, 343–58. ²⁵⁷ Recent scholarship on Foxe has been dominated by the John Foxe project (). See the collective volumes related to this project: Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation; id. (ed.), Foxe: An Historical Perspective; Highley and King (eds.), Foxe and his World ; D. Loades (ed.), John Foxe at

70

The English Reformation

Church: the ‘suffering time’ for the first 300 years until Constantine; the ‘flourishing time’ which lasted again 300 years; the ‘declining or backeslyding time’,‘until the loosing out of Sathan, which was about the thousand yeare after Christ’; the ‘Time of Antichrist, or the desolation of the Church’ until Wyclif and Hus; ‘the reformation and purging of the Churche of God’.²⁵⁸ Gregory I (Pope from 590 to 604) as it were straddled the line: ‘Antichristianism’ had begun before him but only after his time ‘was the seat of Antichrist publicly settled’, when his immediate successors assumed the title of ‘universal bishop’, which he had opposed.²⁵⁹ The Fathers belonged to an intermediate age of the Church and had on that account a double use. On the one hand, their texts gave proofs that many Roman Catholic tenets were as yet unknown in their times. On the other hand, their naeui (blemishes) helped to chronicle what the summation of Protestant historiography, the multi-volume Centuries of Magdeburg, called the inclinatio doctrinae, ‘the decline of doctrine’.²⁶⁰ The Reformed Heidelberg theologians Daniel Toussaint and Abraham Scultetus, and the French Calvinist Andr´e Rivet, inculcated the same notions as the Lutheran Centuriators.²⁶¹ Protestant divines often quoted—completely out of context—the complaint of Hegesippus (a Home and Abroad (Aldershot, 2004). See also P. Collinson, ‘Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in id., Elizabethans (London, 2003), 151–77. ²⁵⁸ John Foxe, The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall history contayning the Actes and Monuments of thynges passed in every kynges tyme in this Realme, especially in the Church of England principally to be noted … from the primitive tyme till the reigne of K. Henry viii. Newly recognized and inlarged (London, 1570), 1. On this chronology, see L. P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (West Lafayette, Ind., 1976), 151–4; V. Norskov Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley, Calif., 1973), 51–100. ²⁵⁹ The title of ‘universal bishop’ had supposedly been given to Pope Boniface III by the usurper Phocas c.606. See William Whitaker, Praelectiones. In quibus tractatur Controuersia de Ecclesia contra Pontificios, inprimis Robertum Bellarminum … Exceptae primum ab ore authoris, deinde cum aliis exemplaribus collatae, et post eius mortem ad breues illius Annotatiunculas examinatae (Cambridge, 1599), 143–4; id., Ad Sanderi demonstrationes responsio, 60, 75, 88. See also Parker, De Antiquitate, ‘Augustinus’ (longer version: see below, n. 311), 3–5; Haugaard, ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship’, 45–6 (on the influential translation of The Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories by Meredith Hanmer, first published in 1577). For continental references, see Luther, Wider das Papstum zu Rom vom Teuffel gestift [1545], WA 54, 230 (cf. J. M. Headley, Luther’s View of Church History (New Haven, 1963), 192–4); Calvin, Institutio (1559), . vii. 17 (CR 30, 836). The story came from Liber pontificalis, ed. L. Duchesne (Paris, 1955), i. 316. ²⁶⁰ Matthias Flacius Illyricus et al., Ecclesiastica Historia (Basle, 1560), ‘Secunda centuria Historiae ecclesiasticae’, fo. aa2v . For reference to the Centuries on this point, see e.g. Abbot, Hill’s Reasons Unmasked, 376. ²⁶¹ Daniel Toussaint, Synopsis de Patribus, siue praecipuis et uetustioribus Ecclesiae Doctoribus, nec non de Scholasticis: quantum eis deferendum: quo tempore uixerint: qua cum

The English Reformation

71

second-century writer, whose lost work is known through fragments preserved by Eusebius) that the Church only remained a pure virgin until the death of the last Apostle, after which heretics began to spread their errors.²⁶² The general current of English divines before Laud had no other view of church history.²⁶³ When the recusant Thomas Wright objected that the Church of the Protestants, by their own account, had been invisible for at least 1,000 years, William Barlow answered that Protestants had the faith that the primitive Christians ‘sincerely kept and professed for 110 yeres after the Ascension of Christ as Hegesippus observed’. It had still been preserved for 600 years after Christ ‘in the soundest churches’ and defended by the Fathers.²⁶⁴ Archbishop Abbot grounded ‘the perpetual visibility and succession of the true Church in all ages’ on the series of faithful witnesses before Luther.²⁶⁵ In 1624, in his Oxford lectures, John Prideaux, Regius Professor of Divinity, still appealed partly to Protestants’ agreement with the Hussites, Wycliffites, and Waldenses, and partly to ‘the conformity of our Church to the primitive Church of Christ and the Apostles’.²⁶⁶ This kind of Protestant apologetics precluded any appeal to an apostolic succession in the personal sense, from consecrator to consecrated. In his Cambridge lectures, Whitaker argued against Bellarmine that episcopal succession, as opposed to succession of faith and doctrine, cautione legendi, quaeque eorum dotes et naeui fuerint (Heidelberg, 1603), 11. On Scultetus and Rivet, see above, 65–6. Yet another exposition of the Calvinist position is Emericus Katona, Tractatus de Patrum, Conciliorum, Traditionum Authoritate circa Fidei Dogmata (Frankfurt, 1611). The author was a Hungarian nobleman, whose work came out after his death with a preface by the great Heidelberg divine David Pareus. It refers to Perkins, Rainolds, and Whitaker (sig. ∗∗ 2v and p. 56). ²⁶² Eusebius, HE, 3. 32. 7–8 (SC 31, 144–5). See e.g. Scultetus, Medulla, 105: ‘Verissime ab Eusebio dictum est: Ecclesiam post tempora Apostolorum non diu mansisse Virginem’; Keckermann (below, n. 275); Robert Abbot, A Defence of the Reformed Catholicke of M. W. Perkins, lately deceased, against the bastard CounterCatholicke of D. Bishop, Seminary Priest. The First Part (London, 1606), 113–14; id., The Third Part of the Defence of the Reformed Catholicke (London, 1609), 148. ²⁶³ For a full discussion, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 270–321. ²⁶⁴ William Barlow, A Defence of the Articles of the Protestant Religion, in aunsweare to a libell lately cast abroad, intituled, Certaine Articles, or forcible reasons, discovering the palpable absurdities, and most intricate errours of the Protestantes Religion [by Thomas Wright] (London, 1601), 17–18 and 20. ²⁶⁵ [George Abbot], A Treatise of the Perpetuall Visibilitie, and Succession of the True Church in all Ages (London, 1624). ²⁶⁶ John Prideaux, Lectiones decem. De totidem religionis capitibus praecipue hoc tempore controuersis prout publice habebantur Oxoniae in Vesperiis. Editio secunda, priori emaculatior et auctior (Oxford, 1626), lectio IX, ‘De Visibilitate Ecclesiae’ (8 July 1624), 293 and 312–17. On Prideaux, see C. W. Boase, Registrum Collegii Exoniensis (new edn., Oxford, 1894), 89–90; A. J. Hegarty, ODNB, xlv. 342–5.

72

The English Reformation

was no ‘mark of the true Church’.²⁶⁷ Perkins distinguished succession ‘of persons and doctrine jointly together’, which had been the case ‘in the primitive Church’; succession of persons alone, which might be found among infidels and heretics; succession ‘of doctrine alone’: ‘And thus our Ministers succeed the Apostles. And this is sufficient. For this Rule must be remembred, that the power of the Keyes, that is, of order and iurisdiction, is tyed by God, and annexed in the new Testament to doctrine.’²⁶⁸ Neither Whitaker nor Perkins made any distinction between the case of England and that of continental Churches. The pendant of this insistence on doctrine was a rather low view of sacerdotal ordination.²⁶⁹ The fact that almost all the Fathers had been bishops was not given any prominence. A logical consequence of the Protestant view of history was a new and much stricter notion of ‘the Fathers’. The medieval schools had never made any attempt at definition, merely distinguishing between the testimonies of ancient doctors (authentica) and those of later, less authorized, teachers of theology (magistralia): it was clear that antiquity was needed for a writer to be truly authoritative, but to what extent? Post-Tridentine Roman Catholics had an extensive notion of the Fathers, regularly giving that name to medieval authors, up to Bernard of Clairvaux at the very least, and ascribing no lesser authority to Aquinas and Bonaventure, whom popes had solemnly proclaimed ‘doctors of the Church’.²⁷⁰ All Protestants, whether in England or on the Continent, considered that the Fathers, properly speaking, were only the Christian writers of the first few centuries. Cranmer insisted on ‘the old authors’, rejecting for instance the eighthcentury bishop John Damascene as ‘but a young new author’.²⁷¹ Jewel contrasted the ‘old godly bishops and fathers of the Church’ and the ‘young fathers and doctors’, that is the Schoolmen.²⁷² Later testes ueritatis were occasionally included in lists of Fathers, for example the ninth-century monk ‘Bertram’ (Ratramnus) of Corbie whose De corpore et sanguine Domini had been a favourite with the Swiss since its editio princeps in 1531 and ²⁶⁷ Whitaker, Praelectiones de Ecclesia, 274–96 and particularly 282–4 (on ordination). The same position was defended by Robert Some in his Godly treatise of the Church (1582): see Lake, ‘Robert Some’, 255–6. ²⁶⁸ Perkins, ‘A Commentarie upon the epistle to the Galatians’, 197. ²⁶⁹ Ibid.: ‘If in Turkie, or America, or else where, the Gospell should be received of men, by the counsell and perswasion of private persons, they shall not neede to send into Europe for consecrated Ministers, but they have power to choose their owne Ministers from within themselves: because where God gives the word, he gives the power also.’ ²⁷⁰ See Quantin, Catholicisme classique, 25–64. ²⁷¹ Walsh, ‘Cranmer and the Fathers’, 238. ²⁷² Jewel, ‘The copy of a sermon’, 11.

The English Reformation

73

whom Ridley quoted on the eucharist as ‘the last of them all’.²⁷³ There was always an awareness that such writers were not properly to be called Fathers.²⁷⁴ The exact boundary was difficult to draw. Jewel challenged Roman Catholics on the first six centuries. Andr´e Rivet was inclined to think that this was somewhat too generous a period. In the first two editions of his Criticus sacer, he professed himself willing to adopt the German Bartholomaeus Keckermann’s stricter limitation to ‘almost the time of Augustine’.²⁷⁵ This, however, had the major inconvenience of leaving beyond the pale the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, two major buttresses of Trinitarian orthodoxy. Rivet significantly corrected himself in his third edition of 1626, now dating the beginning of the corruption of the Church by human traditions ‘soon after the times of Augustine and these four famous Oecumenical Councils’.²⁷⁶ On the other hand, Scultetus descended as low as the year 800.²⁷⁷ The first five centuries were the typical period, both in England and on the Continent.²⁷⁸ In his Treatise of the ²⁷³ Ridley, De Coena Dominica, sigs. ∗ 7v and ∗∗ 1r . The form ‘Bertramus’ is a mistake which derives from some manuscripts of Sigebert of Gembloux’s De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis and was followed in the editio princeps of De corpore et sanguine Domini (Cologne, 1531): see J.-P. Bouhot, Ratramne de Corbie (Paris, 1976), 104–6. For the influence of Ratramnus on the evolution of Ridley and then, through Ridley, of Cranmer, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, 355 and 382. Cf. S. L. Greenslade, The English Reformers and the Fathers of the Church: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 10 May 1960 (Oxford, 1960), 5, on the case of Bernard. ²⁷⁴ Martyr quoted Ratramnus in his Oxford Treatise but explicitly ranked him ‘inter recentiores’ (Tractatio, fo. 8r ; other quotations, fos. 26v and 33v ). ²⁷⁵ Rivet, Critici sacri specimen, 15: ‘quamuis liberaliter admodum egisset Juellus, qui sexcentorum annorum spatium eis [Pontificiis] decurrendum dederat. Alioqui enim non displicet Bartholomaei Keckermanni limitatio, qui … existimat, desiisse Patrum aetatem, cum temporibus pene Augustini; quibus exactis, ab humanis traditionibus Ecclesia uitium accepit.’ Same text in the second edition (Dordrecht, 1619), 6. See Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Systema logicae tribus libris adornatum. Editio secunda, ab autore recognita et emendata (n.p., 1603), 503, who justified this restriction by Eusebius (Hegesippus). ²⁷⁶ Andr´e Rivet, Critici sacri libri IV. In quibus expenduntur, confirmantur, defenduntur, vel reiiciuntur Censurae Doctorum tam ex Orthodoxis quam ex Pontificiis, in Scripta quae Patribus plerisque priscorum et puriorum seculorum, incogitantia uel error affinxit, aut dolus malus supposuit. Tertia editio iusta accessione aucta et recognita (Geneva, 1626): ‘quamuis liberaliter admodum egisset Juellus, qui sexcentorum annorum spatium eis [Pontificiis] decurrendum dederat. Alioqui enim non longe post tempora Augustini, et quatuor illa celebrata Oecumenica Concilia, quae insecuta sunt, dissimiles nobis Doctores dederunt: tum enim manifeste multis in locis, ab humanis traditionibus Ecclesia uitium accepit.’ Same text in the 4th edition (Geneva, 1642) and the 5th, in Andr´e Rivet, Operum Theologicorum, quae Latine edidit, Tomus Alter (Rotterdam, 1652). ²⁷⁷ Scultetus, ‘Breues et perspicui aphorismi’. ²⁷⁸ Greenslade, English Reformers and Fathers of the Church, 5.

74

The English Reformation

use of the Fathers, Jean Daill´e counted ‘the four or five first Centuries after the Apostles’.²⁷⁹ Whatever the subsequent theological evolution of the Church of England, there was never any compromise on this fundamental principle: the age of the Fathers had come to an end in what we would today call late antiquity and stood in clear contrast to the Middle Ages.²⁸⁰ In his Gresham lectures, Richard Holdsworth declared Keckermann’s chronology unexceptionable (it certainly provided for a stretch long enough), but explained that he would for his part follow that of Jewel, since ‘honours are to be extended’ and the first six centuries included both the general councils and all the most eminent doctors of the Church.²⁸¹ Later writers, like Bede, Damascene, Anselm, and Bernard, whatever their learning, could neither be called Fathers nor have the same weight as the ancients: they lived in ‘a more recent and less happy age, which agreed in various errors brought in by the accumulated superstitions of monks’.²⁸² In that sense, English patristics remained consistently Protestant, in marked contrast with the Tridentine notion of the continuity of the teaching Church, the authority of which was equal at all times. Jewel’s recusant adversaries protested against his chronology as too restrictive.²⁸³ In 1609, in the Latin Premonition to his defence of the Oath of Allegiance, James I professed to receive, or at least, to forbear from openly contradicting, ‘everything that the Fathers of the first four hundred years after Christ held unanimously to be necessary to salvation’²⁸⁴ (the official English edition ²⁷⁹ Daill´e, Employ des Peres, 5; Use of the Fathers, sig. A2r . ²⁸⁰ The only exception I know is David Owen, who, in his Herod and Pilat reconciled (see below, 164–5), called ‘Fathers’ all his authorities up to the twelfth century, and then ‘Writers’. ²⁸¹ Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 339. ²⁸² Ibid. 323: ‘nomen Patris non obtinetur, atque minoris erunt ponderis eiusmodi testimonia quam illa quae ex antiquissimorum paginis proferuntur; ut in Beda, Damasceno, Anselmo, Bernardo, uidere est, qui nuperiore et infeliciore seculo uixerunt, et in uarios errores ex cumulatis Monachorum superstitionibus coniurato.’ ²⁸³ See Booty, Jewel, 126–49. ²⁸⁴ Apologia pro Iuramento Fidelitatis. Primum quidem ἀνώνυμος: nunc uero ab ipso Auctore, Serenissimo ac Potentiss. Principe, Iacobo … denuo edita. Cui praemissa est praefatio monitoria, Sacratiss. Caesari Rodolpho II. Semper Augusto, Caeterisque Christiani Orbis Sereniss. ac Potentiss. Monarchis ac Regibus: Illustriss. Celsissimisque Liberis Principibus, Rebus publicis atque Ordinibus inscripta (London, 1609), praefatio monitoria, sep. pagination, 38: ‘Quicquid enim quadringentis post Christum annis, unanimi consensu, Patres ad aeternam salutem esse necessarium statuerunt, aut cum iis ita esse sentiam, aut modesto saltem silentio obmutescam; reprehendere certe non audeo.’ The text is unchanged in the Latin collected edition, Serenissimi et Potentissimi Principis Iacobi, Dei gratia, Magnae Britanniae, Franciae, et Hiberniae Regis, Fidei Defensoris, Opera, edita ab Iacobo Montacuto, Wintoniensi Episcopo, et sacelli Regii Decano (London, 1619), 300. The French translation, Apologie pour le serment de fidelit´e que le Serenissime Roy de la

The English Reformation

75

had ‘the first five hundreth yeeres’).²⁸⁵ Cardinal Bellarmine remonstrated that there was no reason to limit oneself to the first four, or for that matter the first five, centuries and to exclude ‘Gregory [the Great], the Venerable Bede, St. Anselm, St. Bernard, St. Thomas [Aquinas], St. Bonaventure and others, who wrote in later centuries but in the same spirit and with no lesser learning’.²⁸⁶ If there was English originality on this point, it lay in the appeal, not only to the Greek and Latin Fathers, but to the old British Church, before the arrival of the Roman mission led by Augustine of Canterbury, at the end of the sixth century.²⁸⁷ The point had not been missed by Flacius Illyricus, who, in a last-minute addition to his Catalogue, included ‘the really admirable and most worthy to be known story’ of the British Christians’ refusal to acknowledge Augustine’s authority and, by implication, papal primacy.²⁸⁸ A few years later, after Elizabeth’s accession, when he was grand’Bretagne requiert de tous ses sujets … Ensemble un ample avertissement, ou Preface dudit Seigneur Roy (London, 1609), preface, sep. pagination, 37, also has ‘les premiers 400. ans’. ²⁸⁵ An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance. First set foorth without a name: And now acknowledged by the Author, the Right High and Mightie Prince, James … Together, with a Premonition of his Maiesties (Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Maiestie. April. 8. Anno 1609) [STC 14402; e.g. BSG, shelfmark 4◦ D 2971, and BL, shelfmark 1009 c. 7], Premonition, sep. pagination, 36: ‘what ever the Fathers for the first five hundreth yeeres did with an unanime consent agree upon.’ This is the text followed in the collected edition of James’s Workes (London, 1616) [repr. Hildesheim, 1971], 302. The official copies include a warning, on the verso of the title page, that ‘the rashnesse of the Printer and error of the Examiner hath made a number of his Maiesties Bookes to be put forth and sold, being still full of the Copiers fault, and before his Maiestie had fully revised and compared the Copie with the Originall’. Compare the unauthorized edition, An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Maiestie. Anno 1609) [STC 14401; e.g. BNF, shelfmark 4◦ Nc. 219, and BL, shelfmark 714 c. 9], Premonition, sep. pagination, 36: ‘the first foure hundreth yeeres’. On the controversy over the Oath of Allegiance, see W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997), 75–123. ²⁸⁶ Robert Bellarmine, Apologia pro Responsione sua ad librum Iacobi Magnae Britanniae Regis, cuius titulus est, Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus (2nd edn., Rome, 1610: 1st edn. 1609), 93: ‘non posse reddi certam rationem, cur non sint etiam admittendi Sanctus Gregorius, Venerabilis Beda, Sanctus Anselmus, Sanctus Bernardus, Sanctus Thomas, Sanctus Bonaventura et alii, qui posterioribus saeculis, sed eodem spiritu, nec minore scientia scripserunt’. Bellarmine, who was certainly helped by English Jesuits in Rome, pointed out, 77, the discrepancy between the Latin and English versions of the Premonition. ²⁸⁷ See F. Heal, ‘Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the National Past’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68/1–2 (2005), 109–32, esp. 120–7. ²⁸⁸ Flacius, Catalogus testium ueritatis, ‘Appendix, Prioribus iam excusis demum ab autore missa’, 1036–9: ‘plane admirabilem scituque longe dignissimam narrationem.’ Flacius was probably influenced by the English Protestant exile John Bale, who was in Basle at the time (Fairfield, Bale, 91–2 and 151). The conflict between Augustine and

76

The English Reformation

looking for more ‘ancient monuments’ against popery to include in the Centuries, Flacius turned for help to England.²⁸⁹ Archbishop Parker, who was already well aware of the usefulness of such researches for Protestant apologetics, did his best to assist.²⁹⁰ He referred Flacius’ enquiries to the antiquary and divine John Bale, at the time a prebendary of Canterbury. Bale’s lengthy reply illustrates the perspective that English Protestantism then fully shared with the Continent. Manuscripts were valuable because they provided ‘knowledge of thynges necessary in thys fall of Antichriste to be knowne’.²⁹¹ The massacre of the ancient Britons by Augustine’s Saxons ‘at the first enteraunce of the popes religyon into Englande’ thus offered a parallel with the Marian persecutions ‘after the departure of the same false religyon’.²⁹² Special attention ought to be paid to ‘all the writings of those who disagreed totally or partly with the Roman Church’ and to those that had been written against them.²⁹³ This testes ueritatis view of history inspired the campaign that Parker masterminded in the 1560s to recover, publish, and exploit for religious purposes the antiquities of Britain.²⁹⁴ the British Christians had been told by Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 2. 2 (ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 134–43), in a very Roman spirit (see e.g. H. Chadwick, ‘Gregory the Great and the Mission to the Anglo-Saxons’, in Gregorio Magno e il suo tempo: XIX Incontro di studiosi dell’antichit`a cristiana in ´ collaborazione con l’Ecole Franc¸aise de Rome, Roma, 9–12 maggio 1990 (Rome, 1991), i. 199–200). Flacius therefore preferred to refer to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Britanniae utriusque regum et principum Origo et gesta insignia (Paris, 1508), 8. 4, fo. XCIIIv [= The Historia regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568, ed. N. Wright (Cambridge, 1985), cap. 188, 134–5; the title Historia regum Britannie first appeared in Commelin’s edition (Heidelberg, 1587)], whose account was much more favourable to the Britons. See J. Gillingham, ‘The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 13 (1990), 99–118. ²⁸⁹ N. L. Jones, ‘Matthew Parker, John Bale, and the Magdeburg Centuriators’, SCJ 12/3 (1981), 35–49. ²⁹⁰ Parker had appealed to the precedent of the British bishops’ resistance to Augustine several months before Flacius’ request (which was made in June 1560): see his letter to the deprived Marian bishops, 26 March 1560, Correspondence, no. 77, 111–12. ²⁹¹ John Bale’s letter to Parker, 30 July 1560, in T. Graham and A. G. Watson, The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge, 1998), 17. On Bale’s own antiquarian work, see Fairfield, Bale. ²⁹² Bale’s letter to Parker, in Graham and Watson, Recovery of the Past, 23. See John Bale, Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae, quam nunc Angliam et Scotiam uocant: Catalogus (Basle, 1557), 63–6 and 83; Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae posterior pars, quinque continens Centurias ultimas (Basle, 1559), 116. Bale referred to Geoffrey of Monmouth (see above, n. 288). ²⁹³ Bale’s letter to Parker, in Graham and Watson, Recovery of the Past, 22–3 and 25. ²⁹⁴ See Strype, Parker, 528–40. References to modern studies are given in the introduction of Graham and Watson, Recovery of the Past.

The English Reformation

77

Materials had been thrown into disarray by Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and the consequent dispersal of the monastic libraries. With the help of his Latin secretary, John Joscelyn, Parker built a large collection of medieval manuscripts, in both Latin and Anglo-Saxon, which he bequeathed in part to Cambridge University Library, but mainly to his old Cambridge college of Corpus Christi. He thus patronized the editiones principes of several medieval chroniclers and published in 1566 the first Anglo-Saxon book to be printed in England, Ælfric’s Easter Homily.²⁹⁵ Parker had Anglo-Saxon types specially cast for this edition.²⁹⁶ To remove all suspicions of unfaithfulness, he made the Archbishop of York and thirteen other bishops attest with him at the end of the book that they had personally collated the printed text with the manuscripts.²⁹⁷ An English translation was added to enable the work to reach a larger public. The importance of the text in Parker’s eyes dwelt in its rejecting unequivocally the corporal presence of Christ in the eucharist (it is probably no accident that neither the traditionalist Cheyney nor Guest was among the bishops who subscribed).²⁹⁸ Ælfric, who lived about 1000, was of a very late date by Protestant standards, and Parker and his fellow bishops warned the reader that the sermon had otherwise several assertions ‘not consonant to sounde doctrine’.²⁹⁹ This was not to be marvelled at, since ‘the writynges of the fathers even of the first age of the Churche bee not thought on all partes so perfect, that whatsoever thyng hath been of them spoken ought to be receaved without all exception (which honour trulye themselves both knewe and also have confessed to be onely due to the most holy and tryed word of God)’.³⁰⁰ The corruptions of the Church in Ælfric’s time did not at all affect, however, the apologetical use of his testimony against ‘the adversaryes of the truth’, who professed for their part to hold that period in the greatest veneration.³⁰¹ Ælfric’s denial of the corporal presence ruined their pretended ‘great consent … to witte, their doctrine to have continued many hundred yeares as it were lincked together with ²⁹⁵ A Testimonie of antiquitie, shewing the auncient fayth in the Church of England touching the sacrament of the body and bloude of the Lord here publikely preached, and also receaved in the Saxons tyme, above 600 yeares agoe (London, n.d. [1566]). See J. Bromwich, ‘The First Book Printed in Anglo-Saxon Types’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 3 (1959–63), 265–91. ²⁹⁶ Bromwich, ‘First Book’, 271. ²⁹⁷ A Testimonie of antiquitie, sig. ¶1v . ²⁹⁸ Hodges, Bishop Guest, 19 n. 1. ²⁹⁹ A Testimonie of antiquitie, sig. ¶1r (instancing the celebration of the mass for the living and the dead; the mixed chalice; the report of two ‘vayne miracles’). A marginal note was inserted fo. 8r to correct the sermon’s advocacy of the sign of the cross. ³⁰¹ Ibid., sig. A1r . ³⁰⁰ Ibid., sig. ¶1r .

78

The English Reformation

a continuall chaine, whereof hath been no breche at any time’.³⁰² Ælfric’s homily became henceforth a standard witness for English divines, along with the patristic proof-texts that had been culled by continental writers from Oecolampadius onwards.³⁰³ Foxe reprinted both text and translation in the lengthy digression that he introduced in 1570 to confute Henry VIII’s traditionalist Six Articles by ‘allegations out of auncient recordes’.³⁰⁴ Like Parker, Foxe aimed specifically at the Roman Catholic claim to ‘consent’. Insofar as it disproved that pretence, ‘antiquitie of stories may helpe to the restoryng againe of truth and doctrine decayed’.³⁰⁵ Parker summed up his view of English history at the end of his life, in the preliminary sections of his De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae (after having reminded readers in his preface that the Pope was Antichrist).³⁰⁶ He built on the few patristic testimonies available (both Tertullian and Origen instanced ‘the lands of the Britons’ among the regions which believed in Christ) but also on medieval legends to prove that the origins of Christianity in the British Isles were contemporary with the Apostles.³⁰⁷ The Christian faith was never wholly extinguished afterwards among Britons, not even by the cruelty of Saxon invaders, who eventually learnt it from the people that they conquered (hence the preservation in AngloSaxon homilies of many doctrines that went back to the original, British Christianity).³⁰⁸ Augustine of Canterbury’s mission to England had been the first corruption of primitive Christianity. He did not convert the Saxons but merely introduced among them superstitious Roman ceremonies.³⁰⁹ He was anyway ‘more ceremonious than religious’.³¹⁰ In a carefully worked section, of which Parker wrote three successive versions,³¹¹ he pointed out ³⁰² A Testimonie of antiquitie, sig. A2r . ³⁰³ See for instance Perkins, Problema, 166. ³⁰⁴ Foxe, Second Volume of the Ecclesiasticall history, 1302–10. See B. S. Robinson, ‘John Foxe and the Anglo-Saxons’, in Highley and King (eds.), Foxe and his World, 54–72, esp. 55–7 and 62–6. Foxe had already stressed the importance of Ælfric’s testimony in his general preface ‘To the true and faithfull congregation of Christes universall Church’, i (unnumbered). He did not have Parker’s scholarly scruples and made a number of cuts (Strype, Parker, 531). Foxe had given no theological discussion in the first edition and confined himself to narrative (see Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church … from the yeare of our Lorde a thousande, unto the tyme now present (London, 1563), 586–9). ³⁰⁵ Foxe, Second Volume of the Ecclesiasticall history, 1298–9 and 1310. ³⁰⁶ Parker, De Antiquitate, sig. ¶3r . ³⁰⁷ Ibid., preliminary section, 1. Tertullian, Aduersus Iudaeos, 7. 4 (CC 2, 1354); Origen, Homilia IV in Ezechielem, 1 (PG 13, 698). ³⁰⁸ Parker, De Antiquitate, 44. ³⁰⁹ Ibid. 11 and 45. ³¹⁰ Ibid. 45. ³¹¹ After the preliminary section, Parker’s De Antiquitate devotes one section to each Archbishop of Canterbury, in chronological order. There are three versions of ‘Augustinus’: the first and longest one, in twenty-four pages, arranged in a complicated

The English Reformation

79

that the Roman mission coincided with the very turning point of church history, the pontificate of Gregory I, ‘at the time when the ruined discipline and doctrine of the Church had much degenerated from primitive and ancient purity and fallen into the errors of superstition’.³¹² Augustine of Canterbury himself was placed in a very bad light. Parker accused him of having incited the Saxons to go to war against the ancient British Christians, who refused to submit to his authority.³¹³ Foxe’s account is not quite so harsh to the man from Rome but its outlines are the same.³¹⁴

6. AUGUSTINE, CALVIN, AND REFORMED ORTHODOXY Both the limitation of the patristic age to the first five or six centuries and the initiation of Anglo-Saxon studies proved to be of lasting importance for the Church of England. On the other hand, in marked contrast to later tendencies, sixteenth-century authors had no special interest in either the Greek or the ante-Nicene Fathers. Both Cranmer’s library and his quotations show a strong bias for the Latin Fathers, particularly Augustine.³¹⁵ Alley chose to open a list of patristic authorities with the Bishop of Hippo on the ground that ‘he among all other doctors in divinitie beareth the bell’.³¹⁶ This was to some extent a medieval legacy but it also had to do with the system of parallel columns, which Parker eventually abandoned (copies of this longer version have been preserved, along with the second one, in BL, shelfmark G. 11757, and Bodl., shelfmark 4◦ Rawl. 593); a much abridged version, which must be the second, in seven pages (e.g. in Bodl., shelfmark A. 19. 9. Th); the ultimate version (BL, shelfmark C 24 b 7, which is Parker’s gift to the Earl of Arundel, and BL, shelfmark C 24 b 8, which is the presentation copy to Queen Elizabeth) with four pages 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d (i.e. one bifolium) intercalated to amplify the attack against Augustine and Gregory with materials taken over from the first version. On the variant copies of De Antiquitate, see Strype, Parker, 415–19; STC 19292. ³¹² Parker, De Antiquitate, ‘Augustinus’ (final version), 3: ‘Sed ualde dolendum est Anglorum conuersionem in illa tempora incidisse, in quibus collapsa Ecclesiae doctrina atque disciplina, multum ab antiqua ueterique puritate ad superstitionum errores degenerauit.’ ³¹³ Ibid. 4c–4d. ³¹⁴ Foxe, First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall history, book II, 145–60; G. Parry, ‘John Foxe, ‘‘Father of Lyes’’, and the Papists’, in Loades (ed.), Foxe and the English Reformation, 297–9. See also A. Martin, ‘The End of History: Thomas Norton’s ‘‘v periodes’’ and the Pattern of English Protestant Historiography’, in Highley and King (eds.), Foxe and his World, 47–8; G. Williams, ‘Some Protestant Views of Early British Church History’ [1953], repr. in id., Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff, 1967), 207–19; id., Reformation Views of Church History (London, 1970). ³¹⁵ Walsh, ‘Cranmer and the Fathers’, 235 and 242. ³¹⁶ Alley, Poore mans Librarie, ii, fo. 60v .

80

The English Reformation

adoption of a Protestant theology of grace.³¹⁷ The ninth of the FortyTwo Articles (which was incorporated into the tenth of the Thirty-Nine), ‘Of free wille’, borrowed textually from one of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian tracts to stress the need of God’s grace.³¹⁸ The only genuine works by Augustine to be translated into English in the sixteenth century were the two treatises De praedestinatione sanctorum and De dono perseuerantiae, which he had written at the very end of his life against the Massilienses (a group of clergy of Marseilles in Gaul) who had objected against his system as too harsh. Two different versions appeared at a few years’ interval, first in 1550, at the height of the Edwardian Reformation, and then in 1556 (the author of that second translation, John Scory, later Bishop of Hereford under Elizabeth, being at the time a Protestant exile on the Continent). Both translations were strongly Protestant in character, and Scory stressed that he did not translate Augustine to put him on a par with Scripture but to confute popish calumnies that the Reformed doctrine of predestination was a new invention.³¹⁹ The Greek Fathers were considered of no authority on these questions. In his Problema, Perkins explained that ‘improper’ expressions of the ancients on free will had been corrected ‘first of all by Augustine’.³²⁰ On the Continent, Scultetus wrote likewise that, although as a general rule the older the Fathers, the purer, one should make an exception for Augustine, ‘who appears to have excelled by the purity of his doctrine not only his successors but also not a few of his predecessors’.³²¹ Even Augustine, however, was likely to be given up when he went against Reformed principles, for example on the efficacy of baptism in conferring regeneration on children. The discrepancy was too patent to be denied, and Roman Catholics made much of it. Whereas Reformed theologians taught that children of faithful parents were justified before and without baptism by God’s promises, had not Augustine repeatedly asserted against the Pelagians that ‘children will not otherwise be granted ³¹⁷ See Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 3–28; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 338–42. ³¹⁸ I quote the Latin text to make the parallel clearer. Article 9/42 [10/39]: ‘Absque gratia Dei, quae per Christum est, nos preueniente ut uelimus, et cooperante dum uolumus, ad pietatis opera facienda, quae Deo grata sint et accepta, nihil ualemus’; Augustine, De Gratia et libero arbitrio, 17. 33 (PL 44, 901): ‘tamen sine illo uel operante ut uelimus, uel cooperante cum uolumus, ad bona pietatis opera nihil ualemus.’ ³¹⁹ Vessey, ‘English Translations’, 794–9, offers an excellent analysis of both translations and their context. See also Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 18–19 and 25. ³²⁰ Perkins, Problema, 68–9. Perkins used in this context the argument that the ancient Fathers had written ‘more securely’, on which see above, n. 234. ³²¹ Scultetus, ‘Breues et perspicui aphorismi’: ‘qui non tantum se posteriores, sed ex antecessoribus quoque non paucos puritate doctrinae uidetur superasse.’

The English Reformation

81

salvation and eternal life, unless they are baptized in Christ’?³²² The Forty-Two Articles, and subsequently the Thirty-Nine, used expressions (‘effectual signs’, ‘instrument’) ambiguous enough not to exclude the notion of sacramental efficacy, which had been retained by the Lutherans—and probably, in some sense, by Calvin himself—and which had defenders among English Protestants, although such language sounded dangerously ‘Thomistic and scholastic’ to exponents of a Zwinglian position.³²³ The Articles did not say, however, that ‘sacraments confer grace on those who do not make obstruction’—the scholastic axiom, derived from Augustine, on which traditionalists insisted,³²⁴ and which Calvin and the Zwinglian Bullinger had agreed to condemn explicitly in the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549.³²⁵ This actually featured in an earlier version of the Articles, which was presented for subscription to John Hooper on his appointment as Bishop of Gloucester in May 1550: Hooper insisted that the word ‘confer’ be changed into ‘seal’ or ‘testify to’, and he eventually got his way.³²⁶ Peter Martyr complained in 1552 that ‘many’ English Protestants still held that ‘grace is conferred, as they say, by the sacraments’, and refused to admit that children were justified before baptism. Their main ground was the authority of Augustine.³²⁷ Martyr ³²² See for instance Smyth, De infantium baptismo, fos. 6r –7r , quoting on the one hand Calvin, Martyr, Zwingli, and Bullinger, and on the other hand several texts of Augustine, including sermo 294 (PL 38, 1336): ‘Nos dicimus aliter infantes salutem, et uitam aeternam non habituros, nisi baptizentur in Christo.’ ³²³ Articles XXVI and XXVIII of the Forty-Two, and XXV and XXVII of the ThirtyNine. Compare the Augsburg Confession (1530), arts. V, IX, XIII, in Creeds of the Protestant Churches, 10, 13, and 15, and the unambiguously traditional statements in the Ten Articles of 1536, in Hardwick, History of the Articles, 243–4. Fierce 19th-century controversies rather confused the issue. Hardwick’s interpretation, ibid. 92–6, 129–30, 411–16, is very learned but with a strong High Church bias; G. W. Bromiley, Baptism and the Anglican Reformers (London, 1953), 168–96, though less learned (and as much biased in the opposite direction), is on the whole more convincing. See also Spinks, Sacraments, Ceremonies and the Stuart Divines, 1–31. On the divergences between Calvin and the followers of Zwingli, see B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Edinburgh, 1993) (quotation at 168 n. 32). Note the ambiguity of the term ‘instrument’, which was used in different senses by Calvin and Martyr. ³²⁴ See Joliffe, Responsio ad articulos Hoperi, fo. 174r – v . ³²⁵ Consensus Tigurinus, art. 17, in Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche, ed. E. F. K. M¨uller (Leipzig, 1903), 161. ³²⁶ Martin Micronius to Heinrich Bullinger, 28 May 1550, in Epistolae Tigurinae de rebus potissimum ad Ecclesiae Anglicanae reformationem pertinentibus conscriptae A.D. 1531–1558, ed. PS (Cambridge, 1848), 366: ‘cupit conferendi in obsignandi aut testificandi uerbum mutari.’ ³²⁷ Martyr’s letter to Bullinger of 14 June 1852, in An unpublished letter of Peter Martyr … affording additional proof of the meaning of the Articles, ed. W. Goode (London, 1850), 15–16: ‘uolunt multi, atque hi alias non indocti neque mali, per sacramenta

82

The English Reformation

managed to prevent this traditionalist view from being sanctioned in the Reformatio legum.³²⁸ The diffusion of Calvinism in Elizabethan England further encouraged theologians to make light of patristic views on baptism. In his Cambridge lectures on the sacraments, Whitaker had recourse to the usual interpretative tools: rhetoric and the ‘crooked tree’ explanation. When Augustine said that ‘sacraments of the New Testament give salvation, whereas sacraments of the Old Testament promised the Saviour’, ‘I answer with Calvin that such phrases are hyperbolical and should not be pressed too much’.³²⁹ ‘Most of the Fathers gave too much to baptism, and especially Augustine, because he had to deal with the Pelagians’, who denied original sin.³³⁰ Andrew Willet expressed what was current orthodoxy when, in his influential Synopsis Papismi, he declared it a principle of ‘the Protestants’ that ‘the Sacraments have no power to give or conferre graces to the receiver’.³³¹ ut aiunt conferri gratiam. Neque uolunt concedere paruulos iustificatos aut regeneratos ante baptismum.... Ex eo tamen haud parua nobis mouetur inuidia, quod ab Augustino prorsus dissentiamus. Et si authoritate publica fuisset probata nostra sententia, tunc inquiunt manifestissime damnatus esset Augustinus.’ Goode’s edition and English translation were reprinted in The Writings of John Bradford, ed. A. Townsend (Cambridge, 1853; PS), 400–6. Interest in this letter was directly influenced by contemporary debates on the Gorham Case. See F. C. Massingberd, A Letter to the Rev. William Goode (London, 1850); G. C. Gorham, Gleanings of a few scattered ears, during the period of the Reformation in England and of the times immediately succeeding (London, 1857), 280–3; Hardwick, History of the Articles, 92. Both Goode and his adversaries believed that the letter concerned the Forty-Two Articles but it actually related to the Reformatio legum (see next note). ³²⁸ See Reformatio legum 5.1, in Bray, Tudor Church Reform, 226; MacCulloch, ‘Martyr and Cranmer’, 194; Jackson, ‘Law and Order’, 272–4. ³²⁹ William Whitaker, Praelectiones de Sacramentis in Genere, et in Specie de SS. Baptismo et Eucharistia (Frankfurt, 1624), 116: ‘quando Patres uetera Sacramenta cum nostris comparant, et illa aiunt non iustificasse, nostra iustificare, ut quod Augustinus ait, Sacramenta noui Testamenti dare salutem, Sacramenta ueteris Testamenti promisisse Saluatorem [Enarratio in Ps. 73, 2 (CC 39, 1006)]. Respondeo cum Caluino, has dicendi formulas esse hyperbolicas, et non esse minus [sic: an obvious misprint for nimis] rigide urgendas.’ See Calvin, Institutio (1559), . xiv. 26 (CR 30, 961). Whitaker’s lectures had been prepared for publication by his pupil John Allenson, out of his notes, and were eventually edited by Samuel Ward, who dedicated them to Tobie Matthew. ³³⁰ Ibid. 229: ‘fateor Patres plerosque nimium Baptismo tribuisse, imprimis Augustinum, quia rem habuit cum Pelagianis.’ ³³¹ Andrew Willet, Synopsis Papismi (3rd edn., London, 1600), 463. See also the charges made against Hooker by A Christian Letter of certaine English Protestants [1599], in Richard Hooker, Works, Folger Library edn., 7 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1977–98), iv. 38–41 and 43–5—for the evidence that Willet was the author or one of the authors, see J. Booty’s introduction, ibid., pp. xix–xxv; one may add that, although Willet later denied authorship, he defended the work as ‘beeing for the manner modest, and for the points of doctrine there maintained sound’ (Loidoromastix: that is, a scourge for a rayler (Cambridge, 1607), 37). Cf. Calvin, Institutio (1559), . xiv. 14 (CR 30, 951) and

The English Reformation

83

The Fathers were not regarded as sources of doctrine but as repositories of useful quotations to prove a doctrine garnered elsewhere, in theory from Scripture, in practice from the works of modern Protestant theologians. The very pattern of reading, which involved divinity students preparing commonplace books and then filling them with extracts, was retrospective, starting from present-day controversial issues and going back to the Fathers.³³² Roman Catholic divines did not proceed otherwise. The unavoidable consequence was to force on patristic expressions the sense that contemporary confessional orthodoxies appeared to require. Medieval theologians like Aquinas had called such distortions the art of exponere reuerenter, of ‘explaining respectfully’, instead of condemning, patristic assertions that had the appearance of error.³³³ Hence the scholastic joke: ‘authority has a waxen nose, it can be turned in various ways.’³³⁴ Divines from the University Perkins’s careful explanation of the sense in which baptism may be said to confer grace in B. D. Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology: Sacraments and Salvation in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker (Lanham, Md., 1999), 69–81. For the impact of such theological change on religious practices, see W. Coster, ‘Tokens of Innocence: Infant Baptism, Death and Burial in Early Modern England’, in B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), 266–87. ³³² On the importance of commonplace books for controversialists, see e.g. Peter Smith, ‘The Life and Death of Andrew Willet’, prefixed to Andrew Willet, Synopsis Papismi (5th edn., London, 1634), sig. a4r ; Haugaard, ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship’, 55–6 (on Jewel). On how to organize such works, see the advice to students by Matthew Sutcliffe, De recta studii theologici ratione (London, 1602), 31–53. These reading strategies were by no means proper to theology: see Richard Holdsworth, ‘Directions for a Student in the Universitie’, in H. F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, ii: The Cambridge University Period 1625–32 (Urbana, Ill., 1961), appendix II, 651: ‘A Common place book ought to be fitted to that profession you follow, whether of Law, Divinity, Phisick or the like.’ The question has been much studied in recent years. See e.g. P. Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in W. S. Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (Binghamton, NY, 1993), 131–47 (137–40 on theology); K. Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, 2000); A. Blair, ‘Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 11–28; for an overview, with many additional references, ead., ‘Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’, Critical Inquiry, 31 (2004–5), 85–107. ³³³ See e. g. Aquinas’s prologue to his Contra errores Graecorum (ed. leonina, xl/a. 71). ³³⁴ Alan of Lille, De fide catholica contra haereticos, 1. 30 (PL 210, 333): ‘Sed quia auctoritas cereum habet nasum, id est in diuersum potest flecti sensum, rationibus roborandum est.’ The text was first printed in 1612, in an edition dedicated to the French clergy, with a curious variation which does not however affect the overall meaning: ‘sed quia auctoritas cereum habet nasum, id est in diuinis potest flecti sensus, rationibus ideo probandum’ (Alani insignis Theologi Opus aduersus Haereticos, et Valdenses, qui postea Albigenses dicti. Nunc primum `e Bibliotheca Papirii Massoni Foresii in lucem editum, diligentia J. Massoni fratris eius, Ecclesiae Baiocensis Archidiaconi (Paris, 1612), 63–4).

84

The English Reformation

of Douai in the Spanish Netherlands said as much in 1571, when they advised the compilers of the Belgian Index expurgatorius not to forbid Ratramnus’ De corpore et sanguine Domini. Such a move was counter-productive since the book was widely available anyway and it would allow heretics to claim that they really had antiquity on their side. It was much better to do with Ratramnus as was being done with ‘other ancient Catholics’, in whom ‘we put up with numerous errors, which we extenuate, excuse, very often deny by some contrivance, and to which we ascribe a convenient sense when they are opposed in academic disputes or in controversies with our adversaries’.³³⁵ Generations of Protestant divines seized upon this candid profession as a definite proof of popish dishonesty.³³⁶ The fact was that the invention of ‘convenient senses’ was the professional answer of divines of all Churches, when confronted with problematic passages, and that it had a long pedigree. Chemnitz explained that his rules of patristic interpretations were ‘how the Fathers … had extenuated and excused by a convenient interpretation, according to the analogy of the faith, what the ancients had said in an inconvenient manner’.³³⁷ Only when ‘these extenuations or convenient interpretations’ were impossible did the Fathers condemn the unscriptural doctrines of their predecessors.³³⁸ Matthew Sutcliffe echoed Aquinas when he reminded students that ‘sayings of the Fathers should be kindly interpreted’.³³⁹ The young James Ussher, when a Bachelor of Arts in Trinity College Dublin, ‘read here and there divers books of the Fathers, and most Authors ³³⁵ Index expurgatorius librorum (Antwerp, 1571), 4–5, ‘Ut liber Bertrami Presb. de corp. et sang. Domini, tolerari emendatus queat. Iudicium Universitatis Duacensis, deinde Censorum collegio probatum’: ‘[cum] in catholicis ueteribus aliis plurimos feramus errores, et extenuemus, excusemus, excogitato commento persaepe negemus, et commodum iis sensum affingamus, dum opponuntur in disputationibus, aut in conflictionibus cum aduersariis.’ ³³⁶ See e.g. John Rainolds, De Romanae Ecclesiae idololatria, in cultu sanctorum, reliquiarum, imaginum, aquae, salis, olei, aliarumque rerum consecratarum, et sacramenti Eucharistiae (Oxford, 1596), 31 and 355; Abbot, Hill’s Reasons Unmasked, 417; William Crashaw, Romish Forgeries and Falsifications: Together with Catholike Restitutions. The first Booke of the first Tome. Observed, collected, and now discovered for the use and honour of the Catholike Church, and to the iust rebuke of the Romish Sinagogue (London, 1606), sig. C2r ; R. Abbot, Second Part of the Defence of the Reformed Catholicke, 679; id., Third Part, ‘An advertisement for the time concerning Doctor Bishops Reproofe’, sep. pagination, 55; James Ussher, Grauissimae quaestionis, de Christianarum Ecclesiarum, in Occidentis praesertim partibus, ab Apostolicis temporibus ad nostram usque aetatem, continua successione et statu Historica Explicatio (London, 1613), 39–41; Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 338. ³³⁷ Chemnitz, Examen, 1a pars, 81–2: ‘quomodo Patres incommode dicta ueterum … commoda interpretatione, iuxta analogiam fidei, mitigarint et excusarint.’ ³³⁸ Ibid. 83. ³³⁹ Sutcliffe, De recta studii theologici ratione, 28: ‘Candide enim interpretanda sunt dicta patrum.’

The English Reformation

85

writing of the body of Divinity, not only Positively, but Polemically, in confuting of the errors of the Church of Rome’.³⁴⁰ Most students probably never went beyond that—indeed Sutcliffe warned that the Fathers should not be read indiscriminately but used ‘to explain some doctrine which is controverted by papists and other heretics’.³⁴¹ Ussher then embarked on a systematic and exceptionally thorough study of the Fathers, but even at that stage his reading was guided by contemporary controversies. Decades later, when Laudian divines denied the divine institution of the Lord’s day, he confessed: ‘when I gave my self unto the reading of the Fathers, I took no heed unto any thing that concerned this argument: as little dreaming that any such controversie would have arisen among us.’³⁴² In 1602, Sutcliffe advised students to read the Fathers together with standard books by continental divines, such as Calvin’s Institutes, and ‘the confessions of faith of Reformed Churches’.³⁴³ Twenty years earlier, Thomas Cartwright had even argued that ‘the new writers’ should be studied before the old, ‘for that we understanding by them what suits there are depending between us and our Adversaries of all sorts, we may both the better know what evidence is layed up in the Monuments of the Old Writers either for us or them, and make our note accordingly’.³⁴⁴ By ‘new writers’, Cartwright meant primarily Calvin,³⁴⁵ and he was not original in thinking thus. Though the Genevans were by no means the only continental influence on the Church of England, there is good evidence that Calvin outclassed all other authors, and Calvinist doctrines were further spread ³⁴⁰ Nicholas Bernard, The Life and death of the Most Reverend and Learned Father of our Church, Dr. James Usher, Late Arch-Bishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland. Published in a Sermon at his Funeral, at the Abby of Westminster, Aprill 17. 1656. And now re-viewed with some other Enlargements (London, 1656), 30. ³⁴¹ Sutcliffe, De recta studii theologici ratione, 21–2 and 26. ³⁴² Letter of Ussher to William Twisse [1640], in Nicholas Bernard, The Judgement of the Late Arch-Bishop of Armagh, and Primate of Ireland, 1. Of the Extent of Christs death, and satisfaction, etc. 2. Of the Sabbath, and observation of the Lords day. 3. Of the Ordination in other reformed Churches (London, 1657), 74. On the controversy, see Lake, ‘The Laudians and the Argument from Authority’, 159–68. ³⁴³ Sutcliffe, De recta studii theologici ratione, 25–7. ³⁴⁴ Cartwright’s letter to Arthur Hildersham ‘for Direction in the Study of Divinity’, dated 23 March 1583 (since Cartwright was then in Zealand, it is not clear whether the date was old or new style), in Cartwrightiana, ed. A. Peel and L. H. Carlson (London, 1951; Elizabethan Nonconformist Texts 1), 112. The interest of this text was first pointed out by A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism 1535–1603 (Cambridge, 1925), 224–6. Cartwright’s use of the Fathers has been well analysed by J. K. Luoma, ‘Who Owns the Fathers? Hooker and Cartwright on the Authority of the Primitive Church’, SCJ 8/3 (1977), 46–53, but the author mistakenly implies that it was specifically Puritan. ³⁴⁵ Cartwright’s letter ‘for Direction in the Study of Divinity’, 113–14.

86

The English Reformation

by Beza’s works, which were much circulated in the 1580s and 1590s.³⁴⁶ It was not merely a compliment when the University of Cambridge told Beza in 1582: after Scripture ‘there are no writers of any age that we prefer to the memorable John Calvin and to you’.³⁴⁷ Hooker observed (and implicitly deplored) that Calvin had acquired the same status in the Reformed Churches as Peter Lombard in the Church of Rome—where the Sentences provided the framework of theological teaching until the last decades of the sixteenth century.³⁴⁸ At the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the academic establishment in both universities had been largely trained in this manner³⁴⁹ and remained adamant that it was the best. At Cambridge, the Vice Chancellor and the Heads of Houses complained to Archbishop Whitgift in 1595 that ‘the new Writers were very rarely bought’.³⁵⁰ At about the same time, Perkins inveighed in the pulpit against those students of divinity who were ‘despising … the writings of those famous instruments and cleare lights, whom the Lord raised up for the raising and restoring of true religion; such as Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Beza, Martyr, etc.... (the soundest expositors of the Scriptures raised since the Apostles)’.³⁵¹ Neither the Heads of Houses nor Perkins explicitly mentioned the Fathers (they only denounced the recourse to ‘popish writers’ and schoolmen), but the drift of their discourse clearly implied that the Fathers themselves ought to be kept in subordination to the teachings of continental divines. ³⁴⁶ A. Pettegree, ‘The Reception of Calvinism in Britain’, in W. H. Neuser and B. G. Armstrong (eds.), Calvinus sincerioris religionis vindex: Calvin as Protector of the Purer Religion (Kirksville, Mo., 1997), 275–83. See also Dent, Protestant Reformers, 74–102. We need not be concerned here with the difference between Calvin and Calvinism (on which see below, 170). ³⁴⁷ Correspondance de Th´eodore de B`eze, xxiii (Geneva, 2001), 246. ³⁴⁸ Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, preface, 2.8 [Works, i. 11]. In Douai, for instance, Lombard’s Sentences remained the basis of theological teaching until 1594, when they were replaced by Aquinas’s Summa theologiae (DTC, v/1. 871). ³⁴⁹ See Whitaker’s life by Thomas Gataker, in Thomas Fuller, Abel redeuiuus; or, the dead yet speaking. The lives and deaths of the moderne divines (London, 1651), 403. For Oxford, see A Letter of Dr. Reinolds to his friend, concerning his advice for the studie of Divinitie (London, 1613), fo. A7r – v : it is dated 4 July 1577, at the time when Rainolds was himself engaged in his theological studies, and must therefore express his own practice. ³⁵⁰ Letter of 12 June 1595 in John Strype, The Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, D.D., the Third and Last Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1718), 438. ³⁵¹ Perkins, ‘Exposition upon the Epistle of Jude’, 552–3. On the revival of interest in medieval Scholasticism at the end of the 16th century, see C. B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, 1983), 61–8.

The English Reformation

87

The Fathers were much read, studied, and quoted in the Protestant Church of England under Edward and then under Elizabeth. The legacy of that first period of Reformed patristics to later generations of divines should not be underestimated. It fixed once for all the notion of ‘Fathers’, which was unambiguously limited to the writers of the first centuries after Christ. Seventeenth-century theologians also inherited from sixteenthcentury controversies a large stock of proof-texts which, on central topics like the eucharist, they only marginally expanded. The method and style of theological argument, the art of opposing passages to passages and of using ‘clear’ texts as a key to ‘obscure’ ones, did not change much either. Rules of patristic hermeneutics, which paralleled those for biblical exegesis, were formulated at the turn of the century in several handbooks, both in England and abroad, which would prove of lasting influence. Archbishop Parker and his circle pioneered the confessional use of the pre-Norman Church, and their combination of Greek and Latin patristics with British antiquities became a permanent feature of English scholarship. What was to change was the spirit in which the Fathers were read. The appeal to antiquity in Elizabethan England remained firmly anchored within a framework which, for all subsequent assertions of Anglican singularity, was virtually indistinguishable from continental Reformed orthodoxy. The history of the Church after the Apostles was conceived as a series of witnesses to a half-buried truth, which had only fully re-emerged at the Reformation. A course of theological studies therefore involved the reading of continental Reformed authors before the Fathers, as a necessary preparation: truth could be proved from the Fathers, it would not be discovered in them. On the question of grace and predestination, truth was identified with the Calvinistic variety of Augustinism. The position of seventeenth-century divines on those three points will need to be closely considered in order to ascertain the extent to which they departed from Elizabethan orthodoxy.

2 Becoming Traditional? The Appeal to Antiquity in Jacobean Controversies The Church of England under Elizabeth and Archbishop Parker had an essentially Reformed theology. The dominant doctrinal style of the Church of England under Charles I and Archbishop Laud was rather different. Neither of these assertions can now be seriously disputed. The moot point is when and how the shift exactly began and to what extent attitude towards patristic authority was both a factor in and an indicator of it. Older generations of scholars, who believed in a distinctive nature of Anglicanism, more or less contented themselves with answering that the Church of England had simply become conscious of what it was. The process had been quite natural and everything had started from episcopacy. The Church of England realized that it had a special relation to antiquity because it had bishops whereas Reformed Churches abroad had none.¹ For historians who no longer believe in unchanging religious identities, the enquiry is bound to be more difficult.

1. PRIMITIVE EPISCOPACY The originality of the sixteenth-century Church of England was to have adopted a Reformed theology while retaining pre-Reformation structures. When these were challenged, after 1572, by campaigns for a further, Presbyterian, Reformation, conformist divines undertook to justify them. Positions hardened over time. The initial conformist case had been to deny that any ecclesiastical polity, whether episcopacy or presbytery, had been instituted by Christ: the matter was left to the prudential consideration of ¹ The ablest statement of that view would seem to be Mason, Church of England and Episcopacy.

Becoming Traditional?

89

Christian magistrates. This was still the position defended by Hooker in the first four books of his Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593).² Hooker’s subsequent status as a doctor of Anglicanism has predictably caused him to be credited with a ‘patristic mind’, chiefly because of the sacramental theology developed in book V of the Lawes (1597).³ It is not necessary to discuss this claim, which is avowedly based on a peculiar interpretation of what ‘the Fathers’ taught.⁴ The multifaceted reception of the Lawes in seventeenth-century England is a complex question—further complicated by the belated publication of books VI–VIII—but Hooker can simply not be said to have marked a change in attitudes towards the Fathers.⁵ Restoration apologists who produced witnesses to show the special devotion of the Church of England to antiquity never included him,⁶ and not without reason. Hooker, admittedly, demonstrated a vast knowledge of the Fathers, both by quoting them (together with Schoolmen and ancient philosophers), and by countering quotations made by his adversaries. He was particularly good at contextualizing, protesting for instance against Cartwright’s appeal to Tertullian’s De corona militis: ‘whereas in all the bookes of Tertullian besides there is not so much found as in that one, to prove not only that we may do, but that we ought to do sundrie things which the scripture commaundeth not; out of that very booke these sentences are brought to ² See esp. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, III. 10. 8 [Works, i. 246]. In a celebrated passage of book VII (only published in 1662), Hooker mentioned that he had moved towards a higher doctrine of episcopacy (VII. 11. 8 [Works, iii. 208]) but he still considered that it was not an unalterable institution. ³ Middleton, Fathers and Anglicans, 92–113. ⁴ John Booty, who wrote the introduction and commentary to book V in the authoritative Folger Library edition of Hooker’s Works, is thus charged with having ‘not grasped what the Fathers actually mean by the mystery of theosis’ (ibid. 109). I do not mean to enter such debates. ⁵ Hooker’s reception has been much studied in recent years. See the special issue of the Journal of Religious History, 21 (1997), esp. C. Condren, ‘The Creation of Richard Hooker’s Public Authority: Rhetoric, Reputation and Reassessment’, 35–59; P. Lake, ‘Business as Usual? The Immediate Reception of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity’, JEH 52 (2001), 456–86; D. MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s Reputation’, EHR 117 (2002), 773–812; M. Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses, 1600–1714 (Oxford, 2006). ⁶ See the authorities listed by Matthew Scrivener, Apologia pro S. Ecclesiae Patribus, aduersus Joannem Dallaeum De Usu Patrum, etc. Accedit Apologia pro Ecclesia Anglicana aduersus nuperum schisma (London, 1672), 57–63; George Bull, Examen Censurae: siue Responsio ad quasdam animaduersiones, antehac ineditas, in librum cui titulus Harmonia Apostolica, etc. Accessit Apologia pro Harmonia eiusque Authore contra Declamationem Thomae Tullii (London, 1676), ‘Apologia’, sep. paginated, 8–9; Timothy Puller, The moderation of the Church of England; considered as useful for allaying the present distempers which the indisposition of the Time hath contracted (London, 1679), 81–91.

90

Becoming Traditional?

make us believe that Tertullian was of a cleane contrarie minde.’⁷ Such comments testify to Hooker’s abilities as a polemical divine rather than to a supposedly new ‘sense of history’ in the modern sense, or ‘a real advance in patristic scholarship’,⁸ but it is true that De corona militis was regularly adduced by Roman Catholic authors to support unwritten tradition.⁹ Hooker quoted the work himself to defend rites such as the sign of the cross in baptism against Puritan criticisms, but he was careful to stress that those ‘traditions’ (a word which he was reluctant to use because of its Roman Catholic connotations) were only human ordinances and belonged to the realm of adiaphora: Least therefore the name of tradition should be offensive to any, consideringe how farre by some it hath bene and is abused, wee meane by traditions ordinances made in the prime of Christian religion, established with that authoritie which Christ hath left to his Church for matters indifferent, and in that consideration requisite to be observed till like authoritie see just and reasonable cause to alter them.¹⁰

This was the exact doctrine of article XXXIV, ‘Of the traditions of the Church’: ‘they may be changed according to the diversitie of countreys, times, and mens maners, so that nothing be ordained against Gods worde.’¹¹ Chemnitz, whose careful distinction between various kinds of traditions was influential in Elizabethan England, had stressed that such ritual traditions had nothing in common with the papists’ doctrinal ones but their name.¹² ⁷ Hooker, Lawes, II. 5. 7 [Works, i. 172]. This passage has been commented by Haugaard, ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship’, 58–9. For other examples, see II. 5. 4 and V. 62. 18 [Works, i. 160 and ii. 284–5]. ⁸ Such as has been e.g. ascribed to Hooker by Luoma, ‘Who Owns the Fathers?’, 58–9. An obvious objection, which Luoma, 57, vainly tries to explain away, is Hooker’s use of writings which most Protestant theologians in his time already regarded as pseudepigraphical, like those of Pseudo-Dionysius. ⁹ See e.g. New Testament (Rheims), 559. The text had been repeatedly quoted by Smyth, Brief treatyse, sigs. E7v , H4r , H5v , K3v –K4r , P2v , P3v –P4r , S4v . ¹⁰ Hooker, Lawes, V. 65. 2 [Works, ii. 301–2]. Cf. IV. 14. 4–5 [Works, i. 339–40]. See W. D. Neelands, ‘Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and ‘‘Tradition’’ ’, in A. S. McGrade (ed.), Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community ( Tempe, Ariz., 1997), 89–93. ¹¹ It is interesting to note that ‘times’ was an addition of 1563. The Forty-Two Articles (article XXXIII) merely mentioned ‘the diversitie of countreys, and mens maners’ (Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 85; Hardwick, History of the Articles, 138 and 336–7). ¹² Chemnitz, Examen, 1a pars, 83–5 (‘VII. genus Traditionum’). The section on traditions of the Examen was translated separately in English, to accompany a new edition of Cranmer’s Confutation of unwritten verities: A discouverie and batterie of the great Fort of unwritten Traditions, otherwise, An examination of the Counsell of Trent, touching the decree of Traditions. Done by Martinius Chemnitius in Latine, and translated into Englishe by R.V. [Robert Vaux] (London, 1582). Note that Vaux also translated Calvin.

Becoming Traditional?

91

The recusant Christopher Davenport (Franciscus a Sancta Clara) said as much in 1634, in his ‘paraphrastical commentary’ of the ThirtyNine Articles, in which he attempted to reconcile them with Roman Catholic teaching: article XXXIV did not touch on unwritten apostolic doctrines.¹³ As even his Puritan critics admitted, Hooker’s position on the relations between Scripture and tradition was unimpeachably Protestant.¹⁴ There was absolutely no need, he argued, to add traditions to Scripture ‘as a part of supernaturall necessarye truth’.¹⁵ The complete post-Nicene doctrine of the Trinity (including ‘the proceeding of the Spirit from the Father and the Sonne’) and ‘the dutie of baptizing infants’ were ‘deduced out of scripture by collection’.¹⁶ Such was not the case of the perpetual virginity of Mary—another classic Roman Catholic instance of unwritten tradition—but it was, for this very reason, merely ‘probable and not unlikely to be true’.¹⁷ If Hooker departed on that point from some Protestant controversialists (who professed to find the perpetual virginity of Mary in Scripture), his position was identical with that of Bilson and of the great Huguenot divine Daniel Chamier.¹⁸ He expressly declined to adopt Augustine’s rule that what is held by the whole Church and is not written ¹³ Franciscus a Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia. Siue Tractatus, de Praedestinatione, de Meritis et peccatorum remissione, seu de Iustificatione, et denique de Sanctorum Inuocatione. Ubi ad trutinam Fidei Catholicae examinatur Confessio Anglicana et ad singula puncta, quid teneat, qualiter differat, excutitur.... Accessit paraphrastica Expositio reliquorum Articulorum Confessionis Anglicae (Lyon, 1634), 320. For the distinction between doctrinal and ritual traditions in Roman Catholic theology, see P. Nelles, ‘Du savant au missionnaire: la doctrine, les mœurs et l’´ecriture de l’histoire chez les j´esuites’, XVIIe si`ecle, 237 (2007), 669–89. ¹⁴ See [Willet], Christian Letter, in Hooker, Works, iv. 11. ¹⁵ Hooker, Lawes, I. 14. 5 [Works, i. 129]. See also II. 8. 7 [Works, i. 191] against ‘the schooles of Rome’. ¹⁶ Ibid. I. 14. 2 [Works, i. 126]. See above, 41–2 and 63–4. ¹⁷ Ibid. II. 7. 5 [Works, i. 179–80: the commentary ad loc., vi/1. 546, fails to see the significance of Hooker’s position]. For the claim that the perpetual virginity was a point of faith known through tradition only, see e.g. Henry VIII, Assertio, 189; Rex, Theology of John Fisher, 97–8; Smyth, Brief treatyse, sigs. O4v –O8r ; New Testament (Rheims), 559; Stapleton, De principiis fidei doctrinalibus, 410; Marshall, ‘The Debate over ‘‘Unwritten Verities’’ ’, 65–6 and 70. ¹⁸ See Bilson, Christian subjection, 589; Daniel Chamier, Panstratiae catholicae, siue Controuersiarum de Religione aduersus Pontificios Corpus, 4 vols. (Geneva, 1626), i. l. 9us, c. IX, 302–3. For the claim that the perpetual virginity of Mary could indeed be deduced from Scripture, see Jewel, Defence of the Apology, in Works, iii. 440–1; Willet, Synopsis Papismi (1600), 44; Smyth had been made to confess as much in his 1547 recantation (Godly and faythfull Retractation, sig. B4v ). Richard Field, Of the Church, five bookes (London, 1606), 240, asserted both that this was no point of Christian faith and that the Fathers who wrote against Helvidius ‘endeavour to prove it by the Scriptures’.

92

Becoming Traditional?

in Scripture and has not been instituted by a general council must come from the Apostles.¹⁹ Within the limits of probability, Hooker defended the value of ‘arguments taken from humane authoritie’, pointing out that Puritans tacitly owned it, since they used and discussed such arguments. But Hooker did not make any special case for the Fathers, even though he was confuting a text of Cartwright which specifically mentioned ‘the authoritie of the auncient Fathers’.²⁰ Although Hooker adduced many patristic quotations to support rites and institutions attacked by Puritan writers, and occasionally described the age of the Fathers as the period ‘when [the Church of God] most florished in zeale and pietie’,²¹ he based his case on continuity rather than on antiquity per se.²² To uphold ‘the present state of the Church of God established amongst us’,²³ he appealed to ‘wisdome directed by the woord of God and by longe experience confirmed’.²⁴ The ‘universal consent of men’ had its root in natural reason, of which not only the Fathers, but also the Schoolmen, civil and canon law, and, in their own sphere, the ancient philosophers might act as spokesmen.²⁵ Hooker denied that any moment of church history could serve ‘as a pattern for all to followe’.²⁶ Recent institutions, if they were better fitted to recent times, ought not to ‘be taken away for conformities sake with the auncientest and first times’.²⁷ The appeal from ‘this nationall Church’ to ‘ancienter’ Churches is as ‘childish’ as the appeal to foreign Churches.²⁸ The wisdom of God ‘shineth … most in the manifold and yet harmonious dissimilitude of those wayes, whereby his Church upon earth is guided from age to age, throughout all generations of men’.²⁹ To Scripture and reason, Hooker did not juxtapose antiquity but ‘the voice of the Church’.³⁰ One could call this voice ‘tradition’, as the later ‘Anglican’ depiction would ¹⁹ Hooker, Lawes, IV. 2. 2 [Works, i. 277–8]. Augustine’s clearest statement of that rule is De baptismo contra Donatistas, 4. 24. 31 (CSEL 51, 259), on which see below. Hooker does not quote this text but makes the same point by combining De baptismo contra Donatistas, 5. 23. 31 (CSEL 51, 289) and ep. 54 ad Ianuarium, 1. 1 (CSEL 34/2, 159–60). ²⁰ Hooker, Lawes, II. 7. 10 [Works, i. 185–6]. ²¹ Ibid. V. 65. 11 [Works, ii. 311]. See also V. 12. 1 [ibid. 50]: ‘the purest tymes’. ²² See e.g. Lawes, V. 7. 1 [Works, ii. 34]. On the importance of ‘continuance’ for Hooker, see V. 69. 1 [Works, ii. 359–60]. ²³ Ibid., Pref. 1. 1 [Works, i. 1]. ²⁴ Ibid. V. 65. 9 [Works, ii. 309]. ²⁵ See esp. Lawes, I. 8. 3; IV. 1. 3 [Works, i. 83–4; 274]. ²⁶ Ibid. IV. 2. 3 [Works, i. 278]. ²⁷ Ibid., Pref. 4. 2–4. 4 [Works, i. 22–4]. ²⁸ Ibid. V. 71. 7 [Works, ii. 378–9]. ²⁹ Ibid. III. 11. 8 [Works, i. 253]. ³⁰ Ibid. V. 8. 2 and 8. 5 [Works, ii. 39 and 40].

Becoming Traditional?

93

have it,³¹ but Hooker’s tradition ‘included not six but fifteen centuries of Christian history’.³² To some extent this aligned him with contemporary Roman Catholic theology which, as has been seen, had a very extensive notion of the Fathers and tended to identify tradition with church authority. Post-Tridentine theologians, however, did not ascribe to the Church a mere third place ‘after’ Scripture and reason. Hooker’s clearest deviation from Reformed orthodoxy concerned the Canon, which, he argued, ‘is confest impossible for the scripture it selfe to teach’.³³ But he denied at the same time that ‘to learn it we have no other way then onely tradition’. ‘The authority of Gods Church’ indeed had an introductory role. Afterwards the more we bestow our labor in reading or hearing the misteries thereof [Scripture], the more we find that the thing it selfe doth answer our received opinion concerning it. So that the former inducement prevailing somewhat with us before, doth now much more prevaile, when the very thing hath ministred farther reason....the ancient fathers being often constreined to shew what warrant they had so much to relie upon the scriptures, endevored still to maintein the authority of the books of God by arguments such as unbeleevers them selves must needs thinke reasonable, if they judged thereof as they should.³⁴

Only a theologian with a thesis could claim that ‘this is nothing if not a doctrine of the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit’, and that Hooker’s position is identical to Whitaker’s.³⁵ William Covell, who undertook to defend Hooker against his Puritan critics, made a similar claim in 1603 but he also professed to find substantial agreement with Bellarmine: ‘For this point, as it seemeth rightly understood, affordeth little difference betwixt them [Papists] and us.’ This amounted to neutralizing the doctrine of ³¹ Neelands, ‘Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and ‘‘Tradition’’ ’, 93. See also M. E. C. Perrott, ‘Richard Hooker and the Problem of Authority in the Elizabethan Church’, JEH 49 (1998), 29–60. ³² W. P. Haugaard’s introduction to books II, III, and IV, in Works, vi/1. 166–7. See also A. B. Ferguson, ‘The Historical Perspective of Richard Hooker: A Renaissance Paradox’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 3 (1973), 17–49; Luoma, ‘Who Owns the Fathers?’, 56–9. ³³ Lawes, I. 14. 1 [i. 125]. See also II. 4. 2 [i. 153]. Hooker’s deviation from normal Elizabethan views has been rightly noted by P. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), 153–4. ³⁴ Hooker, Lawes, III. 8. 14 [i. 231–2]. ³⁵ N. Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason: Reformed Theologian of the Church of England? (Carlisle, 1997), 93 n. 45, and 108, quoting (in an English translation and at second hand) the text of Whitaker quoted above, Chapter 1 n. 140.

94

Becoming Traditional?

the inner witness while paying lip service to it.³⁶ Hooker was referring to the rational arguments for the divine character of Scripture that had been mustered by apologists, from the Fathers onwards (‘the majestie of the matter’, ‘the pureness of stile’, the accomplishment of prophecies, etc.), and which Calvin, followed in England by Andrew Willet, had declared to be ‘more able to move us, then the bare testimonie of the Church’, but still unable to ‘perswade us’.³⁷ Hooker likewise derided Puritan claims to understand Scripture by ‘the speciall illumination of the holy Ghost’, but (contrary to later champions of the Church of England) he did not oppose pretended revelation to tradition but instead to reason.³⁸ It is significant that Hooker never quoted the canon Concionatores of 1571. It was the proper role of reason, not the authority of the Fathers, that he was anxious to secure. Scripture interpreted by reason was for him the supreme authority.³⁹ It could be argued that, in denying the omnicompetence of Scripture and severely restricting the direct action of the Spirit on believers, in downplaying preaching and revaluing the sacraments, in challenging Calvin’s authority, in propounding a much more continuous view of church history (‘In the Church we were and we are so still’),⁴⁰ Hooker removed the major obstacles to a high doctrine of tradition. But, if he opened the way for it, he did not proceed into such a doctrine. He was both too rational and too conservative to make antiquity the standard of orthodoxy. After 1590, a new generation of conformists began to argue that the superiority of bishops over presbyters was not merely a legitimate ³⁶ William Covell, A Just and temperate defence of the five books of Ecclesiastical Policie: written by M. Richard Hooker (London, 1603), ‘25’ [31]–32, answering [Willet], Christian Letter, 14–17. ³⁷ Willet, Synopsis Papismi (1600), 30, quoting Calvin, Institutio (1559), . viii, CR 30, 61–9. See N. Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford, 2003), 226–32. The distinction between ‘inward witnes from that spirit, which is the author of all truth; and outward arguments, strong motives of beleefe, which cleaveth firmely to the word itselfe’ (such as the accomplishment of prophecy) is clearly made by Covell, Just and temperate defence, 29–30. Sixteenth-century Reformed confessions of faith were not very explicit, since their main target was the Roman doctrine of the Church (see the French confession of 1559, art. IV, and the Confessio belgica of 1561, art. V, in Creeds of the Protestant Churches, 361 and 386–7), but the point was clearly made later by the Westminster Confession (see below, 254, and also Cheynell’s text, 261). ³⁸ See Hooker, Lawes, Pref. III. 10 [i. 17–18], III. 8. 16–18 [i. 233–5] and the comments by Voak, Hooker, 232–8. ³⁹ See e.g. the defence of reason in III. 8. 4 [i. 221–2]. On the relations of Scripture and reason, see Neelands, ‘Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and ‘‘Tradition’’ ’, 76–88. For a balanced discussion of Hooker’s notion of religious authority, see Voak, Hooker, 251–65. ⁴⁰ Hooker, Lawes, III. 1. 10 [i. 201].

Becoming Traditional?

95

ecclesiastical institution, but had in some sense a divine origin.⁴¹ It is interesting that the first theologian to defend this thesis in print, Adrianus Saravia, was an exile from the Continent. He had been encouraged to write by the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, and by Whitgift’s future successor, Richard Bancroft, then a canon of Westminster, and his views were quickly taken up by English divines.⁴² In his posthumously published De politeia ecclesiastica, the radical Puritan Robert Parker charged such higher conformists with betraying the principle of sola Scriptura. He argued that their claim to ascribe to the Fathers a secondary authority was false and popish, since ‘the honour of Scripture cannot be preserved unless it is the only foundation of faith’, and that, moreover, they were being hypocritical, since they quoted the Fathers much more than Scripture.⁴³ According to Parker, ‘Hierarchists’ made the same charges against presbyterians as papists against Protestants: ignoring the Fathers and despising antiquity.⁴⁴ Conformists used the same patristic quotations, especially from Augustine on baptism, as papists did in their defences of unwritten traditions.⁴⁵ Parker restated the usual arguments against patristic authority, quoting Jewel, Rainolds, and particularly Whitaker.⁴⁶ No certain argument could be based on the consensus of the Fathers, ‘since there is no way to make it appear, whether the ancients agreed on anything’.⁴⁷ Parker’s originality in this context was his stress on Antichrist. Modern Reformed writers should be preferred since they understood Scripture much better and grasped the true nature of Antichrist, which had wholly escaped the Fathers.⁴⁸ How could the primitive Christians after the Apostles understand the rise of Antichrist ‘from hierarchical episcopacy’, since they did ⁴¹ Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?; W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, ‘A Reconsideration of Richard Bancroft’s Paules Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/89’, JEH 20 (1969), 253–66. This change has been denied by M. R. Somerville, ‘Richard Hooker and his Contemporaries on Episcopacy: An Elizabethan Consensus’, JEH 35 (1984), 177–87, but all the texts he quotes either pre-date 1590 or concern the case of necessity, for which high conformists were prepared to make allowance (see below). ⁴² Adrianus Saravia, De diuersis ministrorum Euangelii gradibus, sicut a Domino fuerunt instituti, et traditi ab Apostolis, ac perpetuo omnium Ecclesiarum usu confirmati (London, 1590). See W. Nijenhuis, Adrianus Saravia (c.1532–1613): Dutch Calvinist, First Reformed Defender of the English Episcopal Church Order on the Basis of the Ius diuinum (Leiden, 1980), esp. 121–9 and 217–43. ⁴³ Robert Parker, De politeia ecclesiastica libri tres [Leiden, 1616], 143–5: ‘cum honor scripturae saluus esse nequeat, nisi ea fides nitatur sola.’ ⁴⁴ Ibid. 145 and 204. ⁴⁵ Ibid. 171–2. See above, 62, and below, 97. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 145–55, 183–5, 203–14. ⁴⁷ Ibid. 169–70: ‘argumentum hoc ab unanimi consensu ductum, incertum est: nullo etenim modo liquere potest, utrum antiqui in re aliqua consenserint necne.’ ⁴⁸ Ibid. 233–49.

96

Becoming Traditional?

not even know for sure that the Apocalypse was part of the Canon of Scripture?⁴⁹ Parker’s case against higher conformists was based on selective quotations.⁵⁰ Higher conformists did appeal to ‘the generall consent of all the ancient fathers’⁵¹ and, especially in sermons and in their most overtly polemical works, made much of the ‘contemptuous spirit’ of Presbyterians, whom they equated with archetypal heretics like Julian of Eclanum, denounced by Augustine, and Peter Abelard, denounced by Bernard of Clairvaux.⁵² This was no repudiation of Protestant principles. Episcopacy iure diuino was only defended because it was believed to have a clear scriptural basis. Timothy and Titus had been bishops. The angels of the seven churches in the Apocalypse had also symbolized episcopal authority.⁵³ Bilson’s Perpetual Governement of Christes Church, the classic late Elizabethan case for episcopacy, had a quotation from Irenaeus on its title page (‘We can reckon those that were ordained Bishops by the Apostles in the Churches, and their successours to this present’)⁵⁴ and discussed patristic authorities extensively. Bilson made the rhetorical claim that ‘the general consent of al antiquitie’ would be sufficient to settle the question of episcopacy even if Scripture said ⁴⁹ Ibid. 184. On the canonicity of the Apocalypse, see above, 47; on Parker’s chronology of Antichrist, S. Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988), 92–3. ⁵⁰ Parker, Politeia, 145, thus accused William Barlow of approving Basil’s distinction between written and unwritten doctrines (above, 62). But Barlow, One of the foure Sermons preached before the Kings Maiestie, at Hampton Court in September last. This concerning the Antiquitie and Superioritie of Bishops. Sept. 21. 1606 (London, 1606), sig. E4r , made in fact a different point. ⁵¹ Richard Bancroft, A Sermon preached at Paules Crosse the 9 of Februarie … 1588 (London, 1588), 22 and 36. ⁵² Ibid. 22 and 57; [Richard Bancroft], A Survay of the pretended Holy Discipline (London, 1593), 351–3. ⁵³ See e.g. Barlow, One of foure Sermons (London, 1606); George Downham, ‘A Sermon defending the honourable function of Bishops, Preached, April 17 Anno D. 1608 at the Consecration of the right reverend Father in God the L. Bishoppe of Bath and Wells’, in Two Sermons, the one commending the Ministerie in Generall: the other defending the Office of Bishops in particular (London, 1608). On the importance of the ‘Pauline model’ of episcopacy, see Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 9–18. ⁵⁴ Thomas Bilson, The Perpetual Governement of Christes Church. Wherein are handled; the fatherly superioritie which God first established in the Patriarkes for the guiding of his Church, and after continued in the Tribe of Levi and the Prophetes; and lastlie confirmed in the New Testament to the Apostles and their successours: As also the points in question at this day … concerning the Pastorall regiment of the house of God (London, 1593). The quotation is from Irenaeus, 3. 3. 1 (SC 211, 30); it was also used e.g. by Saravia, De diuersis gradibus, 49.

Becoming Traditional?

97

nothing about it.⁵⁵ But he had no doubt that episcopal government was in fact well attested in Scripture.⁵⁶ He insisted on the unanimous practice of the primitive Church as a proof of apostolic tradition. He quoted Tertullian (‘that comes from the Apostles that is held as sacrosanct in the churches of the Apostles’) and Augustine (‘whatever is held by the universal Church and has not been instituted by any council but has always been preserved, is rightly believed to be of apostolic authority’). These texts were great favourites of Roman Catholic controversialists who wrote against sola Scriptura.⁵⁷ The tradition that Bilson meant, however, was scriptural. The role that he ascribed to antiquity was merely that of an interpreter of the Bible, and he was careful not to ground the credit of antiquity on any supernatural assistance but on merely human endowments. The primitive Church could neither be deceived nor wish to deceive.⁵⁸ Richard Bancroft protested in the same way that ‘it goeth hard, when for a matter of historie, all these worthie Fathers [who assert Timothy to have been a bishop], can find no better credit’.⁵⁹ Bilson’s profession of respect for the primitive Church was remarkably moderate: ‘what I finde generally received in the first Church of Christ, I wil see it strongly refuted before I wil forsake it.’⁶⁰ He strikingly ascribed to Calvin, for whom he professed the highest regard, a status similar to the Fathers⁶¹—Bancroft asserted the superiority of the Fathers over Calvin and Beza but he only did so in very moderate terms.⁶² Saravia insisted that ‘the persistent and universal consensus of all the Fathers of the ancient Church’ ⁵⁵ Bilson, Perpetual Governement, sig. ¶6v : ‘But were the word of God in this point indifferent, which for ought I yet see, is very resolute against them; the general consent of al antiquitie that never so expounded S. Pauls words, nor ever mentioned any laie Presbyters to govern the Church, is to me a strong rampire against all these new devises.’ ⁵⁶ See e.g. 224, 233–5, 289–90 on Timothy and Titus, and on the angels of the seven churches. ⁵⁷ Ibid. 258. Tertullian, Aduersus Marcionem, 4. 5. 1 (CC 1, 550): ‘Constabit id esse ab Apostolis traditum, quod apud ecclesias Apostolorum fuerit sacrosanctum.’ Augustine, De baptismo contra Donatistas, 4. 24. 31 (CSEL 51, 259): ‘quod uniuersa tenet Ecclesia, nec conciliis institutum, sed semper retentum est, nonnisi auctoritate apostolica traditum rectissime creditur.’ For the Augustine quotation, see also Barlow, One of foure Sermons, sig. D4v ; Downham, ‘Consecration Sermon’, 56–60. Both texts had been e.g. quoted to defend unwritten tradition by Smyth, Brief treatyse, sigs. G7r (Augustine) and R2r ( Tertullian). ⁵⁸ Bilson, Perpetual Governement, 285. See also 336 and 394. ⁵⁹ Bancroft, Survay, 338. ⁶⁰ Bilson, Perpetual Governement, 280. ⁶¹ Ibid. 281: ‘He [Calvin] declared himselfe to bear a right Christian regarde to the Church of Christ before him; and therefore is worthie with all posteritie to be had in like reverend account, though hee were deceived in some things, even as Augustine and other Fathers before him were.’ Cf. 282. ⁶² Bancroft, Survay, 378. See also Downham, ‘Consecration Sermon’, preface.

98

Becoming Traditional?

for episcopacy made a strong presumptive argument: ‘it is not verisimilar’ that it could have occurred without any foundation in God’s word or in the tradition of the Apostles.⁶³ Saravia warned that ‘he who denies the Fathers any authority, does not leave any for himself ’.⁶⁴ But he was clear that Fathers and councils could err, that no consensus of Churches could hold against God’s word, and that the ultimate criterion to decide between the ancient defenders of episcopacy and its modern opponents was Scripture.⁶⁵ The draft of James I’s Proclamation of October 1603 to announce the Hampton Court conference claimed that the Church of England was ‘the neerest to the condition of the primitive Church of any other in Chrystendome’. It was significantly corrected to ‘agreeable to Gods word, and neare to the condition of the Primitive Church’: it seems clear that the change reflected the bishops’ position as well as that of the King.⁶⁶ When Jerome’s ‘assertion that a Bishop was not diuinae ordinationis’ was incidentally mentioned at the conference (where episcopacy per se was not on the agenda), Bancroft hastened to protest that ‘unlesse he could prove his ordination lawfull out of the scriptures he would not be a Bishop 4 houres’. The two propositions were clearly taken as equivalent.⁶⁷ The decree on the apostolic institution of episcopacy prepared at the convocation of 1606 insisted on the ‘most clear and evident Testimonies’ for episcopal authority in the epistles to Timothy and Titus.⁶⁸ Patristic texts were brought in at a second stage to show that ‘the ancient Fathers generally, having (no doubt) upon their due searching the Scriptures fully considered of the Form of Ecclesiastical Government, whilst the Apostles lived, do with one consent’ affirm that Timothy and Titus were bishops.⁶⁹ The authority of the Fathers was asserted in a rather convoluted manner: convocation declared it a great error to assert ‘that whilst Men do labour to bring into discredit the ancient Fathers and primitive Churches, they do not derogate from themselves such ⁶³ Saravia, De diuersis gradibus, prologue, sig. A1r–v (reproduced unchanged in Adrianus Saravia, Defensio Tractationis de diuersis ministrorum Euangelii gradibus, ab Hadriano Saravia editae contra Responsionem Clarissimi uiri D. Theodori Bezae (London, 1594), 1–2). The expression (‘unanimis et constans omnium patrum ueteris ecclesiae consensus’) sounds pleonastic but I take it to refer to Vincent of L´erins’s three conditions, ubique, semper, ab omnibus (above, 53). ⁶⁴ Ibid., sig. A1r : ‘Quisquis patribus omnem authoritatem adimit, ipse sibi nullam relinquit.’ ⁶⁵ Ibid., sig. A1r–v . See Nijenhuis, Saravia, 172–7. ⁶⁶ F. Shriver, ‘Hampton Court Re-visited: James I and the Puritans’, JEH 33 (1982), 54–5. ⁶⁷ William Barlow, The summe and substance of the conference, wh. it pleased his Majestie to have with the Lords Bishops, and other clergie at Hampton Court (London, 1604), 35–6. For Jerome’s text, see below, n. 71. ⁶⁸ Bishop Overall’s Convocation-Book, book II, 170. ⁶⁹ Ibid. 179–90.

Becoming Traditional?

99

credit as they hunt after, and as much as in them lieth, bring many parts of Religion into a wonderful uncertainty’.⁷⁰ Presbyterians deployed their own patristic evidence. Their major authority was Jerome, who had written, in his commentary on Paul’s epistle to Titus, that ‘a presbyter is the same as a bishop’ and that the authority of one presbyter over the others was only introduced to prevent schisms: ‘bishops should know that they are superior to presbyters rather from custom than according to the truth of the Lord’s institution.’⁷¹ In his letter to ‘Evagrius’ [Evangelus], Jerome instanced Alexandria, where ‘from the time of Mark the evangelist until the bishops Heraclas and Dionysius [in the first half of the third century] presbyters always chose one among themselves, placed him in a higher position, and called him bishop’.⁷² The fourth-century commentary on Paul ascribed to Ambrose also explained that ‘the first presbyters were called bishops, so that, when the first one departed, the next (in seniority) followed him’; this was later ‘changed by a council who provided that not order, but merit should make a bishop’.⁷³ The genuineness of this text had already been challenged, especially by Roman Catholic theologians. Lucas Brugensis was apparently the first to coin the author’s modern name ‘Ambrosiaster’, which did not however come into common use until the end of the seventeenth century.⁷⁴ The Louvain divines, in their 1577 edition of Augustine, noted that ‘some’ were convinced that the work had the same author as the Liber quaestionum ueteris et noui ⁷⁰ Ibid. 191. ⁷¹ Jerome, Commentaria in epistolam ad Titum, 1. 5 (PL 26, 563): ‘Sicut ergo presbyteri sciunt se ex Ecclesiae consuetudine ei qui sibi praepositus fuerit, esse subiectos: ita episcopi nouerint se magis consuetudine, quam dispositionis Dominicae ueritate, presbyteris esse maiores.’ ⁷² Jerome, ep. 146 ad Euangelum Presbyterum (CSEL 56, 310): ‘quod autem postea unus electus est, qui ceteris praeponeretur, in scismatis remedium factum est, ne unusquisque ad se trahens Christi ecclesiam rumperet. nam et Alexandriae a Marco euangelista usque ad Heraclam et Dionysium episcopos presbyteri semper unum de se electum et in excelsiori gradu conlocatum episcopum nominabant.’ Jerome’s correspondent was misnamed ‘Euagrius’ in early modern editions (see e.g. Alter tomus epistolarum Diui Eusebii Hieronymi Stridonensis [= Opera, ed. Erasmus, ii] (Basle, 1524), 333–4), hence the repeated mention of epistola ad Euagrium in the presbyterian controversy. ⁷³ Ambrosiaster, Commentarius in epistulas Paulinas, ad Ephesios 4: 11–12, 5 (CSEL 81/3, 100): ‘primi presbyteri episcopi appellabantur, ut recedente eo sequens ei succederet. … inmutata est ratio prospiciente consilio, ut non ordo, sed meritum crearet episcopum.’ ⁷⁴ Franciscus Lucas Brugensis, Notationes in sacra Biblia (Antwerp, 1580), 427, 435, 439, 441; Robert Cooke [Cocus], Censura quorundam scriptorum, quae sub nominibus sanctorum et ueterum auctorum, a Pontificiis passim in eorum scriptis, sed potissimum in quaestionibus hodie controuersis citari solent (London, 1614), 133–4; R. Hoven, ‘Notes sur Erasme et les auteurs anciens’, L’Antiquit´e classique, 38 (1969), 172–4.

100

Becoming Traditional?

testamenti falsely ascribed to Augustine.⁷⁵ Bellarmine agreed and, since a passage of the commentary had been quoted by Augustine under the name of ‘Sanctus Hilarius’, thought that it should be ascribed to a Roman deacon by that name, who was a Luciferian and was attacked by Jerome.⁷⁶ This identification potentially allowed theologians to deny the authority of the work. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, however, they still commonly quoted it as being by Ambrose. When Lancelot Andrewes, then Bishop of Winchester, was taken to task by Cardinal Du Perron for this (‘all the learned on both sides know that this commentary … is not by Saint Ambrose’), he replied that it was ‘cited continually, under Saint Ambrose’s name by all Learned writers’, including Roman Catholics.⁷⁷ If conformists’ books devoted so much space to the Fathers, it was to a large extent because they had to explain those texts. The usual hermeneutical rules were applied. Jerome had spoken ‘ἀγονιστικως, ˜ in heat of contention’, and not dogmatically or historically. He was a presbyter himself and he was writing against the undue pretensions of Roman deacons.⁷⁸ Other passages from Jerome and ‘Ambrose’ were produced, in which the superiority of bishops was clearly recognized.⁷⁹ All the words of these Fathers were carefully sifted to show that they meant that the move to episcopal government took place in the Apostles’ times and was decided upon by the Apostles themselves.⁸⁰ And even where Jerome ‘retcheth the Presbyters office to the uttermost’, he expressly excludes ordination as pertaining only to the bishop: ‘Quid facit excepta ordinatione Episcopus, quod Presbyter non faciat?’ Bilson, who was adept at squeezing ⁷⁵ Tomus IIII. Operum D. Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis episcopi, Complectens reliqua των ˜ διδακτικων: ˜ per Theologos Louanienses ab innumeris mendis repurgatus (Antwerp, 1576), appendix, 426. ⁷⁶ Robert Bellarmine, De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (Lyon, 1613), 78–9 and 101. See Augustine, Contra duas epistolas Pelagianorum, 4. 4. 7 (PL 44, 614); Jerome, Altercatio Luciferiani et Orthodoxi, 26 (CC 79B, 65): ‘Hilarius, Romanae Ecclesiae diaconus’. Bellarmine could not know Augustine’s other quotation of Ambrosiaster under the name of ‘Hilarius’, in Contra secundam Iuliani responsionem imperfectum opus, 2. 164 (PL 45, 1211), since books I–II of Opus imperfectum were first published in 1616 (Quantin, ‘Augustin du XVIIe si`ecle?’, 17–19). See also below, Chapter 5 n. 167. ⁷⁷ Lancelot Andrewes, Responsio ad Apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini, quam nuper edidit contra Praefationem Monitoriam Serenissimi ac Potentissimi Principis Iacobi, Dei Gratia Magnae Britanniae, Franciae, et Hiberniae Regis, Fidei Defensoris, omnibus Christianis Monarchis, Principibus, atque Ordinibus inscriptam (London, 1610), 45; Jacques Davy Du Perron, Replique a la Response du Serenissime Roy de la Grand Bretagne (Paris, 1620), 1025–6; Andrewes, ‘Answer to the XX Chapter of the fifth Booke of Cardinal Perron’s Reply’, 41–2. ⁷⁸ Bancroft, Survay, 336; George Downham, A Defence of the Sermon Preached at the Consecration of the Bishop of Bath and Welles (London, 1611), 116. ⁷⁹ Bilson, Perpetual Governement, 217–18 and 243 (Ambrosiaster), 277 ( Jerome). ⁸⁰ Ibid. 220–2 and 229.

Becoming Traditional?

101

meaning out of patristic quotations, put great stress on Jerome’s use of the subjunctive: What doeth a Bishop save ordination, which a Presbyter may not doe? He saieth not what doeth a Bishop, which a Presbyter doeth not: for by the custome and Canons of the Church, very many things were forbidden Presbyters, which by Gods word they might doe: but hee appealeth to Gods ordinaunce, which in his Commentaries upon Tite hee calleth the divine institution; and by that hee confesseth it was not lawfull for Presbyters to ordaine any. And why? That power was reserved to the Apostles, and such as succeeded them, not generally in the Church, but specially in the chaire.⁸¹

When an anonymous Huguenot writer ‘in his book from Rochell’ ingeniously proposed to correct the phrase excepta ordinatione into accepta ordinatione, ‘so that the meaning would be that he, who has been ordained bishop by his fellow-presbyters, does nothing that a presbyter does not do’,⁸² Bancroft was indignant: such a way of neutralizing patristic texts was ‘too too childish’.⁸³ On both sides the same technology of truth applied, the same art of manipulating authorities that Martyr and Gardiner had used half a century ago: it implied no distinctive theology of tradition. Even conformists of the higher cast, moreover, were not always clear about what it meant for episcopacy to be from divine right. Bilson was prepared to make a distinction between what came from Christ himself and what came from the Apostles, and to accept that episcopacy was merely of the second kind.⁸⁴ In the case of metropolitans, he even kept open the possibility that their institution, despite the universal practice of ⁸¹ Bilson, Perpetual Governement, 248–9; Jerome, ep. 146 ad Euangelum Presbyterum (CSEL 56, 310). The same interpretation was later defended by the great Jesuit scholar Denis Petau, Dissertationum ecclesiasticarum libri duo, in quibus de Episcoporum dignitate ac potestate; deque aliis Ecclesiasticis dogmatibus disputatur (Paris, 1641), 34–7; id., Theologicorum Dogmatum tomus tertius (Paris, 1644), De ecclesiastica hierarchia, l. I, c. 3, 673–4. ⁸² Gratianus AntiIesuita, in Doctrinae Iesuitarum praecipua capita. Tomus Quartus, nonnulla scripta continens, in quibus tum ex scripto Dei uerbo, tum ex ueteris Ecclesiae suffragiis, uaria Christianae Religionis Dogmata a fallaciis et corruptelis Iesuiticae sectae uindicantur (La Rochelle, 1586), 525: ‘Vide igitur, candide lector, num legendum sit accepta ordinatione, ut sit sensus: ille qui ordinatus est a compresbyteris episcopus, nihil facit, quod presbyter non faciat.’ ⁸³ Bancroft, Survay, 336. ⁸⁴ Bilson, Perpetual Governement, 236: ‘Ieromes wordes then, that the Bishops maioritie above Presbyters came rather by the custome of the Church, then by the trueth of the Lordes disposition, may bee two wayes construed. First, that by the trueth of the Lordes disposition, he meaneth a precept from Christes mouth; and by the custome of the Church, he understandeth a continuation of that regiment even from the Apostles.’ Cf. Barlow, One of foure Sermons, sigs. E3v –E4r ; Downham, Defence, book 4, 138–40. Mason, Church of England and Episcopacy, 45–52, noted with some disappointment that Bancroft and Bilson were content to show that episcopacy was apostolic in origin but

102

Becoming Traditional?

the primitive Church, was not apostolic but had been merely a practical device.⁸⁵ When he reviewed his work under James I, Bilson was definite that the dispute did not concern the essentials of the Christian religion, but only discipline, and he made for that reason a great difference between papists and presbyterians. The idea that the Church of England might be seen to be equidistant from both was foreign to him.⁸⁶ It has been claimed that Bancroft and other ‘high’ conformists held ‘the removal of episcopacy from a church for reasons other than necessity to be a sin comparable to that of Arius’.⁸⁷ They spoke in fact of Aerius, whom Epiphanius had charged with heresy because he held that there was no difference between a bishop and a presbyter.⁸⁸ Presbyterians protested that the accusation was groundless and that Aerius professed the same doctrine as Jerome.⁸⁹ In any case, Aerius was an ancient heretic of an altogether different league from Arius. Downham, who believed the episcopal function to be ‘an apostolicall and divine ordinance’, also professed that, when a church had no bishop, or only heretical ones, presbyterian ordination was lawful: ‘we neede not doubt, but that the ancient Fathers would, in such a case of necessity, have allowed ordination without a bishop, though not as regular, according to the rules of ordinary church-government; yet, as effectual, and as justifiable in the want of a bishop.’⁹⁰ The insistence on the divine right of episcopacy nevertheless had embarrassing implications for the relations between English divines and their continental counterparts, as is shown by the private exchange between Lancelot Andrewes and the French Calvinist controversialist Pierre Du Moulin in 1618–19.⁹¹ Du Moulin knew England well. He had been a student of Whitaker at Cambridge in did not claim direct divine sanction for it. On the various acceptions of iure diuino, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 458–61. ⁸⁵ Bilson, Perpetual Governement, 409–10. ⁸⁶ See Bilson’s dedication to James I of his new, Latin edition, De perpetua Ecclesiae Christi gubernatione.... Liber ad utilitatem Patriae primum Anglice scriptus, nunc demum ad Authore Thom. Bilsono Episcopo Wintoniensi recognitus, auctus, et in publicum Ecclesiae bonum Latine redditus (London, 1611), sig. A6v : ‘Hiis [Presbyterians], quoniam fratres sunt, et nobiscum non de doctrinae ueritate, sed in disciplinae uarietate dissident, probare et persuadere pacis causa conatus sum … ’ ⁸⁷ Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 96. ⁸⁸ See Bancroft, Sermon, 17–19; Saravia, De diuersis gradibus, 49–51; Matthew Sutcliffe, De Presbyterio, eiusque noua in Ecclesia Christiana Politeia (London, 1591), 117. The source was Epiphanius, Panarium, 75. 4–6 (GCS 37, 336–8). ⁸⁹ See below, 235. ⁹⁰ Downham, ‘Consecration Sermon’, 43. See also below, 278. ⁹¹ ‘Reuerendi in Christo Patris, Lanceloti episcopi Wintoniensis, Responsiones ad Petri Molinaei epistolas tres, una cum Molinaei epistolis’, in Andrewes, Opuscula posthuma.

Becoming Traditional?

103

about 1590 and had spent three months at King James’s court in 1615. He was attracted by the order and wealth of the established Church of England, which he could not but contrast with the second-rate position allowed to his confession in France by the edict of Nantes. He had been happy to become a prebendary at Canterbury Cathedral in 1615, though with the proviso that his taking the oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance did not engage him to anything ‘prejudicial to the ecclesiastical order of our Churches in France’. There is even evidence that he coveted a bishopric in England.⁹² In 1618, however, that inexhaustible controversialist wrote a book to defend the legitimate calling of Huguenot ministers against the Jesuit Jean Arnoux. The view of episcopacy that Du Moulin expounded might have satisfied many an Elizabethan conformist. It was a legitimate institution, he argued, introduced into the Church ‘immediately after the Apostles or even in their time, as ecclesiastical history witnesses’, and Aerius had been wrong to oppose ‘the consensus of the Church in his time’. But episcopacy was not of divine origin and was merely a point of human prudence, on which Churches might differ. It survived in England because God chose there to use the bishops as agents of Reformation. Where God only used priests, ‘it was necessary that those priests should resume the powers that they had in the Apostles’ times’.⁹³ Andrewes protested on behalf of James I that Du Moulin’s position was likely to be seized upon by English opponents of episcopacy.⁹⁴ The Church of England was not content that its government should not be condemned as vicious. It wanted everybody to confess that ‘there is among us the form of government which is closest to the use and institution of the ancient Church’, by which one should not understand only the Church which followed immediately on the Apostles but ‘the Apostolic Church itself ’.⁹⁵ Furthermore, to say that ⁹² ‘Autobiographie de Pierre Du Moulin d’apr`es le manuscrit autographe: 1564– 1658’, Bulletin de la Soci´et´e de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Franc¸ais, 7 (1858), 179 (Whitaker) and 343 (Canterbury prebend). For a full account of Du Moulin’s relations with England, see Patterson, James VI and I, 158–95. The two studies by B. Armstrong, ‘The Changing Face of French Protestantism: The Influence of Pierre Du Moulin’, in R. V. Schnuker (ed.), Calviniana: Ideas and Influence of John Calvin (Kirksville, Mo., 1988: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies X), 131–49, and ‘Pierre Du Moulin and James I: The Anglo-French Programme’, in De l’Humanisme aux Lumi`eres: Bayle et le ´ protestantisme. M´elanges en l’honneur d’Elisabeth Labrousse (Paris, 1996), 17–29, offer some interesting information but a superficial (psychologizing) analysis. ⁹³ Pierre Du Moulin, De la vocation des pasteurs (Sedan, 1618), 21–4. See also Du Moulin’s summary of his position in his letter to Andrewes of 5 September 1618, in Andrewes, Opuscula posthuma, 161–3. ⁹⁴ Andrewes’s first letter to Du Moulin, n.d., ibid. 165. ⁹⁵ Andrewes’s second letter, 12 December 1618, ibid. 176: ‘nobis hoc satis non est, si non aspernetur quis nostram Ecclesiae politeiam, ut rem uitiosam aut improbam: Id enim agimus, ut palam sit, et in confesso, eam esse apud nos Politeiae formam,

104

Becoming Traditional?

episcopacy was ‘of apostolic right’ was tantamount to saying that it was ‘of divine right’.⁹⁶ Either episcopacy came from the Apostles, ‘or else all antiquity is deceiving us, or else there is no longer any history of the Church worthy of credit’.⁹⁷ Du Moulin claimed that Timothy and Titus had an extraordinary ministry as evangelists, but ‘none of the ancients said it, there is no history to bear witness to it. But history bears witness that they were bishops.’⁹⁸ Such historicization exempted Andrewes from being more specific about the authority that ought to be ascribed to the Fathers. He merely stressed that ‘all antiquity’ should have more weight than one particular Church such as the French Protestant one.⁹⁹ Since Du Moulin professed for his part that he did not mean ‘to oppose all antiquity’ in condemning episcopacy, the issue did not need to come between them. Du Moulin had produced the classic proof-texts for the original identity of bishops and presbyters.¹⁰⁰ Andrewes had admittedly a more restricted understanding of sola Scriptura than Du Moulin. When the French divine reminded him of ‘that principle which is the main defence of our religion againt Popery, I mean that things which are of divine right are sufficiently and clearly contained in holy Scripture’, the Bishop answered that this was only true of questions of faith and morals.¹⁰¹ Now, episcopacy belonged only to ‘the exterior government’ of the Church, and was not necessary either for salvation or for the being of the Church.¹⁰² It was a matter of practice and could only improperly be ranked among the points of faith.¹⁰³ Andrewes thus opened the theoretical possibility that the divine right of episcopacy could still be asserted—necessarily on the sole basis of antiquity—even though it had no clear foundation in Scripture. He was however definite that the divine right of episcopacy was in fact ‘contained clearly enough in the sacred Scriptures quae quam proxime accedat ad morem institutumque Ecclesiae priscae, siue (ut tu concedis) Apostolis proximae, siue (ut semel scripseras, et nos contendimus) ipsius Apostolicae.’ ⁹⁶ Andrewes’s first letter, ibid. 171. ⁹⁷ Andrewes’s second letter, ibid. 176: ‘Fuit enim Ordo ille non a seculo modo Apostolis proximo; sed et ab ipso adeo seculo Apostolorum; aut nos tota fallit antiquitas, aut nulla superest historia Ecclesiae fide digna.’ ⁹⁸ Andrewes’s third letter, ibid. 195: ‘Nemo enim hoc ueterum dixit, historia nulla testis est. At testis est historia, Timotheum et Titum Episcopos.’ ⁹⁹ Andrewes’s second letter, ibid. 176. ¹⁰⁰ See Du Moulin, Vocation des pasteurs, 20–1, quoting ‘Ambrose’ (Ambrosiaster), Jerome’s Commentary on Titus, and also ‘l’Epistre a` Evagrius’ [ad Euangelum]. ¹⁰¹ Du Moulin to Andrewes, 21 December 1618, in Andrewes, Opuscula posthuma, 183; Andrewes’s third letter, ibid. 197. ¹⁰² Andrewes’s second letter, ibid. 176–7. ¹⁰³ Andrewes’s first letter, ibid. 171.

Becoming Traditional?

105

for those who can see’.¹⁰⁴ The distinction of bishops and presbyters had been instituted by Christ himself ‘in the persons of the Apostles and the seventy-two disciples’. The Fathers taught that bishops were the successors of the Apostles, and presbyters of the seventy-two.¹⁰⁵ Some of the ‘apostolic men’ ordained as bishops by the Apostles, like Polycarp and Ignatius, were not mentioned in Scripture, but others, like Timothy and Titus, were.¹⁰⁶ On the whole, the exchange between the two divines was one of the first instances of estrangement between the Church of England and continental Protestantism. It did not reveal, however, any fundamental difference in theological methodology. Andrewes had no doubt that English and continental Protestants held the same faith.¹⁰⁷

2. PURITANISM? Overt presbyterianism was on the decline in England after the ‘classis movement’ had collapsed in 1590. In the early years of the seventeenth century, non-separated, or semi-separated, Puritans mostly asked for ritual changes that would bring the Church of England more in line with continental models.¹⁰⁸ The controverted points were a legacy from preReformation times, and quotations from the Fathers were an obvious means to defend them. Churchmen, however, did not claim that antiquity conferred any intrinsic value on ‘traditions and ceremonies’ but rather stressed, in accordance with article XXXIV, that the Church had power to impose and change them in the interest of ‘common order’. John Davenant, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in the 1610s, taught that ceremonies were res adiaphorae, indifferent things.¹⁰⁹ He did not appeal to ¹⁰⁴ Andrewes’s third letter, ibid. 197. ¹⁰⁵ Andrewes’s third letter, ibid. 193. ¹⁰⁶ Andrewes’s first letter, ibid. 169–70. ¹⁰⁷ Andrewes’s first letter, ibid. 172. ¹⁰⁸ See Lake, Moderate Puritans; S. Bendall, C. Brooke, and P. Collinson, A History of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (Woodbridge, 1999), 177–86; A. Hunt, ‘Laurence Chaderton and the Hampton Court Conference’, in S. Wabuda and C. Litzenberger (eds.), Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from his Students (Aldershot, 1998), 207–28; P. Lake, ‘Moving the Goal Posts? Modified Subscription and the Construction of Conformity in the Early Stuart Church’, in id. and Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy, 179–205 (Lake convincingly argues that there is substantial agreement between his interpretation and that of Hunt). On the notion of semi-separatists, see Collinson, ‘Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’. For evidence for ‘a radical Puritan continuum’, see N. Tyacke, ‘The Fortunes of English Puritanism, 1603–40’ (1990), repr. in id., Aspects, 111–31. ¹⁰⁹ John Davenant, Determinationes Quaestionum quarundam Theologicarum (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1639), q. XX, 100–1. The text is unchanged from the first edition (Cambridge, 1634).

106

Becoming Traditional?

apostolic tradition for ceremonies as such but for the legitimate authority of all Churches to impose some ceremonies.¹¹⁰ The Hampton Court conference was on the whole a defeat for the Puritan clergy¹¹¹ but it did not canonize patristic authority. The bishops appealed to antiquity for the use of the sign of the cross in baptism, which was eventually retained by the Church of England.¹¹² By contrast, in the case of confirmation, they insisted that it ‘did not depende onely, upon the Antiquitie and practise of the Primitive Church’ but was ‘an Institution Apostolicall’ expressly warranted by Scripture, as Calvin had recognized. James did not declare himself satisfied until he had personally examined the biblical text (Hebrews 6: 2) and ‘approved the Exposition’.¹¹³ Private baptism by laymen, and even women, had potential doctrinal implications since it raised the question of the necessity of baptism for the salvation of children, and ultimately of the efficacy of sacraments to confer grace.¹¹⁴ After the bishops’ scriptural proof for the practice had been pronounced inconclusive by the King, Bilson argued ‘very learnedly’ that it had been ‘the ancient and common practize of the Church’ and warned that to suppress it ‘were to crosse all antiquitie’.¹¹⁵ He failed to sway the King and so the Book of Common Prayer was altered in accordance with ¹¹⁰ Davenant, Determinationes, 99–100. Compare article XXXIV: ‘Every particular or national Churche, hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish ceremonies or rites of the Church, ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying.’ This clause was an addition of 1563: Hardwick, History of the Articles, 127 and 336–7. On Davenant’s subsequent practice in the 1630s as Bishop of Salisbury, see Tyacke, ‘Anglican Attitudes’, 159–60 and 164–5. ¹¹¹ Shriver, ‘Hampton Court Re-visited’, 48–71; P. Collinson, ‘The Jacobean Religious Settlement: The Hampton Court Conference’, in H. Tomlinson (ed.), Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government (London, 1983), 27–51. ¹¹² Barlow, Summe and substance, 68–9; ‘A Declaration of the Conference had before the King … ’, in R. G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church (New York, 1910), ii. 349. The point was then strongly stressed in the 30th canon of 1604 (Bray (ed.), Anglican Canons, 302–8). See S. B. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962), 81–6. ¹¹³ Barlow, Summe and substance, 10–11. Cf. 32. Calvin, Commentarius in epistolam ad Hebraeos (1549), ad loc., CR 83, 69. See J. F. Turrell, ‘ ‘‘Until such time as he be confirmed’’: The Laudians and Confirmation in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England’, Seventeenth Century, 20 (2005), 205–7. ¹¹⁴ See above, 80–2; D. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), 114–23; K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1991; 1st edn. 1971), 63–4; Hunt, ‘Chaderton’, 223–4; Bromiley, Baptism and the Anglican Reformers, 56–63 and 81–9; the anonymous Puritan tract quoted by White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, 142. ¹¹⁵ Barlow, Summe and substance, 18.

Becoming Traditional?

107

Puritan demands.¹¹⁶ According to an anonymous Puritan account of the conference, James bluntly told the bishops ‘that as well might they by color of antiquity bring in prayer for the dead’,¹¹⁷ though, in a typically double-barrelled argument, he also audaciously claimed that ‘Mounser Gourden’ ( John Gordon, one of his theological advisers) could ‘produce many places (especially in Augustine) agaynst the Baptisme of private men and women’.¹¹⁸ Even senior clerics felt no qualms in forsaking antiquity on that point. Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, whom Whitgift consulted before the conference, confessed that ‘all the Schoolmen, and almost all the Ancient Fathers’ held it lawful for laymen to baptize in case of necessity. In Hutton’s view, however, this was an ‘erroneous Custom and Abuse of the Holy Sacrament’, which had sprung ‘from another Error’, urged especially by Augustine, that baptism was necessary for salvation, ‘which hath no sufficient Warrant in the Word’.¹¹⁹ One hundred years later, positions were reversed and the invalidity of lay baptism (i.e., in effect, of baptism administered by ministers not episcopally ordained) became a key issue in the High Church sacerdotalist campaign.¹²⁰ James I’s ¹¹⁶ The words ‘lawfull Minister’ being inserted in the rubrics of the order of private baptism (Brightman, English Rite, i, p. clxxx; ii. 749 and 751). ¹¹⁷ ‘A Declaration of the Conference’, 342. ¹¹⁸ Ibid. The only text of Augustine that Puritans had been able to adduce (following Calvin, Institutio (1559), . xv. 20, CR 30, 974) was Contra epistolam Parmeniani, 2. 13. 29 (CSEL 51, 80), where Augustine blamed lay people’s baptizing without necessity (‘si autem necessitas urgeat, aut nullum, aut ueniale delictum est’), but pronounced such baptism valid. See John Whitgift, The Defence of the Aunswere to the Admonition, against the Replie of T.C. [1574], in Works, ed. J. Ayre, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1851–3; PS), ii. 532 and 536 (quoting and confuting Cartwright); Hooker, Lawes, V. 62. 18 [Works, ii. 284–5]; Willet, Synopsis Papismi (1600), 463. ¹¹⁹ Hutton to Whitgift, 9 October 1603, in Strype, Whitgift, appendix, 233. Hutton was considered exceptionally well versed in the Fathers (Campion, Rationes decem, 495) but he was also a vigorous exponent of the principle of sola Scriptura: see P. Collinson, ‘Perne the Turncoat: An Elizabethan Reputation’ (1991), repr. in id., Elizabethans, 192–5; id., ‘Some Lady Margaret Professors, 1559–1649’, in id., R. Rex, and G. Stanton, Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge, 1502 to 1649 (Cambridge, 2003), 66–7. ¹²⁰ [Roger Laurence], Lay Baptism Invalid: or, an Essay to prove that such Baptism is null and void; especially to those who know that ’twas Administer’d to them, in opposition to the Divine Right of the Apostolical Succession (London, 1708). Laurence’s position had been anticipated by Henry Dodwell, Separation of Churches from Episcopal Government, as practised by the present Non-Conformists, proved Schismatical from such Principles as are least controverted, and do withal most popularly explain the Sinfulness and Mischief of Schism (London, 1679), 142–3, criticized on that score by William Sherlock, A Continuation and Vindication of the Defence of Dr. Stillingfleet’s Unreasonableness of Separation: in answer to Mr. Baxter, Mr. Lob, etc. Containing a further Explication and Defence of the Doctrine of Catholick Communion (London, 1682), 354–6. The reversal of positions was noted by John Edwards, ‘Patrologia: or, a Discourse concerning the Primitive Fathers and Antient Writers of the Christian Church. Designed to undeceive Those who have

108

Becoming Traditional?

perspective was completely different: he did not object to lay baptism on the ground that it was invalid.¹²¹ In controversies on ceremonies, as well as on episcopacy, both sides quoted the Fathers, if only because even the most radical Puritans were aware of the cultural authority of patristic learning. Robert Parker’s treatise against the sign of the cross in baptism opened with a captatio benevolentiae: ‘let none thinke me to be one that standeth upon termes of learning … besides I want bookes and conference, and my Schoole studies have ben long discontinued.’¹²² But it was ‘almost all made up of the fruits of Reading, History, Sentences, etc. [of Fathers, Schoolmen, modern Protestant theologians] of purpose to confute them that said the Nonconformists were no Schollars’.¹²³ One should also take into account the numerous patristic quotations deployed by Puritans in moralizing campaigns, especially against the theatre, from Elizabethan pamphlets up to the issuing of Prynne’s Histrio-mastix.¹²⁴ John Geree later claimed that ‘if we [Puritans] entertained wrong Apprehensions concerning Them and their Writings’, in Remains (London, 1731), 99–101. ¹²¹ James may have used some vehement expressions (‘A Declaration of the Conference’, 342: ‘he had as lieve his childe were baptised by an Ape as by a woman’) but they should not be taken at face value. Isaac Casaubon’s response to Du Perron, written on behalf of the King and approved by him, presents thus the position of the Church of England: ‘laicorum uero baptismum, aut feminarum, ut fieri legibus suis uetat [Ecclesia Anglicana]; sic factum ex legitima formula quodammodo non improbat, baptismum esse pronuntians, etsi non legitime administratum’ (Ad epistolam Illustr. et Reuerendiss. Cardinalis Perronii, Responsio (London, 1612), 33–4). See also James’s later explanations in Featley, Cygnea Cantio, 23–4 (quoting the classic text from Augustine, Contra epistolam Parmeniani, 2. 13: above, n. 118). Fincham and Tyacke’s hypothesis, Altars Restored, 130, that James changed his mind between the Hampton Court conference and the 1620s, seems therefore unnecessary. On the other hand, James maintained to the last that Augustine’s doctrine of the necessity of baptism for salvation was ‘a knowne errour in him’ (Casaubon, Responsio, 34; Featley, Cygnea Cantio, 30–8). ¹²² [Robert Parker], A scholasticall discourse against symbolizing with Antichrist in ceremonies: especially in the signe of the Crosse (n.p., 1607), ‘A protestation of the Authour’, sig. ∗ 1r . ¹²³ Richard Baxter, A Treatise of Episcopacy; confuting by Scripture, Reason, and the Churches Testimony, that sort of Diocesan Churches, Prelacy, and Government, which casteth out the Primitive Church-Species, Episcopacy, Ministry and Discipline, and confoundeth the Christian World by Corruption, Usurpation, Schism, and Persecution. Meditated in the Year 1640 when the Et caetera Oath was imposed. Written 1671 and cast by. Published 1680, by the importunity of our Superiours, who demand the Reasons of our Nonconformity (London, 1681), part I, 51–2. ¹²⁴ See e.g. A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters: the one whereof was sounded by a reverend Byshop dead long since; the other by a worshipful and zealous Gentleman now alive (n.p., 1580): the ‘second blast’, 1–41, is an English translation of Salvian, De gubernatione Dei, 6. 3–11 and 17–18 (PL 53, 111–22 and 127–8). John Rainolds, Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes (n.p., 1599), esp. 157–61, for the claim that the Fathers’ condemnations of the theatre of their time apply to modern theatre as well.

Becoming Traditional?

109

differ from the Fathers in point of Prelacie … we jump with’ them on many things. His instances included ‘promiscuous dancing, especially on the Lords day’ and ‘gaming at Cards, or Dice, and such like’.¹²⁵ The recusant Thomas Hill hinted in 1600 that there was a major rift in Protestant attitudes to the Fathers. He put it clumsily for lack of appropriate words: The Catholike Romane Religion is most plainely taught by all the auncient Fathers … This is very plaine in that the Catholikes are put, and compelled by the Protestants to defend, maintaine, and upholde the credit, and authoritie of the saide Fathers; for the Protestants rayle at them, the Catholiks defend them: the Protestants refuse theyr authoritie, the Catholikes hold it for good … And in naming the Protestants, I include all the Puritanes: for I am not ignorant how the saide Protestants are driven by the said Puritanes, to defende the Fathers, and also are called papists for theyr labour. And hereby it is manifest that the Fathers are with the Catholikes, and neyther with the Protestants, nor Puritanes.¹²⁶

Hill was groping for a name like ‘Anglican’. Subsequent recusant writers, who were often to repeat the same point, spoke of ‘English Protestants’.¹²⁷ In 1604, however, Abbot denied that there was any difference of theological principles between conformists and their critics. It was merely a matter of tempers and circumstances. ‘Some men of learning’ had rightly blamed the abuse of patristic quotations in Latin and Greek in sermons to ordinary people.¹²⁸ ‘Some weaker men in a little humour have seemed to be no great favourers’ of the Fathers, ‘partly because they know them not … and partly because they have no learning to understand them. Also because they wil not be at cost to buy them, or if these impediments were remooved, because they wil not take the paines to read them. But even such do daily more and more reforme their judgment.’¹²⁹ Such a public profession from the man who was about to become in quick succession Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Bishop of London, and Archbishop of Canterbury William Prynne, Histrio-mastix: The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragædie (London, 1633), passim (see table, s.v. ‘Fathers’). ¹²⁵ John Geree, =ινιορραγία, The Sifters Sieve broken (London, 1648), 48. ¹²⁶ Hill, Quartron of Reasons, 45. ¹²⁷ See Cressy’s text quoted below, 296. Cf. T. H. Clancy, ‘Papist—Protestant— Puritan: English Religious Taxonomy 1565–1665’, Recusant History, 13 (1975–6), 233–4 and 241–2. ¹²⁸ The use of ‘learned languages’ in English sermons was much debated at the time. Opponents included John Rainolds: see Dent, Protestant Reformers, 203–4; ‘John Howson’s Answers to Archbishop Abbot’s Accusations at his ‘‘Trial’’ before James I at Greenwich, 10 June 1615’, ed. N. Cranfield and K. Fincham, Camden Miscellany, 29 (1987) [Camden 5th series 34], 333 and note. For other examples, see Lake, ‘Robert Some’, 272; id., Moderate Puritans, 132. ¹²⁹ Abbot, Hill’s Reasons Unmasked, 371–2.

110

Becoming Traditional?

cannot be disregarded. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would seem, attitude towards the Fathers did not constitute a reliable test of Puritanism.¹³⁰ Abbot nonetheless made a very important point when he stressed that patristic studies were doubly expensive, in time and money. It is likely that patristic editions cost more in England than on the Continent, since, throughout the seventeenth century, they had in most cases to be imported.¹³¹ Savile’s Chrysostom, the first—and for long afterwards the only—major edition of the Fathers to be published in England, was also very costly: nine pounds (that is, we are told, the equivalent of a pair of oxen).¹³² Arthur Lake, Bishop of Bath and Wells, observed that buying the Fathers ‘for the ordinary Clergie is so hard a burden’.¹³³ This partly accounts for the recurrence in the seventeenth century, and indeed until the end of the English ancien r´egime, of the theme of the ‘rewards of learning’. Not only was it commonly believed that young students would not undertake severe studies if they did not hope to gain preferment thereby, but even mature scholars needed time and money. In the dedication to King James of his Analecta Ecclesiasticarum Exercitationum against Cardinal Baronius, Richard Montagu lamented the condition of English scholars, ‘who, in most cases, were not born with a large fortune’ and who squandered their ¹³⁰ On Abbot’s notion of Puritanism, see Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Politics’, esp. 42–4. C. W. A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge, 2005), 263, has righly pointed out that ‘patristic scholarship was integral to the business of both defending and attacking the Church’. Unfortunately, the author, who seems blissfully unaware that a theologian like Bilson would hardly read Gregory of Nazianzus in English translation (see 118 n. 15), decided not to ‘attempt to dissect the various ways in which writers employed their sources’ (20). ¹³¹ See generally J. Roberts, ‘The Latin Trade’, in J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv (Cambridge, 2002), 141–73, and e.g. Richard Montagu to John Cosin, 28 November and 6 December [1624], in The Correspondence of John Cosin, D.D., Lord Bishop of Durham: together with other papers illustrative of his life and times, ed. G. Ornsby, i (Durham, 1869; Publications of the Surtees Society 52), 30–1—on the dating of the Montagu–Cosin correspondence, which is often faulty in this edition, see J. S. Macauley, ‘Richard Mountague, Caroline Bishop, 1575–1641’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1964), 511–15; S. Lambert, ‘Richard Montagu, Arminianism and Censorship’, Past and Present, 124 (August 1989), 44 n. 28; 48 n. 39; 54 n. 60. ¹³² See Ussher to Luke Challoner, 9 April 1613, in Richard Parr, The Life of the Most Reverend Father in God, James Usher, Late Lord Arch-Bishop of Armagh, Primate and Metropolitan of all Ireland (London, 1686), letter VIII, 17 (on the state of Ussher’s correspondence, see below, Chapter 3 n. 121); John Bois to Savile, in S. Ioannis Chrysostomi Opera Graece (Eton, 1613), viii/b, coll. 415–16. For comparisons with clerical incomes, see F. Heal, ‘Economic Problems of the Clergy’, in R. O’Day and F. Heal (eds.), Church and Society in England: Henry VIII to James I (London, 1977), 99–118. ¹³³ Letter to Thomas James, 4 January [1620], in Letters Addressed to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library, ed. G. W. Wheeler (Oxford, 1933), 42.

Becoming Traditional?

111

patrimony, first in the costs of their education, then in stocking their libraries. They had to earn their bread as parish clergy, while their Roman adversaries on the Continent enjoyed an uninterrupted otium literarium, and they lacked money to buy the books they needed. People ‘do not pour oil, even though they desire to have light’.¹³⁴ This discourse had some basis in fact but it was at the same time thoroughly ideological. Montagu used the same arguments to defend the divine right to tithe against John Selden—he claimed in this context that a scholar might easily spend more than forty pounds ‘in bookes every yeere, if he will furnish himselfe ad omnia every way’.¹³⁵ Elizabethan champions of the clerical establishment polemically equated presbyterianism with suppression of the rewards of learning and its consecutive decay.¹³⁶ The argument was used further to justify the most unreformed aspects of the Church of England, not only the institutional relics of popish times, such as the chapters of cathedrals and similar bodies, but the unequal and illogical division of the Church’s wealth, and even those evils so much denounced by Puritans, pluralism and non-residence. The official answer of the University of Oxford to the Millenary Petition insisted that, without non-residence, England could not maintain the present superiority of its clergy,¹³⁷ in contrast to ‘the ruines of the Ministery in particular, and generally of al profound learning in other reformed Churches’.¹³⁸ ‘There are at this day, more learned men in this Land, in this one Kingdome; then are to be found among al the Ministers of the Religion … in all Europe besides.’¹³⁹ This line of conformist apologetics culminated in John Hacket’s famous speech ¹³⁴ Richard Montagu, Analecta Ecclesiasticarum Exercitationum (London, 1622), sigs. a4v –a5v . ¹³⁵ Richard Montagu, Diatribae upon the first part of the late History of Tithes (London, 1621), 403. See G. J. Toomer, ‘Selden’s Historie of Tithes: Genesis, Publication, Aftermath’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 65 (2002), 345–78, esp. 371–3 (the mention of Montagu’s edition of Basil, which puzzled the author, 372 n. 102, refers to Montagu’s contribution to the Paris edition of 1618, on which see below, 197). The argument had already been used by Saravia, De diuersis gradibus, 148. On libraries of ‘clerical plutocrats’ of the 1620s, see M. C. Cross, ‘The Incomes of Provincial Urban Clergy 1520–1645’, in R. O’Day and F. Heal (eds.), Princes and Paupers in the English Church 1500–1800 (Leicester, 1981), 81. ¹³⁶ See e.g. Sutcliffe, De Presbyterio, dedication to the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, sigs. B2v –B3r . ¹³⁷ The Answere of the Vicechancelour, the Doctors, both the Proctors, and other the Heads of Houses in the Universitie of Oxford … To the humble Petition of the Ministers of the Church of England, desiring Reformation of certain Ceremonies and Abuses of the Church (Oxford, 1603), 17. See Dent, Protestant Reformers, 162–4. The Answere was not presented to the university convocation and it may not have been representative: see K. Fincham, ‘Oxford and the Early Stuart Polity’, in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 184; N. Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, ibid. 503–4. ¹³⁸ Answere, 29–30. ¹³⁹ Ibid. 31.

112

Becoming Traditional?

to the Commons in 1641, as deputy of all the chapters, at a time when their dissolution threatened: For the next rank of young students that are to begin the study of Divinity, it must be confessed by all men that are conversant in the general experience of the world, that they will be far more industrious when they see rewards prepared which may recompense the costs which they put their friends to in their education, and make them some recompense for their great labours.... Upon the fear and jealousy that these retributions of labour should be taken away from industrious students, the Universities of the realm do feel a languor and a pining away already in both their bodies.... Let any man ask the booksellers of Paul’s Churchyard and Little Britain, if their books, (I mean grave and learned authors,) do not lie upon their hand, and are not saleable.¹⁴⁰

Chapters provided scholars with the company of others of their kind, with ‘copious and well furnished libraries’, and with ‘otium literarium’.¹⁴¹ The peroration was dramatic: ‘upon the ruins of the rewards of learning no structure can be raised up but ignorance; and upon the chaos of ignorance no structure can be built but profaneness and confusion.’¹⁴² Hacket’s arguments were held to be convincing enough to be still reprinted in 1838.¹⁴³ They impressed someone like Sir Edward Dering—an anti-Laudian but scared by the growth of religious radicalism—who suggested that cathedral chapters might be turned wholly into centres of ecclesiastical learning. Among other projects, ‘all the Fathers might be revised and briefly animadversed’.¹⁴⁴ In his own speech against the Grand Remonstrance, on 22 November 1641, Dering insisted on the need for controversial divinity, for which one could not rely on ordinary clergy: How shall he [the Parish Minister] with one hundred pound, (perhaps two hundred pound) per annum, with a family, and with constant preaching, be able, either in ¹⁴⁰ Hacket’s speech reproduced in Thomas Plume, An Account of the Life and Death of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Hacket, late Lord Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, ed. M. E. C. Walcott (London, 1865; 1st edn. 1675), 52–3 (the copy Bodl., shelfmark 11121 f. 6. has corrections and additions by Walcott for a new edition). Hacket became Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield after the Restoration but is chiefly known for the biography of John Williams that he wrote during the Interregnum (see below, n. 295). ¹⁴¹ Ibid. 54. ¹⁴² Ibid. 62. On the significance of cathedral chapters, see S. E. Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege: Cathedrals in English Society, 1600–1700 (Exeter, 1996). ¹⁴³ Apology for Cathedral establishments, by Dr. John Hacket, afterwards Lord Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. Extracted from ‘The Prebendary’, Part II (London, 1838). ¹⁴⁴ Edward Dering, A Collection of Speeches in Matter of Religion (London, 1642), 148. Archbishop Ussher had conceived of a similar plan (Parr, Usher, 96). On Dering’s evolution, see W. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–60 (London, 1969), 81–93; D. Hirst, ‘The Defection of Sir Edward Dering, 1640–1641’, HJ 15 (1972), 193–208; Tyacke, ‘Fortunes of English Puritanism’, 127. For the context, see A. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981), 91–124.

Becoming Traditional?

113

purse for charge, or in leisure for time, or in Art for skill, to this so chargeable, so different, so difficult a work? … Six hundred pound is but a mean expence in books, and will advance but a moderate Library. Paines and learning must have a reward of Honour and Profit proportionall.¹⁴⁵

William Saywell, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, used the same arguments to defend pluralism during the Restoration.¹⁴⁶ In that sense, it may be said that there was a de facto solidarity between patristic learning and anti-Puritanism, hence the deeply ambiguous position of those senior clergymen of the early seventeenth century who might be theologically sympathetic to the Puritan case but whose own career had made them fully accept the axiom: ‘take away the reward of learning and learning will decay.’¹⁴⁷ Moreover, the insistence on the superior learning of the English clergy was bound to melt into a sense of the institutional superiority of the episcopal Church of England over other Protestant Churches. In the early seventeenth century, cathedrals and similar bodies (especially the royal peculiar of Westminster Abbey) were often centres of high ceremonialism.¹⁴⁸ With the benefit of hindsight, it might be said that it was a logical step, for those who extolled learning in order to defend the established Church, to extol antiquity as the main object of learning. This last conclusion, however, was not clearly drawn until the Restoration.¹⁴⁹ In the Jacobean Church, the discourse of the learned clergy might be functionally anti-Puritan; it was not theologically so. In his sermon to the convocation of 1624, Joseph Hall coined an expression which was to have enormous success: Stupor mundi Clerus Britannus, ‘the British clergy is the amazement of the world. So many learned divines, so many eloquent ¹⁴⁵ Dering, Speeches, 117–18. Hacket’s speech is referred to approvingly, 147. For works of theological controversy published by the cathedral clergy, see Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, 129–33. ¹⁴⁶ William Saywell, Evangelical and Catholick Unity, maintained in the Church of England: or an Apology for her Government, Liturgy, Subscriptions, etc. (London, 1682), 144–56. ¹⁴⁷ For an exemplary analysis, see P. Lake, ‘Matthew Hutton: A Puritan Bishop?’, History, 64 (1979), 182–204 (the quotation, at 194, is from a letter of Hutton to Whitgift, January 1602). ¹⁴⁸ Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, esp. 7–22; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, chapter 3, 74–125, passim. Among cathedrals, the best-known case, because of the ensuing controversy, is Durham: see Correspondence of Cosin, i. 161–99; Tyacke, AntiCalvinists, 116–18. But see also A. Milton, ‘ ‘‘Anglicanism’’ by Stealth: The Career and Influence of John Overall’, in K. Fincham and P. Lake (eds.), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), 161, on St Paul’s when Overall was Dean. On Westminster Abbey, see J. F. Merritt, ‘The Cradle of Laudianism? Westminster Abbey, 1558–1630’, JEH 52 (2001), 623–46, with the comments of MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, 208–11; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 82–3. ¹⁴⁹ See below, 309–11.

114

Becoming Traditional?

preachers could not today be found in any other part of the world.’¹⁵⁰ But his list of ‘great lights of the Church which have recently set’, while ecumenical enough to include Hooker and Overall, mostly numbered theologians of unimpeachable Calvinist orthodoxy, such as Andrew Willet or Robert Abbot, several of whom had had Puritan leanings, not least Humphrey, Whitaker, Rainolds, Perkins.¹⁵¹ If the expression Stupor mundi Clerus Britannus had a polemical thrust, it was directed at the Pope.¹⁵² 3. CHRIST ’S DESCENT INTO HELL To see significant divergences among English Protestants on the authority of the Fathers, one should look at less obvious and less well-known topics than episcopacy or ceremonial. The controversy about Christ’s descent into Hell is potentially the most interesting, as both sides agreed that it concerned doctrine.¹⁵³ Here again, Bilson was the main champion on the conformist side. He was now a prominent bishop and his views had a semi-official character. He started the controversy with the full ¹⁵⁰ Joseph Hall, Columba Noae oliuam adferens iactatissimae Christi Arcae. Concio Synodica, ad Clerum Anglicanum (Prouinciae prasertim Cantuariensis) habita, in Aede Paulina Londinensi. Feb. 20 1623 [–24] (London, 1624), 14: ‘Stupor mundi Clerus Britannus. Tot doctos Theologos, tot disertos Concionatores frustra uspiam alibi hodie sub coelo quaesieris.’ ¹⁵¹ Ibid. 15. On Hall’s devotion to ‘the moderate puritan and virulently anti-Catholic tradition of Fulke, Whitaker and Rainolds’, see K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism in the 1630s: Joseph Hall Explains Himself ’, EHR 111 (1996), 856–81 (quotation at 862). ¹⁵² My colleague Franc¸ois Dolbeau kindly pointed out to me that it played with the opening words of Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria noua, a work dedicated to Pope Innocent III and much circulated in the Middle Ages: ‘Papa stupor mundi’ (text in E. Gallo, The Poetria noua and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine ( The Hague, 1971), 14). ¹⁵³ See Parker’s preface to De Descensu Domini nostri Iesu Christi ad Inferos. Libri quatuor. Ab auctore doctissimo, Hugone Sanfordo, Coomflorio, Anglo, Inchoati. Opera uero et studio Roberti Parkeri, ad umbilicum perducti, ac iam tandem in Lucem editi (Amsterdam, 1611), sig. ∗ 3r : ‘Aegre quippe ferebat ueritati deditus [Sanfordus], quod postquam disciplina Christi ab Episcopo-satrapis nostris eliminata tota pene fuerat: extiterint etiam inter eos nonnulli, qui Doctrinam ipsam labefactare tentarunt.’ On the conformist side, Richard Parkes, An Apologie of Three Testimonies of holy Scripture, concerning the Articles of our Creed, He Descended into Hell (London, 1607), sig. ¶4v : ‘Some of that Sect, (I grant) would beare the world in hand, that they dissent not from others in matters of substance, but in ceremonies only: and this to cloake their schisme withal against the Church, and to countenance their errors (if not heresies rather) in oppugning the Doctrine therof. But their dissention about this very Article of Christes descension into hel, if their were nothing els, doth convince this to be false and slaunderous.’ For an overview of the controversy, see D. D. Wallace, Jr., ‘Puritan and Anglican: The Interpretation of Christ’s Descent into Hell in Elizabethan Theology’, ARG 69 (1978), 248–87.

Becoming Traditional?

115

approval of Whitgift¹⁵⁴ and continued it on an express order of Queen Elizabeth.¹⁵⁵ It was commonly believed in the primitive Church that, after Christ’s death on the cross, his soul went to the underworld while his body lay in the grave.¹⁵⁶ The descent into Hell eventually found its way into ecclesiastical formularies, including the Apostles’ Creed.¹⁵⁷ Medieval theology built on it the theory of limbus Patrum, the place where the souls of Old Testament patriarchs were detained. Christ went hither in his human soul to deliver them and he brought them with him to Paradise at his ascension.¹⁵⁸ Protestant divines rejected this medieval geography of the underworld together with the doctrine of Purgatory. They stressed that there was no middle state after death between damnation and blessedness.¹⁵⁹ What was then to be made of the descent into Hell? Rufinus’ commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, which was widely circulated in the early sixteenth century under the names of both Cyprian and Jerome, mentioned that the article Descendit ad inferos was not received in all churches.¹⁶⁰ Erasmus inferred that it was not part of the original version of the Creed.¹⁶¹ It had been received for too long, however, for the Reformers to dare to excise it. The descent was maintained but there was great confusion as to its interpretation.¹⁶² The position eventually adopted by Lutheran orthodoxy ¹⁵⁴ Strype, Whitgift, book IV, c. 21, 502. ¹⁵⁵ See Bilson’s dedication to James I of The Survey of Christ’s sufferings for mans redemption: and of his descent to Hades or Hell for our deliverance (London, 1604), sig. A1r . ¹⁵⁶ R. Gounelle, La Descente du Christ aux Enfers: institutionnalisation d’une croyance (Paris, 2000). ¹⁵⁷ See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (3rd edn., London, 1972), 378–83. ¹⁵⁸ The various questions related to Christ’s descent into Hell are treated by Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIIa, q. LII. See especially art. 2 (ed. leonina, xi. 493–4). ¹⁵⁹ See P. Marshall, ‘ ‘‘The map of God’s word’’: Geographies of the Afterlife in Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in Gordon and Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead, 110–30; id., Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), esp. 189–94. ¹⁶⁰ Rufinus, Expositio symboli, 16 (CC 20, 152–3). The work was included in Erasmus’ edition of Cyprian, though Erasmus knew of its true authorship: Opera diui Caecilii Cypriani episcopi Carthaginensis, ab innumeris mendis repurgata (Basle, 1521), sig. a2r–v and 361–89. For its publication as a work of Jerome, see A. C. de la Mare and L. Hellinga, ‘The First Book Printed in Oxford: The Expositio symboli of Rufinus’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 7 (1977–80), 184–244, esp. 192. ¹⁶¹ Erasmus, Explanatio symboli apostolorum (1533), ed. Bakhuizen van den Brink, 257–60. ¹⁶² See E. Vogelsang, ‘Weltbild und Kreuzestheologie in den H¨ollenfahrtstreitigkeiten der Reformationszeit’, ARG 38 (1941), 90–132. A useful account of early modern controversies, written from the orthodox Lutheran standpoint, is provided by Joh. Augustin Dietelmaier, Historia dogmatis de descensu Christi ad inferos litteraria (Nuremberg, 1741), 179–224.

116

Becoming Traditional?

was that Christ had descended locally into Hell to triumph over it. Bullinger, whose Decades were to prove very influential in England, considered several spiritual interpretations and concluded: ‘We confess in this article, that the souls are immortal, and that they immediately after the bodily death do pass to life, and that all the saints from the beginning of the world, being sanctified by faith through Christ, do in Christ and by Christ receive the inheritance of life everlasting.’¹⁶³ Calvin understood the descent to relate to the pains and torments of Hell that Christ had suffered on the cross. It was necessary that Christ should thus endure the full wrath of God, since he was to give satisfaction for the sins of mankind not only by his body but by his soul as well.¹⁶⁴ It is not clear whether this Calvinist notion was influential in England as early as the reign of Edward VI,¹⁶⁵ but there is evidence that the local descent was already being denied in some quarters at that time. The controversy may have begun among continental exiles in London, but, by 1552, it had already reached Cambridge University.¹⁶⁶ ¹⁶³ The Decades of Henry Bullinger, minister of the Church of Zurich. Translated by H. I. The first and second decades, ed. T. Harding (Cambridge, 1849; PS), 138–9. This is a reprint of the 1587 English edition. The original Latin first Decade had been published in 1549. ¹⁶⁴ Calvin propounded this interpretation in the first edition of the Institutio (1536), expanded it in the editions of 1539–54, and defended it at length against criticisms in the final edition of 1559, book II, c. 16. See CR 29, 69–70 and 529–531; CR 30, 375–9. ¹⁶⁵ Wallace, ‘Puritan and Anglican’, 258, claims that Calvin’s view was expressed by Hooper, on the strength of a treatise printed in 1581 under the latter’s name and said to have been originally published by him in 1550. See ‘A briefe and clear confession of the Christian faith, conteining an hundreth articles, according to the order of the Creede of the Apostles: written by that learned and godly Martyr, I. Hooper, sometimes Byschop of Gloucester in his life time’, in John Hooper, Later Writings, ed. C. Nevinson (Cambridge, 1852; PS), 30. But the existence of the 1550 edition cannot be substantiated and Hooper’s authorship of the work itself has been denied by specialists. See W. M. S. West, ‘John Hooper and the Origins of Puritanism’, Baptist Quarterly,  15 (1953–4), 366 n. 34, followed by Hunt, Life and Times of Hooper, 360. Certainly, Hooper’s general indebtedness to Bullinger and the absence of anything to link him with Calvin render the attribution rather dubious. ¹⁶⁶ For debates in the newly established strangers’ church, see Marten Micron’s letter to Bullinger of 20 May 1550, in Epistolae Tigurinae, 365; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 64–5. On the Cambridge disputation, see Christopher Carlile, A Discourse concerning two divine Positions. The first effectually concluding, that the soules of the faithfull fathers, deceased before Christ, went immediately to heaven. The second sufficientlye setting foorth unto us Christians, what we are to conceive, touching the descension of our Saviours Christ into Hell: Publiquely disputed at a Commencement in Cambridge, Anno Domini 1552 (London, 1582), sigs. ∗ 4r – ∗ 6v . Carlile held that ‘hell’meant grave, and Sir John Cheke, who first opposed him, eventually went over to his opinion. Andrew Perne stuck to the traditional view. Cf. Wood, Athenae, i. 336–7; Strype, Cheke, 116–17; Collinson, ‘Perne the Turncoat’, 186 n. 19.

Becoming Traditional?

117

Despite these doubts, the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 taught unambiguously that Christ’s soul went locally to Hell.¹⁶⁷ This may have been intended as a demonstration of orthodoxy. It would not do to appear to tamper with a doctrine enshrined in so venerable a text as the Apostles’ Creed. Cranmer was certainly aware that the notion of a local descent could be used to support limbus patrum. He may also have known that some exponents of the radical Reformation believed that Christ had descended into Hell to redeem the worthies of the Old Testament and perhaps the virtuous pagans as well.¹⁶⁸ The Archbishop considered inserting a caveat (‘By his descent into Hell, Christ freed no one from their emprisonment or torments’), which was eventually omitted.¹⁶⁹ His main anxiety was however to give the doctrine a scriptural basis. Erasmus had come to think that it did not have one and that it could only be received on the authority of the Church.¹⁷⁰ Roman divines regularly made this an argument against sola Scriptura¹⁷¹—though Smyth insisted in 1547 that the doctrine was actually not a case of unwritten tradition and that ‘manye textes of the scrypture do prove that thing evydently’.¹⁷² Cranmer chose to base it on 1 Peter 3: 18–20,¹⁷³ thereby going back to an exegesis which had been developed ¹⁶⁷ Article 3/42 in Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 71: ‘As Christ died and was buried for us: so also it is to be beleved, that he went downe into hell. For the bodie lay in the Sepulchre untill the resurrection: but his Ghoste departing from him, was with the Ghostes [spiritibus] that were in prison, or in helle, and didde preache to the same.’ ¹⁶⁸ See Williams, Radical Reformation, esp. 455, 1196, 1271–3; C. I. Smith, ‘Descendit ad Inferos—Again’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967), 87–8; J. Friedman, ‘Christ’s Descent into Hell and Redemption through Evil: A Radical Reformation Perspective’, ARG 76 (1985), 217–30. ¹⁶⁹ See the first version of the article in Hardwick, History of the Articles, 279; Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 159. ¹⁷⁰ Erasmus, Explanatio symboli, 258–60. Erasmus previously believed that the descent was attested in Scripture: see Colloquia, ‘Inquisitio’ [1524], ed. L.-E. Halkin, F. Bierlaire, and R. Hoven, in Opera omnia, i/3 (Amsterdam, 1972), 369. ¹⁷¹ Johannes Eck, Enchiridion locorum communium aduersus Lutherum et alios hostes ecclesiae (1525–1543), ed. P. Fraenkel (M¨unster in West., 1979; Corpus Catholicorum 34), 76–7; Cano, De locis, 109. See also below, 123–4, on Andradius. The idea comes from Duns Scotus, Commentarii Oxonienses, lib. I. Sententiarum, dist. XI, q. I, ad 2um, Opera omnia, v/1 (Lyon, 1639), 859. ¹⁷² Smyth, Brief treatyse, sigs. P4v –P5v . This would suggest that the doctrine was already under threat in England: to stress that it had no scriptural basis would have been counter-productive. ¹⁷³ Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 71: ‘as the place of S. Peter dooeth testifie’. Translations, both ancient and modern, of 1 Pet. 3: 18–20 are by no means unanimous, especially in the key verse 19. In the English Bible of 1539–40, it ran thus: ‘For as much as Christ hath once suffred for sinnes, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God, and was kylled, as pertayning to the fleshe: but was quyckened in the spyryte. In which spirit he also went and preached unto the spirites that were in pryson, whych some tyme had

118

Becoming Traditional?

by some, especially Greek, Fathers. It had been rejected by Augustine, for whom ‘the spirits in prison’ referred to the contemporaries of Noah, shut up in the prison of their ignorance. Christ, Augustine explained, was said to have preached to them because he had gone to them in spirit and had taught them through visions. This moral interpretation had been generally followed in the medieval West.¹⁷⁴ Cranmer’s rather surprising choice probably reflected the influence of Peter Martyr, who differed from most continental Reformers in believing in a local descent and who connected it with 1 Peter 3: 19. Martyr was even willing to accept that Christ had truly preached to the damned, not to deliver them but so that they could attest the justice of their damnation by again refusing to believe.¹⁷⁵ The result, in any case, was to commit the Church of England officially to a doctrine which had by this time become quite obsolete in continental Reformed thought.¹⁷⁶ The notion that Christ suffered the pains of Hell was very influential in Elizabethan England. In addition to the authority now enjoyed by Calvin, the onslaughts of Roman Catholics may well have given the doctrine a further commendation.¹⁷⁷ Several catechisms taught it as an article of faith: bene dysobedient, when the longe suffrynge of God was once loked for in the dayes of Noe whyle the Ark was a preparyng.’ The Authorized Version has: ‘For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing.’ ¹⁷⁴ Augustine, ep. 164 ad Euodium, 5. 15–22 (CSEL 44, 534–40), followed e.g. by Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIIa, q. LII, art. 2, ad 3um (ed. leonina, xi. 494). 1 Pet. 3: 19 had been quoted to prove the descent by Erasmus, Colloquia, ‘Inquisitio’ [1524], 369. It was not used by Smyth, Brief treatyse: could it be that this was an additional motive for Cranmer to use it? ¹⁷⁵ See Peter Martyr Vermigli, ‘Simplex duodecim fidei articulorum expositio’, § 20, in id., Loci communes, ed. Robert Masson (London, 1576), at the end of ‘Classis 2a’, 476. The Italian original had been published in Basle in 1544; there was also an English translation (London, 1578). See Donnelly and Kingdon, Bibliography, nos. XV.1 and XV.2, 130–3. ¹⁷⁶ Even among Lutherans, the doctrine was only revived towards the end of the 16th century, after the publication of the Formula of Concord. See Vogelsang, ‘Weltbild und Kreuzestheologie’, 108–28, who insists that Luther himself, and most Lutheran theologians apart from Melanchthon, held a position much closer to Calvin than to later Lutheran orthodoxy. ¹⁷⁷ See Richard Smyth, ‘Refutatio crassissimi, et exitiosissimi erroris Ioannis Calvini, De Christi merito, et hominis redemptione’, in De infantium baptismo, fos. 37r –39v ; id., ‘Refutatio luculentae, crassae, et exitiosae haeresis Ioannis Calvini, et Christophori Carlili, Angli, qua astruunt Christum non descendisse ad inferos alios, quam ad infernum infimum, qui est locus damnatorum perpetuus, aut ad sepulchrum’, in Confutatio eorum, quae Philippus Melanchthon obiicit contra Missae sacrificium propitiatorium. Cui accessit et repulsio calumniarum Ioannis Caluini, et Musculi, et Ioannis Iuelli, contra Missam, eius canonem, et Purgatorium, denuo excusa (Louvain, 1562), fos. 33r –38v .

Becoming Traditional?

119

What meanest thou concerning this that Christ descended into Hell? Answere. Where it is said that Christ descended into hell, thereby I beleeve that Christ did not onelye suffer in his body the punishment due to my body but also in his soule the punishment due to my soule, which was the torments of hel, second death, sorowes of death and abjection from God … For in a myserable case had we beene, if he had suffered onely the punishment due to our bodies, and not to our soules.¹⁷⁸

George Gifford’s catechism repeated the same doctrine and even took pains to explain at length that 1 Peter 3: 19 had nothing to do with the descent.¹⁷⁹ This insistence reveals an anxiety to eliminate the contrary view, which was still being spread by such influential texts as Nowell’s catechisms, which faithfully echoed the Forty-Two Articles.¹⁸⁰ Those who adopted the Calvinist doctrine of Christ’s sorrows did not necessarily use it as an explanation of the descent. Some preferred to take ‘hell’ here to mean simply the grave—an interpretation favoured by Beza.¹⁸¹ Perkins judged Calvin’s explanation ‘good and true’ but did not think that it was the meaning ¹⁷⁸ [Edward Dering, John More, and John Stockwood], A short Catechisme for Househoulders (London, 1580), sig. B5v (a revision of More and Dering’s Catechism, first published in 1572). On this ‘decidedly Protestant’ but by no means ‘subversive’ catechism, which was regularly reprinted up to the early 1630s, see I. Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996), 66–7, 210, and 634–5; on Dering’s Puritanism, see P. Collinson, ‘A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: The Life and Letters of ‘‘Godly Master Dering’’ ’ (1965), repr. in id., Godly People, esp. 293 (his attitude to the Fathers) and 297–9 (his Catechism); Lake, Moderate Puritans, 16–24. See also John Craig, A Short Summe of the whole Catechisme, wherein the Question is propounded and answered in fewe words, for the greater ease of the common people and Children (London, 1589), fos. 12v –13r (the author was a Scottish minister). Moreover both Calvin’s catechism and the Calvinist Heidelberg catechism were translated into English and often reprinted. ¹⁷⁹ [George Gifford], A Catechisme conteining the summe of Christian Religion giving a most excellent light to those that seeks to enter the pathway to salvation (London, 1586), sig. B8v . ¹⁸⁰ Alexander Nowell, Catechismus, siue prima Institutio, Disciplinaeque pietatis Christianae, Latine explicata (London, 1570), 70: ‘Christum ut corpore in terrae uiscera, ita anima a corpore separata, ad inferos descendisse: simulque etiam mortis suae uirtutem, atque efficacitatem ad mortuos, atque inferos adeo ipsos ita penetrasse … ’, with a marginal reference to 1 Pet. 3: 19. On various views of the descent in catechisms, see Green, Christian’s ABC, 316–19. ¹⁸¹ As far as I know, Beza nowhere explicitly rejects Calvin’s interpretation but see his notes on Acts 2: 27 and on 1 Pet. 3: 19, in >˜ης καινη˜ ς /ιαθήκης ἅπαντα. Nouum D. N. Iesu Christi Testamentum, a Theodoro Beza uersum, ad ueritatem Graeci sermonis e regione appositi: cum eiusdem annotationibus, in quibus ratio interpretationis redditur (Basle, 1560), 348 and 787–8, and his Responsio ad defensiones et reprehensiones Sebastiani Castellionis, in Tractationes Theologicae, i. 461. A booke of Christian Questions and answers.... Written in Latin by the learned clerke Theodore Beza Vezelius, and newly translated into English by Arthur Golding (London, 1574), fo. 7r , teaches that ‘at what time he [Christ] hung uppon the Crosse, he was also in the middes of the torments of

120

Becoming Traditional?

of the Creed’s article: the ‘cursed death in which Christ suffered the full wrath of God’ had already been expressed in the preceding words.¹⁸² The implication in any case was that there had been no local descent. Since this denial seemed to run counter to an impressive amount of patristic evidence,¹⁸³ the question became a test of the respective authority attributed to continental Protestant divines on the one hand, and to ‘the Universal Consent, and all the Fathers of both Churches, both of the Greeks and the Latines’ on the other. This was at least how the case was stated by Bishop Alley, who clearly inclined to the traditional position.¹⁸⁴ Complaining that the question was causing bitter disputes in his diocese, he asked for the convocation of 1563 to settle it.¹⁸⁵ Parker, however, preferred to redraft the article so as merely to reproduce the text of the Apostles’ Creed, implicitly leaving its interpretation open.¹⁸⁶ It may be that the suppression of the reference to Peter was partly a tribute to the authority of Augustine,¹⁸⁷ but the main reason must have been to avoid contradicting continental divines. When a dispute on the descent broke out at Cambridge a few years later, the authorities imposed silence.¹⁸⁸ The controversy could not however be buried for ever. It resurfaced several times in the following years,¹⁸⁹ always implying appreciations of the hell that he might fully deliver us from both the deathes’, but does not mention the descent in this context. ¹⁸² William Perkins, An Exposition of the Symbole or Creede of the Apostles, in Workes, i. 236–8 (Perkins’s interpretation was that Christ ‘was held captive in the grave, and lay in bondage under death’ until his resurrection). See also id., Armilla aurea, id est, miranda series causarum et Salutis et Damnationis iuxta uerbum Dei (Cambridge, 1590), 14; id., Problema, 62–66 (Perkins argued that patristic texts about the descent should be read figuratively). Cf. Strype, Whitgift, 439. ¹⁸³ The Lutheran Dietelmaier, Historia dogmatis de descensu Christi ad inferos, 188, claimed: ‘Longius autem a ueteris ecclesiae sententia nemo facile discessit, quam Reformatae ecclesiae doctores.’ ¹⁸⁴ Strype, Annals, i. 309. Cf. Alley, The poore mans Librarie, ii, fos. 60r –64v . ¹⁸⁵ Strype, Annals, i. 309. ¹⁸⁶ Article III: ‘As Christ died for us, and was buried: so also it is to be believed that He went down into Hell.’ Campion’s claim, Rationes decem, 498, that convocation considered dropping the descent from the Creed—something he had been told by Cheyney—must relate to the debates of this year. ¹⁸⁷ As was later deplored by Samuel Horsley, On Christ’s Descent into Hell, and the intermediate state. A Sermon on 1 Peter III. 18, 19, 20 (London, 1804), 14. ¹⁸⁸ Strype, Parker, book III, c. 18, 258. ¹⁸⁹ See Adam Hyll, The Defence of the Article: Christ descended into Hell. With Arguments obiected against the truth of the same doctrine: of one Alexander Humes. All which reasons are confuted, and the same doctrine cleerely defended (London, 1592). The work is dedicated to Whitgift and alludes, fo. 33r–v , to previous episodes of the controversy. According to a rather untrustworthy source, the separatist Henry Barrow’s refusal to accept that Christ’s soul went into Hell was the true cause of his execution in 1593 (Strype, Whitgift, 415).

Becoming Traditional?

121

credit of the ‘new doctors’ as opposed to the ‘old’ ones.¹⁹⁰ In the 1590s a new interpretation was propounded, in the most intransigent manner, by the Hebraist Hugh Broughton, who argued that the Hebrew Sheol as well as the Greek Hades, which had been translated in Latin by Inferi and in English by Hell, represented merely the world unseen, that is, in the case of Christ, Heaven. The descent into Hell was nothing else than the soul of Christ going to Paradise after his death.¹⁹¹ In this context, in 1597, Bilson dared to attack in one of his sermons ‘that late sprong speculation’ according to which Christ had suffered in his soul the pains of Hell. When challenged on the meaning of the descent, he defended its literal interpretation.¹⁹² He was fiercely attacked by the radical Puritan Henry Jacob. While following Broughton on the meaning of Hades, Jacob maintained that Christ had endured ‘Hellish sorrowes’ on the Cross, and appealed to the consensus of all the Protestant Churches abroad.¹⁹³ Patristic testimonies played a great part in the ensuing controversy, and one might think at first sight to have a clear-cut pattern in which there was an episcopalian appeal to the Fathers and a Puritan rejection of them. In his initial attack on Bilson, Jacob certainly made the Fathers responsible, not only for the misinterpretation of Hades as the place of the damned, but for many other mistakes in religion¹⁹⁴ (thus enabling the ¹⁹⁰ Hyll, Defence of the Article, fo. 34r . ¹⁹¹ Broughton had a bitter dispute in Geneva with Beza. According to his own account, he eventually managed to persuade Whitgift. See Strype, Whitgift, 431–2 and 481–4, whose sources are Broughton’s extremely confused writings, collected in his Works (London, 1662). ¹⁹² Thomas Bilson, The effect of certaine Sermons touching the full Redemption of mankind by the death and bloud of Christ Jesus: wherein besides the merit of Christs suffering, the manner of his offering, the power of his death, the comfort of his Crosse, the glorie of his resurrection, are handled, what paines Christ suffered in his soule on the Crosse: together with the place and purpose of his descent to hel after death: Preached at Paules Crosse and else where in London (London, 1599), sigs. A2r –A4r . ¹⁹³ [Henry Jacob], A Treatise of the sufferings and victory of Christ, in the work of our redemption: Declaring by the Scripturs [sic] these two questions: That Christ suffered for us the wrath of God, which we may well terme the paynes of Hell, or Hellish sorrowes. That Christ after his death on the crosse, went not into Hell in his Soule. Contrarie to certaine errours in these points publiklie preached in London: Anno 1597 (n.p., 1598), 87 ( Jacob says ‘Protestant’, although ‘Reformed’ would have been more accurate). See Wood, Athenae, ii. 308–9, s.v.; on Jacob’s ecclesiological stand, see Brachlow, Communion of Saints, esp. 56–64; N. Tyacke, ‘The ‘‘Rise of Puritanism’’ and the Legalising of Dissent, 1571–1719’ (1991), repr. in id., Aspects, 65. According to Peter Heylyn, Aerius redivivus: or, The History of the Presbyterians (Oxford, 1670), 351, Bilson’s doctrine was also ‘opposed by Gabriel Powel, a stiff Presbyterian’. This is repeated by Wood, Athenae, ii. 308, but there must be some mistake (Heylyn’s account is far from accurate anyway). There is no trace of the book in question and, even by Heylyn’s elastic standards, Powel could hardly be described as a presbyterian. See, however, Milton, Heylyn, 231. ¹⁹⁴ Jacob, Treatise, 95–7.

122

Becoming Traditional?

Bishop to complain of ‘his insolent rejecting the Fathers’¹⁹⁵). In his reply to Bilson’s answer, Jacob even took exception to the expression ‘authorities’, which he accused the Bishop of using on purpose, ‘that the world might conceave their [the Fathers’] words to be warrants unto us, and good Authorities to rest on in matters of Religion. If you had not this drift in your minde, why give you them such a title, which to mee seemeth somwhat insolent indeed?’¹⁹⁶ ‘Gods worde only with us hath indeede Authoritie.’¹⁹⁷ Jacob, however, appealed himself to the Fathers, particularly in his second book. The fact that, if we are to believe Bilson, these quotations had actually been given to Jacob by fellow Puritans¹⁹⁸ only confirms the willingness of such men to argue their case from the Fathers. Sanford and Parker’s subsequent Latin treatise against Bilson included a full discussion of patristic evidence.¹⁹⁹ Bilson, for his part, spoke as guardedly on this matter as in his treatise of episcopacy. He consistently subordinated the Fathers to Scripture and he presented their consensus as a strong presumption for the truth of a doctrine rather than an actual proof of it.²⁰⁰ The Fathers should be received as ‘witnesses of the Scriptures sense’.²⁰¹ Jacob cavilled about the various senses of the word ‘witness’, but his own position was similar.²⁰² Bilson was right to answer that, as to the difference of authority between Scripture and the Fathers, ‘there is no such thing in question betwixt us’.²⁰³ Despite Jacob’s polemical accusations,²⁰⁴ there was no contradiction either, allowing for the diversity of contexts, with what Bilson had previously affirmed, when he had maintained the sufficiency of Scripture against Roman Catholics.²⁰⁵ The Bishop and his Puritan adversaries were still at ¹⁹⁵ Bilson, Full Redemption, 226 and 230. ¹⁹⁶ Henry Jacob, A Defence of a Treatise touching the sufferings and victorie of Christ in the worke of our redemption. Wherein is confirmed, 1 That Christ suffered for us, not only Bodily griefe, but also in his Soule an impression of the proper wrath of God, which may be called the paines of Hell. 2 That after his death on the Crosse he went not downe into Hell (n.p., 1600), 26. ¹⁹⁷ Ibid. 28. ¹⁹⁸ Bilson, Survey, sig. ¶4v . ¹⁹⁹ See Sanford and Parker, De Descensu, esp. book IV. According to Parker’s preface, sig. ∗ 4v , patristic testimonies had been mostly added by himself to Sanford’s draft. ²⁰⁰ Bilson, Full Redemption, 172: ‘the generall faith and confession of all the fathers in all ages and countries, since the first foundation of Christs church, should move men that are modest, not hastelie to leape from the universall consent of al places, and persons grounding themselves on the manifest words of the sacred scriptures.’ Cf. Survey, 415: ‘to their interpretations I binde no mans conscience, farther than evident trueth shall appeare to be in them; onely I wish others, and even you, Sir Inventour, not overhastily to despise their judgements, which the Church of God hath for so many hundred yeeres reverenced and followed.’ ²⁰¹ Bilson, Full Redemption, 349. ²⁰² Jacob, Defence, 27–8. ²⁰³ Bilson, Survey, 82. ²⁰⁴ Jacob, Defence, 28. ²⁰⁵ Bilson, Survey, 84.

Becoming Traditional?

123

one in quoting Augustine to that effect.²⁰⁶ They also agreed in denying that the Apostles’ Creed had been written by the Apostles (‘for then it must needes be Canonicall Scripture’): Bilson maintained that it was apostolical, but not in the literal sense.²⁰⁷ Richard Parkes, an Oxford divine who entered the debate on the conformist side in 1604, was ready to go further and to reject openly the thesis that Scripture might be its own interpreter: You must in the end admit as well the interpreter, as the Text itselfe. For though the worde of God bee the ground of our beleefe, yet is the word of Man directed by the spirit of God, the key that openeth the doore of knowledge into the Scriptures. The due regard whereof prevailed so much with the best writers of Auncient times, that in all points of Religion, they still produced the Testimonies of the reverend Fathers and learned Doctors of the Church, not onely as probable inducements, but also as forcible Arguments to confirme the truth, and to confuse the contrary: teaching what they had learned, not of themselves, that is (to use S. Ieroms words) of presumption, which is the worst Schoolemaster of all other: but of the famous men of the Church,²⁰⁸ whereupon their common phrase was, Sic Minutius Felix, ita Victorinus, in hunc modum est locutus Arnobius: ita intellexit Ambrosius, ita Ciprianus, ita Gregorius etc. In this wise spake Minutius, Victorinus, Arnobius: thus Ambrose, Ciprian, Gregory, etc. did understand this place of Scripture. This was the humility of former ages, but the pride of our times hath banished it, together with all other their vertues.²⁰⁹

Parkes, however, claimed that the literal descent was clearly taught by several passages of Scripture, including 1 Peter 3: 18–20. When his Puritan adversary—who was none other than John Rainolds—objected that the Roman Catholic Andradius (Diego Payva d’Andrada) himself rejected this interpretation, Parkes righly answered that Andradius only said so to make the descent an unwritten tradition and thus to defend the Tridentine ²⁰⁶ For Bilson’s appeal to Augustine ‘in sundrie places of his works’ on ‘the eminence of the Canonicall Scriptures above and against all the writings of others, whosoever they be’, see Survey, 82. Sanford and Parker, De Descensu, book IV (sep. pagination), 63, quote to this effect ep. 82 to Jerome, 1. 3 (CSEL 34/2, 354), which Bilson had quoted in Christian subjection, 293. ²⁰⁷ Bilson, Survey, 664. ²⁰⁸ Jerome, ep. 108 (Epitaphium sanctae Paulae), 26 (CSEL 55, 344). ²⁰⁹ Parkes, Apologie, sig. Fff1r . Parkes was replying to [Andrew Willet], Limbo-mastix: that is, a Canvise of Limbus Patrum, shewing by evident places of Scripture, invincible reasons, and pregnant testimonies of some ancient writers, that Christ descended not in soule to Hell, to deliver the Fathers from thence (London, 1604), 31: ‘But we stand not upon mens opinions for the sense of Scripture, which is the best expounder of it selfe.’ Willet had been taken to task in Parkes’s first book ([Richard Parkes], A Briefe Answere unto certaine Objections and Reasons against the descension of Christ into hell, lately sent in writing unto a Gentleman in the Country (Oxford, 1604), 29, 33, 36) for arguing at length that 1 Pet. 3: 19 did not refer to the descent: see Synopsis Papismi, 350–1.

124

Becoming Traditional?

doctrine of the insufficiency of Scripture.²¹⁰ That 1 Peter 3: 18–20 was to be understood of the descent into Hell and not of Christ’s preaching in the days of Noah could be proved from ‘the coherence of precedentes with consequents’ in Peter’s discourse.²¹¹ Parkes convinced Bilson, who had first professed to omit ‘the darke places of Peter … as nothing pertinent to Christs descent to hell … as Saint Austen long since observed’.²¹² The Bishop now acknowledged that Austens sense hath some difficulties and must have some open additions to the text, before it will agree therewith; as by which he went, and preached to (those that now are) spirits in prison (and were) once disobedient in the daies of Noah. Besides that Peter heere purposely speaking of the death of Christ, verse 18 persueth the consequents thereof in order, as his descent to the spirits in prison vers. 19 his resurrection vers. 21 his ascension and sitting on the right hand of God vers. 22.²¹³

What was that but explaining Scripture by Scripture? The only real point of difference concerned the consensus of the Fathers. Jacob used a standard Protestant argument against it: If all the ancient Bishops (such were the Fathers, or most of them which wee have extant) should hold an opinion, yet it followeth not that all Preachers then were of that minde, nor if the Preachers generally thought so, that all the Christians were so perswaded. Thus it is true, they can witnesse what was held by som good men then, as I said, yea perhaps what was commonly thought in the Churches of those places where they lived. But in no wise what was the judgment of all, no not among themselves, much lesse every where and in all ages.²¹⁴

Bilson, on the other hand, grounded his use of the Fathers on the difference between their ‘maine consent’ in the rule of faith, and their private opinions ‘in other questions of lesse importance wherein they differ sometimes from each other, sometimes even from themselves’, and he referred for this distinction to Vincent of L´erins.²¹⁵ It enabled him to invoke the Fathers as to the fact of the descent and to abandon them as to its purpose, that is the deliverance of the souls of the patriarchs. ²¹⁰ [Parkes], Briefe Answere, 46. See Payva d’Andrada, Defensio, fos. 170v –173v . Parkes was answering an anonymous manuscript treatise. In Apologie, 6, he mentioned Rainolds as ‘nowe constantly reported to be the Authour’, and this is confirmed by Willet, Loidoromastix, 9. Cf. Ussher’s letter to Samuel Ward, 15 March 1630, Bodl., MS Tanner 71, fo. 39r : ‘his [Rainolds’s] writing of Christs descent into Hell (which I feare is utterlye abolished).’ Rainolds, who considered Andradius ‘the best learned man (in my opinion) of all the papists’ (Conference with Hart, 700; see also 74) had previously quoted his interpretation of 1 Pet. 3: 19 to show that papists themselves were apt to follow Reformed exegetes like Beza rather than the Fathers (De Romanae Ecclesiae idololatria, 359). ²¹¹ Parkes, Briefe Answere, 47–8. ²¹² Bilson, Full Redemption, 222–3. ²¹³ Bilson, Survey, 676. ²¹⁴ Jacob, Defence, 27. ²¹⁵ Bilson, Survey, 85.

Becoming Traditional?

125

This second point was definitely irreconcilable with Protestant conceptions of the afterlife, and only the first point, Bilson claimed, was ‘the general confession’ of the Fathers.²¹⁶ Augustine ‘mildly’ confuted ‘that fansie, which had possessed many of the fathers before him’ that the patriarchs were in Hell before Christ came.²¹⁷ The same Augustine admittedly accepted that Christ delivered some unspecified souls from Hell but this was only a ‘very weak’ conjecture.²¹⁸ More embarrassingly, he stated that ‘almost the whole Church with one consent’ believed that Adam was among those delivered, but Bilson deftly got rid of the text: since Austen himselfe leadeth us to dislike the opinion of all the Fathers , that the soules of the righteous were in hel before Christes descent thither; hee openeth the waie for us to aske how the church came, by that perswasion; whether by scripture, or by Tradition? Scripture there is none extant for Adam, more then for all other men. Tradition for things done in hell, where no man living was present, can none bee pretended.²¹⁹

For his part, Parkes used the distinction between ‘the private opinion of one, or some few’ of the Fathers and ‘the general confession of all, or the most of them’ to defend the pre-Augustinian exegesis of 1 Peter 3: 19. ‘The former, no man is bound to receive without good warrant, and approbation of the Scriptures: But for the laster, especially when it is confirmed with the Churches authoritie, to reject it (for mine owne part) I ever accounted a badge of presumptuous singularitie, and pernicious novelty.’²²⁰ To claim that there could be an authoritative consensus of the Fathers even in the face of Augustine’s disagreement seems rather un-Protestant, especially since Parkes appealed to the authority of the Church.²²¹ Willet was quite right to point out that this position was very close to that of Bellarmine. The Jesuit had departed from previous Roman Catholic controversialists, no doubt because he had recognized that making the literal descent an unwritten ²¹⁶ Bilson, Full Redemption, 211–12. ²¹⁷ Ibid. 193–5. Augustine, ep. 164 ad Euodium, 3. 6–7 (CSEL 44, 526–7). ²¹⁸ Bilson, Full Redemption, 196. Augustine, ep. 164 ad Euodium, 3. 8 (CSEL 44, 528). ²¹⁹ Bilson, Full Redemption, 197 (the capitalization is Bilson’s). Augustine, ep. 164 ad Euodium, 3. 6 (CSEL 44, 526), actually clearly distinguished between the case of Adam, for which there was a quasi-consensus (‘Et de illo quidem primo homini, patre generis humani, quod eum indidem soluerit [Christus], ecclesia fere tota consentit’), and that of other patriarchs, the deliverance of which was only asserted by ‘some’ (‘addunt quidam hoc beneficium antiquis etiam sanctis fuisse concessum’). Concerning Adam, he stressed that the belief of the Church could not be groundless, ‘etiamsi canonicarum scripturarum hinc expresse non proferatur auctoritas’. ²²⁰ Parkes, Apologie, sig.Iii1v . Augustine’s interpretation had been reaffirmed by Willet, Limbo-mastix, 32. ²²¹ Bilson was more cautious. See Survey, 676.

126

Becoming Traditional?

tradition was counter-productive: Reformed divines were only too glad to agree that it could not be proved from Scripture. One of Bellarmine’s proofs was 1 Peter 3: 19. He gave several reasons for rejecting Augustine’s contrary interpretation, ‘first, because the common opinion of the Fathers goes against it’.²²² The controversy soon reached Cambridge University, where it spawned the correlative question (which Bilson had cautiously declared irrelevant²²³) of the fate of the souls of the patriarchs before Christ. At a disputation in June 1599, John Overall, Regius Professor of Divinity, maintained that these souls had been in a state of happiness which could be called Heaven in a loose sense, but that it could not be decided whether they had been in Heaven strictly speaking, that is in that place into which Christ ascended after his resurrection. The Scriptures did not provide any clear answer, whereas the ‘common opinion of the Fathers’ as well as of many learned moderns was for the negative.²²⁴ Overall was fiercely attacked for this assertion in the following year (at the Commencement disputation) by his colleague Thomas Playfere, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and a strict Calvinist, who claimed that ‘it opened the door to bring back the whole of Popery’.²²⁵ In the memoir he wrote to justify himself, Overall not only produced a long list of patristic testimonies, but took the remarkable step of ²²² Bellarmine, Disputationes, i. 2a controu. generalis, ‘De Christo capite totius Ecclesiae’, l. IV, c. XIII, col. 546: ‘Primo, non placet haec sententia, quia communis Patrum est in contrarium.’ When writing on the necessity of tradition, Bellarmine had nonetheless instanced the descent among those doctrines which could not be easily gathered out of Scripture (ibid. 1a controu. generalis, l. IV, c. IV, col. 215). See Willet, Limbo-mastix, 1–3. For the use of Andradius’ position against the descent, see Whitaker, Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura, quaest. VI, c. 9, 377–8. ²²³ Bilson, Full Redemption, 188. ²²⁴ On the conflicts over Overall teaching in Cambridge, see the texts transcribed in CUL, MS Gg.1.29 (a copy-book belonging to a pupil of Overall); HMC Salisbury, x. 208–12; H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958), 397–404. On the question ‘utrum animae Patrum ante Christum fuerunt in caelo’, see CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fos. 27r –30v . I was not allowed to consult CUL, MS Dd.3.85, no. 5, which the catalogue says to be ‘in Dr Overall’s own handwriting’, but another autograph memoir written by Overall in 1600 is in Bodl., Rawlinson MS D. 692, fos. 240r –247v . Overall’s defence was published after his death by Richard Montagu, Apparatus ad origines ecclesiasticas (Oxford, 1635), 49–68, §§ 104–50. According to a marginal note in CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fo. 16r (and in Montagu, Apparatus, 49), the controversy was started by a ‘M. Howse e` Colleg. Reginali’ [Walter Howse, fellow of Queen’s College, B.D. 1599, ‘a prominent disputant in the schools’: see Alum. Cant., ii. 419]. Other accusations at Cambridge against Overall (CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fos. 104v –105r ; copy in Rawlinson MS D. 857, fo. 233v ) included ‘that Christ in soul went locally to Hell’ and ‘that Christ suffered not the pains of Hell’. ²²⁵ Rawlinson MS D. 692, fo. 240r (the name of Playfere is given by Montagu, Apparatus, 50); HMC Salisbury x. 211–12. On Playfere, see Collinson, ‘Lady Margaret Professors’, 79–80; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 35.

Becoming Traditional?

127

appealing to the canon Concionatores of 1571. Since no orthodox writer for fifteen centuries after Christ had gathered from Scripture that the souls of the patriarchs had been in Heaven (neither had the conclusion been drawn by the first Reformers, nor even by Calvin), the canon of 1571 forbade one to defend it publicly.²²⁶ By contrast, all the Fathers had taught that Heaven was open to no one before Christ, but that the souls of the patriarchs were ‘in Abraham’s bosom’ or ‘in Hell’, by which the Fathers did not mean the popish limbo but merely ‘a place, wherever it was, outside Heaven, or a state not so perfectly happy than in Heaven’.²²⁷ In the controversy over the descent, perhaps for the first time, high conformists claimed that they differed from ‘Puritans’ on some points of faith, and not merely about ceremonies. ‘This was an early, hesitant step in the path towards a distinctly Anglican theology.’²²⁸ Saravia, who had taught the Calvinist interpretation in the Netherlands, professed to have changed his mind in England under the influence of Bilson and ‘other learned men, who are in no way inferior to either Calvin or Beza’.²²⁹ In retrospect, Peter Heylyn associated this controversy with the Cambridge polemic over Peter Baro’s views on predestination. In both these cases, patristic doctrines had been assailed by the imperialism of Calvinistic ideas.²³⁰ The controversy over the descent was probably more significant. Baro was a foreigner and a mere academic, who only publicized his views in his university, whereas Bilson acted as de facto spokesman of the established Church.²³¹ As their catechisms show, Calvinists indeed tried to make their doctrine part of ²²⁶ Rawlinson MS D. 692, fo. 241r . ²²⁷ Ibid., fos. 241v –242r (Overall’s list of patristic testimonies was rearranged in chronological order and expanded by Montagu, Apparatus, 53–6). ²²⁸ Wallace, ‘Puritan and Anglican’, 286. Cf. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 239–40. ²²⁹ Saravia to Johannes Wtenbogaert, 13 April 1612, in Praestantium ac eruditorum uirorum epistolae ecclesiasticae et theologicae, ed. Philippus van Limborch (3rd edn., Amsterdam, 1704), ep. CLXXXI, 295 (reprinted, rather carelessly, in Nijenhuis, Saravia, document XLVI, 357): ‘Ab illis [Catechismis uestris] tamen dissentio in expositione descensus Christi ad inferos: postquam a uestris eiectus, huc sum reuersus mutaui sententiam, melius hic in Anglia edoctus concionibus et scriptis tum doctissimi uiri Reuerendi Episcopi Vintoniensis, tum aliorum doctorum hominum, qui nulla in parte aut Caluino aut Bezae cedunt.’ ²³⁰ Heylyn, Theologia ueterum, sig. B1v . The theme is recurrent in Heylyn’s works: see Aerius redivivus, quoted above, n. 193; Historia Quinqu-Articularis, sig. A4r ; the catalogue of Calvinist corruptions of doctrine in pre-Laudian Oxford, Cyprianus Anglicus, 51. ²³¹ On the Baro controversy, see Porter, Reformation and Reaction, 376–90. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 9, states that ‘before 1604 the challenge to Calvinism never fully escaped from the university confines’. This is more or less true if Calvinism is understood solely of the doctrine of predestination (see however below, n. 252), but it is somewhat surprising to catalogue as Calvinist (Anti-Calvinists, 253) a sermon which Bilson expressly preached and printed to confute the Calvinist tenet of Christ’s suffering the pains of Hell on the cross.

128

Becoming Traditional?

orthodoxy. After Parkes had published his first book on the descent, Willet appealed to Parliament, in order ‘that one uniformitie of doctrine may be taught and held’, to enlarge the Thirty-Nine Articles so as to condemn explicitly ‘unsound doctrines’, or at least to make it unlawful ‘to defend, or maintaine’ them—in the same way as, on grace and predestination, Puritans would have liked the Lambeth Articles to be given official status.²³² High conformists were unable to impose their understanding of the descent on the whole Church of England. Indeed, their failure was so notorious that Roman Catholic controversialists all over Europe made it an argument against the Church of England.²³³ Thomas Rogers (at that stage a staunch anti-Puritan, though an orthodox Calvinist on grace and predestination) admitted in 1607 that ‘in the interpretation of the article, there is not that consent, as were to be wished’, but insisted that, ‘till wee knowe the native, and undoubted sense of this article, and mysterie of religion’, one should at least reject as ‘errors’ the doctrine of Christ’s suffering the pains of Hell as well as the popish limbus patrum.²³⁴ Richard Field was ²³² Willet, Limbo-mastix, sig. A4r (see however his plea for moderation, ibid. 5–6). Willet’s appeal directly echoes the Millenary Petition of the year before: ‘that there may be a uniformity of doctrine prescribed: no popish opinion to be any more taught or defended’ (The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, 2nd edn., ed. J. P. Kenyon (Cambridge, 1986), 118). It is all the more significant as, according to Willet’s later account (Loidoromastix, sig. ¶¶2r ), his book had ‘passed under the censure’ of the Calvinist (but anti-Puritan) Matthew Sutcliffe. ²³³ See e.g. Theophilus Higgons, The first motive of T. H. Maister of Arts, and lately Minister, to suspect the integrity of his Religion; which was detection of falsehood in D. Humfrey, D. Field, and other learned Protestants, touching the question of Purgatory, and Prayer for the dead (n.p., 1609), appendix, 69: ‘Why is no Minister punished for his repugnancy unto this truth? which is of greater consequence, then crosse, cap, surplice, or any ceremonious thing, or whatsoever institution of your Church, for which many have suffered deprivation of their livings.’ This objection was left unanswered by [Thomas Morton], A Direct Answer unto the scandalous exceptions, which Theophilus Higgons hath lately obiected against D. Morton (London, 1609). Higgons converted back to the Church of England a few years later. See also [William Bishop], The Second Part of the Reformation of a Catholike deformed: by Master W. Perkins (n.p., 1607), ‘An Answere unto M. Perkins advertisement’, sep. pagination, 8–9; Bellarmine, Apologia, 82–4; Francisco Su´arez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae et Apostolicae aduersus Anglicanae sectae errores, cum responsione ad Apologiam pro iuramento Fidelitatis, et Praefationem monitoriam Serenissimi Iacobi Magnae Britanniae Regis (Cologne, 1614), l. I, c. 17, col. 103. ²³⁴ Thomas Rogers, The Faith, doctrine and religion, professed and protected in the Realme of England, and dominions of the same: Expressed in 39 Articles, concordablie agreed upon by the reverend Bishops, and Clergie of this Kingdome, at two severall meetings, or Convocations of theirs, in the yeares of our Lord, 1562, and 1604 … Perused, and by the lawfull authoritie of the Church of England, allowed to be publique (Cambridge, 1607), 16–17: Rogers does not name Calvin but he refers to standard expositions of the Calvinist view such as Hume’s Rejoinder and Dering-More’s and Gifford’s catechisms. On Rogers’s anti-Puritanism, see J. S. Craig, ‘The ‘‘Cambridge Boies’’: Thomas Rogers and the ‘‘Brethren’’ in Bury St Edmunds’, in Wabuda and Litzenberger (eds.), Belief and

Becoming Traditional?

129

more irenical but—while never referring to the controversy—he distanced himself from Bilson on several crucial points. He defended Calvin against Roman Catholic charges of blasphemy and used his thorough knowledge of the Schoolmen to show that Christ could truly be said, in a certain sense, to have suffered the pains of Hell.²³⁵ This was not, however, the meaning of the Creed, which should rather be interpreted as referring to Christ’s descent ‘into the places of souls sequestered, and shut out from the presence of God’, in order ‘to fasten condemnation to the Divell and his Angels, to triumph over the principalities of darknesse, to secure us from being surprized by them, and to prevent our comming thither’.²³⁶ All Protestant divines acknowledged this particular descent. ‘Only this difference may seeme to be amongst them, that some of them thinke he went personally and locally, others onely vertually, in power and operation’, which was no fundamental divergence.²³⁷ 1 Peter 3: 19, at any rate, had nothing to do with it, as Augustine had shown. Bellarmine claimed that Augustine was contrary to all the Fathers on this point. But, The first of the Fathers that he alledgeth, is Clemens Alexandrinus, who indeed understandeth the words of S. Peter … of Christ preaching in Hell after his death in his humane Soule; but, not conceiving to what purpose preaching should serve in Hell, if there were not intended a conversion and saving of some there, he runneth into a most grosse and dangerous errour, condemned and rejected as well by Bellarmine, and his companions, as by us: so that his authoritie, as contrarie to Augustines interpretation, needed not to have beene alledged, nor would not have bene, if Bellarmine had meant sincerely. For Clemens Alexandrinus affirmeth … that so manie Infidels as beleeved in Christ, and listened to the words of his preaching when he came into Hell, were delivered thence, and made partakers of everlasting salvation.²³⁸

In 1 Peter 3: 18–19, the Authorized Version unambiguously sided with Rainolds against Parkes.²³⁹ Practice, 154–76; on his Calvinism, Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 33; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 25–7 (to be qualified by White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, 150–2). ²³⁵ Richard Field, The fifth booke of the Church. Together with an Appendix, containing a defense of such partes and passages of the former Bookes, as have bene either excepted against, or wrested, to the maintenance of Romish errours (London, 1610), 60–2 and 66. ²³⁶ Ibid. 70–2. The same position was adopted by Barlow, Defence of the Articles, 170–8; Robert Abbot, Third Part of the Defence of the Reformed Catholicke, 247–9. ²³⁷ Field, Fifth booke of the Church, 73 and 75–6. ²³⁸ Ibid. 80. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 6. 6. 44. 5–46. 1 (GCS 52, 454 [4th edn.]). ²³⁹ Inasmuch as it rendered ζωοποιηθεὶς τῳ ˜ πνεύματι ‘quickened by the Spirit’, not ‘in’, and ἐν ᾧ [πνεύματι] ‘by which [Spirit]’, not ‘in which’ (see above, n. 173). Parkes, Briefe Answere, had vigorously attacked Rainolds for translating thus, contrary to ‘all our

130

Becoming Traditional?

In the mid-1630s, at the zenith of Laudianism, there was a remarkable project of turning the doctrine of the descent into a test of conformity: ‘ministers and lecturers’ of the diocese of London were to be asked to subscribe inter alia to the proposition ‘That Christ descended locally into hell’. But there is no evidence that these articles were ever enforced in London, although it appears that they were actually used by Bishop Bancroft of Oxford to screen candidates for ordination.²⁴⁰ Still, it was something to have ensured the survival of a distinctly un-Reformed interpretation. Bilson’s interpretation of the descent did not become orthodoxy, but his theological stance was of lasting influence. Conformist divines were now ready to hold their ground against Calvin’s authority. At the Synod of Dort, the descent was the only doctrinal point on which the British delegation asserted the right of their Church to differ from other Reformed Churches.²⁴¹ 4. THE CESSATION OF MIRACLES In the case of the descent, the manner of argument, rather than the doctrine itself, proved of lasting importance. But a doctrine which was to be crucial to the Church of England’s self-definition against both Roman Catholics and Nonconformists originated at about the same time: the cessation of miracles.²⁴² One of the arguments developed by CounterReformation divines to prove that their Church was the true Church of Authorized English translations’ (p. 29), and insisted that ‘the controversie dependeth chiefly, if not wholy’ on these particles (p. 22). ²⁴⁰ ‘Certeine articles propounded to ministers and lecturers in and about London to be assented unto’ [1635], in Visitation articles and injunctions of the early Stuart Church, ed. K. Fincham, ii (Woodbridge, 1998; CERS 5), 126. The Bishop of London at the time was William Juxon but a contemporary source suggests that the author was Laud himself. See Fincham’s note, ibid.; id., ‘Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in Lake and Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy, 128 and 155–6; T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement (Cambridge, 1997), 235–6. ²⁴¹ ‘Acta Synodi’, in Golden remains of the ever Memorable Mr John Hales of Eton College. The Second Impression (London, 1673), 2nd pagination, 162 (1 May 1619). The Calvinist bishop George Carleton had foreseen the difficulty: see his letter to Dudley Carleton, 14 January 1619, in Letters from and to Sir Dudley Carleton, Knt. during his embassy in Holland (2nd edn., London, 1775), 332 (and now in A. Milton (ed.), The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) (Woodbridge, 2005; CERS 13), 197–8). ²⁴² Attention was first called to this neglected topic by D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1981), 66–73. See esp. 72–3: ‘I think that perhaps the doctrine of the cessation of miracles, held as a firm principle, was a fairly recent English

Becoming Traditional?

131

Christ was its continuous possession of miraculous powers. Miracles were held to be, not only a ‘sign’ of Christianity for non-believers, but one of the marks—the so-called ‘notes’—that distinguished the Church from heretical communions.²⁴³ The power of exorcizing devils was presented as particularly important, and Roman Catholic apologists laid much stress on its absence among the Protestant clergy.²⁴⁴ One possible response was that such powers had only been temporary, but Protestant divines, either in England or on the Continent, were not unanimous on this question. Calvin thought it ‘more probable’ that the gift of miracles had been granted to the Church ‘only for a while’, at the time when the gospel was new. He observed that they had ceased ‘not long afterwards’, or at least had become ‘so rare that one might infer that they are not equally common to all times’, but he made no attempt to date this process precisely.²⁴⁵ Foxe, in order to dismiss a miracle allegedly performed by Odo, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the middle of the tenth century, observed that ‘the tyme of miracles is expired, we havyng the Scriptures to guyde us’. The point, however, was specifically invention.... In any case, this doctrine, especially in its Anglican form, which includes diabolic phenomena in the class of miracles, may be quite important, and it certainly deserves further investigation. It makes it possible for a pious Christian to live in a world entirely devoid of any supernatural occurrences.’ Walker further developed the idea in ‘The Cessation of Miracles’, in I. Merkel and A. G. Debus (eds.), Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe (Washington, 1988), 111–24; see also his ‘Valentine Greatrakes, the Irish Stroker and the Question of Miracles’, in M´elanges sur la litt´erature de la Renaissance a` la m´emoire de V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva, 1984), 343–56. It was to be the subject of a book which Walker had begun to prepare before he died. Some materials are preserved in the Walker Archive at the Warburg Institute, London (see files A 6. 1–11). I am grateful to the late Professor J. B. Trapp, who compiled the inventory of the Walker papers, for kindly drawing my attention to them. See also A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 226–32. ´ ²⁴³ See G. Thils, Les Notes de l’Eglise dans l’apolog´etique catholique depuis la R´eforme (Gembloux, 1937), 17–19, 64–5, 123–4, 131–2, 139–45. The distinction between ‘signs’ (for non-believers) and ‘notes’ (for heretics) emerged gradually in the seventeenth century: henceforth most theologians no longer regarded miracles as a note by themselves but as a divine confirmation of the ‘note of holiness’. ²⁴⁴ See e.g. New Testament (Rheims), 50 (on Matt. 17: 19–21), 124 (Mark 13: 22), 132 (Mark 16: 17), 559 (2 Thess. 2: 9); Questier, Conversion, 175–6. On debates over possession and exorcism in early modern England, see generally Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, esp. 559–88. ²⁴⁵ Calvin, Commentarius in Harmoniam euangelicam (1555), CR 73, 825 (on Mark 16: 17): ‘Quanquam autem non exprimit Christus, uelitne hoc temporale esse donum, an perpetuo in ecclesia sua residere: magis tamen probabile est, non nisi ad tempus promitti miracula, quae nouum et adhuc obscurum euangelium illustrent.... Et certe uidemus, eorum usum non ita multo post cessasse, uel saltem adeo rara fuisse eorum exempla, ut colligere liceret non peraeque omnibus saeculis esse communia.’

132

Becoming Traditional?

made against the use of miracles to prove transubstantiation.²⁴⁶ Fulke, who clearly stated that ‘the gift of working miracles, is long since ceased in the Church’, was ambiguous enough on exorcisms to be subsequently appealed to by both sides.²⁴⁷ Hooker quoted Irenaeus (indeed the most explicit witness among the Fathers) to prove that ‘miraculous graces of the spirit continued after thapostles times’ and hinted that, though ‘the vulgar use of those miracles’ had already come to an end in Augustine’s days, they had not wholly disappeared—yet another instance of Hooker’s view of the continuity of church history.²⁴⁸ The notion of the cessation of miracles was used by English conformist writers in reaction to the Puritan John Darrell’s highly publicized activities as an exorcist in the 1590s.²⁴⁹ Darrell stressed that his successes in casting ²⁴⁶ Foxe, Second Volume of the Ecclesiasticall history, 1301. Foxe did not make the point when relating the miracle, i. 199. ²⁴⁷ William Fulke, The text of the New Testament of Iesus Christ, translated out of the vulgar Latine by the Papists of the traiterous Seminarie at Rhemes … with a Confutation of all such arguments, glosses, and annotations, as conteine manifest impietie, of heresie, treason and slander, against the Catholike Church of God, and the true teachers thereof, or the Translations used in the Church of England : Both by auctoritie of the holy Scriptures, and by the testimonies of the ancient fathers (London, 1589), fo. 79v (on Mark 13: 22). Elsewhere (fo. 35r , on Matt. 17: 19), Fulke merely denied that exorcizing was an ‘ordinarie function in the Church of God’. Hence the fact that both Darrell and his opponents were able to appeal to Fulke in their favour: see John Darrell, A true narration of the strange and grevous vexation by the devil, of 7 persons in Lancashire, and William Somers of Nottingham. Wherein the doctrine of possession and dispossession of demoniakes out of the word of God is particularly applyed unto Somers, and the rest of the persons controverted: togeather with the use we are to make of these workes of God (n.p., 1600), 29 (‘neither he [Fulke] nor any other returneth in answer, that men cannot in these daies be possest, which had it bene a truth, they wold never have omitted’), and contra, John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogicall Discourses of Spirits and Divels (London, 1601), 335. Among continental divines, Darrell’s position appeared to be supported by Peter Martyr (see A true narration, 57), while his opponents quoted Chemnitz ([Samuel Harsnett], A Discovery of the fraudulent practises of John Darrel Bacheler of Artes, in his proceedings concerning the pretended possession and dispossession of William Sommers at Nottingham: of Thomas Darling, the boy of Burton at Caldwall: and one Katherine Wright at Mansfield, and Whittington: and of his dealings with one Mary Couper at Nottingham; detecting in some sort the deceitfull trade in these latter dayes of casting out Devils (London, 1599), 19). ²⁴⁸ Hooker, Lawes, V. 66. 3 [Works, ii. 322–3], quoting first Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 2. 32. 4 (SC 294, 340–2), and then Augustine, De uera religione, 25. 47 (CC 32, 217). ²⁴⁹ It had not been used in the early 1590s against William Hacket, who also performed exorcisms, and in a more clearly ‘miraculous’ way than Darrell: see A. Walsham, ‘ ‘‘Frantic Hacket’’: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’, HJ 41 (1998), esp. 42 and 53–4; letter of Robert Cecil to Christopher Hatton, 6 August 1591, in ‘Letters from Sir Robert Cecil to Sir Christopher Hatton, 1590–1591’, ed. P. E. J. Hammer, in I. W. Archer (ed.), Religion, Politics, and Society in Sixteenth-Century

Becoming Traditional?

133

out devils were a confutation of popish claims. They were also part of a Puritan propaganda campaign on which Bancroft was determined to crack down, especially in the tense political context of the fall of the Earl of Essex, in 1598–1601.²⁵⁰ Bancroft had become Bishop of London in 1597 and, because of Whitgift’s advanced years, was almost de facto Archbishop of Canterbury.²⁵¹ He used as his mouthpiece Samuel Harsnett, one of the earliest professed anti-Calvinists in the Church of England, who was to die Archbishop of York in 1631²⁵²—in his will he professed to reject ‘all moderne Popishe Superstitions and alsoe all novities of Geneva not concordant with the maximes’ of the primitive Church.²⁵³ His strategy was remarkable since he did not attempt to juxtapose rival exorcisms to Darrell’s, let alone to claim a monopoly on the practice for the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as Roman Catholics did. He preferred to expose exorcism itself as sheer fraud.²⁵⁴ In this context he hinted—though he refrained from stating it expressly—that the very power to exorcize had ended long ago. ‘These giftes are acknowledged by the fathers, to have shined in the Apostles England (Cambridge, 2003: Camden 5th series 22), 226–7, and editor’s introduction, 213–14 n. 67. ²⁵⁰ Walker, Unclean Spirits, 52–65; T. Freeman, ‘Demons, Deviance and Defiance: John Darrell and the Politics of Exorcism in Late Elizabethan England’, in Lake and Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy, 34–63. For the connection between ‘the Earl of Essex his business’ and the repression carried out against those who distributed Darrell’s writings, see Thomas Gataker, ‘The Life and Death of Master William Bradshaw’, in Samuel Clarke, A Generall Martyrologie (3rd edn., London, 1677), 2nd pagination, 33. The recent study by M. Gibson, Possession, Puritanism and Print: Darrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy (London, 2006) has nothing on the theological argument. ²⁵¹ Babbage, Puritanism, 39–41. ²⁵² Harsnett’s Discovery of the fraudulent practises of John Darrel was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 15 November 1599 (Arber, iii. 150). He had previously given vent to his anti-Calvinism in a Paul’s Cross sermon, usually dated to October 1584: see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 164–5; id., ‘Anglican Attitudes’, 149; White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, 99–100. F. W. Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (Newark, Del., 1993), 42–5, has made a good case for redating it to 1594, which would give it a much greater significance, in the context of the Cambridge disputes. See P. Lake, ‘The ‘‘Anglican Moment’’? Richard Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590s’, in Platten (ed.), Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition, 109–10. This redating has been accepted by Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 84–5. On Harsnett’s subsequent episcopal career, see Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils; M. Reynolds, Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c.1560–1643 (Woodbridge, 2005). ²⁵³ Quoted in Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils, 162. ²⁵⁴ As perceptively observed by S. Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in id., Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988), 96–7.

134

Becoming Traditional?

time, and in some fewe ages after the Apostles.’²⁵⁵ John Deacon and John Walker, two ministers who then took up the cudgels against Darrell, stated definitely that miracles had been restricted to ‘the daies of Christ, and his own disciples’ and had already disappeared in ‘the Churches next, and immediately succeeding the Apostles themselves’—a point which they proved with the argument e silentio that Paul left no instructions concerning miracles in his pastoral letters.²⁵⁶ Selective quotations from Augustine and Chrysostom confirmed that miracles had ceased long ago by their time.²⁵⁷ Against the objection that Fathers such as Tertullian and Cyprian repeatedly mentioned exorcisms—they even made it an argument for the truth of Christianity against the heathens—Deacon and Walker answered that the Fathers only gave ‘their bare reports concerning the apocryphall practise of some others conversing among them’, which were no proof of any miraculous power then extant in the Church.²⁵⁸ An early defence of Darrell’s exorcisms protested that ‘touching the ceasing of miracles there is no determination thereof in holie Scripture’—a confirmation that Protestant positions were not yet fixed on the subject.²⁵⁹ Darrell himself did not deny that miracles had ceased. He insisted that possession was no miracle, but ‘a disease sometime by miracle cured’.²⁶⁰ The power of casting out devils miraculously had been proper to the Apostles. But there was another, ordinary, way of exorcizing, through prayer and fasting, which had been used in the age of the Fathers and could still be used now, ‘seinge that in their dayes miracles were ceased, and an end put to them as well as nowe: and that these fathers had no more a guifte to worke miracles, then Mr More [George More, Darrell’s associate] and ²⁵⁵ Harsnett, Discovery, sig. A4r . Cf. 18–19 (‘It is not here meant to discusse, what we ought to thinke touching the continuance of the power of casting out Devils’), 208 and 210. ²⁵⁶ Deacon and Walker, Dialogicall Discourses, 325 and 331. See however what would appear to be a contradiction, 322. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 578, classified Deacon and Walker as ‘Arminians’ but they seem in fact to have belonged to the ‘godly’ clergy; according to Freeman, ‘Demons’, 51–2, their attack was completely independent from Bancroft; according to Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils, 71–4, they began independently but were used by Bancroft for his own purposes. ²⁵⁷ Deacon and Walker, Dialogicall Discourses, 333–6 quoting Augustine, De uera religione, 25. 47 (CC 32, 217); Chrysostom, In Ioannem hom., 24. 1 (PG 59, 144), In Matthaeum hom., 76. 2 (PG 58, 697: on the wonders of Antichrist), In ep. 1 ad Cor. hom., 6. 2–3 (PG 61, 50–1). ²⁵⁸ John Deacon and John Walker, A Summarie Answere to all the material points in any of Master Darel his bookes (London, 1601), 169 and 175–6. ²⁵⁹ A Breife Narration of the possession, dispossession, and, repossession of William Sommers: and of some proceedings against Mr John Dorrell preacher, with aunsweres to such obiections as are made to prove the pretended counterfeiting of the said Sommers (n.p., 1598), sig. C1v . ²⁶⁰ Darrell, A true narration, 29–32.

Becoming Traditional?

135

my selfe, whome God hath pleased (amonge others) to use in the lyke work’.²⁶¹ Chrysostom and Augustine, who say that miracles have ceased, also attest that exorcisms ‘by the prayers of the congregation’ were common practice in their time. ‘Whereupon it must needes follow, that this manner of deliverance in Chrisostomes and Augustines judgments, and so of the Church in their time, was no miracle.’²⁶² The dispute between Darrell and his opponents definitely did not involve any disagreement on the status and authority of the Fathers. The idea of the end of miracles was slow in becoming prominent in anti-Roman controversy. When he wrote in 1603 against Roman Catholic exorcists (but with Darrell still very much in his mind), Harsnett did not mention it at all.²⁶³ Some conformists—even among future bishops—were prepared to follow Darrell. Justus Lipsius’ relations of exotic miracles allegedly performed at two Belgian shrines of the Virgin outraged Protestants all over Europe.²⁶⁴ When a Belgian Jesuit opposed Lipsius’ stories to the young Joseph Hall and attacked ‘our Church, which (as he said) could not yield one miracle’, Hall answered ‘that in our Church, we had manifest proofs of the ejection of Divells by fasting and prayer’.²⁶⁵ ²⁶¹ [John Darrell], A Detection of that sinnful, shamful, lying, and ridiculous discours, of Samuel Harshnet. entituled: A Discoverie of the fraudulent practises of John Darrell (n.p., 1600), 23–5; A true narration, 40 and 55–8. ²⁶² John Darrell, A Survey of certaine Dialogical Discourses: written by John Deacon and John Walker, concerning the doctrine of Possession and Dispossession of Divels (n.p., 1602), 70, quoting Augustine, De uera religione, 25. 47 (CC 32, 217) and Chrysostom, In ep. 1 ad Cor. hom., 6. 2–3 (PG 61, 50–1). Darrell had previously, 61, quoted Chrysostom, De incomprehensibili Dei natura hom., 3. 7 (PG 48, 727) on public prayers for persons possessed. ²⁶³ [Samuel Harsnett], A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, to with-draw the harts of her Maiesties Subjects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian Religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out devils (London, 1603). The book has been mainly studied by Shakespearian scholars because of its influence on King Lear: see most recently Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, 94–128; Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils (where the Declaration is reprinted as part II). ²⁶⁴ Justus Lipsius, Diua Virgo Hallensis. Beneficia eius et miracula fide atque ordine descripta (Antwerp, 1604); id., Diua Sichemiensis siue Aspricollis: Noua eius Beneficia et Admiranda (Antwerp, 1605). See Walker, ‘Cessation of Miracles’, 113–14; G. Tournoy, ‘ ‘‘Ad ultimas inscitiae lineas imus’’: Justus Lipsius and Isaac Casaubon in the Changing World of Classical Scholarship’, Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 68 (1998) [M. Laureys (ed.), The World of Justus Lipsius: A Contribution towards his Intellectual Biography], 204 n. 36; J. Papy, ‘Lipsius and Marcus Welser: The Antiquarian’s Life as Via Media’, ibid. 184. ²⁶⁵ ‘Observations of some Specialties of divine Providence in the Life of Jos. Hall, Bishop of Norwich. Written with his own hand’, in The Shaking of the Olive-Tree. The Remaining Works of that incomparable Prelate Joseph Hall, D.D. Late Lord Bishop of Norwich (London, 1660), 18–19. See also Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 477, on a similar response by William Bedell. For the continuing practice of exorcism among

136

Becoming Traditional?

Hall had witnessed some of Darrell’s exorcisms and, while distinguishing them carefully from the miraculous exorcisms performed by ‘the Disciples of Christ, and their primitive successors’, he believed to the last that they were genuine.²⁶⁶ George Thomson, on the other hand, answered Lipsius with the argument that the gifts promised to believers at the end of Mark’s Gospel were not meant to be permanent in the Church. The power of performing miracles and that of casting out devils were no different from the gift of tongues: they were suited to the circumstances of the first Christians and were meant to help the preaching of the gospel. Both Chrysostom and Augustine attest that miracles had already ceased in their time.²⁶⁷ The belief that the Pope was Antichrist provided a more radical answer to popish claims. Was it not expressly foretold in Scripture that Antichrist would perform, if not true miracles, at least ‘wonders’?²⁶⁸ James I saw in the ‘absurd’ and ‘ridiculous’ miracles claimed by the Pope a demonstrative proof that he was Antichrist.²⁶⁹ Deacon and Walker even charged Darrell with ruining, by his claim to perform exorcisms, ‘one principall marke, for discerning the Antichristian churches from the true churches of Christ’.²⁷⁰ In his Survey of the miracles of the Church of Rome, Richard Sheldon, a former Roman Catholic priest, briefly mentioned ‘the substraction of miracles from the true Church, which hath passed long agoe’—in a marginal note he specified that they ‘ceased for most part’ in the time of Augustine.²⁷¹ He made this point again to reject the stories of miracles wrought by the relics of St Stephen in Augustine’s City of God, 22. 8—a lasting Puritans, though in a less theatrical manner than that of Darrell, see Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 579–81; Webster, Godly Clergy, 50–3. ²⁶⁶ See Joseph Hall, The Invisible world, discovered to spiritual eyes, and reduced to usefull Meditation (London, 1659: 1st edn. 1652), 191–4, with the commentary of R. A. McCabe, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford, 1982), 308–11. ²⁶⁷ George Thomson, Vindex ueritatis aduersus Iustum Lipsium Libri duo. Prior insaniam eius religionem politicam, fatuam nefariamque de Fato, sceleratissimam de Fraude doctrinam refellit. Posterior ψευδοπαρθένου Sichemiensis, id est, Idoli Aspricollis, et Deae ligneae miracula conuellit. Uterque Lipsium ad orco Gentilismum reuocasse docet (London, 1606), 78–9, quoting Chrysostom, In epist. II ad Thess. hom., 4. 1 (PG 62, 485) and Augustine, De uera religione, 25. 47 (CC 32, 217). ²⁶⁸ Fulke, The New Testament translated by the Papists, fo. 35r , on Matt. 17: 19, went so far as to suggest that Antichrist could work true miracles (see also fo. 85r , on Mark 16: 17). ²⁶⁹ See Isaac Casaubon’s account of James’s conversation, Ephemerides, ed. J. Russell (Oxford, 1850), ii. 880 (16 September 1611). ²⁷⁰ Deacon and Walker, Dialogicall Discourses, 331. See also sig. A7v . ²⁷¹ Richard Sheldon, A survey of the miracles of the Church of Rome, proving them to be Antichristian. Wherein are examined and refuted the six fundamentall Reasons of John Flood Ignatian, published by him in defence of Popish Miracles (London, 1616), 11, with marginal references to the standard texts by Augustine and Chrysostom, and also to Gregory I, Hom. 29 in Euangelia, 4 (PL 76, 1215).

Becoming Traditional?

137

favourite of Roman Catholic controversialists, which Sheldon, according to the common Protestant position, considered an interpolation.²⁷² He did not, however, enlarge on this theme: he much preferred to ridicule popish miracles as frauds. He also reminded his readers that ‘at the very time when Antichrist his ministers shall doe many and great miracles, then the true Christians shall worke either none at all, or else so few, that in comparison of the great multitudes, that Antichrist and his shall do, they will seeme none at all’.²⁷³ In order to deny that miracles were a mark of the Church, Field first stressed that ‘in this last houre, and time so neere Antichrist his revelation, it is not to bee marveiled at, if the worlde like a doating olde man, bee abused by many illusions, and fantasies most like to dreames’.²⁷⁴ He answered secondly that, ‘howsoever it may bee, some miracles were done, by such good men as lived in the corrupt state of the Church, in the dayes of our fathers’, they were not done to confirm popish errors. Lastly, he observed that the use of miracles was ‘specially, if not onely, in respect of infidels’.²⁷⁵ In 1622, Richard Baddeley chose to open his denunciation of a new case of popish exorcism with a confutation of the doctrine of perpetual miracles. First, ‘that Gift cannot bee called perpetuall, which ceased by little and little’, as attested by Chrysostom and Augustine, whose time ‘bordered neare upon the Dayes of the Primitive Church’.²⁷⁶ Secondly, if they were necessarie (especially) for the confirmation of the Doctrines of Faith, as the Romish Priests doe in their Exorcismes professe; then would not S. Gregorie, the first and greatest Pope of that name, have held them necessarie onely for the first begetting, breeding, and nourcing of the Church: Even as (saith ²⁷² Ibid. 65–72. Augustine, De Ciuitate Dei, 22. 8 (CC 48, 815–27). Cf. e.g. Pierre Du Moulin, Defense de la foy catholique contenue au livre de trespuissant et Serenissime Jaques I. roy de la grand’Bretagne et d’Irlande, defenseur de la Foy, contenue en trois Livres. Contre la Response de F. N. Coeffeteau Docteur en Theologie, et Vicaire general des Freres Prescheurs (n.p., 1612), 377; Rivet, Critici sacri specimen, ‘422’ [421]. ²⁷³ Sheldon, Survey, 248, with references to Gregory I, Moralia in Iob, books 33–4 (see esp. 34. 3. 8 [CC 143B, 1737–8]), and Pseudo-Chrysostom, Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, hom. 49 (Tertius tomus operum Diui Ioannis Chrysostomi Archiepiscopi Constantinopolitani, in quo Homiliae in Matthaeum et Ioannem: praeterea commentarii digni lectu in Matthaeum incerto autore (Basle, 1530), 722 [PG 56, 909]; on the expurgation of this passage in Roman Catholic editions, see Quantin, ‘Philologie et th´eologie’, 122–3 n. 112). ²⁷⁴ Field, Of the Church, 185. This was a quotation from Jean Gerson, De distinctione uerarum reuelationum a falsis, written in 1401 (Œuvres compl`etes, ed. P. Glorieux, iii ( Tournai, 1962), 38). ²⁷⁵ Field, Of the Church, 185. ²⁷⁶ [Richard Baddeley], The Boy of Bilson: or, a true Discovery of the late notorious impostures of certain Romish Priests in their pretended Exorcisme, or expulsion of the Divell out of a young Boy, named William Perry, sonne of Thomas Perry of Bilson, in the County of Stafford, Yeoman (London, 1622), 2.

138

Becoming Traditional?

he) the watering of plants is necessary, when they are first planted, which, after they come to growth, will be of no use.²⁷⁷

This is a fully-fledged theory of the progressive cessation of miracles. Baddeley, however, only meant to expose popish miracles as frauds. Whereas the theory would later result in ascribing a unique status to ante-Nicene christianity, as an age of extraordinary supernatural assistances, no English theologian thought of drawing such conclusions at this point. In non-polemical contexts, English writers were even less clear about the end of miracles. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, which was most probably written in 1599, some months before Harsnett’s book against Darrell would appear, the Archbishop of Canterbury famously says: ‘miracles are ceased, | And therefore we must needs admit the means | How things are perfected.’²⁷⁸ But when exactly did that process take place? In 1618, while insisting that he was not competent to decide such questions, William Camden hinted that he believed St Patrick to have performed true miracles to convert the Irish in the fifth century, and he quoted as genuine Augustine’s statement, in City of God 22. 8, that miracles were still happening in his time.²⁷⁹ More strikingly, Thomas Fuller in 1642 accepted that some of the miracles ascribed to Hildegard of Bingen, as late as the twelfth century, might be genuine. And, although he thought that most were spurious, he did not use the argument that miracles had ceased: it seems improbable that miracles (which in Scripture are used sparingly, and chiefly for conversion of unbelievers) should be heaped so many together, made every dayes work, and by her commonly, constantly, and ordinarily wrought.... ²⁷⁷ Ibid. 2–3. Gregory I, Hom. 29 in Euangelia, 4 (PL 76, 1215), commenting on the promise of miraculous gifts in Mark 16: 17–18. ²⁷⁸ Henry V, . i. 67–9. See also the later reference in All’s Well That Ends Well, . iii. 1. The passage was apparently not among those expurgated from the Second Folio by the authority of the Spanish Inquisition—but the censor was not very thorough (see R. M. Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton, 1963), 275–93, ‘Appendix: The Roman Catholic Censorship of Shakespeare: 1641–1651’). It does not seem to have been much commented by Shakespearian scholars: I have found no reference to it in the literature quoted above, n. 263, and it is not mentioned in P. Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (London, 1973). In The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1995), 127, T. W. Craik describes it as ‘proverbial’; in The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2005), 83, note ad loc., A. Gurr calls it ‘a Protestant dogma’. ²⁷⁹ William Camden to Sir Thomas Ryves, 3 July 1618, in V. Cl. Gulielmi Camdeni, et illustrium uirorum ad G. Camdenum epistolae, ed. Thomas Smith (London, 1691), 245–6: ‘likewise where S. Augustine lib. 22 de civitate Dei writeth, Quisquis adhuc prodigia quaerit, magnum est ipse prodigium [CC 48, 815], how he is to be understood, when in the same chapter he acknowledgeth, etiam tunc fieri miracula, etsi non tanta claritate illustrantur [CC 48, 815–16], and doth particulate divers [CC 48, 816–27].’

Becoming Traditional?

139

However Hildegardis was a gratious Virgin, and God might perform some great wonders by her hand; but these piae fraudes with their painting have spoyled the naturall complexion of many a good face, and have made Truth it self suspected.²⁸⁰

It may be rather premature to characterize the Church of England in Harsnett and Bancroft’s time as ‘a scholar’s church’, which held ‘the peculiarly Anglican doctrine’ that ‘there are no more miracles and no more prophecies because there is no more need of them’: ‘everything needful is already there, in the early church, and all the consciencious Christians has to do is find it’.²⁸¹ This is however an apt description of the way in which Restoration apologists presented their Church and the roots of this representation go back to Harsnett and Bancroft’s repression of Puritan exorcisms.²⁸²

5. FROM DISTINCTIVENESS TO SINGUL ARIT Y In the Cambridge dispute over Overall’s views, the canon on preachers assumed a new meaning. Overall made it into a fundamental rule.²⁸³ On creating the Doctors of Theology at the Commencement of 1599²⁸⁴ he solemnly adjured them, in Irenaeus’ words, to build doctrine on the ‘firm and solid rock’ of the Scriptures but also to take care ‘that the line of expounding the prophets and apostles be drawn according to the rule of the ecclesiastical and Catholic sense, as Vincent of L´erins says very well’.²⁸⁵ This was exactly what had been prescribed by the ‘priceless’ and ‘truly salutary’ canon of 1571, which, if diligently observed, would be the sure means of cutting short every novelty and error.²⁸⁶ One should take care to distinguish, ²⁸⁰ Thomas Fuller, The Holy State (Cambridge, 1642), book I, c. 13, 43–4. ²⁸¹ Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils, 51–2. ²⁸² See below, 303–4. ²⁸³ The significance of this move has been rightly pointed out by Milton, ‘ ‘‘Anglicanism’’ by Stealth’, 159–76, esp. 163–4. ²⁸⁴ CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fos. 22r –25r ; an extract is transcribed in Bodl., Rawlinson MS D. 857, fo. 223r . ²⁸⁵ CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fo. 23v , quoting Irenaeus 2. 27. 3 [2. 46 in 16th-century editions] (SC 294, 268): ‘in petra firma et ualida et in aperto posita aedificare suam domum’; Vincent of L´erins, Commonitorium, 2. 4 (CC 64, 149): ‘ut propheticae et apostolicae interpretationis linea secundum ecclesiastici et catholici sensus normam dirigatur.’ Overall quoted Vincent’s text again on 30 June 1606 (CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fo. 87r ). ²⁸⁶ Ibid., fos. 23v –24r . Overall also appealed to the canon in the conclusion of a doctrinal statement which he drew up in the 1610s, before the Synod of Dort, ‘Sententia Ecclesiae Anglicanae de Praedestinatione et Capitibus annexis. Ultima reuisio’, ibid., fo. 14r . On this text, see Milton (ed.), British Delegation and Synod of Dort, 55–6 and 71 n. 142. It was first printed, with a false attribution to Davenant, as an appendix to John Davenant, Dissertationes duae: prima de morte Christi, quatenus ad omnes extendatur,

140

Becoming Traditional?

first, between the interpretation of particular places of Scripture, on which progress was possible, and the dogmas of religion; secondly, between what the Fathers asserted ‘dogmatically’ and what they said in passing, and also between their consensus and the points on which they disagreed. This was the way to defeat all popish frauds. Although Overall specified that patristic teaching was only authoritative insofar as it was grounded on Scripture,²⁸⁷ some of his expressions have a quite un-Protestant ring. It is striking to see him quote the biblical injunction ‘not to remove the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set’, which Tobie Matthew had interpreted as referring to Scripture alone.²⁸⁸ In his dedication to James I of the collected edition of Jewel’s works, in 1609, Overall joined together Jewel’s challenge and the canon on preachers.²⁸⁹ The veteran Jesuit controversialist Robert Persons had accused Jewel of hypocrisy, contrasting his challenge with the open rejection of the Fathers by continental Reformers.²⁹⁰ And ‘all other English Protestant writers’ after Jewel (Persons instanced Calfhill, Humphrey, Whitaker, and others) claimed that the Fathers, even when unanimous, had no authority without scriptural proofs: ‘so as if M. Iewell had dealt plainly he might only have called for Scripture at our hands, and not so often for Fathers.’²⁹¹ This was an old recusant argument, but Overall’s answer struck a new note. He explained the texts produced by Persons in such a way as to make them unobjectionable even by Roman Catholic standards.²⁹² English Protestants had only objected to the turning ‘single, private, and naked testimonies’ of the Fathers into ‘groundes of faith’, whereas ‘those grounds of faith, are to be deduced from the Scriptures and ancient Creed of the Apostles, declared in the first generall Councels of the Primitive Church’.²⁹³ Elizabethans would have rather said that the Scriptures were the grounds of faith and that the Creed was deduced from them. Here they appeared to be almost on a par: ‘Unto which divine and heavenly rules … whatsoever is positively set downe by consent of Fathers to be consonant and agreeable; quatenus ad solos Electos restringatur. Altera de praedestinatione et reprobatione (Cambridge, 1650): see a note in Thomas Barlow’s hand in the Bodl. copy, shelfmark I 7.7 Th.; Bernard, Judgement of the Late Arch-Bishop, sig. A5r . It was published under Overall’s name in the anonymous Arminian collection, Articuli Lambethani (London, 1651), 41–55, but the final page was omitted; see now Milton (ed.), British Delegation and Synod of Dort, Document 2/7, 84. ²⁸⁷ CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fo. 24v : ‘Secundum [discrimen] est, inter ea quae Patres ex Scripturis dogmatice asserunt, et ea quae obiter aliis de causis loquuntur.’ ²⁸⁸ See above, 59. ²⁸⁹ Works of Iewell, sig. ¶2r–v . ²⁹⁰ [Robert Persons, SJ], A Treatise tending to mitigation towardes Catholicke-Subjects in England (n.p., 1607) [Allison–Rogers, ii, no. 639], 495 (quotations from Luther, Calvin, and Beza are given 496–7). ²⁹³ Ibid. sig. ¶5r . ²⁹¹ Ibid. 500–1. ²⁹² Works of Iewell, sig. ¶5r–v .

Becoming Traditional?

141

is by our godly Bishop heere [Jewel], and by the rest of our Church with due observation and commendation of the Fathers acknowledged, received and mainteined: and nothing thus by them delivered and held, is refused by us.’²⁹⁴ The canon of 1571 henceforth became prominent in conformist discourse. Archbishop Williams is said to have entertained great respect for the Fathers and to have often quoted the canon to prove ‘that a Disciple of the Church of England must be their Disciple’. Williams had been Overall’s pupil at Cambridge and greatly admired him for his skilful use of Scripture and Fathers.²⁹⁵ Overall’s scheme of church history was akin to that of Hooker. The Reformation was a ‘repurgation’, after which our Church ‘for all substantiall parts and points, remaineth the same it was before, one true Catholike Church from the beginning’.²⁹⁶ A corollary was to recognize that the Church of Rome was a true Church which, though corrupt, retained a legimitate authority in the countries where it was established. Overall refined the plea for the salvation of Roman Catholics that Hooker had made against exclusive Calvinists in 1586. Not only on account of their invincible ignorance, but also because of their deference to ‘the order of the Church’ and of their determination to live ‘in the unity’ of their parishes, might Englishmen before the Reformation, as well as ‘many’ at present on the Continent, ‘well be thought true members of the Catholike Church, and to stande in state of Grace and Salvation’.²⁹⁷ Conversely, the main ²⁹⁴ Ibid., sig. ¶6r . ²⁹⁵ John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata: a Memorial Offer’d to the Great Deservings of John Williams, D.D.... Containing a Series of the Most Remarkable Occurrences and Transactions of his Life, in Relation both to Church and State (London, 1693), part I, 16. On Williams’s admiration for the method, though not necessarily all the conclusions, of Overall, see 10–11. Hacket’s portrait of his hero is certainly a flattering one (see Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 57, 179, 274) but Williams had a well-attested interest in patristic studies: see his correspondence with John Bois in 1630 on the newly discovered epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, Bodl., MS Smith 73, 3–13; letter of Patrick Young to Bois, 23 June 1633, in Patricius Junius (Patrick Young) Bibliothekar der K¨onige Jacob I und Carl I von England. Mitteilungen aus seinem Briefwechsel, ed. J. Kemke (Leipzig, 1898), 69. Richard Montagu planned to dedicate to Williams his editio princeps of Eusebius of Caesarea’s writings against Marcellus of Ancyra, which was eventually published in Paris as an appendix to Eusebius’ Demonstratio euangelica (see Montagu’s letter to Holstenius, 3 February [1625], BAV, Barberinianus lat. 2181, fo. 73r ; Quantin, ‘J´esuites et e´rudition anglicane’, 697–8). ²⁹⁶ Works of Iewell, sig. ¶3r . ²⁹⁷ Ibid., sigs. ¶3v –¶4r . Compare Hooker, ‘A learned discourse of justification, workes, and how the foundation of faith is overthrowne’, in Works, v. 120: ‘The people followinge the conducte of theire guydes and observing as they did exactly that which was prescribed them, thought they did god good servyce when indeed they did dishonour him’ (the case of present Roman Catholics on the Continent is not considered). This sermon, published for the first time in 1612, had been preached by Hooker in the

142

Becoming Traditional?

charge levelled at popish recusants in England was no longer one of idolatry and heresy but one of schism.²⁹⁸ The next stage was to make moderation and faithfulness to antiquity into distinctive marks of the Church of England, by comparison not only with Rome but also with continental Reformed Churches. The idea seems not to have originated with Englishmen but with continentals, although defenders of the religious establishment were quick to seize upon it. At the Hampton Court conference, Bancroft quoted Sully, Henry IV’s Huguenot minister, who had come to England as extraordinary ambassador to compliment James I on his accession, and who had said that, if the Reformed Churches in France had kept the same order as the Church of England, ‘there would have bene many thousands of Protestants more there’.²⁹⁹ By the turn of the seventeenth century, a number of scholars and divines had reacted throughout Europe against the tightening of confessional lines, be they those of dogmatical Calvinism or those of post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism. They looked to the episcopal Church of England as a potential key player in the longed-for reunion of Christendom. Saravia already praised the English Reformation for its unique conformity to antiquity, whereas others had blindly rejected everything they found practised in the Church of Rome, even though it might be of apostolic tradition.³⁰⁰ James I’s public commitment to the cause of religious reconciliation, especially in his Premonition of 1609, further heightened the role of England as a European centre of religious irenicism.³⁰¹ The most famous instance of this attitude is the French Protestant scholar Isaac Casaubon.³⁰² The Roman Catholic Church was reasserting itself in Temple Church in March 1586. See R. Bauckham, ‘Hooker, Travers and the Church of Rome in the 1580s’, JEH 29 (1978), 37–50; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 285–6; on the social importance of the question, Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, 205–10. ²⁹⁸ Works of Iewell, sig. ¶4r . See later Richard Montagu, ‘Concerning Recusancie of communion with the Church of England’, ed. A. Milton and A. Walsham, in S. Taylor (ed.), From Cranmer to Davidson: A Church of England Miscellany (Woodbridge, 1999), 101. ²⁹⁹ Barlow, Summe and substance, 38; for the success of this quotation among ceremonialist writers of the 1630s, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 78–9. On Sully’s embassy ( June–July 1603), see B. Barbiche and S. de Dainville-Barbiche, Sully: l’homme et ses fid`eles (Paris, 1997), 150–4; on his irenical Protestantism, ibid. 414–23. He was indeed impressed by the service and music in Canterbury Cathedral: see Maximilien de B´ethune, baron de Rosny, duc de Sully, M´emoires, vi: L’Ambassade vers Jacques Ier d’Angleterre (Clermont-Ferrand, 2006), 72. ³⁰⁰ Saravia, Defensio contra Bezam, sigs. ¶¶2v –¶¶3r . ³⁰¹ See Patterson, James VI and I, esp. 124–54. ³⁰² The best study is still M. Pattison, Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) (2nd edn., Oxford, 1892). On Casaubon’s religious crisis, see C. Vivanti, Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento ( Turin, 1974: 1st edn. 1963), 342–55.

Becoming Traditional?

143

France after the turmoil of the religious wars, and its divines made the appeal to antiquity their strongest argument. Cardinal Du Perron, the leading figure of the French episcopate at the time and the chief exponent of these tactics, had his eyes on Casaubon as a potential choice convert. Seconded by the Jesuit Fronton Du Duc, an outstanding patristic scholar, he closeted him on several occasions and challenged him with patristic quotations. Casaubon first stood his ground (adducing for example passages of Augustine and Theodoret against transubstantiation) and protested against rumours that he had confessed himself to be beaten by the arguments of his opponents.³⁰³ He then began to vacillate. French Calvinists, as a reaction against the Roman Catholic constant rehearsal of patristic texts, tended in those years to adopt an intransigent sola Scriptura line. The national synod of 1603 forbade preachers to quote from the Fathers in their sermons.³⁰⁴ Controversialists like Du Moulin repudiated patristic authority in the most provocative manner, claiming that to follow the Fathers would precipitate people into many errors and even make them ‘Anabaptists with Cyprian’ (who held that baptism by heretics was invalid).³⁰⁵ Casaubon was outraged by such iconoclasm towards the Fathers.³⁰⁶ Du Moulin’s claim that Scripture was so clear as to need no interpreter contradicted Peter’s warning against private interpretation and opened the door to an endless proliferation of ‘novel and monstrous opinions’.³⁰⁷ Calvin, whom his disciples had blindly followed, had departed on several points from Christian antiquity. The most important was the eucharist³⁰⁸ but Casaubon’s list also included church government, grace and predestination, and Christ’s descent into Hell, on which ‘Calvin speaks with too much cruelty’.³⁰⁹ About 1610 there was expectation on both sides that the great scholar would change his religion. Du Moulin thought that he was hesitating on the verge of popery and ³⁰³ Casaubon to Du Perron, 13 October 1604, in Isaaci Casauboni Epistolae (Rotterdam, 1709), 2nd pagination, no. 417, 222–3. ´ ³⁰⁴ Tous les Synodes Nationaux des Eglises Reform´ees de France; auxquels on a joint des mandements roiaux, et plusieurs lettres politiques, sur ces Matieres Synodales, ed. Jean Aymon ( The Hague, 1710), i. 260. ³⁰⁵ Pierre Du Moulin, Apologie pour la saincte Cene du Seigneur. Contre la presence corporelle, et transsubstantiation. Item contre les messes sans communians (2nd edn., La Rochelle, 1609), fos. 208v –209v . ³⁰⁶ Casaubon to Petrus Bertius, 29 September 1611, Epistolae, no. 743, 433; to Daniel Heinsius, 7 October 1611, ibid., no. 744, 433–4. ³⁰⁷ Casaubon to Petrus Bertius, 29 September 1611, ibid. 433. Compare the Protestant exegesis of 2 Pet. 1: 20, above, 60. ³⁰⁸ Casaubon to Daniel Tilenus, 2 May 1610, ibid., no. 1043, 607–8; to Johann Wtenbogaert, 26 May 1610, no. 670, 350. ³⁰⁹ See Johann Wtenbogaert’s summary of his discussion with Casaubon in Paris in 1610, in Praestantium ac eruditorum uirorum epistolae, ed. van Limborch, 250–‘249’: ‘Pour la descente aux enfers, M. Calvin parle trop cruellement.’

144

Becoming Traditional?

blamed his reading of the Fathers.³¹⁰ There is evidence that Casaubon hinted to Du Perron and Du Duc that his ‘divorce from Calvinist errors’ on the eucharist was imminent.³¹¹ Whether he ever actually thought of going over to Rome is another matter. He remained unreconciled to many of its tenets, and above all to papal supremacy.³¹² He saw in the unprejudiced study of the Fathers a means for the reconciliation of Christendom, and he deplored that divines of both sides only approached their writings with a controversial agenda, as quarries of useful quotations to insert in polemical treatises.³¹³ Casaubon was saved from this uncomfortable state of suspension by James I’s invitation to come to England. The established Church struck him as being exactly what he had been looking for. In conversations with Overall, Saravia, and Andrewes (‘a very wise man, and very wellread in the Fathers’), he heard views akin to his own on the necessity of episcopal succession, against the ‘detestable’ doctrine of Christ’s suffering the pains of Hell and Calvin’s shocking contempt for the Fathers, on the obscurity of Scripture and the necessity of appealing to the Fathers to decide between conflicting interpretations.³¹⁴ His diary records his ‘delight’ at the episcopal consecration of the Scottish bishops in London, according to the English ordinal.³¹⁵ His letters to his continental correspondants expressed admiration: he had recognized in England ‘the face of the ancient Church, which [he] had come to know through the writings of the Fathers’; he was in everyday contact with bishops who were most learned, most pious, and ‘most fond of the ancient Church’; ‘if I am not mistaken, the soundest part of the whole Reformation is in England, where the love of Antiquity flourishes together with the love of Truth.’³¹⁶ ³¹⁰ Letter of Du Moulin to James Montagu, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 1610, in S. Clementis epistolae duae ad Corinthios. His subnexae sunt epistolae aliquot Singulares, uel nunc primum editae, uel non ita facile obviae, ed. Paul Colomi`es (London, 1687), Epistola XXVIII, 282. The whole letter is translated in Pattison, Casaubon, 401–3. ³¹¹ See Fronton Du Duc’s solemn affirmation in Sancti Patris nostri Basilii Magni Caesareae Cappadociae Archiepiscopi, opera omnia (Paris, 1618), appendix, notes to vol. ii, sep. pagination, 25 (‘fidem dederat se Caluinianis erroribus nuntium proximis feriis Pentecostes remissurum’). ³¹² Pattison, Casaubon, 215 and 269. On Casaubon’s subsequent exchanges with Du Perron once in England, see below, 216–17. ³¹³ Casaubon’s dedication of … B. Gregorii Nysseni ad Eustathiam, Ambrosiam et Basilissam epistola. Isaacus Casaubonus nunc primum publicauit, Latine uertit, et illustrauit Notis (Paris, 1606), sig. e4r–v . ³¹⁴ Bodl., MS Casaubon 28, fos. 4r (‘dicta uiri sapientissimi, et in Patrum lectione exercitatissimi, D. Episcopi Eliensis’), 6r–v (Saravia), 7r–v (Overall). ³¹⁵ Casaubon, Ephemerides, ii. 781 (31 October 1610). See also the entry for 4 January 1611, 810, on the English communion service. ³¹⁶ Casaubon to Daniel Heinsius, 8 January 1611, Epistolae, no. 703, 369: ‘Etiam illud solatio mihi est, quod in hoc Regno speciem agnosco ueteris Ecclesiae, quam ex Patrum

Becoming Traditional?

145

Casaubon’s great work while in England was his answer to Baronius’ Annales, the masterpiece of Tridentine historiography. James I and his theological advisers clearly meant the book to have a semi-official character.³¹⁷ Casaubon published a first instalment just before his death, in 1614, with a dedication to James I in which he denounced novelty (either flaunted by people ‘full of their own opinion’, or camouflaged as pseudo-antiquity) as the source of all the troubles and calamities of the Church.³¹⁸ Thus in the early ages of Christianity, the truth had been assailed both by noveltyseeking heretics and by pagans who pretended to follow their ancestors. The Fathers had defended the truth against both.³¹⁹ Then came all the novelties of the Church of Rome until the Reformation.³²⁰ Casaubon rejoiced that England was now freed from this bondage. Its felicities under James I included free access to Scripture, ‘not in order that the faithful should interpret it after their own sense’ but ‘in accordance with the expositions of the first doctors of the Church’.³²¹ Some, indeed, in their eagerness to break with Rome, had gone too far and departed from ‘pious antiquity’. Basil of Caesarea (in his well-known letter concerning Dionysius of Alexandria’s doctrine of the Trinity) had called that ‘to miss the middle point by pulling scriptis didici. Adde, quod Episcopis ὁσημέραι συνδιάγω, doctissimis, sapientissimis, εὐσεβεστάτοις, et quod mihi nouum est, priscae Ecclesiae amantissimis’; Casaubon to Claude Saumaise, 8 November 1612, ibid., no. 837, 489: ‘Quod si me coniectura non fallit, totius Reformationis pars integerrima est in Anglia. Ubi cum studio ueritatis ´ uiget studium Antiquitatis.’ See M. Simon, ‘Isaac Casaubon, Fra Paolo Sarpi et l’Eglise d’Angleterre’, in Aspects de l’anglicanisme: colloque de Strasbourg (14–16 juin 1972) (Paris, 1974), 39–66. ³¹⁷ For the importance they attached to the work, see Lancelot Andrewes to Casaubon, 23 August, no year, BL, MS Burney 363, fo. 26r ; James Montagu, on behalf of James I, to Casaubon, 5 December 1611 and 20 January 1612, MS Burney 365, fos. 235r and 238r . Casaubon’s Exercitationes were printed by John Bill, the King’s printer, ‘by our direction’ (letter of James to the Stationers’ Company, 10 July 1618, in Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602–1640, ed. W. A. Jackson (London, 1957), 362–3). ³¹⁸ Isaac Casaubon, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis Exercitationes XVI. Ad Cardinalis Baronii Prolegomena in Annales, et primam eorum partem, de Domini Nostri Iesu Christi Natiuitate, Vita, Passione, Assumtione (London, 1614), sig. ∗ 3r . Thomas Hearne wrote in 1718 on the flyleaf of his copy [Bodl., shelfmark C. 10. 12 Th]: ‘The Epistle Dedicatory to this Book is highly valuable, and look’d upon as excellent.’ See also for instance Exercitatio XVI, 484, where Casaubon contrasts ‘errores modicae uetustatis’ to ‘uera antiquitas’. ³²⁰ Ibid., sigs. ∗ 4r – ∗∗ 1v . ³¹⁹ Ibid., sigs. ∗ 3v – ∗ 4r . ³²¹ Ibid., sig. ∗∗ 4v : ‘non ut illas [Scripturas] ex proprio sensu fidelis interpretetur: sed ut iis, quae habent perspicua, (habent autem, si credimus Patribus, omnia ad salutem necessaria,) et consentientibus primorum Ecclesiae Doctorum expositionibus, animum sibi muniat aduersus tot falsas opiniones, quae pro antiquis fidei articulis hodie incautis obtruduntur.’

146

Becoming Traditional?

too strongly in the contrary direction’.³²² Thanks to the ‘moderation’ peculiar to the Church of England and to ‘the middle course’ it steered as a result, no Church at present came closer to ‘the shape of the Church as it used to be in its prime’.³²³ Such praise made a powerful contribution to the self-consciousness of the Church of England. Hall appealed to Casaubon in his Episcopacie by Divine Right asserted, a semi-official manifesto against the Scottish Covenanters, at the time of the Bishops’ Wars, which Laud had closely read over before publication.³²⁴ During the difficult times of the Interregnum, Henry Hammond recalled Casaubon’s letters and they became favourites of Restoration divines.³²⁵ In his published Exercitationes, Casaubon concentrated on papal claims but, had he lived to bring out a second volume, he would also have ‘repressed the fury of Puritans’ against the apostolic distinction of bishops and presbyters.³²⁶ He intended to confute the Presbyterian notes that Simon Goulart had inserted in the Geneva edition of Cyprian.³²⁷ Whitgift had ³²² Casaubon, Exercitationes, sig. 5∗ 4r and again 373 and 513: ‘τ˜ῃ ἀμετρίᾳ τ˜ης ἀνθολκ˜ης διαμαρτε˜ι ν το˜υ μεσο˜υ, prae studio immoderato nitendi in contrarium, aberrare a medio’. See Basil, epistle 9 to Maximus the philosopher, 2 [PG 32, 269] (on its use by 16th-century divines, see above, 65). There is a note on this point in Casaubon’s papers, Bodl., MS Casaubon 14, fo. 256r : ‘inter grauissima seculi nostri mala istud est.’ ³²³ Ibid., sig. 6∗ 4r : ‘ut ad florentis quondam Ecclesiae formam nulla hodie propius accedat, quam tua, inter uel excessu uel defectu peccantes mediam uiam secuta.’ ³²⁴ Joseph Hall, Episcopacie by Divine Right asserted (London, 1640), 1st part, 16. See Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 227–38 and 263–76, for correspondence on the book between Laud and Hall. ³²⁵ Hammond to Thomas Smith, 4 January 1653, in [N. Pocock], ‘Illustrations of the State of the Church during the Great Rebellion’, Ecclesiastic and Theologian, 13 ( January–June 1852), 325; John Durel, A View of the Government and Publick Worship of God in the Reformed Churches beyond the Seas. Wherein is shewed their Conformity and Agreement with the Church of England, as it is established by the Act of Uniformity (London, 1662), 296–7; id., Sanctae Ecclesiae Anglicanae aduersus iniquas atque inuerecundas schismaticorum criminationes, Vindiciae (London, 1669), epigraph on title page; Puller, Moderation, 82. Casaubon’s letters in praise of the Church of England were made widely available as early as 1638 by the first edition of his correspondence (see P. Dibon, ‘Les Avatars d’une e´dition de correspondance: les Epistolae I. Casauboni de 1638’ (1981), repr. in id., Regards sur la Hollande du Si`ecle d’Or (Naples, 1990), 221–66). His diary remained unpublished until the 19th century but some English divines read it in manuscript and the two passages mentioned above were reproduced by Colomi`es, Clementis epistolae duae ad Corinthios, 370–1 (the second passage with an interesting correction). ³²⁶ See Bodl., MS Casaubon 3, no. 1, p. 15 (the attack against Puritani was omitted in the partial edition by Johann Christoph Wolf, Casauboniana siue Isaaci Casauboni uaria de Scriptoribus Librisque iudicia, Obseruationes Sacrae in utriusque Foederis loca, Philologicae item et Ecclesiasticae, ut et Animaduersiones in Annales Baronii Ecclesiasticos ineditae, ex uariis Casauboni MSS. in Bibliotheca Bodleiana reconditis nunc primum erutae (Hamburg, 1710), 139). ³²⁷ Bodl., MS Casaubon 14, fos. 249v and 252r ; Opera D. Caecilii Cypriani Carthaginiensis Episcopi … Editio ultima prioribus emendatior: cui nunc primum accesserunt …

Becoming Traditional?

147

complained to Beza at the time that these notes ‘did not less deprave the Sense of that Father than those of Pamelius the Pontifician’.³²⁸ ‘Note here’, Casaubon wrote in his notebook, ‘that in the present state of the Church in Europe, the Church of England is the only one that may appropriate’ to itself Cyprian’s writings concerning episcopacy: papists distort them to the Pope, Calvinists like Goulart to their pastors.³²⁹ Casaubon insisted that one should not idolize the Fathers or ascribe to them the inerrancy that was unique to Scripture. It was ‘ignorance mixed with superstition’ not to recognize that they had made mistakes on historical questions.³³⁰ An obvious instance was their quoting as if genuine the Sibylline oracles (with their many ‘prophetical’ passages about Christ) and the writings that went under the name of Hermes Trismegistus: Casaubon set about to expose both as forgeries.³³¹ Many orthodox Christians (‘for I am not speaking here of books written by heretics’) judged it ‘a worthy deed’ to forge books to promote the truth. Such was also the origin of a great many texts which were put under the name of Christ and the Apostles.³³² The Fathers had shown an amazing propensity to quote from these fakes and even from the worst of them.³³³ Montagu shared Roman Catholic outrage at this ‘unseasonable and improper calumny, rather than accusation’.³³⁴ It was a ‘detraction either from the judgement and intelligence, or from Responsiones passim interiectae ad ea quae Pamelius pro dogmatum Pontificiorum confirmatione ex Cypriano et ueteribus Theologis protulit ([Geneva], 1593). Goulart reproduced the text of Jacques de Pam`ele’s Roman Catholic edition (1568) but added many theological notes. See P. Petitmengin, ‘De Th´eodore de B`eze a` Jacques Godefroy: travaux protestants sur Tertullien et Cyprien’, in I. Backus (ed.), Th´eodore de B`eze (1519–1605): actes du colloque de Gen`eve (septembre 2005) (Geneva, 2007), esp. 317–23. In the course of his discussion with Wtenbogaert, Casaubon complained that Goulart’s Calvinism was ‘un vray Pharisaisme’ (Praestantium ac eruditorum uirorum epistolae, ed. van Limborch, ‘249’). ³²⁸ Whitgift to Beza, 1 February 1594, in Strype, Whitgift, 406 (English translation). ³²⁹ Bodl., MS Casaubon 14, fo. 251v : ‘Hic σημείωσαι ut est hodie facies Ecclesiae in Europa solam esse Ecclesiam Anglicanam quae possit loca illa Cypriani suae Ecclesiae accommodare.’ ³³⁰ Casaubon, Exercitationes, exercitatio I, n. XXVI, 125. See also below, 232, on Justin’s story of the cult of Simon Magus in Rome. ³³¹ Ibid., n. X, 70–87 and exercitatio XVI, n. CLIV, 772. See A. Grafton, ‘Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 46 (1983), 78–93. ³³² Casaubon, Exercitationes, exercitatio I, n. X, 73: ‘primis Ecclesiae temporibus quam plurimos extitisse, qui facinus palmarium iudicabant, coelestem ueritatem figmentis suis ire adiutum: quo facilius uidelicet noua doctrina a Gentium sapientibus admitteretur.... Quo ex fonte dubio procul sunt orti libri sexcenti, quos illa aetas et proxima uiderunt, ab hominibus minime malis, (nam de haereticorum libris non loquimur:) sub nomine etiam Domini Iesu et Apostolorum aliorumque sanctorum publicatos.’ ³³³ Ibid. ³³⁴ Montagu, Analecta, sig. b3r–v .

148

Becoming Traditional?

the good faith and fairness, or again from the learning and erudition of the most ancient Fathers’. Forgeries had been perpetrated in the first centuries, but only by heretics.³³⁵ Indeed, Casaubon’s charge was widely used by subsequent authors to undermine the credit of the Fathers.³³⁶ But Casaubon himself was far from drawing such conclusions. He insisted that it was ‘heartlessness and I should almost say impiety’ to debase the Fathers because of ‘human failings of that kind’.³³⁷ He continued to look to ‘the primitive faith’, as to the only principle that could reconcile Christendom. This was especially true on the eucharist, on which Casaubon clearly hinted that he thought the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence closer than the Reformed to the original³³⁸ (this was to be the subject of a future book, which he did not live to write³³⁹). The appeal to the Fathers was also essential for Marcantonio De Dominis, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Spalato who fled to England in 1616 and joined for a while the established Church.³⁴⁰ The first two volumes of his massive De Republica ecclesiastica were published in London on James I’s orders and, like Casaubon’s Exercitationes, were meant to publicize abroad the position of the Church of England.³⁴¹ The frontispiece shows the Archbishop at his writing-desk, surrounded by folios of the Fathers, in the course of transcribing a passage from Cyprian’s works.³⁴² The chapter that he subsequently devoted ex professo to the Fathers was largely a commentary on Vincent of L´erins’s ‘golden sayings’ (‘holy Scripture because of its height, is not received by all men in the same sense … it is therefore necessary that the line of expounding the prophets and apostles be drawn according to the ³³⁵ Montagu, Analecta, 129: ‘Sed nec ferendam doctissimi Exercitatoris censuram reor esse illam, quam merito Rosweydus flagellat, qua nimium petulanter, in praeiudicium Patrum uetustissimorum, grassatus est; quorum uel judicio, et intelligentiae: uel fidei et candori: uel etiam doctrinae et eruditioni detractum iuit Exercitator.’ See again 141. ³³⁶ See below, 236. ³³⁷ Casaubon, Exercitationes, exercitatio I, n. XXVI, 125. ³³⁸ Ibid. exercitatio XVI, n. XXVIII, 500–3. ³³⁹ See ibid. 503, 516, 524. ³⁴⁰ Patterson, James VI and I, 220–59, esp. 224, 230–1, 236–8, 244–5. For an overview, see N. Malcolm, De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and Relapsed Heretic (London, 1984). The recent study by E. Belligni, Auctoritas e potestas: Marcantonio de Dominis fra l’inquisizione e Giacomo I (Milan, 2003) has almost nothing on De Dominis’ appeal to the Fathers. ³⁴¹ The King’s printer, John Bill, had to print De Dominis’ books, like Casaubon’s, on royal command. He had also to send ‘over into fforaine Contries by our appointment some great quantities of the said Archbishops workes, ymediatelie upon the first impression thereof ’ (letter of James I to the Stationers’ Company, 10 July 1618, in Records, ed. Jackson, 362–3). On Overall’s possible role in the publication, Milton, ‘ ‘‘Anglicanism’’ by Stealth’, 170. ³⁴² Marcantonio De Dominis, De Republica ecclesiastica pars I (London, 1617), pars secunda (London, 1620).

Becoming Traditional?

149

rule of the ecclesiastical and Catholic sense’, etc.).³⁴³ The Fathers had no authority in themselves. Their consensus was only ‘a sure and firm rule of faith’ insofar as the Fathers were ‘witnesses of ancient truth’ and ‘preservers of legitimate traditions’,³⁴⁴ that is of traditional interpretations of Scripture. The dogma of Christ’s two natures in one person, for instance, was not given in express terms in Scripture, ‘but this interpretation was given viva voce by the Apostles, received and preserved in the Church, and transmitted from Fathers to Fathers’. The council of Ephesus then defined it solemnly and quoted patristic authorities to support it.³⁴⁵ There were two criteria to discern ‘easily’ when the Fathers were transmitting apostolic tradition: the point in question had to be ‘a necessary and fundamental dogma’, and the Fathers should really be unanimous. Therefore, millenarianism should be rejected since it was ‘a small question of little moment’ and ‘all the orthodox did not agree in that error’.³⁴⁶ Although De Dominis’ position deviated subtly from post-Tridentine principles—tradition was restricted to the interpretation of Scripture, and the authority of the Fathers was not grounded on the infallibility of the Church—it was liable to most of the usual Protestant objections against the consensus of the Fathers. It was clearly incompatible with the way sola Scriptura had been commonly understood in Elizabethan England. The Restoration apologist Matthew Scrivener later referred his reader to De Dominis’ ‘learned and full’ discussion of the authority of the ancient Church.³⁴⁷ One would like to know how it was received by English theologians at the time. The figure of Hugo Grotius obviously looms large in this milieu. He had become estranged from Calvinism—one of the doctrines he strongly rejected was, interestingly enough, Christ’s suffering the pains of Hell.³⁴⁸ For most of his life, he considered the Church of England closest to many of his ideals. He insisted on antiquity, more particularly on the first three centuries, as the basis for ecclesiastical peace.³⁴⁹ In writings of 1615–18, the last years of his ‘Dutch period’, he repeatedy quoted the ³⁴³ Marcantonio De Dominis, De Republica ecclesiastica pars tertia (Hanau, 1622), l. VII, c. 7, 98–104. The publication of this volume abroad may have had financial, rather than doctrinal, reasons. The previous volumes had been pirated on the Continent and Bill had suffered great losses: see James’s letter, quoted above, n. 341, and W. W. Greg (ed.), A Companion to Arber (Oxford, 1967), Document no. 55, 258. See however Patterson, James VI and I, 243–4. ³⁴⁴ De Republica ecclesiastica pars tertia, 99, 102, 103. ³⁴⁵ Ibid. 102. ³⁴⁶ Ibid. 103. ³⁴⁷ Scrivener, Apologia, 54. ³⁴⁸ See Grotius to G. J. Vossius, 12 January 1617, Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, 17 vols. ( The Hague, 1928–2001), i, no. 498, 554. ³⁴⁹ G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, ‘Hugo Grotius as an Irenicist’, in The World of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645): Proceedings of the International Colloquium Organized by the

150

Becoming Traditional?

canon Concionatores of 1571, which he must have known through Overall. He saw it as a decisive proof, together with episcopacy, confirmation, and liturgy, that the Church of England paid more respect to antiquity than French Huguenots³⁵⁰—Restoration divines quoted those texts together with Casaubon’s.³⁵¹ All these figures shared a special interest both in the ancient Greek Fathers and in the contemporary Greek Orthodox Church with Cyril Lucaris then at its head.³⁵² In his classic biography of Casaubon, Mark Pattison called his attitude towards the Fathers ‘Anglo-Catholic’: the Exercitationes ‘is among the earliest of the array of anglo-catholic attempts to set up the authority of ‘‘Antiquity’’ as the canon of religious truth’.³⁵³ Anglo-Catholicism, Pattison thought, had actually been born in those years as the natural effect of patristic learning.³⁵⁴ But Pattison’s Casaubon was largely a book on the author’s own troubled relations with the Oxford movement (he contemplated in his hero the fate he had nearly escaped himself ), and one should be wary of projecting nineteenth-century categories back into the past. The early seventeenth-century appeal to the Fathers was both irenical and liberal in character, in the Erasmian tradition of Christian humanism. The whole point was to distinguish the fundamentals of Christianity from later accretions and disputed adiaphora. Casaubon deplored religious hatreds, which ‘have lately come to a climax’,³⁵⁵ and he extolled what he called, again using a Greek patristic word, sunkatabasis, the ‘Christian condescension in religious disputes’, which ‘the pious Fathers recommend in so many places’.³⁵⁶ The irenical dimension was even more marked in Grotius. Grotius Committee of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Rotterdam 6–9 April 1983 (Amsterdam, 1984), 43–63, esp. 48–50; H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Hugo Grotius and England’, in From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, 47–82; E. Rabbie, ‘Nobis modica theologia sufficit: il contesto europeo dell’irenismo di Grozio’, Rivista storica italiana, 106 (1994), 247–50. ³⁵⁰ See Grotius’ letter to Gideon van den Boetzelaer, early December 1615, Briefwisseling, i. 431; De Imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra, ed. H.-J. van Dam, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2001), i. 312; letter of the States of Holland to James I (written by Grotius), 1618, in Praestantium ac eruditorum uirorum epistolae, ed. van Limborch, 502. ³⁵¹ Puller, Moderation, 81. ³⁵² H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Archbishop Laud in Retrospect’, in From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, 136–7; ‘The Church of England and the Greek Church in the Time of Charles I’ (1978), ibid. 88–99; Patterson, James VI and I, 196–219. ³⁵³ Pattison, Casaubon, 336. ³⁵⁴ Ibid. 266–7. ³⁵⁵ Casaubon, Exercitationes, exercitatio XVI, n. XXVIII, 501–2: ‘ad ultimam dudum odiorum lineam est peruentum.’ ³⁵⁶ Ibid., n. XXXII, 513. Casaubon’s presentation of Gregory of Nyssa’s mission for peace was a transparent appeal for religious reconciliation in his own time (Gregorii Nysseni ad Eustathiam, Ambrosiam et Basilissam epistola, 39–41).

Becoming Traditional?

151

Although Casaubon came to admire the communion service of the Book of Common Prayer,³⁵⁷ he had no interest in pre-Reformation survivals in the English liturgy. His claim that feasts such as the Circumcision and the Epiphany were respectable but not primitive practices earned him a stern rebuke from Montagu—now Laudian Bishop of Chichester: Casaubon could not have written such things if he had not been ‘too much inclined to the party of innovators’, and did not ‘embrace ecclesiastical rites and antiquity only slantways and unwillingly’.³⁵⁸ As to Grotius, in his treatise Of the authority of the highest powers about sacred things, he denied the Church any independent authority, strictly subordinating it to the state, and he only defended episcopacy in the qualified way that Andrewes rejected as insufficient. It was a useful institution, which had its beginning in the Apostles’ time, and which had been approved by God—Grotius drew largely for scriptural and patristic proofs on the Latin edition of Bilson’s Perpetual Governement. But it was not of divine precept, it was not universally instituted by the Apostles, and it was not necessary in the Church.³⁵⁹ Unsurprisingly, Overall and Andrewes were critical when they read Grotius’ book in manuscript,³⁶⁰ and Laud advised against its publication.³⁶¹ Henry Hammond, then the leading episcopalist controversialist, protested when it eventually appeared in print after Grotius’ death.³⁶² It was later hailed by the Nonconformist Richard Baxter, who professed to agree with it ‘in almost all things’.³⁶³ Grotius’ views were even less satisfactory from a sacerdotalist point of view. His short treatise Of the administration of the eucharist in the absence ³⁵⁷ See Casaubon, Ephemerides, ii. 810 (4 January 1611). ³⁵⁸ Richard Montagu, De Originibus Ecclesiasticis Commentationum tomus primus (London, 1636), 136: ‘nisi quod proniores ferebantur [uiri eruditi] in partes νεοτεριζόντων, et Ecclesiasticos ritus, atque antiquitatem, nisi ἐκ πλαγίου, aut inuiti amplectantur’; see also 237–8. Casaubon is not named but he is unmistakably the person referred to (see Exercitationes, exercitatio II, n. IX and XI, 177 and 185). ³⁵⁹ See Grotius, De Imperio summarum potestatum, i. 526–52, with van Dam’s commentary, ii. 849–59. ³⁶⁰ See introduction, ibid. 41–2. ³⁶¹ An English translation was however published in 1651 by the Royalist divine Clement Barksdale, perhaps as an anti-presbyterian move. See Trevor-Roper, ‘Hugo Grotius and England’, 69–70; Posthumus Meyjes, ‘Hugo Grotius as an Irenicist’, 51–3. ³⁶² Henry Hammond, An Answer to the Animadversions on the dissertations touching Ignatius’s Epistles and the Episcopacie in them Asserted (London, 1654), 134. See also John Bramhall, Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication of himself and the Episcopal Clergy, from the Presbyterian Charge of Popery, as it is managed by Mr. Baxter in his Treatise of the Grotian Religion. Together with a Preface shewing what Grounds there are of Fears and Jealousies of Popery (London, 1672), 18–19 (the book was published posthumously but was written in 1659). ³⁶³ Baxter, Treatise of Episcopacy, part I, 71–4. See also below, 268, on Grotius’ letter to Bignon.

152

Becoming Traditional?

of pastors went so far as to affirm, on the strength of a controverted passage in Tertullian’s De exhortatione castitatis,³⁶⁴ that, in some circumstances, lay people might consecrate.³⁶⁵ When the book was published in 1638, its potential consequences alarmed people in England. Someone, who may have been Laud himself, had Grotius warned that ‘in the times where wee are, men might serve themselves of it to put all in disorder’.³⁶⁶ Grotius eventually repudiated the De coena³⁶⁷ but, in his 1641 Annotations on the four Gospels, he made the equally subversive claim that Christ had not delivered the Lord’s Prayer as a set form to repeat, but only as a list of topics to develop in one’s own prayers.³⁶⁸ This was not only to align himself with Cartwright against Hooker but, in the context of mid-seventeenth-century England, to deprive conformists of their strongest argument for fixed liturgies.³⁶⁹ The Restoration apologist John Durel charged Grotius here with contradicting all antiquity to side with the Anabaptists, ‘whom he favours too much on other points as well, as keen readers will easily discover’.³⁷⁰ M´eric Casaubon dismissed such ‘extravagant conceits of his old age’, insisting that ‘Grotius, when truest Grotius, was I know, and can say it; a great admirer of the Church of England’.³⁷¹ ³⁶⁴ Tertullian, De exhortatione castitatis, 7. 3 (CC 2, 1025): ‘ubi ecclesiastici ordinis non est consessus, et offers et tinguis et sacerdos es tibi solus.’ ³⁶⁵ Dissertatio de Coenae administratione ubi Pastores non sunt. Item an semper communicandum per symbola (Amsterdam, 1638). See H. J. M. Nellen, ‘Disputando inclarescet ueritas: Grotius as a Publicist in France (1621–1645)’, in id. and E. Rabbie (eds.), Hugo Grotius Theologian: Essays in Honour of G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden, 1994), 132–6. ³⁶⁶ John Scudamore to Grotius, 21 March 1639, Briefwisseling, xvii, no. 4045A, 479–80 (French original and contemporary English translation). See editor’s note for the identification of the person referred to by Scudamore as Laud. On Scudamore’s Laudianism, see I. Atherton, Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: The Career of John, First Viscount Scudamore (Manchester, 1999), 50–93. For later attacks against the notion that the laity might administer the eucharist, see N. Tyacke, ‘Arminianism and the Theology of the Restoration Church’ (1994), repr. in id., Aspects, 329; Henry Dodwell, De Iure Laicorum Sacerdotali, ex sententia Tertulliani aliorumque Veterum Dissertatio, in Hugo Grotius, De Coenae Administratione, ubi Pastores non sunt, Item An Semper Communicandum per Symbola? Dissertatio. Cum diuersorum Responsionibus (London, 1685). ³⁶⁷ Nellen, ‘Disputando inclarescet ueritas’, 136 n. 67. ³⁶⁸ Hugo Grotius, Annotationes in libros Euangeliorum (Amsterdam, 1641), 142 (on Matt. 6: 9). ³⁶⁹ See Hooker, Lawes, V. 35 [Works, ii. 143–7]; G. F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1946), 67. ³⁷⁰ Durel, Vindiciae, 77. ³⁷¹ M´eric Casaubon, A Vindication of the Lords Prayer, as a formal prayer, and by Christ’s institution to be used by Christians as a Prayer : against the Antichristian Practice and Opinion of some men. Wherein, Also their private and ungrounded zeal is discovered, who are very strict for the observation of the Lord’s Day, and make so light of the Lords Prayer

Becoming Traditional?

153

One had to be pretty selective to turn Grotius into a champion of the established Church. There was much illusion in the ecumenical patristic movement. It never included more than a handful of brilliant but isolated citizens of the international Republic of Letters. Grotius’ praise of the Church of England and his repeated appeal to the canon Concionatores in the period immediately preceding the Synod of Dort were meant to dissuade James I from siding with the Dutch Contra-Remonstrants. These tactics failed dismally and at no point in his career did Grotius find in England the support he was hoping for.³⁷² The Erasmian exiles in England had very little English (Casaubon did not understand it at all, and De Dominis only ‘now and then, here and there a word, or halfe a sentence’³⁷³). Relying on Latin for their communication, they could not but have a very imperfect idea of the realities of English church life. The bishops who befriended Casaubon were a tiny minority of the episcopate and he was eventually disappointed by the reception he met with in England.³⁷⁴ In any case, the trend of the times, with the beginning of the Thirty Years War and the Synod of Dort, went more and more against such irenicism.³⁷⁵ De Dominis went back to Rome in 1622 amid bitter controversy, claiming that he had been deceived by English Protestants ‘of the meeker sort’ about the true character of their Church. It was, he had come to realize, fiercely anti-Roman and full of ‘Puritan’ ministers, and had committed itself at Dort to all the ‘Calvinian rigours’.³⁷⁶ Repudiating all that he had written while in England, he confessed that (London, 1660), 79–80—written just before the Restoration, though published after it. See also Pearson’s notes on Grotius published in The Minor Theological Works of John Pearson, ed. E. Churton (Oxford, 1845), i, pp. cxxxi–cxxxii. ³⁷² See van Dam’s introduction to Grotius, De Imperio summarum potestatum, i. 28–30; C. Grayson, ‘James I and the Religious Crisis in the United Provinces 1613–19’, in D. Baker (ed.), Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c1500–c1750 (Oxford, 1979; Studies in Church History. Subsidia 2), 195–219; Trevor-Roper, ‘Hugo Grotius and England’, 53–4, 57–9, 63–5, 72. ³⁷³ Richard Montagu, Immediate addresse unto God alone. First delivered in a Sermon before his Majestie at Windsore. Since revised and inlarged to a just Treatise of Invocation of Saints. Occasioned by a false imputation of M. Antonius De Dominis upon the Authour (London, 1624), sig. A2r . ³⁷⁴ See Casaubon’s complaint to de Thou, 9 Nov. 1612, Epistolae, no. 841, 506: ‘Ego mores Anglorum non capio’; Casaubon to de Thou [?], 1 January 1613, no. 848, 511–12, about his conflict with Savile and Montagu. ³⁷⁵ This was one of the major ideas of Hugh Trevor-Roper. See his ‘Laudianism and Political Power’, in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays (London, 1987), 57–60; ‘Hugo Grotius and England’, 57–8; ‘Archbishop Laud in Retrospect’, 138. ³⁷⁶ Marcus Antonius de Dominis Archiepiscop. Spalaten. Sui reditus ex Anglia Consilium exponit (Rome, 1623), pp. xiv–xvi and xxxi–xxxii. For an answer from one of those ‘meeker Protestants’, see Montagu, Immediate addresse, sigs. ¶3v –4r .

154

Becoming Traditional?

he had unduly extended the boundaries of the Catholic Church, which should be restricted to embrace only those Churches in actual communion with Rome.³⁷⁷ By the 1620s the neo-Erasmian international movement had quite clearly come to a dead end. Its legacy was taken over to some extent by the Laudian or ‘Arminian’ tendency within the Church of England but in a very different context. Laudians readily agreed with Casaubon as to the deficiencies of the continental Reformation. When he travelled to France in 1625 Peter Heylyn was anything but impressed by the Huguenots. Their sermons he esteemed ‘very plain and home-spun, little in them of the Fathers, and lesse of humane learning; it being concluded in the Synod of Gappe, that only the Scriptures should be used in their Pulpits’.³⁷⁸ They had no ceremonies and ‘as are their Churches, such is their Discipline, naked of all Antiquity, and almost as modern as the men which imbrace it’.³⁷⁹ Laudians, however, were primarily interested in their own Church. The movement became what Lord Dacre has called ‘Arminianism in one country’.³⁸⁰ ³⁷⁷ De Dominis, Consilium reditus sui, p. VIII. ³⁷⁸ Peter Heylyn, A Full Relation of two Journeys: the one into the main-land of France. The other, into some of the adjacent Ilands (London, 1656), 243. See above, 143. ³⁷⁹ Ibid. 245. Though only published in 1656, the text was probably written in late 1625. See Milton, Heylyn, 17–19 and 161–2. ³⁸⁰ Trevor-Roper, ‘The Church of England and the Greek Church’, 100.

3 Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers In 1613, in a sermon on purity of religion in England, Lancelot Andrewes, then Bishop of Ely, proclaimed that ‘one Canon of Scripture put in writing by God, two Testaments, three Creeds, the first four Councils, five centuries and the succession of the Fathers therein, three centuries before Constantine, two centuries after Constantine, draw for us the rule of religion’.¹ The formula became famous.² Twentieth-century authors have seen in it the motto of ‘a specifically Anglican theology’ to set against that of Geneva as well as that of Rome.³ This is to forget that Andrewes’s audience included not only James VI and I but the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, the chief champion of Calvinism in Germany, who had come to England to marry James’s daughter Elizabeth, and was now preparing to return to Heidelberg with his bride. The matrimonial alliance was a decisive move to cement England’s bond with continental Reformed Protestants. Andrewes had been ordered by the King to preach in Latin, so that the German party could understand.⁴ He prayed for the Churches in England and Ireland, and the Churches of the Palatinate as belonging equally to that ‘part of the Catholic Church which is in peace’, that is happily Reformed.⁵ He expressly praised the Palatine Reformation.⁶ He only expounded the ¹ Andrewes, ‘Concio latine habita, coram Regia Majestate, XIII◦ Aprilis, A.D. MDCXIII in Aula Grenvici: Quo tempore, cum Lectissima Sua Conjuge, discessurus iam erat Gener Regis, Serenissimus Potentissimusque Princeps Fridericus Comes Palatinus ad Rhenum’, in Opuscula posthuma, 86: ‘Nobis Canon unus in Scripta relatus a Deo, Duo Testamenta, Tria Symbola, Quatuor Priora Concilia, Quinque saecula, Patrumque per ea series, trecentos ante Constantinum annos, ducentos a Constantino, regulam nobis Religionis figunt.’ ² It was reproduced verbatim by John Cosin in an exposition of the doctrine of the Church of England that he wrote at Hyde’s request in 1652 (published in Thomas Smith, Vitae quorundam eruditissimorum et illustrium uirorum (London, 1707), ‘Vita Joannis Cosini’, sep. pagination, 31). ³ See P. A. Welsby, Lancelot Andrewes 1555–1626 (London, 1958), 155–6, faithfully echoed by Middleton, Fathers and Anglicans, 115–16. ⁴ Andrewes, ‘Concio’, 71–2. ⁵ Ibid. 74. ⁶ Ibid. 78.

156

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

‘ancient’ rule of faith to oppose it immediately to ‘the new addition of the Roman religion’, the ‘dregs of abuses and errors (not to mention the fables and fictions, which began afterwards to invade the Church)’.⁷ This was Protestant rhetoric at its most traditional, and Andrewes’s chronology for the Church Fathers was definitely Protestant.⁸ Indeed, his formula echoed James I’s profession of faith in his Premonition of 1609, to which the Bishop himself had contributed. To counter Bellarmine’s charges of heresy, the King had declared that he received the creeds and the first four ecumenical councils and that he respected the consensus of the Fathers.⁹ In such a polemical and anti-Roman context, the appeal to creeds, councils, and Fathers was not a repudiation of the principle of sola Scriptura. Andrewes went on in his sermon to give a list of Roman errors, in which the very first point was ‘unwritten faith’.¹⁰ Though his language was refined he deliberately gestured to the coarsest kind of anti-popish polemic when he attacked transubstantiation.¹¹ There was nothing here with which the German visitors would have found it hard to identify. Heidelberg was the European centre of Reformed patristic scholarship and the Elector’s retinue included Abraham Scultetus.¹² The only part of the sermon from which German Calvinists must have felt excluded was Andrewes’s uncompromising eulogy of ‘the apostolic order’ of the Church of England, with its threefold ministry of deacons, priests, and bishops, which ‘all antiquity received and venerated’.¹³ Remarkably for a Court bishop well experienced in dealing with princes, Andrewes even risked offending the guests’ sensitivity and openly attacked the Genevan system for its lay deacons and its ‘ecclesiastical order truncated of bishops’.¹⁴ Since Andrewes was not commanded by the King to publish his sermon, ⁷ Andrewes, ‘Concio’, 86: ‘Quibus uero uetus Catholica non satis, sine Romanae assumento nouo; Quibus, in iis quae dixi non est satis, nisi et ad faeces usque hauriunt abusuum atque errorum (ut fabulas taceam et figmenta, quae Ecclesiam post coeperunt occupare) fruantur sane.’ ⁸ See above, 73–4. ⁹ James I, Apologia pro Iuramento Fidelitatis, praefatio monitoria, sep. pagination, 37–9 (for the English version, see above, Chapter 1 n. 285). On Andrewes’s contribution to the work, see Welsby, Andrewes, 145. ¹⁰ Andrewes, ‘Concio’, 86. ¹¹ Ibid.: ‘Adorent ibi sub speciebus delitescens Numen, de pistrino factum: horreret hoc Sion et plane refugeret.’ ¹² See Scultetus, De curriculo uitae [suae], 52–64, for the relation of his travel, and above, 65, on his patristic work. ¹³ Andrewes, ‘Concio’, 87. ¹⁴ Ibid.: ‘Non hic uideas … Diaconos Sacris nunquam initiatos, mere Laïcos, annuos, bimulosue, post munere exuendos. Non mutilum Episcopis Ecclesiasticum Ordinem …’ The significance of this passage has been rightly noted by Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 486.

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

157

it is likely that this anti-presbyterian outburst was his own initiative. This was certainly a matter on which he felt deeply. It should however be noted that he put the royal prerogative on a par with episcopacy in describing the English church order, and that he did not make antiquity his main ground for this. He preferred to marshal every conformist argument available and to declare that the government of the Church of England did ‘conform to Holy Scripture, holy canons, the practice of the ancient Church’, and also the structure of a monarchical state.¹⁵ A tirade remarkably similar to Andrewes’s appears in Hall’s convocation sermon of 1624 (the only difference is that Hall appealed to the Fathers of the first six, not five, centuries). Hall may have drawn his inspiration from Andrewes, supposing that the latter’s sermon had been circulated in manuscript, or from James I’s Premonition. The important point is that Hall explicitly claimed that his formula encapsulated the faith of all Protestants. It vindicated their claim to be ‘Christians and Catholics’ despite Rome’s charges of heresy.¹⁶ He stressed that differences between Protestants were minor and only concerned theological conclusions or external rites, ‘not the principles of the Christian faith’. All discord could easily be extinguished if James I’s irenical efforts were seconded by other princes and if all the Reformed Churches would meet together in a general council.¹⁷ Hall was fulsome in his praise of the threefold ministry but vague on the implications of its absence in continental Churches. ‘The Church of England, the most flourishing and happiest of Churches’ wished fervently that ‘its dearest sisters had retained this most ancient and best mode of government’. They would ‘perhaps’ have done so if they had enjoyed the benefit of a kingly Reformation like that which had taken place in England.¹⁸ Hall’s sermons of this period, for all their rhetoric of English exceptionalism, consistently aimed at toning down differences between Protestants in order to facilitate a crusade against popish Spain and its allies.¹⁹ Andrewes’s sermon was first published in 1629, in the posthumous collection of his Latin writings edited by Laud and Buckeridge. His private ¹⁵ Andrewes, ‘Concio’, 87. ¹⁶ Hall, Columba Noae, 34: ‘Profecto qui uerbo Dei aeternis literarum monumentis consignato, qui symbolis quibusque primoribus, qui Conciliis quatuor Generalibus, qui communi Patrum per sexcentos a Christo annos iudicio lubens subscripserit (quod nos facere religiose profitemur Reformati) si errare in minimis poterit, haereticus esse non poterit.’ ¹⁷ Ibid. 42–6. ¹⁸ Ibid. 18: ‘Oh quoties, quamque non sine imis suspiriis, suo sanguine emptum optauerit florentissima ac foelicissima Ecclesiarum Anglicana a charissimis sororibus suis retentum hunc antiquissimum optimumque regiminis morem: Qui utique obtinuisset fortean, si, quae nobis Dei beneficio, eadem et ipsis Reformatio Monarchica obtigisset.’ ¹⁹ Lake, ‘Joseph Hall’s Via Media in Context’, 58–67.

158

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

exchange with Du Moulin also appeared for the first time in print in the same volume.²⁰ The conjunction is not accidental. Andrewes’s texts articulated a case for episcopacy more intransigent than anything that had previously been published in England, since they were directed not at English Puritans but at continental Reformed Churches. Together with the folio collection of Andrewes’s XCVI sermons, which came out at the same time, the Opuscula posthuma were meant to provide authorities for the growing Laudian style of churchmanship.²¹ Bishop Williams, who was a conformist of the old cast, tried to prevent the publication of the letters to Du Moulin, ‘for feare, forsooth, of offending our neighbour Churches’. Laud remonstrated to Charles I that it would mean ‘a great loss for the Church of England’, and eventually carried his point.²² The vicissitudes of the Thirty Years War had by now wiped out the Palatinate. Andrewes’s description of the rule of faith must have sounded much more specifically English than it had in its original context. There are serious objections to holding Andrewes to be the founding father of the so-called Anglican via media. His own views changed over time and, even when in possession of his mature opinions, he did not always publicize them.²³ He nonetheless exerted a major personal influence on the group of younger English divines who came to be known to their opponents as Arminians. Recent studies have drawn attention to Andrewes’s sacramentalist sermons at the court of James I as well as to his role as Dean of Westminster Abbey, which he preserved as a peculiar centre of high ceremonialism and in which many important figures of the Caroline Church formed their religious outlook.²⁴ Certainly Laud looked to him as a model and an inspiration. But Andrewes did not seek to enforce his ritual standards on the whole Church. In Fuller’s beautiful expression, he was ²⁰ See above, 102. ²¹ See P. McCullough, ‘Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626–1642’, HJ 41 (1998), 401–24. ²² See Laud’s diary for 17 January 1627, in Wharton, Troubles and tryal, 38: ‘contra illud quod misere, et in maximum damnum Ecclesiae Anglicanae, Episcopus Lincoln. significauit Regi’; Peter Heylyn, Antidotum Lincolniense. Or an Answer to a Book entituled, the Holy Table, Name, and Thing, etc. said to be written long agoe by a Minister in Lincolnshire, and Printed for the Diocese of Lincolne, A◦ 1637 (London, 1637), section III, 8 (misdating the episode under King James). Heylyn’s informant must have been Laud himself. ²³ See N. Tyacke, ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism’, in Lake and Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy, 5–33. ²⁴ See P. Lake, ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I’, in L. L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), 113–33 (esp. 128, for an important analysis of the function of patristic quotations); McCullough, Sermons at Court, esp. 114, 121–2, 147–55, 160–1; Merritt, ‘Cradle of Laudianism?’

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

159

‘content with the enjoying, without the enjoining, [his] private practices and opinions on others’.²⁵

1. THEOLOGICAL METHOD Reviewing half a century of theological evolution at a time when the tide had turned again and Calvinists were getting their own back, the undaunted Heylyn had no doubt that the major event had been Richard Montagu’s pamphlet A new Gagg for an old Goose (1624): ‘no man had the courage to make such a general assault against the late received opinions as the Bishop did; though many when the ice was broken, followed gladly after him.’²⁶ Montagu’s book was indeed the most provocative text of the Arminian school so far. It made clear how far some English divines had travelled from Elizabethan Calvinism. The Gagg defied Romanists to show that any of their distinctive tenets had been ‘the dogmaticall resolution of any one Father, for 500 years after Christ’.²⁷ At first sight, this was merely a repetition of Jewel’s challenge, with two minor modifications to which no Protestant could take objection.²⁸ Montagu, however, only defended the Church of England by distancing it firmly from Calvinist orthodoxy. He thought that it should ‘stand in the gapp against Puritanism and Popery, the Scilla and Charybdis of antient piety’.²⁹ The insistence on a core of belief guaranteed by the Fathers was no longer merely directed at Tridentine ²⁵ Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain, book XI, § 48, ed. J. S. Brewer, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1845), vi. 40. See Andrewes, Preces Privatae, ed. Brightman. ²⁶ Heylyn, Theologia ueterum, sig. B1v (Montagu became Bishop of Chichester in 1628). ²⁷ Richard Montagu, A Gagg for the new Gospel? No: a new Gagg for an old Goose. Who would needes undertake to stop all Protestants mouths for ever, with 276 places out of their owne English Bibles. Or An Answere to a late Abridger of Controversies, and Belyar of the Protestants Doctrine (London, 1624), ‘to the Reader’, unnumbered. See also the unnumbered preface. Later authors were disdainfully put aside: Anselm could not be ranked among the Fathers (29), John Damascene was but ‘a childe in yeares, of yesterdayes birth, in respect of those old Heroes of the Primitive times’ (41), and even ‘Saint Gregorie is of later date then Saint Augustine, and of lesse credit by much in controverted questions’ (317). On the publication of the Gagg and of Montagu’s subsequent Appello Caesarem, see Lambert, ‘Richard Montagu, Arminianism and Censorship’, 42–54. ²⁸ On the limitation to the first five, rather than six, centuries, see above, 73. By ‘dogmatical resolution’, Montagu meant, in accordance with Perkins’s rules (above, 64–5), what the Fathers had said ‘δογματικως, ˜ by way of peremptory and Theologicall conclusion’, and not ‘ἐριστικως, ˜ in heate of contention and opposition. πανηγυρικως, ˜ by way of Amplification … διηγητικως, ˜ by way of History and relation’, and he specifically charged ‘the Church of Rome’ with ignoring, or affecting to ignore, these distinctions (Montagu, Diatribae, 267–8). ²⁹ Letter of Montagu to Cosin, 28 June [1624], Correspondence of Cosin, i. 21.

160

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

additions to the primitive Creed. It aimed also at countering that excessive reliance on modern, Calvinistic, systems of divinity that Casaubon had deplored and which Laudians made to be a part of Puritanism, as they now redefined it. This implied first of all a change in theological method. The Calvinist system was no longer to be the obligatory framework through which to read patristic texts. There may have been a reaction against it in some circles as early as the 1590s.³⁰ Montagu, who became a scholar of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1594, certainly professed later, in his Appello Caesarem, to have ‘balked’ at the usual Calvinist handbooks ‘from [his] first entrance to the studie of Divinity’ in order to apply himself ‘to Scripture the Rule of Faith, interpreted by Antiquity, the best Expositor of Faith and applyer of that Rule: holding it a point of discretion, to draw water, as neere as I could, to the Well-head, and to spare labour in vaine, in running further off to Cisternes and Lakes’—a striking alteration of the Protestant metaphor of Scripture as fountain.³¹ Laud, who was at Oxford in the same years, is said to have founded his studies in divinity ‘on the Holy Scriptures, according to the Glosses and Interpretations of the ancient Fathers’.³² John Williams, by contrast, who graduated BD at Cambridge ³⁰ See the complaints of the Cambridge authorities, above, 86. For the suggestion that the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, may have been deliberately purged of Calvin’s works between the 1560s and 1600, Gaskell, Trinity College Library, 38–40. ³¹ Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem. A Iust Appeale from two unjust Informers (London, 1625), 11–12. Montagu had already used the metaphor of fontes and riuuli in the dedication to King James of his 1622 Analecta, sig. a3r–v . Abbot, Hill’s Reasons Unmasked, 373–4, had expressly rejected its application to the Fathers: ‘although it be likely that neerest to the fountaines, the waters runne most cleerely, and the farther of, that we are, they are the more likly to be polluted, yet in spirituall thinges that is not to be understood of place or time but of keeping close to the original of the written word, and not varying from it.’ ³² Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 52. A much stronger version is given by David Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings and Deaths of those noble, reverend, and excellent personages, that suffered Death, Sequestration, Decimation, or otherwise, for the Protestant Religion, and the great Principle thereof, Allegiance to their Soveraigne, in our late Intestine Wars … (London, 1668), 225–6: ‘Doctor Young the Lord Bishop of Rochester that Ordained him [deacon in 1600 and priest in 1601], finding his study raised above the Systems and Opinions of the age, upon the nobler foundation of the Fathers, Councils, and the Ecclesiastical Historians, easily presaged, ‘‘That if he lived he would be an instrument of restoring the Church from the narrow and private principles of modern times, to the more free, large, and publick sentiments of the purest and first Ages’’.’ The account would seem to be of slight credit (on Lloyd’s ‘infinite errors’, see Wood, Athenae, iv, cols. 349 and 352). For suggestions that it may have some basis, see N. Tyacke, ‘Archbishop Laud’ (1993), repr. in id., Aspects, 206—but one might wonder how it can fit with the alleged ‘Calvinist phase’ (see below, n. 174) in Laud’s development. Laud declared as late as 1635 that ‘Calvin’s Institutions may profitably be read, and as one of their [students’] first Books for Divinity’: he merely objected to an overemphasis on it. See ‘An Historical Account of all Material Transactions relating to the University of

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

161

in 1613, followed the old course, devoting his first two years of theology to read Scripture along with the works of major continental divines (Martyr, Chemnitz, Musculus, Calvin, and Zanchi). He then moved on to ‘the School-men, Histories Ecclesiastical, and the Fathers all together’.³³ Robert Sanderson, who took his MA at Oxford in 1607, began his theological studies with Calvin’s Institutes ‘for that Book was commended to me, as it was generally to all young Scholars in those times, as the best and perfectest systeme of Divinity, and fittest to be laid as a ground work in the study of that profession’—although he claimed that Providence made him read Hooker before it, which ‘proved … a good preparative to me (that I say not Antidote)’.³⁴ James I’s directions to both universities (given to delegates of Cambridge in December 1616 and then sent to Oxford in January 1617) included a clause which enjoined ‘that young Students in Divinity be … excited to bestow their time in the Fathers and Councels, Schoolmen, Histories and Controversies, and not to insist too long upon Compendiums and Abbreviators, making them the grounds of their Study in Divinity’.³⁵ This injunction was later given a strongly anti-Calvinist significance, especially by Peter Heylyn,³⁶ whose interpretation was largely followed by Oxford, from Arch-bishop Laud’s being elected Chancellor to his Resignation of that Office. Written by Himself ’, in The Second Volume of the Remains of the Most Reverend Father in God, and Blessed Martyr, William Laud, ed. Henry and Edmund Wharton (London, 1700), 2nd pagination, 82. ³³ Hacket, Scrinia Reserata, i. 12. ³⁴ Letter of Sanderson to Thomas Pierce quoted in Henry Hammond, Aάρις καὶ εἰρήνη, or A Pacifick Discourse of Gods Grace and Decrees: in a Letter, of full Accordance written to the Reverend, and most learned, Dr. Robert Sanderson (London, 1660), 8–9. See Lake, ‘Serving God and the Times’, 112–13. ³⁵ CSPD 1611–18, 411 (3 December 1616); C. H. Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, iii (Cambridge, 1845), 104–5; Anthony Wood, The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, ed. J. Gutch, ii (Oxford, 1796), 323. ³⁶ Heylyn gave three successive accounts of the directions. He first made them a product of the Pareus affair (on which see below), without reference to the doctrine of grace and predestination. Pareus’ book was ordered to be publicly burnt ‘and shortly after came out that order of King James, prohibiting young ungrounded Students to beginne their studies in Divinity with such books as those, in whom there were such dangerous positions, tending so manifestly to Anarchy and disobedience.... Besides … generally those divines of forraigne Churches are contrary in the point of discipline, unto the Hierarchy and rites of the Church of England … so might it be another motive, why by the Kings direction they should come in last’ (Peter Heylyn, A Briefe and Moderate Answer, to the seditious and scandalous Challenges of Henry Burton (London, 1637), 119); this first account would be plausible, were it not that the Pareus affair actually happened in 1622 (the King’s directions were then reissued). Heylyn’s second version, Historia Quinqu-Articularis, part III, 106, is that James ‘considering … with himselfe, or being informed by tale of the Bishop and Divines, as were then about him, how great an adversary was Calvinius [sic] to Monarchicall interesse, how contrary the Predestinarian

162

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

Restoration writers as well as twentieth-century historians.³⁷ It is unlikely that it could have been the King’s meaning at the time. In November 1617 he complained of the progress of Arminianism among Cambridge students.³⁸ The injunction would even seem to tie in quite well with the anti-Arminian exhortation addressed to the University of Oxford by Robert Abbot, on his relinquishing the Regius Professorship of Divinity to become Bishop of Salisbury, at the end of 1615. Abbot warned students to beware of the ‘numberless’ writings of ‘the recent authors beyond the seas’, who cared only for novelty and singularity (that is Arminius and his followers). After students had ‘laid the true foundations of faith’, using the official texts of the Church of England but also Calvin’s Institutes, they should ‘turn to the old writers, from whom they may extract the most genuine resources of theology’.³⁹ Abbot was succeeded in his chair by John Prideaux, whose influence precluded any anti-Calvinist interpretation of James’s directions.⁴⁰ Prideaux nonetheless dutifully warned students against ‘the abuse of compendiums and systems’, which might divert them from more elaborate works and from ‘the painful investigation into the writings of the ancients’.⁴¹ By contrast, John Preston, who was Dean and Catechist doctrines were to all rules of Government, he found it necessary to devise of admit some course of the preventing of the mischiefe’. Eventually, in Cyprianus Anglicus, 71–2, Heylyn specifically explained the directions as a consequence of Laud’s conflict at Oxford with the Calvinist Robert Abbot: Bishop Neile allegedly took that opportunity to persuade James of the danger of training students in ‘Calvinian Doctrines’; this last version is unconvincing, if only because the directions were given to Cambridge earlier than Oxford (cf. Fincham, ‘Oxford and the Early Stuart Polity’, 188–90). ³⁷ See Wood, History, ii. 323; Izaak Walton, The Life of Dr. Sanderson, Late Bishop of Lincoln (London, 1678), sig. b7r–v ; H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573–1645 (3rd edn., Houndmills, 1988; 1st edn. 1940), 49. ³⁸ ‘Gulielmi Camdeni Annales ab Anno 1603, ad Annum 1623’, in Camdeni epistolae, ed. Smith, sep. pagination, 27; D. M. Hoyle, ‘ ‘‘Near Popery yet no Popery’’: Theological debate in Cambridge 1590–1644’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1991), 117–20 (and see 94–109, on the continuing dominance of Calvinist divinity in Cambridge in the second decade of the 17th century). On James’s anti-Arminian stance at that time, see K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, JBS 24 (1985), 188–91; McCullough, Sermons at Court, 128. ³⁹ The text has not been preserved but may be partly reconstructed through Abbot’s own account in De gratia et perseuerantia sanctorum, exercitationes aliquot habitae in Academia Oxoniensi (London, 1618), sig. d1r–v , and the extracts from auditors’ notes reproduced in Daniel Featley’s biography in Fuller, Abel redeuiuus, 546–7. ⁴⁰ The decree taken in convocation in pursuance of the King’s directions was much more limited in scope (Wood, History, ii. 327–8). See also Henry Hickman, Historia Quinqu-Articularis Exarticulata; or Animadversions on Dr. Heylyn’s Quinquarticular History (n.p., 1673), sig. Ll4v , and for Prideaux’s influence Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 72. ⁴¹ John Prideaux, Viginti-duae Lectiones de totidem religionis capitibus, praecipue hoc tempore controuersis prout publice habebantur Oxoniae in Vesperiis. Quibus accesserunt

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

163

at Queens’ College, Cambridge, between 1620 and 1622, appears not to have paid any attention to the King’s directions.⁴² The real breakthrough took place in April 1622, when John Knight, a young fellow of Broadgates Hall, Oxford (soon to become Pembroke College), who was much concerned at the recent successes of the CounterReformation all over Europe, preached a sermon in which he propounded not only the Calvinist doctrine of the right of resistance but, it would seem, its most radical version, including a justification of tyrannicide. Being taken to task, he defended himself on the ground that he had only been following Pareus, the great Heidelberg divine, in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.⁴³ James I had always been acutely sensitive to the danger of Tredecim Orationes Inaugurales … Subnectuntur Sex Conciones pro more habitae, ad Artium Baccalaurios in die Cinerum (Oxford, 1648), concio Ia ‘In die Cinerum, ann. 1616’ [i.e. 14 February 1617], sep. pagination, 9: ‘Tertium accedit studiorum obstaculum compendiorum et systematum Abusus, siquidem hisce Capti nonnulli, ad quaestiones explicatiores, Commentarios, et molestam Antiquorum inuestigationem statim nauseant.’ ⁴² See Thomas Ball, ‘The Life of Doctor Preston’, in Clarke, Generall Martyrologie, 2nd pagination, 84: ‘It was not long before it came to Master Prestons course for to be Dean and Catechist, which he resolved to improve by going through a Body of Divinity, that might be a guide unto the Schollars in their Studies in Divinity: For it was not his opinion that others should do as he had done, that is, peruse the Schoolmen first, and then come to the modern Writers; but first, read Summes and Systemes in Divinity, and settle their opinions and judgements, and then read Fathers, Schoolmen, or what they had a mind to.’ On Preston’s ‘Summe of Theology’, see I. Morgan, Prince Charles’s Puritan Chaplain (London, 1957), 34–8; J. D. Moore, s.v., ODNB, xlv. 262. Preston had read the Schoolmen, if apparently not the Fathers, before tackling ‘modern Writers, especially Master Calvin, whose very style and language much affected him’ (Ball, ‘Preston’, 79 and 81). ⁴³ There are various versions of what Knight actually said: see Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 95; a manuscript note by Thomas Barlow in his copy of Heylyn (Bodl., shelfmark NN Theol. 118); Richard Clayton’s relation, printed with minor changes by Wood, History, ii. 341–2, and from the original, Bodl., MS Wood D 18, by D. Macleane, A History of Pembroke College, Oxford, anciently Broadgates Hall (Oxford, 1897; Oxford Historical Society 33), 142–4—this relation calls him ‘William’ but he calls himself John in his petition (CSPD 1618–1623, 400) and should thus be identified with the John Knight, BA from Broadgates Hall in 1612 and MA in 1619 (Alum. Oxon., ii. 861). The fullest and most reliable account would seem to be provided by the young Dutchman George Rattaler Doublet, who was in Cambridge at the time and was well connected in English ecclesiastical circles (see C. S. M. Rademaker, Life and Work of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577–1649) (Assen, 1981), 217–18). According to Doublet’s letter to Gerardus Joannes Vossius of 26 August 1622, Knight ‘cum prius generalia quaedam proposuisset, ex quibus uereri uidebatur, nequid Religio reformata, ubique fere terrarum, nunc concussa etiam in Anglia, detrimenti caperet; tandem eousque deueniebat, ut assereret in tali casu, fas fore subditis, aut saltem inferioribus Magistratibus, etiam inuito, et aliud moliente Principe, omnibus modis, atque adeo, uel armis Religionem ueram, eiusque publicum exercitium tueri; addens illustrandae Theseos suae causa, existimare se, Regem Galliarum, si (dum exercitui Reformatos in urbe aliqua obsidenti interest quotidie) ferro per manum subditi caderet, iuste et sine ullo mactationis crimine occisum

164

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

such doctrines. Indeed it was on such political grounds that, contrary to the theology of most of his bishops, he considered Puritanism and popery to be equally threatening.⁴⁴ His view was perfectly expressed in the biblical images of David Owen’s 1610 pamphlet Herod and Pilat reconciled. Puritans and papists were like the foxes which Samson let loose in the fields of the Philistines—the image had been applied to heretics by the fourth Lateran council (1215), and was rather a clich´e for any controversialist fighting on two fronts. ‘They are so fast linked behind, and tayle-tied together with firebrands betweene them, that if they be not quenched by the power of Majestie, they cannot chose (when the meanes are fitted to their plot) but set the Church on fire, and the state in an uprore.’⁴⁵ They not only resembled Herod and Pilate reconciled against Jesus, but the two thieves of Golgotha: ‘The Kings of Christendome are daily crucified, (as Christ their Lord was) betweene two theeves; I meane the Papist and Puritan.’⁴⁶ This echoed a well-known patristic text, Novatian’s De Trinitate, where Christ was said to be crucified between two kinds of heretics, those who made him a mere man and those who said that he was God the Father.⁴⁷ The iri’ (Gerardi Joann. Vossii et Clarorum Virorum ad eum epistolae, ed. Paul Colomi`es (London, 1690), epistolae ad Vossium no. LI, 30). This is indeed Pareus’ doctrine, though he did not expressly address the problem of tyrannicide: see David Pareus, In diuinam ad Romanos S. Pauli Apostoli epistolam commentarius (Heidelberg, 1613), in cap. XIII, Dubium IV, cols. 1348–57. Calvin’s genuine teaching only involves the right of inferior magistrates to take up arms to defend religion. In its decree of 25 June 1622, the University of Oxford specifically condemned the distinction between ‘subditi in Magistratu inferiori constituti’ and ‘subditi mere priuati’ (‘Decretum Uniuersitatis Oxoniensis damnans propositiones Neotericorum infrascriptas siue Iesuitarum siue Puritanorum, siue aliorum cuiuscunque scriptorum’, Bodl., MS Rawl. D. 1001; printed in Statuta antiqua Uniuersitatis Oxoniensis, ed. S. Gibson (Oxford, 1931), 545–7). See further CSPD 1618–1623, 396 and 400; Fincham and Lake, ‘Ecclesiastical Policy’, 199. ⁴⁴ See Fincham and Lake, ‘Ecclesiastical Policy’. ⁴⁵ David Owen, Herod and Pilat Reconciled: or, The Concord of Papist and Puritan (against Scripture, Fathers, Councels, and other Orthodoxall Writers) for the Coercion, Deposition, and Killing of Kings (Cambridge, 1610), sig. ¶¶2r (alluding to Judg. 15: 4–5). See Lateran IV, chapter III, in Mansi, xxii. 986, and in the canon law, Cap. Excommunicamus, extra de Haereticis (Friedberg, ii. 787). The image had already been applied to papists and Puritans in The Answere of the Universitie of Oxford to the Millenary Petition, sig. ¶¶2v . Robert Abbot, on the other hand, used it of Jesuits and seminary priests (Second Part of the Defence of the Reformed Catholicke, sigs. A2v –A3r ). Luther had used it of papists and Anabaptists (In epistolam S. Pauli ad Galatas commentarius [1535], WA 40/1 (Weimar, 1911), 36). ⁴⁶ Owen, Herod and Pilat reconciled, 56. ⁴⁷ Novatian, De Trinitate, 30. 6 (CC 4, 73): ‘Re uera quasi inter duos latrones crucifigitur Dominus, quomodo fixus aliquando est, et ita excipit haereticorum istorum ex utroque latere sacrilega conuicia.’ The work had been published in 1545 as part of the Opera omnia of Tertullian. Jacques de Pam`ele restored it to Novatian in his edition, Q. Septimii Florentis Tertulliani Carthaginiensis Presbyteri, Opera, quae

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

165

traditional rhetoric of orthodoxy was transferred to politics. In any case, Owen appealed against papists and Puritans to the Church Fathers, quoting Tertullian and Cyprian to prove that Christians had never resisted the persecutions of heathen emperors; later, the only weapons that the faithful used against Julian were their tears, as Gregory of Nazianzus testified.⁴⁸ In 1618, when the Calvinist Ralph Brownrigg, then a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, criticized Owen’s book and was provoked to maintain (in private) a right to resist kings in some cases, he was denounced to the university authorities and obliged to recant, ‘utterly renouncing all private opinions of Mr. Calvin or Mr. Beza, wherein they differ from the doctrine and discipline of the church of England’. James I personally intervened in the proceedings.⁴⁹ Knight’s public outburst looked particularly bad in the context of James’s negotiations for a marriage alliance with Spain.⁵⁰ Anti-Calvinists exploited the affair to the utmost, with Laud playing a leading role in impressing on the King’s mind the link between continental divinity and political subversion.⁵¹ Pareus’ commentary was solemnly burnt in Oxford, Cambridge, and London. The King reminded Oxford of his 1616 directions,⁵² which were reissued, ‘that all young Students in Divinity hactenus reperiri potuerunt omnia.... Cum Iacobi Pamelii Brugensis Theologi, Archidiaconi Audomaropolitani, Argumentis et Adnotationibus toti operi interiectis (Paris, 1584; 1st edn., Antwerp, 1583), 1232–3. It was still included in the 17th-century editions of Tertullian’s works and was regularly cited under his name, e.g. by Jacobus Laurentius, Reuerentia Ecclesiae Romanae, erga Sanctos Patres Veteres subdola, ex ipsorum Pontificiorum Iesuitarumque libris certis atque euidentibus testimoniis demonstrata (Leiden, 1624), sig. ∗ 2r , who quotes the passage on the crucifixion. See G. F. Diercks’s introduction to his edition, CC 4, 2–5; P. Petitmengin, ‘Une nouvelle e´dition et un ancien manuscrit de Novatien’, Revue des ´etudes augustiniennes, 21 (1975), 256–9; C. Micaelli, ‘Il ‘‘De Trinitate’’ di Novaziano da Mesnart a Pamelius: problemi testuali ed esegetici’, in Cortesi (ed.), ‘Editiones principes’ dei Padri, 178–203. ⁴⁸ Testimonies were arranged in chronological order. See Owen, Herod and Pilat reconciled, 4–5, quoting Tertullian, Ad Scapulam, 2 (CC 2, 1128) and Cyprian, Liber ad Demetrianum, 17 (CC 3A, 44–5); ibid. 15, quoting Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio IV. Contra Julianum I, 96 (PG 35, 629). ⁴⁹ The dossier (February–March 1618) is printed in J. Heywood and T. Wright (eds.), Cambridge University Transactions during the Puritan controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries, 2 vols. (London, 1854), ii. 292–5. For evidence that Brownrigg’s views were far from isolated in Cambridge, see Hunt, ‘Chaderton’, 218–20. ⁵⁰ See T. Cogswell, ‘England and the Spanish Match’, in R. Cust and A. Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London, 1989), 107–33, esp. 118 and 129. ⁵¹ See Laud’s diary for 16 April 1622, in Wharton, Troubles and tryal, 4. On the use of the affair by Cambridge ‘Remonstrants’, see Doublet’s letter to Vossius, 26 August 1622, Vossii epistolae, epistolae ad Vossium no. LI, 30–1. ⁵² CSPD 1618–1623, 379 (letter to the University of Oxford of 24 April 1622, endorsed by Laud), printed in Wood, History, ii. 342–3. James further procured a

166

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

might take notice of them: And this produced by little and little such an alteration, that the name of Calvin (which before had carried all before it) began to lessen by degrees.’⁵³ Montagu’s Appello Caesarem assured that the issue became contentious. Young anti-Calvinists now interpreted James’s directions in the light of Montagu’s book and pursued their theological studies in that spirit.⁵⁴ The Fathers were read in chronological order. Henry Hammond thus made a thorough study of Ignatius’ letters—in the interpolated recension that was then the only one known—‘in my entrance on the study of Divinity, beginning with him as the first Ecclesiastical Writer then extant’.⁵⁵ Prideaux now saw the danger and attempted to divert students from the new course, solemnly admonishing them to ‘begin in the Study of Divinity, with some systematicall Catechisme … and not to apply themselves at first to the Fathers, etc.’⁵⁶ In sermons which would seem to have been preached in those years, John Preston, now Master of Emmanuel College, insisted that Calvin and Beza were much better interpreters of Scripture than the Fathers, since they knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, whereas none of the Fathers mastered the three languages. Even ‘the best’ of the Fathers, Augustine, was an exegete far inferior to Calvin, who should be regarded as ‘the best since the Apostles’. As to their dogmatic writings, the Fathers were only engaged ‘in particular controversies’ against such or such heretic, and thus inferior declaration to the same purpose by the Archbishop of Canterbury and twelve bishops (CSPD 1618–1623, 396, 22 May 1622), which was notified to both universities by the Privy Council on 31 May 1622 (letter printed in Wood, History, ii. 343–4, and in Heywood and Wright (eds.), Cambridge Transactions, ii. 303–5). See M. Todd, ‘Anti-Calvinists and the Republican Threat in Early Stuart Cambridge’, in Knoppers (ed.), Puritanism and its Discontents, 85–105, spec. 94–5; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 518–20. The ‘Directions concerning preachers’, on which see below, were published at the same time and expressed the same worries. ⁵³ Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 95–6 (reproduced verbatim by Wood, History, ii. 347); letter of the University of Oxford to the King, 17 July 1622, CSPD 1618–1623, 426–7. Heylyn’s confusion in 1637 between the first publication of James’s directions in 1617 and their reissue in 1622 (above, n. 36) would suggest that they did not become well known till that later date. ⁵⁴ Heylyn’s testimony about himself, Theologia ueterum, sig. B1v , is not above suspicion (see Milton, ‘Creation of Laudianism’, 165–73), but see John Fell, The Life of the most Learned, Reverend and Pious Dr H. Hammond (London, 1661), 6–7, on Hammond’s theological studies. ⁵⁵ Hammond, Answer to the Animadversions, 23: ‘for Clement’s Epistle was by Mr. Yong [sic] seven or eight years after publisht’ (in 1633: see below, 268). ⁵⁶ Thomas Turner to Laud, 23 May 1625, in Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 157. In an undated discourse to Bachelors of Arts, Prideaux also insisted on the use of catechisms and warned against a premature study of the Schoolmen (the Fathers were not mentioned): see Prideaux, Viginti-duae Lectiones, concio IV, sep. pagination, 34–5, and compare the contrary warning he had given in 1617 (above, 162).

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

167

to ‘modern Writers’. Augustine himself had erred ‘because he lived in the dayes when God made way for Antichrist’, whereas Calvin ‘was raised up to abolish him’.⁵⁷ Preston warned his audience that the Fathers should only be quoted as a defence against accusations of novelty or singularity. Otherwise this was in effect putting them on a par with Scripture and bringing popery back.⁵⁸ Such sensitivity is to be understood as a defensive reaction against the rise of Arminianism.⁵⁹ In the 1630s, a number of divines of the new school were bishops and they used their authority to promote their views. There is a story of Montagu’s examining a student for ordination. The candidate thought he would impress him by telling him that he had ‘read Calvin’s Institutions thrice over’: Indeed, said the Bishop, you have done more than I have done, for I am not got so far by four hundred Years [i.e. until Bernard of Clairvaux, who died in 1153]. The ingenious young Man presently apprehended the meaning of the Bishop’s Answer, and prudently told him, he was sensible he had begun his Studies in Divinity at the wrong end, and wished the Time he had spent in reading of Calvin, he had spent in reading the Primitive Fathers, and promised his Lordship to alter the Method of his Studies, to which the Bishop encouraged him with many Reasons, and particularly with this one: That he would never be able to judge when modern Writers of Divinity were in the right, and when in the wrong, or to distinguish true from erroneous, new from old, or particular from generally received Doctrines, or to know the true Sense of the Scriptures relating to the Faith, Government, and whole Constitution of the Church, but by knowing the consentient Doctrine and Practice of the more ancient Fathers …⁶⁰

It is revealing of Montagu’s agenda that his very last work, published in 1640, had a long section of the descent into Hell, ‘since it is our first and foremost wish and intent that it be manifest to all adversaries that the present Church of England follows the footsteps of pious and primitive antiquity, against all the novelties of any innovator whatever’.⁶¹ ‘A few persons in ⁵⁷ John Preston, ‘A Pattern of Wholesome Words. Or, Paul’s Charge to Timothy, in a Treatise on 2 Tim. 1. 13 being the sum of sundry Sermons’, in Riches of Mercy to men in Misery (London, 1658), 318–20. ⁵⁸ Ibid. 308–17. ⁵⁹ See ibid. 276. On Preston’s position, see Bendall, Brooke, and Collinson, History of Emmanuel, 215–21; S. R. Pointer, ‘The Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Election of 1622: The Constraints of a Puritan Institution’, in Knoppers (ed.), Puritanism and its Discontents, 106–21, and below on the York House conference. ⁶⁰ Hickes’s preface to A Second Collection of Controversial Letters Relating to the Church of England, and the Church of Rome, as they passed between an Honourable Lady, and Dr. George Hickes (London, 1710), pp. xxxv–xxxvi. ⁶¹ Richard Montagu, 3εανθρωπικο˜υ seu de Vita Iesu Christi Domini nostri Originum Ecclesiasticarum pars posterior (London, 1640), 440: ‘τὸ ζήτημα istud omittere non

168

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

the Church of England, without either much reputation or much learning’ had admittedly been ‘ensnared by the fanatical delusions of Calvin, Beza, Perkins, and Willet’ and denied the local descent, but they had nothing to do with the Church of England.⁶² Montagu was ready to accept, although he did not assert categorically, that, when Christ descended into Hell to triumph over it, he found the patriarchs and prophets ‘detained’ there, ‘as has been thought by many eminent doctors of the Church’.⁶³ He denied however that Christ converted or freed anyone, ‘such as Plato, Aristotle etc.’ The preaching mentioned in 1 Peter 3: 19 should be understood of Christ’s announcing their condemnation to the damned.⁶⁴ Antiquity had become the necessary preparation for reading continental works, instead of the other way round. The Scotch Calvinist Robert Baillie, who regarded this new order as ‘most unhappie and dangerous’, called it ‘the Englishe method of studie’.⁶⁵ Since students’ time was short, it was easy to foresee that many would hardly bother with continental authors any more. In most cases, of course, the Fathers must still have been read according to a predetermined framework, but its categories were meant to be specifically English. Robert Skinner, Bishop of Bristol, warned his clergy against ‘foreign Writers; foreign, I mean, that are modern’ and advised ‘young Divines to begin rather with that they are sworn to, the Doctrine and Discipline contained in the Book of Common-Prayer, and the XXXIX Articles, and then on to the Homilies’. They should then move ‘to our own excellent Writers’, such as Jewel, Hooker, Bilson, Field, and Andrewes, who ‘would season and settle them both at once; yes and prepare them for reading the Fathers and Councils, [and] the Schools’.⁶⁶ The debemus, qui in uotis et proposito cum primis hoc habemus, ut cuiuis pateat, των ˜ ἐξ ἐναντίας, Ecclesiam hodiernam Anglicanam, uestigiis insistere, piae et primigeniae Antiquitatis, contra omnes quorumcunque Nouatorum καινοφωνίας.’ ⁶² Ibid. ⁶³ Ibid. 444 (to answer the objection that Christ could not have triumphed over Hell, since he was alone): ‘nec solum triumphasse [Christum] probabunt [Nouatores]: siquidem, quod uisum est multis magnis Ecclesiae doctoribus, Patriarchae et Prophetae, quod modo recitatum est e Tertulliano [De anima, 55. 2 (CC 2, 862)], apud Inferos detinebantur.’ ⁶⁴ Ibid. 444–5. ⁶⁵ Robert Baillie, ‘To Mr. William Spang. History of the General Assembly at Glasgow in 1638’ (written in June 1639), in Letters and Journals, ed. D. Laing, i (Edinburgh, 1841), 149. See Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen, 128–33. ⁶⁶ The Speech of Dr. Robert Skinner, Lord Bishop of Bristol, at the Visitation at Dorchester, September 18. 1637. Earnestly and humbly recommended to the serious Perusal of the Clergy of the present Age by their humble servant, Philo-Clerus (London, 1744), 17–18. See also 12. The text was preserved and then published by Nonjurors: see Rawlinson’s note in his copy (Bodl., Rawl. 8◦ 576), which is bound with the manuscript.

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

169

doctrinal and disciplinary points stressed by Skinner in his sermon—the efficacy of baptism for the regeneration of children, the Real Presence, sacerdotal absolution, kneeling ‘at the Prayers of the Church’, reverence to the altar—reveal the sacerdotalist spirit in which he expected the Fathers to be read.⁶⁷ Henry Burton’s inflammatory sermons of 1636 against an alleged Arminian plot to destroy the Protestant religion saw James’s order in retrospect as a critical step. The writings of Fathers and Schoolmen had many excellences but were ‘not without their naeui, or spots’. Young students, who ‘have not the maturity of judgement’ to make the discernment, were likely to be thus ‘infected with the poyson of Popish error and Superstition’, and the risk was all the greater because of the prestige of antiquity.⁶⁸ They should therefore (inverting Montagu’s imagery) ‘bee admonished not to meddle with Fathers and Schoole-men, till they … bee well seasoned with the pure liquor of Trueth, both immediately drunke in from the fountaines of the Scriptures, and derived by those uncorrupt Conduit-pipes, the Divines of the Reformed Churches’.⁶⁹ Some moderate men remained attached to the old course, although in a sort of defensive way. Holdsworth recommended that students should learn the rudiments of theology from modern authors, since they were better suited to the capacities of the young than the Fathers, who ‘handle many things cryptically and obscurely’. Ancient Jews, according to Gregory of Nazianzus and Jerome, had thus deferred the reading of some difficult parts of Scripture until they reached a mature age.⁷⁰ This is an interesting instance of the circulation of arguments between discussions on Scripture and discussions on the Fathers: Gregory’s and Jerome’s texts were commonly used by Roman Catholics against the promiscuous reading of the Bible by lay people, and Protestants did their best to extenuate them.⁷¹ No doubt, the Fathers were far superior in science and sanctity to modern writers and one should not spend too much time in the study of the latter, but it was a good method to ‘lead the mind through what is easier to what is more difficult’.⁷² ‘Moderns are more fitted to form childhood, Fathers to confirm ⁶⁷ Ibid. 2, 18–20, 22, 28. ⁶⁸ Henry Burton, For God, and the King. The summe of two sermons preached on the fifth of November last in St Matthewes Friday-Streete. 1636 (n.p., 1636), 112–13. ⁶⁹ Ibid. 113. ⁷⁰ Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 312, referring to Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio II (apologetica), 48 (PG 35, 456–7) and Jerome, Commentarii in Hiezechielem, prologus (CC 75, 3–4). ⁷¹ See e.g. New Testament (Rheims), sig. a4r and Fulke’s answer, The New Testament translated by the Papists, sig. A4r . ⁷² Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 312–13.

170

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

adulthood.’⁷³ Rather than Calvin’s Institutes, Holdsworth recommended to beginners the handbook by the German Calvinist Marcus Friedrich Wendelin, ‘as being clearer exacter and fuller, … and acquainting you in a plain easy way with all ordinary Controversies without which you will never understand positive Divinity’.⁷⁴

2. AUGUSTINISM AND CALVINISM The downgrading of Calvinistic textbooks in the theological curriculum was part of a wider ‘Arminian’ surge, which has been much chronicled and debated by historians. As far as it concerned the authority of the Fathers, two different moves should be distinguished: from Calvin (or, to be more accurate, late sixteenth-century Calvinist orthodoxy)⁷⁵ to Augustine; from Augustine to the Greek Fathers or to more ancient Latin ones. At the end of the sixteenth century, those divines who were reacting against the Cambridge school of strict Calvinism used Augustine as a bulwark. They stressed quite rightly that their opponents were not only going further ⁷³ Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 313: ‘ad infantiam formandam aptiores Neoterici, Patres ad prouectiorem aetatem firmandam.’ ⁷⁴ Holdsworth, ‘Directions for a Student in the Universitie’, in Fletcher, Intellectual Development of Milton, ii. 633 and 645–6. Both this edition and that (signed ‘J.A.’) in Emmanuel College Magazine, 4 (1892–3), 8, read ‘Clavius Institutions’, but this is clearly a scribal error. Marcus Friedrich Wendelin, Christianae theologiae libri II. Methodice dispositi (Amsterdam, 1639; 1st edn., Hanau, 1634). See J. A. Trentman, ‘The Authorship of Directions for a Student in the Universitie’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 7 (1977–80), 170–83; Schmitt, John Case, 46. ⁷⁵ The distinction need not be discussed here, since English opponents as well as defenders of this system commonly ascribed it to Calvin (see P. Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635’, Past and Present, 114 (February 1987), 32–76, esp. 61 n. 74). That Beza and other architects of Calvinist orthodoxy deviated from Calvin has been strongly asserted e.g. by R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Carlisle, 1997: 1st edn. 1979)—a study with an obvious theological agenda, which does not mention Whitaker at all. Their substantial continuity has been maintained in several well-informed, if also theologically driven, studies by R. A. Muller. See his Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC, 1986); After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2003). The distinctive features of Beza’s view have been recently stressed by D. Sinnema, ‘Beza’s View of Predestination in Historical Perspective’, in Backus (ed.), Th´eodore de B`eze, 218–39. S. F. Hughes, ‘The Problem of ‘‘Calvinism’’: English Theologies of Predestination c.1580–1630’, in Wabuda and Litzenberger (eds.), Belief and Practice, 228–49, offers an interesting discussion. I shall also ignore the problems raised by the growth of ‘federal theology’: see D. A. Weir, The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought (Oxford, 1990); S. Strehle, Calvinism, Federalism, and Scholasticism: A Study of the Reformed Doctrine of Covenant (Bern, 1988).

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

171

than Augustine but pretended to make their peculiar doctrines compulsory for everyone. In April 1595, William Barrett, fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, preached a provocatively anti-Calvinist sermon. In May, the Calvinist majority of the Heads of Houses, led by Whitaker, ordered Barrett to read a recantation. It included the assertions that ‘true faith’ once received could not be lost (reprobates could only have ‘counterfeit faith’) and that the reprobation of the wicked was ‘from eternity’ and had no other cause than God’s will.⁷⁶ In a detailed memorandum which he drew up for Whitgift, Saravia was able to muster a long series of quotations from Augustine to the contrary. Augustine had expressly stated that reprobates could have true, justifying faith for a time and then lose it: what was proper to the elect was not faith but the gift of perseverance.⁷⁷ And he had carefully distinguished between reprobation and election: ‘we look for the merit of obduracy and we find it. The whole mass indeed has deserved damnation for their sin.... But we look for the merit of mercy and we do not find it, because there is none.’⁷⁸ Saravia gibed at those who ‘write about God’s eternal decree of predestination as if they had been present at his council’: ‘I dare not go beyond what Augustine taught out of the word of God.’⁷⁹ Both Whitgift and his fellow Archbishop, Hutton of York, saw in Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings the test of orthodoxy on the question of grace.⁸⁰ Whitgift considered that there was no reason to grant Calvin ⁷⁶ Strype, Whitgift, appendix, no. XXII, 185–7. The best account of the controversy is now Lake, Moderate Puritans, 201–42. See also Porter, Reformation and Reaction, 314–22 and 344–75; White, Predestination, 101–23. On the political dimension, see E. Gilliam and W. J. Tighe, ‘To ‘‘Run with the Time’’: Archbishop Whitgift, the Lambeth Articles, and the Politics of Theological Ambiguity in Late Elizabethan England’, SCJ 23 (1992), 325–40. ⁷⁷ ‘Mr. Saravia, Opinion of Barretts Recantation’, in Nijenhuis, Saravia, Document XXXIX, 338, quoting De correptione et gratia, 13. 40 (PL 44, 941): ‘credendum est quosdam de filiis perditionis, non accepto dono perseuerandi usque in finem, in fide quae per dilectionem operatur incipere uiuere, et aliquando fideliter et iuste uiuere, et postea cadere’ (Nijenhuis failed to recognize that this was a quotation from Augustine). On Saravia’s text, see ibid. 132–3 and 182–9. It had first been published by Strype, Whitgift, appendix, no. XXIV. ⁷⁸ Ibid. 338. Augustine, ep. 194 ad Sixtum, 3. 14 (CSEL 57, 187): ‘Quaerimus meritum obdurationis, et inuenimus. Merito namque peccati uniuersa massa damnata est.... Quaerimus autem meritum misericordiae, et non inuenimus, quia nullum est.’ ⁷⁹ Ibid. 338–9: ‘De reprobatione alia est ratio, in qua ulterius progredi quam Augustinus ex uerbo Dei docuit non audeo.... Ita docti quidam uiri de aeterno illo Dei decreto scribunt, ac si ipsi diuino inter fuissent consilio.’ ⁸⁰ See letters of Hutton to Whitgift in Strype, Whitgift, 461 and 477; Matthew Hutton, ‘De electione, praedestinatione et reprobatione commentatio’, in Breuis et dilucida explicatio uerae, certae et consolationis plenae doctrinae, de electione, praedestinatione ac reprobatione. Authore Matthaeo Eboracensi Archiepiscopo, Theologo eximio. Cui accesserunt et aliorum Clariss. Theologorum inclytae Cantabrigiensis Academiae … eiusdem argumenti

172

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

an authority superior to that of the Fathers.⁸¹ He was clearly unconvinced by Whitaker’s claim that the doctrine expressed in Barrett’s recantation was fully Augustinian.⁸² In November, Whitaker went to Lambeth and submitted to the Archbishop nine articles on grace and predestination. Whitgift approved them in substance, thereby clearly siding with the Heads against Barrett, but he introduced some significant changes. On every point where Augustine’s doctrine did not coincide with that of Calvin, the alterations made the articles accord with the former.⁸³ Whereas Whitaker’s draft ascribed predestination in general to the sole will of God, the text approved by Whitgift only spoke of ‘predestination to life’, thus implying that reprobation was a different matter.⁸⁴ Lancelot Andrewes had argued the point powerfully, and Augustine’s authority was invoked for the modification.⁸⁵ Similarly, Whitaker had written that ‘true, living and justifying faith’ was not lost ‘either totally or finally in those that have been once partakers of it’, but the last words were changed into ‘in the elect’, ‘in an altogether different sense and in accordance with Augustine’s mind, whereas the expression of the draft was in accordance with that of Calvin’.⁸⁶ Two decades later, when Overall summed up the doctrine of the Church of England on predestination, he protested that the opinion of the final perseverance of all those who had once believed was a novelty,

scripta. Nec non Lambethani Articuli, seu assertiones Orthodoxae, cum Anglicana confessione, et Patrum, maxime Augustini, sententia collatae, ed. A. Thysius (Harderwijk, 1613), 3–44—on this publication, see Lake, Moderate Puritans, 331 n. 53. The Calvinist retreat to Augustine has been perceptively observed by Lake, ‘Matthew Hutton’, 201–2. ⁸¹ Strype, Whitgift, 441 and 456. ⁸² See Whitaker’s letter to Whitgift, ibid., appendix, no. XXV, 200. Barrett’s recantation included a reference to Augustine which was more a biased summary than a textual quotation (ibid. 186). ⁸³ For the doctrinal analysis of the Lambeth Articles, Hardwick, History of the Articles, 158–77, is still valuable. See also Porter, Reformation and Reaction, 365–71. Lake, Moderate Puritans, 218–27, rightly stresses Whitgift’s fundamental agreement with the Heads but he may underestimate the significance of the alterations. Here and elsewhere the distinction between ‘Augustinian’ and ‘Calvinist’ has been missed by Tyacke, AntiCalvinists, 30–3 (see id., ‘The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered’ (1987), repr. in Aspects, 162, for the claim that the distinction is actually ‘of no great moment’). ⁸⁴ See the original and final versions of article II, with anti-Calvinist commentaries, in the Arminian collection, Articuli Lambethani, 10 and 13 (from CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fos. 114v –116r ). The text was reprinted in Hardwick, History of the Articles, appendix V, 364–7, who called it ‘the commentary or critique of Whitgift and the rest’. Its origin is not clear but it is probably contemporary with Andrewes’s observations. ⁸⁵ Articuli Lambethani, 13, and ‘Reuerendissimi το˜υ πάνυ doctissimique Patris Lanceloti Wintoniensis (qui ipse eiusdem pars magna fuit) de Synodo oblatis a D. Whitakero Articulis Iudicium’, ibid. 21–32. ⁸⁶ Articuli Lambethani, 10 and 15 (article V): ‘sensu plane alio et ad mentem Augustini; cum illa [uerba] in autographo sint ad mentem Caluini.’

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

173

‘never approved by any Father of the ancient Church and rejected by all antiquity’.⁸⁷ The move from Calvin to Augustine was probably accelerated by the attitude of Dutch Remonstrants. They stressed that Augustine in his anti-Pelagian writings had departed from the Greek Fathers, from his predecessors among the Latin Fathers, and from his own previous works. They claimed that his teaching on predestination and perseverance had never been sanctioned by the Church (what had made Pelagius an heretic and had been condemned by councils was his denying the necessity of grace).⁸⁸ This interpretation was spread all over Europe by the influential Historia Pelagiana that the Arminian scholar Gerardus Joannes Vossius published at the time of the Synod of Dort. Vossius insisted that he would play the part of ‘an historian more than a theologian’,⁸⁹ but he also thought that the consensus of antiquity, as textually established by him, was authoritative: he quoted in his preface the formulas of Vincent of L´erins.⁹⁰ For theologians of all Churches, in any case, the ancient controversies of grace were of immediate relevance and they were keen to identify their opponents with heretics who had been condemned in this context. The very name, or rather misnomer, ‘Semi-Pelagians’, which came into current use in about 1600 to describe the Gallic critics of Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, appears to have been coined during contemporary theological disputes between Jesuits and Dominicans. It proved a useful polemical tool against Roman Catholic Molinists as well as Protestant Arminians, whose doctrine was too different from that of Pelagius to be simply labelled ‘Pelagian’.⁹¹ Vossius ⁸⁷ Overall, ‘Sententia Ecclesiae Anglicanae de Praedestinatione et Capitibus annexis’, CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fo. 13v , published in Milton (ed.), British Delegation and Synod of Dort, Document 2/7, 83: ‘Certe sententia illa, de qua tantopere pugnatur hodie (de certa perseuerantia eorum omnium qui semel crediderint, ac regenerati fuerint) nullis unquam Veteris Ecclesiae Patribus probata fuit, sed ab omni Antiquitate reiecta, et perpetua omnium temporum experientia nimium refutata, et non nisi hoc ultimo seculo nata.’ In the edition in Articuli Lambethani, 55, this is the concluding sentence. ⁸⁸ See for instance Petrus Bertius, Hymenaeus desertor. Siue de sanctorum apostasia problemata duo (Frankfurt, 1612), 64–77. ⁸⁹ Gerardus Joannes Vossius, Historiae de Controversiis, quas Pelagius eiusque reliquiae mouerunt, libri septem (Leiden, 1618), 3 and again 259. The success of the book is attested by the existence of a pirated edition, ‘Iuxta Exemplar quod Lugduni Batavorum, excudit Joannes Patius, Iuratus et Ordinarius Academiae Typographus, Anno 1618’ (copies at Biblioth`eque de l’Arsenal, Paris, shelfmark 4◦ H. 6982, and BL, shelfmark 1010 a. 11). See Rademaker, Vossius, ‘Checklist of Vossius’ works’, 357, no. 6. ⁹⁰ Vossius, Historia Pelagiana, 3 and sig. a4r–v . ⁹¹ The question needs further examination but see already M. Jacquin, ‘A` quelle date apparaît le terme ‘‘Semip´elagien’’?’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et th´eologiques, 1 (1907), 506–8. The word was already in use in Protestant controversy: see e.g. William Perkins’s preface to his A Golden Chaine, or the description of Theologie, containing the

174

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

wrote with the Remonstrant controversy in the Netherlands very much in his mind,⁹² but he was also well aware of Roman Catholic internal debates.⁹³ According to Vossius, all the Greek Fathers and the Latin Fathers prior to Augustine, as well as Augustine himself in his early writings, held that God predestined those whom he foresaw would believe and persevere with the help of grace.⁹⁴ They thought that grace was made efficacious by man’s cooperation with it. Augustine, ‘in order to press Pelagius harder’, then made additions to the common doctrine: first, that grace was given to some and not to others, and was more efficacious in some than in others, ‘out of an absolute decree of God’;⁹⁵ secondly, that this absolute decree accounted for perseverance.⁹⁶ But ‘this appendix of Augustine’ was never accepted by all Catholics and it remained a free opinion.⁹⁷ One should thus carefully distinguish in Augustine’s writings ‘the common doctrine of Catholics and the particular doctrine of some persons, chiefly of Augustine’.⁹⁸ Although Vossius highlighted the differences between Augustine’s doctrine and that of Calvin—that justifying faith once received could be lost, that all the faithful were not elected, that nobody could be secure of his election⁹⁹—his main point was clearly to limit Augustine’s authority. The Bishop of Hippo’s antiPelagian writings could not be equated with orthodoxy. Some moreover had gone beyond Augustine and denied free will altogether. Vossius took pains to follow this ‘heresy of the predestinarians, which, as Sigebert testifies, originated from the books of Augustine wrongly understood’, beginning with the monks of Adrumete in Augustine’s lifetime down to Gottschalk order of the causes of Salvation and Damnation, according to Gods woorde (London, 1591), sig. A2r , on ‘Semipelagian Papists, which ascribe Gods Predestination, partlye to mercye, and partly to mens foreseen preparations and meritorious workes’—the preface was an addition to the Latin original, Armilla aurea (1590). On the long popularity of this ‘misleading misnomer’, see R. W. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul (Washington, 1989), 128–30. ⁹² See Vossius, Historia Pelagiana, sigs. b1r and b4v . On the Dutch context of Vossius’ work, see Rademaker, Vossius, 87–125. ⁹³ See his references to Roman Catholic theologians of both sides, Historia Pelagiana, 158, 307, 554, and 606. ⁹⁴ Ibid., Liber 6us, Thesis VIII, 538–48. ⁹⁵ Ibid., Thesis X, 548–57 (‘ut fortius premeret Pelagium’). ⁹⁶ Ibid., Thesis XI, 557–65. ⁹⁷ Ibid., Thesis XIV, 594–602, and Thesis XVII, 614–19. ⁹⁸ Ibid., Thesis XVIII, 629: ‘Haec fuse adeo prosequi uisum fuit, ut intelligamus, quatenus in hac controuersia, Augustini uerba, nunc communem Catholicorum, nunc peculiarem quorundam, ac Augustini inprimis, sententiam comprehendant … Et sane si quis cum iudicio in Augustino et Prospero uersari, deque Pelagianismo, aut Semipelagianismo iudicium ferre uolet: eum duo haec, non malo quorundam more confundere; sed curare, ueterum exemplo, distinguere opus est.’ ⁹⁹ Ibid., Thesis XII, 565–71. Vossius also mentioned that antiquity believed all baptized children to be saved, l. II, pars 3, Thesis IV, 263–5.

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

175

in the ninth century and even later in the Middle Ages.¹⁰⁰ Since Vossius had warned at the beginning of his book that it was equally erroneous to deny free will and to deny grace,¹⁰¹ the implicit lesson was that one should look for the middle ground, somewhere between Augustine and the Semi-Pelagians, which expressed the true consensus of antiquity. Vossius did not draw this conclusion explicitly in his book—he was a cautious man—but he spelt it out ten years later in a private letter to Laud.¹⁰² There are obvious parallels with the work of contemporary Jesuit scholars: the reaction against Augustine’s authority was a major European trend.¹⁰³ Contra-Remonstrants, like anti-Molinists in the Roman Catholic Church, made Augustine’s later writings a standard of orthodoxy. Vossius had many troubles with the synods of South Holland after the meetings of the Synod of Dort. Although the historical character of his book partly sheltered him from repression, he had to promise that he would make a public profession of Augustinianism. He did so, rather half-heartedly, in the entry on Cassian in his 1627 De historicis Latinis —a book which was largely meant for an English audience, since Vossius dedicated it to the Duke of Buckingham and presented copies to several English bishops and scholars.¹⁰⁴ Cassian had been severely attacked for his views on grace by Prosper, Augustine’s disciple, and Vossius had apologized for him in his Historia Pelagiana by pointing out that Cassian had had no intention to bring in a new doctrine but had only been echoing the teaching of the Greek Fathers. Vossius now stressed that all the later doctors of the Western Church, such as Fulgentius of Ruspe, had followed the doctrine of Augustine and Prosper, ‘which I follow and approve myself ’, not that of Cassian. If some thought that the Historia Pelagiana meant to oppose ¹⁰⁰ Ibid., Liber 1us, c. VIII, 34–5 (‘haeresis praedestinatorum, siue praedestinatianorum: quam Sigebertus … ex libris Augustini male intellectis ortam testatur’); c. XV, 56; c. XXVI, 71–2 (on Honorius Augustodunensis); Liber 7us, pars quarta, ‘quae est de caussa Godscalci, et iis, quae huic sunt adnexa’, 733–90. See Sigeberti Gemblacensis coenobitae Chronicon ab anno 381 ad 1113 (Paris, 1513), fo. 7v : ‘Praedestinatorum haeresis | hoc tempore coepit serpere | qui ideo praedestinati uocantur: quia de praedestinatione et diuina gratia disputantes | asserebant quod nec pie uiuentibus prosit bonorum operum labor: si a Deo ad mortem praedestinati fuerint | nec impiis obsit quod improbe uiuant: si a Deo praedestinati fuerint ad uitam. quae assertio: et bonos a bonis auocabat | et malos ad mala prouocabat. Haec haeresis ex libris Augustini male intellectis: initium sumpsisse dicitur’ [= ed. L. C. Bethmann, MGH. Scriptores, vi. 306]. This is the editio princeps, by Antoine Le Roux (Antonius Rufus). ¹⁰¹ Ibid., Liber 1us, c. I, 1–3. ¹⁰² See below. ¹⁰³ See J. Orcibal, Jans´enius d’Ypres (1585–1638) (Paris, 1989), 15–56, ‘Rome, Louvain et l’autorit´e de saint Augustin’; B. Neveu, ‘Le Statut th´eologique de saint ´ Augustin au XVIIe si`ecle’ (1990), repr. in id., Erudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe si`ecles (Paris, 1994), 473–90. ¹⁰⁴ Rademaker, Vossius, 228–9.

176

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

either the Fathers who lived before Augustine or Augustine’s own earlier writings to his later doctrine, ‘as if it was impious or even false’, they were mistaken. ‘Indeed, in my opinion, Augustine is not contrary to the earlier Fathers, but he adds on predestination what the earlier Fathers for the most part omitted, and he explains what they said incautiously concerning grace.’¹⁰⁵ The Arminian crisis had a major impact in England, where it exposed fault-lines which had previously been buried under the dominant Reformed consensus.¹⁰⁶ As anti-Arminians struggled to reassert and clarify what they took to be the orthodox doctrine of grace and predestination, Augustinianism tended to be much more prominent than Calvinism. In some cases, the shift was due to conviction. John Hacket, Archbishop Williams’s biographer, tells us that his hero ‘had a mighty Insight into the seventh Volume of St. Austin’s Works, wherein that holy Bishop hath so divinely contended for the Efficacy of Grace against Pelagians, and Semipelagians. For his own part, St Austin had possess’d him, and he was ever entirely his Adherent in those Controversies.’ Williams had been Overall’s pupil but had also received ‘by Tradition’ at St John’s College, Cambridge, the teaching of the late Whitaker. He deplored the violence of the Arminian controversy and preached moderation, holding all the while ‘his Augustinian Conclusions’.¹⁰⁷ Of John Davenant and Samuel Ward, who were two of the four English delegates at the Synod of Dort, it has been plausibly said that ‘their general doctrine had been drawn exclusively from Hippo, in contradistinction to Geneva’.¹⁰⁸ Their stand was approved by James I, who instructed the British delegates in March 1619 ‘to have those conclusions [on the application of Christ’s death to mankind] couched, in manner and terms, as ¹⁰⁵ Gerardus Joannes Vossius, De Historicis Latinis libri tres (Leiden, 1627), 213: ‘Nec enim, iudicio meo, B. Augustinus prioribus Patribus repugnat: sed quod de Praedestinatione priores fere Patres praeteribant, hoc addit: atque ubi illi de gratia incautius essent locuti, hoc explicat.’ See Rademaker, Vossius, 135–6 and 143–8. Compare the balanced treatment of Cassian in Historia Pelagiana, l. 1us, c. VII. ‘De Cassiano et scriptis eius’, 28–33, and l. 4us, c. I, Thesis I, 388–99, and, by contrast, his condemnation in Perkins, Problema, 36. ¹⁰⁶ See the important study by D. Como, ‘Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in Lake and Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy, 64–87. ¹⁰⁷ Hacket, Scrinia Reserata, i. 16. On Whitaker’s influence see ibid. 15; on Overall’s, above, 141. In both Erasmus’ edition of Augustine’s Opera omnia (Basle, 1528–9) and that of the Louvain divines (Antwerp, 1576–7), volume vii comprised the anti-Pelagian writings. ¹⁰⁸ Hardwick, History of the Articles, 194. See J. Platt, ‘Eirenical Anglicans at the Synod of Dort’, in Baker (ed.), Reform and Reformation, 221–43; Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church’, 54–60 and 63; A. Milton’s introduction to British Delegation and Synod of Dort.

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

177

near as possibly may be, to those which were used in the Primitive Church by the Fathers of that time against the Pelagians, and Semi-Pelagians, and not in any new phrase of the Modern age’.¹⁰⁹ Ward is an interesting figure, who confirms that devotion to antiquity was by no means confined to English Arminian circles.¹¹⁰ He was accounted a Puritan at the time of Laud’s ascendency in the Church. He nevertheless sided with the King during the Civil War and was imprisoned by the Parliamentarian authorities.¹¹¹ He was celebrated for his deep knowledge both of Fathers and Schoolmen,¹¹² and, although he had been Perkins’s student, appears to have fully espoused the new course of theological studies. The ultra-Laudian bishop John Bramhall, who was a student at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, under Ward’s mastership, later testified: When I was a young Student in Theology, Doctor Ward declared his mind to me, to this purpose, that it was impossible that the present Controversies of the Church should be rightly determined or reconciled without a deep insight into the Doctrine of the Primitive Fathers, and a competent skill in School Theology. The former affordeth us a right pattern, and the second smootheth it over, and plaineth away the knots.¹¹³

On predestination Ward believed that ‘St Austin’s Opinion is the truth’.¹¹⁴ When he was entrusted with writing a letter of thanks to Vossius, who ¹⁰⁹ Letters of British delegates to Archbishop Abbot, 11 March 1619, in Hales, Golden remains, 2nd pagination, 184–5 (republished in Milton (ed.), British Delegation and Synod of Dort, 216). ¹¹⁰ For a summary of his career, see M. M. Knappen’s introduction to Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward (Chicago, 1933), 37–49. The complex personality of Ward has been rediscovered in recent years, largely thanks to several studies by Margo Todd. See her ‘The Samuel Ward Papers at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1985), 582–92; ‘ ‘‘An Act of Discretion’’: Evangelical Conformity and the Puritan Dons’, Albion, 18 (1986), 581–99; ‘Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward’, JBS 31 (1992), 236–64. On Ward as a scholar, see J. P. Carley, ‘Books Seen by Samuel Ward ‘‘in Bibliotheca regia’’, circa 1614’, British Library Journal, 16 (1990), 88–98. ¹¹¹ Hence Thomas Fuller’s superb eulogy in The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), Durham, 299: ‘He turned with the Times as a Rock riseth with the Tide; and for his uncomplying therewith, was imprisoned in Saint Johns Colledge in Cambridge. In a word, he was counted a Puritan before these times, and Popish in these times, and yet being alwayes the same, was a true Protestant at all times.’ ¹¹² See Thomas Goad’s poem prefixed to Samuel Ward, Gratia discriminans. Concio ad Clerum, habita Cantabrigiae in Ecclesia B. Mariae, Ian. 12 1625 (London, 1626), unnumbered: ‘Antiquitatis crypta tu penetras frequens, | Scholasticorum tu profundos uortices.’ ¹¹³ Bramhall, Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication, 134. Since Bramhall took his MA in 1616 and BD in 1623, Ward’s advice to him must have been immediately subsequent to James I’s directions. ¹¹⁴ Ward to Ussher, 25 September 1622, in Parr, Usher, letter L, 82. On the importance of Augustine for Ward, see Todd, ‘Puritan Self-Fashioning’, 246–9.

178

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

had presented a copy of his De Historicis Latinis to the University of Cambridge, he politely, but clearly, told the author that he was less pleased with the Historia Pelagiana. Remonstrants often appealed to it to defend their errors on grace and original sin, ‘two articles on which Augustine, not without good reason, hinted that the Christian faith properly rests’.¹¹⁵ Ward’s Cambridge sermon of 1626 against Arminianism never cited modern Reformed authors but was replete with quotations from the Fathers, above all from Augustine, who was appealed to for the gratuitousness of predestination, the efficacy of grace, the certainty that the human will, though always able to resist and even sometimes in fact resisting grace, would never resist it victoriously.¹¹⁶ At the end of his sermon, Ward exhorted divinity students to read Augustine’s polemical writings against the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians, and particularly the very last ones, his De praedestinatione sanctorum and De bono perseuerantiae: ‘almost all the arguments with which Augustine crushed the Massilienses, those remnants of the Pelagian heresy, may most rightly be turned against Arminius and the Remonstrants.’¹¹⁷ Elsewhere, Ward—all the more remarkably since he had been a pupil at Cambridge of both Perkins and Whitaker—distanced himself from those divines who had spoken ‘in too harsh terms’ of gratuitous predestination. It should rather be explained ‘according to Scripture, Augustine and the article of our Church’, as Overall had done.¹¹⁸ ¹¹⁵ Ward to Vossius in Vossii epistolae, epistolae ad Vossium no. LXXIII, 44: ‘In quibus duobus Articulis, non leuiter innuit Augustinus [De peccato originali, 24. 28; CSEL 42, 187], fidem Christianam proprie consistere.’ White’s claim, Predestination, 209 and 283, that Vossius’ work was specially admired by ‘moderates looking for a middle way’ between Remonstrants and Anti-Remonstrants, flies in the face of all the evidence. ¹¹⁶ Ward, Gratia discriminans, esp. 22, 28, 30, 50–51. On Ward’s role againt Arminianism, see M. Todd, ‘ ‘‘All One with Tom Thumb’’: Arminianism, Popery, and the Story of the Reformation in Early Stuart Cambridge’, CH 64 (1995), 563–79. ¹¹⁷ Ward, Gratia discriminans, 53–4: ‘Eoque magis hortor, quod omnia fere argumenta, quibus ille in istis libris Massilienses reliquias Pelagianae haeresis confodit, rectissime in Arminium et Remonstrantes intorqueri posse in hac causa studiosus lector facile perspiciat.’ The description of the Massilienses is an echo of Prosper’s letter to Augustine against the Gallic anti-predestinarians [= Augustine, ep. 225], 7, CSEL 57, 465: ‘ista Pelagianae reliquia prauitatis.’ ¹¹⁸ Samuel Ward, determinatio ‘Ecclesiae Reformatae non dissentiunt in fundamentis fidei’, in Opera nonnulla viz. Determinationes Theologicae, Tractatus de Iustificatione, Praelectiones de Peccato Originali, ed. Seth Ward (London, 1658), 114: ‘post Lutheri tempora controuerti coepit [articulus de praedestinatione], occasione forsan Theologorum quorundam qui praedestinationem gratuitam asserentes … formulis loquendi durioribus utuntur. Ego plane existimo, eo modo et ordine posse explicari iuxta Scripturas, Augustinum, et Ecclesiae nostrae articulum prout P.M. Reverendiss. Overal. explic.[auit].’ On Overall’s tract on predestination, see above, Chapter 2 n. 286; on its circulation in manuscript, Milton, ‘ ‘‘Anglicanism’’ by Stealth’, 172–5.

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

179

Ward maintained a lifelong correspondence with Ussher, to whom he was very close in theological outlook. Ussher too advised students ‘not to spend too much time in Epitomes’, but to read the Fathers in chronological order. Contrary to Ward, he did not think much of ‘the subtilties of the Schoolmen’, although he conceded that they ‘might serve for the understanding, and answering the Controversies, between those of the Church of Rome and us’.¹¹⁹ Even in theology, Ussher was primarily an antiquarian. He published extensively on the ancient disputes on grace and predestination and his aim throughout was to demonstrate that strict Augustinianism was the truth and that all its opponents had been heretics. His 1631 Historia Gotteschalci was dedicated to Vossius but it was clearly intended to promote a rival theological agenda by means of superior philological and historical criticism. Thus, the alleged heresy of the ‘predestinarians’ had never existed. It was only an invention of the Semi-Pelagians ‘to embarrass the orthodox doctrine of predestination held by Augustine himself ’. According to the printed text of the chronicle of Pseudo-Prosper (the Gallic Chronicle of 452), it originated ‘from the books of Augustine wrongly understood’ (Vossius had quoted this version through the later compilation of Sigebert of Gembloux). That this was a later interpolation was clear since two ‘excellent’ manuscripts read simply that the heresy was said ‘to have had its beginning from Augustine’.¹²⁰ Ward had helped Ussher with the scholarly demonstration ¹¹⁹ Parr, Usher, ‘98’ [97]. ¹²⁰ James Ussher, Gotteschalci, et Praedestinatianae controuersiae ab eo motae, historia: una cum duplice eiusdem Confessione, nunc primum in lucem edita (Dublin, 1631), 17–18: ‘qui [Semipelagiani] nouellae cuiusdam Praedestinatianae haereseos excogitato odioso nomine, ipsius Augustini orthodoxam de Praedestinatione doctrinam praegrauare studuerunt.’ See Chronica Gallica a. 452, in Chronica minora saec. IV. V. VI. VII, ed. T. Mommsen, i (Berlin, 1892; MGH. Auctores antiquissimi IX), 656 and critical apparatus; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, 123. The two manuscripts used by Ussher (‘alterum Bibliothecae Regiae, alterum Benedictini apud Cantabrigienses Collegii’) should be identified with BL, Regius MS 13, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 51 (see Mommsen’s introduction, 624): the latter was collated for Ussher by Ward (see next note). The Gallic Chronicle of 452 (also called Chronicon imperiale by modern historians) had first been published by Pierre Pithou, who claimed that it was the genuine work of Prosper: Chronicon Prosperi Tironis Aquitani, a morte Valentis Imp. ad captam a Genserico urbem. Nunc primum in lucem editum, longe aliud ab eo quod hactenus B. Hieronymi Chronico subiunctum est (n.p., 1588). It was reprinted in Pierre Pithou, Opera, sacra, iuridica, historica, miscellanea (Paris, 1609). See fo. 4v of the original edition (335 of the re-edition): ‘Praedestinatorum haeresis, quae ab Augustini libris male intellectis accepisse dicitur initium.’ The difference between Prosper and Pseudo-Prosper had been pointed out by Arnauld Pontac, Chronica trium illustrium auctorum Eusebii Pamphili episcopi Caesariensis D. Hieronymo interprete. D. Eusebii Hieronymi presbyteri. D. Prosperi Aquitanici episcopi Regiensis ab Abraham ad an. Christi 449 (Bordeaux, 1604), ‘Apparatus’, 21–3 (see A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, ii: Historical Chronology (Oxford, 1993), 531–4), whom Ussher

180

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

of this point.¹²¹ The Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates, which came out in 1639 and were largely a history of Pelagianism, likewise extolled Augustine’s doctrine and depicted all who had departed from it in the blackest colours.¹²² Both friends and foes well understood what Ussher was up to. The controversialist William Twisse, who championed the strictest form of Calvinism, rejoiced about the blow that the History of Gottschalk had dealt to Vossius’ reputation. He quickly put it to use against Arminians, citing Ussher’s demonstration that the predestinarian heresy ‘was but a trick of the Pelagians’.¹²³ Prideaux congratulated Ussher on ‘the publishing of your Ecclesiastical Antiquities, so much desired. In which the History of Pelagius and Faustus’s foysting, being fully and impartially set, will put a period (I trust) to the troublesome Fancies which of late have been set on cited. Vossius was unclear about the relationship of the two works: see De historicis Latinis, 779. See also below, Chapter 6 n. 106, on Vossius’ ascribing to Augustine a text which is actually by Pelagius! ¹²¹ See Ussher to Ward, 15 March 1630, Bodl., MS Tanner 71, fo. 39r ; Ward to Ussher, 25 May 1630, in Parr, Usher, letter CLX, 436; Ussher to Ward, 10 December 1630, Bodl., MS Tanner 71, fo. 62r ; Ward to Ussher, 6 May 1635, Bodl., MS Rawl. lett. 89, no. 77 (printed with some mistakes in The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher, ed. C. R. Elrington, 17 vols. (Dublin, 1847–64), xvi, letter CDXXIV, 526–7). Ussher’s correspondence has come down to us in a very unsatisfactory condition. Richard Parr, Ussher’s former chaplain, chiefly used a volume from which he took away, and thereby caused to be lost, most of the letters. The remnant arrived in the 19th century at Trinity College, Dublin. See Whole Works, unnumbered notice prefixed to vol. xvi. Parr’s edition has several obvious mistakes, which can only be explained on the supposition that there was no competent corrector at the press (e.g. 318: ‘Bochel’s Decanonization’, where it is of course ‘Becket’; 369: ‘the Book ad Caesarium Monachum, which he [John Chrysostom] wrote against the History of Sidonius Apollinarius’—instead of ‘the Heresy of Apollinarius’). Moreover, comparison with the originals of Ussher’s letters to Samuel Ward (MSS Tanner 70 and 71) shows that Parr misdated some and recomposed others arbitrarily (e.g. letter CLIX, 434, dated to 10 December 1630, is a montage of Ussher’s letter of 15 March 1629–30 and of his actual letter of 10 December); the errors are corrected in the Bodleian copy, shelfmark A.9.10 Th, which belonged to Edward Bernard. Elrington’s edition of the correspondence, Whole Works, xv–xvi, is mainly a reproduction of Parr’s, with a number of misprints, though he added new letters and also rectified some of Parr’s misdatings (see for the letters of 15 March and 10 December 1630, xv, letter CLXIII, 480–3, and letter CLXXIX, 540–1). Whenever possible, I have referred to the original; in most cases, Parr’s edition is unfortunately the only authority. ¹²² Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates. Quibus inserta est pestiferae aduersus Dei Gratiam a Pelagio Britanno in Ecclesiam inductae Haereseos Historia. Collectore Jacobo Usserio Archiepiscopo Armachano, totius Hiberniae Primate (Dublin, 1639), 205–512. ¹²³ Letter of William Twisse to Ussher, 29 May 1640, published in Bernard, Judgement of the Late Arch-Bishop, 101–2. See William Twisse, Ad Iacobi Arminii collationem cum Francisco Junio; et Iohan. Arnoldi Coruini Defensionem sententiae Arminianae … animaduersiones (Amsterdam, 1649), In Coruinum, Digressio IV, 183–95 (the work was published posthumously but written during the 1630s).

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

181

foot.’¹²⁴ On the other side, Heylyn accused Ussher of having deliberately targeted the Historia Pelagiana in order to advance Calvinism.¹²⁵ When Davenant taught at Cambridge that sufficient grace was not granted to all men, that Christ had died for all men sufficiently but effectually for the elect alone, that God’s decree of predestination or reprobation was not caused by his foreknowledge of men’s faith or unbelief, he never referred to Calvin. But he quoted abundantly from Augustine and from his disciples Prosper and Fulgentius.¹²⁶ Davenant held a sublapsarian view of predestination and offered a mild interpretation of Calvin and English Calvinists’ statements to the contrary: they had only meant to say that God’s foreknowledge of the Fall was not the cause, but merely ‘the joined condition’ of his predestination of mankind.¹²⁷ On the whole, there was little in the theology of these English divines to which their contemporary Cornelius Jansen (who was then working on his massive Augustinus in Roman Catholic Louvain), or even a champion of the Dominican school against Molina, could not have agreed. Ward had in Gratia discriminans a long quotation from B´an˜ ez, whom he highly praised.¹²⁸ Although he occasionally pointed out that he was urging less the authority of Augustine than his reasons ‘most solidly grounded on Holy Scripture’,¹²⁹ his way of arguing was often reminiscent of Roman Catholic divines. Not only did he insist on the reception of Augustine’s ¹²⁴ Prideaux to Ussher, in Parr, Usher, letter CXXXII, 399. Parr’s date of 27 August 1628 is clearly wrong. Not only does Prideaux mention the Antiquitates as about to be published but he refers to Ussher’s ‘purpose of printing Ignatius here’ (in Oxford) and complains: ‘our Oxford presses are not for pieces of that Coin. We can print here, Smiglecius the Jesuits Metaphysical Logick, and old John Burridane’s Ploddings upon the Ethicks.’ Buridan was printed in Oxford in 1637 and Smiglecki in 1638 [Madan, i. 196, no. 5; 210, no. 22]; the printing of Ussher’s Ignatius began in Oxford in September 1640 (Ussher to Samuel Hartlib, 30 September 1640, in Whole Works, xvi, letter CCXXVI, 64). H. Trevor-Roper, who had initially accepted Parr’s date (Archbishop Laud, 112), then recognized the error and redated the letter to 1639–40 (‘James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh’, in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, 290 n. 44). A. L. Capern, ‘The Caroline Church: James Ussher and the Irish Dimension’, HJ 39 (1996), 80 n. 113, suggests ‘1638’, which accounts for Parr’s mistake and, in my view, fits rather better the internal evidence. ¹²⁵ Heylyn, Respondet Petrus, 116; Cyprianus Anglicus, 215–16. ¹²⁶ John Davenant, Determinationes, q. XLIX, 234–9 (text unchanged from the first edition); id., Dissertationes duae. The latter work was withdrawn from publication in the 1630s because of Charles I’s declaration against controversies (preface, sig. A3v ), on which see below. ¹²⁷ Davenant, Determinationes, q. XXVI, 118–23 (text unchanged from the first edition). ¹²⁸ Ward, Gratia discriminans, 40–1. See also Davenant’s appeal to ‘saniores Papistae’, Dissertationes duae, 85–6. ¹²⁹ Ward, Gratia discriminans, 32.

182

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

doctrine by ‘the universal Church’ since his time,¹³⁰ but he stressed the doctrinal authority of the liturgical prayers ‘that the Church has always used’, quoting the famous axiom ascribed to Pope Celestine I that ‘the rule of prayer is the rule of belief ’.¹³¹ Developing this point in a second edition the following year, Ward instanced orations from the Roman Missal.¹³² In 1635 he told Ussher that he had been lecturing on original sin and had vindicated Baius ( Jansen’s great predecessor in Louvain) against Bellarmine’s criticisms.¹³³ On the other hand, after the Jansenist crisis had broken out in the Roman Catholic Church, anti-Jansenists accused their opponents of borrowing arguments from Ussher, specially as to the non-existence of the predestinarian heresy.¹³⁴ Ward was eventually ready to follow Augustine even on the efficacy of baptism, an idea most unpalatable to Reformed orthodoxy.¹³⁵ This was all the more remarkable as he had been responsible for the publication, in 1624, of Whitaker’s Calvinist lectures on the sacraments.¹³⁶ In 1629 and again in 1631, Ward taught at Cambridge that ‘all baptized infants [and not only the elect] are undoubtedly justified’. Sacraments, according to the scholastic axiom derived from Augustine, ‘confer grace on those who do not make obstruction’. Since infants are by definition incapable of making any obstruction, baptism ‘infallibly confers’ to them, according to ‘the consensus of antiquity’, the remission of original sin.¹³⁷ Ward’s main ¹³⁰ Ward, Gratia discriminans, 54. ¹³¹ Ibid. 51: ‘Ex hisce enim [orationibus sacerdotalibus, quibus semper usa est Ecclesia] optime euincitur antiqua Ecclesiae fides, cum lex supplicandi legem statuat credendi, ut optime Caelestinus’ [‘Capitula Caelestini’ (a compilation of authorities against SemiPelagianism which may be the work of Prosper), cap. 8 (Denz.–Sch¨on. 246)]. ¹³² See the edition ‘emendatior et auctior’ (London, 1627), 38–42 (which expands the quotation from the capitula and quotes several liturgical texts). ¹³³ Ward to Ussher, 6 May 1635, MS Rawl. lett. 89, no. 77. For Ward’s subsequent interest in the Jansenist controversy, see Todd, ‘The Samuel Ward Papers’, 589, no. 7. ´ ¹³⁴ See Antonius Ricardus [= Etienne Dechamps], Defensio Censurae Sacrae Facultatis Parisiensis, latae XXVII. Iunii anno MDLX. seu disputatio theologica de libero arbitrio, editio tertia prioribus multo auctior (Paris, 1646), sig. e2r–v , 134–40, 143–9 (Ussher was not mentioned in the first edition, 1645). The charge was repeated by Antonin Moraines, Anti-Iansenius. Hoc est, selectae disputationes de haeresi Pelagiana et Semipelagiana: deque uariis statibus naturae humanae: et de Gratia Christi Saluatoris. In quibus uera de illis doctrina proponitur, et Cornelii Iansenii Iprensis falsa Dogmata refutantur (Paris, 1652), ´ 158 and 162; Etienne Dechamps, De haeresi Ianseniana ab apostolica Sede merito proscripta libri tres (Paris, 1654), 114–17 and 307. ¹³⁵ See above, 80–2 and Robert Abbot’s judgement, quoted below, 185. ¹³⁶ See above, Chapter 1 n. 329. ¹³⁷ See Ward’s determinationes ‘Sacramenta non ponentibus obicem conferunt gratiam’ [1631] and ‘Omnes Baptizati Infantes sine dubio iustificantur’ [1629], in Opera nonnulla, 44–9 and 50–5 (for dates, see BL, Harleian MS 7038, fo. 62r–v ). The notion of obex comes from Augustine, ep. 98 ad Bonifacium, 10 [CSEL 34/2, 532], which

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

183

ground was, as he explained it to Ussher, that ‘the perpetual Tradition of the Church is no way to be slighted, where it doth not cross the Scripture, but is consonant to general Grounds contained in them’.¹³⁸ Ussher, who arranged for the posthumous publication of Ward’s texts on baptism, seems to have been of a similar mind,¹³⁹ and so certainly was Davenant.¹⁴⁰ Some English divines remained faithful to an uncompromising Calvinism. A university preacher at the Oxford Act of 1629 is alleged to have ‘expressly preferred Calvin before St Augustine’.¹⁴¹ William Bedell, who had studied with Ward at Cambridge under Perkins, remained steeped in the theological climate of his formative years.¹⁴² While chaplain to the English ambassador in Venice in the aftermath of the Interdict crisis, he handed out copies of Calvin’s Institutes to Pietro Sarpi and other Venetian divines whom he hoped to win over to Protestantism.¹⁴³ A long-time correspondent of Ward, with whom he shared the same position of ‘evangelical conformity’, or inner dissent, within the established Church,¹⁴⁴ Bedell objected nonetheless to his friend’s view of baptism. Sacraments, he told him in 1630, do not act ‘as medicines but as seales; to confirme the Covenant, not to conferre the promise immediately’. Patristic authorities were bluntly dismissed: the Emphaticall speeches of Augustine against the Pelagians (and of Prosper) are not so much to be regarded; who says the like of the Eucharist also touching the Ward quotes, 44–5 and 51. It seems that Ward was provoked to state his views by Cambridge Arminians (see his letter to Ussher, 25 May 1630, in Parr, Usher, letter CLX, 438; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 52). On Ward’s ‘implicitly criticizing Calvin’, see E. B. Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven, 1974), 78–82. ¹³⁸ Samuel Ward to Ussher, 25 May 1630, in Parr, Usher, letter CLX, 438. ¹³⁹ See Thomas Bedford’s preface to his edition of Ward’s texts, Vindiciae Gratiae sacramentalis (London, 1650), sigs. A8v –a1r , a2v , a7v . Ussher’s initial reaction was cautious: see his letter to Ward of 15 March 1630, Bodl., Tanner MS 71, fo. 39v . ¹⁴⁰ Though Davenant thought it unexpedient to publish this doctrine for fear of dividing the opponents of Arminianism: see his letter to Ward, printed by Bedford, Vindiciae, esp. 12; Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church’, 66. ¹⁴¹ See letter of Robert Skinner to an unknown correspondent (addressed as ‘Worthy Sir’), 16 July 1629, endorsed by Laud, LPL, MS 943, p. 133. The preacher thus denounced was a ‘Mr. Williamson’, probably Robert Williamson of Magdalen, proctor for 1628 who had recently proceeded BD (Alum. Oxon., iv. 1648, s.v.). For obvious reasons his sermon was not published. ¹⁴² For an overview of Bedell’s career, see Bendall, Brooke, and Collinson, History of Emmanuel, 83–7. ¹⁴³ See Bedell to Adam Newton (preceptor to Prince Henry), n.d. [c. end of 1608], in Some Original Letters of Bishop Bedell, concerning the Steps taken toward a Reformation of Religion at Venice, upon Occasion of the Quarrel between that State and the Pope Paul V (Dublin, 1742), 59 and 62. ¹⁴⁴ Todd, ‘ ‘‘An Act of Discretion’’ ’.

184

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

necessity and efficacy in the case of Infants: and they are very like the speeches of Lanfranck and Guilmund [sic] of Christ’s presence in that Sacrament, opposing ueraciter and uere to Sacramentaliter, which is a false and absurd contraposition.¹⁴⁵

Of Bedell’s exegetical writings, his biographer tells us that ‘any man of understanding would have chosen [them] before all the commentaries of the fathers or most of their children that followed them. The Greekes having no Hebrew, and the Latins neither Hebrew nor Greek, have made sad expositions of Scriptures, following a false vulgar out of a false 72; which this learned and great divine did easily discover.’¹⁴⁶ It is no accident that Bedell was also a firm opponent of Laudian ritualism.¹⁴⁷ Thomas Gataker had been at Cambridge in the same years as Ward and Bedell and had consorted with the latter in a scheme to go and preach in parishes with unfit incumbents, which had more than a smack of Puritanism.¹⁴⁸ He also sent to Ward a series of objections against his teaching on baptism.¹⁴⁹ Though amicable, the exchange was to a large extent a clash of theological cultures, with Ward constantly referring to the Fathers and Gataker drawing on the works of Reformed writers, from Calvin to Whitaker and Robert Abbot (he charged Ward with condemning ‘almost all the evangelical theologians who have written ex professo against Popish errors’).¹⁵⁰ The credit to be given to the Fathers was a major issue in the discussion. Gataker, who approved of the Elizabethan course ¹⁴⁵ Letter of Bedell to Samuel Ward, 2 April 1630, in Two Biographies of William Bedell, Bishop of Kilmore, with a Selection of his Letters and an Unpublished Treatise, ed. E. S. Shuckburgh (Cambridge, 1902), 301–2. Bedell made the point again in his letter to Ward of 14 November 1630, ibid. 323. On this exchange, see also Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology, 164–8. ¹⁴⁶ Alexander Clogie, ‘Speculum episcoporum; or the Apostolick Bishop: being a brief account of the life and death of William Bedell’, in Two Biographies of William Bedell, ed. Shuckburgh, 207. Clogie, who wrote during the Restoration, had married Bedell’s stepdaughter. See A true Relation of the life and death of the Right Reverend Father in God William Bedell, ed. T. Wharton Jones (London, 1872; Camden Society  IV), 211–20. ¹⁴⁷ Clogie, ‘Speculum episcoporum’, 153. ¹⁴⁸ Simeon Ashe, Gray Hayres crowned with Grace. A Sermon preached at Redrish near London Aug. 1. 1654. At the Funerall of that Reverend, eminently Learned and faithfull Minister of Jesus Christ Mr Thomas Gataker (London, 1655), ‘Narrative of the Life and Death of Mr Gataker’, 45 (reproduced unchanged in Clarke, Generall Martyrologie, 250). According to Lake, Moderate Puritans, 117 and 316 n. 5, Ward was also involved: he is not mentioned in Ashe’s Narrative but see K. Fincham, ‘Ramifications of the Hampton Court Conference in the Dioceses, 1603–1609’, JEH 36 (1985), 211. ¹⁴⁹ For the complete controversy, in four stages (Ward’s thesis; Gataker’s exceptions; Ward’s answer; Gataker’s reply), see Gataker’s publication De Baptismatis Infantilis ui et efficacia disceptatio, priuatim habita, inter … Samuelem Wardum … et Thomam Gatakerum (London, 1652). Bedford’s Vindiciae only print the first three stages. ¹⁵⁰ Gataker, De Baptismate disceptatio, 133.

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

185

of studying modern divines before the Fathers,¹⁵¹ believed in the general superiority of modern over ancient interpreters of Scripture.¹⁵² He claimed to ‘grant as much to Augustine as himself wanted to be granted’, citing the classic (Protestant) texts.¹⁵³ In the case of baptism, it was notorious that the Fathers, and above all Augustine, had propounded exaggerated notions, pronouncing damnation on all children who had died unbaptized and even (since ‘human nature, once it has transgressed the boundaries fixed by God, can hardly find a point to stop’) making infant communion necessary for salvation. For Gataker, such errors disqualified all the Fathers’ assertions on the subject.¹⁵⁴ Even genuine Calvinists, however, made a tactical retreat to Augustine. Robert Abbot rejected as ‘popish’ the axiom that ‘sacraments confer grace to those who do not make obstruction’.¹⁵⁵ But he also distanced himself from the exponents of supralapsarian predestination, declaring that Perkins had here made a grievous mistake and that this ‘detestable’ notion, ‘unheard of in the Church before’, should not be made a part of Augustine’s genuine scheme.¹⁵⁶ Abbot’s 1613 lecture on the saints’ perseverance, and the four discourses on grace that he delivered in 1614 and 1615, invoke Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings almost on every page as being the best confutation of Arminius.¹⁵⁷ He denounced the success of Arminius’ books among young and ill-instructed divinity students who, ‘on account of I know not what misfortune of theirs have taken an aversion to the name of Calvin’. What they rejected as Calvinism was actually the very doctrine of Augustine and ‘of almost the whole Church’, both before and after him.¹⁵⁸ When Abbot ¹⁵¹ See his comment in his biography of Whitaker, in Fuller, Abel redevivus, 403. ¹⁵² Gataker, De Baptismate disceptatio, 88–9. On Robert Abbot’s view, see below. ¹⁵³ Ibid. 264, with references to De Trinitate, the letters to Vincent and Jerome, etc. (see above 123 n. 206 and 55). ¹⁵⁴ Ibid. 89, 194–5, 198–9, 269 (‘fines etiam limitesque a Deo defixos ubi semel transilierit indoles humana, ubi consistat, uix reperit’). Ward was reduced to the defensive by this argument since, unlike rigid Roman Catholic Augustinians, he did not accept that infants who had died unbaptized were damned: see his attempt to tone down Augustine’s position on that question, ibid. 197, and compare Florence Conry, ‘Tractatus de statu paruulorum sine baptismo decedentium ex hac uita iuxta sensum B. Augustini’ (1624), reprinted at the end of Cornelius Jansen, Augustinus (Rouen, 1643), sep. pagination, 1–48. On Conry, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, an Irish exile in Louvain, see the entry in J. Lesaulnier and A. McKenna (eds.), Dictionnaire de Port-Royal (Paris, 2004), 293. For a biased but well-informed summary of debates within the Roman Catholic Church, see J. Bellamy, ‘Baptˆeme (sort des enfants morts sans)’, DTC, ii/1. 364–77. ¹⁵⁵ Robert Abbot, De gratia et perseuerantia sanctorum, 119: ‘Papisticum illud Scholasticorum pronunciatum’. ¹⁵⁷ See for instance ibid. 44. ¹⁵⁶ Ibid., sig. c2r and 83–4. ¹⁵⁸ Ibid. 23: ‘Theologi nostri iuniores, qui nescio qua tempestate in Arminii libros delati, creduntur nonnulli, uixdum iactis studii Theologiae fundamentis, temerarii magis,

186

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

published his discourses, he dwelt at length in his preface on the authority of Augustine in the Church and on the solemn approbation that Augustine’s teaching on grace and predestination had received from ancient popes.¹⁵⁹ Prideaux, who succeded Abbot in his campaign against the Arminians, was probably a harsher Calvinist. Yet even he constantly appealed to the Fathers and the Schoolmen, claiming that all the Arminians’ arguments were mere repetitions of those of the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians, already confuted by Augustine and his disciples.¹⁶⁰ He put a special emphasis, exactly as Ward did, on Augustine’s writings against the Massilienses, whose positions ‘accord in everything with the Arminians’.¹⁶¹ Earlier Fathers, especially the Greeks, who had a different agenda and were ‘still fresh from the schools of the Philosophers’, had spoken ‘with more security’.¹⁶² Prideaux insisted in true Elizabethan fashion that he did not cite Augustine in order to build articles of faith on his authority but so ‘that it should appear to everyone that in this controversy we do not teach or interpret Scripture otherwise than those Fathers who were most illustrious in destroying Pelagianism’.¹⁶³ William Crashaw, who had been educated under Whitaker in Calvinist Cambridge, chose to cry up the authority of Augustine in 1620, in his dedication of the English translation of the City of God : ‘regarding the times he lived in, it is no wonder he had errors, but that he had no more. In a word, his errors are few, and not fundamentall, therfore not to be regarded where so many truthes are so faithfuly taught, and so manfully maintained.’¹⁶⁴ To counter the objection that Augustine et curiosi quam docti, nimio in tam prauam illius sententiam affectu propensi esse, et quia Caluini nomen nescio quo eorum infortunio fastidio illis esse coepit, confodiunt in illo Augustinum, totiusque fere ueteris illius et succedentis Ecclesiae, adeoque ipsius scholae hac in re consensum impugnant.’ ¹⁵⁹ Ibid., sigs. b1v –c1v . ¹⁶⁰ Prideaux, Lectiones decem, 19, 28–31, 34, 73–7 (theological lectures on grace and predestination delivered in 1616, 1617, and 1618). For the polemical parallel between Arminianism and (Semi-)Pelagianism, see also [Daniel Featley], Parallelismus nou-antiqui erroris Pelagiarminiani (London, 1626). On Featley’s Calvinism, see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 64–5; id., ‘Fortunes of English Puritanism’, 116. ¹⁶¹ Prideaux, Lectiones decem, 30. ¹⁶² Ibid. 73. See above, 65. ¹⁶³ Ibid. 93: ‘Augustinum et Patres non urgemus, ac si humana authoritate articulum fidei sanciremus, sed ut omnibus innotesceret nos in hac controuersia, non aliter docere, aut Scripturas interpretari, quam Patres isti, qui ob profligatum Pelagianismum maxime claruerunt.’ ¹⁶⁴ Crashaw’s dedication to the Earl of Pembroke and his brothers of Augustine, Of the Citie of God: with the learned Comments of Io. Ludovicus Vives. Englished first by J. H. And now in this second Edition compared with the Latine Originall, and in very many places corrected and amended (London, 1620), sig. ¶3r . This is a significant difference from the first edition, which was already dedicated to Pembroke but had nothing to say on the authority of Augustine. See Of the Citie of God: with the learned Comments of Io. Lod. Vives. Englished first by J.H. (London, 1610).

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

187

did not know the original languages of Scripture, Crashaw even made the extraordinary claim that Augustine was ‘a competent Grecian and Hebrician’.¹⁶⁵ As their adversaries thus chose to take Augustine as their best weapon, so anti-Calvinists undertook to qualify his authority. Overall adopted a middle course on predestination, ‘so that he condemned neither the early, nor the late doctrine of Augustine’: in other words, he refused to take Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings as the sole standard of orthodoxy.¹⁶⁶ Some were ready, at least privately, to reject them altogether. An interesting document here is a copy of Ward’s sermon Gratia discriminans, annotated throughout by Matthew Wren, then a fellow Head of House at Cambridge.¹⁶⁷ Wren protested against the identification of the Remonstrants with the Pelagians (Arminius and his followers actually agreed on many points with Augustine’s teaching on the necessity of grace against Pelagius)¹⁶⁸ and he pointed out the discrepancies between Calvinism (which he wholly ascribed to Ward) and Augustine.¹⁶⁹ Wren, however, also argued that Augustine had gone too far against the Pelagians and had innovated on predestination, contradicting both ‘orthodox antiquity’ and his own previous writings.¹⁷⁰ When Ward used stale rhetoric to claim that ‘one should give more credit to the old Augustine alone’ than to one hundred modern Arminian dogmatizers, Wren burst out in exasperation: Who will not give more credit to Augustine considered in the flower of his age and not yet carried away by heat or prejudice, than to the same Augustine suffering from infirmity of spirit and body, deserting the received doctrine of the Church and of the ancient Fathers, giving birth to a new dogma at that time as yet unheard of?¹⁷¹ ¹⁶⁵ Augustine, Of the Citie of God (1620), sig. ¶3v . The extent of Augustine’s knowledge of Greek has been much debated among modern specialists but I do not think that there is any question that he never had any Hebrew. ¹⁶⁶ ‘Articulorum Lambethae exhibitorum Historia’, in Articuli Lambethani, 8: ‘ita sibi temperabat, ut nec priorem, nec posteriorem Augustini sententiam damnaret.’ A copy of this text is in CUL, MS Gg.1.29, fos. 112v –114r . The author may be John Cosin (Porter, Reformation and Reaction, 365–6 n. 2). ¹⁶⁷ Bodl., shelfmark 4◦ Rawl. 150. This is an interleaved copy, mutilated in parts. A note on the flyleaf by Thomas Baker, the antiquary and once the owner of this copy, ascribes the annotations to Wren. Their interest was pointed out by Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 48. ¹⁶⁸ Wren’s notes, 33 n. 4; 34 n. 3 (‘quid igitur pelagianismi insimulantur ii qui hic non dissentiunt ab Augustino?’); 35 nn. 8, 9, 10; 44 n. 4, etc. ¹⁶⁹ Wren’s notes, 16 and 32 ([Augustinus] ‘cui ipse non stabis in salute omnium infantium baptizatorum, in non perseuerantia quorundam uere iustificatorum, in incertitudine salutis tuae etc.’). ¹⁷⁰ Wren’s notes, 26, 30, 32, 51. ¹⁷¹ Wren’s notes, 54: ‘quis non plus tribuat Augustino in florenti aetate spectato necdum feruore aut praeiudicio abrepto quam eidem aegritudine animi et corporis

188

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

Truth might be located in the mean between the two extremes of Augustine and Pelagius:¹⁷² such had been the doctrine of the Church in its ‘purer’ time and such was the present doctrine of so-called Arminians.¹⁷³ Laud’s own views, although nowhere so aggressively stated, seem not to have differed substantially from this. There is no evidence that, at any point in his career, he followed Augustine’s, let alone Beza’s, doctrine of predestination.¹⁷⁴ In his marginal notes on Bellarmine’s Disputationes, he objected to a passage in which Bellarmine, for polemical purposes, had misrepresented Calvin and falsely accused him of ‘audaciously rejecting Augustine’s opinion’, whereas Calvin merely rejected Peter Lombard’s interpretation of Augustine. This shows that Laud, as a serious scholar, was reading Bellarmine and Calvin side by side: it does not mean that he ‘defended Calvin’s exposition of St Augustine on the relationship between grace and free will’.¹⁷⁵ He had read closely Vossius’ Historia Pelagiana¹⁷⁶ and laboranti receptam Ecclesiaeque patrumque antiquiorum sententiam deseranti nouum dogma at ante illam diem inauditum parturienti.’ ¹⁷² Wren’s notes, 22. ¹⁷³ Wren’s notes, 54. ¹⁷⁴ This avowedly ‘surprising claim’ has been made by White, Predestination, 277–81 on the basis of Laud’s marginalia on his copy of Bellarmine’s Disputationes (in the edition of Lyon, 1596–9, now at Marsh’s Library, Dublin), first printed in Works, ed. W. Scott and J. Bliss, vi/2 (Oxford, 1857; LACT ), 607–708. J. H. Todd, who transcribed them for this edition, conjectured that they ‘were written at some period between 1608 and 1621’ (notice, 607–8), but some may well pre-date 1608 (the publication date of Bellarmine’s Recognitio, to which Laud added references) and others are certainly later than 1621: on fasting, Laud makes several references to Nicolas Vedelius’ edition of the Ignatian epistles, published at Geneva in 1623 (see 707). On grace and justification, there are two references to Vossius’ Historia Pelagiana (702 and 705) but they may be later additions. The marginalia on grace and predestination are short (in several cases no more than cross-references) and difficult to interpret. The least that can be said is that White’s case is built on very slender foundations. When Bellarmine pointed out that God would have been unfair if he had damned man for no fault, Laud noted: ‘He could not damn justly without a fault. How then could he damn justly without a fault which man cannot avoid?’ (Works, vi/2. 700: ‘Non potuit damnare sine culpa iuste. Quî ergo iuste sine culpa, quam incurrit homo ineluctabiliter?’). The meaning of this is rather puzzling but elementary Latin grammar is sufficient to be sure that Laud could not mean: ‘He could not damn without just guilt. Who therefore is without guilt, into which man falls ineluctabiliter?’, as White, Predestination, 279, mistranslates in order to make Laud a strict Calvinist. The ‘demonstration’ apparently convinced N. Tyacke, whom White had taken to task for neglecting Laud’s notes in Anti-Calvinists, and who now regarded them as ‘evidence that he himself went through a Calvinist phase’ (‘Archbishop Laud’, 209). Cf. Davies, Caroline Captivity of the Church, 97. Trevor-Roper’s point, Archbishop Laud, 33, that Laud’s intellectual development ‘is unknown to us’, is still valid. ¹⁷⁵ White, Predestination, 280. Compare Bellarmine, Disputationes, iv. 3a controu. generalis, controu. 1a principalis, l. I, c. XII, col. 563; Laud, Works, vi/2. 698. ¹⁷⁶ Laud’s copy of Augustine’s Opera (Paris, 1586: a reprint of the Louvain edition; Bodl., shelfmark A 4. 1–5 Th.) includes many underlinings and marks, and a number of

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

189

he secured Vossius’ appointment to a canonry of Canterbury in 1629.¹⁷⁷ Later, Laud exchanged several letters with the Dutchman about Ussher’s Historia Gotteschalci. Vossius told Laud that the doctrine of the Fathers who lived before the Pelagian controversy was the Catholic middle way, from which Augustine had begun to depart when he made grace derive from God’s absolute decree. The Praedestinatiani had then gone even further to the extreme.¹⁷⁸ Laud fully agreed that the writings of the Fathers before Augustine provided the best scheme of grace and free will.¹⁷⁹ Laud’s quoting from Cassian in a sermon preached before James I in 1622 may have been a deliberate act of distancing from the Augustinian tradition.¹⁸⁰ But, whatever some of the most eager Arminians may have wished, Laud and Charles I did not intend to mount an attack against Augustine but rather to silence controversy on the whole issue. Such was the purpose of the ‘Proclamation for the establishing of the Peace and Quiet of the Church of England’ of June 1626,¹⁸¹ and even more clearly of the declaration prefixed to the new edition of the Thirty-Nine Articles in November 1628.¹⁸² The declaration significantly placed contemporary debates within the long history of ‘these both curious and unhappy differences, which have for so many hundred years, in different times and places, exercised the Church of Christ’.¹⁸³ James I, in the wake of the Knight–Pareus affair, had already forbidden preachers ‘to preach in any popular auditory the deep points of predestination, election, reprobation, or of the universality, efficacy, resistibility, or irresistibility of God’s grace … as marginal notes in Laud’s hand. There are several references to Vossius’ Historia Pelagiana: see i. 3; iv. 229 and 316; vii. 517, 531, 597, 616. ¹⁷⁷ Rademaker, Vossius, 231–5. Ussher, who certainly disagreed with Vossius, had a project for appointing him Dean of Armagh (Laud to Ussher, 23 February 1630, in Parr, Usher, letter CXLIV, 426–7). But Ussher’s scholarly interests and contacts were much more catholic than Laud’s, and the latter’s patronage of Vossius is best explained by doctrinal sympathies. ¹⁷⁸ Vossius to Laud, 13 February 1632 and 26 November 1632, in Vossii epistolae, ed. Colomi`es, Vossii epistolae, no. 158, 188–90, and no. 186, 208–9; Laud to Vossius, 3 July 1632 and 15 February 1633, ibid., epistolae ad Vossium, no. 149, 100 and no. 140, 92 (the letters are inverted in the edition because the second one is dated in the old style). ¹⁷⁹ Laud to Vossius, 15 February 1633, ibid., epistolae ad Vossium, no. 140, 92. ¹⁸⁰ William Laud, A Sermon preached at White-Hall, on the 24. of March 1621, being the day of the beginning of his Maiesties most gracious Reigne (London, 1622), 43. The quotation itself was fairly uncontroversial but I would tend to agree with N. Tyacke that, especially in a sensitive context, the name of Cassian was significant. See Tyacke, ‘Archbishop Laud’, 210–11, and foreword to Anti-Calvinists, paperback edn., p. x. ¹⁸¹ J. F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, ii (Oxford, 1983), no. 43, 90–3. ¹⁸² Gardiner (ed.),Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, no. 13, 75–6. ¹⁸³ Ibid. 76.

190

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

being fitter for the schools and universities, than for simple auditories’.¹⁸⁴ Now even university readers were banned from disputing ‘either way’ on such topics.¹⁸⁵ And the new prohibition applied also to bishops, whom James had exempted from his directions. Ussher’s antiquarianism was a way of circumventing the ban: he could not have expressed his theological views in a formal theological discourse. Ward and Davenant, who had treatises ready against Arminianism, refrained from publishing them.¹⁸⁶ It is remarkable that the popes adopted exactly the same policy: a decree of 1611 forbidding the publication of anything de auxiliis was renewed in 1625.¹⁸⁷ Men of order all over Europe were realizing that the contest over grace could only undermine religious establishments. Neither in the Roman communion nor in the Church of England was the ban perfectly observed.¹⁸⁸ It prevented nevertheless a major dispute over Augustine from breaking ¹⁸⁴ ‘Directions concerning preachers’, sent by James to Archbishop Abbot on 4 August 1622, art. III, in Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, ed. E. Cardwell, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Oxford, 1844), ii, no. CXXXII, 202. For the link in James’s mind with the Knight–Pareus affair, see art. IV, and James’s covering letter to Abbot, ibid. 199. ¹⁸⁵ Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 76. See also the proclamation of 17 January 1629 for the suppression of Montagu’s Appello Caesarem, in Larkin (ed.), Stuart Proclamations, ii, no. 105, 218–20: according to D. R. Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London’, HJ 46 (2003), 264 n. 2, this provided the legal basis for High Commission prosecutions. ¹⁸⁶ Ward to Ussher, 12 August 1634 and 6 May 1635, Bodl., MS Rawl. lett. 89, nos. 76 and 77; Ford, Ussher, 155–61 and 210–11. See also Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 97; J. M. Atkins, ‘Calvinist Bishops, Church Unity, and the Rise of Arminianism’, Albion, 18 (1986), 411–27 (a study which is however marred by the author’s uncritical acceptance of the via media conception of the Church of England). ¹⁸⁷ See Orcibal, Jans´enius d’Ypres, 47–8; L. Ceyssens, ‘Le cˆot´e juridique des premi`eres difficult´es jans´enistes’, in Reformata reformanda: Festgabe f¨ur Hubert Jedin (M¨unster, 1965) ii. 401–13 [= Jansenistica Minora, x (Malines, 1968), fascicle 81]. This parallel might appear to be more helpful than N. Tyacke’s analogy with a modern goverment’s forbidding discussions of Marxism (Anti-Calvinists, foreword to the paperback edn, p. xii). That the application of Charles’s declaration was biased against Calvinists is undeniable but Tyacke, pp. xiii–xv and 181–8, underestimates Laud’s genuine wish to silence controversies (which has been rightly stressed by Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism and Political Power’, 69; id., ‘Archbishop Laud in Retrospect’, in From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, 141). For corrections, see Lambert, ‘Richard Montagu, Arminianism and Censorship’, 58–68, and the balanced discussion by Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy’. Tyacke’s interpretation is substantially followed by S. M. Towers, Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2003), esp. 210–20. See also Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 90–6; Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict’, 263–94; Hoyle, ‘ ‘‘Near Popery yet no Popery’’ ’, 188–206, on the royal declaration as ‘a very partial tool’ in Cambridge controversies. ¹⁸⁸ For Roman Catholic books de auxiliis published despite the ban, see J. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jans´enius [Les Origines du jans´enisme, i] (Louvain, 1947), 262–3 n. 2; for the continued publication of Calvinist works in the 1630s, even at Oxford, see White, Predestination, 287–99; H. Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press, i (Oxford, 1975), 35.

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

191

out for the next fifteen years. Quietness was ended in the Roman Catholic Church by the posthumous publication of Jansen’s Augustinus in 1640, which made the status and interpretation of Augustine’s writings the central doctrinal issue for decades to come. The order in Church and state began to collapse in England in that very year, but even afterwards the question of grace was only one point of debate among many, and certainly less prominent than episcopacy. Laud’s policy could be said to have been effective in this respect—successful is obviously a different matter. Not until the 1650s did Peter Heylyn state openly that Augustine’s doctrine on grace was contrary to, and Arminius’ in agreement with, ‘the general current of the ancient Fathers, who lived … before the rising of the Pelagian Heresies’.¹⁸⁹ Heylyn even claimed that the canon Concionatores forbade one to follow Augustine, since he was ‘but a Bishop, not Bishops in the plural number, but one father, and not all the fathers, and therefore his opinion not to be maintained against all the rest’.¹⁹⁰ Such extreme views had never been propounded in Laud’s time. 3. THE AUTHORIT Y OF TRADITION There could hardly be better evidence for the weight now attached to ‘the consensus of the Fathers’ than the claim of both parties in the Arminian controversy to have such support on their side. Did this new emphasis bring Laudians close to a belief in tradition in the Tridentine sense? The Scot Robert Baillie made this the first of their popish errors, in the twofold dimension of recognizing traditions that had no ground in Scripture and of making the Fathers authoritative interpreters of Scripture.¹⁹¹ The second accusation is by far the easier to substantiate. Thomas Chowney’s Collections (a curious breviary of Laudian theology by a country squire) condemned the interpretation of Scripture by private persons according to their own sense.¹⁹² Although Chowney protested against ascribing to ‘all traditions’ an equal authority with Scripture, he maintained that the traditional sense of Scripture, drawn from the Fathers and approved by the Church, was a ¹⁸⁹ Peter Heylyn, Examen historicum: or a Discovery and Examination of the Mistakes, Falsities, and Defects in some modern Histories. Occasioned by the Partiality and Inadvertencies of their Severall Authours (London, 1659), 162; id., Certamen Epistolare, or the Letter-Combate (London, 1659), 22. ¹⁹⁰ Heylyn, Historia Quinqu-Articularis, part III, 60. ¹⁹¹ [Robert Baillie], Ladensium αὐτοκατάκρισις, The Canterburians self-conviction. Or an evident demonstration of the avowed Arminianisme, Poperie, and tyrannie of that Faction, by their owne confessions. With a Post-script to the Personate Jesuite, Lysimachus Nicanor, a prime Canterburian ([Amsterdam], 1640), 62–6. ¹⁹² Thomas Chowney, Collectiones theologicarum quarundam conclusionum, ex diuersis Authorum sententiis, perquam breues sparsim excerptae (London, 1635), 22–5.

192

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

rule of faith.¹⁹³ Even at that level, however, Laudians appear not to have easily put their views in print. The Laudian William Page wrote a treatise to show that ‘the catholic rule of expounding Scripture’ was the consensus of the Fathers of the first four centuries, but it was never published.¹⁹⁴ John Pocklington is reported to have scandalized people in Cambridge as early as 1616 by bluntly asserting ‘that interpretation of Scripture should be made, not by Scripture, but by the exposition of holy men’.¹⁹⁵ In 1633, Pocklington sent a deliberately provocative letter to his old college, Sidney Sussex, to offer to endow a lectureship in ecclesiastical history. He took this opportunity to stress that ‘consent of Antiquity’ was ‘the best exposition of Scripture’. Nothing came of the project.¹⁹⁶ On 26 May 1622, Laud, at the time Bishop of St David’s, had a conference with ‘Fisher the Jesuit’ ( John Percy) before a selected audience. The aim was to reclaim the Countess of Buckingham, the mother of the King’s favourite, for the Church of England. James I deliberately chose Laud because his moderate stance appeared more suitable than rabid, apocalyptic, anti-popery.¹⁹⁷ According to his own Relation, which he published in 1624 and again, in an augmented version, in 1639, Laud was rather ambiguous ¹⁹³ Chowney, Collectiones, 30–1: ‘Quamuis constet, non sine iniuria, traditiones omnes uerbo Dei scripto aequipollere: sensum tamen Scripturarum, ex patribus et doctoribus Ecclesiae, deductum, et traditum, et in Ecclesia conseruatum, et approbatum, quid ni pro tali traditione agnoscamus, in cuius ueritate acquiescendum, et a qua minime discedendum sit.’ On the author, see Wood, Athenae, ii. 601 (‘an esquire’s son of Kent, became a commoner of Christ Church in Lent-term 1600, aged 17, left it without a degree, retired (after he had seen the world) to his estate at Alfrinston in Sussex, prosecuted his studies in divinity’); Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 184–5. ¹⁹⁴ The Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 247, fos. 18r –41v , ‘Some reasons objected against Dr Pages book manuscript, concerning the catholique rule of Expounding Scripture, which rule he conceives the consent of fathers of the first four Centuries.’ On Page’s Laudianism, see most recently Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 140 and 184. He ‘was esteemed well vers’d in the Greek fathers’ (Wood, Athenae, iii. 654). ¹⁹⁵ ‘Certaine Articles against Master Pocklington, found in the Records of the University of Cambridge, and truly transcribed by Master Tabor, which shewe that the seed which brought forth all this cursed fruit, has taken root in him long agoe’, in ‘I.H. of Cardington, in the County of Bedford, Gentleman’, The Petition and Articles, or severall Charge exhibited in Parliament against John Pocklington, Doctor in Divinity, Parson of Yelden in Bedfordshire, Anno 1641 Mense Ian. Together with a Collection of his Jewish, Popish, Superstitious and Antichristian Doctrines, gathered verbatim out of his own Books, and exhibited against him in Parliament (London, 1641), 291 no. 11. ‘Holy men’ was a typically Roman Catholic name for the Fathers (see above, 53). On the caution needed to interpret this evidence, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 319 n. 229; Hoyle, ‘ ‘‘Near Popery yet no Popery’’ ’, 107–9. ¹⁹⁶ Letter of Pocklington to Sidney Sussex, 18 February 1633 (in the college archive) quoted and analysed by Hoyle, ‘ ‘‘Near Popery yet no Popery’’ ’, 208–9. ¹⁹⁷ See Laud’s diary for April–May 1622, in Wharton, Troubles and tryal, 5; T. H. Wadkins, ‘The Percy–‘‘Fisher’’ Controversies and the Ecclesiastical Politics of Jacobean Anti-Catholicism’, CH 57 (1988), 153–69.

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

193

on the role of tradition in the interpretation of Scripture. On the one hand, he claimed that Scripture ‘by the manifest Places in it … is able to settle Unity and Certainty of Beliefe in Necessaries to Salvation’.¹⁹⁸ On the other hand, he insisted that sola Scriptura was ‘never to be understood with exclusion of Tradition, in what causes soever it may be had’, and quoted Vincent of L´erins: ‘Not but that the Scripture is abundantly sufficient to it selfe for all things, but because it is deepe, and may be drawne into different senses’¹⁹⁹—in 1639 Laud made this caveat more explicit with an addition: ‘and so mistaken, if any man will presume upon his owne strength, and go single without the Church.’²⁰⁰ For his own part, he repeatedly professed to believe ‘Scripture interpreted by the Primitive Church’.²⁰¹ Infant baptism ‘may be concluded directly’ out of Scripture. Augustine’s famous statement on the custom of the Church only meant, Laud argued, that ‘it would have beene somewhat difficult to finde the Collection out of Scripture onely’. ‘But the Tradition being Apostolicall, led on the Church easily to see the necessary Deduction out of Scripture. And this is not the least use of Tradition, to lead the Church into the true meaning of those things which are found in Scripture, though not obvious to every eye there.’²⁰² Most interesting is a summary of agreements and disagreements between the Church of England and the Church of Rome, written by John Cosin.²⁰³ Agreements included ‘the Reception and believing’ of the canonical ¹⁹⁸ William Laud, A Relation of the Conference betweene William Lawd, Then, Lord Bishop of St Davids; now Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury: and Mr. Fisher the Jesuite (London, 1639), 196. This is an addition to the first edition, ‘An Answere to Mr. Fishers Relation of a Third Conference betweene a certaine B. (as he stiles him) and himselfe’, at the end of Francis White, A Replie to Iesuit Fishers answere (London, 1624); this Relation was written by Laud himself ‘and put in writing at the Command of King James, having been before Read to the King’ (see Laud’s diary for 11 and 16 January, 4 February, 16 April 1624, in Wharton, Troubles and tryal, 8, 9, 12). On the exchange, see also J. M. Levine, ‘From Tradition to History: Chillingworth to Gibbon’, in Grafton and Salmon (eds.), Historians and Ideologues, 183–8. ¹⁹⁹ Conference with Fisher (1639), 104 (= 1624, 31). Vincent of L´erins, Commonitorium, 2. 2–3 (CC 64, 148). ²⁰⁰ Conference with Fisher (1639), 104. ²⁰¹ Ibid. (1639), 336, 378, 386 (these are all additions to the 1624 edition). See also 325 (= 1624, 72): ‘to believe the Scripture, and the Creeds; to believe these in the sense of the Ancient Primitive Church.’ ²⁰² Conference with Fisher (1639), 55–7. The point did not appear in the 1624 edition. See above, 62, for Augustine’s text. ²⁰³ ‘The Differences in the Chiefe points of Religion between the Roman Catholiques and us of the Church of England, Together with the agreements which wee for our parts profess and are ready to embrace if they for theirs, were as ready to accord with us in the same’, LPL, MS 1742, fos. 7r –10r . This copy belonged to Edmund Gibson, to whom the original had been lent by George Hickes (see Hickes to Gibson, 10 January

194

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

Scriptures ‘as the onely foundation and perfect rule of our Faith’; of ‘all the Apostolicall and Ancient Creeds, especially those which are commonly called the Apostoles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Creed of St Athanasius all which are clearly deduced out of the Scriptures’; of ‘all the Decrees of Faith and Doctrine set forth’ in councils that were truly general, that is the first six, and ‘in all the following Councells that be thereunto agreeable’; of ‘the unanimous and Generall consent of the Ancient Catholike Fathers, and the uneversall Church of Christ in the Interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and the collection of all necessary matters of faith from them during the first six hundred years and downewardes to our owne days’.²⁰⁴ Whereas the first two points merely reproduced the Thirty-Nine Articles and the third could more or less be reconciled with them, the fourth, with its deliberate blending of the canons of 1571 and Tridentine decrees,²⁰⁵ marked a departure from the current of English Protestant thought. It is unfortunately impossible to assign a precise date to this text and to say whether it expressed more than Cosin’s personal views (it may well have been written during his exile in France, after the collapse of the Laudian Church).²⁰⁶ 1699, LPL, MS 1741, fo. 1r ). Hickes subsequently printed the text ‘from the very Copy, which Dr. John Cosins, afterwards Bishop of Durham, gave to the late Countess of Peterborough’. See Several Letters which passed between Dr. George Hickes, and a Popish Priest, upon occasion of a young Gentlewoman’s departing from the Church of England to the Church of Rome.... With an Appendix containing several remarkable Papers (London, 1705), sigs. b5v –b6r and appendix IV, sigs. Aa8v –Bb3v (there is no difference except in the spelling). The text was reprinted in More and Cross (eds.), Anglicanism, 53–6. ²⁰⁴ LPL, MS 1742, fo. 9r . By comparison Richard Montagu was much less explicit when he professed that the Church of England received ‘the Canon of Scriptures, the Tradition and Praxis of the Church, the three Creeds, the [first] foure Generall Councills’ (‘Concerning Recusancie’, 96). ²⁰⁵ See Denz.–Sch¨on. 1507 and above, 52. ²⁰⁶ The text certainly pre-dates the Restoration since Hickes says ‘afterwards Bishop of Durham’. ‘The late Countess of Peterborough’ must be Penelope O’Brien (c.1622–1702), who married Henry Mordaunt, second Earl of Peterborough, in 1644 (V. Stater, ODNB, xxxix. 22). According to J. M. Rigg, DNB, xiii. 850, the Earl was in France in 1645–6, and he would have been likely to meet Cosin in Paris. Hickes’s words do not necessarily imply, though, that the text given to the Countess had originally been written for her. On Cosin’s discussions with Roman Catholics in Paris, see E. Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and ‘The Voyage of Italy’ in the Seventeenth Century (Geneva, 1985), 96–8, with the abundant notes ad loc., 384–7. Note that in 1646 Cosin already considered ‘they of Geneva’ much closer to the Church of England than the Church of Rome, as differing only in discipline, not in doctrine (letter of 19 June 1646 to Richard Watson, in Works, ed. Sansom, iv (1851), 386); after the Restoration, he expressed utmost doubt as to the possibility of a deal with Rome (see Fuller, Worthies, Durham, 296). See also below, 276–7. The exposition of the doctrine of the Church of England written by Cosin in 1652 was much more clearly Protestant, stating inter alia that ‘in iis enim, quae aperte in S. Scriptura posita sunt, continentur illa omnia, quae fidem spectant, moresque uiuendi’ (Smith, ‘Vita Cosini’, 31).

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

195

It would be much more difficult to find a Laudian divine stating in express terms that unwritten traditions are on a par with Scripture. Laud’s notes on this point on his copy of Bellarmine’s Disputationes testify to a carefully balanced attitude. When Bellarmine posited that apostolic teaching had the same authority whether it was written or not,²⁰⁷ Laud objected that this was only true when apostolic origin could be known with equal certainty in both cases: ‘I do not detract from venerable antiquity, I believe to a large extent what these ancient writings say of ecclesiastical traditions, but I do not believe them with the same certainty as I believe Holy Scripture, because I do not know with the same certainty that these traditions are apostolical.’²⁰⁸ And when Bellarmine adduced Basil’s famous assertion (‘of those doctrines and predications which are kept in the Church, we have some from the written teaching, others from apostolic tradition’ and both types have ‘the same strength for piety’) in favour of the Roman position,²⁰⁹ Laud pointed out that the text admitted of a weaker interpretation.²¹⁰ In his conference with Fisher, Laud firmly rejected the Jesuit’s arguments for unwritten tradition: ‘not the Church of England only, but all Protestants, agree most truly, and most strongly in this, That the Scripture is sufficient to salvation, and containes in it all things necessary to it.’²¹¹ Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto was met with the standard Protestant answers: Basil only spoke ‘of Apostolicall Tradition, not of the Traditions of the present Church’; ‘the Learned’ considered the book ‘corrupted’; Basil himself elsewhere made ‘Scripture superior’ to traditions as ‘their Touch-stone, or tryall’.²¹² ²⁰⁷ Bellarmine, Disputationes, i. 1a controu. generalis, l. IV, ‘De uerbo Dei non scripto’, c. III, col. 205: ‘Iam uero si non minor est auctoritas Apostoli ore praecipientis, quam literis mandantis, certe non est audacia, aequare aliquid non scriptum, uerbo scripto.’ ²⁰⁸ Laud’s notes on Bellarmine (on which see above, n. 174), in Works, vi/2. 618: ‘Eadem est authoritas loquentis et scribentis Apostoli, sed iis tantum qui tam certi sunt de uoce, quam de scriptura eius; nobis autem forte non ita, nam infallibiliter certi sumus de scriptura, de traditionibus non item. De iis scimus ex scriptura aliquas ab Apostolis traditas, sed quas et quales per omnia opinor nescimus. Deinde fidem ego non detraho uenerandae antiquitati, scriptis illis uetustis de apostolicis traditionibus magna ex parte credo, non tamen tam certo credo atque scripturae sacrae, quia non tam certo scio esse apostolicas.’ ²⁰⁹ Bellarmine, ‘De uerbo Dei non scripto’, c. VII, cols. 224–5. ²¹⁰ Laud’s notes on Bellarmine, 619: ‘Forte eandem uim habent non eodem modo; una enim … propter se, altera non nisi per et propter authoritatem ecclesiae. Non dicit ad fidem faciendam, sed pietatem.’ ²¹¹ Conference with Fisher (1639), 52 (= 1624, 15). ²¹² Conference with Fisher (1639), 92 (an addition to the 1624 edition). For De Spiritu Sancto’s being corrupted, Laud referred to Andrewes’s response to Du Perron, posthumously published in 1629, on which see below, n. 218.

196

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

On the Canon, Laud largely adopted Hooker’s position, allowing only a preparatory role to ‘the Tradition of the present Church’, and stressing the weight of internal arguments:²¹³ when [a man] hath studied, considered, and compared this Word with it selfe, and with other Writings, with the helpe of Ordinary Grace, and a minde morally induced, and reasonably perswaded by the Voyce of the Church; the Scripture then gives greater, and higher reasons of Credibility to it selfe, then Tradition alone could give. And then he that Believes, resolves his last and full Assent, That Scripture is of Divine Authority, into internall Arguments found in the Letter it selfe, though found by the Helpe and Direction of Tradition without, and Grace within.²¹⁴

At no point in the argument did Laud make the point, which was to become the general view in the Restoration Church, that the Canon of Scripture depended on the testimony of the Fathers. Restoration apologists had need of some subtlety to interpret the Archbishop in that sense.²¹⁵ Montagu’s Gagg had seemed to go much further. Unwritten tradition was one of the topics on which the book raised an outcry, especially because of its appeal to Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto. Montagu denied that the passage concerning tradition was an interpolation, although ‘some Protestants, especially of preciser cut’ said so, ‘upon Eramus bare word’.²¹⁶ This had been of course the answer of Bilson and of several other English theologians.²¹⁷ Even Andrewes—in a text still unpublished at the time—protested that De Spiritu Sancto was ‘corrupted’ when it was alleged by Cardinal Du Perron to support the Roman Catholic doctrine of tradition.²¹⁸ But Montagu was ²¹³ Conference with Fisher (1639), 58–127, with repeated references to Hooker (see esp. 88–90 the quotation from Lawes, III. 8. 14). The text was greatly expanded but the doctrine was the same in the 1624 edition, 16–37. On Laud’s use of Hooker, see Condren, ‘Creation of Hooker’s public authority’, 45–7. ²¹⁴ Conference with Fisher (1639), 83 (= 1624, 25). ²¹⁵ Stillingfleet distinguished between the resolution of faith into the books and into the doctrine of Scripture: ‘supposing the Books owned on the account of Tradition, if the Question be concerning the Divinity of the Doctrine, then he [Laud] asserts, that the resolution of this is into the Divine Light of Scripture, i.e. into that rational evidence which we find of the Divinity of it, in these Books which are owned on the account of Tradition’ (A Rational Account of the grounds of Protestant religion: being a Vindication of the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury’s Relation of a Conference, etc. From the pretended Answer by T.C. (London, 1665), 226). Laud nowhere makes this distinction. ²¹⁶ Montagu, A new Gagg, 42. ²¹⁷ See above, 63. The point had been made again by George Carleton, Consensus Ecclesiae Catholicae contra Tridentinos (Frankfurt, 1613), 130–4. ²¹⁸ See Andrewes, ‘Stricturae: or, a briefe answer to the XVIII Chapter of the first Booke of Cardinal Perron’s Reply written in French, to King James—his Answer written by Mr Casaubon in Latine’, in Opuscula posthuma, sep. pagination, 9; ‘An Answer to the XX Chapter of the fifth Booke’, ibid. 30. It has been seen that this answer was adopted by Laud.

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

197

right philologically. Unlike Bilson, who had based his whole discussion on the Latin translation, without even bothering to look at the Greek,²¹⁹ he knew what he was talking about. He had himself, some years previously, collated Greek manuscripts of Basil. His work had been of great help to the new Paris edition, where Erasmus’ ‘iniquitous and absurd criticism’ had been vehemently confuted by Fronton Du Duc.²²⁰ Casaubon had also defended the genuineness of the controverted passage.²²¹ Montagu had no qualms about accepting its theology. Some might reproach Basil as giving too much to traditions, but ‘I like not that the ancient Fathers should so be philipped of, and sent away like school-boyes with snips’.²²² The Church of England was in full agreement with Basil providing the traditions in question were truly perpetual. Basil’s first instance was the sign of the cross, which the Church of England not only ‘practices’ but ‘commands’ at baptism.²²³ Ten years later, Franciscus a Sancta Clara saw in Montagu’s text a confirmation of his thesis that the Thirty-Nine Articles, on the question of tradition as on every other, were perfectly reconcilable with Tridentine teaching.²²⁴ Montagu came under attack at the York House conference.²²⁵ On 17 February 1626, John Preston, who was one of the two spokesmen for ²¹⁹ See Bilson, Christian subjection, 595–6 and note that the Greek text had been available since 1532 (see above, Chapter 1 n. 218). ²²⁰ Basilii opera omnia (1618), appendix, notes to vol. ii, sep. paginated, 19: ‘iniqua et insulsa censura’ (with references to previous refutations of Erasmus by Billy and Du Perron). In his notes to De Spiritu Sancto, ibid. 18–27, Du Duc often refers to collations of English manuscripts sent by Montagu. See Quantin, ‘J´esuites et e´rudition anglicane’, 698. ²²¹ Casaubon, Exercitationes, 556. ²²² Montagu, A new Gagg, 42. ²²³ Ibid. 44. ²²⁴ Franciscus a Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia.... Tertia editio multo auctior, pluribus materiis Theologicis illustrior, et in articulorum discussione clarior, et fusior. Praemittitur Epistolium Apologeticum Lectori Catholico, in quo ratio totius operis exhibetur (Lyon, 1635), 358 and 398 (on articles XX and XXXIV). These references to Montagu did not appear in the first two editions (both published in Lyon, 1634). ²²⁵ For general views of the debates, see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 165–81 (whose perspective is essentially political); Donagan, ‘York House Conference Revisited’. Both parts wrote accounts of the debates. The Arminian one is by John Cosin, ‘The sum and substance of the conferences lately had at York House concerning Mr. Mountague’s books’, first published in Works, ed. J. Sansom, ii (Oxford, 1845; LACT ), 18–81 (a copy in Bodl., MS Tanner 303, fos. 32v –46r ). The Puritan account was written by John Preston: it does not cover the first conference as Preston did not take part in it, but only an informal discussion after the conference proper (on falling from grace) and the second conference. It was clearly intended for publication but was only circulated in manuscript: see copies in BL, Harleian MS 6866, fos. 73r –81r ; BL, Burney MS 362, fos. 95r –104v ; LPL, MS 935, nos. 2 and 3 (note that the copyist left blanks for the Greek words which he could not decipher) and MS 943, 61–2 (part one only); Bodl., MS Tanner 303, fos. 46v –47v (part one only, in Archbishop Sancroft’s handwriting); Henry Wharton, who had a copy, considered it to be ‘wrote very Partially, in favour

198

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

Calvinist othodoxy, accused him of holding the doctrine of traditions ‘as fully as any Popish writer’, on the strength of a passage which ‘our divines generally who writt against Bellarmine, and others who write concerning the controversie of traditions’, reject ‘as counterfeit and inserted’.²²⁶ Preston was far less qualified than Montagu philologically but his theological point was strong. When Montagu again declared the rejection of the Basil passage peculiar to ‘some of the preciser sort’, Preston referred him to Bilson.²²⁷ Moreover, Basil instanced among apostolic traditions the practice of praying towards the east and the unction with chrism in baptism,²²⁸ which the Church of England rejected: ‘then eyther that place of S. Basile must be counterfit, or Basile must bee acompted erronious.’²²⁹ We unfortunately have only Preston’s version of that part of the conference.²³⁰ If we are to believe it, Montagu defended himself very weakly²³¹ and was reduced to dubious evasions. He first pretended that the word dogma used by Basil was not to be taken in its strongest meaning but only ‘signifies a thinge that seemes so’. Preston easily confuted this explanation, which was indeed indefensible if one looked at the context, which Preston ‘(having St Basill by him) reade in English to the Lords’.²³² Montagu then explained that he had spoken only hypothetically, in case there should be indeed traditions from God as well as Scripture,²³³ but Preston replied that he had clearly ‘pronounced it affermitively, that both doe come from the same authority’.²³⁴ With all due allowance for the partisan character of the account, it may well be that Montagu was not too keen to embark on a fully-fledged defence of the principle of tradition, especially before a group of laymen who identified orthodoxy with mainstream English Calvinism.²³⁵ In 1640, when the Laudian regime was on the brink of collapse, Clement Bretton, fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, offered for his DD a series of highly provocative questions, which included ‘The Canon of Scripture is only known by the tradition of the Church’ and ‘Unwritten apostolic of Dr. Preston’ (Wharton, Troubles and tryal, 28, marginal note). The text was later summarized and partly rewritten by Ball, ‘Preston’, 101–6. ²²⁶ BL, Harleian MS 6866, fo. 75v . Cf. fo. 76r : ‘never any Popish writer said more for tradition then S. Basill in this place: yea scarce soe much, therefore to justifie this place which is but counterfeit and incerted, is to agree fully with them in this point.’ ²²⁸ Basil, De Spiritu Sancto, 27. 66 (PG 32, 188). ²²⁷ Ibid., fo. 75v . ²²⁹ BL, MS Harley 6866, fos. 75v –76r . ²³⁰ Cosin, ‘Sum and substance of the conferences’, 74 (Bodl., MS Tanner 303, fo. 32v ), gives only the list of points debated. ²³¹ BL, Harleian MS 6866, fo. 76r : ‘To this there was nothing Mr Mountague answered materiall.’ ²³⁴ Ibid. ²³² Ibid. ²³³ Ibid., fo. 76v . ²³⁵ See Donagan, ‘York House Conference Revisited’.

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

199

traditions are of equal authority to the written word of God’. Neither of these questions, however, reached Commencement House.²³⁶ When it came to concrete issues and especially to the liturgical observances that Laudians championed or restored in the 1630s, they had no such reticence.²³⁷ They were wont to plead for ecclesiastical traditions as ultimately derived from the Apostles by uninterrupted succession. In the course of the altar controversy, Heylyn posed as a principle that ‘things that have generally beene received in the Church of Christ, are generally conceived to have been derived from Apostolicall tradition, without any speciall mandat, left in Scriptis’, and he referred to Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto.²³⁸ In a sermon on church authority Samuel Hoard rejected the Tridentine doctrine of traditions—or rather his polemical presentation of it²³⁹—but insisted that the existence of particular traditions was no point of controversy between the Church of England and the papists: We yeeld that there are Apostolique traditions, rituall and dogmaticall, which are no where mentioned, or not enjoyned in the Scriptures, but delivered by word of mouth from the Apostles to their followers; for some of which these are reputed, viz. the number of Canonicall bookes, the Apostles Creed, the baptisme of infants, the fast of Lent, the Lords day, and the great festivals of Easter and Whitsontide; These we justly take for theirs, grounding upon S. Austins rule, Those observations which have beene of universall use in the Catholique Church, and appeare not to have beene the Constitutions of generall Councils, we are in reason to hold for Apostolique traditions.²⁴⁰ ²³⁶ ‘Innovations in Religion and Abuses in Government in the University of Cambridge’, BL, Harleian MS 7019, fo. 67r : ‘Canon Scripturae innotescit solummodo per traditionem Ecclesiae.... Traditiones Apostolicae non scriptae sunt aequalis authoritatis cum uerbo Dei scripto.’ The questions eventually defended by Bretton on Commencement Day (BL, Harleian MS 7038, fo. 65r ) were ‘Ordo et iurisdictio Episcoporum sunt iure Diuino’ (about the least controversial of his original list) and ‘Dies Dominicus est Immutabilis’, which was not among the questions that he had offered and must have been appointed to him by the Vice Chancellor and the Heads of Houses. See Hoyle, ‘ ‘‘Near Popery yet no Popery’’ ’, 251; D. Hoyle, ‘A Commons Investigation of Arminianism and Popery in Cambridge on the Eve of the Civil War’, HJ 29 (1986), 423. ²³⁷ On the preference of Laudians for livres de circonstance over systematic statements, see Lake, ‘Laudian Style’; on the ‘process of functional radicalization’ in ceremonialist apologetics, Milton, ‘Creation of Laudianism’, 177–83. ²³⁸ Heylyn, Antidotum Lincolniense, section II, 87. ²³⁹ Samuel Hoard, The Churches Authority asserted: in a Sermon preached at Chelsmford, at the Metropoliticall Visitation of the most Reverend Father in God, William, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury his Grace, etc. March 1. 1636 (London, 1637), 5: ‘Never durst any Prelates in the Church, but the Pope, take liberty to stamp new Articles of faith, or to joyne Traditions to the written word of God, for supply of its imperfection, which are of the same authority, and to be received (pari pietatis affectu) with the like religious respect, as the Trent Councill hath determined.’ ²⁴⁰ Ibid. 13–14. On Augustine’s saying, see above, 91–2 and 97. On its use by Laudians, see also Lake, ‘The Laudians and the Argument from Authority’, 158–9 and 164–5.

200

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

The argument was normally applied to matters of practice only, not of belief, but the boundary between the two was easy to jump, as some of Hoard’s examples demonstrate. This is confirmed by an unpublished short tract by William Page on prayer for the dead, the very practice that James I had urged as an ad absurdum argument against undue reliance on antiquity at the Hampton Court conference.²⁴¹ Page began by asserting that the practice was both attested by ‘the word of God’ and derivable ‘as a good conclusion from some grounds and principles in’ it. Even if it could not be justified in that way, ‘the generall consent of the antients and constant practice of the Church of God for so manie hundred yeares even from the Apostles to these times of reformacion should be a good motive not to condemne or easily reject it’.²⁴² The argumentation so far is not too different from, say, that of Bilson on episcopacy or on the descent into Hell. But Page expressly claimed that ‘wee have manie points come unto us upon no other grounds’ and he instanced the perpetual virginity of Mary. ‘Though it bee neither in expresse termes, nor by any good consequence drawne out of Scripture; yet because it hath beene alwayes entertained in the Church as a pious and orthodox truth it ought not easily to be distasted, and Helvidius had much ado to escape the name of an heretick for denying it.’²⁴³ Such pleas for tradition were closely linked with an ecclesiology of divine right episcopacy. It was now stressed that most of the Fathers had been bishops.²⁴⁴ The testes ueritatis line of Protestant apologetics was discarded as unfit to establish the ‘visible and perpetuall succession’ of the Church of England and only suitable for sectaries.²⁴⁵ As early as 1603 Laud braved Oxford Calvinist authorities and ‘maintained the constant and perpetual visibility of the Church of Christ, derived from the Apostles to the Church of Rome, continued in that Church (as in others of the East and South) till the Reformation’.²⁴⁶ He was thus able, a quarter of a century later, to comfort Heylyn, whom Prideaux had taken to task for defending the same position in the divinity school.²⁴⁷ The notion that the Church of Rome was a true Church, though corrupt, and the questioning of the identification of ²⁴¹ ‘Oratio pro Defunctis. That we maie and ought to pray for the dead without any reference to Popish Purgatory. By Dr Page fellow of All Souls Coll. Oxon. 1635’, Bodl., MS Barlow 54, fos. 29r –36v . Page was specially thinking of his own college which should, he argued, comply with the obligations laid by its founder. See Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, 180–7; on James I, above, 107. ²⁴² Page, ‘Oratio pro Defunctis’, fo. 31v . ²⁴³ Ibid., fos. 31v –32r . Compare Hooker’s position, above, 91. ²⁴⁴ Heylyn, Answer to Burton, 120. ²⁴⁵ Ibid. 68–69 and 72. ²⁴⁶ Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 53. ²⁴⁷ Heylyn, ‘An Appendix to the Advertisements on Mr Sanderson Histories’, Examen historicum, sigs. P3v –P4r ; George Vernon, The Life of the Learned and Reverend Dr. Peter

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

201

the Pope with Antichrist made sense within this new conception of church history.²⁴⁸ An indignant Prideaux could not prevent Gilbert Sheldon from denying publicly at Oxford that the Pope was Antichrist.²⁴⁹ The change of theological climate is especially noticeable in sermons, where clergymen were more at liberty than in theological treatises. In 1635, Pocklington preached a fierce and somewhat rambling sermon against Puritans, those ‘Vipers’,²⁵⁰ whose ‘disobedient and scornfull contempt of our Church Liturgie … may drive many that reverence antiquity with us, and for that cause stand well affected to our Church, to withdraw themselves from us’.²⁵¹ Pocklington also put an elaborate complaint (which, taken literally, would tend to ascribe to patristic writings some degree of divine inspiration) against the freedoms that the Centuries of Magdeburg had taken with the Fathers.²⁵² He reminded his audience that Irenaeus had confounded the heretics of his time by tracing the apostolic succession of Peter and Paul in the see of Rome. This confuted those who ‘against all Antiquity, upon idle ghesses, make fooles beleeve that St Peter was never at Rome, making the succession of Bishops and truth of the Latine Churches as questionable as the Centurists orders’.²⁵³ In the same way both Tertullian and later Augustine had challenged heretics to show their own succession from the apostles.²⁵⁴ And Pocklington concluded, in what is probably the most provocative utterance of a Laudian ever: ‘Hereby we may by Gods mercy make good the truth of our Church. For we are able lineally to set downe the succession of our Bishops from St Peter to S. Gregorie, and from Heylyn, Chaplain to Charles I and Charles II Monarchs of Great-Britain (London, 1682), 26–9; Milton, Heylyn, 20–2. ²⁴⁸ See Hill, Antichrist, 33–9; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 110–27. ²⁴⁹ The Genuine Remains of that Learned Prelate Dr. Thomas Barlow, late Lord Bishop of Lincoln (London, 1693), 192. For a similar affair in Cambridge, see Todd, ‘ ‘‘All One with Tom Thumb’’ ’, 571. ²⁵⁰ John Pocklington, Sunday no Sabbath. A Sermon preached before the Lord Bishop of Lincolne, at his Lordships visitation at Ampthill in the County of Bedford, Aug. 17 1635. Second edition corrected (London, 1636), 37. On the context, see Milton, ‘Creation of Laudianism’, 173–5. The sermon and a similar one the next year proved so controversial that they were subsequently condemned to be burnt by the Long Parliament. See Petition and Articles against John Pocklington; Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 471–2. William Bray, Laud’s chaplain, was also obliged to preach a recantation for having licensed them. See Greg (ed.), Companion to Arber, no. 333. ²⁵¹ Pocklington, Sunday no Sabbath, 36. ²⁵² Ibid. 8–10 (the Centuriators were treating the Fathers as Balaam treated his ass, ‘if they will not goe that way that they would have them, though Gods Angel suffer them not so to do, but the Spirit of truth lead them quite otherwise’). ²⁵³ Ibid. 43, referring to Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 3. 3–4 (SC 211, 30–52). ²⁵⁴ Ibid. 43–4. Tertullian, De Praescriptione haereticorum, 32. 1 (CC 1, 212); Augustine, Psalmus contra partem Donati [PL 43, 30] (Pocklington’s reference is erroneous).

202

Arminianism, Laudianism, and the Fathers

him to our first Archbishop St Austin, our English Apostle … downeward to his Grace that now sits in his chaire [Archbishop Laud].’²⁵⁵ In 1636, when Laudian ritualism was at its height, the Jesuit Matthew Wilson congratulated himself on English Protestantism becoming ‘wearie of it self ’²⁵⁶ and instanced among many other things that ‘Traditions’ were recognized, men ‘use willingly the once fearfull names of Priests, and Altars’, clergymen ‘are now put in minde that for Exposition of Scripture, by Canon they are bound to follow the ancient Fathers’,²⁵⁷ and the ‘bad carriage towards the ancient Fathers’ of the Centuriators was denounced.²⁵⁸ The passage was seized upon by Laud’s opponents as a proof of his popish designs²⁵⁹ and turned against him at his trial.²⁶⁰ It was still quoted against the episcopal establishment by Restoration Nonconformists.²⁶¹ In his answer to Wilson, Chillingworth (whose book, idiosyncratic as it was, appeared under Laud’s control) claimed that all the developments listed by Wilson had nothing to do with popery, but did not deny their reality.²⁶² Heylyn later quoted Wilson’s enumeration as redounding to the late Archbishop’s glory.²⁶³ ²⁵⁵ Pocklington, Sunday no Sabbath, 44. The passage was immediately denounced by Burton, For God, and the King, 69, and by [William Prynne], The unbishoping of Timothy and Titus. Or a briefe elaborate Discourse, proving Timothy to be no Bishop (much lesse any sole, or Diocaesan Bishop) of Ephesus, nor Titus of Crete; and that the power of ordination, or imposition of hands, belongs Iure Diuino to Presbyters, as well as to Bishops, and not to Bishops onely. Wherein all Objections and Pretences to the contrary are fully answered; and the pretended superiority of Bishops over other Ministers and Presbyters Iure Diuino, (now much contended for) utterly subverted in a most perspicuous maner (n.p., 1636), 14. ²⁵⁶ [Matthew Wilson, aka Edward Knott], A Direction to be observed by N.N. if hee meane to proceede in Answering the Booke intituled Mercy and Truth, or Charity Maintained by Catholiks etc (n.p., 1636) [facsimile in English Recusant Literature 339, 1977], 21. ²⁵⁷ Ibid. 23–4. ²⁵⁸ Ibid. 25. ²⁵⁹ Burton, For God, and the King, 152–5. ²⁶⁰ Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 114. ²⁶¹ [William Jenkyn], Celeusma, seu Clamor, ad Theologos Hierarchiae Anglicanae, Sanctitate Doctrinae, et Vitae, Conspicuos (London, 1679), 28–9; Lewis Du Moulin, A Short and True Account of the several Advances the Church of England hath made towards Rome (London, 1680), 21–2. ²⁶² William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants a Safe way to Salvation. Or, an Answer to a Book Entituled Mercy and Truth, or, Charity maintain’d by Catholiques: Which pretends to prove the Contrary [1st edn.: Oxford, 1638], preface to the author of Charity Maintain’d, §§ 20–6, in Works, 10th edn. (London, 1742), 18–20. See below, 241. ²⁶³ Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 252 (who quotes almost certainly from Chillingworth and not from the original). It should nevertheless be noted that Heylyn omits altogether the article of traditions.

4 The Fathers Assaulted Were one to judge of the Church of England by reference to Montagu, Pocklington, or Heylyn, there would be little difficulty in concluding that, by the 1630s, it had moved to distinctly un-Protestant positions on the authority of the Fathers—had become, indeed, that ‘Catholic’ body later celebrated by Tractarians. One should beware however of attributing this shift to the whole English Church. Even apart from such marked Calvinists as Preston or Prideaux, more cautious attitudes towards the Fathers were still to be found. The liberal, undogmatic stance which led some divines to reject Calvinist orthodoxy could also inspire them with a mistrust against doctrinal certainties of any kind, apart from the express teaching of Scripture. The inheritance that the Caroline Church bequeathed to the Restoration was thus anything but unequivocal. It needed the trauma of the Puritan Revolution to make the defence of patristic authority an essential part of Church of England apologetics.

1. THE SURVIVAL OF ELIZ ABETHAN THEOLOGY The continuity in the Church of England of a sola Scriptura view is attested by a lucid short treatise by Jewel’s nephew John Downe. Although Downe had studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in the last decades of the sixteenth century, he was not a strict Calvinist and even less a Puritan. He might best be described as a pre-Laudian conformist.¹ At some point, apparently in the early 1620s, he engaged in a written controversy with ¹ Neither the DNB nor the ODNB discusses Downe’s religious views; for a brief but important analysis, see Fincham and Lake, ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism’, 865. In A Treatise of the true Nature and Definition of justifying faith; together with a Defence of the same, against the Answere of N. Baxter (Oxford, 1635), he holds that justifying faith is not to be identified with assurance of salvation, but only with ‘affiance’ in Christ. On his opposition to Puritanism, see his treatise ‘Of sitting and kneeling at the Communion’, ibid. 273–90, in which he defends ‘conformity in Kneeling’ against ‘singularity in Sitting’, and also letter of Oliver Naylor to Cosin, 11 May [1624], Correspondence of Cosin, i, no. XII, 20.

204

The Fathers Assaulted

one Bayly, who professed to have been won over to Rome by his reading of the Fathers and to believe Scripture according to their interpretation.² Downe was well read in the Fathers and willing to discuss their testimonies, notably on the eucharist.³ He was convinced that ‘in the maine and great questions controverted’ between Protestants and Roman Catholics, the Fathers were ‘expresly’ for the former,⁴ and referred to Jewel’s challenge.⁵ He defined the Fathers exactly as Jewel had, as the authors who lived ‘within sixe hundred yeares after Christ’.⁶ They ‘were freer from errour, as living neerer the Apostles times, and before the first discovery of Antichrist’.⁷ When it came to principles, however, Downe maintained that to believe Scripture as interpreted by the Fathers amounted in effect to denying the authority of Scripture.⁸ After a short preamble on the respect that ought to be paid to the Fathers’ ‘venerable antiquity’ and to their great achievements against the heretics of their times,⁹ he went on to show at large that they should not be equalled with the Apostles. First, the Fathers took Scripture as the rule of their faith.¹⁰ Moderns had all the resources that the Fathers had had to understand the Bible, plus the benefit of the Fathers’ works and moreover the skilfulness in original languages that most of the Fathers had lacked.¹¹ Downe was aware that Roman Catholic divines restricted the authority of the Fathers to the questions on which they spoke unanimously.¹² But then—this was his second argument against Bayly—one would need to know with certainty which of the writings ascribed to the Fathers were really theirs.¹³ Not only was this objection a legitimate retort against the Roman Catholic argument that we could have no certainty of the Canon ² John Downe, ‘Not consent of Fathers but Scripture the ground of Faith. Written by the occasion of a conference had with M. Bayly’, in Treatise of justifying faith, 211–72 (I have not found any reference to this Bayly, or to any person with a similar name, in the standard repertories of English Catholics. If the name is an alias, it does not appear to have been registered). The exchange is not dated but in a contemporary tract (‘The Reall Presence by Transsubstantiation unknowne to the Ancient Fathers’, Certaine Treatises of the late Reverend and Learned Divine, Mr John Downe (Oxford, 1633), 38), Downe mentions Harding’s Answer to Jewel (1564) as written ‘about sixtie yeares since’. Downe’s text was only published posthumously in 1635 but had some previous circulation in manuscript: see Downe, ‘A defence of the Former Answer against the Reply of N.N.’, in Certaine Treatises, 13 and 53. ³ See ‘The Reall Presence by Transsubstantiation unknowne to the Ancient Fathers’. ⁴ ‘Not consent of Fathers but Scripture’, 216. ⁵ Ibid. 216–17. ⁶ ‘The Reall Presence by Transsubstantiation unknowne to the Ancient Fathers’, 115. ⁷ ‘A defence of the Former Answer against the Reply of N.N.’, 12. ⁸ ‘Not consent of Fathers but Scripture’, 215. ⁹ Ibid. ¹⁰ Ibid. 217–19. See also the conclusion, 255–7. ¹¹ Ibid. 220. ¹² Ibid. 221–2 (quoting Cano). ¹³ Ibid. 222–3.

The Fathers Assaulted

205

of Scripture without recourse to the authority of the Church,¹⁴ but it worked much more strongly against the Fathers, since the Roman Church itself had never fixed a canon of them.¹⁵ Even supposing that the question of attribution could be settled with certainty, one would still need to be assured that the text had been kept unaltered. There are numerous instances of corruptions, both old and new (one of them none other than Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto).¹⁶ And then, is one assured of the consensus of the Fathers by one’s own study or does one rely on the report of others? Have they been read in the original or have translations been used, at least for the Greek Fathers?¹⁷ Roman Catholics objected to the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura by saying that Scripture was obscure, but Downe argued that the Fathers were ‘as darke and doubtfull’.¹⁸ Both parties claimed to be favoured by them (as to the sincerity of that pretence, Downe quoted the Belgian Index on Ratramnus).¹⁹ The Fathers were unanimous in teaching points that the Roman Church now condemned, such as millenarianism and the necessity of the eucharist for infants.²⁰ Roman Catholic divines freely rejected the authority of the Fathers when they pleased.²¹ ‘Tomteltroth Cornelius Mus’ (Cornelius Musso, Bishop of Bitonto in the kindgom of Naples) even exclaimed that he preferred the authority of the Pope alone to that of ‘a thousand Augustins, Hieromes, or Gregories’.²² This led Downe to his last point, which was that the Romanists, for all their boasts of patristic authority, grounded certainty on the sole authority of the present Church, that is, in effect, of the Pope.²³ Readers of Rainolds and Whitaker, as well as of continental Reformed writers, would have recognized, not only arguments, but even examples and quotations here with which they were already familiar. Although much larger and more elaborate than Downe’s work, Richard Holdsworth’s Gresham lectures leave the reader with a similar impression.²⁴ They are all the more interesting since Holdsworth, as Master of Emmanuel College, was an important influence on the future Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft.²⁵ Holdsworth’s theological outlook appears to ¹⁴ Ibid. 228. ¹⁵ Ibid. ¹⁶ Ibid. 230. ¹⁷ Ibid. 233. ¹⁸ Ibid. 235. ¹⁹ Ibid. 236. See above, 84. ²⁰ Ibid. 240 and 242–6. ²¹ Ibid. 246. ²² Ibid. 249. Cornelius Musso, In B. Pauli Apostoli Epistolam ad Romanos Absolutissima Commentaria (Venice, 1588), 606. It is most likely that Downe had found the quotation in Rivet, Critici sacri specimen, 56–7. ²³ ‘Not consent of Fathers but Scripture’, 250–1. ²⁴ See above, 54 n. 164. ²⁵ See G. D’Oyly, The Life of William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury (2nd edn., London, 1840), 16–20; Bendall, Brooke, and Collinson, History of Emmanuel, 224–6, 243–6, 252–4.

206

The Fathers Assaulted

have been close to that of his Cambridge contemporaries Samuel Ward and Ralph Brownrigg (a great friend of his, who is said to have preserved the text of his lectures from destruction),²⁶ and also to that of Ussher. He disapproved of ‘super-ceremonialism’ and was said to have ‘corrected at the Presse’ in 1637 John Williams’s book against Laud’s altar policy, The Holy Table, Name and Thing.²⁷ But he had no time for nonconformity and, in his capacity as Archdeacon of Huntingdon, he ordered refractory parishioners to receive communion at the rail: ‘I would never be guilty of betraying the Church’s power and pious constitutions by complying with such factious spirits, who from the first Reformation have been thorns in our eyes, by opposing dignities, authorities, and every decency of religion by their humours.’²⁸ Holdsworth collaborated with Ussher on schemes for a ‘reduced episcopacy’ in 1641 and sat with Ussher, Ward, and Brownrigg in the Lords’ committee for religion.²⁹ He eventually threw in his lot with the King’s cause and, like Ward, ended a victim of the Long Parliament.³⁰ Philip Warwick called him in retrospect a ‘Church-Puritan’ as opposed to ‘the Knave-Puritan’, on the one hand, and to ‘the more Canonical Churchmen’ on the other.³¹ Holdsworth had made a thorough study of the Fathers.³² He thought that it was ‘Popish perversity’ to claim that there were exaggerations in Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings.³³ Though a comparatively late Father, Augustine had a doctrine much purer than most of his predecessors.³⁴ Such comments may well have been aimed at Holdsworth’s immediate predecessor at Gresham College, Samuel Brooke, who was a strong Arminian.³⁵ ²⁶ Holdsworth, Praelectiones, sigs. A4r and A7r . ²⁷ John Gauden, ‘The Life and Death of Mr Richard Hooker’, in Hooker, Works (London, 1662), 4; Richard Dey, Two Lookes over Lincolne, or, a view of his Holy Table, name, and thing, discovering his erronious and Popish Tenets and Positions (London, 1641), 5. On Holdsworth’s opposition to sacerdotalist tenets, see also Hoyle, ‘ ‘‘Near Popery yet no Popery’’ ’, 200. For some evidence that he may have fallen foul of Laud for preaching against Arminianism in London in 1629, see Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict’, 267–8 and 279. ²⁸ Letter to Sir John Lambe, 12 February 1640, printed in CSPD 1639–1640, 455–6. See also Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 209 and 212–13. ²⁹ Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 246–7, 249, 271–2; Fletcher, Outbreak, 121–2 and 149; W. M. Abbott, ‘James Ussher and ‘‘Ussherian Episcopacy’’, 1640–1656: The Primate and his Reduction Manuscript’, Albion, 22 (1990), 241. ³⁰ See J. Twigg, The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution 1625–1688 (Woodbridge, 1990), esp. 56–8, 71, 85–7. ³¹ Warwick, Memoirs, 88. ³² See the series of his patristic notebooks among the Sancroft MSS at the Bodleian. MS Sancroft 109 gives for instance extracts from Basil, MS Sancroft 117, pp. 261–84, extracts from Vincent of L´erins’s Commonitorium. ³³ Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 358. See also 404. ³⁴ Ibid. 454. ³⁵ Ward, Lives, 53–6.

The Fathers Assaulted

207

Holdsworth’s lectures were meant to be a Protestant equivalent to Cano’s De locis theologicis, detailing the sources to be used by theologians and preachers. By far the greatest detail was devoted to the Fathers.³⁶ The programme proved too ambitious and the plan over-rich in distinctions and subdistinctions. After having expounded at full length the rules to be followed in reading the Fathers, Holdsworth stopped short and never treated ex professo the central question of the authority of the consensus of the Fathers.³⁷ His developments such as they are make clear enough, however, that he strictly followed the Elizabethan understanding of sola Scriptura. ‘True and primitive antiquity’ he located in Scripture (the Fathers were merely an ‘adoptive and secondary’ antiquity). Since papists did not have Scripture, they did not have true antiquity.³⁸ Their boasted tradition was a mere human authority. Like Archbishop Matthew, Holdsworth interpreted ‘thy fathers’ in Proverbs 22: 28 as meaning the Apostles.³⁹ The full Trinitarian dogma was in Scripture ‘if not literally, at least by necessary consequence’, as the Fathers had argued against heretics of their time.⁴⁰ The consensus of the Fathers was impossible to establish in ³⁶ For whom he followed Jewel’s chronology: see above, 74. ³⁷ Taking as his text Matt. 13: 52: ‘Ideo omnis scriba doctus in regno caelorum, similis est homini patrifamilias, qui profert de thesauro suo noua et uetera’, Holdsworth pointed out that a divine should be versed in both ancients and moderns. He then distinguished two main points to be handled, ‘antiquity and novelty as to persons’ and ‘antiquity and novelty as to things’. Point one fell into four divisions: ‘Primum, quae utriusque [uetustatis et nouitatis] Natura et Definitio. Secundum, Quae Cautelae regulaeque in utrisque obseruandae. Tertium, Quae Scriptorum nouorum et ueterum in Fidei definitionibus uis atque authoritas. Quartum, Quam iniquae Pontificiorum in Orthodoxos calumniae circa utrumque.’ No less than eleven lectures were devoted to the second division, in the course of which Holdsworth developed five rules for reading the Fathers (rule fourth, the longest, being articulated in six distinctions: see above, 66). When he had at last brought that point to an end, Holdsworth had more or less lost the thread of his discourse. He announced that he would end with the question of the authority of the Fathers (Praelectiones, 428–9). ‘Haec duo Capita sunto inquisitionis nostrae; Quid roboris in Antiquitate, et, Quid in Consensu sit statuendum’ (447). Holdsworth only had time to treat the first point before the end of term. Before suspending his lectures for the vacation, he announced that he would handle the validity of the consensus of the Fathers during the next term, ‘ut idem possit esse et anni finis et argumenti’ (460). But he actually started a new series of lectures, ‘to avoid being tiresome’: ‘Non quod sim nescius superesse adhuc Argumenti pristini aliquid nondum enucleatum, De Sanctorum Patrum, uel omnium uel plurimorum, consentientium Authoritate in rebus Fidei; sed ualde exigua erat ista appendicula, et Coronidis tantum loco reseruata, et saepius etiam a me in disputationibus aliis exagitata, quoties in illius (quod non raro contigit) mentionem inciderim’ (465). ³⁸ Ibid. 449–52. ³⁹ Ibid. 455. The agreement is all the more noteworthy as Matthew’s sermon was still unpublished (see above, Chapter 1 n. 195). ⁴⁰ See 87–8.

208

The Fathers Assaulted

practice⁴¹ and only Scripture could remedy their contradictions.⁴² One could always, Holdsworth argued, go back from one Father to other, more ancient, and more authoritative ones (from John Damascene to Augustine and Ambrose, from Augustine and Ambrose to Cyprian, Irenaeus, Justin, Ignatius), until one came at last to the Apostles, than whom there was nothing greater.⁴³ The Church, as Hegesippus observed, lost its virginity after the Apostles’ death.⁴⁴ The Fathers were fallible and had actually fallen into several mistakes, acknowledged as such by the papists themselves (millenarianism, rebaptizing, the eucharist necessary for the salvation of infants, and so on).⁴⁵ After one had followed all the rules requisite for the right reading of the Fathers, ‘the rule of rules’ was therefore to ‘reduce the Fathers to the norm of Scripture’.⁴⁶ Holdsworth stressed that such a course was commanded by Scripture⁴⁷ and that it had also been taught by the Fathers, especially by Augustine, ‘who may rightly stand for all, since he is used to passing judgement on himself more often than all the others’.⁴⁸ It was nonetheless slander to say that Protestants despised the Fathers. Papists always ran to excess, giving too much to the Fathers on some occasions, but too little on others (Holdsworth quoted several popish divines, including Musso and Cajetan).⁴⁹ The comments on Ratramnus in the Belgian Index betrayed what little respect papists actually paid to the Fathers.⁵⁰ Protestants, on the contrary, ‘observe throughout the golden mean’.⁵¹ There were, Holdsworth argued, five legitimate uses of antiquity. It helped to condemn, in accordance with Scripture, ‘ancient heretics and those who are trying to bring back their errors from Hell’. It enabled Protestant theologians to show the falsity of popish claims to antiquity. ‘The monuments of antiquity’ were useful for the right understanding of Scripture. Patristic writings also allowed one to know the history of doctrine and discipline as well as the agreement of the ancient Church with the present (Protestant) one ‘on the main points of religion’. Lastly, the Fathers were a great ornament to sermons, ‘since it is undoubted that there is a much greater amount of knowledge, conscience, piety, and zeal in the writings of the ancients, which smell of the very spirit of martyrdom, ⁴¹ Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 399–400 (with the usual arguments: the loss of many patristic writings, the impossibility for the faithful to explore all the writings still extant, the neglect of the consensus of the Fathers on many points by papists themselves) and 450. ⁴² Ibid. 402. ⁴³ Ibid. 410. ⁴⁴ Ibid. 454. ⁴⁵ Ibid. 410. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 405 and 407 (‘quod Dogmatice, et consulto, et sedate, et Categorice, et ex fide sua, et constanter idem Patres dixerunt, tum demum ad Scripturae normam est redigendum’). ⁴⁷ Ibid. 407–11. ⁴⁸ Ibid. 420 (‘merito instar omnium esse potest, quia saepius quam reliqui omnes de se solet censuram facere’). See again 439–41. ⁴⁹ Ibid. 441–4. ⁵⁰ Ibid. 339. ⁵¹ Ibid. 438.

The Fathers Assaulted

209

as Erasmus puts it’.⁵² Leaving aside this last clause,⁵³ there was nothing distinctly English in Holdsworth’s lectures. The persistence in England, throughout the Laudian ascendency, of this Protestant attitude towards the Fathers was confirmed by the appearance in 1635 (the same year in which Downe’s treatise on the Fathers was at last printed) of a translation of Daniel Toussaint’s patristic handbook, originally published in Heidelberg in 1603.⁵⁴ Interestingly, while most of the book was faithfully put into English, some Calvinist notations, notably the comment that Chrysostom, ‘like most of the Greeks, gave too much to free will’, were left aside.⁵⁵ These omissions (which seem to have expressed the translator’s own views rather than being an effect of Laudian censorship) bear witness that the refusal to treat the Fathers as authoritative was not incompatible with English Arminianism.⁵⁶

2. THEOLOGICAL LIBERALISM AND THE FATHERS: THE GREAT TEW CIRCLE That anti-Calvinism and a sceptical stance towards the Fathers could even go hand in hand is illustrated by John Hales, a fellow of Eton College, whose hostility to dogmatism and theological bickering had been fed by his attendance at the Synod of Dort in 1618–19, from which he was later said to have emerged a decided anti-Calvinist.⁵⁷ He was entirely conversant ⁵² Ibid. 304–5 and 458–60 (‘cum hoc sit indubitatum, multo amplius extitisse et scientiae et conscientiae, et pietatis et zeli, in priscorum scriptis, ipsum spiritum martyrii redolentibus, ut Erasmus loquitur’). ⁵³ On continental Reformed practice, see above, 143. ⁵⁴ Daniel Toussaint, A Synopsis or compendium of the Fathers, or of the most Famous and Ancient Doctors of the Church, as also of the Schoolmen (London, 1635). On the original, see above, Chapter 1 n. 261. ⁵⁵ Compare the original Synopsis de Patribus, 33 (‘Liberum arbitrium etiam nimis tribuit, quemadmodum et Graecorum plerique’) and the translation, 62. See also the original, 23, and the translation, 37 (on Arnobius); the original, 40, and the translation, 80–1 (on Peter Lombard). ⁵⁶ The preface of the translator, A Synopsis or compendium, sig. A5v , includes a high commendation of Arminius. ⁵⁷ The main evidence for this is the testimony of Anthony Farindon, in a letter to Timothy Garthwait prefixed to Golden remains of the ever Memorable Mr John Hales of Eton College (London, 1659), sig. a4r : ‘in his younger days he was a Calvinist, and even then when he was employed at that Synod, and at the well pressing 3 S. John 16 by Episcopius,—there I bid John Calvin good night, as he has often told me.’ In this edition, Farindon’s letter is only dated ‘Septemb.’ but it is dated ‘Sept. 17. 1657’ in the second edition (London, 1673). See Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Life … Written by himself. Now for the first time carefully printed from the original ms. preserved in the Bodleian Library, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1857), i. 48–9; W. K. Jordan, The Development of

210

The Fathers Assaulted

with Christian (as also with pagan) antiquity, as the numerous Greek and Latin quotations in his sermons, after the fashion of the time, testify. He had been one of Henry Savile’s main collaborators in his edition of Chrysostom—and had earned in that way his Eton fellowship.⁵⁸ But, if Hales studied the Fathers, he was ready in true Protestant fashion to point out their mistakes, thus reminding his audience that the millenarian error ‘arose immediately after the Apostles times, and strongly prevailed with almost all the Fathers of the Church before the Nicene Council’.⁵⁹ He quoted Irenaeus’ vivid description of the prodigious fertility of the earth during the millennium and commented unmercifully that the Father thus ‘betrayed what a childish gross conceit he had of the spiritual Kingdome of Christ, which he took to be like Mahomets Paradise’.⁶⁰ Hales’s distrust of the dogmatic uses of Christian antiquity and of the authoritarian appeal to tradition was expressed in an especially radical manner in a sermon that he preached at Eton, at an unknown date, on the duty for everyone to use their own reason (it was much later given the title ‘Of private judgment in religion’).⁶¹ Men, Hales pointed out, sought for Religious Toleration in England: From the Accession of James I to the Convention of the Long Parliament (1603–1640) [= ii] (London, 1936), 400–12; J. H. Elson, John Hales of Eton (New York, 1948); R. Peters, ‘John Hales and the Synod of Dort’, in G. J. Cuming and D. Baker (eds.), Councils and Assemblies: Papers Read at the Eighth Summer Meeting and the Ninth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Cambridge, 1971; SCH 7), 277–88. This view of Hales’s development has been challenged by W. R. Godfrey, ‘John Hales’ Good-Night to John Calvin’, in C. R. Trueman and R. S. Clark (eds.), Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle, 1999), 165–80, who has rightly pointed out that too much had been made of Hales’s letters from Dort (cf. Milton’s introduction to The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, pp. li–lii); on the other hand, Godfrey’s Calvinist reading of Hales’s later sermons is unconvincing. See also Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 582 n. 35. ⁵⁸ See Hales’s notes in Chrysostomi Opera Graece, viii/b (on all volumes from the third onwards). He was made a fellow of Eton on 24 May 1613 ( T. Harwood, Alumni Etonenses (Birmingham, 1797), 64). He is almost certainly the person referred to by Savile, letter of 26 January 1614 to Dudley Carleton, CSPD 1611–1618, 221 (‘has given the fellowship at Eton to one younger than Mr Horne, but who helped him three years, day and night, at his great work of St. Chrysostom’). ⁵⁹ Sermons preach’d at Eton, by John Hales, Late Fellow of that Colledge. Not till now Published (London, 1660), ‘The Third Sermon’, 41. ⁶⁰ Ibid., translating Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 5. 33. 3 (SC 153, 414): ‘there shall be in a field ten thousand vines, every vine shall have ten thousand branches, every branch ten thousand stalks, every stalk ten thousand clusters, every cluster ten thousand grapes, and every grape five and twenty pottles of wine’ (first published in 1575 by Feu-ardent, Irenaei aduersus Valentini et similium Gnosticorum Haereses, Libri quinque, 371). It is likely that Hales used the second edition (Cologne, 1596), which was more widely circulated than the first (see above, Chapter 1 n. 190). ⁶¹ Ibid. first sermon, on Gal. 6: 7. The sermon has no title in this first edition. In Works (Glasgow, 1765), iii. 141–66, it is called ‘Of enquiry and private judgment in religion’.

The Fathers Assaulted

211

infallibility in others, either in general councils or in the Bishop of Rome, whereas infallibility ‘is, or ought to be, in themselves’. Paul’s precept ‘Be not deceived’ was addressed to everyone,⁶² ‘of all sexes, ages, callings’,⁶³ even the unlearned,⁶⁴ who should not therefore follow their teachers blindly, but use their own reason. Appeals to antiquity, universality, ‘Synods, Councels, and consent of Churches’ were ‘nothing else but deceitfull formes of shifting the account and reason of our Faith and Religion from our selves, and casting it upon the back of others’.⁶⁵ Hales confuted these pleas one after the other: Antiquity, what is it else (God onely excepted) but mans Authority born some ages afore us? Now for the Truth of things, time makes no alteration; things are still the same they are, let the time be past, present, or to come....there is an Antiquity, which is proper to Truth, and in which Error can claim no part; but then it must be antiquitas antiquissima, most ancient. This cannot be but true, for it is God, and God is Truth. All other parts of Antiquity deceit and falshood will lay claim to as well as Truth.⁶⁶

As for councils and synods, they were but ‘humane Authority after another fashion’ and experience showed that ‘the Truth hath not been more relieved by these, then it hath been distressed’: the Arian crisis of the fourth century was a case in point.⁶⁷ Hales’s sermons were only circulated in manuscript to a few friends in his lifetime.⁶⁸ But his repudiation of antiquity surfaced in a long letter which he addressed in 1636 to his young friend William Chillingworth on the problem of schism. Hales blamed an excessive reverence for antiquity as the source of the unreasonable dread of schism. On that question, the judgements of the ancients ‘many times (to speak most gently) are justly to be suspected’.⁶⁹ In the Easter controversy of the second century, both parties (the Asiatic ‘Quartodeciman’ Churches who celebrated Easter, according to Jewish practice, on 14 Nisan, and the Roman Church who observed it on the following Sunday) were schismatic.⁷⁰ Hales’s even-handedness here is ⁶² Sermons preach’d at Eton, 5. ⁶³ Ibid. 11. ⁶⁴ Ibid. 6. ⁶⁵ Ibid. 11. ⁶⁶ Ibid. 12. See also Hales’s irony about tradition as a supplement to Scripture in ‘the Third Sermon’, ibid. 41. ⁶⁷ Ibid. 13. ⁶⁸ The point was made by Elson, Hales, 100. On the circulation of Hales’s sermons, see John Pearson’s preface and Anthony Farindon’s letter in Golden remains (1659), sig. a3r – v . ⁶⁹ [John Hales], A Tract concerning Schisme and Schismatiques wherein is briefly discovered the originall causes of all Schisme. Written by a Learned and Judicious Divine (London, 1642), 3–4. ⁷⁰ Ibid. 5.

212

The Fathers Assaulted

very remarkable, as Eusebius clearly states that Pope Victor was the one who took the initiative in the separation, when he excommunicated the Asiatic Churches, and that he was rebuked for this by Irenaeus.⁷¹ The episode was commonly held by Protestants as the first recorded manifestation of papal tyranny⁷² or even of ‘the spirit of Antichrist’.⁷³ In the Donatist crisis, Hales argued, the Donatists were the guilty party but Augustine’s argument against them, from the consensus of the Church throughout the whole world, did not prove anything.⁷⁴ ‘North or South, many or few, dispersed in many Places, or confined to one: None of these do either prove or disprove a Church.’⁷⁵ Hales concluded in thoroughly liberal fashion that it would have been licit to communicate in sacred matters with the Quartodecimans or the Donatists, provided one had not ‘flattered’ them in their schism.⁷⁶ And apropos the Easter controversy, he briefly digressed to show ‘the danger of our appeal to antiquity, for resolution in controverted points of Faith, and how small relief we are to expect from thence’: since ‘the chiefest Guides and Directors of the Church’ in that time were so blatantly mistaken, ‘can we without the imputation of great grossness and folly, think so poor spirited persons, competent Judges on the questions now on foot betwixt the Churches’?⁷⁷ This letter was circulated contrary to Hales’s wish. A copy came into Laud’s hands and the Archbishop summoned the author to Lambeth for a discussion.⁷⁸ One of the points he found objectionable was that Hales had ‘been too sharp in censuring Antiquity’.⁷⁹ Judging by the letter that Hales sent to Laud after their meeting (and which was only published long afterwards), Hales held his ground, claiming that he had judged the ⁷¹ Eusebius, HE, 5. 24 (SC 41, 67–71). ⁷² See for instance Bilson, Christian subjection, 70–1; George Carleton, Iurisdiction Regall, Episcopall, Papall. Wherein is declared how the Pope hath intruded upon the Iurisdiction of Temporall Princes, and of the Church. The intrusion is discovered, and the peculiar and distinct Iurisdiction to each properly belonging, recovered (London, 1610), 54. ⁷³ Whitaker, Praelectiones de Romano Pontifice, q. IV, c. 2, 627. ⁷⁴ Hales, Of Schisme, 6. Hales does not give any reference and his quotation (‘Unitatem Ecclesiae per totum mundum dispersae praeceptam non esse disserendam [sic]’) is not literal. But see e.g. Augustine, Contra litteras Petiliani, 3. 4. 5 (CSEL 52, 167): ‘unitatem Ecclesiae toto orbe diffusae pro alienis peccatis nullo modo esse deserendam.’ The idea recurs constantly in Augustine’s anti-Donatist works. ⁷⁵ Hales, Of Schisme, 7. ⁷⁶ Ibid. ⁷⁷ Ibid. 5–6. ⁷⁸ Elson, Hales, 23–5 and 123–5; Several Tracts by the Ever-Memorable Mr. John Hales of Eaton-College, etc. … To which is Added, His Letter to Archbishop Laud, occasion’d by his Tract of Schism; never before published among his Works (n.p., 1716), 215; R. H. Thornton, ‘John Hales, of Eton’, Notes and Queries, 9th series 4 ( July–December 1899), 106. ⁷⁹ Hales, ‘Letter to Laud’, in Several Tracts by the Ever-Memorable Mr. John Hales, 221.

The Fathers Assaulted

213

ancients involved in the Easter controversy according to what he thought of their actions.⁸⁰ This was hardly, one would think, an argument very apt to mollify Laud. When the letter to Chillingworth was eventually published in 1642, apparently without the author’s cognizance, under the title of A Tract concerning Schisme and Schismatiques, it was vigorously criticized by William Page for its excessive neglect of ‘antiquity, and indeed all authority’.⁸¹ Hales’s case had by then been argued much more forcefully by William Chillingworth, the addressee of the letter on schism and also a keen reader of Hales’s sermons in manuscript.⁸² Chillingworth was Laud’s godson and had been educated at Oxford, becoming a fellow of Trinity College in 1628. Shortly afterwards he was won over to Roman Catholicism by Jesuit missionaries.⁸³ The common assumption, grounded upon a very clear letter of Chillingworth to his friend Gilbert Sheldon, in which he exhorted him to follow his example, is that he converted because of an aspiration to certainty, which he felt could only be gratified by an infallible living judge of controversies.⁸⁴ An influential monograph on Chillingworth has claimed to disprove this interpretation by ‘the only known document which was certainly written during the period before his conversion’,⁸⁵ a manuscript treatise preserved in the Bodleian and which once belonged to Archbishop Sancroft. Chillingworth, we are told, propounded there a view of the Church of Rome as liberal and broad-minded, ready to accommodate ‘even ⁸⁰ Ibid. 221–2. See also Clarendon, Life, i. 51. Heylyn’s story, Cyprianus Anglicus, 362 (‘He [Hales] told me afterwards … That he was now resolved to be Orthodox, and to declare himself a true Son of the Church of England, both for Doctrine and Discipline’), is too good to be true (cf. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 337–8). ⁸¹ [William Page], A Tract concerning Schisme and Schismatiques. Wherein, is briefly discovered the originall causes of all Schisme. Written by a Learned and Judicious Divine. Together with certain Animadversions upon some Passages thereof (Oxford, 1642), 4. ⁸² See Hales, Golden remains, fo. a3v . ⁸³ See Thomas Birch, ‘The Life of Mr. William Chillingworth’, prefixed to Chillingworth, Works, 10th edn., pp. i–ii. ⁸⁴ See Pierre Des Maizeaux, The Life of William Chillingworth, ed. J. Nichols (London, 1863: 1st edn., London, 1725), 5–6, who printed the letter to Sheldon for the first time and whose interpretation was followed by all writers until R. Orr, and again by W. Chernaik, ODNB, xi. 456. See also White Kennett’s letter to a friend, 27 August 1717, printed in [William Newton], The Life of the Right Reverend Dr. White Kennett, Late Lord Bishop of Peterborough (London, 1730), 271–5: Kennett had copied Chillingworth’s letter while it was still in manuscript and rightly concluded: ‘’tis plain, he went over to Rome only to step upon the Rock of Infallibility.’ On the ideological purpose of Des Maizeaux’s biography, see S. Mandelbrote, ‘Pierre Des Maizeaux: History, Toleration, and Scholarship’, in Ligota and Quantin (eds.), History of Scholarship, 385–98. ⁸⁵ R. R. Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford, 1967), 14. See also the proud assertion of the preface, p. x (‘this material, long known but little used, illuminates the period before 1634, when Chillingworth was a Roman Catholic’). Orr misled inter alios Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 234, and Brydon, Evolving Reputation, 52–3.

214

The Fathers Assaulted

those who have not shared the respect she officially gives to the writings of the early Fathers’. To confirm his irenical interpretation of Roman Catholicism, he even attempted to show that the Thirty-Nine Articles could be reconciled with it.⁸⁶ This reconstruction of Chillingworth’s motives is based on a fantastic misinterpretation of the evidence. The alleged treatise is not even a single document but is made of two different sets of notes, one in Latin and one in English. There is first a Latin commentary on the Thirty-Nine Articles which is neither anterior to Chillingworth’s conversion nor even a work of his, but merely a series of extracts that he took down from Franciscus a Sancta Clara’s book, in the augmented edition of 1635.⁸⁷ Chillingworth later reused these papers, on which large blank spaces remained, to write down the draft of his English answer to the recusant Dialogues of William Rushworth.⁸⁸ He did not allege there the discrepancy of modern divines from the Fathers (on the Immaculate Conception) to celebrate the latitude of the Church of Rome, but to show, using a standard Protestant argument, ‘how small and heartless the Reverence of the Church of Rome is to ancient Tradition’.⁸⁹ There was nothing liberal in Chillingworth’s conversion, nor did he return afterwards to the Church of England because he had come to realize that the Roman Church was not so broad-minded after all. The arguments that persuaded him were the standard Tridentine ones, including that ‘the doctrine of the Church of Rome is conformable, and the Doctrine of Protestants contrary to the Doctrine of the Fathers of ⁸⁶ Orr, Reason and Authority, 13–20, commenting Bodl., MS Tanner 233, fos. 6r –29v . Orr was misled by Sancroft’s note (on fo. 1v ) that these remarks on the ThirtyNine Articles ‘seem to have been written, when he [Chillingworth] was going, or gone over to the Ch. of Rome’. On the other hand, nothing but scholarly inadequacy can explain Orr’s inability to decipher basic Latin abbreviations (see 15 n. 5, where he left aside the words ‘respectu omnium’ of fo. 6v ). ⁸⁷ The comments on each article are extracts from ‘Articuli confessionis Anglicae, paraphrastice exponuntur, et in quantum cum ueritate compossibiles reddi possunt, perlustrantur’, in Franciscus a Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia (3rd edn., 1635), 337–420. See e.g. fo. 16r the reference to Montagu on tradition, which did not appear in the first two editions (Chapter 3 n. 224). The notes on the nature of heresy, fo. 6r – v come from the ‘Epistolium Apologeticum’, which is also unique to the third edition (sigs. A6r –B4r ). ⁸⁸ William Chillingworth, An Answer to some Passages in Rushworth’s Dialogues, in Works, 2nd pagination, 183–99. The text in Bodl., MS Tanner 233, fos. 6v –22r is the draft of pp. 187–99. On Rushworth’s Dialogues, see below, n. 115: they were first published in 1640 but Chillingworth read and confuted a manuscript version (Des Maizeaux, Chillingworth, 37 and 42–3), perhaps the abridgement written by Sir Kenelm Digby ( Thomas White, An Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues. Wherin the Exceptions of the Lords Falkland and Digby are answer’d: and the Arts of their commended Daill´e Discover’d (Paris, 1654), 2–3). ⁸⁹ Chillingworth, Answer to Rushworth’s Dialogues, 193–4. Compare e.g. Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 442.

The Fathers Assaulted

215

the Primitive Church, even by the confession of Protestants themselves; I mean, those Fathers who lived within the compass of the first 600 years; to whom Protestants themselves do very frequently, and very confidently appeal’.⁹⁰ After Chillingworth had returned to the Church of England, he settled with Lord Falkland at the latter’s seat at Great Tew in Oxfordshire, which soon became a rallying point for people, particularly Oxford men, engaged in religious enquiry in an undogmatic spirit which might well be called Erasmian.⁹¹ Falkland had much read Erasmus and thought that he might ‘passe for a Confessor, having suffered, and long, by the Bigotts of both Parties’.⁹² Falkland’s own mother had gone over to Roman Catholicism, after having moved a while in English Arminian circles,⁹³ and she now exhibited all the zeal of a convert, first of all in her own family. Falkland was apparently the only one of her children who escaped her proselytizing.⁹⁴ One ⁹⁰ Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, preface to the author of Charity Maintain’d, § 43, in Works, 25. The motives had already been reproduced, to embarrass Chillingworth, by Wilson, A Direction to be observed, 38–9. ⁹¹ The best study is Trevor-Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle’, in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, 166–230, but H. J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1951), 63–95, is still worth reading. See also J. C. Hayward, ‘New Directions in Studies of the Falkland Circle’, Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), 19–48; Levine, ‘From Tradition to History’, 189–96. Neither R. Ollard, Clarendon and his Friends (London, 1987), nor P. G. Stanwood, ‘Community and Social Order in the Great Tew Circle’, in C. J. Summers and T.-L. Pebworth (eds.), Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England (Columbia, Mo., 2000), 173–86, are of much use. On the Oxford connection, see the much quoted text by Clarendon, Life, i. 39–40, but also Thomas Triplet’s dedication to Falkland’s son of Sir Lucius Cary, late Lord Viscount of Falkland, his Discourse of Infallibility, with an Answer to it: And his Lordships Reply. Never before published. Together with Mr. Walter Mountague’s Letter concerning the changing his Religion. Answered by my Lord of Falkland (London, 1651), sig. (∗∗∗ 2)r : ‘This was it that made Tew so valued a Mansion to us: For as we went from Oxford thither, we found our selves never out of the Universitie: So we thought our selves never absent from our own beloved home.’ ⁹² Falkland, ‘Reply’, in Falkland, his Discourse of Infallibility, with an Answer to it: And his Lordships Reply, 187–8. See also 161 and the repeated quotations of Erasmus’ letters, 111, 123, 146, 151. Falkland’s admiration for Erasmus is recalled by Triplet, ibid., sig. ∗∗∗ 4r . ⁹³ See Montagu to Cosin, 26 August [1626], before her conversion (Correspondence of Cosin, i, no. LXIV, 101), and, after it, letter of Alexander Cook to Ussher, 30 November 1626, in Parr, Usher, letter CXII, 372–3: ‘Mr. Mountague, Mr. Cosens, and the Colledg (as it is called) at Durham-house, are sensible of the disgrace which they sustain by reason of her fall.’ On her conversion, see M. C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006), 454. ⁹⁴ See The Lady Falkland: her life. From a MS. in the Imperial Archives at Lille (London, 1861), which was written by one of her daughters. D. Lunn, ‘Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (1586/7–1639)’, Royal Stuart Papers, 11 (1977), is of scant interest.

216

The Fathers Assaulted

of the key influences on her conversion had been her assiduous reading of the Fathers and especially of Augustine (in vernacular translations).⁹⁵ After she had become a Roman Catholic she translated the works of Cardinal Du Perron ‘for the sakes of the scholars of Oxford and Cambridge (who do not generally understand French)’.⁹⁶ Not only had Du Perron made great use of the Fathers, he had also elaborated a new rationale of the appeal to antiquity. The Roman Catholic distinction between the Fathers’ individual opinions and their consensus had been badly damaged by Protestant controversialists. In a letter addressed to Casaubon but actually aimed at James I, Du Perron found two ways of evading the impossible requirement of unanimity. First, ‘a doctrine or observation’ was sufficiently proved to be Catholic ‘when the most eminent Fathers of every country agree in the affirmation of the same doctrine or practise, and that none of the others that have bene without note of dissension from the Church, have opposed it’. Thus the council of Ephesus judged it sufficient to quote ten Fathers against Nestorius, and Vincent of L´erins approved of that course, ‘because none doubteth but that those tenn did trulie hold the same with al their other bretheren’.⁹⁷ Secondly, and crucially, Du Perron shifted the debate from doctrine to history, from the Fathers ‘as Doctors’ to the Fathers ‘as witnesses of the Customes and practise of the Church of their times’. ‘In this case wee argue noe more upon their wordes probablie, as wee doe when they speake in the quality of particular Doctors, but we argue thereupon demonstrativelie’.⁹⁸ A special credit ought to be attributed to those who lived at the time of the first four general councils, since (contrary to ante-Nicene writers) a sufficient corpus had been preserved ⁹⁵ Lady Falkland: her life, 10 and 113: she read ‘all that she could meet with in French, Spanish, or Italian’. ⁹⁶ Ibid. 30, 38–9, 49, 108. See also the appendix, 170–2. Lady Falkland’s translation was only partially printed: The Reply of the most illustrious Cardinall of Perron, to the Answeare of the most excellent King of Great Britaine. The first tome (Douai, 1630) [Allison–Rogers, ii, no. 127]; facsimile in English Recusant Literature 248 (Ilkley, 1975), and in The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, series I, part 2, xiii (Aldershot, 2000). It was seized and destroyed by English authorities, but it was known to her entourage and Chillingworth quoted from it (Religion of protestants, chapter VI, § 29, 338). On the reception of Du Perron’s Reply in England, see also letter of Hammond to Thomas Smith, 4 January 1653, in Pocock, ‘Illustrations’, The Ecclesiastic and Theologian, 13 ( January–June 1852), 325–6. ⁹⁷ Jacques Davy Du Perron, Lettre Envoy´ee au Sieur Casaubon en Angleterre (Paris, 1612), 23–4. See Vincent of L´erins, Commonitorium, 30. 7 (CC 64, 191). I quote Lady Falkland’s translation, prefixed to Reply, 7. There had already been a version by the Jesuit Thomas Owen (A Letter written from Paris, by the Lord Cardinall of Peron, to Monsr Casaubon in England. Translated out of the French corrected Copie, into English (n.p., 1612) [facsimile in English Recusant Literature 72 (Menston, 1971)]: Allison–Rogers, ii, no. 581) but it is faulty in places. ⁹⁸ Lettre au Sieur Casaubon, 24–5; Reply, 7–8.

The Fathers Assaulted

217

and Protestants agreed that the Church then was still the true Church.⁹⁹ ‘That shall remaine truly antient and Apostolicke, that the Fathers of those ages doe testifie to have bin observed by the whole Church, not as a thing sprung up in their time, but as a thing derived downe to them either from the immemorial succession of former ages, or from the expresse tradition of the Apostles.’¹⁰⁰ Casaubon, who answered on behalf of James I, had no objection against appealing to the Fathers as witnesses, but protested that the post-Constantinian Church ought not to be privileged. The Church of the first three centuries was ‘equal or even superior’ as to orthodoxy of doctrine and purity of discipline.¹⁰¹ Few ante-Nicene writers, admittedly, had been preserved, ‘but some have and they are most worthy to be taken account of ’. Cyprian alone would teach one the government of the primitive Church much better than many fourth-century Fathers.¹⁰² Du Perron’s posthumous reply enlarged on the principles of his letter.¹⁰³ This historicizing move was hugely influential among Roman Catholic theologians, especially in France (English recusants were on the whole less responsive to it).¹⁰⁴ The problem of the status of the Church Fathers was one that members of the Great Tew circle could not escape. Neither could they merely repeat against Du Perron the old Elizabethan arguments.¹⁰⁵ Falkland read the Fathers closely, with a special interest in the ante-Nicene and the Greek: according to his own account, he found the study rather painful, but it was necessary to arbitrate between the rival claims of contemporary Churches.¹⁰⁶ About 1636 and probably with Chillingworth’s assistance, he wrote a short discourse ‘Of the Infallibility of the Church of Rome’, which ⁹⁹ Lettre au Sieur Casaubon, 19–20; Reply, 6–7. ¹⁰⁰ Lettre au Sieur Casaubon, 25–6; Reply, 8. ¹⁰¹ Casaubon, Responsio, 40. ¹⁰² Ibid. 41: ‘Quod si non adeo multi eorum temporum scriptores ad nostram aetatem peruenerunt: at peruenerunt tamen nonnulli, quorum ratio habeatur dignissimi.’ ¹⁰³ See esp. Du Perron, Replique, 720–46 on the preferential appeal to 4th- and 5th-century Fathers. ¹⁰⁴ Quantin, Catholicisme classique, 79–82. ¹⁰⁵ Falkland thought that Du Perron had argued the Roman case much more ably than Bellarmine (Falkland, his Discourse of Infallibility, with an Answer to it: And his Lordships Reply, 59). ¹⁰⁶ Falkland, ‘Of the Infallibilitie of the Church of Rome’, in [Henry Hammond], A View of some exceptions which have beene made by a Romanist to the Lord Viscount Falkland’s Dicourse of the Infallibilitie of the Church of Rome. Submitted to the Censure of all sober Christians, Together with the Discourse it selfe of Infallibilitie prefixt to it (London, 1646), 12–13; Clarendon, Life, i. 40—repeated in [Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon], Animadversions upon a Book, Intituled, Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed to the Catholick Church, by Dr Stillingfleet, and the Imputation Refuted and Retorted by S.C. By a Person of Honour (London, 1673), 185. Cf. Hayward, ‘New Directions’, 21–5.

218

The Fathers Assaulted

remained unpublished in his lifetime.¹⁰⁷ Exposing the inadequacy of every ground alleged for such an infallibility, Falkland came to tradition, and observed that it could not be known with certainty. All the doctors of the Christian Church during the first two centuries believed the millenarian doctrine to be an apostolic tradition, on the strength of Papias’ testimony, and held it as part of the faith: Justin Martyr said that it was believed by ‘all that are in all parts Orthodox Christians’; ‘Irenaeus sets it down directly for a Tradition, and relates the very words that Christ used when he taught this.’¹⁰⁸ What shall we then think of the presumptive reasoning that the Fathers would not ‘joyne in opinions, if there were no traditions for them’?¹⁰⁹ On the other hand, Falkland argued, the Church of Rome was divided on the issue of election and reprobation, which should have been resolved ‘if conformity to the ancient Church be required’. On this question, ‘the Jesuits have Ancienter and more general Traditions on their side, then the Church of Rome hath in any other question’, namely all the Fathers before Augustine ‘(who is very various I confesse in it)’.¹¹⁰ Falkland’s discourse circulated in manuscript and was immediately answered, perhaps even twice, by recusant controversialists, whom his own mother spurred on.¹¹¹ One was Thomas White, an able reasoner, who had ¹⁰⁷ The first edition appeared in Oxford in 1645. On the work, its origins, and the subsequent controversy, see K. Weber, Lucius Cary Second Viscount Falkland (New York, 1940), 213–47. ¹⁰⁸ Falkland, ‘Of the Infallibilitie of the Church of Rome’, 7. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 80 (Opera (Paris, 1615), 307 = PG 6, 668): ’Εγὼ δὲ, καὶ εἴ τινές εἰσιν ὀρθογνώμονες κατὰ πάντα Χριστιανοὶ, καὶ σαρκὸς ἀνάστασιν γενήσεσθαι ἐπιστάμεθα· καὶ χίλια ἔτη ἐν ‘Ιερουσαλὴμ … , οἱ προφ η˜ ται ’Ιεζεκιὴλ, καὶ ’Ησαίας, καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι ὁμολογο˜υσιν (the syntax is problematic: for Thorndike’s reading, see below, 356); the edition of 1615 was reprinted in Paris, 1636, with the same pagination. Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 5. 33. 3 (SC 153, 414): Falkland mentioned that the text had been first published by Feu-ardent, ‘though we need it not much, for many of the Fathers take notice of this beliefe of his’ (see above, Chapter 1 n. 190). ¹⁰⁹ Ibid. 8. ¹¹⁰ Ibid. 13. ¹¹¹ The question is somewhat obscure. White, Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues, 3, states that ‘many years’ before Falkland’s Discourse was published, ‘a deceased friend … extorted from me an unlick’d Mola, representing suddenly and imperfectly, my judgement in reference to that Authors work’. This is certainly ‘An Answer to the Lord Faulklands Discourse of Infallibility’, eventually published by Thomas Triplet in 1651 together with Falkland’s reply (above, n. 91)—it has White’s characteristic ideas. Another opponent wrote A Treatise Apologeticall, touching the Infallibility of the Church Catholique, in answer to another of the like argument lately published, which Hammond received in manuscript and which he reproduced in order to confute it (it does not appear to have ever been published separately). This second opponent complained that Falkland’s Discourse ‘was written by the Author divers yeares ago, in his Catholique Mothers life time, and was by her mediation forthwith answered at large, and the answer sent unto the Enquirer fairely bound up … yet had it never any reply made unto it, though it was sometimes threatned it should’, and was eventually lost (View of some

The Fathers Assaulted

219

remained more or less impervious to the continental move towards positive theology. He was certainly more adept at making a priori distinctions than at discussing historical facts. He argued that ‘Catholic Tradition’ (that is ‘that doctrine which was publikely preached in the Churches, ordred and planted in the manners and customes of the Church’) was very different from the tradition pretended by ancient heretics, which was ‘a kind of secret doctrine’ allegedly derived from the esoteric teaching of the Apostles. Such was the millenarian tradition ‘imposed upon’ Papias.¹¹² A later Roman Catholic answer, written after Falkland’s Discourse had been printed, claimed more specifically that millenarianism had never been the universal belief of the Church. Justin expressly distinguished three categories of Christians: ‘those who as he conceived did in all points hold aright’ (a rather toned down translation) and who held the doctrine of the millennium; those who rejected it and were nevertheless ‘of pure and pious judgement’; heretics who denied the resurrection altogether.¹¹³ But White did not even bother at this stage to discuss Justin’s and Irenaeus’ texts. He preferred to stress that ‘the witnesses also of ancient Fathers are no parts of tradition, but signes and markes where it hath passed, whereas the body of tradition is in the life and beleife of the whole Church’.¹¹⁴ In White’s view, which he may have partly inherited from a fellow-recusant, William Rushworth, tradition had been transmitted orally—and, he claimed, with an infallible certainty—from generation to generation since the Apostles’ times up to the present day.¹¹⁵ A Tradition, or a point of faith delivered by tradition, is a point universally preached and delivered by the Apostles and imprinted in the harts of the Christian world, And by an universall beliefe and practise continued unto our days; whereof our exceptions, 21). Should one understand (as Hammond did, ibid., sig. A3r ) that this first answer was ‘by the same hand’ as the Treatise Apologeticall, or was it simply White’s answer, as eventually published in 1651? I would tend to favour the second interpretation. According to Wood, Athenae, ii. 569, Thomas Barlow attributed the answer published by Triplet (i.e. White’s) to the Jesuit Guy Holland: is there a confusion and should one give Holland the authorship of the Treatise Apologeticall instead? Neither work is mentioned in Holland’s notice in Sommervogel, Biblioth`eque, iv, col. 433. ¹¹² [White], ‘Answer’, in Falkland, his Discourse of Infallibility, with an Answer to it: And his Lordships Reply, 22–3. ¹¹³ Treatise Apologeticall, reproduced in Hammond, View of some exceptions, 83–4. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 80 (Opera (Paris, 1615/1636), 306–7 = PG 6, 664–8): πολλοὺς δ’ αὖ καὶ των ˜ τ˜ης καθαρας ˜ καὶ εὐσεβο˜υς ὄντων Χριστιανων ˜ γνώμης, το˜υτο μὴ γνωρίζειν. ¹¹⁴ [White], ‘Answer’, 35. ¹¹⁵ See The Dialogues of William Richworth. Or, the judgmend of common sense in the choice of Religion (Paris, 1640). William Rushworth (or Richworth) had died in 1637 and it has often been surmised that the book was in fact by White. He certainly endorsed it unreservedly and he appropriated it to the extent of making subsequently large additions

220

The Fathers Assaulted

warrant is no other then that we finde the present church in quiet possession of it, and whereof no beginning is knowne.¹¹⁶

This definition was explicitly designed to cut short any objection drawn from embarrassing patristic texts.¹¹⁷ White later used it in the case of Irenaeus’ millenarianism: ‘the very expression of Irenaeus proves it to be no Tradition; for he sets down the supposed words of our Saviour, which plainly shews it is a Story, not a Tradition; a Tradition (as we have explicated it) being a sense delivered not in set words, but setled in the Auditors hearts, by hundreds of different expressions explicating the same meaning.’¹¹⁸ White was actually rather wary of those who ‘seeke tradition out of the fathers’: I intende not to detract from their labours who have taken paines in this kinde, for they are profitable and necessarie for the church of God, and excellent testimonies of Tradition, but I never thinke it to be the bodie of Tradition, but only an effect and consequent of it, nor that the multitude of Christians, whose faith is to be regulated by Tradition, neede to have recourse to those learned workes. Wherefore although divers fathers in the same or different ages be found to contradict some point, whereof the present church is in quiet and immemorable possession, their authorities ought not to prevaile; nor are they sufficient to prove there was not even in their days a contrarie Tradition.¹¹⁹

In his reply to White, Falkland elaborated his thoughts on traditions. He recognized only one ‘Universall tradition’ above all exceptions, that of the Canon of Scripture,¹²⁰ though he repeated his assertion that there was ‘an Unanimous consent’ before Augustine in favour of Molinism.¹²¹ The to it; one may however accept his claim that he was only the editor of the original work: see his preface to Rushworth’s Dialogues. Or, the Judgment of common sence in the choyce of Religion. Last Edition, corrected and enlarged (Paris, 1654); B. C. Southgate, ‘A Note on the Authorship of Rushworth’s Dialogues’, Notes and Queries, 226 (1981), 207–8. The same ideas were elaborated at length by White’s prolific disciple John Sergeant, on whom see below, 322–3. Tavard, Seventeenth-Century Tradition, 158–79 (‘The Legacy of William Rushworth’) and 219–45 (‘The Harvest of John Sergeant’) provides a helpful introduction but one should be wary of his post-Vatican II confessional agenda. ¹¹⁶ Dialogues of William Richworth (1640), Third Dialogue, § 13, 554–5 (there are only slight stylistic changes in the edition of 1654). ¹¹⁷ Ibid. 556–7. ¹¹⁸ White, Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues, 81. For Justin, White used the unoriginal answer that he acknowledged many Christians not to have held his opinion (78–9 and 81–2). ¹¹⁹ Dialogues of William Richworth (1640), Third Dialogue, § 13, 559–60. On the authority of the Fathers, see also Thomas White, Sonus buccinae: siue tres tractatus; de uirtutibus fidei et theologiae, de principiis earundem, et de erroribus oppositis (Paris, 1654), tract. 2, § 5, 265–270 (the BNF copy, shelfmark D2-5432, was Sir Kenelm Digby’s). ¹²⁰ Falkland, ‘Reply’, 95. Cf. 55 and 157. ¹²¹ Ibid. 109 (with a very critical comment on Augustine).

The Fathers Assaulted

221

instance of millenarianism ruined all present appeals to tradition. Du Perron had built his entire case for Rome on the trustworthiness of the Fathers’ testifying to the doctrine of the Church in their time, but this would prove that the millenarian doctrine ‘which is now hereticall in your Churches beleife was the opinion of the Ancient Church’.¹²² The same applied to the necessity of the eucharist for infants.¹²³ And Du Perron (in order to have the Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, rather than those of the first three, taken as standards of truth) had observed that an Arian would like to have his cause judged by the ante-Nicene writers.¹²⁴ According to Falkland, Jerome’s explanation that the Fathers ‘spoke with less circumspection’ before Arius (Augustine made the same point on those who wrote before Pelagius) ‘is a weapon against Tradition in generall’.¹²⁵ Indeed, Athanasius had blatantly to distort Dionysius of Alexandria’s meaning in order to make his writings agree with ‘Catholique Doctrine’.¹²⁶ Falkland’s short tract was, as his adversaries rightly recognized, ‘an Embryo’ of The Religion of Protestants a Safe way to Salvation,¹²⁷ the folio volume that Chillingworth published in Oxford, at the end of 1637, against the Jesuit Edward Knott and which was an immediate success.¹²⁸ The book, which was substantially finished at the beginning of 1637,¹²⁹ had ¹²² Ibid. 72–3. ¹²³ Ibid. 82, citing Augustine and Innocent I, but without any precise reference (see below, nn. 138 and 139). ¹²⁴ Ibid. 77. See Du Perron, Replique, 729. ¹²⁵ Ibid. 78: ‘how then can any age be sure, that by this reason (of minus caute loquuti sunt) their Ancestors have not mistaken their Fathers, and mislead their Posterity?’ See Jerome, Apologia aduersus libros Rufini, 2. 17 [PL 23, 440]. For Augustine’s text see above, 65. ¹²⁶ Ibid. Athanasius, De sententia Dionysii (Werke, ii/1, 46–67). ¹²⁷ Treatise Apologeticall, reproduced in Hammond, View of some exceptions, 21. ¹²⁸ William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants a Safe way to Salvation. Or An Answer to a Booke entitled Mercy and Truth, Or, Charity maintain’d by Catholiques, Which pretends to prove the Contrary (Oxford, printed by Leonard Lichfield, and are to be sold by John Clarke, 1638; Madan, i. 205, no. 6). As already noted by Birch, ‘Chillingworth’, iii, the book must have come out ‘in the latter End’ of 1637. Printing was under way in September and Laud was anxious that the book should come out as soon as possible (see Laud’s letters to the Vice Chancellor of Oxford University, 15 and 22 September 1637, in Remains, ii, 2nd. pagination, 141–2). The approbation by Samuel Fell, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, is dated 14 October 1637. Samuel Baker, chaplain to Bishop Juxon of London, gave his licence to reprint the book in London on 6 February 1637–8: The Religion of Protestants a Safe way to Salvation … The second edition (London, printed for John Clarke, 1638), sig. A4v . This second edition was entered on the Stationers’ Registers on 4 June 1638, both Chillingworth and the Oxford printers having given their consent, which must mean that the first edition was already sold out (Arber, iv. 421). On the controversy, see Birch, ‘Chillingworth’, pp. iii–iv. ¹²⁹ According to a letter of Laud to Prideaux, 3 March 1637, Remains, ii, 2nd pagination, 128.

222

The Fathers Assaulted

been at least two years in the making and Falkland had contributed much to it, including patristic references (logic, not history, was Chillingworth’s forte).¹³⁰ The sum of the religious thought of the Great Tew circle, it was also to prove its most influential legacy to the Church of England. Chillingworth firmly denied that the testimony of the Fathers could ever provide a certain argument. They did not, for sure, favour the Roman cause.¹³¹ Confuting the very arguments that had once persuaded him, Chillingworth pointed out that Roman Catholics themselves confessed their doctrine to be ‘contrary to the Fathers in many points’.¹³² They could not oblige Protestants to submit to judges they were not willing to admit for themselves,¹³³ there being nothing more unreasonable ‘that you should account them Fathers when they are for you, and Children when they are against you’.¹³⁴ To the famous passage of Augustine on the apostolical origin of the universal practices of the Church,¹³⁵ Chillingworth answered that this made indeed a ‘probable’ case, considering the proximity of Augustine’s time to that of the Apostles, but in no way a ‘certain and infallible’ one. Millenarianism and the necessity of the eucharist for infants were taught by many Fathers, and in such a way as to meet all the criteria laid down by Du Perron for patristic testimonies to be demonstrative¹³⁶—this had been Falkland’s argument. Chillingworth pursued it in more detail, with an abundance of patristic quotations, in two discourses against the infallibility of the Church, which were only published in 1687.¹³⁷ Pope Innocent I ‘concludes against the Pelagians, that Infants could not attain eternal Life without Baptism, because without Baptism they were incapable of the Eucharist, and without the Eucharist could not have eternal Life’.¹³⁸ Augustine taught the same doctrine ‘so plainly and so frequently, that he ¹³⁰ See Barlow, Remains, 329 (‘it is certain that most of those Ancient Authorities which Mr. Chillingworth makes use of, he owes’ [to Falkland]). See also 348–9. ¹³¹ Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, preface to the author of Charity Maintain’d, § 25, 20, in Works (10th edn., London, 1742) (all references are to this edition). ¹³² Ibid., § 44, 26. ¹³³ Ibid., chapter II, § 163, 129 (on Augustine) and chapter III, § 10, 147 (on the Fathers in general). ¹³⁴ Ibid., chapter VI, § 22, 334. ¹³⁵ Charity Maintain’d, chapter III, § 16, reproduced ibid. 137. ¹³⁶ Ibid., chapter III, § 44, 162–3. See already chapter II, § 155, 126, and also Answer to Rushworth’s Dialogues, 188. ¹³⁷ ‘An Argument drawn from the admitting Infants to the Eucharist, as without which they could not be saved, against the Church’s Infallibility’, Works, 2nd pagination, 165–71; ‘An Argument drawn from the Doctrine of the Millenaries against Infallibility’, 172–6. ¹³⁸ ‘An Argument drawn from the admitting Infants to the Eucharist’, 169, referring to Innocent, ep. ad concilium Mileuitanum, inter Augustini ep. 182, 5 (CSEL 44, 720).

The Fathers Assaulted

223

must be a mere Stranger to him, that knows it not, and very impudent, that denies it’.¹³⁹ As for millenarianism, Justin’s text should be corrected. It said at present that many ‘who are also of the pure and holy Opinion of Christians’ did not believe the millennium, but the true reading had to be ‘who are not of the pure and holy Opinion of Christians’: Justin immediately afterwards explained that these were heretics.¹⁴⁰ Justin and the Church of his time thus held millenarianism ‘as a necessary Matter, so far as to hold them no Christians that held the contrary’.¹⁴¹ Although he made no acknowledgement, Chillingworth probably borrowed the correction from Joseph Mede, who had propounded it with exactly opposite aims. A millenarian himself, Mede was keen to show that this doctrine had been indeed ‘the Opinion of the whole Orthodox Christian Church in the Age immediately following the death of St John’. He considered that Justin’s testimony ought ‘to perswade such as rely upon Authority and Antiquity’.¹⁴² Chillingworth’s conclusion was obviously that neither authority nor antiquity could be relied upon.¹⁴³ This is an early instance of scholarly endeavours to revive forgotten doctrines being turned into arguments against the Fathers. Chillingworth’s confutation of Knott’s appeal to church authority and antiquity climaxed in the famous profession of faith, so often quoted afterwards: The , I say, the  only, is the Religion of Protestants! … I for my part after a long, and (as I verily believe and hope) impartial Search of the true Way to eternal Happiness, do profess plainly that I cannot find any Rest for the Sole of my Foot, but upon this Rock only. I see plainly, and with mine own Eyes, that there are Popes against Popes, Councils against Councils, some Fathers against others, the same ¹³⁹ Ibid. 169–70. Chillingworth quotes Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione, 1. 20. 26–8 and 1. 24. 34 (CSEL 60, 25–7 and 33–4), and gives many additional references. ¹⁴⁰ ‘An Argument drawn from the Doctrine of the Millenaries’, 174–5. ¹⁴¹ Ibid. 176. This position was already ascribed to Justin in Religion of protestants, ‘Answer to the Preface’, § 10, 38, but without justification or reference. ¹⁴² See ‘Iustini Martyris Dialogo cum Tryphone Iudaeo locus insignis de Millenio Regni Christi emendatus et notis illustratus’, in [Joseph Mede], Clauis Apocalyptica. Editio secunda (Cambridge, 1632), sep. pagination, 281–5, and Mede’s letter to Meddus, 18 August [no year], in The Works of the Pious and Profoundly-Learned Joseph Mede, B.D. sometime Fellow of Christ’s Colledge in Cambridge, ed. John Worthington (London, 1672), 771. See J. K. Jue, Heaven upon Earth: Joseph Mede (1586–1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism (Dordrecht, 2006), esp. 109–25; S. Hutton, ‘The Appropriation of Joseph Mede: Millenarianism in the 1640s’, in J. E. Force and R. H. Popkins (eds.), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, iii: The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dordrecht, 2001), 1–13, esp. 8. ¹⁴³ Religion of Protestants, chapter V, § 91, 289.

224

The Fathers Assaulted

Fathers against themselves, a Consent of Fathers of one Age against a Consent of Fathers of another Age, the Church of one Age against the Church of another Age, Traditive Interpretations of Scripture are pretended; but there are few or none to be found: No Tradition, but only of Scripture, can derive itself from the Fountain, but may be plainly proved, either to have been brought in, in such an Age after Christ, or that in such an Age it was not in. In a Word, there is no sufficient Certainty but of Scripture only, for any considering Man to build upon.¹⁴⁴

Chillingworth’s ‘Scripture only’ was markedly different from the Reformed sola Scriptura, since he stressed that Scripture was unable to authenticate itself. Indeed he went as far as to tell Knott that ‘it is altogether as αὐτόπιστον, that the Gospel of St. Matthew is the Word of God, as that all which your Church say is true’.¹⁴⁵ As for the standard ‘internal arguments’ (‘the divine Matter’ of the Scripture etc.), they might ‘confirm’ and ‘strengthen’ the faith of those who already believed in the divinity of the Scriptures, but they were not the proper ground of that faith. Though Chillingworth quoted Hooker on this question, his position was quite different.¹⁴⁶ The Canon could only be determined ‘by the Testimonies of the Ancient Churches’.¹⁴⁷ Chillingworth professed himself willing to adopt Augustine’s famous saying and ‘say, That we also would not believe the Gospel, unless the Authority of the Catholick Church did move us, (meaning by the Church, the Church of all Ages, and that Succession of Christians which takes in Christ himself and his Apostles)’.¹⁴⁸ ‘Universal Tradition’ therefore, inasmuch as it gives attestation to Scripture, ‘is the Rule to judge all Controversies by’.¹⁴⁹ In effect, however, ‘because nothing besides Scripture comes to us with as full a Stream of Tradition as Scripture, Scripture alone, and no unwritten Doctrine’ is ‘the only Rule for us’, speaking of course ‘of all those [controversies] that are possible to be judged by Scripture, and of those that arise among such as believe the Scripture’.¹⁵⁰ ‘Traditive Interpretations’ of Scripture ought to be received if they could be ¹⁴⁴ Religion of Protestants, chapter VI, § 56, 354 (sic). ¹⁴⁵ Ibid., chapter II, § 46, 91. ¹⁴⁶ Ibid., § 47, 91–2. Compare Hooker, Lawes, III. 8. 14, above, 93: Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, § 30, 88–9, quotes the text but interprets ‘God’s Church’ of ‘that particular Church wherein a Man is bred and brought up’ (88 note g), thus safegarding the fundamental role of ‘universal tradition’. ¹⁴⁷ Ibid., § 27, 87 and § 42, 91. ¹⁴⁸ Ibid., § 54, 94. See also § 97–9, 106–7. This interpretation of Augustine’s words went back to some late medieval Schoolmen and was not unusual among Protestant divines, but they stressed that, even in this sense, the Church had only an introductory role and that Scripture had authority of itself: see e.g. Field, Of the Church, 215, 218, 238. Hales defended the same position as Chillingworth in a short tract ‘How we come to know the Scripture to be the Word of God’, which was first published in his Golden remains (2nd edn., London, 1673), 259–61. ¹⁴⁹ Religion of Protestants, chapter II, § 155, 126. ¹⁵⁰ Ibid., §§ 155–6, 126.

The Fathers Assaulted

225

traced back to the Apostles.¹⁵¹ Indeed, ‘who can doubt but the Primitive Christians, to whom the Epistles of the Apostles were written, either of themselves understood or were instructed by the Apostles, touching the Sense of the obscure Places of them’? But these interpretations ‘are all lost, nay, were all lost, within a few Ages after Christ’, as is proved by the lack of agreement of ‘the ancient Interpreters’. ‘You cannot make this appear in any Thing [that it is Tradition], but only in the Canon of Scripture.’¹⁵² Chillingworth articulated this understanding of sola Scriptura with a peculiar and strongly historicized notion of faith. ‘Of this Hypothesis, That all the Articles of our Faith were revealed by God, we cannot ordinarily have any rational and acquired Certainty, more than moral’, since it was based on a universal tradition about the truth of Scripture and the miracles related therein.¹⁵³ Chillingworth opposed this ‘moral certainty’, which might also be called ‘the highest Degree of Probability’,¹⁵⁴ to ‘mathematical’ and, elsewhere, to ‘metaphysical certainty’, ‘whereby wee know that a thing is so and cannot be otherwise’. ‘Morall certainty is begott in us, by presumptions and probabilityes, which eyther by their strength and violence or by their multitude, make up a Morall Demonstration, to which being well considered, though a perverse and obstinate wrangler may, yet no prudent and sober man can possibly refuse to yeeld, a firme, certayne, undoubting, unmoveable assent and adhaerence.’¹⁵⁵ Distinguishing between various kinds of certainty, according to different kinds of evidence, was a central concern of seventeenth-century thinkers all over Europe.¹⁵⁶ ¹⁵¹ Ibid., §§ 88–9, 104. ¹⁵² Ibid., chapter III, § 46, 164. See also chapter II, § 10, 82. Tavard, SeventeenthCentury Tradition, 88–9 (quoting Religion of Protestants, chapter III, § 45, 163), claims that ‘Chillingworth admitted, like Wilson, the infallibility of universal unwritten traditions’ and was therefore a ‘strangely blinded adversary’: but Chillingworth was, of course, speaking hypothetically and made clear in the very next paragraph that no such traditions had actually survived. ¹⁵³ Religion of Protestants, chapter I, § 8, 58–9. ¹⁵⁴ Ibid., chapter IV, § 57, 222. ¹⁵⁵ LPL, MS 943 (‘Papers of Mr William Chillingworth, formerly delivered by Archbishop Sheldon to Dr Sancroft, then Dean of St Pauls, and by my Lord Archbishop Sancroft delivered to me, November 1693. Hen. Wharton’), 871. See also 873. This is the draft of an answer to ‘Mr Peake’s 5 questions’, the second of which was ‘Whither such a certainty be required to faith as makes the truth beleeved more then barely probable to the beleever’. On this manuscript, see Birch, ‘Chillingworth’, p. viii; extracts are quoted by Orr, Reason and Authority, 51–2. On Chillingworth’s use of moral certainty, see H. G. van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 1630–1690 ( The Hague, 1963), 18–32; R. T. Carroll, The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stillingfleet, 1635–1699 ( The Hague, 1975), 4–12. ¹⁵⁶ For an overview, see L. Daston, ‘Probability and Evidence’, in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ii (Cambridge, 1998), 1108–44, esp. 1116–22.

226

The Fathers Assaulted

The standard reference was Aristotle’s warning: ‘it is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.’¹⁵⁷ The principle had been more cogently expressed by Grotius in his hugely influential treatise Of the truth of the Christian religion: ‘as there are variety of things which be true, so are there divers wayes of proving or manifesting the truth. Thus is there one way in Mathematicks, another in Physicks, a third in Ethicks, and lastly another kinde when a matter of fact is in question: wherein verily wee must rest content with such testimonies as are free from all suspition of untruth.’¹⁵⁸ Chillingworth may have been the first to transfer Grotius’ arguments from Christian apologetics to theological controversy between Christian confessions. He certainly made sure that they became central to the defence of the Church of England. Chillingworth stressed that ‘God desires only that we believe the Conclusion, as much as the Premisses deserve, that the Strength of our Faith be equal or proportionable to the Credibility of the Motives to it.’¹⁵⁹ It is therefore sufficient to believe the Gospel ‘with such a Kind or Degree of Assent, as they [men] yield to other Matters of Tradition’,¹⁶⁰ that is as they believe ‘that there was such a Woman as Queen Elizabeth, such a man as Henry VIII’, ‘that there is such a City as ¹⁵⁷ Aristole, Nicomachean Ethics, . iii. 4. 1094b 23–7 (trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library). ¹⁵⁸ True religion explained and defended against the Arch-enemies thereof in these times. In six Bookes. Written in Latine by Hugo Grotius, and now done in English for the common good (London, 1632), book I, c. 23, 148. This translation was based on Hugo Grotius, De ueritate religionis Christianae. Editio secunda, priore auctior et emendatior (Leiden, 1629), 97: ‘pro rerum diuersitate, diuersa quoque esse probandi genera, alia in Mathematicis, alia de affectionibus corporum, alia circa deliberationes, alia ubi facti est quaestio in quo genere sane standum est nulla suspicione laborantibus testimoniis.’ The clause ‘in quo genere sane standum est nulla suspicione laborantibus testimoniis’ was an addition. Compare the first Latin edition, Sensus librorum sex, quos pro ueritate religionis Christianae Batavice scripsit Hugo Grotius (Leiden, 1627), 80–1. In the edition of 1640 (De ueritate religionis christianae. Editio Noua, additis annotationibus in quibus testimonia (Paris, 1640), 418), Grotius quoted Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and also Metaphysics, . iii. 3. 995a 15–16: ‘Mathematical accuracy is not to be demanded in everything’ (trans. H. Tredennick, Loeb Classical Library). See J. P. Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist for the Christian Religion: A Study of his Work De ueritate religionis christianae (1640), trans. J. C. Grayson (Leiden, 2004), esp. 86–9. ¹⁵⁹ Religion of Protestants, chapter I, § 8, 58. See also chapter II § 154, 124–5; chapter VI, § 7, 327. The idea had been anticipated by Hooker, Lawes, II. 7. 5 [Works, i. 179]: ‘it is not required or can be exacted at our hands, that we should yeeld unto any thing other assent, then such as doth answere the evidence which is to be had of that we assent unto.’ ¹⁶⁰ Religion of Protestants, chapter I, § 9, 59.

The Fathers Assaulted

227

Constantinople’, or even that ‘Caesar’s Commentaries, or the History of Sallust’ are true¹⁶¹—there are clearly differences of degree but the certainty involved is of the same kind. Chillingworth did not deny that ‘God’s Spirit, if he please, may work more, a Certainty of Adherence beyond a Certainty of Evidence’, but (in the same way as internal arguments could confirm faith in those who already believed) this was ‘a Reward to Believers’, not a necessary condition for salvation.¹⁶² That moral certainty was sufficient should be stressed ‘because I am more and more confirmed in my Persuasion, that the Truth which I here delivered, is of great and singular Use’.¹⁶³ It was explicitly meant to confute the Roman Catholic doctrine that faith should be infallible (and therefore based on the authority of the present Church), but it was as directly opposed to the Calvinist notion of ‘saving’, as opposed to mere ‘historical’, faith worked by the Spirit in the elect.¹⁶⁴ Chillingworth’s scripturalism was a liberating principle—he explicitly refused to be bound by any authority other than the Bible¹⁶⁵—and it made his Christianity largely undogmatic. The Religion of Protestants used as an epigraph a quotation from Casaubon’s letter to Du Perron, on the importance of distinguishing between what is necessary for salvation and what is not,¹⁶⁶ but Chillingworth pushed this distinction much further than Casaubon had done. Antiquity could no longer guarantee the core of (especially Trinitarian) orthodoxy on which the main Churches agreed. As Thomas Hobbes famously put it, Chillingworth ‘was like a lusty little fellow that did drive his enimies before him, but would often give his owne party smart back-blowes’.¹⁶⁷ Knott having charged Protestant principles with leading to Socinianism, Chillingworth retorted that the very best doctors of the Roman Church had freely declared that the ante-Nicene Fathers taught the christology afterwards condemned as Arian.¹⁶⁸ This was no mere ad hominem argument: Chillingworth himself was definitely ¹⁶¹ Ibid., chapter IV, § 57, 222; chapter VI, § 5, 325. ¹⁶² Ibid., chapter I, § 9, 59; chapter II, § 154, 124. Cf. Hales, ‘How we come to know the Scripture to be the Word of God’, 261: ‘doubtless the holy Ghost doth so work in the heart of every true Beleiver, that it leaves a farther assurance, strong and sufficient, to ground and stay it self upon: But this, because it is private to every one, and no way subject to sense, is unfit to yeild argument by way of dispute … and by so much the more unfit it is, by how much by experience we have learn’d, that men are very apt to call their own private conceit, the Spirit.’ ¹⁶³ Religion of Protestants, chapter VI, § 3, 323. ¹⁶⁴ See below, 261 and 307. ¹⁶⁵ See especially Religion of Protestants, chapter IV, § 16, 203–4 and chapter VI, § 56, 354 (sic). ¹⁶⁶ Casaubon, Responsio, 31. ¹⁶⁷ John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (London, 1950), 64. ¹⁶⁸ Religion of Protestants, preface to the author of Charity Maintain’d, § 18, 16–17. Chillingworth quotes the same passage of Du Perron as Falkland, plus several others.

228

The Fathers Assaulted

of the same opinion at the time. He admitted in private exchanges that he was ‘very inclinable to beleeve, that the Doctrine of Arius is eyther a Truth, or at least no damnable Heresy’.¹⁶⁹ The errors of the Eutychians, the Macedonians, the Nestorians, and at least ‘a part of the Arians’ were ‘about mere speculations’ and did not prevent them from believing ‘the summe and substance of Christianity’. Therefore, ‘though the forenamed Heretiques were by ancient Fathers cast out of the Church communion, yet by more ancient then they, they would have been received’.¹⁷⁰ Chillingworth had such scruples about subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles (especially on account of the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed, which he found ‘in a high degree presumptuous and schismaticall’) that he declined any preferment.¹⁷¹ He eventually managed to bring himself to subscribe but it is quite clear that a Church governed by his principles could not be but of the utmost doctrinal latitude. Hales had also stated that differences of opinion, even on the theology of the Trinity, should be borne with charity, and that one could even attend an Arian Church, ‘so there be no Arianism exprest in their Liturgy’.¹⁷²

´ 3. AN ANTI-PATRISTI C BREVIARY: JEAN DAILL E’S USE OF THE FATHERS Falkland and his friends were prepared by their views to welcome the Traict´e de l’employ des Saincts Peres which the French Calvinist Jean Daill´e published at the end of 1631.¹⁷³ Even apart from its subject the book had ¹⁶⁹ See letter without date ‘to one of his Friends, who had desired to know, what Judgment might be made of Arianism from the Sense of Antiquity’, published by Birch, ‘Chillingworth’, pp. iv–v. It was circulated in manuscript at the beginning of the 18th century and attracted much interest among Arian or Arianizing divines (see a copy among Samuel Clarke’s papers, CUL, Add. MS 7113, no. 3, with a note by Clarke). ¹⁷⁰ LPL, MS 943, p. 876. This was an answer to Peake’s question, 857: ‘Whither the common doctrine of Protestants, that Holy Scripture doth evidently containe all necessary points of beleef, being rationally pursued, doth not enforce a toleration at least, and a non-denyall of Ecclesiasticall communion to the Manichaean, Pelagian, Arrian, Macedonian, Eutychian and generally to most other the infamous Heresyes that ever were heard of in the Christian Church.’ ¹⁷¹ Letter to Dr Sheldon of 21 September 1635, in Birch, ‘Chillingworth’, p. vi. The very same words are applied in Religion of Protestants, preface to the author of Charity Maintain’d, § 35, 23, to the Roman Church’s making articles of faith of unnecessary doctrines, and also chapter VI, § 56, 354 (sic), to those Protestants who would require the belief of anything besides the Bible. ¹⁷² Hales, Of Schisme, 9–10. ¹⁷³ Traict´e de l’employ des Saincts Peres, pour le jugement des differends, qui sont aujourd’huy en la Religion: par Jean Daill´e, Ministre du Sainct Evangile en l’Eglise Reform´ee

The Fathers Assaulted

229

much to appeal to adepts of a rational style of theology. It was remarkably clear, with a logical progression and regular recapitulations which made it easy to follow.¹⁷⁴ Even its fiercest critics had to recognize its ‘lucid method’.¹⁷⁵ The general thesis was that ‘the Fathers cannot be the Judges of the Controversies in Religion at this day betwixt the Papist and the Protestant’ for two main reasons, the first of fact and the second of right. First, it is, ‘if not an impossible, yet at least a very difficult thing to finde out’ what the Fathers held on questions now controverted. Second, even if we could find out, their judgement ‘not being Infallible, and without all danger of Errour, cannot carry with it a sufficient Authority for the satisfying the Understanding; which neither can, nor indeed ought to believe any thing, in point of Religion, but what it knows to be certainly True’.¹⁷⁶ The first reason was made good by eleven points. Few writings of the Fathers, especially of the first three centuries, have survived. Those that have come down to us handle questions which are very remote from present controversies. Many writings ascribed to the Fathers are fakes, whether of ancient or modern origin. ‘Those of the Writings in the Fathers which are Legitimate, have been in many places corrupted’, either by accident or on purpose. Patristic texts are difficult to understand because of their language and style, and particularly as a result of the change of meaning that words have undergone since the time of their composition. The Fathers often said things which they did not believe themselves: when commenting on Scripture, they reproduced the opinions of others; they spoke guardedly in their sermons on account of the presence of catechumens; they used ad hominem arguments in controversies. Should one know for sure that a Father was speaking his own mind, one would still need to know that this de Paris (Geneva, 1632). For the date of publication, see ‘Abbreg´e de la vie de Mr Daill´e’ by his son, prefixed to Les deux derniers sermons de Mr Daill´e, prononcez a` Charenton le jour de Pasques sixi´eme Avril 1670 et le Jeudy suivant. Avec un Abreg´e de sa Vie, et le Catalogue de ses Oeuvres (Charenton 1670), sep. pagination, 14. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations follow the English translation, A Treatise concerning the Right Use of the Fathers, in the Decision of the Controversies that are at this day in Religion. Written in French by John Daille, Ministre of the Gospel in the Reformed Church at Paris (London, 1651). For the French context of the work, see J.-L. Quantin, ‘Un manuel anti-patristique: contexte et signification du Trait´e de l’emploi des saints P`eres de Jean Daill´e (1632)’, in G. Frank, T. Leinkauf, and M. Wriedt (eds.), Die Patristik in der fr¨uhen Neuzeit: Die Relekt¨ure der Kirchenv¨ater in den Wissenschaften des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2006; Melanchthon-Schriften der Stadt Bretten 10), 299–325. ¹⁷⁴ See for instance the recapitulation of book I at the beginning of book II, Employ des Peres, 256–90 (sic=sig. r1v ); Use of the Fathers, book II, 1–3. ¹⁷⁵ Scrivener, Apologia, 75: ‘perspicuam methodum cerno’. ¹⁷⁶ Use of the Fathers, sig. ¶3r . Note that the French original (Employ des Peres, sig. ¶5r ) was more qualified: ‘sc¸avoir nettement et precis´ement’; and so the Latin (on which see below, n. 318), De usu Patrum, sig. ¶¶3r : ‘liquido et definite constituere’.

230

The Fathers Assaulted

was his final opinion and that he did not subsequently change his view; then, that he held his opinion as necessary, and not merely as probable; then again, that it was not his private opinion but the belief of the Church in his time, and not merely of one particular but rather of the universal Church. But it was impossible to know what was the universal belief of the Church at any one time, since there were certainly then, just as now, many secret dissenters. Daill´e then came to the question of right and advanced six points. The Fathers are not always reliable witnesses of the faith of the Church in their time. They themselves disclaim any absolute authority for their writings. The loose and careless manner in which they wrote made it clear that they did not intend to prescribe to the faith of their posterity. They actually erred on several essential points of faith. They contradicted each other. Neither Protestants nor Roman Catholics acknowledge them as judges. Each of these points was developed in a separate chapter with an array of arguments, examples, and quotations. Many were classics of Protestant controversy and had been used in an English context by writers like Rainolds, Humphrey, or Whitaker (whom, considering the international circulation of their works, Daill´e might well have known), as well as by continental Calvinists. Scrivener later accused Daill´e of having drawn on numerous authors but especially on Rivet and on the Dutch divine Jacobus Laurentius (the last of whom Daill´e never quoted, whereas he cited the first only once).¹⁷⁷ Some of Daill´e’s illustrations were actually so well known that it would be idle to speculate on his sources. He quoted the Belgian censors’ confession that Roman Catholics contrived to ascribe ‘some convenient probable sense’ to embarrassing patristic texts.¹⁷⁸ His chapter on the Fathers’ disclaiming any absolute authority for their writings opened with two lengthy quotations from Augustine (references to many more parallel statements were given in the margin).¹⁷⁹ Cornelius Musso’s famous tirade was produced to show that Roman Catholic divines did not acknowledge antiquity, but only the present Church, as the judge of controversies.¹⁸⁰ Moreover, several of Daill´e’s arguments against the use of the Fathers were merely variations on the usual rules about the right way to interpret them. Before heresies arose, he pointed out, the Fathers spoke only obscurely and ¹⁷⁷ Scrivener, Apologia, 75–6. On Rivet, see above, 65: Daill´e cited him (together with Scultetus), Employ des Peres, 32; Use of the Fathers, book I, 17. For Jacobus Laurentius, see his Conscientia Iesuitica cauteriata (Amsterdam, 1615), chapter III, subsequently enlarged in Reuerentia Ecclesiae Romanae, erga Sanctos Patres Veteres subdola. ¹⁷⁸ Employ des Peres, 126; Use of the Fathers, book I, 78. ¹⁷⁹ Employ des Peres, 271–5; Use of the Fathers, book II, 11–14. ¹⁸⁰ Employ des Peres, 457; Use of the Fathers, book II, 141–2.

The Fathers Assaulted

231

ambiguously. Those who lived before Arius had many expressions which were hardly to be reconciled with the Nicene dogma (as had been noted by Jerome and Du Perron).¹⁸¹ Fathers like Jerome indulged in rhetoric.¹⁸² They had been transported by the heat of controversy and, when writing against an error, often appeared to fall into the opposite extreme, hence Theodoret’s simile of the gardener and the crooked tree, and Basil’s excusing Gregory of Neocaesarea for having spoken ‘not Dogmatically’ but ‘in the heat of Disputation’.¹⁸³ In their polemical writings they held it fair to use everything that argued for them and to disown even the truth if it would weaken their case. Jerome made therefore a sharp distinction between writing ‘by way of Disputation’ and ‘by way of Instruction’.¹⁸⁴ Readers of Perkins in England, or of Scultetus on the Continent, would have been familiar with such points. Downe had used the same sources, hence the numerous parallels between his, as yet unpublished, treatise and Daill´e’s book. The Employ des Peres was thus a synthesis of half a century of Protestant controversy. It was, however, much more than that, as is shown by a comparison with Downe’s piece. First, it was exceptionally rich in illustrations. Even Scrivener, who disputed the originality of Daill´e’s ideas, recognized the profusion of his examples.¹⁸⁵ Daill´e did not merely draw together all the references that were scattered in various Protestant authors, he also added many of his own. He had a real knack for picking from his extensive reading the sentence or the small fact that would best suit his point. Several of the examples that he unearthed became classics in their turn. Among ‘the Mistakes, and Oversights’ of the Fathers, for example, he instanced Justin Martyr’s assertion that there was at Rome a statue dedicated to Simon Magus ‘with this inscription     : whereas, as our Learned Criticks now inform us, it was onely an Inscription to one of the Pagan Demi-gods, in these Words,   ; which this Good Father mistook, instead of Semoni, reading Simoni, and for Sanco, reading Sancto.’¹⁸⁶ The problem had already been much discussed, ever since the discovery in Rome, in 1574, of the base of a statue with an inscription to Semo Sancus. Baronius argued that there had been two different statues. Protestant critics such as Didier H´erauld held that Justin ¹⁸¹ Employ des Peres, 130–1; Use of the Fathers, book I, 79–81 (Daill´e quotes the same texts of Jerome and Du Perron as Falkland, above, nn. 124–5). ¹⁸² Employ des Peres, 144–6; Use of the Fathers, book I, 89–91. ¹⁸³ Employ des Peres, 150–2; Use of the Fathers, book I, 94–5. ¹⁸⁴ Employ des Peres, 176–7; Use of the Fathers, book I, 117–18. ¹⁸⁵ Scrivener, Apologia, 75. ¹⁸⁶ Employ des Peres, 322; Use of the Fathers, book II, 46–7. Justin, Apologia I, 26 [PG 6, 368].

232

The Fathers Assaulted

had been mistaken.¹⁸⁷ The Jesuit scholar Denis Petau, who was not afraid to admit that the Fathers had made mistakes, thought this ‘highly probable’.¹⁸⁸ Casaubon himself was sceptical of Justin’s claim, as not a single profane author could be found to confirm it.¹⁸⁹ Daill´e, who referred to H´erauld, was the first to use the story against the credit of the Fathers. The statue of Simon became crucial in all subsequent debates on this question.¹⁹⁰ Daill´e’s list of the doctrinal errors into which the Fathers had fallen, both singly and collectively, was of unprecedented comprehensiveness and remained unsurpassed.¹⁹¹ He first discussed one Father after the other, from Justin to Augustine. Justin was a millenarian.¹⁹² Moreover, he believed that angels had sex with women and begot children ‘which are those we now call Demons’ (and so said several other Fathers).¹⁹³ Irenaeus claimed to have it from apostolic tradition that Christ ‘was above Forty years of Age’ when he died.¹⁹⁴ Clement of Alexandria held that Christ and his Apostles preached to the souls in Hell, ‘conceiving, that God otherwise should have been Unjust, and an Accepter of Persons; if so be, He should have condemned all those who died before the Coming of his Son’.¹⁹⁵ ¹⁸⁷ Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vi/1 (Berlin, 1876), no. 567 (text of the inscription and commentary); Baronius, Annales, ad ann. 44, nn. LIV–LIX [Lucca edn., i. 306–8]; Q. Septimii Florentis Tertulliani Apologeticus. Desiderius Heraldus ex antiquis libris emendauit, Commentario libro illustrauit, et duos digressionum libros, quibus eiusdem Tertulliani et aliorum scriptorum plurima loca emendantur, explicantur et illustrantur, adiecit (Paris, 1613), Commentarius, 77–8. H´erauld’s opinion was followed by Saumaise (Historiae Augustae Scriptores VI. Claudius Salmasius ex ueteribus libris recensuit (Paris, 1620), Notae in Spartianum, 39) but attacked by the Jesuit Pierre Halloix, Illustrium Ecclesiae Orientalis Scriptorum, qui sanctitate iuxta et eruditione, secundo Christi saeculo floruerunt, uitae et documenta (Douai, 1636), 381–7. ¹⁸⁸ Epiphanii opera omnia, ed. Petau, ii, ‘Animaduersiones’, ad Haeresim XXI, sep. paginated, 41: ‘Quae mihi coniectura sane probabilis est uisa.’ For Petau’s attitude towards the Fathers, see ibid., ad Haeresim LI, 145, on Irenaeus and the age of Christ (confuting Baronius’ claim that the passage was interpolated: see above, Chapter 1 n. 189), and below, 346. ¹⁸⁹ Bodl., MS Casaubon 3, no. 1, p. 4 (published in Wolf, Casauboniana, 127): ‘Cogita de hac historia. Nam quod Iustinus p. 273 ait de tributa huic Simoni potestate ὑπεράνω πάσης etc. [Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 120 (PG 6, 756)], id ego ualde dubito. Nam quis historicorum, quis poetarum, quis omnium auctorum meminit?’ ¹⁹⁰ See below, 271. ¹⁹¹ Employ des Peres, 341–415; Use of the Fathers, book II, 60–111. ¹⁹² Employ des Peres, 345; Use of the Fathers, book II, 63. ¹⁹³ Employ des Peres, 346; Use of the Fathers, book II, 64. Justin, Apologia II, 5 [PG 6, 452]. See also Employ des Peres, 352–3, 355, 367; Use of the Fathers, book II, 68, 70, 78 for the same charge against Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Lactantius respectively. ¹⁹⁴ Employ des Peres, 349; Use of the Fathers, book II, 65–6. Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 2. 22. 5 (SC 294, 224). ¹⁹⁵ Employ des Peres, 351; Use of the Fathers, book II, 67. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 6. 6. 44–53 (GCS 52, 453–5 [4th edn.]).

The Fathers Assaulted

233

Tertullian made human souls corporeal and went so far as to say that ‘God is a body’.¹⁹⁶ Cyprian, backed by ‘the most Eminent Men of his time’ and by several councils, maintained the nullity of baptism by heretics, while his adversary Pope Stephen ran into the opposite extreme and allowed of the baptism of all heretics indiscriminately.¹⁹⁷ Cyprian also held the eucharist to be necessary for salvation, even for infants.¹⁹⁸ Lactantius’ Trinitarian doctrine was erroneous,¹⁹⁹ and so on. It was useless, Daill´e argued, to object that one should differentiate between individual Fathers and their unanimous teaching. There was a consensus among the first Fathers for the millenarian doctrine. Justin Martyr told Trypho that such was the belief of all those who were fully Christian. It is true that he excepted some who were ‘of the pure and holy opinion of Christians’, but it might well be that this contradiction was introduced in his text by the mistaken zeal of later centuries.²⁰⁰ It was clear, in any case, that at least a great part of the doctors and of the faithful in Justin’s days held that error, and so did most Fathers afterwards until the fourth century.²⁰¹ There was an even fuller consensus, from Justin onwards, for the doctrine that the souls of the faithful would not be admitted into Heaven before Judgement Day. The council of Florence nonetheless ¹⁹⁶ Employ des Peres, 354–5; Use of the Fathers, book II, 70. Tertullian, Aduersus Marcionem, 2. 16. 4 (CC 1, 493); De anima, 22. 2 (CC 2, 814). ¹⁹⁷ Employ des Peres, 359–60; Use of the Fathers, book II, 73. Whereas Cyprian’s position had long been a standard instance of patristic error, Daill´e was more original in accusing Stephen of error too. His evidence was Cyprian, ep. 74 ad Pompeium, 1. 2 (CC 3C, 564), where Stephen is quoted as saying that converts ‘a quacumque haeresi’ should not be rebaptized. Taken literally this would accept the baptism even of heretics who do not baptize in the name of the Trinity, contrary to the later decrees of the councils of Arles (Denz.–Sch¨on. 123) and Nicaea (Denz.–Sch¨on. 128). Daill´e’s interpretation was subsequently propounded by Huguenot scholars like David Blondel (De la primaut´e en l’Eglise: Traitt´e o`u sont confrontees, avec la Response du Serenissime Roy de la grand’Bretagne, les Annales du Card. Baronius, les Controverses du Cardinal Bellarmin, la Replique du Cardinal Du Perron, etc. (Geneva, 1641), 50–1) and ultra-Gallicans such as Jean de Launoy, epistola ad Iacobum Beuilaquam [Jacques Boileau] (1673), in Epistolae Omnes, ed. Saywell, 806–28. See the balanced discussion by S´ebastien Le Nain de Tillemont, Memoires pour servir a` l’histoire ecclesiastique des six premiers siecles, iv (Paris, 1696), 626–9. ¹⁹⁸ Employ des Peres, 361–3; Use of the Fathers, book II, 74–5. Cyprian nowhere says so explicitly but Daill´e inferred this from Ad Quirinum (Testimoniorum libri tres), 3. 25–6 (CC 3, 121), where Cyprian seems to mean that the eucharist is as necessary as baptism. Compare Chillingworth, ‘An Argument drawn from the admitting Infants to the Eucharist’, 168–9. ¹⁹⁹ Employ des Peres, 366; Use of the Fathers, book II, 78. ²⁰⁰ Employ des Peres, 404; Use of the Fathers, book II, 104 (no change or addition on that point in the Latin edition of 1655 (on which see below), 287–8). Chillingworth was less cautious (see above, 223). ²⁰¹ Employ des Peres, 404–7; Use of the Fathers, book II, 104–6.

234

The Fathers Assaulted

decreed the opposite in 1439, in utter disregard of the principles of Vincent of L´erins.²⁰² Secondly, and most importantly, in contrast with previous Protestant controversialists, Daill´e’s target was not merely the Tridentine doctrine in general. The Use of the Fathers aimed specifically at Du Perron’s new case for the authority of the Fathers, as witnesses of ecclesiastical belief. The Cardinal was by far the most quoted author in the book, which rightly noted his original position within Roman Catholic apologetics.²⁰³ His distinction between witnesses and doctors was received as fundamental: There are two sorts of Passages to be observed, in the Writings of the Fathers: In the one, you have them speaking only as Witnesses, and testifying what the beliefe of the Church was, in their Time: In the other, they propose to you, like Doctors, their own Private Opinions. Now, there is a world of difference, betwixt these two things: For in a Witness, there is required only Faithfulness, and Truth; but in a Doctor, Learning, and Knowledg.²⁰⁴

Daill´e began therefore by emphasizing the scarcity of extant writings of the first three centuries, which would otherwise have been of the greatest authority. Du Perron’s argument that one should concentrate on the Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries was merely ‘a Tacite confession’ of this huge loss.²⁰⁵ Writings from later periods were indeed much more numerous, but they carried much less weight ‘especially in the judgement of the Protestants, who maintain … that the Christian Religion hath from its beginning had its declining by little and little, losing in every Age some certain degree of its Primitive and Native purity’.²⁰⁶ If, as Hegesippus testified, the Church only remained a pure virgin until the time of Trajan, corruption must have been even greater in the following centuries.²⁰⁷ And the very abundance of writers from the fourth and fifth centuries made it extremely difficult to ascertain ‘the True and Common Opinion of the Whole’.²⁰⁸ The impossibility of using the Fathers as witnesses for the whole Church was developed in a forceful crescendo in the last three chapters of the first part. The argument culminated in the last chapter, which was in many ²⁰² Employ des Peres, 408–10; Use of the Fathers, book II, 106–8. For the decree of Florence, see Denz.–Sch¨on. 1305. ²⁰³ Employ des Peres, 49; Use of the Fathers, book I, 26. ²⁰⁴ Employ des Peres, fo. r2r ; Use of the Fathers, book II, 3. See already Employ des Peres, 215–16; Use of the Fathers, book I, 136–7. ²⁰⁵ Employ des Peres, 12–13; Use of the Fathers, book I, 4–5. ²⁰⁶ Employ des Peres, 17; Use of the Fathers, book I, 7. ²⁰⁷ Employ des Peres, 11–12; Use of the Fathers, book I, 3–4. For this representation of church history as a progressive decay, see also Employ des Peres, 440–2; Use of the Fathers, book II, 129–31. ²⁰⁸ Employ des Peres, 17; Use of the Fathers, book I, 7.

The Fathers Assaulted

235

respects the core of the book. By ‘the Church’, Daill´e observed, one could mean either all people in the communion of the Christian Church at any one time, or clergymen only.²⁰⁹ In the first and larger sense, there could be no debate that patristic writings were inadequate sources. The Fathers did not mean to teach everything that was actually believed in their time but ‘what they thought should be believed in all times’.²¹⁰ Even if they had wished to describe actual beliefs, how could one bishop, such as Cyprian, have known the views of everyone in his diocese?²¹¹ Patristic writings were hardly more helpful if one understood the Church to refer only to clergymen, leaving aside the problems raised by such a restriction. Epiphanius charged Aerius with heresy for denying that the bishop was superior to the priest by apostolic institution, and clearly implied that such was the doctrine of all the doctors of the Church. Epiphanius’ contemporary and friend Jerome was nevertheless adamant that priest and bishop were synonymous names among the ancients. If Jerome’s writings had been lost, everyone would naturally have inferred from Epiphanius ‘that no Doctor of the Ancient Church ever held, that a Bishop and a Priest were one and the same thing, in its Institution’.²¹² Daill´e also appealed to the experience of his own times, when many, both lay people and ecclesiastics, had opinions at variance with those of their bishop.²¹³ He was thinking of the Roman Catholic Church in France but his point must have had much relevance for his first English readers, at the time of the Laudian offensive in the dioceses. ‘It is a very hazardous business, to take Eight or Ten Men, how Holy and Learned soever they may have been, as Sureties for all the Doctors of the Church Universal, that lived in their Age’.²¹⁴ The argument was repeated yet again with fresh examples at the opening of the second part. In most of their writings, the Fathers were not historians but doctors, who aimed at exhortation, not at narration.²¹⁵ Daill´e’s anxiety to confute the human, historical credit of the Fathers accounts for the devastating chapter he devoted to their gross mistakes in ²⁰⁹ Employ des Peres, 239; Use of the Fathers, book I, 152. ²¹⁰ Employ des Peres, 240: ‘non tant ce que chacun croyoit en leur siecle, que ce qu’ils estimoyent devoir estre creu en tous.’ The English translation, book I, 153 (‘not what each particular Man believed in their time; but rather what they thought fit that all Men should have believed’) does not exactly render the point of the original. ²¹¹ Employ des Peres, 241; Use of the Fathers, book I, 153. ²¹² Employ des Peres, 252–4; Use of the Fathers, book I, 161–2. See Epiphanius, Panarium, 75. 4–6 (GCS 37, 336–8) and for Jerome’s texts above, 99. ²¹³ Employ des Peres, 241–2 and 244–6; Use of the Fathers, book I, 153–4 and 156–8. ²¹⁴ Employ des Peres, 249; Use of the Fathers, book I, 159. Falkland, ‘Reply’, 140–1, made the same point with an explicit reference to Calvinists and anti-Calvinists in contemporary England. ²¹⁵ Employ des Peres, sigs. r4v –r5r ; Use of the Fathers, book II, 7.

236

The Fathers Assaulted

human learning (in history, grammar, geography, natural philosophy, and so on). Not only had Justin been unable to read correctly that inscription which he had seen with his own eyes on the Tiberine island, but he wrote that Ptolemaeus Philadelphus, when he wanted to have the Bible translated, sent ambassadors to Herod: an anachronism of several centuries.²¹⁶ Several Fathers categorically denied the existence of the antipodes.²¹⁷ Their utter ignorance of Hebrew made them invent the most absurd etymologies for biblical names.²¹⁸ Those were the sort of mistakes that Casaubon had said it would be ‘impious’ to use to debase the Fathers ( Justin’s anachronism about the composition of the Septuagint was one of his examples).²¹⁹ Daill´e protested that those ‘Small, Trivial Errours’ should not at all make us think less highly of the Fathers and only showed that they had written carelessly.²²⁰ He may not have been fully sincere. On the denial of the antipodes and similar faults in natural philosophy, he observed that these were ‘not bare Mistakes, and Oversights only; but are rather Errours, which proceeded from the want of a due Examination, and a right Apprehension of things’.²²¹ He repeatedly commented that the mistakes of the Fathers were ‘childish’ and would be punished with a beating at school.²²² Such passages have an iconoclastic flavour. It is hard to avoid the impression that Daill´e took some half-conscious pleasure in bringing down to earth those great authors so celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church. An even more damaging charge, in his chapter on fakes, was that some of the Fathers themselves have made use of these kinde of Forgeries … others have favoured them, because they served their turn; some have not been able to discover them; and some others have not been willing to do so, whatsoever their reason hath been.... They made choice to let such things pass, rather then out of a little tenderness of conscience to oppose them.²²³ ²¹⁶ Employ des Peres, 321; Use of the Fathers, book II, 46. Justin, Apologia I, 31 (PG 6, 376). Amusingly, Daill´e had his own chronology completely false, writing ‘le Roy Herode n’ayant eu le regne de Judee que quatre cens quarante et tant d’annees du depuis.’ The error was corrected in the English translation (‘Two hundred forty and odd years’) and then in the Latin version (De usu Patrum, 238): ‘ducentis et quod excurrit annis, antequam Herodes regnaret in Iudaea.’ ²¹⁷ Employ des Peres, 325; Use of the Fathers, book II, 49. ²¹⁸ Employ des Peres, 326–9; Use of the Fathers, book II, 49–52. ²¹⁹ Casaubon, Exercitationes, Exercitatio I, n. XXVI, 124. See above, 148. ²²⁰ Employ des Peres, 339; Use of the Fathers, book II, 58. Cf. Employ des Peres, 319; Use of the Fathers, book II, 44–5. ²²¹ Employ des Peres, 325; Use of the Fathers, book II, 49. ²²² Employ des Peres, 321, 328, 335, 380; Use of the Fathers, book II, 46, 51, 56, 88. ²²³ Employ des Peres, 54–5; Use of the Fathers, book I, 30–1. Among fakes favoured by the Fathers, Daill´e instanced the Sibylline Oracles.

The Fathers Assaulted

237

Such comments could easily be turned against Christianity as a whole. Daill´e may have been aware of the risk, hence his furious tirade at the end of his book against atheistic ‘dogs and hogs’ and his insistence that the consensus of the Fathers provided at least a ‘probable argument’ of the truth of Christianity. Could ‘so many Holy Men, who were endued (as it appeareth by their Writings) with such Admirable Parts, with so much strength and Clearness of Understanding’ have all been mistaken?²²⁴ Their very divergences on some points strengthened their testimony, since they proved that there had been no secret agreement between them.²²⁵ Daill´e was well aware that Roman Catholic divines had made objections against sola Scriptura very similar to those he was making against the use of the Fathers.²²⁶ He thus observed that, should he wish to, he could justify his chapter on the Fathers’ errors by the precedent of Du Perron, who had compiled a list of seemingly absurd and shocking passages in the Bible to justify the restriction of its reading.²²⁷ Nowhere did Daill´e really attempt to discuss to what extent his arguments against the use of the Fathers could or could not be applied in turn to the Bible. He only briefly observed that patristic writings were much more liable to textual corruption than the books of Scripture, which had always been preserved in the Church with the utmost care, had been translated into every language, and were recognized as sacred by all the rival Christian Churches.²²⁸ He believed anyway that the Scriptures had authority ‘of themselves’²²⁹ and he could have had no notion that he was weakening the Canon by showing that the Fathers had gladly used fakes and that, for instance, ‘Clemens Alexandrinus, the most Learned, and most Polite of all the Fathers, in S. Hieromes judgment’ had regularly quoted apocryphal texts under the names of the Apostles.²³⁰ On the whole, the only use that Daill´e allowed of the Fathers in controversy was negative. While their consensus was not sufficient to prove anything true, their ‘General Silence’, at least on points necessary to salvation, was an unanswerable argument that a doctrine did not come ²²⁴ Employ des Peres, 518; Use of the Fathers, book II, 185. ²²⁵ Employ des Peres, 520–1; Use of the Fathers, book II, 186. ²²⁶ See the first sentence of the first chapter Employ des Peres, 1, and then e.g. 114; Use of the Fathers, book I, 1 and 69–70. ²²⁷ Employ des Peres, 343; Use of the Fathers, book II, 61–2. See Du Perron, Replique, 1098–101. ²²⁸ Employ des Peres, 61–2; Use of the Fathers, book I, 35–6. ²²⁹ See Employ des Peres, 61 (‘l’authorit´e que l’Escriture divine doit avoir de par elle-mesme envers chacun homme’) and 518: ‘la sagesse exquise et l’inestimable beaut´e de la discipline mesme de Iesus Christ est … le plus fort, et le plus seur argument de sa verit´e’; Use of the Fathers, book I, 35 and book II, 184. ²³⁰ Employ des Peres, 54; Use of the Fathers, book I, 31.

238

The Fathers Assaulted

from Christ and the Apostles.²³¹ Irenaeus and Tertullian rightly used this method against the heretics of their time.²³² Daill´e even professed to believe that ‘Divine Providence’ had preserved ‘so many’ patristic writings ‘safe, down to our times’ for this negative purpose.²³³ They could now be used to confute Roman Catholic tenets like papal supremacy, host worship, auricular confession, and so on.²³⁴ ´ 4. THE FIRST ENGLISH FORTUNE OF DAILL E’S USE OF THE FATHERS Though evolved within a specifically French context, Daill´e’s Use of the Fathers became a European success. Nowhere was his career so long and rich as in England. In the middle of the eighteenth century William Warburton observed that it was ‘the storehouse, from whence all who have since written popularly on the character of the Fathers, have derived their materials’.²³⁵ Relations between English divines and their continental counterparts were regular enough for new books to cross the Channel fairly soon after their publication. The Trait´e de l’emploi des Saints P`eres was admittedly Daill´e’s first book and its author had not yet made a name for himself. But we know that Ussher owned a copy, which he had almost certainly acquired through his Swiss prot´eg´e Jacob Frey, who acted as his intermediary with continental Protestant scholars and also as his purveyor of books.²³⁶ Frey, the scion of an ecclesiastical and academic family from Basle, had travelled to England and spent some time in Oxford, where he assiduously read the Greek and Latin Fathers in the Bodleian Library. He conformed to the Church of England and received episcopal ordination as a deacon in 1630. He returned to the Continent in the summer of 1632 as tutor to Viscount Dungarvan, the Earl of Cork’s eldest son, and had close contacts with French Protestant theological circles. He must have discovered ²³¹ Employ des Peres, 523–6; Use of the Fathers, book II, 187–9. ²³² Employ des Peres, 526–7; Use of the Fathers, book II, 189–90, with references to Irenaeus, 3. 1–4 (SC 211, 20–52) and Tertullian, De Praescriptione haereticorum, 22 (CC 1, 203–4). ²³³ Employ des Peres, 528; Use of the Fathers, book II, 191. ²³⁴ Employ des Peres, 531–2; Use of the Fathers, book II, 192–3. ²³⁵ Warburton, Julian, p. viii. ²³⁶ See the ‘catalogue of Ussher’s library as given to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1666’, TCD, MS 6, fo. 50r . One copy of the Trait´e de l’emploi des Saints P`eres at TCD, shelfmark BB o. 22, has the manuscript note on the title page ‘Ja: Frey’. One should note that Daill´e and Ussher never engaged in direct correspondence: Daill´e’s letter to Ussher of 12 January 1656 was the first one (Parr, Usher, letter CCXCVIII, 619) and Ussher died on the following 21 March.

The Fathers Assaulted

239

The Use of the Fathers on this occasion, shortly, that is, after its publication (he died in 1636).²³⁷ It would appear that the Great Tew circle only got hold of Daill´e’s book a few years later, either just before or just after the composition of The Religion of Protestants. The Roman convert, and Benedictine monk, Hugh Cressy subsequently related that he had himself in 1638, when still a dignitary of the Church of England, given to Falkland the Trait´e de l’emploi des Saints P`eres, which was ‘at that time not at all taken notice of ’.²³⁸ Falkland shared it with Chillingworth, then just returned to England and still unsettled in his beliefs. Chillingworth had resolved, with Laud’s approbation, ‘to spend a year or two in a solitude, and the Study of Greek and Latin Fathers, fully purposing to embrace that Religion which appeared to him most consonant to what the Fathers generally taught’. He was now withdrawn from this study by ‘that unlucky book’, which convinced him first to reject the authority of the Fathers, then to espouse Socinian principles against all authority, and lastly to write The Religion of Protestants.²³⁹ There are obvious chronological impossibilities in this account, as Clarendon, who intervened as one of the last surviving members of the Tew circle, was quick to point out.²⁴⁰ One should however distinguish between Cressy’s circumstantial statement that he gave the book to Falkland, which there is little reason to suspect, and the attempted polemical link with ²³⁷ See Daniel Tossanus, Oratio panegyrica in obitum Reuerendi et Clarissimi Viri, Domini M. Jo. Jacobi Frey, Professoris Graeci in Academia patria, et Designati Decani Armachani, in Hibernia (Basle, [1636]), esp. 42–3; E. Staehelin, ‘Kirchlisch-menschliche Beziehungen im Zeitalter der Orthodoxie und des beginnenden Pietismus nach den Stammb¨uchern des Frey-Gryn¨aischen Institutes in Basel’, ARG 38 (1941), 133–41; Memoirs of Richard Boyle, earl of Corke, in The Works of the honourable Robert Boyle (London, 1744), i. 4; D. Townshend, The Life and Letters of the Great Earl of Cork (London, 1904), 249; HMC Twelfth Report, appendix, i/1. 468–9; Ussher to Lodewijk de Dieu, 9 June 1632, in Parr, Usher, letter CLXXIV, 462; Ussher to Vossius, 10 June 1632, ibid., letter CXC, 480; Johann Buxtorf to Ussher, 26 August 1633, ibid., letter CLXXVI, 465–7. In his letter from Paris, 25 June 1635, Bodl., MS Rawl. lett. 89, no. 79 (printed in Ussher, Whole Works, xvi, letter CDXXIII, 525), Frey told the Archbishop that he was sending him Pierre Du Moulin, Iconomachus, seu de Imaginibus et earum cultu (Sedan, 1635). The copy is at Trinity College, Dublin [shelfmark BB mm. 4] with the manuscript note on the title page ‘For my Lord Primate. Ja: Frey’. ²³⁸ [Serenus (Hugh Paulinus) Cressy], Fanaticism Fanatically imputed to the Catholick Church by Doctour Stillingfleet: And the Imputation refuted and retorted by S.C. a Catholick O.S.B. (n.p., 1672), 165. ²³⁹ Ibid. 166–7. See already the comments on Chillingworth in Exomologesis: or, a Faithfull Narration of the Occasion and Motives of the Conversion unto Catholike Unity of Hugh-Paulin de Cressy, lately Deane of Laghlin, etc. in Ireland, and Prebend of Windsore in England. Now a second time printed; With Additions and Explications, by the same Author, who now calls himself, B. Serenus Cressy, Religious Priest of the holy Order of S. Benedict, in the Convent of S. Gregory in Doway (Paris, 1653), esp. 88–90, 247–8. ²⁴⁰ Clarendon, Animadversions, 185–6.

240

The Fathers Assaulted

Chillingworth.²⁴¹ The Trait´e de l’emploi des Saints P`eres is nowhere quoted in The Religion of Protestants and, although the two works have similarities, these do not prove that one was the source of the other.²⁴² While the Tew circle were not the first English readers of Daill´e, they pioneered his use in English religious controversies.²⁴³ In his defence of his discourse on infallibility Falkland stated that Daill´e, ‘our Protestant Perron’, had confirmed him in his conviction that it was impossible to demonstrate a tradition through patristic testimonies.²⁴⁴ In March 1639, in the course of the exchange—in which Chillingworth was also involved—between George Digby and his cousin Kenelm, a recent convert to Rome, George referred to Daill´e for a full demonstration of ‘the impossibility of drawing out of the Fathers any such proofs either way in our controversies, whereon an inquiring and judicious person should be obliged to relie and acquiesce’.²⁴⁵ Daill´e’s book was indeed central to the argument since George Digby had specifically attacked the trustworthiness of the Fathers as witnesses, which Kenelm in turn defended.²⁴⁶ Falkland even began a translation of Daill´e’s book, which was left half finished at his death.²⁴⁷ ²⁴¹ The same conclusion was reached by Des Maizeaux, Chillingworth, 136–8; see also 15–17. Note that Cressy also claimed that he had lent Socinus’ works to Falkland (Aubrey, Brief Lives, 56). Cressy’s date of 1638 is inherently not implausible and one factor in its favour is that, when investigated, it proved incompatible with his polemical purpose (this was indeed the only point which he was ready to give up: see An Epistle Apologetical of S. C. to a Person of Honour: Touching his Vindication of Dr. Stillingfleet (n.p., 1674), 81). However 1638 is the date on the title page of The Religion of Protestants and it might well be that it was given by Cressy for this reason. ²⁴² They both quoted exactly the same sentence from Petau’s notes to his 1622 edition of Epiphanius (see below, Chapter 6 n. 123). But the heresy concerned was Arianism, a section of Epiphanius’ Panarion which Chillingworth and Falkland were likely to study closely: it is not implausible that they found Petau’s note by themselves. See also J. Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the 17th Century, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1874; repr. Hildesheim, 1966), i. 158 n. 1. ²⁴³ B. H. G. Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, Historiography and Religion 1640–1660 (Cambridge, 1989: 1st edn. 1951), 251–3. Supplementary information will be found in J. W. Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism 1643–1660 with Special Reference to Henry Hammond (Manchester, 1969), 64–70. The fact was already noted by Warburton, Julian, pp. vii–viii. ²⁴⁴ Falkland, ‘Reply’, 202–3. Falkland’s point, 141, about contemporary France ‘wherein many called Cassandrians, dissent from the publiquely received Doctrines, though with so little stirr, that our Posterity will not know that there now are such’, is certainly derived from Daill´e, Employ des Peres, 246–7; Use of the Fathers, book I, 157–8. ²⁴⁵ Letters between the Lord George Digby, and Sir Kenelm Digby knight concerning Religion (London, 1651), 27–8. George then proceeded to summarize Daill´e. ²⁴⁶ Ibid. 3 (George to Kenelm, 2 November 1638); 8 (Kenelm to George, 29 December 1638). See M. Foster, ‘Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65) as Man of Religion and Thinker’, Downside Review, 106 (1988), 35–58 and 101–25, esp. 48–50. ²⁴⁷ See the preface by T.S. [Thomas Smith, on whom see below] to Daill´e, Use of the Fathers, sig. ¶1r . Part of a translation is preserved at St John’s College, Cambridge, MS

The Fathers Assaulted

241

The Church of England, for all the Laudians’ veneration for tradition, was still able to accommodate such views. Although Falkland’s discourse on infallibility as well as Hales’s Tract of schism did not appear in print until the Laudian ascendency was over, The Religion of Protestants was published in Oxford with the approval of both professors of divinity, under Laud’s watchful eye.²⁴⁸ This would confirm the genuine strand of doctrinal liberalism in Laudianism,²⁴⁹ but Laud must also have recognized that members of the Great Tew circle were indeed loyal Churchmen. Their liberalism left them with no sympathy for Puritan dogmatism. Falkland’s anti-Calvinism was fierce: ‘I should rather be a Pelagian, then a Calvinist.’²⁵⁰ Chillingworth was even prepared to defend Laudian patristic sacerdotalism, though not quite on Laudian principles.²⁵¹ After the Archbishop had summoned him, Hales protested his full obedience to the authorities in Church and state.²⁵² The turmoil of the following years confirmed the group’s allegiance. Hales suffered deprivation and persecution for his faithfulness to the Book of Common Prayer. Falkland gave vent to his resentment of clerical authoritarianism in the early stages of the Long Parliament but his aim was probably to save episcopacy by distancing it from the hated Laudian bishops,²⁵³ S. 60, ‘The Right Usage of the Fathers’, paginated 5–58 and clearly incomplete (the text both begins and ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence); it ends at the beginning of Daill´e’s book I, chapter V. M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of St John’s College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1913), 360, no. 445, thought that this translation was ‘probably the one afterwards published’ in 1651, but textual comparison shows that it is a different one. If this work is not Falkland’s, it means that yet another person was interested enough in Daill´e’s book in those years to undertake its translation. ²⁴⁸ On Laud’s close interest in the book, see Remains, ii, 2nd pagination, 128; CSPD 1636–1637, 486; CSPD 1637, 429 and 476; Remains, ii, 2nd pagination, 141–2. Cf. Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, 588–90; Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy’, 649. ²⁴⁹ As stressed e.g. by McLachlan, Socinianism, 52–4 and 96–7; Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, ‘preface to the second edition (1962)’, p. xii; id., ‘Archbishop Laud in Retrospect’, 140–1. ²⁵⁰ Falkland, ‘Reply’, 126. See also Chillingworth’s comments on the Pelagians, ‘who even their adversarys being their judges, were generally pious men themselves, and held no errours but in favour of piety’ (LPL, MS 943, p. 876). ²⁵¹ See Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 20: ‘What if the names of Priests and Altars, so frequent in the ancient Fathers, though not now in the Popish sense, be now resumed and more commonly used in England than of late times they were; that so the colourable argument of their Conformity, which is but nominal, with the ancient Church, and our Inconformity, which the Governours of the Church would not have so much as nominal, may be taken away from them … ?’ See also Greenslade, ‘Authority of the Tradition of the Early Church’, 29. ²⁵² Hales, ‘Letter to Laud’, 227–8. ²⁵³ See D. L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c.1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994), esp. 44–5, 54–5, 66–73, 143–56. On Falkland’s speeches in the

242

The Fathers Assaulted

and he met death while fighting on the King’s side. Chillingworth died as a prisoner of parliamentary troops, abused to the last by a Presbyterian zealot.²⁵⁴ The spirit of Great Tew was not buried with them. Jeremy Taylor expressed it forcefully in his 1647 Liberty of prophesying, in which he argued for mutual toleration in all things not necessary. And Taylor defined things necessary as what was clearly expressed in Scripture, that is ‘all that concerns repentance from dead works and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ’.²⁵⁵ The sum of faith was the Apostles’ Creed, which, if not written by the Apostles themselves, went back to the apostolic age (leaving aside the article of Christ’s descent into Hell, which was a later addition²⁵⁶). It was received as perfectly sufficient by all Churches, as the Fathers testified. No further profession of faith had been required of catechumens in order to be baptized.²⁵⁷ God had taken care that these articles should be ‘cleerely and plainly set down in Scripture’.²⁵⁸ Apart from these fundamental points, Scripture was full of obscure places which God could not therefore have meant to be ‘furniture of Creeds, and Articles of beliefe’.²⁵⁹ There was ‘great variety of readings both in the Old Testament and in the New’, and ‘every reading takes away a degree of certainty from any proposition derivative from those places so read’.²⁶⁰ A text might have many senses, both literal and spiritual.²⁶¹ Interpreters were easily swayed and misled by their prejudices.²⁶² ‘Internall means of expounding Scripture’²⁶³ (comparison of places, analogy of faith, recourse to the original and so on) were very good in themselves but of little avail in practice, ‘because men doe not learn their Long Parliament, see M. L. Schwartz, ‘Lay Anglicanism and the Crisis of the English Church in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Albion, 14 (1982), 1–19. Falkland’s hostility to clericalism was clearly sincere but Schwartz seems to me to underestimate the rhetorical nature of his denunciation of Laudianism. Cf. J. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), 164–5. ²⁵⁴ Francis Cheynell, on whom see below, 260–3. ²⁵⁵ Jeremy Taylor, Θεολογία ἐκλεκτική. A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying. Shewing the unreasonablenes of prescribing to other mens Faith, and the Iniquity of persecuting differing opinions (London, 1647). All references are to this first edition, but for convenience sake I will add the page numbers from The whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor, ed. C. P. Eden, 10 vols. (London, 1847–54), v, in which patristic references have been checked and supplemented throughout. ²⁵⁶ Ibid. 10 [Eden, 372], referring among other authors to Rufinus. See however 47 [Eden, 400]. ²⁵⁷ Ibid., epistle dedicatory, 33 [Eden, 357]. The point is developed in section I of the book, ‘Of the nature of Faith, and that its duty is compleated in believing the Articles of the Apostles Creed’, 5–18 [Eden, 368–78]. ²⁵⁸ Ibid. 59 [Eden, 409]. ²⁵⁹ Ibid. 60 [Eden, 410]. ²⁶⁰ Ibid. 61 and 63–4 [Eden, 411 and 413]. ²⁶¹ Ibid. 64–5 [Eden, 414–15]. ²⁶² Ibid. 71–3 [Eden, 419–21]. ²⁶³ Ibid. 73 [Eden, 421].

The Fathers Assaulted

243

doctrines from Scripture, but come to the understanding of Scripture with preconceptions and idea’s of doctrines of their own’.²⁶⁴ Taylor must have had in mind the Calvinist confidence in the perspicuity of the Bible which had inspired the divines of the Westminster Assembly. Their confession of faith, which produced plenty of scriptural passages for the Calvinistic system, had been completed only a few months before.²⁶⁵ He quoted approvingly Vincent of L´erins’s statement that ‘almost as many opinions as men’ could be derived from Scripture.²⁶⁶ Such views were highly obnoxious to Puritans.²⁶⁷ Taylor had no time however for Vincent’s conclusion, which had been so dear to Overall (‘that the line of expounding the prophets and apostles be drawn according to the rule of the ecclesiastical and Catholic sense’).²⁶⁸ He did not accept the dualistic assumption which had so far organized confessional controversy: the choice between sola Scriptura and tradition. He immediately proceeded to confute ‘extrinsecall meanes of determination, as traditive Interpretation, Councels, Fathers, Popes, and the like’.²⁶⁹ He said very little of ‘traditive Interpretations’ of Scripture, merely denying that there were any universal ones.²⁷⁰ According to the usual Protestant understanding of the Tridentine decrees, he concentrated on ‘traditive Propositions’, that is articles with no scriptural basis that were allegedly derived from apostolic oral teaching.²⁷¹ The Fathers were unreliable witnesses of such traditions. ‘Nothing is more usuall then for the Fathers to colour their popular opinion with so great an appellative’, as witnessed in the question of infants’ communion.²⁷² Augustine’s rule on universal practice of unknown origin was at most ‘probable’, but it gave no certainty,²⁷³ especially since so many ancient writings had been lost.²⁷⁴ Millenarianism had been believed as an apostolic tradition for three centuries on the strength of Papias’ testimony.²⁷⁵ Irenaeus declared it to be a tradition from St John that Christ was ‘almost fifty’ when he died.²⁷⁶ On the other hand, many genuine traditions had been ²⁶⁴ Ibid. 80 [Eden, 426]. ²⁶⁵ See below, 254. ²⁶⁶ Ibid. 81 [Eden, 427]. ²⁶⁷ See Henry Hickman, Laudensium Apostasia: or a Dialogue in which is shewen, That some Divines risen up in our Church since the greatness of the late Archbishop, are in sundry Points of great Moment, quite fallen off from the Doctrine received in the Church of England (London, 1660), 17–25 and 48–50. ²⁶⁸ Taylor, Liberty of Prophesying, 83 [Eden, 428]. See above, 139. ²⁶⁹ Ibid. 68 [Eden, 417]. ²⁷⁰ Ibid. 99 [Eden, 441]. ²⁷¹ See above, 54. ²⁷² Taylor, Liberty of Prophesying, 88 [Eden, 432]. ²⁷³ Ibid. 84 [Eden, 429]. For the use of that rule by Laudians, see above, 199. ²⁷⁴ Ibid. 87 [Eden, 432]. ²⁷⁵ Ibid. 84–5 [Eden, 429–30]. ²⁷⁶ Ibid. 90 [Eden, 434]. This is a somewhat harsh interpretation since Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 2. 22. 5 (SC 294, 224) says that Christ was less than 50 but more than 40. Daill´e was more literal (see above, 232).

244

The Fathers Assaulted

lost, for example those enumerated in Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto—which Taylor later pronounced to be interpolated.²⁷⁷ Universal tradition could not be proved for any point of faith that was not clearly expressed in Scripture already, apart from the Canon of Scripture itself, ‘and as it is now received, even in that there is some variety’.²⁷⁸ When the Fathers appealed to tradition against the heretics of their times, they actually meant ‘the fundamentall points of Christianity which were also recorded in Scripture’.²⁷⁹ The questions at present controverted between Christians, Taylor argued, were in any case unknown in the first centuries, so that ‘to dispute concerning the truth or necessity of Traditions, in the Questions of our times, is as if Historians disputing about a Question in the English Story, should fall on wrangling whether Livie or Plutarch were the best Writers’.²⁸⁰ ‘If the Fathers, when they are witnesses of Tradition doe not always speak truth … then is their Testimony more improbable when they dispute or write Commentaries.’²⁸¹ More recent Fathers, for instance Augustine in his writings on ‘absolute predestination’, contradicted their predecessors.²⁸² The Fathers had fallen into many mistakes, although Taylor handled that argument sparingly out of respect for ‘their great reputation, which I desire should be preserved as sacred as it ought’.²⁸³ He dwelt at more length on spurious pieces, interpolations, and falsifications.²⁸⁴ In any case, Taylor argued, nobody was ready to be tried by the Fathers. Papists cried up patristic authority when convenient (‘as is to be seen in that excellent nothing of Campian’s ten reasons’) but repudiated it freely on other occasions ( Taylor gave the classic instance of the Immaculate Conception).²⁸⁵ Taylor admitted that the testimonies of the Fathers, the decrees of councils, ‘Ecclesiasticall Tradition’ might provide probable arguments.²⁸⁶ He himself appealed to the patristic exegesis of Thou art Peter as referring to the faith, not the person, of Peter: ‘although all these witnesses concurring cannot make a proposition to be true, yet they are sufficient witnesses that it was not the Universall beliefe of Christendom that the Church was built ²⁷⁷ Ibid. 88 and 157–8 (quoting Erasmus) [Eden, 432 and 488–9]. ²⁷⁸ Ibid. 91 [Eden, 434–5]. ²⁷⁹ Ibid. [Eden, 435]. ²⁸⁰ Ibid. 95 [Eden, 439]. ²⁸¹ Ibid. 151 [Eden, 483]. ²⁸² Ibid. ²⁸³ Ibid. 157 [Eden, 488]. ²⁸⁴ Ibid. 157–61 [Eden, 488–91]. Many of these arguments applied to councils as well: see esp. ibid. 117–19 [Eden, 455–7] on corruptions of acts of councils. ²⁸⁵ Ibid. 154 [Eden, 486]. ²⁸⁶ Ibid. 155 [Eden, 487]: ‘if one wise man sayes a thing, it is an Argument to me to believe it in its degree of probation, that is, proportionable to such an assent as the Authority of a wise man can produce, and when there is nothing against it that is greater; and so in proportion higher and higher as more wise men (such as the old Doctors were) doe affirm it.’ Cf. 124 [Eden, 461], 169 [Eden, 498], and 183 [Eden, 509].

The Fathers Assaulted

245

upon S. Peters person.’²⁸⁷ He denied however that such arguments could ever be sufficient to determine controversies. Taylor’s book completely dissolved pretended certainties. The practical conclusion was that one should be wary of condemning anyone. No doctrine was truly heresy unless it either taught immorality or contradicted an article of the Apostles’ Creed.²⁸⁸ Particular Churches should not frame ‘bodies of Confession and Articles’, the effect of which was to make ‘unnecessary or uncertain propositions a certaine meanes of Schism and disunion’.²⁸⁹ Such passages would seem to condemn much of the ecclesiastical policy of Charles I and Laud. The King, however, had been defeated and the episcopal Church was struggling for survival. The Long Parliament had abolished the Book of Common Prayer in 1645 and made the Westminster Directory compulsory. Taylor himself had been deprived of his living and had retired to Wales, where he lived in straitened circumstances.²⁹⁰ Although he was careful not to make any reference to contemporary events, some of his remarks were clearly aimed at the then victorious presbyterians.²⁹¹ He warned that persecutors would be persecuted ‘upon the turn of the wheele’.²⁹² It is significant that his book was almost exclusively concerned with toleration within a national Church, not with the Grotian ideal of a reconciliation of Churches.²⁹³ Taylor appealed for toleration and charity to the practice and teaching of ‘the best ages of the Church’.²⁹⁴ Cyprian was in the wrong on rebaptism, but he was excused by his ‘piety’ as well as his ‘modesty and sweetnesse of temper’, whereas Pope Stephen, who had truth on his side, was guilty of ²⁸⁷ Ibid. 131 [Eden, 467]. ²⁸⁸ Ibid., epistle dedicatory, 29–30, 40–1; 18–32 of the main text [Eden, 355, 360, and 378–89]. ²⁸⁹ Ibid. 265 [Eden, 603]. ²⁹⁰ See R. Heber, Life of Jeremy Taylor, in Whole Works, ed. Eden, i, pp. xxiv–xxix. ²⁹¹ Taylor blamed those who rejected doctrines and practices for no reason other than that they were held by the Church of Rome (Liberty of Prophesying, 175); he instanced Aerius among those ancients who turned heretics because they had failed to become bishops (185); he claimed that the clergy was right to ‘maintaine their just rites [sic] and Revenues which by pious dedications and donatives were long since ascertained upon them’ (186) [Eden, 503, 510, 512]. ²⁹² Ibid. 193–6 [Eden, 517–19]. Cf. 215–16 [Eden, 535]: ‘For if it be necessary for all men to subscribe to the present established Religion, by the same reason at another time a man may be bound to subscribe to the contrary, and so to all Religions in the world.’ ²⁹³ See Taylor’s insistence, 5 [Eden, 368], that Churches should follow ‘the division of Kingdomes’. He barely mentions, 262–3 [Eden, 601–2], the duty ‘of particular Churches to each other’. ²⁹⁴ Ibid. 36–7 [Eden, 358]. Cf. 197 [Eden, 520]: ‘the instance and precedent of those ages who were confessedly wise and pious, and whose practice are often made to us arguments to follow.’

246

The Fathers Assaulted

uncharitableness. ‘S. Cyprien had not learn’d to forbid to any one a liberty of prophesying or interpretation, if hee transgressed not the foundation of Faith and the Creed of the Apostles.’²⁹⁵ Persecution had only begun with ‘the expiration of the first blessed Ages of Christianity’,²⁹⁶ ‘when the Churches fortune grew better, and her Sonnes grew worse, and some of her Fathers worst of all’.²⁹⁷ The Fathers themselves had been misled by ‘an overactive zeale’ and seemed, as early as the second and third centuries, to have branded as heresies many opinions which did not deserve that name.²⁹⁸ The main guilt might actually lie with fourth- and fifth-century writers but Taylor implied that the heresiological tradition of the ancient Church was not reliable.²⁹⁹ Primitive simplicity deteriorated further with the general councils, from Nicaea onwards: then ‘the Creeds multiplyed in number, and in Articles, and the liberty of prophesying began to be something restrained’.³⁰⁰ When the Arian controversy first began at Alexandria, the Emperor Constantine declared with ‘much reason’ that both parties were in the wrong, so fiercely to dispute on a matter which was ‘of no great importance, but vaine, and a toy in respect of the excellent blessings of peace and charity’.³⁰¹ Consubstantiality might have been true, but it would have been better not to insert it in the Creed: ‘if the Article had been with more simplicity, and lesse nicety determin’d; charity would have gain’d more, and faith would have lost nothing.’ Such an authoritative determination provided a dangerous precedent.³⁰² It eventually brought about the ‘uncharitablenesse’ of ‘the Symbol of Athanasius’ ( Taylor thought ‘more than probable’ that it was not a genuine work of that Father). ‘Nothing there but damnation and perishing everlastingly, unlesse the Article of the Trinity be believed, as it is there with curiosity and minute particularities explaind.’³⁰³ All subsequent religious hatreds followed that example.³⁰⁴ ²⁹⁵ Taylor, Liberty of Prophesying 40–3 [Eden, 396–7]. See also 67 [Eden, 416]. ²⁹⁶ Ibid. 4 [Eden, 367]. ²⁹⁷ Ibid., epistle dedicatory, 18–19 [Eden, 350]: ‘in the first three hundred years there was no sign of persecuting any man for his opinion, though at that time there were very horrid opinions commenced, and such which were exemplary and parallel enough to determine this Question.’ Cf. 205–6 [Eden, 527–8]. ²⁹⁸ Ibid. 32–3 [Eden, 389–90]. ²⁹⁹ Ibid. 34–40 [Eden, 390–5]. ³⁰⁰ Ibid. 43 [Eden, 398]. Cf. 191 [Eden, 516]. ³⁰¹ Ibid. 45–6 [Eden, 399], translating at length Constantine’s letter in Socrates, HE, 1. 7 (GCS,  1, 13–17). ³⁰² Ibid. 46–7 [Eden, 400–1]. ³⁰³ Ibid. 53–5 [Eden, 405–7]. The attribution of the Creed to Athanasius had recently been rejected, with very strong arguments, by Gerardus Joannes Vossius, Dissertationes tres de tribus symbolis, Apostolico, Athanasiano, et Constantinopolitano (Amsterdam, 1642), 37–55, but Taylor only referred to earlier works on the subject. ³⁰⁴ Taylor, Liberty of Prophesying, 56–7 [Eden, 407–8].

The Fathers Assaulted

247

Many of Taylor’s arguments and examples are strikingly reminiscent of Chillingworth. There are even verbal echoes.³⁰⁵ Whatever Taylor may have meant by his plea for toleration, it was to prove highly influential. What should be stressed is that his attitude to the Fathers was deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, the first three centuries could be taken as a model for a moral, practical, largely undogmatic version of Christianity. On the other hand, the fatal evolution towards theological hair-splitting, unscriptural impositions, and appeals to the secular arm had begun very early on. The first four general councils, in their proceedings if not in their definitions, had been a key stage in the corruption of primitive Christianity. No authoritative appeal to the Fathers could be now of any validity. Taylor referred his reader to Daill´e’s Trait´e for further arguments on that point.³⁰⁶ He appears not to have had the book at his disposal at the time, and there is no evidence that he had read it yet (he borrowed it soon afterwards from his patron Lord Hatton).³⁰⁷ But his arguments against the Fathers as witnesses of tradition were fully congruent with those of the Frenchman. The English translation of Daill´e’s book which came out in 1651 originated from the same milieu. The translator is unknown, but his work was revised by Thomas Smith, of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who also wrote the preface, where he put great stress on the high opinion of Daill´e held by Falkland, Chillingworth, and Taylor.³⁰⁸ Smith was an admirer of Chillingworth, whose memory he defended, and he was in close contact with ³⁰⁵ Compare Liberty of Prophesying, 101 [Eden, 442]: ‘But since we are all this while in uncertainty, it is necessary that we should addresse ourselves somewhere, where we may rest the sole of our foot’ and Religion of Protestants, chapter VI, § 56, 354 (sic): ‘I for my part after a long and (as I verily believe and hope) impartial search of the true Way to eternal Happiness, do profess plainly that I cannot find any rest for the sole of my foot, but upon this Rock only.’ ³⁰⁶ Liberty of Prophesying, 157 [Eden, 488]. ³⁰⁷ See letter of Peter Gunning to Christopher Lord Hatton, 10 February 1648, and the enclosed list of ‘Books which Dr Taylor tooke with him’ (Bodl., MS Bodley 878, fos. 11v and 20r ). Gunning bought books in those years on behalf of Hatton, who was building his library. On Hatton and Taylor, see Heber, Life, pp. xxiv–xxv; J. P. Wainwright, Musical Patronage in seventeenth-century England (Aldershot, 1997), 13–15 According to Liberty of Prophesying, epistle dedicatory, 2 and 5 [Eden 341 and 343], Taylor had no library while writing (see however W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England … (1640–1660) [= iv] (London, 1940), 379 n. 2). ³⁰⁸ Daill´e, Use of the Fathers, preface (dated 1 August 1651). The translation itself was early on (already by the Latin translator of 1655: see below, n. 319) ascribed to Smith, but this is clearly an error: see Henry Hammond, The Dispatcher Dispatched. Or, an Examination of the Romanists Rejoynder to the Replies of D.H. Being a Third Defence of the Treatise of Schisme. Wherein is inserted a View of their Possession and Oral Tradition in the way of M. White (London, 1659), 57. According to Scrivener, Apologia, sig. A3v , the translator was an Oxford man.

248

The Fathers Assaulted

the survivors of the Tew circle and notably with Henry Hammond.³⁰⁹ It has even been surmised that Hammond had some share in the publication.³¹⁰ Scrivener later did his best to weaken its significance.³¹¹ He even affirmed that he had it from Smith’s own mouth that ‘he had once intended to write a confutation of Daill´e but, after having better considered of it, found that there was nothing in Daill´e worth his pain’.³¹² This does not appear to deserve any credit. Smith for years kept up a friendly correspondence with Daill´e³¹³ and his preface made it clear that he hoped that The Use of the Fathers (like another book by Daill´e which he had previously translated himself ) would serve as an antidote against Roman Catholic missionaries, who were of great concern to him.³¹⁴ Heylyn lamented in 1654 that ‘our Downe, and after him one Dalie a French-man’ had done their best to ruin the credit of the Fathers. The next thing that we have to do, is to cry down the Canon of the Scripture also: and as we have vilifyed the Creeds, Councels, and Fathers, to make the fairer room for our own right reason, which is both Fathers, Creeds, and Councels to our now great wits; so to reject the Scriptures also (as some do already) to make the clearer ³⁰⁹ See P. Hammond, ‘Thomas Smith: A Beleaguered Humanist of the Interregnum’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 56 (1983), 180–94, and above, Chapter 2 n. 325. Hammond’s study is irritatingly judgemental and ignores Smith’s important letters to Samuel Hartlib, which have been used by Bendall, Brooke, and Collinson, History of Emmanuel, 241. ³¹⁰ Trevor-Roper, ‘Great Tew Circle’, 221. ³¹¹ Scrivener, Apologia, sig. A3v : ‘Quod ergo ad Praefatiunculam attinet Anglicanam, crediderem (si modo author eius dicendus sit Smithus) pro more et rogatu Bibliopolae expressam potius ab ipso fuisse, quam ex ingenio suo promanasse libero.’ ³¹² Ibid. ³¹³ Their correspondence does not seem to have survived and is not mentioned by Hammond, ‘Thomas Smith’, but see Daill´e’s account, De Cultibus religiosis Latinorum libri nouem. I. De Baptismi Caerimoniis. II. De Confirmatione. Reliqui VII de Eucharistiae Ritibus. Quibus demonstratur nouitas Caerimoniarum, quae ad duo Sacramenta a Christo instituta, praesertim ad Eucharistiam in Communione Romana adiectae sunt. Opus posthumum (Geneva, 1671), 96: [Thomas Smithaeus Cantabrigiensis Bibliothecarius] ‘quocum mihi dum uixit, amicitia et litterarum usus fuit’; ‘Abbreg´e de la vie de Mr Daill´e’ by his son, 14–15 (that Daill´e junior mistakenly ascribed the translation of The Use of the Fathers, and not merely the preface, to Smith, does not impair his testimony); … Origenis contra Celsum libri octo. Eiusdem Philocalia. Guglielmus Spencerus, Cantabrigiensis, Collegii Trinitatis Socius, utriusque operis uersionem recognouit, et Annotationes adiecit (Cambridge, 1658), notes, sep. pagination, 85. ³¹⁴ See Smith’s preface to The Use of the Fathers, sig. ¶1v , and his preface to Jean Daill´e, An Apologie for the Reformed Churches; wherein is shew’d the Necessitie of their separation from the Church of Rome; against those who accuse them of making a Schisme in Christendome. Translated out of French. And a Preface added; containing the Judgement of an University-man, concerning Mr. Knot’s last book against Mr. Chillingworth (Cambridge, 1653), preface, sep. pagination, 12–14. Note that Smith had made the translation ‘several years since’, i.e. before the publication of The Use of the Fathers. Cf. Hammond, ‘Thomas Smith’, 183–4.

The Fathers Assaulted

249

way to new revelations, which is the Paraclet, or the holy Ghost, of our present Montanists.³¹⁵

But Heylyn was a marginalized old man and he was writing to maintain the uncritical as well as un-Protestant thesis that the Apostles’ Creed had been composed by the Apostles themselves. Most episcopalian divines did not yet feel threatened by The Use of the Fathers. The only Englishman to write against the book in these years was White, and he did not so much confute it in detail as reaffirm vehemently his own notion of an uninterrupted oral tradition transmitted in the Roman Church until the present day.³¹⁶ Indeed, Rushworth’s Dialogues agreed with Daill´e as to the difficulty of using the Fathers in religious controversies.³¹⁷ Daill´e had meanwhile acquired a European status. He now wrote and published his theological works in Latin and no longer in French. A Latin version of L’Emploi des Saints P`eres was printed in Geneva in 1655.³¹⁸ The translator, the Huguenot Jean Mettayer, knew of the English version and mentioned that it had encouraged him in his own work.³¹⁹ The general architecture of the book was unchanged but the text had been revised by Daill´e, who drew on his further research to add many new examples. The Augustinian dossier which showed that the Fathers disclaimed any binding authority for their writings was enlarged by a highly topical extract from De baptismo contra Donatistas.³²⁰ Several new mistakes of the Fathers were instanced to illustrate their carelessness. Pope Gregory, who had been left alone in the original text (and indeed was hardly to be considered a Father at all according to Daill´e’s chronology), was now specially taken to task. Gregory had carried ‘frenzy’ so far as to ‘dream’ that Italian volcanoes were bursting forth the fires of Hell.³²¹ He not only had no Greek, despite ³¹⁵ Heylyn, Theologia ueterum, preface, 8. See Milton, Heylyn, 148–52, 160, 192. ³¹⁶ White, ‘Daill´e’s Arts discover’d: or, his Right Use, prov’d a Down-right Abuse of the Fathers’, in Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues, 179–261. ³¹⁷ Dialogues of William Richworth (1640), Third Dialogue, § 13, 557–8: ‘the fathers speake some time as witneses of what the church held in their days, and some times as Doctors, and so t’is often hard to distinguish how they deliver their opinions … So that who seeke’s Tradition in the fathers and to convince it by their testimonie, take’s a hard taske upon him, if he goe rigorously to worke and have a conning Criticke to his Adversarie.’ ³¹⁸ Ioannis Dallaei de usu Patrum ad ea definienda religionis capita, quae sunt hodie controuersa, Libri duo, Latine e Gallico nunc primum a I. Mettayero redditi; Ab Auctore recogniti, aucti et emendati (Geneva, 1655). A number of copies have the date 1656 on the title page. ³¹⁹ Dedication of the translator to Daill´e, dated 1 January 1654, ibid. sig. ¶3r : ‘eoque libentius quod … accepi hoc ipsum opus ab ornatissimo uiro Tho. Smitho in Anglicum idioma translatum.’ ³²⁰ Ibid. 214. Augustine, De baptismo contra Donatistas, 2.3.4 (CSEL 51, 178–9). ³²¹ Ibid. 242, referring to Gregory, Dialogi, 4. 36. 12 (SC 265, 122).

250

The Fathers Assaulted

having spent several years at Constantinople, but he was ignorant of Latin words ‘that even children know today’. This was a just punishment for his professed disdain for humanities and even for grammar, which he had made a religious point of violating—for all his warnings against patristic rhetoric, Daill´e chose to take at face value Gregory’s affected protestations of rusticity.³²² The chapter devoted to the Fathers’ errors against the faith now included a section on the three Cappadocians. All three were suspected to some degree of holding Origen’s doctrine that Hell fire was only temporary. Daill´e’s polemical drift is very apparent here, since he was reusing materials from his 1649 book on purgatory but without any of the qualifications and precautions of that work. In order to incriminate Basil, he now omitted to mention that the text involved (the commentary on Isaiah) was unlikely to be genuine.³²³ The Use of the Fathers is a learned book but it is a book with a theological thesis, and the Latin edition aimed at piling on even more facts to prove it. There were hardly any new ideas, apart from an important addition in the first chapter. Coming back to the paucity of ante-Nicene writings, Daill´e now suggested that it was no mere accident but the consequence of the corruption of doctrine in later times. Thus Tertullian’s Montanist writings survived, whereas the anti-Montanist writings of his contemporary Apollonius, ‘a man who was highly esteemed among Catholics’, perished, because the Church eventually adopted the very fasts and ascetic practices that ‘the ancients had condemned in Montanus and his followers’.³²⁴ This was the final blow to Du Perron’s theory that ³²² Ibid. 243: ‘Sed tam pueriliter istum labi non indignum fortasse fuit, qui litteras fastidit et pro nugis habet, iisque studere episcopum, impium et profanum putat [ep. 11, 34 to Desiderius, Bishop of Vienna, CC 140A, 922; the letter was numbered 9, 48 in 16th-century editions]; et alibi pene gloriatur se artem loquendi, quam magisteria disciplinae exterioris insinuant, seruare despexisse, non barbarismi confusionem deuitare, situs, motusque praepositionum, casusque seruare contemnere, quia indignum (inquit) uehementer existimo, ut uerba caelestis oraculi restringam sub regulis Donati [Moralia in Job, ep. ad Leandrum, 5; CC 143, 7]; quasi uero humani Diuinique sermonis leges addiscere et obseruare, id sit Caelestia oracula Donato subiicere.’ Daill´e is somewhat disingenuous, as Gregory actually objected to Desiderius’ teaching grammar himself (at a time when the school system had completely collapsed in Gaul). ³²³ Daill´e, De usu Patrum, 269–70. Compare Jean Daill´e, De poenis et satisfactionibus humanis, libri VII (Amsterdam, 1649), 368–77, 407–12, 560–1. Daill´e referred to Basil, In Isaiam 4. 4 (PG 30, 340–1). On this work, which Erasmus considered spurious, see Backus, Lectures humanistes, 179–83; CPG 2911; P. J. Fedwick, Bibliotheca Basiliana Universalis, iii ( Turnhout 1997), 761–5. ³²⁴ Daill´e, De usu Patrum, 5–6: ‘Nulla rei tam incredibilis ratio occurit probabilior, quam quod receptis postmodum apud Christianos ieiuniorum legibus, xerophagiarumque disciplinis, quas ueteres in Montani partibus damnauerant, posteri Apollonium ueterum defensorem perire non inuiti passi sint; Tertullianum ob eius cum suis conformitem suum fuisse putantes, fouerint.’ Apollonius is only known through Eusebius, who gives extracts from his book against Montanus (HE, 5. 18, SC 41, 55–9).

The Fathers Assaulted

251

the fourth- and fifth-century Fathers might act as mouthpieces for anteNicene Christianity. This was also a notion which could be devastating for Trinitarian orthodoxy.³²⁵ ³²⁵ For its use by Arians, see Christoph Sand (senior), preface to Christoph Sand (junior), Nucleus Historiae Ecclesiasticae, exhibitus in Historia Arianorum (2nd edn., Cologne, 1676), sig. ∗ 2v . Sand junior made the point himself, 49.

5 A Patristic Identity In the 1630s, many members of the Established Church, even those with impeccably episcopalian credentials, still dealt freely with the authority of the Fathers. The attitude of the victorious Puritans did much to alter that state of affairs. Daill´e’s disparagement of the Roman Catholic case for the consensus of the Fathers had been welcome to members of the Tew circle, who integrated it with their own doctrinal liberalism. But it now became a weapon in the hands of theologians who did not mean to warn against hasty certainties but to propound the most literal, archaic version of sola Scriptura. The Restoration Church would hardy have been so keen to champion patristic authority if its enemies had not taken the contrary way.

1. PURITAN SCRIPTURALISM On 12 June 1643 the Long Parliament convened an assembly of divines to review the doctrinal foundations of the Church of England. The initial intention was merely to revise the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Assembly made some progress in this work, from July to October.¹ Already at that stage, the intention both to stress the primacy of Scripture and to advance Calvinism against patristic authority was unmistakable. The committee to which the second Article, ‘Of the Son of God’, had been entrusted wanted to add ‘That for our sakes he suffered most greivous torments in his soule immediately from God’, and eventually prevailed over those, such ¹ See C. B. Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly 1643–1652’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 2004), i, esp. chapter IV, 211–69, which has fully superseded the older accounts by S. W. Carruthers, The Everyday Work of the Westminster Assembly (Philadelphia, 1943), 105–14, and R. S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate’ (Edinburgh, 1985), 74–87. Van Dixhoorn’s rediscovery and edition of the first volume of John Lightfoot’s Journal at CUL shed much new light on the debates of July–August 1643, which were only known so far by [Daniel Featley], Sacra Nemesis (Oxford, 1644). They are of the highest interest for the question of patristic authority.

A Patristic Identity

253

as John Lightfoot, who feared that this addition ‘would intricate the article rather then cleere it’.² The Article on the descent into Hell occasioned long and vehement debates between those who still adhered to Calvin’s interpretation, those who preferred that of Beza, and those who followed Broughton. All however rejected the local descent. And they agreed on the fundamental rule ‘that no right sense can be given of this Article which cannot be prooved and confirmed by expresse scripture’.³ A minority wanted the article to ‘be utterly expunged’.⁴ Some theologians, perhaps even the same ones—Lightfoot called them ‘the excepters’—then objected to the authority ascribed to the historical Creeds in the eighth Article, ‘as if it set them in too high a place in an equality with Scripture’.⁵ They criticized more specifically the clause in the Nicene Creed, ‘God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God’, as contradicting Calvin’s controversial notion that the Son was αὐτόθεος, God of himself. Scripturalism went hand in hand with Calvinism. No agreement could be reached on this point, but it is noteworthy that the later productions of the Assembly made no mention of the creeds and refrained from using the expression ‘God of God’.⁶ As for the sixth article, it was remodelled on the basis of the Irish Articles, so as to base the authority of the canonical books on their inspiration, and the Church was no longer mentioned.⁷ ² John Lightfoot, ‘A Briefe Journal of Passages in the Assembly of divines’, in Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation’, appendix A, ii. 10–11 (18–19 July 1643). This was based on the Irish Articles, § 29 (Hardwick, History of the Articles, appendix VI, 376). The Assembly had been divided into three standing committees, each of which was responsible for revising a different set of articles (Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation’, i. 147–54). ³ Lightfoot, ‘Journal’, 13–15 (22–7 July). The importance of the scripturalist principle has been rightly stressed by Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation’, i. 229. The work done on articles II and III was reused for the chapter ‘Of Christ the Mediator’ of the Westminster Confession, which substituted ‘He remained under the power of death’ for ‘He descended into Hell’, while enshrining the doctrine that Christ had suffered ‘most grievous torments immediately in His soul’ (S. W. Carruthers (ed.),The Westminster Confession of Faith (Manchester, [1937]), chapter VIII, § IV, 106–7). See A. F. Mitchell and J. Struthers (eds.), Minutes of the sessions of the Westminster Assembly of divines while engaged in preparing their directory for Church government, Confession of faith, and Catechisms (November 1644 to March 1649) (Edinburgh, 1874), 130 (September 1645) [= Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation’, appendix B, vi. 175]. ⁴ Lightfoot, ‘Journal’, 17 (28 July), 36 (17 August). ⁵ Ibid. 36–9 (18–25 August). ⁶ Featley, Sacra Nemesis, 13–19; Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation’, i. 232–53 and 259. On the doctrine that Christ is autotheos, see R. A. Muller, PostReformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, iv: The Triunity of God (2nd edn., Grand Rapids, Mich., 2003), 324–32. ⁷ ‘The Proceedings of the Assembly of Divines upon the Thirty nine Articles of the Church of England’, at the end of The humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, Now

254

A Patristic Identity

Eventually, it was decided to compose a wholly new formula, the so-called Westminster Confession of Faith. Whereas the Articles opened on the Trinity, the Westminster Confession followed the continental pattern and devoted its first chapter to Scripture. It was discussed in July 1645.⁸ ‘The testimony of the Church’ was restricted to a preparatory role and, although the ‘incomparable excellencies’ of Scripture were said to be ‘arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God’, ‘our full persuasion and assurance’ of its authority was founded on ‘the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts’.⁹ Scripture was declared to contain not only, as in the sixth article, ‘all things necessary to salvation’, but ‘the whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life’. ‘Nothing at any time’ was ‘to be added [to it] whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men’ (the sixth article only forbade the imposition of a non-scriptural ‘article of the faith’).¹⁰ ‘The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture’ was Scripture itself,¹¹ but ‘the inward illumination of the Spirit of God’ was ‘necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word’.¹² Lastly, it was decreed that ‘the Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture’.¹³ The Westminster Confession was approved by Parliament on 20 June 1648. In March 1660, on the eve by Authority of Parliament sitting at Westminster, concerning a Confession of Faith, with the Quotations and Texts of Scripture annexed. Presented by them lately to both Houses of Parliament (London, [1647]), sep. pagination, 5–6: ‘By the name of holy Scripture we do understand all the Canonical Books of the Old and New Testament; which follow.... All which Books, as they are commonly received, we do receive, and acknowledge them to be given by the inspiration of God, and in that regard to be of most certain credit, and highest authority.’ This is a limited edition, printed for Parliament and the Assembly only (copies at CUL, shelfmark Syn. 7. 64. 142; Peterborough, K. 2. 16). See above, 48, for the Irish article. ⁸ Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 110–15 [= Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation’, appendix B, vi. 144–52]. ⁹ Carruthers (ed.), Westminster Confession, chapter I, § V, 91. On the sources of this chapter, the articles of B. B. Warfield, ‘The Westminster Doctrine of Holy Scripture’ [1893] and ‘The Doctrine of Inspiration of the Westminster Divines’ [1894], repr. in id., The Westminster Assembly and its Work (New York, 1931), 155–257 and 261–333, are still worth reading. ¹⁰ Carruthers (ed.), Westminster Confession, chapter I, § VI, 91. ¹¹ Ibid., § IX, 92. ¹² Ibid., § VI, 91. This clause was not part of the original draft and its redaction was carefully pondered: see Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 114 [= Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation’, appendix B, vi, 149]. ¹³ Carruthers (ed.),Westminster Confession, chapter I, § X, 93.

A Patristic Identity

255

of the Restoration, presbyterians tried to make it the basis of the future church settlement.¹⁴ The list of ‘fundamentals’ that John Owen, Cromwellian Dean of Christ Church, drew up in 1652, and which were meant to define the limits of orthodoxy for the Interregnum Church, pushed scripturalism even further. Scripture was now said to be ‘that rule of knowing God, and living unto him, which who so doth not believe, but betakes himselfe to any other way of discovering truth, and the minde of God instead thereof, cannot be saved’.¹⁵ When a committee of divines revised the text in late 1654 in order to have it approved by the Protectorate Parliament, Baxter made the obvious objection that the first Christians, before the New Testament was written, had known revelation through preaching only. Owen countered that, until the New Testament was written, ‘the Primitive Church was bound to believe no more from the Apostles but what was written in the Old Testament, and proved thence’.¹⁶ The text of 1652 was slightly attenuated but the doctrine remained unchanged.¹⁷ Eventually, the confession of faith appproved by ¹⁴ G. R. Abernathy, The English Presbyterians and the Stuart Restoration, 1648–1663 (Philadelphia, 1965; Transactions of the American Philosophical Society,  55, part 2), 40–1; De Krey, London and the Restoration, 57–8. ¹⁵ [John Owen], Proposals for the furtherance and propagation of the Gospell in this Nation. As the same were humbly presented to the Honourable Committee of Parliament by divers Ministers of the Gospell, and others. As also, some Principles of Christian Religion, without the beliefe of which, the Scriptures doe plainly and clearly affirme, Salvation is not to be obtained. Which were also presented in explanation of one of the said Proposals (London, 1653: published in December 1652), 5. The ‘fundamentals’ were reprinted without change in 1654 for approval by the Protectorate Parliament: The Principles of Faith, presented by Mr. Tho. Godwin … and other Ministers, to the Committee of Parliament for Religion, by way of explanation to the Proposals for propagating of the Gospel (London, 1654). See B. Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration (Oxford, 1984; SCH 21), 203–4, 215, 219; J. R. Collins, ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History, 87 (2002), 18–40; J. Coffey, ‘A Ticklish Business: Defining Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution’, in Loewenstein and Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics, 119–22. Owen’s scripturalism inspired his famous attack on Walton’s London Polyglot, on which see below, Chapter 6 n. 175. ¹⁶ Reliquiae Baxterianae: or, Mr. Richard Baxter’s narrative of the most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times. Faithfully Publish’d from his own Original Manuscript, by Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), part II, 199. Owen must have grounded this idea on Acts 22: 22 (‘saying none other things then those which the Prophets, and Moses did say should come’), which is one of the proof-texts for the article on Scripture in Proposals, 6. For a convenient overview of Owen’s career, see P. Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen, Pastor, Educator, Theologian (Exeter, 1971). ¹⁷ A unique printed copy of the new text is preserved in BL, shelfmark E 826 (3): the text has no title but Thomason inscribed it ‘A new Confession of Faith, or the first Principles of the Christian Religion’ and noted that it had been presented to Parliament by the grand committee for religion on 12 December 1654 and printed by express order of Parliament. See the first principle, 1: ‘The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New

256

A Patristic Identity

representatives of the Congregational Churches at the Savoy in October 1658, which was largely the work of Owen, reproduced verbatim the Westminster chapter on Scripture, with one key change. ‘The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined’ was no longer ‘the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture’ but ‘the holy Scripture delivered by the Spirit; into which Scripture so delivered, our Faith is finally Resolved’.¹⁸ The aim was clearly to counter the new threat posed by Quakers, who claimed that the Spirit dwelt in every man and was the touchstone of Scripture itself. For Owen, the Spirit never spoke without Scripture.¹⁹ Baxter’s stand in 1654 earned him the charge of being ‘Popish, and plead[ing] for the Sufficiency of Tradition, to Salvation, without the Scripture’.²⁰ This accusation was made a fortiori against episcopalian divines. At Laud’s trial Prynne numbered among the Archbishop’s crimes his having owned a picture ‘of the foure Fathers of the Church, Saint Ambrose, Saint Chrysostome, Saint Austin and St. Hierom, all in their Pontificalibus, with the Picture of the Holy Ghost in form of a Dove, hovering over their heads, and from his beake distilling the rayes, streames, and influences of his graces severally upon them’.²¹ When Bishop Hall, certainly no Laudian, tried to save the stained glass windows in his chapel from Parliamentarian iconoclasts, ‘I told them they were the Pictures of some antient and worthy Bishops, as St Ambrose, Austin, etc. It was answered me, that they were so many Popes.’²² The literary equivalent of this iconoclasm was Milton’s pamphlet of May 1641, Of Reformation in England, which denounced ‘the votarists of Antiquity’ as among the main Testament are the Word of God, and the only rule of knowing him savingly, and living unto him in all holiness and righteousness, in which we must rest; which Scriptures, who so doth not believe but rejecting them, doth instead thereof betake himselfe to any other way of discovering the minde of God, cannot be saved’ (I emphasize the significant changes, which may have been intended to address some of Baxter’s objections). ¹⁸ A. G. Matthews (ed.),The Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order 1658 (London, 1959), chapter I, § 10, 78. ¹⁹ See Nuttall, Holy Spirit, 23–34; C. R. Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle, 1998), 64–75; M. Haykin, ‘John Owen and the Challenge of the Quakers’, in R. W. Oliver (ed.), John Owen—the Man and his Theology: Papers Read at the Conference of the John Owen Centre for Theological Study September 2000 (Darlington, 2002), 133–55. See also Matthews (ed.), Savoy Declaration, chapter XX, 101–2 (which is wholly an addition to the Westminster Confession). ²⁰ Reliquiae Baxterianae, part II, 199. ²¹ Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 67. The subject was obviously the four doctors of the Latin Church (Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great), the last of whom has a dove for his emblem (see Laud’s answer, ibid. 472). ²² ‘Bishop Hall’s Hard Measure’ [1647], in Hall, Shaking of the Olive-Tree, 62.

A Patristic Identity

257

hinderers of Reformation.²³ To confute them, Milton launched a savage attack against the Fathers: ‘who is ignorant of the foul errors, the ridiculous wresting of Scripture, the Heresies, the vanities thick sown through the volumes of Justin Martyr, Clemens, Origen, Tertullian, and others of eldest time?’²⁴ Moreover, they referred ‘all decision of controversie to the Scriptures, as all-sufficient to direct, to resolve, and to determine’.²⁵ If these Doctors who had scarse half the light that we enjoy, who all except 2 or 3 were ignorant of the Hebrew tongue, and many of the Greek … could yet find the Bible so easie, why should we doubt, that have all the helps of Learning and faithfull industry that man in this life can look for, and the assistance of God as neer now to us as ever. But let the Scriptures be hard; are they more hard, more crabbed, more abstruse then the Fathers?²⁶

On the very eve of the Restoration, Henry Hickman, fellow of Magdalen College (then the stronghold of Puritanism at Oxford), again denounced the Laudians’ appeal to antiquity and apostolic traditions.²⁷ Although Hickman agreed that the Fathers ought to be studied, he insisted that ‘not consent of Fathers, but Scripture’ only ought to settle religious controversies. The Fathers wrote nothing at all on many present controversies or, worse, they wrote so incautiously as seemingly to favour heresies like Pelagianism, ‘being engaged against such as were in the contrary extream’.²⁸ ‘The Fathers of Prime Antiquity did either write nothing at all, or but very little; and what of theirs is come to our hands, is so interpolated, that it is extreamly difficult to find out their meaning; yea, the Editions are so various, that I know not which to prefer.’²⁹ Many of the Fathers ‘were so ignorant either of Hebrew, or Greek, or both, that they have fallen into sad mistakes’ in their commentaries of Scripture and ‘our later Writers’ are often superior.³⁰ Their scripturalist principles did not prevent Puritans from making an apologetical use of the Fathers. The defence of presbyterian ordination that the London ministers published in 1654 included an appendix on ‘the Judgement and Practice of Antiquity’ (which was much indebted to the work of the great Huguenot scholar David Blondel).³¹ The ministers were ²³ John Milton, Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in England: and the causes that hitherto have hindred it [May 1641], in Complete Prose Works, i. 541. ²⁴ Ibid. 551–2. ²⁵ Ibid. 563. ²⁶ Ibid. 566–8. ²⁷ Hickman, Laudensium Apostasia, sig. a3v . On the author, see Wood, Athenae, iv. 368–73; B. Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 763. ²⁸ Hickman, Laudensium Apostasia, 4–5. ²⁹ Ibid. 5–6. ³⁰ Ibid. 6. ³¹ Ius Diuinum Ministerii Euangelici. Or the divine Right of the Gospel-Ministry … Together with an Appendix, wherein the Judgement and Practice of Antiquity about the whole matter of Episcopacy, and especially about the Ordination of Ministers, is briefly discussed. Published by the Provincial Assembly of London (London, 1654). The book was subscribed in the name of the Assembly by the Moderator, Assessors, and Secretaries on

258

A Patristic Identity

careful to stress first of all that Scripture alone was ‘a perfect reconditory of all credenda, petenda, facienda’, and that the Fathers, according to Augustine’s rules, should be rejected when they disagreed with Scripture.³² ‘There were many corruptions which crept into the Church, in the very Infancy of it, and were generally received as Apostolical traditions’: millenarianism, ‘the necessity of childrens partaking of the Eucharist, which was taught by Austin and others as an Apostolical tradition’, the pretended traditions of Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto.³³ The ministers made the point again in their conclusion, now instancing Irenaeus on the age of Christ and the Easter controversy. They had only discussed antiquity ‘for the Vindication of Presbytery from the prejudice of Novellisme’ and ‘for the Satisfaction of young Students, who scruple the Ordination by Presbyters for this reason onely’³⁴—that this was no idle talk is shown by the well-known instance of the young Simon Patrick, who had himself reordained by Bishop Hall in this very year 1654.³⁵ Calvinist divines quoted the Fathers against ‘Arminians’ of all kinds— either Laudian, high episcopal divines, or radical Independents who, like John Goodwin, had espoused a doctrine of universal redemption.³⁶ Goodwin refused to be frightened by the charge of Pelagianism and generally by such heresy-mongering as was constantly practised by presbyterians.³⁷ He denounced the use of the heresiological tradition to construct orthodoxy: if men can finde that any Opinion, which hath the least semblance, or sympathy, though but in sound of words onely, with that, which opposeth theirs, hath either been held by any former Heretique, or Person voted Erroneous, or else opposed by those, unto whose lot it is fallen to be sirnamed Orthodox, they make an importune outcry against this Opinion (I mean which opposeth theirs) as if it were nothing but an old Infamous Error, held onely by Heretiques and Erroneous Men, but stigmatized and cast out of the Church by the Orthodox, long ago.³⁸ 2 November 1653. Compare David Blondel, Apologia pro sententia Hieronymi de episcopis et presbyteris (Amsterdam, 1646). ³² Ius Diuinum, 2nd part, 100. ³³ Ibid. 100–1. ³⁴ Ibid. 148–9. ³⁵ Simon Patrick, ‘Autobiography’, in Works, ed. A. Taylor, 9 vols. (Oxford, 1858), ix. 423–4. ³⁶ See J. Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2006), 199–232; Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 106–11 and 130–2. ³⁷ John Goodwin, ’,πολύτρωσις ’,πολυτρώσεως or Redemption Redeemed (London, 1651), sig. c3r–v . ³⁸ Ibid. 365–6. See A. Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), esp. 66–105, ‘Edwards among the Heresiographers’; ead., ‘Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena and Heresiological Traditions’, in Loewenstein and Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics, 137–59 (Edwards appealed specially to Augustine’s

A Patristic Identity

259

Goodwin was willing nonetheless to speak the language of orthodoxy and antiquity in order to vindicate himself, and he adduced many texts of ‘the Orthodox Fathers’ to prove, first, that justifying faith could be lost, and, secondly, that Christ had died for all men. He was indebted for references to Vossius’ Historia Pelagiana, which he highly praised, but he was clearly well read in the Fathers—he had studied theology in Cambridge after James I’s instructions, and had been a pupil of Davenant.³⁹ Some of the Calvinist answers were essentially pieces of Reformed scholasticism, which devoted little space to patristic arguments. They merely stressed in a general way that Augustine had the same doctrine as Calvin, and that the Fathers who lived before Pelagius had had no opportunity of expresssing the truth clearly.⁴⁰ Goodwin had opened his list of Fathers with ‘Irenaeus, who lived about the 172 year after Christ’.⁴¹ But, ‘had he lived about 100 years after that, it would have bin all one to the purpose; the question being not how near he came to Christs time, but to Christs Doctrine’.⁴² Owen was at much greater pains to sketch the history of the doctrine of the saints’ perseverance.⁴³ He began with writers before Pelagius, and then moved on to those ‘who De haeresibus and Theodoret’s Haereticarum fabularum compendium). On presbyterian charges of heresy directed specifically against Goodwin, see Coffey, Goodwin, 131–67. ³⁹ See Goodwin, Redemption Redeemed, 366, and compare the quotations on conditional perseverance (in English but with Greek and Latin originals in the margin), 370–83, with the references given by Vossius, Historia Pelagiana, l. 6us, Thesis XII, 566–8. George Kendall, Sancti Sanciti. Or, the common Doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints (London, 1653), chapter VII, 105, gibed that ‘his [Goodwin’s] quotations of the Ancients, have not stood him much, as being all taken from Vossius’; but Vossius only gave the references, not the relevant passages. For ‘Prosper, Salvian, Gregory the great, Isidor Hispalensis, and other the best Writers after Augustine’, Goodwin referred his reader to Vossius, since ‘the transcribing of more passages in this kinde, being already drawn together, and directed unto, by another, and that in a book of no difficult procurement’ was unnecessary (383). Goodwin’s patristic evidence for universal redemption, 524–62, on the other hand, is only partly to be found in Vossius, Historia Pelagiana, l. 7us, Pars I, Theses II and III, 633–70. On his theological studies, see Coffey, Goodwin, 24–30. ⁴⁰ See George Kendall, 3εοκρατία: Or, a Vindication of the Doctrine commonly Received in the Reformed Churches concerning Gods Intentions of Special Grace and Favour to his Elect in the Death of Christ (London, 1653), e.g. part II, 148; Sancti Sanciti, chapter VII, 95–9 and 105–17. ⁴¹ Goodwin, Redemption Redeemed, 370. ⁴² Kendall, Sancti Sanciti, chapter VII, 105–6. ⁴³ John Owen, The Doctrine of the Saints perseverance Explained and Confirmed .... In a Full Answer to the Discourse of Mr John Goodwin against it, in his Book Entituled Redemption Redeemed (Oxford, 1654), sig. B2v . On the controversy, see H. M. Knapp, ‘John Owen’s Interpretation of Hebrews 6: 4–6: Eternal Perseverance of the Saints in Puritan Exegesis’, SCJ 34 (2003), 29–52. A. C. Clifford, Atonement and Justification: English Evangelical Theology 1640–1790. An Evaluation (Oxford, 1990) is useless for historians.

260

A Patristic Identity

bare the burthen and heat of the Opposition’, primarily Augustine, who ‘spake the sense of the whole Church, in those dayes wherin he lived’.⁴⁴ In later times, Owen singled out ‘our Bradwardin’, the Dominicans in the Roman Church, and contemporary Jansenists.⁴⁵ This history of doctrine was only however a ‘preliminary discourse’ and Owen advised readers whose ‘enquiry be only after the substance of the Truth’ to go directly to the bulk of the work ‘where it is expresly handled from the Scriptures, without the intermixture of any humane Testimonies’.⁴⁶ The book that Hickman published in 1659 to confute the Laudian Thomas Pierce bore quotations from both Augustine and Calvin on its title page.⁴⁷ In the course of his work, Hickman adduced many patristic passages: ‘Now though I would not err with the Fathers: yet do I lesse distrust my self to erre, while I keep them company, and do with the more confidence, look an adversary in the face, when my quiver is full of their Testimonies.’⁴⁸ He even quoted the Schoolmen, since ‘the general suffrage of the Schools doth signify much to me, in matters where they are not overawed by a Church Canon’.⁴⁹ Hickman later professed to be confident that ‘next to the study of the Holy Scriptures, the reading of the Fathers is the best preservative against Arminianism, which came into the low Countrys with the contempt of the Fathers’—by whom he meant primarily Augustine.⁵⁰ Hickman has been characterized as a ‘moderate Calvinist’ and he was a presbyterian, whereas Owen was an Independent and the foremost expositor of ‘high Calvinism’, but both used the Fathers.⁵¹ The Fathers were even more important to the defence of Trinitarian dogma, as the work of Francis Cheynell testifies. A former opponent of Laudianism at Oxford and a member of the Westminster Assembly, Cheynell was one of the Parliamentarian visitors sent to Oxford after the Royalist defeat in 1646. He became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity there in 1648.⁵² The treatise of the Trinity that he published in 1650—an ⁴⁴ Owen, Saints perseverance, sig. E3v . ⁴⁵ Ibid., sigs. F2v –F4r . ⁴⁶ Ibid., sig. B1r . ⁴⁷ Henry Hickman, ;ατρο-σχολαστικο-δικαίωσις, Or a Justification of the Fathers and Schoolmen: Shewing, That they are not Self-condemned for denying the Positivity of Sin. Being an Answer to so much of Mr. Tho. Pierce’s Book, called ,υτοκατάκρισις, as doth relate to the foresaid Opinion (Oxford, 1659). ⁴⁸ Ibid. 55. ⁴⁹ Ibid. 56. ⁵⁰ Hickman, Historia Quinqu-Articularis Exarticulata, sig. Ll4r–v (though published in 1673, the book was written ‘sundry years ago’, probably not long after Heylyn’s Historia came out in 1660). ⁵¹ On ‘moderate’ as opposed to ‘high’ Calvinists, see Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 132–57. ⁵² Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 721–3. On Cheynell’s opposition to Laudianism in the 1630s, see Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, 589–90.

A Patristic Identity

261

unimaginative but solid book, with many references to continental works of Reformed Scholasticism⁵³—included a lengthy section to prove that ‘the Holy Ghost speaking in the Scripture’ ought to be the supreme judge of all controversies: ‘I am willing to dwell longer upon this subject, because it is Fundamentum Fundamentorum.’⁵⁴ Cheynell insisted that the divinity of Scripture was properly proved by the inner testimony of the Spirit.⁵⁵ There were many arguments—prophecies, miracles, ‘the Antiquity, Majesty, Efficacy of it’, ‘the divine and heavenly matter contained in it’, and also ‘the harmonious testimony that the Church, Martyrs, Saints, have in all ages given to it’—but they ‘will not be effectuall for our regeneration and conversion, untill the Spirit be pleased to set all home upon the heart by his own irresistible efficacy, and seale this truth to the Conscience by his own infallible testimony’.⁵⁶ This testimony of the Spirit could alone be the ground of ‘justifying’, as opposed to ‘historical’ and ‘temporary’, faith.⁵⁷ ‘We must rest our Faith upon the Authority of God in this and in all other points, or else our Faith will not be a Divine Faith.’⁵⁸ Cheynell rejected indignantly the Roman Catholic claim that Scripture was insufficient without tradition to prove the doctrine of the Trinity: the Papists ‘do promote Socinianisme by their vaine doctrine of unwritten traditions’.⁵⁹ He met it with the standard answers: the Fathers argued from Scripture against the Arians; Augustine wrote that, although words like ‘consubstantial’ were not in Scripture, their sense was.⁶⁰ Cheynell, however, was also keen to stress that there was a consensus of the Fathers for the Nicene doctrine. Even before the council of Nicaea, ‘the Doctrine of the Coessential Trin-unity was for the manner and substance, if not in expresse terms, in terminis terminantibus as we say, constantly maintained’.⁶¹ Cheynell referred ‘all that desire resolution in this weighty point’ to two continental anti-Socinian works, a thesis by the Orthodox Lutheran Abraham Calovius and also, quite extraordinarily, a massive ⁵³ Francis Cheynell, The Divine Triunity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: or, the blessed Doctrine of the three Coessential Subsistents in the eternall Godhead without any confusion or division of the distinct Subsistences, or multiplication of the most single and entire Godhead, acknowledged, beleeved, adored by Christians, in opposition to Pagans, Jewes, Mahumetans, blasphemous and Antichristian Hereticks, who say they are Christians, but are not (London, 1650). Cheynell wrote in English so as to answer Socinians more efficiently but was ‘forced sometimes to expresse [his] minde in Latine in the margin’ on technical points (dedication to Francis Rous, sig. B3r ), and his book is steeped in Reformed scholasticism. See e.g. 230–5, his defence of Calvin’s controversial statement that ‘Christ is God of himself ’. ⁵⁴ Ibid. 290–323, at 295. ⁵⁵ Ibid. 305–12. ⁵⁶ Ibid. 316–17. ⁵⁷ Ibid. 319–20. ⁵⁸ Ibid. 306. ⁵⁹ Ibid. 15. ⁶⁰ Ibid. 17, quoting Augustine, ep. 238 [174], 1. 4, and Contra Maximinum Arianum, 2 [3]. 3, on which see above, Chapter 1 n. 106. ⁶¹ Ibid. 258–9.

262

A Patristic Identity

patristic (or rather pseudo-patristic) compilation by a Polish Dominican, Bernardus Paxillus.⁶² Since Socinians claimed that the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity had been a new invention, the traditional argument that the more ancient Fathers had spoken incautiously was indeed useless or even counter-productive. Calovius conceded that this might have been the case of two Fathers, Theophilus of Antioch and Lactantius—but the latter, he astutely observed, lived in Constantine’s time and therefore did not count since the debate only concerned the Fathers before Constantine. All the others wrote unambiguously against the Arian doctrine.⁶³ The post-Nicene vocabulary, moreover, was indispensable as a test of orthodoxy. In 1648, Cheynell denounced to the Westminster Assembly the recent English translation of Jacobus Acontius’ Stratagems, a sixteenthcentury plea for restricting fundamentals to a few points clearly expressed in Scripture, to which Chillingworth had appealed in the Religion of Protestants.⁶⁴ For Cheynell, the translation was part of a design ‘to promote a Syncretisme beyond the Orthodoxe lines of Communication’, that is including Socinians:⁶⁵ ‘Acontius doth cautelously decline the Orthodox expressions of the Ancient Church, in the foure first generall Synods; and doth deliver his Creed in such general expressions, that as we conceive the Socinians may subscribe it, and yet retaine the worst of their blasphemous errours.’⁶⁶ The Fathers not only provided a standard of orthodoxy but also gave a model of orthopraxy: they ‘were rigidly Orthodoxe, and faithfully severe in requiring men to beleeve those grand Articles of Faith which are necessary to Salvation’,⁶⁷ and they refused to hold any communion with Arians or to make any compromise with them.⁶⁸ Baxter called Owen and Cheynell ‘the over-Orthodox Doctors’ for their anxiety, in the 1654 committee on fundamentals, ‘to put in those words, which (as they said) ⁶² Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 255–6, referring to Bernardus Paxillus, Monomachia pro Defensione Fidei SS. Trinitatis, i [no more published] (Cracow, 1616) and Abraham Calovius, ‘’Εξέτασις Fidei De uero Deo Patre, Filio, Spiritu S. Praecipuorum Ecclesiae Dd. Qui ante Concilium Oecumenicum Nicenum tribus prioribus aetatibus a nato θεανθρώπῳ floruerunt’, in Dissertationes Theologicae Rostochienses (Rostock, 1637), 185–222. Paxillus adduced with no reservation such gross fakes as Martial, Prochorus, and the Pseudo-Decretals; Calovius was careful to distinguish between spurious and genuine works. ⁶³ Calovius, ‘Fides Doctorum ante Concilium Nicenum’, 195–7. ⁶⁴ Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, chapter IV, § 16, 203 n. On Acontius ( Jacopo Aconcio) and his influence in 17th-century England, see A. G. Keller, ODNB, i. 161–2; Weber, Falkland, 254–9 and 263–70; McLachlan, Socinianism, 55–62. ⁶⁵ Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 445. ⁶⁶ Cheynell’s report to the Assembly (8 March 1648), published ibid. 455. See Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 505 and 507 [= Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation’, appendix B, vii. 766 and 770]. ⁶⁷ Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 447. ⁶⁸ Ibid. 423–4 and 451.

A Patristic Identity

263

did obviate the Heresies and Errours of the Divines’.⁶⁹ But even John Goodwin, for all his efforts to repudiate the heresiological tradition, quoted the Athanasian Creed against Unitarians, whose doctrine, he claimed, was ‘scarce any thing else but a Rapsody or Fardle of old abhorrid Errors and Heresies of the Anthropomorphits, Arians, Macedonians, Origenists, with several others, who were the greatest troublers of the Gospel in the course of it, and Enemies and Opposers of the Truth in their times’.⁷⁰ Cheynell noted that, according to the Fathers, Christian magistrates should punish seducing heretics. ‘Augustine doth well observe’ that toleration of heresies was a device of the Emperor Julian to destroy Christianity.⁷¹ Cheynell is best known to posterity for his relentless harrying of Chillingworth—into whose grave, according to his own account, he threw the Religion of Protestants with this imprecation: ‘Get thee gone then, thou cursed booke, which hast seduced so many precious soules … get thee gone into the place of rottennesse, that thou maist rot with thy Author, and see corruption.’⁷² The ‘Prophane Catechism’ that he collected out of it gave pride of place to the claim that the Canon of Scripture was based on universal tradition: this was to ‘preferre Tradition before Scripture’ and to favour both atheists and papists.⁷³ Cheynell’s sola Scriptura was definitely very different from Chillingworth’s. When he argued that ‘the Holy Ghost speaking in the Scripture’ was the supreme judge of all controversies, Cheynell referred to Rainolds and Whitaker.⁷⁴ The ambivalence of Interregnum Puritans towards the Fathers was indeed strongly reminiscent of Elizabethan theology. They also went back to the past in preferring continental Reformers above the Fathers. Owen professed in 1657 that he knew of nobody superior to Calvin, ‘and scarcely of anyone equal to him’, in the Church since the Apostles’ time.⁷⁵ The shift that had taken place in the universities since ⁶⁹ Reliquiae Baxterianae, part II, 199. See Coffey, ‘Ticklish Business’, 126–29; N. H. Keeble, ‘ ‘‘Take heed of being too forward in imposinge on others’’: Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Baxterian Tradition’, in Loewenstein and Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics, 282–305. Owen defended the same position in his exchange with Baxter after the Restoration: see Trueman, Claims of Truth, 26 n. 55, and 29–30. ⁷⁰ John Goodwin, ;λήρωμα τὸ ;νευματικόν. Or, a being filled with the Spirit (London, 1670), 381 and 385. This is a series of sermons probably preached in the early 1650s in reaction to John Biddle’s publications (see 374 and Coffey, Goodwin, 246 n. 59). ⁷¹ Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 469. Augustine, ep. 105, 2. 9 (CSEL 34, 601). ⁷² Francis Cheynell, Chillingworthi nouissima. Or, the Sicknesse, Heresie, Death, and Buriall of William Chillingworth (London, 1644), sig. E3r . This pamphlet became well known through the reproduction of much of it in Des Maizeaux, Chillingworth, 312–49. ⁷⁴ Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 290–1. ⁷³ Ibid. sigs. F1r –F2r . ⁷⁵ Letter of John Owen to Kendall, dated 1 April 1657, in George Kendall, Fur pro Tribunali (Oxford, 1657), sig. A1v . On Calvinism at Oxford in those years, see generally Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, 598–9.

264

A Patristic Identity

James I was reversed and modern Reformed syntheses became again the basis of teaching.⁷⁶ Hickman looked for guidance to the old Elizabethan times when ‘Systems and Models of Divinity, or Catechisms’ were read to Oxford students ‘as good means to keep them Orthodox’.⁷⁷ As for ‘ordinary Country Preachers’, who were in no position to study the Fathers personally, their best way to obey the canon Concionatores was ‘to buy such Books, as contain a Confession of Faith confirmed all along with Scriptures and Fathers’. Hickman commended two, both by continental Calvinists, Gaspar Laurentius’ Consensus, and Hottinger’s edition of Cyril Lucaris’s ‘Confession of Faith, as Calvinistical as if it had been extracted out of Calvin’s own Institutions’.⁷⁸ Scrivener, who studied in Cambridge in the 1640s, recalled that Calvin, Beza, and Ursinus had been ‘the Authors first of all recommended unto me, and read by me more then those of our own Church’. He followed on with Perkins.⁷⁹ George Hickes, who arrived at Oxford in 1659, spoke with scorn, fifty years later, of that time ‘when Students of Divinity began with Wollebius, and proceeded no higher than to Calvin, and such Writers’.⁸⁰ In this context, the fortune of Daill´e’s book began to shift decisively. From a weapon which liberal episcopalians were happy to wield against Rome, it became the preserve of Independents and presbyterians. Owen referred ⁷⁶ According to Thomas Smith’s admittedly prejudiced account of the state of Oxford in 1655: ‘nouam Theologiam, relicta ueteri, ex Conciliorum canonibus Patrumque scriptis hausta, e compendiis et systematibus introductam’ (Admodum Reuerendi et Doctissimi Viri D. Roberti Huntingtoni, Episcopi Rapotensis, epistolae … Praemittuntur D. Huntingtoni et D. Bernardi Vitae (London, 1704), Life of Bernard, sep. pagination, 5–6). John Conant, the presbyterian Rector of Exeter College, gave weekly catechetical lectures in the 1650s, ‘in which he went over Piscator’s Aphorisms’ ( Johannes Piscator, Aphorismi doctrinae christianae maximam partem ex Institutione Caluini excerpti) and Joannes Wollebius’ Christianae theologiae compendium (The Life of the Reverend and Venerable John Conant, D.D., Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, Regius Professor of Divinity in that University … written by his son, John Conant, ed. W. Stanton (London, 1823), 13; this passage is quoted in M. Burrows (ed.), The Register of the Visitors of the University of Oxford, from A.D. 1647 to A.D. 1658, Camden Society,  XXIX (London, 1881), l). ⁷⁷ Hickman, Laudensium Apostasia, 7–8. ⁷⁸ Hickman, Historia Quinqu-Articularis Exarticulata, 499. See Gaspar Laurentius, Catholicus ueterum, qui Patres uocantur, ex uerbo diuino, cum superiori confessionum fidei Syntagmate, in omnibus Fidei Christianae articulis Consensus, at the end of Corpus et Syntagma confessionum Fidei (Geneva, 1612); Johann Heinrich Hottinger (the elder), Analecta Historico-theologica (Zurich, 1652), 398–549. ⁷⁹ Mathew Scrivener, A Course of Divinity: or, an Introduction to the Knowledge of the True Catholick Religion; especially as Professed by the Church of England (London, 1674), sig. b2v . See a manuscript note on the author in the Bodl. copy, shelfmark folio Delta 620. ⁸⁰ Hickes, Second Collection of Controversial Letters, p. xl. See also the case of Bull, below, 347.

A Patristic Identity

265

to it in 1654 as the final work on ‘the Authority of the Ancients’, after which ‘all farther labour in that kind may be well spared’.⁸¹ The London ministers praised the (recently published) letter in which George Digby, out of Daill´e, had shown the Fathers’ ‘want of ability in many points of our Controversies: in most, of will to decide them’.⁸² Of particular interest here is a very long letter of Richard Baxter to an otherwise unknown episcopalian divine called Thomas Hone.⁸³ Hone had written to Baxter that, in all matters ‘not sufficiently cleerd’ by Scripture, he took as his chief criterion of orthodoxy ‘both as to Doctrine and Discipline’ the Church of the first 360 years after Christ.⁸⁴ Baxter thought the principle worthy of a full confutation.⁸⁵ He countered with six reasons. First, the Fathers said nothing on most of the points now in controversy. Secondly, where they did, they were seldom unanimous. Thirdly, they committed errors. Fourthly, ‘most of the writings ascribed to them of the two first Centuryes (besides the Scriptures) are forged things’.⁸⁶ Significantly, Baxter paused only to develop the third point, the errors of the Fathers, giving many instances, most of which might be found in the relevant chapter of Daill´e.⁸⁷ Hone might perhaps reply that such errors were not common to all the Fathers, ‘but one held one, and another another’. Even if this were ⁸¹ Owen, Saints perseverance, sig. B2v . Owen subsequently acquired a copy of The Use of the Fathers in the Latin translation of 1655/6 (Bibliotheca Oweniana (London, 1684), Libri Theologici in Quarto, no. 47). ⁸² Ius Diuinum, 2nd part, 148; see also 107. On Digby’s letter, see above, 240. ⁸³ N. H. Keeble and G. F. Nutall, Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, i (Oxford, 1991), no. 343, tentatively suggest identifying him with a Thomas Hone, who was MD (Cantab.) in 1655. The episode is not mentioned in W. M. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millenium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution (London, 1979). ⁸⁴ Doctor Williams’s Library, MS 59, iii, fo. 113v , undated ( January or February 1657 according to Keeble and Nutall, Calendar, no. 356). Hone justified this chronology by a curious allegorical interpretation, which seems to have been of his own devising, of Rev. 11: 1–2. ⁸⁵ Doctor Williams’s Library, MS 59, iii, fo. 119r–v (Baxter to Hone, 13 February 1657). ⁸⁶ Ibid., fo. 119r . ⁸⁷ Baxter confined himself to the ante-Nicene Fathers, whom he took one after the other in chronological order, from Justin Martyr to Lactantius. Justin, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Lactantius are charged with having taught that angels had sex with women; Theophilus of Antioch and Lactantius had unacceptable notions of the Trinity; Irenaeus declared that Christ was 40 or 50 years old when he died and claimed to know it ‘by certaine tradition’; Tertullian held ‘that the soul is corporeall, yea Angells, yea God is corporeall’; Clement of Alexandria received many apocryphal books, ‘as the Gospel according to the Egyptians, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, Matthias traditions etc’ (this one is not in Daill´e); Cyprian, backed by a whole council, held that those baptized by heretics should be rebaptized when they came over to the Church.

266

A Patristic Identity

so, ‘it would prove them incompetent Judges of our Controversyes’. But many errors were actually ‘the most common Judgment of the writers of the Primitive times’. Baxter’s list is rather confused here, as he did not distinguish between doctrines (like the necessity of infant communion) and ceremonies (‘that the newly baptized should tast milke and honny, and be clothed with a white garment’). Moreover he mixed doctrines now rejected by all the major Churches (‘that spirits are corporeall: that the soule goes not to heaven till the Resurrection’) with specifically Calvinistic tenets, on which anti-Calvinists were only too glad to appeal to the Fathers.⁸⁸ Daill´e was too able a controversialist to make such mistakes. Baxter then came briefly to his last two points. The Fathers were at least as hard to understand as Scripture. ‘Lastly as to discipline, it is not possible for you to conforme yourselfe to the first 350 yeares, because the Church continued not so long in one way’, and episcopacy slowly evolved. Baxter concluded his argument by referring his correspondent to Daill´e and his whole letter is not much more than an ill-digested and rather unbalanced summary of The Use of the Fathers, of which he owned a copy.⁸⁹ The most subtle and original point of the book—that patristic writings are no adequate expression of the ancient Church as a whole—was utterly lost on Baxter. In his hands, the book had become a useful repertory of absurdities and mistakes to discredit the Fathers as well as their times. This biased reading was not unique to Baxter. Algernon Sidney professed to ‘yield much’ to the ‘historical’ writings of the Fathers, when they told ‘what was the custom, practice, or belief of the church in their times’: But as for matters of their opinion I think I am to receive no more than what they prove to be true, there being hardly one of them that has not left in his writings some notorious error and several opinions clashing one with the other. I learnt these cautions in reading of them from Monsieur Daill´e, that excellent and learned preacher of the gospel in Charenton.⁹⁰ ⁸⁸ ‘That God electeth man upon foresight of faith and good workes: that none can be sure that they are Justifyed and shall be saved: that we may meritt heaven by good workes: that Justification consisteth in inherent Righteousnes: that the Justified oft fall away totally and finally: that mans will hath power to beleive and obey, while they are unbeleivers.’ ⁸⁹ See G. F. Nutall, ‘A Transcript of Richard Baxter’s Library Catalogue’, JEH 2 (1951), 207–21; 3 (1952), 74–100, no. 747 (the English translation, probably in the 1651 edition). ⁹⁰ Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims, ed. H. W. Blom, E. H. Mulier, and R. Janse (Cambridge, 1996), 111–12. The text was written in 1664–5. On Sidney and Daill´e, whom he probably met at Charenton in the 1630s, see J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge, 1988), 17, 28, 53; id., Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991), 249–50 and 281—although, in

A Patristic Identity

267

In fact, Daill´e’s warnings concerned the historical credit of the Fathers much more than their doctrinal authority.

2. THE EXTINCTION OF THE GREAT TEW SPIRIT? Beleaguered episcopalians must have felt it less and less advisable to attack the use of the Fathers in religious controversies. Episcopacy was now explicitly made by them a fundamental of the Church,⁹¹ and the appeal to antiquity was foremost in its defence. The patristic dossier had lately received a decisive boost with Ussher’s publication at Oxford, in 1645, of the uninterpolated Latin version of Ignatius’ letters (the so-called Short, or Middle, Recension), which appeared to put their authenticity at last beyond all doubt. Ussher’s conclusions were soon afterwards confirmed by Isaac Vossius’ edition of the corresponding Greek text.⁹² Bishop Hall wrote triumphantly to Ussher that this amounted to a full confutation of ‘the assertors of the new-fangled parity’. At the very time that episcopacy had been ‘most unfairly abolished’, Ignatius, the blessed martyr and disciple of the Apostles, pleaded ‘its cause so sagaciously’ as to make its adversaries ashamed of themselves.⁹³ Hammond thought that Ussher’s Ignatius had view of Sidney’s very partial reading of The Use of the Fathers, I wonder whether Scott does not make too much of Daill´e’s influence over his hero. ⁹¹ Henry Hammond, Dissertationes quatuor, quibus Episcopatus Iura ex S. Scripturis et Primaeua Antiquitate adstruuntur, contra sententiam D. Blondelli et aliorum. Quibus praemittitur dissertatio prooemialis, de Antichristo, de Mysterio Iniquitatis, de Diotrephe, et ἐν παρόδῳ, de Gnosticis, sub Apostolorum aeuo se prodentibus (London, 1651), preface, sigs. C2v –C4r . See Mason, Church of England and Episcopacy, 134–42; Packer, Transformation of Anglicanism, esp. 106–20; Spurr, Restoration Church, 132–43. ⁹² Polycarpi et Ignatii Epistolae … Accessit et Ignatianarum Epistolarum uersio antiqua alia, ex duobus Manuscriptis in Anglia repertis, nunc primum in lucem edita. Quibus praefixa est … Iacobi Usserii Archiepiscopi Armachani Dissertatio (Oxford, 1644: it came out in March 1644–5: Madan, ii. 382–3, no. 1739); Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii martyris; quae nunc primum lucem uident ex bibliotheca Florentina. Adduntur S. Ignatii epistolae, quales uulgo circumferuntur. Adhaec S. Barnabae epistola. Accessit uniuersis translatio uetus. Edidit, et Notas addidit, Isaacus Vossius (Amsterdam, 1646). On the history of these editions, see J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, 5 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1889–90; repr. Peabody, Mass., 1989), ii/1, esp. 231–45 (to which H. de Quehen, ‘Politics and Scholarship in the Ignatian Controversy’, Seventeenth Century, 13 (1998), 69–84, adds little); F. F. Blok, Isaac Vossius and his Circle: His Life until his Farewell to Queen Christina of Sweden, 1618–1655 (Groningen, 2000), 133–4 and 208–13; Quantin, ‘L’Orthodoxie, la censure et la gloire’, 138–59. ⁹³ Hall to Ussher, 25 May 1647, in Parr, Usher, letter CCXVIII, 516–17: ‘causamque iniquissime iam abdicatae ἐπισκοπη˜ ς in Ecclesiae totius foro tam cate agit, ut non pudere non possit hesternae Disciplinae astipulatores, tam male-suscepti, litis iniustae patrocinii.’

268

A Patristic Identity

appeared ‘not without a special providence of God’.⁹⁴ Presbyterians were slow to understand that it radically altered the state of the question. In 1654 the London ministers still denied the genuineness of Ignatius’ letters on the strength of arguments that they had found in patristic handbooks like Rivet’s, but which only applied to the interpolated text (the Long Recension).⁹⁵ Clement of Rome’s epistle to the Corinthians, the publication of which (by Patrick Young in Oxford in 1633) had been another major achievement of English scholarship and had heralded the rediscovery of the ‘Apostolic Fathers’,⁹⁶ was less clear-cut, since, as Grotius immediately pointed out, it did not mention the threefold ministry of bishop, priests, and deacons. According to Grotius, this proved that the text had been written at a time when the Churches were still governed by councils of presbyters.⁹⁷ Young had carefully refrained from tackling the question in his notes, and it was later said—after his subsequent collaboration with Parliamentary authorities had made him suspect in many an episcopalian eye—‘that from his Edition of St Clemens’s Epistle to the Corinthians, if it does not appear he was for Presbytery, neither does it that he was concern’d for Episcopacy’.⁹⁸ Presbyterians gladly appealed to the text.⁹⁹ Hammond succeeded nonetheless in marshalling it for the episcopal cause: Clement denounced schism, that is the revolt of private persons against their bishops.¹⁰⁰ Episcopalians had been vanquished in the battlefield but they were confident that they were winning the scholarly argument against the ‘Aerians’.¹⁰¹ Their case could best be argued if the Fathers were treated according to Du Perron’s distinction, not as authoritative teachers but as witnesses of the belief and practice of the primitive Church. In his 1640 defence ⁹⁴ Hammond, Dissertationes quatuor, 57. See also his A Vindication of the Dissertations concerning Episcopacie: from the Answers, or Exceptions offered against them by the London Ministers, in their Ius Diuinum Ministerii Euangelici (London, 1654), 145. ⁹⁵ Ius Diuinum, 2nd part, 108–14. See Hammond’s reply,Vindication, 145–52. ⁹⁶ … Clementis ad Corinthios epistola prior. Ex laceris reliquiis uetustissimi exemplaris Bibliothecae Regiae, eruit, lacunas expleuit, Latine uertit, et notis breuioribus illustrauit Patricius Junius (Oxford, 1633). ⁹⁷ Grotius to J´erˆome Bignon, 17 July 1634, Briefwisseling, v, no. 1938, 261. This letter was published in Hugonis Grotii epistolae ad Gallos, nunc primum editae (Leiden, 1648), no. 154, 418–23, and was used against English episcopalians by [Lewis Du Moulin], Patronus bonae fidei, in causa Puritanorum contra Hierarchicos Anglos (n.p., 1672), epistola, 67. ⁹⁸ James Eckersall to Thomas Smith, 10 October 1693, MS Smith 49, p. 195. ⁹⁹ See the commentary in Blondel, Apologia, 9–13. ¹⁰⁰ Hammond, Dissertationes quatuor, 263–4. ¹⁰¹ Ibid., dedication, sig. B3r : ‘Hierarchiam Ecclesiasticam … calamitosam, sed erectam, et nunquam de deuictis et explosis Aerianis gloriosius, quam de iam prosperis et uictoribus, triumphantem.’ On Aerius, see above, 102.

A Patristic Identity

269

of episcopacy, Hall quoted Augustine’s axiom: what is universally received in the Church and has not been instituted by any council must be an apostolic tradition.¹⁰² Hall noted that Daniel Chamier had rightly held against Bellarmine that ‘the Evidence of these kinde of Traditions from the universall receit of the Church, doth not breed a plerophory of assent’.¹⁰³ But he doth not herein touch upon us; since his Opposition is only concerning points of faith; Our defence is concerning matter of fact; neither do we hold it needfull there should be so full a sway of assent to the testimony of the Churches practice herein, as there ever ought to be to the direct sentence of the sacred Scripture.... Is it not enough that I doe as verily believe (upon these humane proofes) what was done by the Apostles for the plantation and settlement of the Church, as I do believe there was a Rome before Christ’s Incarnation; or that Julius Caesar was Emperour, or Dictator there; or Tully an Oratour, and Consul; or Cato a wise Senator; or Catiline a Traytor?¹⁰⁴

Hammond stressed in 1651 that the Canon of the New Testament was grounded on patristic testimonies.¹⁰⁵ This was why the Church of England had ‘taken as its constant principle (and as the foundation of the English Reformation) that, in deciding controversies of faith or practice, the first place should be given to the Scriptures, and the second to the bishops, martyrs, and ecclesiastical writers of the first centuries’.¹⁰⁶ Hammond developed his thought on this point in a short but essential text of 1652, ‘Concerning the way of Resolving those Controversies which are not so clearly stated and resolved in the Scriptures’.¹⁰⁷ There are indeed ‘Omissions, or Obscurities of Intimations’ in Scripture, especially in the New Testament, because the things referred to were well known at the time and ‘any larger description of them was perfectly superfluous’. It should not be objected ‘that the Scriptures were written for our instruction, and not onely for them in whose age they were written’, since ‘for those things, which are not at large set down there … God hath graciously provided a competent supply by those Records of Primitive and pure Antiquity, that ¹⁰² Hall, Episcopacie by Divine Right asserted, 1st part, 41. ¹⁰³ Chamier, Panstratia, i, l. 8us, c. XIII, 258–62, esp. 260. ¹⁰⁴ Hall, Episcopacie by Divine Right asserted, 43–4. See also 45. ¹⁰⁵ Hammond, Dissertationes quatuor, 2, 50, 102. ¹⁰⁶ Ibid. 50: ‘quod in Controuersiis fidei, aut πράξεως decernendis, illud firmum ratumque semper habuerit (et huic basi Reformationem Britannicam niti uoluerit) ut Scripturis Primae, dein primorum saeculorum Episcopis, Martyribus, Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis Secundae deferrentur.’ ¹⁰⁷ Henry Hammond, A Letter of resolution to six quaeres, of present use in the Church of England (London, 1653), 1–33. The work came out on 1 November 1652 (Pocock, ‘Illustrations’, The Ecclesiastic and Theologian, 13 ( January–June 1852), 323–4).

270

A Patristic Identity

are by the good hand of Providence happily preserved to us’.¹⁰⁸ After having thus come dangerously close to a theory of the insufficiency of Scripture, Hammond advanced his supreme argument: ‘The Authority of the Canon of Scripture, or the first ground of beleiving it to contain … the word and will of God, is taken from the authentick testimony of the Christian Church of the first ages, and not from any other wayes of probation (one or more) abstracted from this, or not superstructed on it.’¹⁰⁹ The authority of the Canon could not be proved ‘from the inspiredness of the Apostles’ (as the Westminster divines had recently attempted to do), since this was ‘the begging of the question’.¹¹⁰ Now, ‘the accepting of so great a thing, as is the Canon of Scripture, primarily and fundamentally from this testimony of the ancient Church’ is ‘a very great presumption, and acknowledgement of the force of the argument drawn from the universal testimony of the first and purest ages of the Church’—the very inference that Chillingworth had done his best to prove unwarranted.¹¹¹ Therefore whatsoever hath the concordant attestation of the Christian Church of the first ages (the Scripture remaining obscure, or silent in the matter) that it was the doctrine or practise Apostolical, there remains not to any that now lives (thus remote from those fountains of story, and onely repositories of such truths) any imaginable ground of sober or prudent doubting, or questioning the truth of it.¹¹²

The Fathers were also called for as witnesses in political debates. After David Owen—whose Herod and Pilat reconciled was reprinted in 1642 under a title suited to the times¹¹³—Royalist theologians stressed that the Fathers had professed non-resistance to persecuting heathen emperors, although Christians were already very numerous at that time. Tertullian had claimed that Christians were everywhere in the Empire, pagan temples only excepted, and that they would have been ready for any war, ‘if this doctrine did not command to be killed rather than to kill’.¹¹⁴ This was an essential point since it precluded the traditional response, which had been first used by defenders of the papal deposing power, that the primitive Christians only refrained from resistance because they were not strong enough.¹¹⁵ Against ‘that unhappy learning of the contrary side’, Goodwin ¹⁰⁸ Hammond, Letter of resolution, 14–15. ¹⁰⁹ Ibid. 21. ¹¹⁰ Ibid. 25–6. ¹¹¹ Ibid. 26. ¹¹² Ibid. 27. ¹¹³ A Perswasion to Loyalty, or the Subjects dutie. Wherein is proved that resisting or deposing of Kings (under what specious pretences soever couched) is utterly unlawfull. Collected by D.O. Dedicated to all dutifull Subjects (London, 1642). Probably to make the work more effective, some cuts were made, but they did not concern patristic testimonies. ¹¹⁴ Tertullian, Apologeticum, 37. 4–5 (CC 1, 148). ¹¹⁵ See Aquinas, Summ. theol., IIa IIae, q. XII, art. 2, ad 1um (edit. leonina, viii. 105), and more recently Bellarmine, Disputationes, i, 3a controu. generalis, liber V, c. 7, col. 1084. Among Calvinists, a similar position had been propounded by George

A Patristic Identity

271

protested that Tertullian’s tirade on the great number of Christians in his time was unreliable. ‘This was no point of faith, nor of Christian Religion; and therefore a devout Father might easily fall upon a misprision herein’. In any case, Tertullian became a Montanist and erred against the faith, so as to be ‘a memorable example and warning (as it were) from heaven, how unsafe and dangerous it is to build upon the authority of men’. He wanted to extol the patience of Christians, and it is well known that ‘even in the pious and Orthodox Fathers themselves’ there were already ‘some fibrae of that root of bitternesse which afterwards … flourished above measure in the times of Popery … I mean an inclination to credit and countenance their religion in the sight of the heathen … by very slender reports and relations of things, as of Miracles, Visions, strange accidents, etc. which are generally rejected, as fabulous and false, by the sounder and more considerate knowledge of these latter daies’.¹¹⁶ On this point, Hammond again defended the historical credit of the Fathers: ‘lesse reason is there to deny the authority of the ancients in matters of fact (which if they were not evident to them, must needs be much lesse evident to us …) then of faith, the ground of which being only the written word of God, is common with them to us.’¹¹⁷ It is no wonder that Hammond defended Justin’s testimony concerning Simon Magus’ statue in Rome.¹¹⁸ Refusal to accept that Justin could have been mistaken became henceforth a constant of Church of England apologetics, right up until the nineteenth century. The amount of discussion devoted to what would seem a fairly minor point was actually proportionate to the issues at stake. If Justin could not be relied upon when, in an apology for Christians addressed to the Emperor and on the evidence of his own senses, he confidently asserted a fact which anybody could easily check, what would remain of the credibility of the Fathers as witnesses?¹¹⁹ Buchanan, De Iure Regni apud Scotos, Dialogus (Edinburgh, 1579), 76–7. Owen, Herod and Pilat reconciled, 6, countered with Tertullian’s testimony. ¹¹⁶ John Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme, or, Truth pleading as well the Necessity, as the Lawfulnesse of this present Warre, for the suppressing of that Butcherly brood of Cavaliering Incendiaries, who are now hammering England, to make an Ireland of it (London, 1642), 16–17. On the work and its influence, see Coffey, Goodwin, 85–91; E. Vallance, ‘Preaching to the Converted: Religious Justification for the English Civil War’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 65 (2002), 415. ¹¹⁷ Henry Hammond, Of resisting the Lawfull Magistrate upon colour of Religion (London, 1643), 10–11. Cf. [Dudley Digges], The Unlawfulnesse of Subjects taking up Armes against their Soveraigne, in what case soever (n.p., 1643), 51. ¹¹⁸ Hammond, Dissertationes quatuor, 30–1. ¹¹⁹ See Origenis contra Celsum libri octo, ed. Spencer, notes, sep. pagination, 32, quoting Hammond (on the editor, see Alum. Cant., iv. 134); [Robert Jenkin], Defensio S. Augustini aduersus Joannis Phereponi in eius Opera Animaduersiones (Cambridge, 1707),

272

A Patristic Identity

Hammond actually used Justin’s testimony to interpret ‘the man of sin’ and ‘the mystery of iniquity’ of 2 Thessalonians 2—which Protestant exegesis had always identified with the papal Antichrist—as referring to Simon and his followers, the Gnostic heretics.¹²⁰ Hegesippus’ complaint about the defloration of the Church was meant, Hammond thought, of the Gnostics’ open persecution of the Orthodox Christians.¹²¹ The assault on tradition which had been so characteristic of Falkland and his friends began to be consigned to oblivion. As early as 1646, Hammond was careful to tone down Falkland’s views. ‘His Lordship’s reasonings about tradition and authority of fathers … are not designed, or fitted to the taking away all authority from them, to make them vile or meane to any, but onely to reduce them in ordinem, to prove them not infallible.’¹²² Hammond conceded to Falkland’s Roman Catholic critics that millenarianism was not ‘a Catholick doctrine, (much lesse a tradition)’ and that Justin did not 176–7; George Hickes’s letter to the translator (Hilkiah Bedford) of [Jean-Franc¸ois Baltus], An Answer to Mr. de Fontenelle’s History of Oracles (London, 1709), sig. A3v , and Bedford’s preface, sig. b3v ; William Reeves, The Apologies of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Minucius Felix in defence of the Christian religion with the commonitory of Vincentius Lirinensis, translated with a preliminary discourse upon each author. Together with a prefatory dissertation about the right use of the Fathers (London, 1709), i. 54–6 note w; Thomas Jenkins, An Impartial Examination of the Free Inquiry: the Primitive Fathers vindicated, and the Necessity of Miracles maintain’d, to the Conclusion of the Third Century. In a Letter to Dr Middleton (Cambridge, 1754), 75, against Conyers Middleton, A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers, which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church, from the Earliest Ages, through several successive Centuries. By which is shewn, That we have no sufficient Reason to believe, upon the Authority of the Primitive Fathers, that any such Powers were continued to the Church, after the Days of the Apostles (London, 1749), 40; Edward Burton, An Inquiry into the heresies of the apostolic age, in eight sermons preached before the University of Oxford [Bampton Lectures 1829] (Oxford, 1829), 374–8; Blunt, Right Use of the Early Fathers, 165–6. That the supposed statue of Simon belonged to Semo is generally accepted today, though there are interesting divergences of interpretation. For F. Heintz, Simon ‘le magicien’: Actes 8, 5–25 et l’accusation de magie contre les proph`etes thaumaturges dans l’Antiquit´e (Paris, 1997; Cahiers de la Revue biblique 39), 120–1, Justin made no mistake but ‘falsified the text on purpose’; for some scholars (see references in D. Cˆot´e, Le Th`eme de l’opposition entre Pierre et Simon dans les Pseudo-Cl´ementines (Paris, 2001) 149), the error did not originate from Justin but from the Simonian sect. Seventeenth-century divines would have made much of this. ¹²⁰ Henry Hammond, A Paraphrase, and Annotations upon all the Books of the New Testament (London, 1653), 715–21. ¹²¹ See e.g. Hammond, Answer to the Animadversions, 13, 39, 160. Hegesippus had been quoted against the appeal to antiquity by Milton, Of Reformation, 549–50. Hammond’s explanation was attacked by John Owen, Of Schisme (Oxford, 1657), 142–3, who repeated the traditional Protestant view (‘the good man intended corruptions in the Church, not out of it, nor oppositions to it’), and defended by Hammond, A Continuation of the Defence of Hugo Grotius, in an Answer to the Review of his Annotations (London, 1657), 35–6. ¹²² Hammond, View of some exceptions, 93–4.

A Patristic Identity

273

imply as much. He energetically protested against the correction of Justin’s text (to read ‘who are not of the pure and holy Opinion of Christians’) as ‘a strange and bold Criticisme of very ill example’.¹²³ To answer Roman Catholic proselytizers, the Royalist Henry Ferne, a future Restoration bishop, set out in 1652 the usual Protestant arguments against unwritten traditions. He even denied that the Canon had no other foundation than ‘the consent of all ages’: ‘although scripture is so brought downe to us, yet being received upon such Tradition, it discovers it selfe to be divine, by its owne light, or those internall arguments (as they are called) which appeare in it to those that are versed in it.’¹²⁴ In a passage reminiscent of Daill´e’s newly translated Use of the Fathers, Ferne observed that popish arguments against the sufficiency of Scripture could be used much more cogently against the Fathers.¹²⁵ He pointed out that, in a number of instances, the Fathers had erred ‘with a generall consent (as in the Millenary beliefe, the Infant communion, and the place of faithfull Soules out of Heaven till the day of Judgment)’.¹²⁶ He had previously alleged the ‘grosse errours’ of millenarianism and the giving of the eucharist to infants ‘as necessary to their salvation’, to show that it was legitimate to use one’s ‘private judgment’, otherwise ‘there would be a necessity of the Churches continuing in errour’.¹²⁷ Ferne must have become conscious of the potential danger of such arguments, since he did his best to restrict their significance in his next book: nothing was intended or can be concluded by those Instances [the millenary belief, and infant communion] to the prejudice of the whole Church, as if thereby might be proved, that the whole Church Universally and in all the Members of it may Err, and be infected with Error in points of concernment; or prejudicial to the Faith; for that of the Millenary, as it was not Universal, so not of such moment: and that of the Infant-Communion, though more Universal and of longer continuance, was but a tolerable Mistake.... the instances of those Errors were … onely made use of against the Church of Rome, and the Errors there prevailing, which they will not acknowledge can take hold on that Church.¹²⁸

It is no accident that Hales’s Golden remains, published by his episcopalian disciples on the eve of the Restoration, included neither the Tract of Schism ¹²³ Ibid. 87–9. ¹²⁴ [Henry Ferne], Of the division between the English and Romish Church upon the Reformation (London, 1652), 139–40. On Ferne, see Smith, Constitutional Royalism, 228–31. ¹²⁵ Ferne, Of the division, 204. ¹²⁶ Ibid. 205. ¹²⁷ Ibid. 57–8. ¹²⁸ Henry Ferne, Certain Considerations of present Concernment: touching this Reformed Church of England. With a particular Examination of An: Champny (Doctor of the Sorbon) his exceptions against the Lawful Calling and Ordination of the Protestant Bishops and Pastors of this Church (London, 1653), sigs. A8v –A9r .

274

A Patristic Identity

nor the sermon on private judgement.¹²⁹ Peter Gunning, who oversaw the section devoted to sermons,¹³⁰ significantly chose to open it with ‘Abuses of hard places of Scripture’ (on 2 Peter 3: 16). This was one of Hales’s earliest sermons, which he had preached at St Mary’s, Oxford, in 1617 and, exceptionally, published in the same year.¹³¹ Hales there warned subtle men against ‘the too much pleasing themselves in the goodness of their ¹²⁹ The editorial history of Hales’s works is complex. After his death (on 19 May 1656), two booksellers began independently to work at a collected edition. On 28 August 1656, 29 December 1656, and 7 September 1657, Timothy Garthwait entered in the Stationers’ Register Hales’s letter from the Synod of Dort and several sermons (E & R, ii. 81, 104, 144). Most of these were published as Golden remains of the ever Memorable Mr John Hales of Eton College (London, printed for Tim. Garthwait, 1659; BL, shelfmark E 769 and G 20084; Thomason acquired his copy on 13 July). On Pearson’s role in this edition, see E. Churton, ‘Memoir of the Life and Writings of Bishop Pearson’, in Pearson, Minor Theological Works, i, pp. xxxviii–xxxix; on its anti-Calvinist purpose, Milton (ed.), British Delegation and Synod of Dort, pp. xix–xx. The collection did not include the Tract of schism. Later, presumably after Garthwait’s death in 1669 (H. R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London, 1907), 80), the unsold copies of Golden remains were bought by Robert Pawlett (see the copy at BL, shelfmark C. 77 b. 31, with a cancel title page: ‘printed for R. Pawlett’, no year). Pawlett also acquited the copyright since he entered the contents of the collection in the Stationers’ Register on 22 October 1671 (E & R, ii. 433). The second undertaking was by Richard Marriott, who entered in the Stationers’ Register A Tract of Ethicks [sic] and several sermons (12, 18 September, 6 November 1657, 24 December 1659, E & R, ii. 145, 147, 152, 246). He published four of these (the first one being the sermon on private judgement), as Sermons preach’d at Eton, by John Hales, Late Fellow of that Colledge. Not till now Published (London, printed by J. G. [John Grismond II] for Richard Marriot, 1660): in contrast to Golden remains, there are no preliminaries. In 1673, both Marriott and Pawlett reprinted their collections: Sermons preach’d at Eton, by John Hales, Late Fellow of that Colledge. The Second Edition (London, printed by T. Newcomb for Richard Marriott, 1673; advertised in the Term Catalogue for Easter 1673, TC, i. 137); Golden remains of the ever Memorable Mr John Hales of Eaton-College, etc. The Second Impression. With additions from the Authours own Copy, viz. Sermons and Miscellanies. Also Letters and expresses concerning the Synod of Dort (London, printed by Tho. Newcomb for Robert Pawlett, 1673; advertised in the Term Catalogue for Trinity 1673, TC, i. 143). The additions were mostly pieces (e.g. the letter ‘Concerning the lawfulness of marriages betwixt cousin-germans’) that had been entered by Garthwait in the Stationers’ Register but had not been included in the 1659 edition. Since Pawlett and Marriott used the same printer, it is possible that there was an agreement between them. The two collections are bound together in the BL copy, shelfmark 3752 ee. 7, which also includes A Tract concerning Schisme and Schismaticks (signed and paginated separately, with no mention of printer or publisher). ¹³⁰ Golden remains (1659), sig. a3v . For an overview of Gunning’s career, see K. W. Stephenson, ODNB, xxiv. 249–51; H. A. Lloyd Jukes, ‘Peter Gunning, 1613–84: Scholar, Churchman, Controversialist’, in C. W. Dugmore and C. Duggan (eds.), SCH, i (London, 1964), 222–32. ¹³¹ John Hales, A Sermon preached at St Maries in Oxford upon Tuesday in Easter Weeke, 1617. Concerning the abuses of obscure and difficult places of holy Scripture, and remedies against them (Oxford, 1617). See Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, 581–2.

A Patristic Identity

275

own conceits’,¹³² which would end in ‘deep and subtil heresies’.¹³³ He attacked the desire to innovate and ‘to amend what is already well’,¹³⁴ and quoted Gregory of Nazianzus on the manifold divisions and intestine wars created by ‘great and ardent tempers’.¹³⁵ He denounced the pretention of the unlearned to interpret Scripture as a ‘bold intrusion … into the chair of the teacher’. Hales quoted Jerome’s complaint on this point (a text much used by Roman Catholic writers) and concluded that ‘Scripture is given to all, to learn: but to teach, and to interpret, onely to a few’.¹³⁶ Christian learning included ‘the knowledge of the state and succession of doctrine in the Church from time to time; a thing very necessary for the determining the controversies of these our days’.¹³⁷ Hales also denounced the pretences to an inner spirit,¹³⁸ which led to ‘schisme and contention in the Church’.¹³⁹ Hales was careful to point out that the learning he required was not to be equated with academic studies or extensive reading,¹⁴⁰ and there were in his sermon many elements of theological liberalism, which anticipated his later views.¹⁴¹ In the context of 1659, however, after the dread caused by ‘mecanick preachers’, the sermon was much more likely to be read as a warning against, than as an appeal to, private judgement in religion. The preface to the collection, written by John Pearson, rather extenuated Hales’s recourse to that principle, as if it had been something quite peculiar to himself and not to be generalized.¹⁴² Even before the Restoration, if we are to believe Scrivener, Hammond called Daill´e’s Use of the Fathers in private a ‘defamatory book’.¹⁴³ ¹³² Golden remains (1659), 7. ¹³³ Ibid. 8. ¹³⁴ Ibid. 8–9. ¹³⁵ Ibid. 9. Gregory of Nazianzus, oratio de moderatione in disputando (XXVI in Hales’s time, XXXII since the Maurists), 3–5 (PG 36, 175–80). ¹³⁶ Ibid. 9. Jerome, ep. 53 ad Paulinum, 7 (PL 22, 544). Cf. e.g. New Testament (Rheims), sig. a3v . ¹³⁷ Ibid. 11. ¹³⁸ Ibid. 15–16. ¹³⁹ Ibid. 16. ¹⁴⁰ Ibid. 9–10. ¹⁴¹ One should not impose probable reasonings as certain conclusions or points of faith, but restrict oneself to ‘the plain text of Scripture’ (18–19); the Church should not pretend to determine every controversy (23); infallibility does not belong to the Fathers, the councils, or the Church (20). The point was made convincingly by Elson, Hales, 30–42. ¹⁴² Pearson, ‘To the Reader’, in Golden remains, sig. a2r : ‘if ever any man might be allowed in these matters to judge, it was he who had so long, so much, so advantageously consider’d, and which is more, never had the least wordly designe in his determinations.’ ¹⁴³ Scrivener, Apologia pro Patribus, sig. A2v . If the statement is true, it would most likely refer to Hammond’s last years. According to Henchman, Hammond always spoke honourably of Daill´e (‘Diatriba Praeliminaris’ prefixed to Henry Hammond, De Confirmatione, siue Benedictione, post Baptismum, solenni, per impositionem Manuum Episcopi celebrata, commentarius ex Sententia Ecclesiae Anglicanae. Cui accessit Diatriba Praeliminaris (Oxford, 1661), sig. A2r : ‘in priuatis alloquiis debitis auxit semper encomiis’. See

276

A Patristic Identity

Hammond, it is true, objected to Thomas White’s reviling of Daill´e and he pointed out two cases where White had falsely charged The Use of the Fathers with falsification.¹⁴⁴ But he carefully refrained from passing any judgement on the book as a whole and he professed to have found in White’s answer ‘some things very true, and seasonably observed, as that neither the Chiliasts nor the Arrians had any title to universal Tradition’, and that Hegesippus’ testimony ‘belonged only to the rising up of hereticks against the Church not to the Churches corruption’.¹⁴⁵ It was later claimed that Hammond had ‘defended’ Daill´e against White:¹⁴⁶ this was rather a half-hearted defence. Daill´e was still far from being an episcopalian bˆete noire. After the failure of their last risings in the 1620s, the Huguenots were keen to demonstrate their loyalism to the French monarchy. Their leaders were aware that assimilation with seditious English Puritans would have disastrous consequences. As Roman Catholic divines such as Petau blamed French presbyterian writers first for the Revolution and then for the execution of Charles I,¹⁴⁷ pastors did their best to stifle any expression of sympathy for Parliamentarians among their folk. They ‘desperately identified themselves with the Church of England’.¹⁴⁸ In his church in Charenton near Paris, which acted as the religious centre of French Protestantism, Daill´e cultivated those English exiles, such as John Cosin, who were willing to consort with him. Cosin professed to ‘have good acquaintance’ with the ministers of Charenton and to ‘find them to be very deserving and learned men, great Lovers and Honourers of our Church, notwithstanding the Loss which She hath lately received in externall Matters, wherein we are agreed that the Essence of true Religion doth not consist’.¹⁴⁹ Daill´e’s protest against ‘fanatics’ who below, n. 164, for the variant copies of this work). For Scrivener’s dubious claim that Thomas Smith (of Cambridge) was also opposed to The Use of the Fathers, see above, 248. ¹⁴⁴ Hammond, Dispatcher Dispatched, 55–7 and 62–3: in the first case the fault was not Daill´e’s but his English translator’s, in the other there was no fault at all. ¹⁴⁵ Ibid. 61–2. ¹⁴⁶ Humphrey Henchman’s preface to Hammond, De Confirmatione, sig. A2r–v . ¹⁴⁷ See Petau, Theologicorum Dogmatum tomus tertius (Paris, 1644), De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia, praefatio, 652–3;Theologicorum Dogmatum tomi quarti pars altera (Paris, 1650), ‘Appendix de Hierarchia Ecclesiastica’, epilogus, 751–2. ¹⁴⁸ E. Labrousse, ‘Calvinism in France, 1598–1685’, in Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 303–4. See e.g. Claude Sarrau to Isaac Vossius, 26 March 1650, RK, III E 9 (4). ¹⁴⁹ Letter of Cosin to Mr Warren, 6 April 1658, in Heylyn, Examen historicum, part I, 292. On Cosin’s relations with Daill´e and other Charenton ministers, see Smith, ‘Vita Cosini’, 19–20—George Hickes, who had read the text in manuscript, objected to it as too favourable to Huguenots, but Smith did not change it: see letter of Hickes to Smith, 1 June 1704, Bodl., MS Smith 50, pp. 125–6. According to a letter of the Roman Catholic convert Thomas Gawen to the Jesuit George Bisset, 22 August 1658

A Patristic Identity

277

dared accuse Cosin of popery was published by Heylyn. For harassed episcopalians, the testimony of such a prominent figure of European Calvinism—‘one of the greatest account, and the best Deserts amongst the reformed Church-men in France’—could not but be welcome.¹⁵⁰ Daill´e was among the Huguenot divines who were approached in 1660 for testimonials of Charles II’s Protestant faith and subsequently for a declaration that episcopacy was lawful.¹⁵¹ In 1662, when Roman Catholic controversialists accused him of despising episcopacy, Daill´e protested that he was in full communion with English bishops. Although he could wish that episcopal authority were ‘reformed according to God’s word and the most ancient Church’, he acknowledged that ‘at bottom, the function of bishops is good and lawful, and was established by the Apostles, according to the Lord’s command, in the churches that they founded’.¹⁵² This declaration was rather ambiguous—and, in different contexts, Daill´e spoke harshly against ‘ancient and modern hierarchists’—but the apologist John Durel was glad to quote it against English Dissenters.¹⁵³ The fact remained that Daill´e’s full-scale assault on Roman Catholicism had unpleasant repercussions for the episcopal Church of England. It could not be expected that Church of England divines would remain (published by Chaney, Grand Tour, 391–2), Cosin moved closer to the Huguenots in the late 1650s. He was rather an exception among English divines in this respect: Pocock, ‘Illustrations’, Ecclesiastic and Theologian, 6 ( July to December 1848), 73–4, 220, 223; Mason, Church of England and Episcopacy, 170–6 and 221–32. ¹⁵⁰ Extract of a letter of Daill´e to a friend in Cambridge, published in Heylyn, Examen historicum, part I, 294: ‘Tuus Cosins, imo noster (intercedit enim nobis cum illo suauis amicitia atque familiaritas) mihi admodum probatur. Bestiae sunt et quidem fanatici qui eum de Papismo suspectum habent, a quo uix reperias qui sit magis alienus.’ The identification of the friend with Smith is confirmed by Durel, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Vindiciae, 66. ¹⁵¹ Certain Letters evidencing the Kings stedfastness in the Protestant Religion: sent from the Princess of Turenne, and the Ministers of Charenton, to some Persons of Quality in London (London, 1660), 17–24. Daill´e responded positively on the question of episcopacy as well, though the project apparently came to nothing. See R. S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement: The Influence of the Laudians 1649–1662 (New York, 1951), 131–2 and 134. ¹⁵² Jean Daill´e, Replique … aux deux livres que Messieurs Adam et Cottiby ont publiez contre luy (Geneva, 1662), 3rd part, 261–2: ‘Et bien que nous souhaiterions, que le Ministere des Evesques fust mieux regl´e, qu’il n’est, leur puissance sur leurs troupeaux, et sur leurs Prestres reform´ee selon la parole de Dieu et selon la plus ancienne Eglise … tant y a que nous confessons, qu’au fond leur charge est bonne et legitime, e´tablie par les Apˆotres selon le commandement du Seigneur, dans les Eglises, qu’ils ont fond´ees.’ ¹⁵³ Durel, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Vindiciae, 521–2. Compare the strongly presbyterian statements in Jean Daill´e, Exposition de l’epistre de S. Paul a Tite en dix-huit sermons, prononc´es a` Charanton, l’an 1652. 1653. et 1654 (Charenton, 1655), 48–52 and 87–100; Du Moulin, Patronus bonae fidei, epistola, 42–4.

278

A Patristic Identity

silent on the matter for ever. A first, revealing clash occurred on the eve of the Restoration, over the book on confirmation that Daill´e published in 1659. Daill´e had built on a thorough survey of the historical evidence to conclude that laying on of hands and anointing with oil were accessory ceremonies to baptism, which had been first introduced at the end of the second century, when Christians had begun to deviate from primitive simplicity and to imitate Jewish rites.¹⁵⁴ Only very late and only in the Latin West had confirmation become a sacrament of its own and been appropriated to the bishop. In the Eastern Church, unction had been performed by simple priests ‘from the earliest times’, as witnessed by Pseudo-Ambrose’s (Ambrosiaster’s) commentary on Paul: ‘in Egypt, priests seal (consignant) if the bishop is not present.’¹⁵⁵ Such a position would not have upset Elizabethan divines. Hooker had cited the same text of Ambrosiaster’s commentary in book VII of his Ecclesiastical Polity, as a convincing argument that confirmation, as opposed to ordination, was not ‘any part of that power which hath always belonged openly unto Bishops’.¹⁵⁶ Hooker’s seventh book, admittedly, lay dormant until 1662, and Bancroft confidently declared at the Hampton Court conference that ‘none of all the Fathers ever admitted any to confirme but Bishops alone’.¹⁵⁷ As late as 1611, though, Downham, ‘out of a Christian and charitable desire to preserve the credit of such reformed Churches as have no Bishops’ against the objections of papists, used ‘Ambrose’ to prove that ‘in the case of necessity, and in the want or absence of the Bishop the antient Church held it lawfull for Ministers to impose hand’ in confirmation. Therefore ‘in a case of necessity, we may well thinke they [the Fathers] would have allowed of ’ presbyterian ordination.¹⁵⁸ Episcopalian divines could no longer afford such concessions. An essential point in their case was that ‘catholic antiquity affixed to the order’ of bishops ‘a power distinct and superior to that of presbyters’, of which ‘confirmation ¹⁵⁴ Jean Daill´e, De duobus Latinorum ex unctione Sacramentis, confirmatione et extrema ut uocant unctione disputatio (Geneva, 1659), 119–26. A first version of the book was already completed by 1647 but could not be published at that time, because booksellers thought it would not sell (see below, n. 408). Daill´e certainly reworked it, since, 220, he referred to Hammond’s Dissertationes quatuor. ¹⁵⁵ Daill´e, De duobus Latinorum ex unctione Sacramentis, 218–20, quoting Ambrosiaster, Commentarius in epistulas Paulinas, ad Ephesios 4: 11–12, 5 (CSEL 81/3, 100): ‘Denique apud Aegyptum presbyteri consignant, si praesens non sit episcopus.’ ¹⁵⁶ Hooker, Lawes, VII. 6. 4 [Works, iii. 172]. ¹⁵⁷ See Barlow, Summe and substance, 34. ¹⁵⁸ Downham, Defence, book 3, 107–9, also quoting (as ‘Augustine’) the parallel text of the Quaestiones ueteris et noui Testamenti, on which see below. Cf. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 467–8.

A Patristic Identity

279

of baptized people’ was a part.¹⁵⁹ On the other side, Blondel, followed as usual by the London presbyters, had argued that Ambrosiaster’s testimony proved that ‘the power of bishops and presbyters is the same by nature’.¹⁶⁰ In 1651, Hammond had resorted to the standard method in patristic hermeneutics: to explain a difficult passage by a clearer one of the same author. ‘Pseudo-Ambrose or whoever he is’ stated in his Quaestiones ueteris et noui testamenti —according to Erasmus’ edition—that ‘in Alexandria and in the whole of Egypt, if there is no bishop, the priest consecrates (consecrat)’, i.e. he is exceptionally allowed to consecrate the eucharist. Consignare in the commentary on Paul must mean the same thing.¹⁶¹ In his treatise on confirmation, Daill´e reversed the argument: consecrare was a general word whereas consignare was more definite. ‘It seems better and truer to explain what is more general by what is more special and more proper, rather than the reverse’ and the meaning of Ambrosiaster is thus that Egyptian priests have power to confirm.¹⁶² Hammond’s first reaction was to expostulate with ‘the very learned old man’ in ‘a friendly letter’. He then realized that the cause was not merely his, but that Daill´e had attacked ‘the discipline of the Church of England, or rather of the ancient and purer Church’, and he determined to write a full response to the Frenchman.¹⁶³ This was finished in ¹⁵⁹ Jeremy Taylor, Of the sacred order and offices of episcopacy, § 33, in Works, ed. Eden, v. 122. ¹⁶⁰ Blondel, Apologia, 57: ‘Ergo eadem (natura sua) utrorumque potestas est’; Ius Diuinum, 2nd part, 133–4. Blondel suggested that consignat might in fact mean ordination and the London presbyters, 134, declared this interpretation to be ‘more likely’: ‘But howsoever it is not much material. For Confirmation was restrained to the Bishop as well as Ordination; and if the Presbyter might confirm si desit Episcopus, then he might also Ordain.’ ¹⁶¹ Hammond, Dissertationes quatuor, 162, quoting Quaestiones ueteris et noui Testamenti, 101. 5, according to Erasmus’ edition, Quartus tomus Operum diui Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis episcopi (Basle, 1528), 556: ‘In Alexandria et per totam Aegyptum, si desit episcopus, consecrat presbiter’ (CSEL 50, 196, reads consignat, and does not even mention the various reading). The point had already been made by Taylor, Of episcopacy, § 33 [Whole Works, ed. Eden, v. 126]. For the attribution of the commentary on Paul and the Quaestiones to the same author, see above, 99–100. ¹⁶² Daill´e, De duobus Latinorum ex unctione Sacramentis, 220–1: ‘Itaque cum eadem sit utriusque loci ratio, et unius consecratio, alterius sit consignatio; omnino potius et uerius uidetur, ut id quod generalius est ex eo interpretemur, quod est specialius et magis proprium, quam contra.’ ¹⁶³ Henchman, ‘Diatriba Praeliminaris’, to Hammond, De Confirmatione, sig. A2r–v : ‘amicissimis Literis (pro summa eius erga Senem eruditissimum beneuolentia …) causam suam priuatim cum doctissimo Viro disceptare uoluit; atque adeo Literas conficit, easdem propediem missurus. Postea uero, re acrius pensitata, animaduertit doctissimum Virum in hoc maxime incumbere, omnesque adhibere machinas, ut probaret Confirmationem meram esse Baptismi laciniam, et appendicem, adeoque iam non suam agi causam, sed Ecclesiae Anglicanae, imo ueteris puriorisque Ecclesiae disciplinam iri labefactatum.’

280

A Patristic Identity

January 1660. Hammond died three months afterwards and his friend Humphrey Henchman (to whom he had sent his manuscript for advice) arranged for printing. The publication was somewhat delayed ‘for appropriate reasons’—in all likelihood to avoid giving offence to presbyterians as long as the religious settlement was uncertain—but the book eventually appeared in the second semester of 1661.¹⁶⁴ It complained that Daill´e’s thesis, although primarily directed against papists, ‘bore as hard in many things on the assertors of episcopal dignity’, and amounted to an act of war ‘against our reformed (and not yet deformed) England’.¹⁶⁵ The doctrine of the Church of England, which was borne out by ‘very clear testimonies of the Fathers’, was that ‘the rite of confirmation has come down to us from the pattern of the Apostles’.¹⁶⁶ Hammond heaped abuse upon Ambrosiaster, that ‘little man of no name or credit in the Church of God, a masked deacon’, whom, playing upon a somewhat cryptic expression of Blondel,¹⁶⁷ ¹⁶⁴ For the chronology, see Henchman, ibid., sigs. A3r –A4v : ‘tandem etiam ante senos menses opus suum absoluerat Typographus; sed rationibus ductus idoneis hucusque premebam.’ The ‘Diatriba’ (signed A8 –B8r , B8v being the errata) was printed in London, with a new title page and an imprimatur dated St Peter’s day [29 June] 1661, after Hammond’s book had been printed in Oxford (with the title page De Confirmatione, siue Benedictione, post Baptismum, solenni, per impositionem Manuum Episcopi celebrata commentarius, ex Sententia Ecclesiae Anglicanae. Authore H. Hammond S. Th. Prof. Oxoniensi. Huic accessit Diatriba Praeliminaris Reuerendissimi in Christo patris Humphredi Episcopi Sarisburiensis, which proves that the inclusion of the ‘Diatriba’ had been planned from the beginning). See Madan, iii. 149, no. 2557; Wing H533B. Some copies, e.g. BNF, shelfmark D2-4446, have both the new and old title pages, others, e.g. BSG, 8◦ D 2301 and BSG, 8◦ D 7860, only the new one. Moreover, there were two issues of the ‘Diatriba’, one signed ‘H.S.’ (BNF, D2-4446), one ‘H. Sarisburiensis’ (the two BSG copies). Some copies of the Oxford print were sold separately, without Henchman’s Diatriba, despite the claim to the contrary on the title page (Wing H533; e.g. BNF, shelfmark D2-18227, and Paris, Biblioth`eque Mazarine, shelfmark 42983). Henchman was appointed Bishop of Salisbury in October 1660. Baxter credited him with ‘a good insight in the Fathers and Councils, Cosins and he and Dr. Gunning being all that shewed any of that skill among us [at the Savoy Conference] considerable’ (Reliquiae Baxterianae, part II, 363). He was considered a moderate Churchman and was no stickler for liturgical conformity: see I. M. Green, The Re-establishment of the Church of England 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1978) and Spurr, Restoration Church, 35 and 207. ¹⁶⁵ Hammond, De Confirmatione, 32: ‘[Dallaei sententia] praecipue quidem contra … Papalis Hierarchiae propugnatores instituta, in multis tamen Praelaticae seu Episcopalis dignitatis assertores ex aequo premente, adeoque contra Reformatam (necdum deformatam) Angliam nostram, reliquosque Primaeuae Antiquitatis, et puritatis, et simplicitatis indefessos asseclas, aut uindices, qui Episcopalem προεδρίαν, contra Presbyteranam ἰσοβαθμίαν, tutandam duximus … militante.’ ¹⁶⁶ Ibid. 174. Cf. 34: ‘Apostolorum seu praecepto, seu saltem praxi.’ ¹⁶⁷ Bellarmine (above, 100) had observed that Pseudo-Ambrose had been quoted as ‘Hilarius’ by Augustine and identified him with Hilarius, the Luciferian deacon attacked by Jerome. Blondel, Apologia, 48, agreed and cited Augustine’s other quotation of ‘Hilarius’, in Contra secundam Iuliani responsionem imperfectum opus, 2. 164 (PL 45,

A Patristic Identity

281

he affected to call always ‘Hilarius Sardus’ or simply ‘Sardus’.¹⁶⁸ Hammond gladly pointed out that this author had been charged with Pelagianism by ‘Petrus Aurelius’, the great Gallican theologian, who had intervened in the conflict between the English Jesuits and the Vicar Apostolic, Richard Smith, titular Bishop of Chalcedon—after the Jesuits had cited Ambrosiaster to prove that there was no need of a bishop to administer confirmation.¹⁶⁹ Even Huguenots like Blondel and Daill´e admitted that ‘Sardus’ had been a ‘strenuous advocate of the Luciferian schism’.¹⁷⁰ He was, in any case, a mere compiler, who pretended to pronounce on the practice of the Church of Alexandria without even knowing Greek.¹⁷¹ 1211). Blondel further observed that this deacon Hilarius had been one of the legates of Pope Liberius to the Arian Emperor Constantius, who, according to Athanasius, Historia Arianorum ad monachos, 41 (PG 25, 741), had him whipped for courageously defending the Nicene faith. See C. and L. Pietri (eds.), Prosopographie chr´etienne du Bas-Empire, ii: Prosopographie de l’Italie chr´etienne (313–604) (Rome, 1999), i, s.v. ‘Hilarius 1’, 985–6. Blondel’s calling him ‘Sardus’ (‘[Hilario] non Pictauiensi (nec enim patitur stylus) sed forte coaetaneo Sardo, Romanae Ecclesiae diacono’) is somewhat puzzling. Is this an allusion to Hilarius’ subsequent adhesion to Luciferianism (Lucifer was Bishop of Cagliari in Sardinia)? But Blondel seems to mean that Hilarius was really Sard and he was clearly intent on raising the profile of the author, not on stressing his schism. Could it be that he was simply mistaken, perhaps because of a confusion with a later and better-known Roman deacon by the name of Hilarius, who was indeed Sard, was one of the papal legates at the council of Ephesus of 449, and subsequently became Pope (C. and L. Pietri (eds.), Prosopographie, i, s.v. ‘Hilarius 2’, 989–92)? ¹⁶⁸ Hammond, De Confirmatione, 5: ‘multo minus ad Sardum [prouocandum duxi], nullius in Ecclesia Dei, aut nominis aut aestimationis homuncionem, Diaconum quippe Laruatum.’ In classical Latin, laruatus only means ‘demented’ but Hammond takes the word in its neo-Latin acceptation, ‘masked’, as in Descartes’s famous confession: ‘laruatus prodeo’ (cf. 4: ‘Scriptis, sub Ambrosii et Chrisostomi Larua fallentibus’). As for ‘Sardus’, Hammond clearly uses it as a derogatory term. Sards had rather a bad name in antiquity, witness the proverb ‘Sardi uenales, alius alio nequior’ (‘Sardinians for sale, one worse than the other’), which is quoted by Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares, . xxiv. 2. ¹⁶⁹ Ibid. 29. See Orthodoxus. Perpetuam Ecclesiae, et SS. Patrum de Confirmationis Sacramento traditionem, Iac. Sirmondi Societ. Iesu Presbyteri prioribus ac posterioribus haresibus oppositam, explanans (1637), reprinted in Petri Aurelii Theologi Opera, iussu et impensis Cleri Gallicani denuo in lucem edita (Paris, 1642), 533–4. This charge of Pelagianism had been rebutted by Daill´e, De duobus Latinorum ex unctione Sacramentis, 219. ‘Petrus Aurelius’ was the pseudonym of the abb´e de Saint-Cyran. See J. Orcibal, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abb´e de Saint-Cyran, et son temps (1581–1638) [Les Origines du jans´enisme, ii] (Louvain, 1947), 334–75; A. F. Allison, ‘Richard Smith’s Gallican Backers and Jesuit Opponents: Some of the Issues Raised by Kellison’s Treatise of the Hierarchie 1629. Part I, May 1629–Autumn 1631’, Recusant History, 18 (1986–7), 341–4, 347–9, 358, and ‘Part III: Continuation of the Controversy’, ibid. 20 (1990–1), 191–8. On the importance of confirmation in the conflict between the pro-episcopal faction and the regulars, see also Questier, Catholicism and Community, 453–4 and 461. ¹⁷⁰ Hammond, De Confirmatione, 29. See Blondel, Apologia, 48; Daill´e, De duobus Latinorum ex unctione Sacramentis, 218–19. ¹⁷¹ Hammond, De Confirmatione, 30.

282

A Patristic Identity

Daill´e, who knew that a controversy with English episcopalians was the last thing that the Huguenots needed, forbore to answer for a decade. When he eventually did so, in his very last book—a huge treatise against Roman Catholic rites and ceremonies which came out after his death—he professed his dismay at an attack from a ‘brother in the Lord’, whom he had always highly respected and whose death, as their common friend Thomas Smith, were he still alive, could have testified, he had much lamented.¹⁷² He had never meant to denigrate the Church of England, which he had always acknowledged to be free from all superstitions and errors ‘after the pattern of the heavenly Scriptures’. Many people, ‘including a bishop who is foremost in it for his virtue as well as for his dignity’, could vouch for his respect for ‘that most excellent Church’.¹⁷³ What he had said about imposition of hands in antiquity did not concern the present English rite of confirmation, which was a wholly different and, indeed, much better and more Christian institution.¹⁷⁴ But people like Hammond, ‘who make a little too much of the authority of the ancients on the point of religion’ and who ‘have preconceived that their rites differed in nothing from antiquity’, tend always to believe that everything that is said of the ancients is actually meant of themselves.¹⁷⁵ To say that English confirmation was so far from conforming to ancient practice that it was actually much better was not the best way to defend it in the eyes of many Restoration divines.¹⁷⁶ At the bottom of the ¹⁷² Daill´e, De Cultibus religiosis, 95–6. Daill´e died on 15 April 1670. ¹⁷³ The magnificent eulogy, in the Latin style for which Daill´e was much admired at the time, deserves to be quoted in full (ibid. 97–8): ‘Anglicanam ego Ecclesiam, exoticis, prauis, superstitiosis cultibus, erroribusque aut impiis, aut periculosis egregie ex Scripturarum coelestium norma purgatam, tot tamque illustribus martyriis probatam, pietate in Deum, in homines caritate, laudatissimisque bonorum operum exemplis abundantem, laetissimo doctissimorum ac sapientissimorum uirorum prouentu iam a Reformationis principio ad hodierna usque tempora florentem, equidem eo quod debui, loco ac numero habui hactenus, ac dum uiuam, habebo; Eius honos, nomen, laudes semper apud me manebunt. Testes meae huius de praestantissima illa Ecclesia existimationis possem laudare non paucos, neque contemnendos uiros; etiam praecipuae apud eam et uirtutis et dignitatis Antistitem [most likely Cosin, bishop of Durham, who was still alive when Daill´e was writing].’ See also 281. ¹⁷⁴ Ibid. 104. ¹⁷⁵ Ibid. 103–4. ¹⁷⁶ The highest possible case for confirmation was made after the Restoration by Taylor, according to whom it is not sufficient to derive it from ‘the example of the Apostles’. It is ‘of divine original’, was instituted by Christ himself, and made by the Apostles a necessary part of Christian doctrine. See Aρ˜ι σις τελειωτικὴ. A Discourse of Confirmation [1663], in Works, ed. Eden, v. 630. Eden, ibid. 617 note d, points out that Taylor borrowed many of his authorities from Franc¸ois Hallier, Defensio ecclesiasticae hierarchiae (Paris, 1632). For the success of this work among Restoration divines, see also [Laurence Womock], The Verdict upon the Dissenters Plea, occasioned by their Melius Inquirendum (London, 1681), 62, who calls Hallier ‘a sober and learned Sorbonist’.

A Patristic Identity

283

controversy between Hammond and Daill´e lay two different notions of church history. Hammond understood it as fundamentally a continuum, which included even the pre-Reformation period. He felt no qualms about quoting at length the King’s Book of 1543, ‘before what we call the reformation of doctrines’, which derived confirmation from apostolic practice.¹⁷⁷ Apart from dropping the name ‘sacrament’, which could only be used of confirmation in a loose sense, and from suppressing unction as an indifferent ceremony, the Reformation had changed nothing. Hammond even made the quite extraordinary claim that the same doctrine had been ‘defended by Henry VIII against Luther’.¹⁷⁸ Henry’s Assertio actually claimed that confirmation had been instituted by Christ himself and was conveyed to the Church by an unwritten tradition of the Apostles.¹⁷⁹ This was the full medieval teaching, from which Henry’s subsequent formularies departed under evangelical influences.¹⁸⁰ Daill´e did not know enough of English history to make this point. He only replied indignantly that Henry’s laws were ‘corrupted with the Latin leaven’ and had nothing to do with the true Reformed Church of England. English people owed their present faith to the Reformers and not to Henry VIII and his adherents.¹⁸¹ For continental Calvinists, the Reformation was still what it had been for Elizabethan divines: the single most important event since the Apostles, a radical break with the past. In his magnum opus against Roman ceremonies, Daill´e included those that the Church of England had kept and which English Nonconformists were now attacking as relics of popery: the sign of the cross in baptism (a practice with no authority either from the Apostles or from ancient bishops, which had been first devised by private individuals),¹⁸² questions originally meant for adult catechumens now asked of infants (‘a perfectly absurd and almost ridiculous rite’ spread in the fifth century by a ‘foolish imitation Hallier, a moderate Gallican, defended the necessity of confirmation against the English Jesuits. See Allison, ‘Smith’s Backers and Opponents: Part III’, 172–3. ¹⁷⁷ Hammond, De Confirmatione, 34–6. ¹⁷⁸ Ibid. 36: ‘Haec certe sic a maioribus nostris accepta, et ab Henrico VIII aduersus Lutherum defensa, et uindicata, Reformatio nostra (sola Sacramenti uoce omissa, quam nos strictiori acceptione, ad ea sola quae a Christo, ut omnibus necessaria instituta sunt, accommodandam censuimus: et Chrismatis Usu, inter Caeremonias libere inductas, libere itidem omittendas, habito) integra, et nulla ex parte mutilata, ad nos deduxit; nec quicquam aut de Origine, aut fundamento, illa Ecclesiastica, hoc Apostolico, nedum de usu, et beneficiis huius Ritus immutandum existimauimus.’ ¹⁷⁹ Henry VIII, Assertio, ed. Fraenkel, 188–90. ¹⁸⁰ See MacCulloch, Cranmer, 189, on debates preliminary to the Bishops’ Book. ¹⁸¹ Daill´e, De Cultibus religiosis, 101: ‘Iniuria fit Reformatorum, si Angli eam quam hodie docent ac tenent fidem, eam non ab ipsis illis eximiis seruis, sed ab Henrico Rege et eius sectatoribus accepisse dicantur.’ ¹⁸² Ibid. 63.

284

A Patristic Identity

of antiquity’),¹⁸³ kneeling at communion (a novelty ‘which sprung in the eleventh or perhaps even in the twelfth century, apparently from the belief in transubstantiation’).¹⁸⁴ Daill´e declined there to enter the dispute on episcopacy¹⁸⁵ but the book which he had published against the Ignatian epistles in 1666 seemed to mark him as an arch-enemy of bishops.¹⁸⁶ Certainly, Restoration Nonconformists congratulated themselves that Huguenot writers ‘have done more against our English Hierarchy, than the Writers of any, or all Reformed Churches besides’.¹⁸⁷

3. THE RESTORATION CHURCH BET WEEN DISSENTERS AND PAPISTS It has been argued that the Church of England of the 1660s, wary of old Laudian clericalism and keen to emphasize its links with the monarchy, looked for inspiration to Grotius’ work.¹⁸⁸ Key men of the Restoration settlement—Sheldon in the Church and Clarendon in the state—had ¹⁸³ Daill´e, De Cultibus religiosis, 89–93 (‘ex quadam antiquitatis cacozelia’). ¹⁸⁴ Ibid. 722–8. Daill´e’s comment on kneeling was later quoted by Daniel Whitby (‘Whigby’) as an argument to prove that it ought to be dispensed with to accommodate Dissenters’ scruples: see The Protestant Reconciler, Humbly Pleading for Condescention to Dissenting Brethren, in Things Indifferent and Unnecessary for the Sake of Peace: and shewing how Unreasonable it is to make Such Things the Necessary Conditions of Communion (London, 1683), 292–3 and for the subsequent controversy, J.-L. Quantin, ‘Conscience, autorit´e et c´er´emonies dans l’Angleterre de la Restauration: le Protestant Reconciler de Daniel Whitby et la r´eaction tory (1682–1685)’, in B. Barbiche, J.-P. Poussou, and A. Tallon (eds.), Pouvoirs, contestations et comportements dans l’Europe moderne: m´elanges offerts au Professeur Yves-Marie Berc´e (Paris, 2005), 955–84. ¹⁸⁵ Daill´e, De Cultibus religiosis, 105. ¹⁸⁶ Jean Daill´e, De scriptis, quae sub Dionysii Areopagitae et Ignatii Antiocheni nominibus circumferuntur, libri duo. Quibus demonstratur illa subdititia esse, diu post Martyrum, quibus falso tribuuntur, obitum ficta (Geneva, 1666). See Dodwell’s significant association of Daill´e with Saumaise and Blondel, below, Chapter 6 n. 272. The ultra-tory Simon Lowth, Of the Subject of Church-Power, in whom it resides, its force, extent, and execution, that it opposes not civil government in any one instance of it (London, 1685), 35–43, violently attacked them as the anti-episcopal ‘Triumviri’ of ‘the French [Reformed] Churches’. ¹⁸⁷ [Henry Hickman], The Nonconformists vindicated from the abuses put upon them by Mr. Durel and Scrivener. Being some short Animadversions in their Books soon after they came forth: In two Letters to a Friend (who could not hitherto get them Published). Containing some Remarques upon the Celebrated Conference at Hampton-Court. By a Country Scholar (London, 1679), 22. The first part of the book is actually a revised edition of Bonasus Vapulans: or, Some Castigations given to Mr. John Durell, for fouling himself and others in his English and Latin Book. By a Country Scholar (London, 1672); the second part (against Scrivener) is new. ¹⁸⁸ Trevor-Roper, ‘Hugo Grotius and England’, 81.

A Patristic Identity

285

frequented the Great Tew circle before the Civil War and been close to Falkland and Chillingworth. According to Clarendon, Sheldon had even been the man who had brought Chillingworth back to the Church of England.¹⁸⁹ One should not, however, make too much of that: Great Tew was a society both informal and diverse, and having been a guest there in the 1630s is no key to one’s subsequent positions.¹⁹⁰ The Great Tew attitude to tradition was again forcefully expressed at the end of 1660 in Edward Stillingfleet’s Irenicum. The ecclesiastical settlement was still in the balance. Charles II favoured a broad, comprehensive Church, and his Worcester House Declaration of 25 October went a long way to satisfy presbyterian requests that a ‘modified episcopacy’ should be established and that disputed ceremonies should be made optional. On the other hand, the restoration of the Church as it had stood before 1640 was already under way. New bishops were consecrated on 28 October to begin to fill the vacant sees.¹⁹¹ At this critical juncture, Stillingfleet pleaded for a reversion to the old conformist position, for which he brought a wealth of evidence, that episcopacy was not owned ‘as a distinct order from Presbytery of Divine Right, but only as a prudent constitution of the Civil Magistrate for the better governing in the Church’.¹⁹² He referred to ¹⁸⁹ See Clarendon, Animadversions, 185 (‘the present Arch-Bishop of Canterbury, had first reclaimed him from his doubtings’). Other and more credible accounts ascribe however the principal role to Laud. ¹⁹⁰ See R. Beddard, ‘Sheldon and Anglican Recovery: Review Article’, HJ 19 (1976), 1007–8 and 1010; Smith, Constitutional Royalism, 56. ¹⁹¹ Edward Stillingfleet, Irenicum. A weapon-salve for the Churches Wounds. Or the divine right of Particular Forms of Church-Government; Discussed and examined according to the Principles of the Law of Nature, the positive Laws of God, the practice of the Apostles and the Primitive Church, and the judgement of Reformed Divines. Whereby a foundation is laid for the Churches peace, and the accommodation of our present differences (London, 1661). As C. E. Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism (London, 1968; reprint of the 1st edn., 1931), 479 n. 2, already pointed out, Thomason acquired his copy on 21 November 1660 (see his manuscript note on the title page, BL, shelfmark E 1049). The only difference in the second edition (London, 1662) is the addition of ‘A Discourse concerning the Power of Excommunication in a Christian Church’. On the context, see A. Whiteman, ‘The Restoration of the Church of England’, in G. F. Nuttall and O. Chadwick (eds.), From Uniformity to Unity 1662–1962 (London, 1962), 49–76; Spurr, Restoration Church, 30–8. I cannot see how B. Till, ODNB, lii. 790 (admittedly copying the DNB), could claim that the book was published in 1659, ‘at the end of the interregnum’. G. A. J. Rogers’s minimal introduction to the reprint of the 1661 edn. (Bristol, 2000; The Philosophy of Edward Stillingfleet I), ix, claims for his part that the book was first published in 1659 and the second edition in 1661. Stillingfleet’s preface, sig. a3r , explicitly refers to the restoration of Charles II and his promise of indulgence for tender consciences. ¹⁹² Stillingfleet, Irenicum, 393. Stillingfleet published for the first time, 391–3 (wrongly dating them to the reign of Edward VI), Cranmer’s ultra-Erastian answers to Henry VIII on the original identity of bishops and presbyters, and the right of Christian

286

A Patristic Identity

‘learned and judicious Mr. Hookers Ecclesiastical Polity’ for a full proof of ‘the mutability of the Form of Church Government’,¹⁹³ and gave quotations from Casaubon and Grotius very different from those normally favoured by episcopalians, on the importance of distinguishing between what was of divine right and what was not.¹⁹⁴ The ius diuinum of a particular form of church government, whether episcopacy or presbytery, could not be proved from Scripture. Episcopalian divines—Stillingfleet was thinking especially of Hammond, his main target throughout—tacitly confessed as much ‘when they call in the help of succeeding Ages to make the scripture speak plain for them’.¹⁹⁵ Stillingfleet showed at length that antiquity could provide no reliable evidence for apostolic tradition. There were very few records of ‘the time immediately after the Apostles, which must have been most helpful to us in this inquiry’, and ‘nothing but the forgeries of latter ages to supply the vacuity’.¹⁹⁶ In their commentaries on Scripture, the Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries judged ‘of the practice of the first primitive Church, according to the customes of their own’.¹⁹⁷ Even earlier Fathers were of no credit, because of ‘their stiff and pertinacious adhering to private traditions contrary to one another, and both sides maintaining theirs as Apostolical’. Stillingfleet instanced the Easter controversy and quoted Hales’s warnings against ‘the danger of our appeal to Antiquity’.¹⁹⁸ Therefore, ‘as to matters of fact not clearly revealed in Scripture, no certainty can be had of them, from the hovering light of unconstant tradition’.¹⁹⁹ Stillingfleet did not quote Daill´e’s Use of the Fathers but there is at least one parallel which suggests that he was indebted to it.²⁰⁰ Like Taylor, princes to make a bishop [= Thomas Cranmer, Remains, ed. H. Jenkins (Oxford, 1833), ii. 98–103]. On the subsequent controversy, see editor’s preface to Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, ed. N. Pocock, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1865), 123–8. ¹⁹³ Stillingfleet, Irenicum, 394. ¹⁹⁴ See epigraphs on the title page. For other references to Casaubon and ‘the deservedly admired Grotius’, ibid., sig. a3v , 280 (citing Grotius’ letter to Bignon on Clement of Rome, on which see above, n. 97), 281. ¹⁹⁵ Ibid. ‘286’ [294]. ¹⁹⁶ Ibid. 296. See also 298. ¹⁹⁷ Ibid. 317. ¹⁹⁸ Ibid. 317–18, quoting Hales, Of Schisme, 5–6 (see above, 212). See also 108 and 395–6 for other quotations (and praise) of Hales. Chillingworth is quoted 396. ¹⁹⁹ Ibid. 320. ²⁰⁰ See ibid. 278, on Jerome’s method of transcribing other writers in his commentaries on Scripture. Not only does Stillingfleet quote exactly the same sentence from Jerome’s letter to Augustine as Daill´e [Jerome, ep. 112, 4 (CSEL 55, 371)], but like Daill´e he stops to comment on it before summarizing the next sentence in the letter (which Daill´e also quotes): ‘A strange way of writing Commentaries on Scripture, wherein a man having jumbled other mens notions together in his brain, by a kind of lottery draws out what comes next to hand, without any choice: yet this we see was his practice, and therefore he puts Austin …’ Compare Daill´e, Employ des Peres, 166–7; Use of the

A Patristic Identity

287

Stillingfleet stressed that one should not look to the primitive Church for a model of government or for particular rites to use now but for ‘that admirable temper, moderation, and condescension which was used in it, towards all the members of it’. It allowed liberty ‘to dissenters … in matters of practice and opinion’.²⁰¹ Events, however, and with them the dominant trend of theological opinion in the established Church, in the end went in the contrary direction. From 1662 to 1665, the Cavalier Parliament imposed a rigidly episcopal church settlement. Charles II made several fruitless attempts at religious accommodation but gave up after 1674 and accepted the Cavalier programme of coercion against both Protestant Nonconformists and Roman Catholics. Whig interpretations of history used to celebrate the group of divines whom their adversaries nicknamed ‘Latitudinarians’ or ‘latitudemen’ as the torch-bearers of the values of religious toleration.²⁰² Some older Latitudinarians, the ‘Cambridge Platonists’ (as it has been customary to call them since the nineteenth century), had had personal contacts with the Great Tew circle.²⁰³ The younger generation, primarily London-based clerics, were influenced by Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants. The future Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson read it in his youth, and we are told that it ‘gave his mind the ply that it held ever after’.²⁰⁴ Indeed, originally as a reaction against Interregnum Calvinism, the theology of these divines was largely undogmatic. They sharply distinguished between Fathers, book I, 105 (‘Do but think now with your self, whether or not this be not an excellent, rare way of Commenting upon the Scriptures; and very well worthy both to be esteemed, and imitated by us! He then turneth his speech to S. Augustine, saying …’), and the earlier comment on Jerome’s method, Employ des Peres, 161–2; Use of the Fathers, book I, 102 (‘Now I must needs say, that this seems to be a very strange way of Commenting. For, what light or what certainty can a Reader be able to gather out of such a Rapsodie of different opinions, tumbled together in a heap, without so much as intimating either which is good or bad; or probable, or necessary; or to the purpose, or not? But seeing it hath pleased S. Hierome to follow this course …’). To my knowledge, neither the argument nor the quotation had been used by Protestant controversialists before Daill´e. ²⁰¹ Stillingfleet, Irenicum, sigs. a2v –a3r . ²⁰² See esp. Jordan, Religious toleration, iv. 94–137, on ‘the Cambridge Platonists’ as ‘the true successors of Falkland and his group’. ²⁰³ M. Nicolson, ‘Christ’s College and the Latitude-Men’, Modern Philology, 27 (1929–30), 36. ²⁰⁴ Gilbert Burnet, A Sermon preached at the funeral of the Most Reverend Father in God John, by the Divine Providence, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1694), 11. For other references, see M. I. J. Griffin, Jr., Latitudinarianism in the SeventeenthCentury Church of England (Leiden, 1982), 181 n. 21 (note that Griffin’s study was written between 1958 and 1962). On the prominence of latitude-men in London, see J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), 40–51.

288

A Patristic Identity

fundamentals and non-fundamentals, and they thought that the former were not numerous.²⁰⁵ In his ultra-Erastian sermon of April 1680, The Protestant Religion vindicated, Tillotson somewhat ambiguously described the Protestant faith as ‘the Articles of the Apostles Creed, as explained by the first four General Councils’.²⁰⁶ After he had become Archbishop, he famously wrote about the Athanasian Creed: ‘I wish we were well rid of it.’²⁰⁷ If the Cambridge Platonists appealed to some Fathers, especially to Origen—a Father of rather dubious standing—it was not to buttress an authoritarian orthodoxy but rather to find precedents for their deviations from received doctrines.²⁰⁸ Recent studies, however, have established that, during the Restoration, there was hardly a specific latitudinarian outlook, let alone a latitudinarian party. Prior to the realignments of 1689, the Church of England cannot be described as divided between ‘High Churchmen’ and ‘Latitudinarians’, especially as regards attitudes to either comprehension or toleration. The Latitudinarians’ very scepticism against divine-right ecclesiologies and their conception of ceremonies as adiaphora made them regard Nonconformity as unwarranted. They believed that dissenting congregations, which multiplied in 1672–3 thanks to Charles II’s short-lived Declaration of Indulgence, were weakening the Church of England.²⁰⁹ ²⁰⁵ B. J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton, 1983), 104–10; I. Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, i: Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge, 1991), 25–88; G. A. J. Rogers, ‘Locke and the Latitude-Men: Ignorance as a Ground of Toleration’, in R. Kroll, R. Aschcraft, and P. Zagorin (eds.), Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 1992), 235–42. For a suggestion that the usual characterization of the Cambridge Platonists as undogmatic may be exaggerated, see D. Fouke, The Enthusiastical Concerns of Dr. Henry More: Religious Meaning and the Psychology of Delusion (Leiden, 1997), 170 n. 134. ²⁰⁶ John Tillotson, The Protestant Religion vindicated, from the charge of singularity and novelty: in a sermon preached before the King at White-hall, April the 2d 1680 (London, 1680), 22. Compare Andrewes’s description of the rule of religion, above, 155. ²⁰⁷ Letter of Tillotson to Burnet, 23 October 1694, printed in Thomas Birch, The Life of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (2nd edn., London, 1753), 315. See also T. E. S. Clarke and H. C. Foxcroft, A Life of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (Cambridge, 1907), 278; M. Greig, ‘The Reasonableness of Christianity? Gilbert Burnet and the Trinitarian Controversy of the 1690s’, JEH 44 (1993), 631–51. ²⁰⁸ See R. Lewis, ‘Of ‘‘Origenian Platonism’’: Joseph Glanvill on the Pre-existence of Souls’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 69 (2006), 267–300; D. W. Dockrill, ‘The Fathers and the Theology of the Cambridge Platonists’, Studia patristica, 17/1 (Oxford, 1982), 427–39. ²⁰⁹ J. Marshall, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-Men 1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and ‘‘Hobbism’’ ’, JEH 36 (1985), 407–27; J. Spurr, ‘ ‘‘Latitudinarianism’’ and the Restoration Church’, HJ 31 (1988), 61–82; id., ‘The Church of England,

A Patristic Identity

289

The Latitudinarians’ hostility to Dissent was made clear in May 1680 by the celebrated sermon that Stillingfleet, now Dean of St Paul’s, preached in London before the Lord Mayor. This was the height of what historians used to call the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81, but what they now prefer to describe as the ‘Restoration Crisis’, since attempts to exclude the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York, from the succession to the throne were merely one aspect of it. What was at stake was ‘arbitrary government’ but also the exclusive church settlement of 1662.²¹⁰ Charles II relied on the loyalism of the church party. In March–April 1680, he insisted on the enforcement of the Corporation Act against Dissenters. Partly as a reaction, anticlericalism was running high. Parliament had been repeatedly prorogued since December 1679, but it was widely expected that, when it eventually met, it would, on the one hand, attempt to comprehend moderate presbyterians into the Church and, on the other, relieve all Protestant Nonconformists from penal laws.²¹¹ In this context, Stillingfleet stressed ‘the sinfulness and mischief ’ of separation from the national Church.²¹² He partly argued on Hookerian lines, conceding that the primitive churches might have been ‘barely congregational, by reason of the small number of Believers at that time’, although this was ‘very uncertain’. ‘But it is most certainly our duty to preserve Peace and Unity among Christians; and it Comprehension and the Toleration Act of 1689’, EHR 104 (1989), 927–46; R. Aschcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History’, in Kroll, Aschcraft, and Zagorin (eds.), Philosophy, Science, and Religion, 151–77; W. M. Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Athens, Ga., 1993), 33–53; Tyacke, ‘Arminianism and the Restoration Church’, 334–6; S. Mandelbrote, ‘Religious Belief and the Politics of Toleration in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Dutch Review of Church History, 81 (2001), 104–5. An extreme case of latitudinarianism actually leading to Hobbism is Samuel Parker, on whom see below, n. 370. For the special position of Gilbert Burnet, who espoused the latitudinarian theory of adiaphora but strongly believed in comprehension, see M. Greig, ‘Gilbert Burnet and the Problem of Non-conformity in Restoration Scotland and England’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire, 32 (1997), 1–24. ²¹⁰ Scott, Sidney and the Restoration Crisis; M. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994); De Krey, London and the Restoration, esp. 169–73. ²¹¹ Knights, Politics and Opinion, 258–68; De Krey, London and the Restoration, 188–201; H. Horwitz, ‘Protestant Reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis’, JEH 15 (1964), 201–17; M. Goldie, ‘Danby, the Bishops and the Whigs’, in T. Harris, P. Seaward, and M. Goldie (eds.), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), 75–105; J. R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis 1678–1683 (London, 1961), 115–55; R. Hutton, Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), 386–95; Tyacke, ‘Legalising of Dissent’, 74–6. ²¹² Edward Stillingfleet, The Mischief of Separation. A Sermon Preached at Guild-Hall Chapell, May 11. MDC.LXXX (London, 1680), 19–20. On this sermon and its impact, see Marshall, ‘Ecclesiology’; De Krey, London and the Restoration, 190–1 and 273–4. On Stillingfleet’s evolution, see Carroll, Stillingfleet, 18–31; Spurr, Restoration Church, 152–8.

290

A Patristic Identity

is impossible so to do if men break all Orders in pieces for the fancy they have taken up of a Primitive Platform.’ One might as well bring back ‘the first Community of Goods, which was far more certainly practised, than Congregational Churches’.²¹³ However, Stillingfleet appealed to antiquity against ‘the sin of Schism’.²¹⁴ He went further in March 1685, just after the accession of James II. The church party had held sway for several years, during the ‘Tory Reaction’, and its champions were confident that ‘if God send us a truly loyall Parliament we shall be safe all our dayes’.²¹⁵ Stillingfleet now proved the apostolic institution of episcopacy by ‘the general Consent of the Ancient Fathers, who were the most competent Witnesses in this Case’, arguing in the fashion of Hammond that there could ‘be no stronger Proof of such a matter of Fact’ and that the Canon of Scripture had no other.²¹⁶ He did his best to present his Irenicum as a youthful indiscretion, which was to be excused because it meant ‘to gain upon the Dissenters from our Church’ by showing that presbyterianism was not iure diuino.²¹⁷ Even so, Stillingfleet failed to appease extreme Churchmen like the future Nonjuror Simon Lowth, who charged him with having ruined the certainty of the Canon and betrayed the Church of England.²¹⁸ The trauma left by the experience of the revolutionary years can hardly be overestimated. Many episcopalian divines came back from exile overseas or a period in hiding in England with the conviction that their Church was now permanently threatened. The theme of the two symmetrical perils, Puritanism on the one hand, popery on the other, became a clich´e of Restoration apologetics, especially in the countless sermons on passive obedience that were preached during the Restoration Crisis and, subsequently, as part of the Tory Reaction.²¹⁹ The image of Christ crucified between the two thieves, which David Owen had applied to the King, was ²¹³ Stillingfleet, Mischief of Separation, 30–1. ²¹⁴ Ibid. 29–30. ²¹⁵ George Hickes to Arthur Charlett, 5 March 1685, Bodl., MS Ballard 12, fo. 7v . ²¹⁶ Edward Stillingfleet, A Sermon preached at a Publick Ordination at St. Peter’s Cornhill, March 15th 1684–5 (London, 1685), 30, 27, 38. ²¹⁷ Ibid., ep. dedicatory to Bishop Compton, sigs. A3r –b1r . See already [Edward Stillingfleet], Several conferences between a Romish Priest, a Fanatick Chaplain, and a Divine of the Church of England, concerning the Idolatry of the Church of Rome (London, 1679), 170–2. ²¹⁸ Simon Lowth, A Letter to Edw. Stillingfleet, D.D. etc. in answer to the Epistle Dedicatory before his sermon, preached at a Publick Ordination at St. Peter’s Cornhill, March 15th 1684–5 (London, 1687), 27. ²¹⁹ Owen, Herod and Pilat reconciled was reprinted in full, after the Restoration, ‘Dedicated to the Loyal Subjects of Great Britain’ (London, 1663). See J.-L. Quantin, ‘Patristique et politique dans l’Angleterre de la Restauration’, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 36 (2000), 415–48.

A Patristic Identity

291

now transferred, or rather returned, to the Church.²²⁰ ‘This poor distressed Church (the Envy of Rome, and the Glory of all Christendom) is in danger of being torn in pieces by the Lion on this hand, and the Bear on That.’²²¹ What Richard Montagu under James I had said in a private letter to a confidential friend was now proclaimed from the pulpit: the Church of England stood between ‘the Popish Scylla and the Fanatical Charibdis’.²²² At the same time, clergymen never tired of repeating that the established Church had the unique distinction, among all the other Churches in the world, of being the most faithful to the primitive model.²²³ In 1679, in a book dedicated to Archbishop Sancroft, Timothy Puller contrasted at length ‘the moderation of the Church of England’ and ‘the extreams of Popery and Enthusiasm’.²²⁴ Puller’s moderation was very different from religious irenicism. He extolled ‘the general practice in our Universities (those noble Seminaries of the Church) where among the Theses which are disputed in the Divinity Schools, commonly one is given to assert our Church against the Romanists, the other to defend our Church against other Sectaries’.²²⁵ The Church of England was moderate in making Scripture the rule of faith while refusing to ground its authority on the inner testimony of the Spirit²²⁶—as Calvinist Dissenters persisted in doing.²²⁷ It was further moderate in interpreting Scripture according to antiquity, as witnessed by the canon of 1571, the ‘Golden Rule of our Church’.²²⁸ The ²²⁰ See e.g. Nathaniel Bisbie, The Modern Pharisees: or a Sermon … shewing the Principles of the present Jesuites, and Puritans, to be of the same evil influence with the ancient Pharisees; and equally vexatious and destructive to Government (London, 1683), 27. On this image, see above, 164. ²²¹ Edward Pelling, A Sermon Preached before the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen, at St Mary le Bow, on Nov. 5 1683 (London, 1683), 37. ²²² Henry Constantine, A Sermon Preached at the Assises held at York, July the 23d 1683. Not long after the Discovery of the late Horrid Conspiracy against His Majesties Person and Government (London, 1683), 5. For Montagu’s use of the same image, see above, 159. ²²³ Clement Barksdale, A Sermon Preached upon the Fifth of November, 1679. In the Cathedrall Church at Gloucester (Oxford, 1680), 14; John Turner, A Sermon Preached at Epsom upon the 9th of September, Being the Day of Thanksgiving Appointed by His Majesty for the Discovery and Disappointment of the Republican Plot (London, 1683), 2; Benjamin Calamy, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, and the Court of Aldermen, at Guild-Hall Chappel, upon the 30th of January 1683 (London, 1683), 28–9. ²²⁴ Puller, Moderation, 21. ²²⁵ Ibid. 134. On the predominance of controversy in the teaching of theology in Restoration Oxford, see [John Fell], preface to Richard Allestree, Forty Sermons (Oxford, 1684), sig. e1v ; R. A. Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford and the Remaking of the Protestant Establishment’, in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 837. ²²⁶ Puller, Moderation, 71. ²²⁷ See e.g. John Owen, Exercitations on the epistle to the Hebrews, [i] (London, 1668), 18–20. ²²⁸ Puller, Moderation, 81.

292

A Patristic Identity

Church of England paid ‘great deference to the judgment, testimony, and practice’ of the Fathers.²²⁹ It is, admittedly, not always clear, in rhetorical contexts, what ‘primitive’ and ‘apostolic’ were exactly supposed to mean. Tirades in sermons about the Church of England being ‘the lively portraicture of the Apostolic Age, and the resurrection of the Primitive Doctrine and Polity, before any fatal defection had sullyed its Purity’, were susceptible of a standard scripturalist interpretation.²³⁰ The same preacher, however, said something more definite when he added that his Church appealed to ‘a conjunct Tryal of Scripture, first-Antiquity, and Reason altogether’ in opposition to ‘a circling Infallibility, an expurgatory Index, or a stubborn private Spirit’.²³¹ Several sermons of the period expressly asserted that ‘the Practice of the primitive Christians’ was ‘the best interpreter of those places of Scripture, which command absolute Obedience’,²³² or even ‘the best (if not only) Interpreter of the New Testament’ in general.²³³ In a sermon on Restoration Day 1684, John Clerke, a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, extolled the Church of England for referring the interpretation of Scripture ‘to those impartial Commentators, those greatest Lovers and most competent Judges of the Divine Truth; namely, the uncorrupted Councils, and genuine Works of those ancient Fathers, who came nearest our Blessed Saviour (the first Author, and last Finisher of our Faith) as well in Holiness as time’.²³⁴ The future Archbishop John Sharp accused Bellarmine (who had argued that Christians had not revolted against heathen emperors because ²²⁹ Puller, Moderation, 88–9. ²³⁰ William Smith, A Sermon preached in the Cathedral Church of Norwich, on the 9th of September 1683 (London, 1683), 7–8. The author was a prebendary of Norwich. ²³¹ Ibid. 8. Cf. Samuel Crispe, A Sermon Preach’d at the Primary Visitation of the Right Reverend Father in God, William Lord Bishop of Norwich. Held at Beccles the 23d of April, 1686 (London, 1686), 4–7. ‘Circling Infallibility’ meant that the Church of Rome claimed both that it was infallible in its interpretation of Scripture and that its infallibility could be proved by Scripture. Expurgatory indices were a standing theme of anti-Roman polemic: the Fathers were normally immune from them but Protestant controversialists suspected that they were not: see e.g. Crashaw, Romish Forgeries and Falsifications; Thomas James, A Treatise of the Corruption of Scripture, Councels, and Fathers, by the Prelats, Pastors, and Pillars of the Church of Rome, for maintenance of Popery and irreligion (London, 1611). ²³² Miles Barne, A Discourse Concerning the Nature of Christ’s Kingdom, with Relation to the Kingdoms of this World; in two Sermons Preach’d at St Maries before the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1682), 2nd sermon, 11. ²³³ William Clifford, The power of Kings, particularly the British Monarchy Asserted and Vindicated, in a Sermon preached at Wakefield in the County of York, Sunday, October the 30th 1681 (London, 1682), 11. ²³⁴ John Clerke, A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Rochester, on the 29th of May, 1684. Being the Anniversary of His Most Sacred Majesty’s Birth and happy Restauration to these his undoubted Realms and Dominions (London, 1684), 12.

A Patristic Identity

293

they had not strength enough) of violating the Tridentine command ‘to interpret Scripture according to the Ancient Fathers’.²³⁵ According to William Saywell, the Church of England, in the canon Concionatores, and the Church of Rome, in the Tridentine decree on the interpretation of Scripture, ‘lay down much the same Rule’.²³⁶ The Church of England had faithfully followed it ‘ever since the Reformation’,²³⁷ whereas ‘we charge them [of the Church of Rome] for having left their own Principle, and instead of the Doctrine of the ancient Fathers and Councils, enjoyning Papal Decrees and Superstitions’.²³⁸ Former Reformed controversialists would have concluded that, since the papists themselves did not follow antiquity, it was useless to appeal to it, but Saywell drew just the opposite lesson: Now, since the chief Article whereby they [Papists] are deluded, is a pretended Shew of Antiquity, and Conformity to the Primitive Church, which we have hitherto laid juster Claim to than they, and been defended by our able Divines therein : there can be no readier way in the World to gain them, than by Sticking close to this Principle, and urging them strongly with the Authority thereof.²³⁹

Universities after the Restoration reverted to the Jacobean course of theological studies. In a polemical dialogue, Stillingfleet staged the career of ‘a fanatic’, who had read every ‘System of Orthodox Divinity’ in his youth, had subsequently become a chaplain in Cromwell’s army, and now despised Church of England clergymen for reading the Fathers.²⁴⁰ The caricature was revealing of current prejudices. Giving advice to the young White Kennett at Oxford, Andrew Allam confessed that the old way of beginning by modern systematic treatises was ‘exploded and cried down by many of late … as a very preposterous methode setting out the wrong way and beginning at the wrong end’.²⁴¹ Allam believed for his part that such books could be useful ‘if read judiciously’. He did not mean, though, that his pupil should ground himself in Calvinistic divinity but rather that he should read ²³⁵ John Sharp, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, and Aldermen of London, at Bow-Church (London, 1676), 16. For Bellarmine’s text, see above, n. 115. ²³⁶ William Saywell, The Original of all Plots in Christendom; with the Danger and Remedy of Schism (London, 1680), 188–9. See also 201. ²³⁷ Ibid. 188. ²³⁸ Ibid. 194 (and again 300). ²³⁹ Ibid. 312. See also Saywell, Evangelical and Catholick Unity, 307–8. ²⁴⁰ Stillingfleet, Several conferences, 5. ²⁴¹ Allam to Kennett, 21 September 1680, BL, Lansdowne MS 960, fo. 34r . Cf. Fell’s approval of the (then) new course followed by Hammond, above, Chapter 3 n. 54. In instructions of 6 February 1661 to the University of Cambridge, Charles II commanded that all the orders of his father and grandfather ‘be duly observed and put in execution’ (Heywood and Wright (eds.), Cambridge Transactions, ii. 545).

294

A Patristic Identity

concurrently Calvinistic and Arminian expositions.²⁴² John Pearson, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, devoted one of his university sermons to the necessity of studying antiquity. In the controversies that divided the Roman and Reformed Churches, and the Reformed Churches between themselves, all sides had a stock of proofs drawn from Scripture and reason. ‘Let the orthodox exert themselves as much as they want, they will hardly show more Scriptural texts, they will hardly bring more arguments. The authority of the ancient Church only will overwhelm everyone.’²⁴³ Such views were not shared by every member of the Restoration Church. The Protestant line on tradition, inherited from the Elizabethans and rejuvenated by the Great Tew circle, never died out. Even after he had become Bishop of Lincoln, Thomas Barlow kept recommending Daill´e’s Use of the Fathers as the first book for a student to read ‘about the Authority and Use of Fathers’.²⁴⁴ Barlow was however isolated on the Restoration bench of bishops.²⁴⁵ In Oxford, where he had been Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, the Independent Lewis Du Moulin praised him for being ‘as Lot in Sodom’.²⁴⁶ On several questions, Barlow looked like a survivor from an earlier age. He maintained that the Pope was Antichrist and regarded the contrary opinion as an innovation against the true doctrine of the Church of England.²⁴⁷ He extolled Davenant’s anti-Arminian writings.²⁴⁸ Despite Ussher and Vossius, he rejected en bloc the genuineness of the Ignatian letters.²⁴⁹ ²⁴² Allam to Kennett, 21 September 1680, BL, Lansdowne MS 960, fo. 34r . ²⁴³ Pearson, ‘Concio ad clerum I’, in Minor theological works, ii. 10: ‘Sudent orthodoxi quantum uelint, uix plures Scripturas ostendent, uix plura argumenta afferent. Unius antiquae Ecclesiae auctoritas omnes opprimet.’ See Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment, 31–3. ²⁴⁴ Thomas Barlow, ‘,ὐτοσχεδιάσματα. Or Directions to a Young Divine, for his Study of Divinity, and Choice of Books, etc.’, in Remains, 25. After Daill´e, Barlow recommends Katona’s Tractatus and Rivet’s intoduction to his Criticus sacer (on which works, see above, Chapter 1). According to the editor, P. Pett, the first version of the text dates from about 1650 but it was revised by Barlow after he had become Bishop of Lincoln (in 1675). See Pett’s epistle to the reader, sig. A2r , and, for the circulation of the text while still unprinted, Andrew Allam to White Kennett, 22 August 1681, BL, MS Lansdowne 960, fos. 35v and 151r –152r . Note that Barlow referred to both the French original and the Latin translation of Daill´e. On Barlow’s view of the Fathers, see also J. A. I. Champion, ‘An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie: Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Barlow, and the Restoration Debate over ‘‘Heresy’’ ’, in Loewenstein and Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics, 235–45. ²⁴⁵ Goldie, ‘Danby’, 93. ²⁴⁶ Du Moulin, Short and True Account, 31 (the person referred to is not named but see Wood, Athenae, iii. 1058). See Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford’, 833–5. ²⁴⁷ Barlow, Remains, 191–2. ²⁴⁸ Ibid. 91 (cf. 181 on Prideaux). ²⁴⁹ Ibid. 114–15. See also Barlow’s hostile notes on his copy of John Pearson, Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatii (Cambridge, 1672), Bodl., shelfmark B 9. 17 Linc.

A Patristic Identity

295

Criticism of tradition was not much in evidence in Church of England discourse, except in some disputes with recusants. Such was the case in the 1660s, in the great controversy opened by Thomas Pierce’s Court sermon ‘The Primitive Rule of Reformation’. To counter Roman claims, Pierce adduced the standard Protestant instances of errors received universally in the first centuries: One would have thought that the Tenet of Infallibility upon Earth had been sufficiently prevented by the Heresie of the Chiliasts, wherewith the Primitive Church her self (I mean the very Fathers of the Primitive Church, for the two first Centuries after Christ,) was not onely deceiv’d by Papias, who was a Disciple of St John, but ( for ought I yet learn) without the least Contradiction afforded to it. Nay the whole Church of God (in the opinion of St Austin and Pope Innocent the third [sic], and for six hundred years together, if Maldonate the Jesuit may be believ’d) thought the Sacrament of Eucharist to have been necessary to Infants, as well as to men of the ripest Age.²⁵⁰

How then could Pierce maintain at the same time that members of the Church of England ‘are so zealous for Antiquity, (provided it be but Antique Enough,) that we have never despised a meer Tradition, which we could track by sure footsteps from as far as the times of the purest Christians’?²⁵¹ Surely, the example of millenarianism would seem to prove that there was no such thing as a sure tradition? Pierce’s sermon had the flavour of Great Tew. When he reviewed it for the collective edition of his sermons, he significantly added a reference to Falkland’s discourse ‘Of Infallibility’.²⁵² In the course of the ensuing controversy, the young Daniel Whitby, then to all appearances an orthodox Oxonian, freely referred to Daill´e’s Use of the Fathers to show that ‘albeit the Church be visible in all Ages, yet is it not necessary to know its visibility in all Ages, or be able to produce in all Ages such Churches, and Persons as have held the same Tenets, as the Church ²⁵⁰ Thomas Pierce, ‘The Primitive Rule of Reformation: Delivered in a Sermon before His Majesty at Whitehall, Feb. 1. 1662. In Vindication of our Church against the Novelties of Rome’, in A Collection of Sermons upon Several Occasions (Oxford, 1671), 373–4, quoting in the margin Jean Maldonat [Juan Maldonado], Commentarii in quatuor Euangelistas (Pont-`a-Mousson, 1596), on John 6: 53, col. 719: ‘Missam facio Augustini, et Innocentii primi sententiam, quae sexcentos circiter annos uiguit in Ecclesia, Eucharistiam etiam infantibus necessariam’ (this is the first, posthumous edition, prepared by the Jesuits Fronton Du Duc and Cl´ement Du Puy). This passage of Maldonat had been quoted by Daill´e, Employ des Peres, 208 and 413 (Use of the Fathers, book I, 131, and book II, 110), and by Chillingworth in his (as yet unpublished) discourse, ‘An Argument drawn from the admitting Infants to the Eucharist’, 170. For Augustine and Innocent, see above, Chapter 4 nn. 138–9. ‘Innocent the third’ is an obvious misprint, copied uncorrected from the first edition (London, 1663, 23). ²⁵¹ Pierce, ‘Primitive Rule of Reformation’, 364. ²⁵² ‘A Paraenesis to the Reader, touching the sermon going before, and the discourse which follows after of Romes pretended infallibility’, ibid. 402.

296

A Patristic Identity

now visible doth’. Records might have been lost or corrupted, spurious ones might be impossible to distinguish from genuine, and so on.²⁵³ Cressy accused Pierce of deserting the proper ground of the Church of England and speaking like one of the ‘fanatics’. ‘Though he florish with Greek and Latin quotations of Fathers joynd to Scripture, which they do not’, he, like them, made ‘private spirit’ the rule of the interpretation of Scripture.²⁵⁴ The charge was not wholly convincing. It was not true that, as opposed to presbyterians and other sectaries, ‘both Catholicks and English Protestants, though they acknowledge Divine Revelations to be their only Rule, yet they admit certain universally received Traditions, besides expresse Scripture’²⁵⁵—‘English Protestants’ refused the notion that traditions existed besides Scripture. It was pure polemic to assert that they made the present governors of their Church ‘a speaking Judge’ to determine the sense of Scripture and traditions.²⁵⁶ Cressy, and recusants in general, were so intent on inculcating the necessity of a ‘visible Judge’ that they missed the exact balance—together with the latent contradictions—of their adversaries’ position. Church of England theologians would not have accepted that ‘the Primitive Church’ was no sufficient rule, ‘since those ancient Fathers are now past speaking, and their Writings are as obnoxious to disputes as the Scriptures themselves’.²⁵⁷ But Cressy had a point when he noted that Restoration apologists ‘finde themselves obliged to behave themselves differently to several adversaries … And great difficulties they often find how to avoid being accounted Papists, when they speak to Sectaries, and being even Fanaticks when they Dispute with Roman Catholicks.’²⁵⁸ Arguments against tradition resurfaced after 1685, when James II’s policies made confutation of popish claims of pressing urgency. Whitby contributed two tracts on the subject for the anti-Roman campaign. The second one showed that there was no evidence in antiquity for those traditions that the Church of Rome claimed were apostolical. As was usually the case with Whitby’s books, this was essentially a compilation, and not very clearly arranged at that, but there was hardly anything in it with ²⁵³ Daniel Whitby, /ὸς πο˜υ στω. ˜ Or, An Answer to Sure Footing (Oxford, 1666), ‘An Answer to Five Questions propounded by a Roman Catholic’, 25–7. See also 21–2. Pierce, ‘A Paraenesis to the Reader’, 401 and 431, mentioned approvingly—though not warmly—Whitby’s book. For references to the Use of the Fathers in anti-Roman polemics, see also Barrow, A Treatise of the Pope’s Supremacy, 105 (though Barrow did not own a copy according to M. Feingold, ‘Isaac Barrow’s Library’, in id. (ed.), Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow (Cambridge, 1990), 333–72). ²⁵⁴ [Serenus (Hugh) Cressy], Roman-Catholick Doctrines no novelties: or an Answer to Dr. Pierce’s Court-Sermon, Mis-call’d The Primitive Rule of Reformation. By S. C. a Roman-Catholick (n.p., 1663), 92–3. ²⁵⁵ Ibid. 90. ²⁵⁶ Ibid. 91–2. ²⁵⁷ Ibid. 91. ²⁵⁸ Ibid. 92.

A Patristic Identity

297

which any theologian of the established Church could have disagreed.²⁵⁹ The first tract, on traditions in general, while making many points which were run-of-the-mill anti-Roman polemic,²⁶⁰ went much further. Not only did Whitby give all the standard instances of false traditions and errors in antiquity, while referring his reader to Daill´e for more²⁶¹ and declaring Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto to be spurious,²⁶² but he also ridiculed the Fathers as interpreters of Scripture: Whosoever doth consider that many of the Fathers came immediately from Heathenism to read the Scriptures, that they insisted most on the Old Testament, of which they did not understand the Language, and of which they had only an imperfect, or corrupt Translation, and that they took the liberty to allegorize, and to give mystical Interpretations of them, as their luxuriant Phancies led them to it, will not think it strange that so many extravagant Interpretations of the holy Scriptures should drop from their Pens; That they should tell us that Noah’s being drunk with Wine [Genesis 9: 21] was, Sacramentum et figura Domini passionis²⁶³ … And from these Words of the Apostle [Galatians 5: 12] I wish they were cut off that trouble you, they should gather that the Apostle desired that the Abettors of the legal Ceremonies and Circumcision might be gelt. To omit infinite Passages of the like Nature.²⁶⁴ ²⁵⁹ Daniel Whitby, A Treatise of Traditions. Part II. Shewing the Novelty of the pretended Traditions of the Church of Rome; as being, I. Not mentioned by the Ancients of [sic] their Discourses of Traditions Apostolical, truly so called, or so esteemed by them. Nor, II. In their avowed Rule, or Symbol of Faith. Nor, III. In the Instructions given to the Clergy, concerning all those things they were to teach the People. Nor, IV. In the Examination of a Bishop at his Ordination. Nor, V. In the Ancient Treatises designed to instruct Christians in all the Articles of their Faith. VI. From the Confessions of Romish Doctors. With an Answer to the Arguments of Mr. Mumford for Traditions. And a Demonstration, That the Heathens made the same Plea for Tradition as the Romanists do; and that the Answer of the Fathers to it doth fully justifie the Protestants (London, 1689). ²⁶⁰ Daniel Whitby, A Treatise of Traditions. Part I. Where it is proved, That we have Evidence sufficient from Tradition; I. That the Scriptures are the Word of God. II. That the Church of England owns the true Canon of the Books of the Old Testament. III. That the Copies of the Scriptures have not been corrupted. IV. That the Romanists have no such Evidence for their Traditions. V. That the Testimony of the present Church of Rome can be no sure Evidence of Apostolical Tradition. VI. What Traditions may securely be relyed upon, and what not (London, 1688). ²⁶¹ Ibid., p. xxiv (‘The learned Dailly in that elaborat Treatise of the Use of the Fathers’), 7–15, 73–81 (the millennium), 84–6 (Easter controversy), 91–102 (rebaptism). ²⁶² Ibid. 16. ²⁶³ Ibid., p. xviii, referring to Cyprian, ep. 63 to Caecilius, in Sancti Caecilii Cypriani Opera Recognita et Illustrata per Ioannem Oxoniensem Episcopum. Accedunt Annales Cyprianici, siue Tredecim Annorum, quibus S. Cyprianus inter Christianis uersatus est, breuis historia Chronologice delineata per Ioannem Cestriensem (Oxford, 1682), letters, sep. pagination, 149 [= CC 3C, 391]. ²⁶⁴ Whitby, Of Traditions. I, p. xx, citing the commentaries of Jerome (PL 26, 405–6), Chrysostom (PG 61, 668), Theodoret (PG 82, 496), Pseudo-Oecumenius (PG 118, 1153), and Theophylact (PG 124, 1013). This interpretation had so many

298

A Patristic Identity

Such a position was hard to reconcile with the exaltation of antiquity by many Church of England divines. One of Whitby’s targets was none other than Cyprian, the patron saint of High Churchmanship, whose complete works had been published in Oxford in 1682 (Whitby had himself provided some assistance for the edition).²⁶⁵ Whitby was to elaborate further on this attack at the end of his life, in his Dissertatio de S. Scripturarum Interpretatione secundum Patrum commentarios, a large catalogue of patristic interpretations of Scripture which were far removed from the literal sense. He had become by then a committed Low Churchman and his book was explicitly aimed at the Oxford school of patristic theology.²⁶⁶ It was hailed by the Huguenot expatriate Samuel Masson as ‘a useful complement to Mr Daill´e’s book, De l’usage des P`eres, by which some stiff English people had been so much scandalized. One is pleased to see here a kind of apology for that famous French Protestant.’²⁶⁷ Whitby’s Treatise of Traditions nonetheless came out in 1688 with the imprimatur of one of Archbishop Sancroft’s chaplains. It must have been considered useful ammunition in the ongoing fight against Roman Catholicism. It is true that Whitby made a distinction between unwritten, and as such utterly unreliable, traditions and ‘such things as are not written in the Scripture, though they are left on Record in the Ecclesiastical writings of the first and purest Ages’. To this second category belonged the Canon and textual integrity of Scripture, and also ‘the superiority of Bishops over Presbyters, the Ordination of Presbyters and Deacons by Bishops only, and the like’.²⁶⁸ However, some of Whitby’s arguments against the authority of the Fathers would seem to affect written patristic authorities that the great Jesuit exegete Cornelius a Lapide did not dare to reject it explicitly, although he clearly preferred to take ‘Abscindantur’ to mean ‘Abscindantur ab Ecclesia’: ‘Hic sensus planus est, et grauitate Apostolica dignus’ (Cornelius Cornelii a Lapide [van den Steen], In omnes diui Pauli epistolas Commentaria (Lyon, 1644), 454). ²⁶⁵ On Fell’s edition, see below. Whitby, who was precentor of Salisbury, helped to collate a manuscript in the cathedral library (Whitby to Thomas Smith, 6 July 1676, MS Smith 54, 127). In his edition, Fell defended Cyprian’s exegesis of Gen. 9: 21 and actually used it to score a polemical point against transubstantiation: ‘Interim ut typi ratio consistat, necesse est uinum non minus Dominum quam Noachum bibisse [at the Last Supper]’ (Cypriani Opera, letters, sep. pagination, 149 n.). ²⁶⁶ Daniel Whitby, Dissertatio de S. Scripturarum Interpretatione secundum Patrum commentarios (London, 1714). The work includes Gal. 5: 12 (see 280) but not Gen. 9: 21. ²⁶⁷ Histoire critique de la R´epublique des Lettres, tant Ancienne que Moderne, 7 (1714), 436: ‘on peut dire que c’est un suppl´ement utile au Livre de Mr. Daill´e, de l’usage des P`eres, dont certains rigides Anglois avoient e´t´e si scandalisez. Il y a plaisir, de voir ici une espece d’Apologie pour ce fameux Protestant Franc¸ois.’ ²⁶⁸ Whitby, Of Traditions. I, 41. See also on episcopacy, 73 and 120–2; on the Canon, 109 and 123–32. The imprimatur of William Needham, Sancroft’s chaplain, is dated 5 June 1688.

A Patristic Identity

299

traditions as well, and it is significant that he felt it necessary to resort to Providence as the ultimate guarantee of the transmission of Scripture.²⁶⁹ The great problem of anti-Roman polemics was just where to stop in the assault on tradition before it began to damage the Church of England’s own case. 4. HISTORY VERSUS ENTHUSIASM During the 1640s and 1650s Radicals had claimed an immediate, illuminative knowledge of divine truth.²⁷⁰ ‘Enthusiasm’ became therefore a major concern of Restoration episcopalians, who thought it the origin of doctrines of resistance and tyrannicide. The connection was explicitly made in the Oxford Decree of 1683 ‘against certain Pernicious Books and Damnable Doctrines Destructive to the Sacred Persons of Princes, their State and Government, and of all Humane Society’.²⁷¹ This may seem historically rather strange. The fact was that Independent divines of the Civil War had laid much stress on Old Testament figures like Elisha and David, who resisted evil kings. Goodwin insisted in 1642 that those models, being ‘Canonicall’, were more authoritative than the non-resistance of primitive Christians so much cried up by Royalist divines.²⁷² He also argued that God ‘by way of special dispensation’ might have hidden from the primitive Christians their liberty to resist persecutors: Antichrist was then to come into the world.... Whereas, now on the contrary, that time of Gods preordination and purpose, for the downfall of Antichrist, ²⁶⁹ Ibid. 5. ²⁷⁰ Nuttall, Holy Spirit; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 156–73 and 178–9; C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London, 1972). ²⁷¹ See the 24th proposition condemned by the decree: ‘Populo Dei etiam post consignatum Scripturae Canonem in omni aeuo nouae Reuelationes sunt expectandae ad quarum normam actiones suas dirigant, uitamque componant, et priuatus quilibet a Spiritu Sancto instigatus, iure potest occidere Tyrannum.’ In a remarkable inversion of chronology, the first part was ascribed to ‘Quakers and other Enthusiasts’, the second to Christopher Goodman (Oxford University Archives, register Tb, p. 378). The text was immediately printed both in the original (Iudicium et Decretum Uniuersitatis Oxoniensis Latum in Conuocatione habita Jul. 21. An. 1683. Contra quosdam Perniciosos Libros et Propositiones Impias, quae Capitibus sacratissimorum Principum, eorum Statui et Regimini, et omni Humanae Societati exitium intentant) and in English translation (The Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford Past in their Convocation). See also Edward Stillingfleet, An Answer to several late Treatises, Occasioned by a Book entituled a Discourse concerning the Idolatry practised in the Church of Rome, and the Hazard of Salvation in the Communion of it. The first part (London, 1673), 59–60. ²⁷² Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme, 24. David’s taking up arms against Saul is related in 1 Sam. On Elisha and the King’s messenger, see 2 Kgs. 6: 32.

300

A Patristic Identity

drawing neere, there is a kind of necessity, that those truths, which have slept for many yeares, should now be awakened … Evident it is, that they are the commonalty of Christians, I meane Christians of ordinary ranke and quality that shall be most active, and have the principall hand in executing the judgments of God upon the Whore.... Now this promise and prediction of God concerning the destruction of the Whore by Christians of inferiour ranke and quality, can hardly be conceived however it should be fulfilled and take place, except the judgments and consciences of men should be loosed and set at liberty from the bands and fetters of those enslaving Doctrines and apprehensions.²⁷³

This mixture of the Old Testament and millenarianism was successful among Parliamentarians.²⁷⁴ In Of resisting the Lawfull Magistrate upon colour of Religion, Hammond, speaking for the Royalist side, countered that this was downright ‘Enthusiasme, which is hardly ever distinguishable from a demure frensie’.²⁷⁵ This was also, more generally, the charge that Hammond made against the political appeal to the Old Testament. The Jews had been governed by a theocracy, God ‘interposing by his oracle, and other particular directions, as well as standing Law, as in that case of Phineas and Elias’, and all Zealots. To claim that such extraordinary behaviour could be a model for Christians now was to profess oneself ‘an asserter of Enthusiasmes’.²⁷⁶ Hammond enlarged his point in 1647 in a special dissertation ‘Of the Zelots among the Jewes and the Liberty taken by them’, which he appended to the new edition of his treatise: All use of this liberty, all imitation of that Jewish priviledge of Zealots in the Old Testament, is clearely interdicted all Christians. First, because the written word is the onely Oracle wherein God constantly reveales himselfe to Christians now under the New Testament, neither are any other incitations to be expected from God … what is more then this, yea though it come to us from the Pulpit, savours of enthusiasmes and seducing spirits.²⁷⁷ ²⁷³ Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme, 22–3. ²⁷⁴ Hammond, Of resisting, 10: ‘it is said, many have been satisfied in the lawfulnesse of their present course by those Answers and Objections which that book [Anti-Cavalierisme] hath helpt them to.’ This is confirmed by Coffey, Goodwin, 90. ²⁷⁵ Hammond, Of resisting, 23. ²⁷⁶ Ibid. 7–8. On Phineas’ executing judgement on Zimri and Cozbi ‘because he was zealous for his God’, see Num. 25; on Elijah’s putting to death the prophets of Baal, 1 Kgs. 18: 40; on his bringing fire from heaven upon the kings’ soldiers, 2 Kgs. 1. ²⁷⁷ Henry Hammond, Of Resisting the Lawfull Magistrate under colour of Religion, and appendant to it, of the word KPIMA, rendred damnation, Rom. 13 reprinted. Also, of the Zelots among the Jewes. Of taking up the Crosse. A vindication of Christians reprehending Saint Peter, from the exceptions of Master Marshall. Augmented by the Author (n.p., 1647), 56.

A Patristic Identity

301

Debates of the Restoration Crisis were largely conducted with reference to the events, and in the religio-political languages, of the 1640s.²⁷⁸ There are numerous textual echoes of Hammond’s Of resisting in the sermon preached before the House of Lords on 5 November 1678 by Thomas Lamplugh, Bishop of Exeter.²⁷⁹ Archbishop Sancroft had strongly insisted that Lamplugh should perform this duty and the subject must have been chosen after much deliberation, at a time when the Cavalier regime had begun to unravel. Parliament had gathered again two weeks earlier, after the summer recess, and had immediately begun to investigate the supposed Popish Plot. The Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Danby, who had dominated politics since 1674, in close alliance with the bishops, was under threat.²⁸⁰ In his sermon, Lamplugh opposed the spirit of Elijah and the spirit of Christ. ‘The Spirit of Elias was a Prophetick Spirit, whose Dictates … were secret Impulses from Heaven, whether by instinct or extasie’ and therefore ‘a Zelotick Spirit’, which justified extraordinary actions.²⁸¹ The situation of Christians, Lamplugh argued, was wholly different since they were ‘not to teach or practise any thing but what the setled Canon of the Scripture, the revealed Will of God will own’.²⁸² The raptures of sectaries and the fictions of the Church of Rome were equally contrary to ‘the Oeconomy of the Gospel’.²⁸³ The spirit of the gospel taught submission to magistrates and non-resistance, as had been practised under persecution by those ‘who lived in the Primitive light’.²⁸⁴ The campaign against enthusiasm culminated in George Hickes’s Oxford University sermon of July 1680, The Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised, exactly ²⁷⁸ Scott, Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, passim; Goldie, ‘Danby’, 78–80, 92, 95–6; Beddard, ‘Tory Oxford’, 876 and 879–80; De Krey, London and the Restoration, esp. 154–6, 166, 238, 244–5, 309–10. ²⁷⁹ Thomas Lamplugh, A Sermon Preached before the House of Lords on the 5th of November, in the Abby Church at Westminster (London, 1678). Lamplugh’s text was Luke 9: 55–6 (Christ’s rebuke to James and John for wanting to imitate Elijah: ‘Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of ’), which Hammond had commented, Of Resisting, 7–8. For other references to Hammond’s Of Resisting in Restoration sermons, see Sharp, Sermon Preached before the Lord Mayor, 16; Edward Pelling, A Sermon Preached on the Thirtieth of January, 1678/9 (London, 1679), 4. See also [James Craufurd], A serious expostulation with that party in Scotland commonly known by the name of Whigs (London, 1682), 17; Laurence Womock, Suffragium Protestantium. Wherein our Governours are Justifyed in their Impositions and Proceedings against Dissenters. Meisner also and the Verdict rescued from the Cavils and Seditious Sophistry of the Protestant Reconciler (London, 1683), 355–6. ²⁸⁰ See letter of Lamplugh to Sancroft, 4 September 1678, to try to be released from the task, and then letter of 5 October accepting to preach, Bodl., MS Tanner 39, fos. 93r and 111r . On the context, see Goldie, ‘Danby’; Knights, Politics and Opinion, 16–28; De Krey, London and the Restoration, 151–9. ²⁸¹ Lamplugh, Sermon before the House of Lords, 21 and 29–31. ²⁸² Ibid. 22. ²⁸³ Ibid. 22–4. ²⁸⁴ Ibid. 35–6.

302

A Patristic Identity

two months after Stillingfleet had preached against ‘Separation’ in London.²⁸⁵ Hickes’s sermon was the most articulate exposition of the theory of the cessation of miracles. Divines like Puller had already denounced both the Church of Rome and the ‘Enthusiasts of our late Age’ for pretending ‘to such extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit, as were peculiar to the first Ages of the Church’.²⁸⁶ But Puller reserved the word ‘enthusiasm’ to Protestant radicalism and merely claimed that it was conducive to popery as ‘one extream to another’.²⁸⁷ Hickes emphasized that popery and radical Protestantism were two species of enthusiasm, thereby opening a line of apologetics which was to survive political changes, up to such works as Bishop Lavington’s The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists compared (1747). Hickes had just had direct experience of the subversive implications of ‘enthusiasm’. A fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, of the strongest Royalist convictions, he had gone to Scotland in 1677 as chaplain to Charles II’s high commissioner, the Duke of Lauderdale.²⁸⁸ The climate was one of extreme tension: episcopacy had been restored more nominally than effectively, and the fragile ecclesiastical establishment had been made subservient to government politics, which tried to combine indulgence for moderate presbyterians and vigorous repression for the hardliners.²⁸⁹ Radical Covenanters, who had taken up arms in 1666, were ready to rise again. Hickes wished that they would—as they did indeed in June 1679—‘that they might give so good occasion for their own extirpation, for if they do they’l neither find mercy in the field nor at the bar’.²⁹⁰ In January 1678, the belated ²⁸⁵ George Hickes,The Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised: In a Sermon Preached Before the University of Oxford, on Act-Sunday, July 11 1680 (London, 1680). On the general context, see above, n. 210; on ‘the visceral toryism of the university’, Beddard, ‘Tory Oxford’, 862–79. ²⁸⁶ Puller, Moderation, 101. ²⁸⁷ Ibid. 145–6. See also Clarendon, Animadversions, 230–1. ²⁸⁸ There is no monograph on Hickes. T. Harmsen, ODNB, xxvii. 5–11, provides a good summmary of his life. Additional information will be found in J. Maskell, ‘George Hickes the Nonjuror’, Notes and Queries, 6th series 12 (1885), 401–3; D. C. Douglas, English Scholars 1660–1730 (2nd edn., London, 1951), 77–97. He was chosen by Lauderdale on the recommendation of Bishop Compton of London (Hickes to Anthony Wood, 9 August 1682, Bodl., MS Wood F. 42, fo. 193r ). ²⁸⁹ For Hickes’s sense of being under siege, see e.g. his letter to Thomas Smith, 30 March 1678, Bodl., MS Smith 50, p. 88. See C. Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003), 104–30; E. H. Hyman, ‘A Church Militant: Scotland, 1661–1690’, SCJ 26 (1995), 49–74; G. M. Yould, ‘The Duke of Lauderdale’s Religious Policy in Scotland, 1668–79: The Failure of Conciliation and the Return to Coercion’, Journal of Religious History, 11 (1980–1), 248–68; on the impact of Scottish affairs on the Restoration Crisis, Scott, Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 149–54. ²⁹⁰ Hickes to Thomas Smith, 29 October 1677, Bodl., MS Smith 50, p. 73 (Hickes had used the same expression in a letter to an unknown correspondent, 23 October 1677,

A Patristic Identity

303

trial of James Mitchell, a mentally disturbed preacher who had attempted, ten years earlier, to murder the Archbishop of St Andrews, became the focus for religious passions. Hickes, who attended the trial, suffered ‘many affronts’ from ‘the zealous rabble’.²⁹¹ After Mitchell’s condemnation and execution, Hickes, at Lauderdale’s request, hastened to publish an account of the proceedings for the English public.²⁹² ‘The blind Pseudo-Zealot’ had justified his actions by the precedents of Phineas and Elijah.²⁹³ Hickes denounced this way of arguing ‘by false Analogy from things and persons in the Jewish, to things and persons under the Christian Dispensation’ as an invention of the Romanists, which presbyterians had then taken up.²⁹⁴ The sermon which Hickes preached to his university after his return struck at the root of the mischief. Taking as his text 1 Corinthians 12: 4 (‘Now there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit’), Hickes distinguished between graces (gratiae gratum facientes, in scholastic parlance), which were essential to Christianity, and extraordinary charisms (gratiae gratis datae), which were only fit for the ‘infant-state’ of the Church, its ‘Minority’.²⁹⁵ Moreover, Hickes claimed, ‘in the Churches where they were useful, they were, as it appears from Ecclesiastical History, commonly given to the Ministers more than the People, to Children not at all, and seldomer to Women, than to Men’ (the prominence of women among the religious prophets of the Civil War had especially outraged conservatives).²⁹⁶ ‘As the Gospel increased and HMC Portland, ii, 37). Same wish in Hickes’s letter to Smith of 27 November 1677, Bodl., MS Smith 50, p. 78, and in his letter to Simon Patrick, 24 January 1678, in Original Letters, illustrative of English History, ed. H. Ellis, 2nd series, iv (London, 1827), 46 (also printed in HMC Portland, ii. 45). ²⁹¹ See Hickes’s account of the trial to Simon Patrick, 10 January 1678, in Original Letters, ed. Ellis, 2nd series, iv. 47–51; Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 140–1; Gilbert Burnet, History of [my] own time (Oxford, 1833), ii. 134. ²⁹² [George Hickes], Ravaillac rediuiuus: being a Narrative of the Late Tryal of Mr James Mitchel a Conventicle Preacher, Who was executed the 18th of January 1677 for an Attempt which he made on the Sacred Person of the Arch-Bishop of St. Andrews.... In a Letter from a Scottish to an English gentleman (2nd edn., London, 1682). All quotations are from this edition but have been checked throughout against the first (London, 1678). For the authorship, see Hickes to Anthony Wood, 9 August 1682, MS Wood F. 42, fo. 193r : ‘I was fain to disguise myself under a feigned name and character to secure my self from the murderous Scottish whigs.’ He had sent his manuscript from Scotland to Simon Patrick, ‘who committed it to the press’ (Hilkiah Bedford, ‘An account of the several works of the very Revd Dr George Hickes Dean of Worcester, with the time and occasion of publishing each of them’, Bodl., MS Eng. misc. e. 4, fo. 30r ). See also Hickes to Patrick, 4 April 1678, HMC Portland, ii. 50. A copy prepared by Hickes for a third edition, to which he intended to put his name, is in the Bodl., shelfmark C. 16. 17 Th (2). ²⁹³ Hickes, Ravaillac rediuiuus, 16, 18–20, 21–6. ²⁹⁴ Ibid. 26–7. ²⁹⁵ Hickes, Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised, 21 and 26. ²⁹⁶ Ibid., 7. See K. Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (April 1958), 42–62; id., Religion and the Decline of Magic, 156–73;

304

A Patristic Identity

the Church grew up, God like a wise nurse, weaned her by degrees from these miraculous Gifts, till at last having arrived at her full stature in Christ, he left her, as Parents leave their children when they are grown to be men, to subsist without extraordinary helps and supplies.’²⁹⁷ According to Hickes, the gift of working miracles was the last to be withdrawn, but even miracles ceased ‘about the beginning of the fifth century’, with the extinction of idolatry ‘and when the Church built Her faith not on present, but past Miracles, and her Hieroms, Augustins, and Chrysostoms like us were not inspired, but studied divines’.²⁹⁸ Hickes could thus go on to expose as ‘gross impostors and Enthusiasts’ Roman Catholic thaumaturgic saints, men and women, who pretended to the same ‘sorts of Miraculous gifts, that we read of in the Primitive Church’.²⁹⁹ The Pope’s claim to infallibility itself ‘must be resolved upon this Enthusiastical principle of immediate Inspiration’, which is ‘a most dangerous and Fanatical Pretension’ and ‘destroys the certainty of the Christian belief, which was fixed above Sixteen hundred years ago’.³⁰⁰ In the new edition of 1709, Hickes, now the patriarch of the Nonjurors, added that it destroyed ‘the old Rule of determining Controversies laid down by Vincentius Lirinensis’.³⁰¹ Quakers were guilty of as dangerous an enthusiasm.³⁰² Even if ‘the Spirit of Prophecy’ was still alive, anyway, ‘the historian would have as much to boast of ’ as the prophet, ‘the knowledge of things past being as excellent in it self, and generally more useful to the world, than the Knowledge of Things to come’. Not only is historical knowledge ‘more clear and distinct’ than prophecy but, now that the world has grown old, it ‘extends a great deal farther’.³⁰³ In his 1709 edition, Hickes introduced correctives to make the claim to immediate inspiration proper to ‘some Popish Writers’—‘the CourtWriters of the Church of Rome’—and no longer to all papists.³⁰⁴ Indeed, French Gallicans, especially those of the Jansenist stamp, rejected it. In May 1652 the theologians deputed by the French Jansenist bishops asked Pope Innocent X for a contradictory debate with their adversaries, offering to prove clearly that these had misinterpreted Augustine. The Pope replied that ‘the first and soveraign vicar of Christ was not obliged to examine everything through disputation’ and that ‘the truth of his decrees only P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992). ²⁹⁷ Hickes, Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised, 27. ²⁹⁸ Ibid. 29. ²⁹⁹ Ibid. 37. ³⁰⁰ Ibid. ³⁰¹ George Hickes,The Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised: In a Sermon Preach’d Before the University of Oxford, etc. the Fourth Edition, much enlarg’d (London, 1709), 61. ³⁰² Hickes, Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised [1680], 39–40. ³⁰³ Ibid. 33. ³⁰⁴ See Hickes, Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised [1709], 61.

A Patristic Identity

305

relied on divine inspiration’.³⁰⁵ Isaac Barrow, who knew the episode from a French Jansenist pamphlet, thought that Innocent’s claim was ‘downright Quakerisme, Enthusiasme, Imposture’.³⁰⁶ Jansenist divines, at least in private, were almost as critical of the Pope’s attempt ‘to play the prophet’ and of his ‘pretended enthusiastic infallibility’.³⁰⁷ Hostility to inspiration in the name of history was widespread in both French and English religious cultures. Underlying the opposition to ‘popery’ and ‘enthusiasm’ was a distinct doctrine about the nature of faith. The difference between the English and the Roman Catholic ‘analysis of faith’ (to use a seventeenth-century expression) was already apparent in the exchanges between Laud and Fisher or Chillingworth and Knott. It became prominent in Restoration controversies. The usual post-Tridentine position, which was given official support by a decree of Pope Innocent XI in 1679, held that moral certainty was not a sufficient ground for an act of faith. After the fact of revelation had been ascertained, through evidence of a historical character, the will, assisted by grace, ought to move the intellect to a higher plane, to supernatural and saving faith, the certainty of which was stronger than mathematical demonstration.³⁰⁸ The ordinary rule that the ground of assent should be ³⁰⁵ Report of the deputies to their bishops, 5 May 1652, printed in Louis Gorin de Saint-Amour, Journal de ce qui s’est fait a` Rome dans l’Affaire des Cinq Propositions (n.p., 1662), 441: ‘Elle [Sa Saintet´e] nous repartit que le premier et souverain Vicaire de Jesus-Christ n’estoit point oblig´e d’examiner toutes choses par la dispute; Que c’estoit ass´es qu’il prist les moiens qu’il jugeoit convenables pour former son jugement sur les controverses qu’on luy proposoit, et qu’apres cela nous devions croire que l’inspiration de Dieu ne luy manqueroit point pour connoistre le fond des choses contest´ees, et pour les decider infailliblement; et que la verit´e de ces decrets dependoit seulement, solamente, de cette inspiration Divine.’ See also the Pope’s speech to Saint-Amour on 10 July 1651, ibid. 97. ³⁰⁶ Isaac Barrow, A Treatise of the Pope’s Supremacy. To which is added a Discourse concerning the Unity of the Church (London, 1680), 395, quoting [Gabriel Gerberon], Memorial historique de ce qui s’est pass´e depuis l’ann´ee 1647. jusques a` l’an 1653. touchant les cinq Propositions, tant a` Paris qu’`a Rome (‘A Cologne, chez Pierre Marteau’, 1676), 78: ‘Le Pape r´epondit que le Vicaire de Jesus-Christ n’estoit point oblig´e d’examiner toutes choses par la dispute, que la verit´e de ses Decrets dependoit seulement de l’inspiration Divine’ (Gerberon’s cut in the Pope’s speech made it sound even more ‘enthusiastic’ than it was). ³⁰⁷ Antoine Arnauld to his brother Henri, Bishop of Angers, January 1664, in Œuvres, 43 vols. (Paris, 1775–83), i. 462–3: ‘cette pr´etendue infaillibilit´e d’enthousiasme est la porte ouverte a` toute sorte d’erreurs.... le danger que court l’Eglise, si l’on souffre que les Papes se mettent en possession d’agir en Prophetes, et de juger de toutes choses avec une infaillibilit´e d’enthousiasme.... Innocent X … a eˆu tort de vouloir faire le Prophete, et de nous d´ebiter ses inspirations pour les regles de notre foi.’ See also Saint-Amour, Journal, 443. ³⁰⁸ In 1679, Pope Innocent XI condemned the proposition ‘Voluntas non potest efficere, ut assensus fidei in se ipso sit magis firmus, quam mereatur pondus rationum

306

A Patristic Identity

more certain than that which I assent to on that ground did not apply to ‘the Act of Believing … which the Understanding Elicites, rather by a Voluntary and Free inclination and Consent of the will, then from any Evident Certainty in the Object, whereto it assents’.³⁰⁹ Church of England divines held—as Stillingfleet put it, following Chillingworth and Laud—that ‘such as the nature of the assent is, such is the evidence [God] gives for it’. Since God ‘requires our firm assent’ that Christ performed miracles, he gives us ‘certain [but not infallible] evidence by an Universal and uncontrouled tradition’.³¹⁰ The Roman Catholic position was hardened by White and his disciple John Sergeant, who required that the motives of faith be ‘practically Self-evident’ and ‘impossible to be false’—as was the case, they claimed, of ‘the Catholick Rule of Faith, the Living Voice and Practice of the Church’.³¹¹ ‘Moral Certainty’, Sergeant argued, ‘is in reality Uncertainty.’³¹² In the long controversy that followed, Stillingfleet essentially reiterated Chillingworth’s point, that ‘a moral Certainty’ might indeed be a sufficient foundation for faith.³¹³ ad assensum impellentium’ (Denz.–Sch¨on. 2119). See the explanations of the Jesuits Juan de Cardenas, Crisis theologica, in qua plures selectae difficultates ex morali theologia ad Lydium ueritatis lapidem reuocantur ex regula morum posita a SS. D.N. Innocentio XI. P.M. in Diplomate damnante sexaginta quinque Propositiones (Cologne, 1702), 320–6, and Domenico Viva, Damnatae Theses ab Alexandro VII. Innocentio XI. et Alexandro VIII. necnon Iansenii ad Theologicam trutinam reuocatae juxta pondus Sanctuarii (8th edn., Padua, 1717: 1st edn. 1708), i/2. 203–7; S. Harent, DTC, vi, s.v. ‘Foi’, col. 311–12; R. Aubert, Le Probl`eme de l’acte de foi. Donn´ees traditionnelles et r´esultats des controverses r´ecentes (2nd edn., Louvain, 1950), 93–102. ³⁰⁹ [Thomas Thorold], Labyrinthus Cantuariensis: or Doctor Lawd’s Labyrinth. Being an answer to the late Archbishop of Canterburies relation of a conference between himselfe and Mr. Fisher (Paris, 1658), 57–8. According to Stillingfleet, who wrote a reply, the book only came out in 1664 (Rational Account, fo. a2r ). ³¹⁰ Stillingfleet, Rational Account, 138. Compare Hooker, Lawes, II. 7. 5 [Works, i. 179]: ‘it is not required or can be exacted at our hands, that we should yeeld unto any thing other assent, then such as doth answere the evidence which is to be had of that we assent unto’; Laud, Conference with Fisher (1639), 61. For Chillingworth, see above, 226. ³¹¹ See esp. White, ‘A Preface, shewing the necessity of certitude in Religion’, in Rushworth’s Dialogues (1654); [John Sergeant], Sure-footing in Christianity, or Rational Discourses on the Rule of Faith (2nd edn., London, 1665); id., Faith vindicated from Possibility of Falshood (Louvain, 1667). Bruno Neveu was prevented by his untimely death from completing his book on this subject: for a presentation of his work, see J.-L. Quantin, ‘De l’histoire de l’´erudition eccl´esiastique a` l’histoire de l’orthodoxie religieuse: Bruno Neveu et le catholicisme’, in id. and J.-C. Waquet (eds.), Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne: m´elanges a` la m´emoire de Bruno Neveu (Geneva, 2006), 15–21. ³¹² Sergeant, Faith vindicated, 34. ³¹³ Stillingfleet, Answer to several late Treatises, 91. For an analysis of Stillingfleet’s theory of certainty, see Carroll, Stillingfleet, 42–9 and 57–79. A position essentially similar was defended by Tillotson (Van Leeuwen, Problem of Certainty, 32–48). See also Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, esp. 94–104—but the author wrongly implies that

A Patristic Identity

307

We have a moral Certainty of the matters of Fact, which do concern the Doctrine, the Miracles, and the Books of Scripture: which is of the same kind with the certainty those had of Christs Doctrine and Miracles, who lived in Mesopotamia, at that time; which must depend upon the credibility of the Witnesses who convey these things, which is a Moral Consideration, and therefore the Certainty which is taken from it may be properly called Moral Certainty. Of which there being many degrees, the highest is here understood, which any matter of fact is capable of.³¹⁴

‘Tradition is a kind of derivative and perpetuated sensation to us.’ We have more reason to believe than those contemporaries of Jesus who heard reports of his miracles and doctrines, ‘because by such a continued tradition we have an evidence of the efficacy of this Doctrine, which had so continual a power as to engage so many in all ages since its first appearance to be the propagators and defenders of it’.³¹⁵ On the Puritan side, the Westminster Confession had determined that ‘the grace of faith, whereby the elect are enabled to believe to the saving of their souls, is the work of the Spirit of Christ in their hearts’.³¹⁶ Cheynell had taken Chillingworth to task for his notion of faith: ‘to rely upon Tradition, is but to rely upon Humane testimony; and such as the testimony is, such is the faith: if the testimony, which is the ground of faith, be humane, then the faith cannot be divine.’³¹⁷ John Owen argued in very similar terms two decades later: since ‘no Faith can be of any other kind, than is the Evidence it reflects on’, a faith which was ‘resolved into humane Testimony only’, was ‘meerly humane’, ‘a moral Assurance’.³¹⁸ Divine faith required both ‘the Work of spiritual illumination’ performed by the Holy Spirit in our minds, and ‘an immediate internal Testimony of the Holy Ghost, assuring us of the divine Original and Authority of the Scripture’.³¹⁹ On the whole, as this epistemology was proper to ‘Latitudinarians’, whereas it was ‘distinctly second-hand and commonplace’ (Spurr, ‘ ‘‘Latitudinarianism’’ ’, 72 and 75); Spellman, Latitudinarians, 72–88. ³¹⁴ Stillingfleet, Several conferences, 267. See also Rational Account, 202–34, A Discourse concerning the Nature and Grounds of the Certainty of Faith (London, 1688), and, in a different context, A Letter to a Deist, in Answer to several Objections against the Truth and Authority of the Scriptures (London, 1677). ³¹⁵ Stillingfleet, Rational Account, 205. ³¹⁶ Westminster Confession, ed. Carruthers, chapter XIV, § I, 116. The statement is reproduced verbatim in Matthews (ed.), Savoy Declaration, 92, and amplified in its new chapter XX, § IV, 102. ³¹⁷ Cheynell, Chillingworthi nouissima, sig. F1r . ³¹⁸ John Owen, The Reason of Faith. Or an Answer unto that Enquiry, Wherefore we believe the Scripture to be the Word of God. With the Causes and Nature of that Faith wherewith we do so (London, 1677), 18–19 and 67–9. See also 77. ³¹⁹ Ibid. 91–4, 147–50, 183–84. See Trueman, Claims of Truth, 75–90; S. Rehnman, Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2002), 129–54.

308

A Patristic Identity

Owen himself pointed out, Dissenters on this point were closer to Roman than to Restoration divines.³²⁰ Puller had thus some justification for yoking Sergeant and Owen together.³²¹ He saw here yet another instance of the moderation of the Church of England, which did not ask for more than ‘moral evidence; that is, such an evidence as we can have of things and actions past, as is sufficient to guide and govern our manners and behaviour’.³²² And among the very many reasons which we have from rational and moral evidence, whereby the truth of the Divine Testimony is confirmed to us abundantly; Our Church allows no one greater (since the miraculous gifts) than the testimony of Gods Church, now and in all Ages since Christ and his Apostles time, because of the sundry Evidences also which confirm to us the truth of the Churches testimony.³²³

Such a position was open to a latitudinarian construction, which Chillingworth had made explicit and which was to come to the fore again after 1689. Hostility to ‘enthusiasm’ was shared by many sections of the established Church. When Hickes’s Oxford sermon was printed, it was welcome by ‘very many learned men’, including the leading Cambridge Platonists, ‘Dr Cudworth, Dr More, and Dr Whichcote, who sent to desire him to give them a meeting, where they all gave him their thanks on this occasion, and told him, they heartily subscrib’d to all that he had said in this Discourse’.³²⁴ In Hickes’s case, however, the denunciation of ‘enthusiasm’ was closely linked with a high episcopalian ecclesiology and also with tory politics. His Oxford sermon had already hinted at political implications³²⁵ and he made these explicit six months later, in February 1681, in the tense interval between the second and third Exclusion Parliaments. Hickes had been appointed by Sancroft to the rich living of All Hallows, Barking-bythe-Tower, in the ‘Tory space’ of London, and he was playing a key part in the network of preachers on whom the Crown relied to balance whig influence in the City.³²⁶ The subject of his sermon was the special status of ³²⁰ Owen, Reason of Faith, 86 and 190–1. ³²¹ Puller, Moderation, 144–5. ³²² Ibid. 142–3. ³²³ Ibid. 146. ³²⁴ Bedford, ‘Account of Hickes’s works’, fo. 32r . On More’s somewhat ambiguous hostility to ‘enthusiasm’ (or what he chose to call so), see Fouke, Enthusiastical concerns, esp. 151–80 and 230–3. Cf. more generally M. Heyd, ‘Be sober and reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, 1996), 165–90. ³²⁵ See Hickes, Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised [1680], 39–40. ³²⁶ R. Beddard, ‘The Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions, 1681–84: An Instrument of Tory Reaction’, HJ 10 (1967), 31–3; Knights, Politics and Opinion, 289–90; De Krey, London and the Restoration, 284–90. The second Exclusion Parliament was dissolved on 18 January 1681 and the election for the Oxford Parliament took place on 4 February (ibid. 210–16).

A Patristic Identity

309

‘the Jews, as the chosen and adopted people of the Lord’, and the correlative impossibility of taking them for models under the gospel. The general idea went back to Hammond but Hickes’s reflection had been nourished by his Scottish experience.³²⁷ Only impostors and enthusiasts could now pretend ‘like the Prophets, and Heroes of the Old Testament, to Illuminations, Prophecies, Visions, Dreams, Raptures, Inspirations, Voices from without, irresistible impulses within, familiar Communion with God, converses with his Angels, and I know not what Mercuries of the other World’.³²⁸ Christians should not try to imitate ‘the extraordinary heroicall acts’ of zealots, who were immediately inspired by God to work his commissions.³²⁹ Hickes pointed out that ultra-Catholics at the time of the French League as well as Calvinist exponents of the right of resistance had invoked Old Testament figures.³³⁰ Parliamentarian preachers had done so again during the Civil War, ‘which made the common people of Great Britain consider themselves as the people of Israel’.³³¹ ‘But our Saviour, who put an end to the Jewish State, and his Fathers temporal Reign, put an end thereby to all future pretentions of supralegal impulses and Zeal’ and regularly settled authority in ‘the Civil Magistrate, the Minister of God to execute Wrath’.³³² The appeal to the Fathers lay not only in the actual contents of theological discourse but in the modes of its social production. Whereas radical claims to illumination would have bypassed university education,³³³ the reference to antiquity guaranteed a tight link between religion and learning. Theology was to remain the preserve of specialists. Hickes concluded his sermon against enthusiasm by stressing ‘the usefulness of humane learning, and the ³²⁷ George Hickes, Peculium Dei, A Discourse about the Jews, as the Peculiar People of God. In a Sermon Preached before the Honourable the Aldermen and Citizens of London, On the Sixth of February, 1680/81 (London, 1681), 1 (Hammond is cited on zealots, 11). According to Bedford, ‘Account of Hickes’s works’, fo. 33r , Hickes first preached this sermon at Oxford ‘when he was only Bachelour of Divinity [in 1675 or 1676], and Dr Allestry then Regius Professor of Divinity was so pleas’d with it, that he sent for him the next day, and gave him particular thanks for it’. But this must have been a first version, which Hickes subsequently reworked. See Hickes to Patrick, 10 January 1678: ‘I now long to be in England to finish that discourse I formerly told you of, of which I see by the people in this country there is so much need: I mean that of which you heard an abstract at the Abbey [Westminster], founded on the notion of the theocracy’ (in Original Letters, ed. Ellis, 2nd series, iv. 51). ³²⁸ Hickes, Peculium Dei, 3. ³²⁹ Ibid. 11. ³³⁰ Ibid. 19–20. ³³¹ Ibid. 22. See also 27–9. See H. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Fast Sermons of the Long Parliament’ (1964), repr. in id., Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (3rd edn., London, 1984), 294–344, esp. 305–8, 318, 334; Vallance, ‘Preaching to the Converted’, esp. 404–9 and 415–18. ³³² Hickes, Peculium Dei, 21. Romans 13: 4. ³³³ Twigg, Cambridge, 217–33; Nuttall, Holy Spirit, 81–4; Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 238–45.

310

A Patristic Identity

necessity of erecting Schools, and Universities for the teaching thereof ’.³³⁴ In an Oxford University sermon of 1664, Thomas Pierce, at the time President of Magdalen College, claimed that academic education made up for the end of miracles.³³⁵ Religion was to be learnt gradually and painfully by poring over huge and costly folios, ‘at what an expense of Time and Labour, and (I may add) of money too’.³³⁶ Patristic learning was a badge of conformity in Church and state. Anthony Wood sketched a satirical vignette of young Oxford scholars educated ‘in the Presbyterian discipline’ and hastening to display ‘their affection to the prelaticall party’ at the Restoration: this involved kneeling in the pulpit, exchanging long extemporary prayers for short and formal ones, and quoting ‘in their sermons the Fathers and Schoolmen’.³³⁷ During the Tory Reaction, one preacher complained, significantly plagiarizing an old Royalist sermon of 1642, that the ‘Primitive Doctrine’ of the sacredness of kings ‘would still be believed and practised’ but for those ‘who dare declaim against all Authority as Anti-Christian, all Antiquity as Heretical, all moral Learning as in it self Damnable; which I must confess is the best Plea for their own Ignorance’.³³⁸ In his invective against the dead Mitchell, Hickes commented ironically that a few modern books on the right of subjects to resist their governors were ‘the Fathers and Councils of our Fife, and Western Whigs’.³³⁹ Mitchell’s ignorance went hand in hand with his ‘Enthusiasm’. After a poor education during the Protectorate, he had ministered to congregations that only cared for extempore preaching and rejected study and books ‘as a stinging the Spirit’.³⁴⁰ Hickes made at this point ‘a small but very useful and pertinent digression’ on the ignorance of presbyterians in general.³⁴¹ Indeed all the late Troubles upon the account of Episcopacy, are chiefly to be ascribed to the shameful Ignorance of Protestant Divines in Ecclesiastical Antiquity, ³³⁴ Hickes, Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised [1680], 45. ³³⁵ Pierce, ‘A Sermon preached upon Act-Sunday-Morning at S. Maries Church in Oxford July 10 1664, Touching the Usefulness and Necessity of Humane Learning, together with its Insufficiency without the Help of the Divine’, in Collection of Sermons, 305. ³³⁶ Ibid. 313. ³³⁷ Anthony Wood, Life and Times, ed. A. Clark, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1891–5), i. 366–7. ³³⁸ Titus Bruce, Monarchy Maintained. In a Sermon preached at St. Anne Blackfryers (London, 1682), 7. Like several passages of Bruce’s sermon, this is taken word for word from Thomas Stephens, 6όγοι ὡρα˜ι οι. Three seasonable Sermons. The First preach’t at St. Mary’s in Cambridge, May 31. 1642. The Others designed for publick Auditories, but prevented (London, 1660), first sermon, 16. Compare also the description of the sufferings of primitive martys in Bruce, 13–14 and Stephens, 25–6. On Stephens’s sermon of 1642, see Hoyle, ‘ ‘‘Near Popery yet no Popery’’ ’, 262–4. ³³⁹ Hickes, Ravaillac rediuiuus, 16. ³⁴⁰ Ibid. 2. ³⁴¹ Ibid. 3.

A Patristic Identity

311

who looking no further back into the History of Religion, than the times of the Reformation, and some of them not so far, did either hate Episcopacy as an Usurpation; or else looked upon it as a meer Humane Constitution, and so could not have that particular Veneration for it, that was due to an Apostolical Ordinance, so visibly founded in the Scriptures, and which was the sole invariable Government of Gods Universal Church for above 1500 years.³⁴²

The errors of Calvin himself, whether on church government or on ‘the Horrible Decree’ of absolute predestination, had had no other origin. ‘Had he been but half as well versed in the more Primitive Ecclesiastical Writers, as he was in St Augustine’, he would have been ‘as Orthodox and Consumate Divine as ever was in the Church of God’.³⁴³ At the end of his time with Lauderdale, Hickes was presented by the Archbishop of St Andrews ‘in his own name, and in the name of the Church of Scotland as an aknowlegement of the services I did that Church, with the Councelles in 18 volumes folio’, of the last edition, a monument of French Jesuit scholarship. This had been the lifework of Father Philippe Labbe and had been at last brought to completion after his death by his fellow Jesuit Gabriel Cossart.³⁴⁴ Clarendon took a cynical view, but this very cynicism, and the remarkable analogy he drew with Latin, attest that patristic learning was still essential cultural capital: ‘we may modestly enough (which more Men think than say) believe that of the Fathers, which one of Tully’s Orators said of the Latin Language, Non tam praeclarum est scire Latine, quam turpe est nescire; it is more Shame to Scholars not to have read the Fathers, than profitable for them to have read them.’³⁴⁵ Moderate presbyterians recognized this as well as divines of the establishment. Recalling Cosin’s performance at the Savoy conference in 1661, Baxter confessed ‘that he was excellently well versed in Canons, Councils, and Fathers, which he remembred, when by citing of any Passages we ³⁴² Ibid. 3–4. ³⁴³ Ibid. 4. ³⁴⁴ Hickes to Wood, 15 August 1682, Bodl., MS Wood F. 42, fo. 196r . On Labbe’s edition, published in 1671–2, which incorporated the work of all previous scholars, see H. Quentin, Jean-Dominique Mansi et les grandes collections conciliaires (Paris, 1900), 29–32: it is actually in 17 volumes but vol. xi is divided into two tomes. Richard Allestree owned the previous (and very luxurious) French collection, ‘of near forty volumes [actually 37] of great royal paper’, published at the royal press in the Louvre in 1644 (extract from his will published in Etoniana, 59 (30 July 1935), 140). Cf. M. Purcell, ‘ ‘‘Useful weapons for the defence of that cause’’: Richard Allestree, John Fell and the Foundation of the Allestree Library’, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 21 (1999), 124–47. ³⁴⁵ ‘Of the Reverence due to Antiquity’ (1670), published posthumously in A Collection of several Tracts of the Right Honourable Edward, Earl of Clarendon (London, 1727), 237. For the Ciceronian tag, see Brutus, XXXVII. 140; it is not mentioned in F. Waquet, Le Latin ou l’empire d’un signe XVIe–XXe si`ecle (Paris, 1998).

312

A Patristic Identity

tried him’.³⁴⁶ When writing against Heylyn, Henry Hickman exposed his opponent’s scholarly deficiencies exactly as Fulke had done for Campion or Du Perron for Andrewes. Heylyn quoted Ambrosiaster’s commentaries on Paul as Ambrose, ‘yet every one knows’ that they are not genuine. And he quoted Chrysostom in Latin: ‘it is little credit to a Doctor in Divinity, living so near the University, to bring Chrysostom in Latine, whose Greek is so easie, as that School-boys are able to undertand it.’³⁴⁷

5. WINNING THE PATRISTIC ARGUMENT The example of presbyterian controversialists, who regularly cited the Fathers in their works, demonstrates yet again that there was no necessary connection between the appeal to antiquity, at least as one argument among several, and a commitment to tradition. Restoration divines, though, must have valued antiquity all the more as they were confident, to a higher degree than ever before, that they could argue from it much more effectively than any opponent—that, as their case was better, so also was their learning. The 1670s and 1680s saw the heyday of English patristic scholarship, especially at Oxford, under Bishop Fell’s guidance. Its history will need to be told in detail elsewhere, but it was meant to express and promote the confessional identity of the Restoration Church.³⁴⁸ Nowhere was this apologetic dimension more aggressive than in Fell’s edition of Cyprian, the masterpiece of Oxford scholarship. Fell went so far as to compare Cyprian’s libellatici —those who, if they had not actually sacrificed to idols under Decius’ persecution, had at least bought certificates stating that they had done so—with those who used similar subterfuges ‘under Cromwell’s tyranny, when the rebels’ army had overwhelmed the best of princes and the conquerors raged impotently against all those who remained faithful’.³⁴⁹ Fell also crammed his footnotes with anti-Roman ³⁴⁶ Reliquiae Baxterianae, part II, 363. ³⁴⁷ Hickman, Historia Quinqu-Articularis Exarticulata, 499. ³⁴⁸ See J. Johnson and S. Gibson, Print and Privilege at Oxford to the Year 1700 (Oxford, 1946; Publication of the Oxford Bibliographical Society 7), 40–108; Stanley Morison, John Fell, the University Press and the ‘Fell’ Types: The Punches and Matrices Designed for Printing in the Greek, Latin, English, and Oriental Languages Bequeathed in 1686 to the University of Oxford by John Fell, D.D. Delegate of the Press, Dean of Christ Church, Vice-Chancellor of the University and Bishop of Oxford (Oxford, 1967); Carter, History of Oxford University Press, 53–132; E. G. W. Bill, Education at Christ Church Oxford 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1988), 26–36; Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford’, 843–7; id., ‘Tory Oxford’, 874–5; Quantin, ‘Anglican Scholarship gone Mad?’ ³⁴⁹ Fell’s note on De lapsis, in Sancti Caecilii Cypriani Opera (Oxford, 1682), treatises, 133: ‘Certe nuper apud nos sub Cromwelliana tyrannide, cum rebellium arma

A Patristic Identity

313

polemics, not only denouncing ‘the more than imperial power’ usurped by the Pope, in defence of which nothing could be offered but ‘fables and dreams which can hardly stand rational examination’,³⁵⁰ but also taking every possible opportunity to attack Roman Catholic doctrines and practices: transubstantiation, communion under one kind, Corpus Christi processions, auricular confession, purgatory, indulgences, and so on.³⁵¹ The censor who reported on Fell’s edition to the Congregation of the Index in 1685 compiled a lengthy catalogue of such statements, which amounted to a full recapitulation of contemporary controversies between the Church of England and the Church of Rome.³⁵² Fell summarized what he held to be the distinctive position of his Church in a note on Cyprian’s De unitate Ecclesiae: ‘the innovators on both sides are equally wrong, I mean those who, instead of the one episcopate, want a single bishop in the whole world, and those who do not want any.’³⁵³ Scholarship in itself, apart from its message, was a matter of pride and self-celebration. In his influential reference works on ecclesiastical writers, William Cave repeatedly quoted Hall’s saying, stupor mundi Clerus Britannus, and he now connected it with a unique reverence to, and continuous study of, antiquity ever since the Reformation.³⁵⁴ optimum principem oppressissent, et uictores in eos impotentissime grassarentur quot quot in fide permanserunt; plurimi fuere qui in aduersa castra transierunt, et aperte desciuerant, Apostatis annumerandi. Multi etiam erant, modestius, ut sibi uidebantur, mali, qui tesserulis (cuiusmodi traditae fuerant illis qui fidem rebellibus obligauerant) uel pretio emtis, aut ab indutis personam eorum acceptis; securitatem paciscebantur … quod quidem hominum genus, libellaticis uidetur accensendum.’ The interest of this passage was already pointed out by Carter, History of Oxford University Press, 114–15. ³⁵⁰ Ibid. 107–8: ‘Haec quidem fabellae aut somnii rationem uix sustinentia, importune admodum adhibentur ad iuris istius et praerogatiuae plusquam imperatoriae firmamentum, quae Papa nunc dierum per uniuersum terrarum orbem sibi arrogat.’ ³⁵¹ See e.g. ibid. 87–8 (communion under one kind), 128 (the eucharist), 162 (Purgatory), 216 (Corpus Christi processions); letters, ‘72’ [70] (indulgences). ³⁵² On the examination of Fell’s Cyprian in Rome, see ACDF, Index, Diari, viii. 77 (4 September 1685); Index, Protocolli T2, fo. 442r–v . The report (censura) was entrusted to the Dominican Paolino Bernardini, who read it at the meeting of 3 December 1685 (Protocolli V2, fos. 29r –32v ); see also ibid., fos. 35r –36v , ‘Additio ad Relationem in librum Episcopi Oxoniensis inscriptum Opera Cypriani etc.’ The cardinals decreed that another report was unnecessary and that the book should be condemned (Index, Diari, viii, 3 December 1685, 96). This was done by a decree of 2 July 1686 (ibid. 134), which was published on 9 July (a copy of the printed poster is in Index, Protocolli V2, fo. 248r ). ³⁵³ Sancti Caecilii Cypriani Opera, treatises, 108 n.: ‘Perinde peccant, utriusque partis Novatores; nimirum qui pro Episcopatu uno, unum in orbe terrarum Episcopum; et qui nullum uolunt.’ ³⁵⁴ William Cave, Chartophylax ecclesiasticus (London, 1685), sig. A6r ; id., Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Historia literaria, a Christo nato usque ad saeculum XIV (London, 1688), unnumbered dedication ‘Sanctissimae Charissimaeque Matri Ecclesiae Anglicanae’; id., Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Historia literaria … Pars altera (London, 1698), sig. ∗ 2r .

314

A Patristic Identity

Dissenters were no match for Church of England divines. Baxter was first and foremost a scholastic divine.³⁵⁵ He characteristically disparaged Hooker’s Laws as a book written ‘in a tedious Preaching stile, where you may read many leaves for so much Argumentation, as one Syllogism may contain’. It was no more worth confuting than ‘Mr. Fox’s Book of Martyrs, or Baronius his Annals’.³⁵⁶ A confutation of Baronius, of course, had been considered an essential task by many Protestants since Casaubon—it was indeed a recurrent project in the seventeenth century—but Baxter did not understand that historical scholarship had no need of syllogisms to make very persuasive points. What he knew of ecclesiastical history he derived from a vast and desultory reading, which was not up to the standard of contemporary scholarship. For example, he apparently did not know of Vossius’ edition of Ignatius until it was reprinted in London in 1680.³⁵⁷ His blunders in his Church History were mercilessly exposed by Henry Maurice, one of Sancroft’s chaplains and a keen patristic scholar, who explored libraries in search of unpublished texts.³⁵⁸ Baxter had read Eusebius in the old, faulty English translation by Meredith Hanmer.³⁵⁹ He quoted the councils out of Binius’ edition (‘an Old incorrect Edition of the Year 1606’), whereas, had he ‘consulted Sirmond’s Edition of the French Councils, he ³⁵⁵ Baxter’s Scholasticism has been rightly stressed by Trueman, Claims of Truth, e.g. 26–7 and 32. See also E. C. Ratcliff, ‘The Savoy Conference and the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer’, in Nuttall and Chadwick (eds.), From Uniformity to Unity, 108–9, on Baxter’s impatience ‘with whatever he regarded as illogical’. ³⁵⁶ Baxter, Treatise of Episcopacy, part I, 51. ³⁵⁷ Ibid., part II, 23. See S. Ignatii martyris; Epistolae genuinae ex bibliotheca Florentina. Adduntur S. Ignatii epistolae, quales uulgo circumferuntur. Adhaec S. Barnabae epistola. Accessit uniuersis Translatio uetus. Edidit et Notas addidit Isaacus Vossius (London, 1680), a mere reprint of the 1646 edition. ³⁵⁸ See Bodl., MS Eng. misc. f. 5, ‘Memoirs of the Life of Dr Hen: Maurice communicated by Dr Wynne, Chancellor of St Asaph, 1742’. Interesting light is shed on his patristic scholarship by BL, Add. MS 21081, fos. 126r –159v , ‘Tractat. Latin. sub nomine S. Chrysostomi, contra eos qui negabant ueritatem carnis humanae assumtae a uerbo Dei’: a copy by Henry Dodwell of Maurice’s transcription, with notes, of Eutropius presbyter’s De similitudine carnis peccati (CPL 567), which he had discovered in Madgalen College, Oxford, MS 76, no. 11, with a false attribution to John Chrysostom (H. O. Coxe, Catalogus codicum MSS. qui in collegiis aulisque Oxoniensibus hodie adseruantur, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1852), ii, sep. pagination, 44; De La Mare and Hellinga, ‘First Book Printed in Oxford’, 192–3). ³⁵⁹ [Henry Maurice], A Vindication of the Primitive Church, and Diocesan Episcopacy (London, 1682), sigs. A6r and A7v –A8r , against Richard Baxter, Church-History of the Government of Bishops and their Councils abbreviated. Including the chief Part of the Government of Christian Princes and Popes, and a true account of the most troubling Controversies and Heresies till the Reformation (London, 1680). Hanmer’s translation (The Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories of the first six hundred yeares after Christ, wrytten in the Greeke tongue by three learned Historiographers, Eusebius, Socrates, and Evagrius) was first published in 1577 and reprinted several times until 1663.

A Patristic Identity

315

must have wanted several Allegations of the Congregational way, which are nothing else but corrupt Readings’.³⁶⁰ With some justification, Maurice argued that Baxter cited ‘Books of which he had never seen any more than the Titles’, and that he made gross mistakes in translating Latin texts (especially in place names), and that his chronology was wrong, and that, whenever he wanted ‘to play the Critick’, he was mistaken.³⁶¹ In the Treatise of Episcopacy that he published at the end of 1680, Baxter resorted to his beloved syllogisms to prove that ‘the Ordination lately exercised by the Presbyteries in England is valid’. ‘The way of Ordination which was valid in the Primitive Church is valid now. But the way of Ordination by meer Presbyters was valid in the Primitive Church: Ergo it is valid now.’³⁶² Baxter’s proofs for his minor premiss, however, were liable to many scholarly objections. He began by rehearsing Jerome’s ‘frequently cited works in his Epistle to Evagrius’—but his translation was inaccurate and episcopalians had long adduced a number of plausible solutions to Jerome’s text.³⁶³ ‘This testimony is seconded by a more full one of Eutychius, Patriark of Alexandria, who out of the Records and Tradition of that Church’ wrote that Mark the Evangelist established at Alexandria a college of twelve presbyters who, when the patriarch died, chose a successor among themselves and ordained him. This institution held until the Patriarch Alexander, who, at the time of the council of Nicaea, imposed episcopal ordination.³⁶⁴ The relevant extract of Eutychius’ hitherto unknown Arabic Annals had been published by Selden in 1642, with a Latin translation and commentary, as a confirmation of Jerome’s and Ambrosiaster’s famous statements.³⁶⁵ This publication was clearly a move against iure diuino episcopacy and Blondel quickly seized upon it, in the same astute way as Martyr had seized upon the newly published Theodoret one hundred years before: by the time Baxter used it, it had been much disputed.³⁶⁶ ³⁶⁰ Maurice,Vindication, sigs. A6r and b3r–v . ³⁶¹ Ibid., sigs. A5v , b1r –b3r , b5r , b4r–v . For Baxter’s ignorance of chronology and historical geography, see also [Thomas Baker], Reflections upon Learning (2nd edn., London, 1700), 163–4. ³⁶² Baxter, Treatise of Episcopacy, part II, 223. ³⁶³ Ibid.: ‘he [Jerome] tells us, that the Presbyters of Alexandria from the daies of Mark till Heraclas and Dionysius made or ordained their own Bishops.’ Compare Jerome’s original quoted above, 99, and see Saywell’s complaint, Evangelical and Catholick Unity, 93–4. ³⁶⁴ Baxter, Treatise of Episcopacy, part II, 223–4, quoting Eutychii Ægyptii … Ecclesiae suae Origines. Ex eiusdem Arabico nunc primum typis edidit ac Versione et Commentario auxit Ioannes Seldenus (London, 1642), pp. xxix–xxxi. ³⁶⁵ See Selden’s preface, Eutychii Origines, pp. iv–vi, and his commentary, 132–4 n. 19; Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 322. ³⁶⁶ See Blondel, Apologia, Praefatio, 17–18; below, n. 374, for confutations by Hammond and Petau.

316

A Patristic Identity

Baxter then moved on to ‘the Tradition or History of Scotland [which] telleth us that their Churches were long governed by Presbyters without Bishops, and therefore had no ordination but by Presbyters’. Quotations from Scottish historians, including the as yet unpublished Scotichronicon, were readily to hand in Ussher’s Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates, and Baxter had only to transcribe them.³⁶⁷ The argument itself had been common in presbyterian writings at least since Blondel.³⁶⁸ Baxter’s only original contributions were heavy discussions to prove ‘the very Species of our Diocesan Prelacy to be altered from the antient Episcopacy’, as if he meant to teach logic to his opponents.³⁶⁹ It would have been hard to devise a style of argumentation better suited to infuriate Oxford men. The ultra-tory Samuel Parker wrote to Henry Dodwell in a savage letter, which was not merely a reflection of the passions of the Exclusion years: ‘it is high time to shake off these insipid vipers, and not suffer them to eat out the Bowells of Church and State.’ Parker’s anger showed the centrality of historical and philological learning in the ³⁶⁷ Baxter, Treatise of Episcopacy, part II, 224, out of Ussher, Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates, 800. The most ancient authority quoted was ‘Iohannes Fordonus in Scotichronico’, book 3, c. 8: ‘Ante Palladii aduentum habebant Scoti fidei Doctores ac Sacramentorum Ministratores Presbyteros solummodo uel Monachos, ritum sequentem Ecclesiae primitiuae.’ Seventeenth-century scholars did not distinguish between the work of Fordun (14th-century) and the Scotichronicon, which is a 15th-century reworking of it by Walter Bower (see John Pits, Relationum historicarum de rebus Anglicis tomus primus (Paris, 1619), 277). Both have the same text in book 3, c. 8. See John of Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. William F. Skene (Edinburgh, 1871), 94; Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. D. E. R. Watt, ii (Aberdeen, 1989), 22. Neither had been published and it is not clear whether Ussher (who had borrowed a manuscript of Scotichronicon from Cotton but also owned one himself ) quoted from manuscrits of the original or of the reworking. See Ussher, Antiquitates, 613; Ussher to Sir Robert Cotton, 25 January [1623], BL, Cotton MS Julius C.iii, fo. 380r ; Selden’s preface to Historiae Anglicanae scriptores X, ed. Roger Twysden (London, 1652), pp. xix–xx; Skene’s preface to his edition, pp. xxvii and xxix, and Scotichronicon, ed. Watt, ix (Aberdeen, 1998), 200–2, on manuscripts in the Cottonian Library and in Trinity College, Dublin. ³⁶⁸ See Blondel, Apologia, 314–15 (whose quotations clearly derive from Ussher); Ius Diuinum, 2nd part, 112–13 and 141 (quoting Blondel). I do not know when the argument first appeared in English controversies, but it is already in Smectymnuus, An Answer to a Book entituled, an Humble Remonstrance (n.p., 1641), 16. It must have been older in Scotland: in his Irenicum amatoribus ueritatis et pacis in Ecclesia Scoticana (Aberdeen, 1629), 159, the irenicist John Forbes used it to confirm that episcopacy was ‘non ad esse, sed ad melius esse Ecclesiae’. ³⁶⁹ Baxter, Treatise of Episcopacy, part I, 11. See e.g. part II, 85: ‘And first let it be remembred in what predicament the things in question are, a Church and a Bishop: That is, They are relations. Then let it be remembred what goeth to the essence and definition of a Relation, that is, The Relate, the Correlate, the Subject, the Fundamentum (or as some speak the Ratio Fundandi also) and the Terminus. Now where these are not the same, or any of these, then the Relation is not the same: because where an essential ingredient is wanting, the essence is wanting.’

A Patristic Identity

317

apologetic strategy of English episcopalianism. Baxter had dared to declare episcopacy contrary to Christ’s institution: But to do this with so much confidence, without any shadow of Argument, or any Pretendent in all Antiquity, but only the barbarous and modern story of Eutychius concerning the custom of Alexandria, is the highest flight, that I know of, or Presbiterian Impudence.... And so, if I were to advise, I would have you treat him, which a man of your eminent meekness may safely do without suspicion of Arrogance, represent him as a man altogether unlearned; send him to the grammar school to learn to read Greek and write Latin, and advise him to learn better Logique, and let him know that when our saviour settled his Church, he had no regard to genus and species and those little knacks of barbarous learning with which he makes so great a puther. To this add his intollerable impudence in writing as he does at second hand, and repeting endlessly bafled and thredbare and superannuated objections.³⁷⁰

The nature of scholarship had changed. Antiquarians like Selden relied on accumulation and were happy to quote, with a minimal disclaimer, even blatant fakes, so as not to omit any text potentially relevant to their subject or their digressions from it. In the preface to his Antiquitates, Ussher warned that the book was meant to serve as a collection of materials from which future historians could choose. He had therefore quoted dubious authors and even included ‘obviously false’ stories, since ‘I thought it very expedient for the reader to know through this sample with what shameful absurdities the past age corrupted lives of saints and the whole ecclesiastical history’.³⁷¹ In the second half of the seventeenth century, criticism became the order of the day.³⁷² Now, Eutychius’ story failed all the contemporary criteria of historical criticism. Not only did it begin with a miracle of the most suspect kind (Mark the Evangelist went to a cobbler to have the thong of his sandal repaired, the cobbler pricked his finger with his needle and bled, Mark cured him miraculously, baptized him, and made him Patriarch of ³⁷⁰ Samuel Parker to Henry Dodwell, 13 November 1680, Bodl., MS Eng. lett. c. 28, fos. 3v– 4r . For Parker’s case for coercion against Dissent, see G. Schochet, ‘Samuel Parker, Religious Diversity, and the Ideology of Persecution’ in R. D. Lund (ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), 119–48; J. Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the Later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’, HJ 42 (1999), 85–108. Dodwell, letter to Friedrich Spanheim, 11 March 1685, MS St Edmund Hall 15, fo. 34v , defended Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie against charges of Hobbism. ³⁷¹ Ussher, Antiquitates, fo. A2r–v : ‘Nam ad aperte falsa quod attinet: non parum etiam Lectoris interesse putabam, ex isto ut cognosceret specimine, quam foedis ineptiis Sanctorum Vitas totamque Ecclesiae Historiam aetas superior contaminauerit.’ ³⁷² For an analysis of this mutation (chiefly based on French examples), see J.-L. Quantin, ‘Document, histoire, critique dans l’´erudition eccl´esiastique des temps modernes’, Recherches de science religieuse, 92 (2004), 597–635.

318

A Patristic Identity

Alexandria all at one go), but its chronology contradicted Jerome’s, and the author had written in the tenth century.³⁷³ Both Hammond and Petau exploded Eutychius’ testimony—Petau noted tersely that it required ‘a very credulous reader’.³⁷⁴ Selden made no real attempt to defend it. He preferred to stress that the case of the ancient Church of Scotland agreed fully with what Eutychius told of Alexandria.³⁷⁵ Stillingfleet’s ironical comment, in his Irenicum, that, had Eutychius ‘told us that Mark and Anianus, etc. did all there without any Presbyters’, he would have been much quoted by episcopalians,³⁷⁶ was likely enough, but the fact was that Eutychius was a presbyterian authority, and one that it was easy to counter.³⁷⁷ It only remained for William Lloyd, Bishop of St Asaph and an expert in chronology, to turn historical criticism against the Scottish case for presbyterianism. Lloyd would become a prominent whig bishop after 1689 and he already associated with Gilbert Burnet.³⁷⁸ But he was also a close friend of Dodwell’s, with whom, in the years of the Tory Reaction, he shared not only scholarly interests but also a determination to crush Dissent. In 1681, he challenged a Nonconformist minister of his diocese to a public disputation ‘to give Account, by what Right he exercised the Ministry, not having Episcopal Ordination’. ‘The Bishop came according to Appointment, and brought with him for his Assistant, the famous Mr. Henry Dodwell.... The Discourse began at Two a Clock in the Afternoon, and continued till between Seven and Eight at Night; much was said pro and con, touching the Identity of Bishops and Presbyters, the Bishopping and Unbishopping of Timothy and Titus, the Validity of Presbyterian Ordination, etc.’³⁷⁹ In 1684, Lloyd traced the foundation ³⁷³ Selden tried to forestall some objections. See Eutychii Origines, pp. xxvi and 135–8. ³⁷⁴ Petau, Theologica Dogmata, iii: De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia, l. I, c. 13, 727–8; iv/2, ‘Appendix de Hierarchia Ecclesiastica’, l. II, c. 2, 724–7; Hammond, Dissertationes quatuor, 177. ³⁷⁵ Selden’s preface to Historiae Anglicanae scriptores X, pp. vi–xiv. ³⁷⁶ Stillingfleet, Irenicum, 274–5. See also Baker, Reflections upon Learning, 131–2 on Pearson’s use of Eutychius on chronological questions. ³⁷⁷ See e.g. Saywell, Evangelical and Catholick Unity, 95. ³⁷⁸ On Lloyd’s contribution to Burnet’s History of the Reformation, see Gilbert Burnet, A Letter writ by the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, to the Lord Bishop of Cov. and Litchfield, concerning A Book lately Published, called, A Specimen of some errors and defects in the History of the Reformation of the Church of England, by Anthony Harmer (London, 1693), 2–4, 17, 19. ³⁷⁹ [Matthew Henry], An Account of the Life and Death of Mr. Philip Henry, Minister of the Gospel, near Whitchurch in Shropshire. Who Dyed June 24. 1696 in the Sixty fifth Year of his Age (2nd edn., London, 1699), 104–5. On Lloyd’s repression of Dissent in his diocese, see Spurr, Restoration Church, 212. A. T. Hart, William Lloyd 1627–1717: Bishop, Politician, Author and Prophet (London, 1952), has devoted an appendix, 153–6,

A Patristic Identity

319

story of the Church of Scotland back to ‘John of Fordon, who lived in the fourteenth Century, and then writ the Scoti-Chronicon’.³⁸⁰ ‘Out of two or three lines of this Book there hath been a formal story made up by others, which hath been of great use to them that write against Episcopacy, and especially of late to Mr. Baxter.’³⁸¹ It originated in the mistaken belief that ancient Scots lived in present-day Scotland, rather than in Ireland. Lloyd played on his readers’ sense of superiority to poke fun at the ‘dreaming Monk’ (whose account ‘might be true, for ought any man knew that understood so little of Antiquity as they did that liv’d in those days’),³⁸² his late medieval followers, and Blondel and Selden’s uncritical use of such sources: Mr Selden very well knew that in this Learned Age no wise Man will believe any thing of Ancient times, but what he sees proved out of very good Authors. For want of such, he took the Monk of Fordon, and such others, which thˆo they were of no Authority, yet for the Cause that he had undertaken they were the best that could be had. But his Authors, for their parts, were Men that had no such awe upon them. They were secured against their Readers by the gross darkness, in which they lived; and therefore, without the assistance of Books, they could tell of any thing that past a hundred years before they were born, as well as if it had happen’d within their own knowledge.³⁸³

Recusants were no more equipped to confront the established Church on the historical ground. Some of the works that they published under James II, especially on the eucharist, showed a striking ignorance of contemporary scholarship. Edward Sclater, a clergyman who had studied at Oxford in to Lloyd’s relations with Dodwell, dealing mainly with the post-1688 period. Their acquaintance dates from 1676 and their friendship soon became close enough for them to live together: see letters of Dodwell to Thomas Smith, 21 April and 1 August 1676, MS Smith 49, pp. 126 and 129. ³⁸⁰ William Lloyd, An Historical Account of Church-Government as it was in GreatBritain and Ireland, when they first received the Christian Religion (London, 1684), 133–4 (Lloyd only knew the work through Ussher and Selden, and he refers to the latter for dating). The book is dedicated to Stillingfleet and Dodwell, who had both encouraged its publication (sig. A2r ). For Dodwell’s regard for it, see his letter to Friedrich Spanheim, 11 March 1685, Bodl., MS St Edmund Hall 15, fo. 33v . ³⁸¹ Lloyd, Historical Account, 134. ³⁸² Ibid. 147–8. The mistaken belief that Fordun was a monk probably originated from Pits, Relationes, 276–7, who conflated him with the Cistercian ‘Ioannes de Forda, alias Fordeham’, whose works had been listed by Bale, Scriptorum illustrium Catalogus, 258—Pits copied Bale’s notice but added the mention of the Scotichronicon. It was repeated by Vossius, De Historicis Latinis, 424. The confusions surrounding Fordun were first sorted out by Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Britannicae, or, the Antiquities of the British Churches (London, 1685), 249. ³⁸³ Lloyd, Historical Account, 146. See also sig. A5r–v on Blondel.

320

A Patristic Identity

the troubled times of the Civil War without going beyond the degree of MA, and who now went over to Rome, attempted to justify his conversion by the Fathers, claiming that he had only been following the Church of England’s own injunction in the canon Concionatores of 1571.³⁸⁴ But many of his patristic testimonies were taken from works that had long been recognized as spurious. ‘S. Athanasius in his epistle to Pope Marcus’ told him: ‘Your Holy Roman See is to be appealed unto, to which is granted by our Lord the power of binding and loosing by a special privilege; for that is the holy Top.’³⁸⁵ ‘St. Andrew’ (that is the Passion of Saint Andrew allegedly written by the priests of Achaia) said: ‘I every day Sacrifice to God the Immaculate Lamb, who, though truly Sacrificed, and his flesh truly eaten, remains whole and alive.’³⁸⁶ Sclater must have found such texts in outdated compilations like Josse Coccius’ Thesaurus Catholicus, originally published in 1600–1 and made infamous among Protestants for its utter lack of criticism (Holdsworth nicknamed the author ‘the treasurer of ancient names’).³⁸⁷ Roman Catholic controversialists were still vaunting its value in England as late as 1704³⁸⁸—nobody would have dared to do so in France. Richard Smyth, being ‘desyrous to bringe in suche thynges as the adversaryes of the church do not refuse, but them self also do alledge’, had refrained from using the ‘St Andrew’ quotation as early as 1546!³⁸⁹ Sclater’s spurious quotations made him an easy prey for his adversaries, who could oppose to him, not only ‘Dr Cave, and our own writers’, but also ‘the present Learned and Judicious Sorbonist Du Pin’ and, in the case of Athanasius’ letter to Marcus, even Baronius and ³⁸⁴ Consensus ueterum: or, the Reasons of Edward Sclater Minister of Putney, for his Conversion to the Catholic Faith and Communion (London, 1686), fo. A3v. See E. Vallance, ODNB, xlix. 306–7. ³⁸⁵ Sclater, Consensus ueterum, 12. This is a free translation of extracts from Athanasius, ep. ad Marcum (PG 28, 1445–6). ³⁸⁶ Ibid. 30. Passio sancti Andreae Apostoli, 6, in R. A. Lipsius and M. Bonnet (eds.), Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha, ii/1 (Leipzig, 1898), 13–15. See R. A. Lipsius, Die apokryphen Apostelgeschichten und Apostellegenden. Ein Beitrag zur altchristlichen Literaturgeschichte, 4 vols. (Brunswick, 1883–90), i. 563–7. ³⁸⁷ Josse Coccius, Thesaurus catholicus, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1600–1), i. 827 (Athanasius, ep. ad Marcum) and ii. 719 (Passion of Saint Andrew: Coccius’ quotation is however shorter than that of Sclater); Holdsworth, Praelectiones Theologicae, 366 (‘antiquorum nominum Thesaurarius’). See also Casaubon, Exercitationes, exercitatio XV, n. XIV, 418; James, Corruption, 1st part, 2. ³⁸⁸ Letter of 10 April 1704 in Several Letters which passed between Dr. George Hickes, and a Popish Priest, 208. ³⁸⁹ Richard Smyth, The Assertion and Defence of the sacramente of the aulter (London, 1546), fo. 16r–v . On the other hand, Gardiner laid great stress on ‘sainte Andrewe’, in his A Detection of the Devils Sophistrie, wherwith he robbeth the unlearned people, of the true byleef, in the most blessed Sacrament of the aulter (London, 1546), fos. lxxxvr –lxxxviv .

A Patristic Identity

321

Bellarmine: ‘I cannot but admire that you should offer to put off such pitifull obsolete stuff in a Nation that hath so vast a number of learned men, and thereby to make your self ridiculous and contemptible.’³⁹⁰ Elsewhere, Sclater claimed that he ‘read in Theodoret, Ignatius cited’ on heretics who ‘do not receive Eucharists and Oblations, because they will not confess the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ’.³⁹¹ But ‘you need not, if you really did go to Theodoret for [this quotation], since it is now common in Ignatius himself from the Florentine Copy’ (the Greek manuscript from which Vossius had published the Middle Recension)—and it can easily be explained in a figurative sense.³⁹² Sclater returned to the Church of England after the Glorious Revolution. His recantation, which was prepared by theologians of the established Church under the direction of Henry Compton, Bishop of London, and approved by Archbishop Sancroft, had him confess that, ‘having now more seriously considered these Things’, he ‘sincerely’ thought ‘the Testimonies of the first six Centuries to be most fairly interpreted by the Divines of the Church of England’, whereas ‘I my self did alledge them very partially and ³⁹⁰ [Edward Gee], Veteres uindicati, in an Expostulatory letter to Mr. Sclater of Putney upon his Consensus ueterum (2nd edn., London, 1687), 20, 37, and 63; see also 66–7 (on the Passion of Andrew), 76, etc. The reference to Cave is to his Chartophylax ecclesiasticus (1685), a summary of his future Historia literaria (above, n. 354). On Du Pin, an ultra-Gallican divine, whose Biblioth`eque des Auteurs Eccl´esiastiques got him intro trouble with Bossuet, see J. Gr`es-Gayer, ‘Un th´eologien gallican, t´emoin de son temps: ´ Louis Ellies du Pin (1657–1719)’, Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, 72 (1986), esp. 70–83; on the translation of the Biblioth`eque by William Wotton (An History of Ecclesiastical Writers, 1692–9) and its success in England, see J. Champion, ‘ ‘‘To know the edition’’: Erudition and Polemic in Eighteenth-Century Clerical Culture’, in M. McCarthy and A. Simmons (eds.), The Making of Marsh’s Library: Learning, Politics and Religion in Ireland, 1650–1750 (Dublin, 2004), 130–2. On the obvious chronological impossibilities in Athanasius’ letter to Marcus, see Baronius, Annales, ad ann. 336, nn. LX–LXII [Lucca edn., iv. 290–1], followed by Bellarmine, De scriptoribus, 64 and 184–5. ³⁹¹ Sclater, Consensus ueterum, 30. ³⁹² Gee, Veteres uindicati, 67–8. The passage involved (Ignatius, ep. to the Smyrnaeans, 6 [ed. Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, ii/2. 306], quoted by Theodoret, Eranistes, Florilegium III, no. 1 [ed. Ettlinger, 229]) did not appear in the Long Recension of Ignatius’ letters. Its presence in the Middle Recension rediscovered by Ussher and Vossius was regarded by episcopalians as a conclusive proof that this text was genuine. See Ussher’s dissertation ‘De Ignatii Martyris epistolis, indeque occasione data, de Polycarpi quoque scriptis, atque Apostolicis Constitutionibus et Canonibus Clementi Romano tributis’, prefixed to Polycarpi et Ignatii Epistolae (1644), pp. xiv–xvi; Hammond, Vindication, 151–2. On ‘the Florentine Copy’ (Florence, Bibl. Laurenziana, MS 57, 7), see A. M. Bandini, Catalogus codicum graecorum Bibliothecae Laurentianae, ii (Florence, 1768; repr. Leipzig, 1961), 345–8; Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, ii/1. 73–4. The extract from Ignatius, ad Smyrnenses, ‘citante Theodoreto Dialogo 3’, is e.g. in Coccius, Thesaurus catholicus, ii. 606.

322

A Patristic Identity

corruptly, in behalf of Transubstantiation, and other Errors of the Church of Rome’.³⁹³ Whether Sclater was sincere or not, this was the ingrained conviction of ‘the Divines of the Church of England’.³⁹⁴ Another Roman collection of patristic testimonies, John Gother’s Nubes testium, was revealed to be almost entirely plagiarized from the French Dominican No¨el Alexandre’s Selecta Historiae Ecclesiasticae capita, a vast digest for the use of Sorbonne theology students, which (though of a higher critical standard than Sclater’s work) was certainly not above reproach.³⁹⁵ Sergeant believed ‘that the voluminous way of alledging places out of the Fathers, which had bin observed hitherto, had not (as things were carryed) gain’d very much advantage to the Catholic cause, at least had brought nothing to a decision’. He therefore resolved ‘to take the way of reason’ and to argue a priori from the nature of the rule of faith.³⁹⁶ He did so to his own satisfaction and had no doubt that all his adversaries, from Hammond to Stillingfleet, had failed to answer him and only written ‘ridiculous nonsense’.³⁹⁷ Sergeant was indeed unanswerable, in the sense ³⁹³ Anthony Horneck, An Account of Mr. Edward Sclater’s Return to the Communion of the Church of England: and of the Publick Recantation he made at the Church of St Mary Savoy, the 5th of May, 1689 (London, 1689), 12. ³⁹⁴ See also [Edward Pelling], The Antiquity of the Protestant Religion: with an Answer to Mr. Sclater’s Reasons, and the Collections made by the Author of the Pamphlet entitled Nubes testium. In a Letter to a Person of Quality. The First Part (London, 1687); [John Patrick], A full view of the Doctrines and Practices of the Ancient Church relating to the Eucharist. Wholly different from those of the present Roman Church, and inconsistent with the belief of Transubstantiation. Being a sufficient Confutation of Consensus Veterum, Nubes Testium, and other Late Collections of the Fathers pretending to the contrary (London, 1688); [James Taylor], A Letter of Enquiry to the Reverend Fathers of the Society of Jesus, written in the Person of a Dissatisfied Roman Catholick (London, 1689: imprimatur by Henry Wharton, dated 26 October 1688), 43. ³⁹⁵ [John Gother], Nubes testium: or a Collection of the Primitive Fathers, giving Testimony to the Faith once deliver’d to the Saints. Being a Full Discovery of the Sentiments of the Ancient Fathers in the Chief Points of Controversie at present under Debate (London, 1686); [Edward Gee], An Answer to the Compiler of Nubes testium: Wherein is shewn that Antiquity (in relation to the Points of Controversie set down by Him) did not for the first five hundred years Believe, Teach or Practise, as the Church of Rome doth at present Believe, Teach and Practise (London, 1688). See J.-L. Quantin, ‘Entre Rome et Paris, entre histoire et th´eologie: les Selecta Historiae Ecclesiasticae capita du P. No¨el Alexandre et les ambiguït´es de l’historiographie gallicane’, M´emoire dominicaine, 20 (2006) [Dominicains, th´eologiens et historiens: colloque en l’honneur du P. Guy Bedouelle], 81–9. ³⁹⁶ ‘The Literary Life of the Rev. John Serjeant, written by himself, and never before published’ [1700], Catholicon: or, the Christian Philosopher, 2 (December 1815–July 1816), 175–6. See again 218–19 and ibid., 3 ( July–December 1816), 14–16 and 55–8. ³⁹⁷ Ibid., 3. 126 and passim—Sergeant’s scorn for his adversaries is such that his memoirs make rather painful reading.

A Patristic Identity

323

that he was impervious to any objection. He had nothing but scorn for Wake’s announcement that his arguments for the infallibility of tradition would be answered ‘in An Historical Discourse concerning Tradition’:³⁹⁸ ‘as if intrinsical arguments drawn ex natura rei, and demonstrations could be answer’d or solved by a history’!³⁹⁹ Against adversaries of that ilk how could Church of England controversialists have doubted that history was their choicest weapon? Without drawing such extreme conclusions as Sergeant, the Port-Royal theologians in France were also concerned that the usual way of arguing with patristic passages was inconclusive, especially on the eucharist, since both sides had quotations which, at first view, seemed to favour their position. They attempted therefore to rejuvenate the controversy through what they called, following Tertullian, a prescriptive argument. There could be no discussion that in the middle of the eleventh century, when Berengarius was condemned for denying the Real Presence, the whole Catholic Church had the same doctrine as the present Roman one. But it was impossible that, on such a subject as the eucharist, the whole Church could have changed its belief without many conflicts and divisions. Since there was no record of such conflicts, one might infer, without discussing in detail the writings of the Fathers, that they had the same faith as the Roman Church.⁴⁰⁰ English theologians were too well informed of French religious controversies not to be acquainted with this new development, but they did not think much of it. Stillingfleet actually made fun of the argument.⁴⁰¹ When some Roman Catholic controversialists tried to use a version of it in England, Burnet and Stillingfleet countered that ‘in a matter of fact concerning a change made in ³⁹⁸ [William Wake], A Continuation of the Present State of the controversy, between the Church of England, and the Church of Rome. Being A Full Account of the Books that have been of late Written on both sides (London, 1688), 41. Wake says that the work has been undertaken by ‘a very Learned Person’ and that ‘we may expect to have [it] published shortly’. I do not know that it was, unless Wake meant Whitby’s Treatise of Traditions. ³⁹⁹ Catholicon, iii. 101. ´ ⁴⁰⁰ [Pierre Nicole and Antoine Arnauld], La Perpetuit´e de la foy de l’Eglise catholique touchant l’Eucharistie. Avec la Refutation de l’Ecrit d’un Ministre contre ce Trait´e (Paris, 1664); Antoine Arnauld [and Pierre Nicole], La Perpetuit´e de la foy de l’Eglise catholique touchant l’Eucharistie, deffendue contre le livre du sieur Claude, Ministre de Charenton (Paris, 1669). See Quantin, Catholicisme classique, 321–56. Contrary to Sergeant, the Port-Royalists made it clear that their reasoning only applied to ‘popular articles’ like the eucharist: the ‘human infallibility’ it produced did not replace but supplemented ‘the supernatural infallibility’ enjoyed by the Church on all articles of faith (see Perpetuit´e deffendue, 65–9). ⁴⁰¹ Edward Stillingfleet, An Answer to Mr. Cressy’s Epistle Apologetical to a Person of Honour: Touching his Vindication of Dr. Stillingfleet (London, 1675), 277. See also Wake, Defence of the Exposition, pp. ii–iii.

324

A Patristic Identity

the belief of the Church, the only certain method of enquiry, is, to consider the Doctrine of the Church in former Ages; and to compare that with what is now received’.⁴⁰² Church of England theologians were still happy to argue in the old way, passage against passage. The conference on the eucharist held in November 1686 before James II and the Earl of Rochester was almost a repetition of the Oxford disputation of 1549. Not only was the method of discussion substantially unchanged, but many of the texts discussed were the same.⁴⁰³ The Protestant champions, Patrick and Jane, were now able to quote the Greek original of Origen’s commentary on Matthew, which Martyr had only known through Erasmus’ Latin translation, ‘unto which they [the Roman Catholics] knew not what to say: for I believe they understood not the Greek words’.⁴⁰⁴ ‘At last we produced Bertram’s book, which the King took into his hand, and read in it a while. Here they shuffled miserably, and affirmed confidently things that were false.’⁴⁰⁵ ⁴⁰² ‘A Discourse to shew that it was not only possible to change the Belief of the Church concerning the Manner of Christ’s Presence in the Sacrament; but that it is very reasonable to conclude, both that it might be done, and that it was truly changed’, in [Gilbert Burnet], A Relation of a conference held about religion, at London, the Third of April 1676. By Edw. Stillingfleet, D.D. and Gilbert Burnet, with some Gentlemen of the Church of Rome (London, 1676), 2nd pagination, 116. This was a written answer, both to what one of the Roman disputants had said in the course of the conference, and to [William Hutchinson], A Rational Discourse concerning Transubstantiation. In a Letter to a Person of Honor, from a Master of Arts of the University of Cambridge (n.p, 1676), esp. 7–17. Hutchinson’s version of the argument betrays the influence of Sergeant’s ideas (‘Oral teaching’, transmission from fathers to children) but the answerer chose to identify his position with Arnauld’s (‘Discourse’, 114–16). H. C. Foxcroft in Clarke and Foxcroft, Life of Burnet, 147, ascribes the Relation to Burnet and the appended discourses to Stillingfleet, without stating her authority; the preface seems clearly to mean that the discourses were written by Burnet, although ‘by his [Stillingfleet’s] direction, and approbation’ (Relation, sig. A8v ). There was a new edition in 1687, in which the only difference is the suppression of Burnet’s name on the title page (A Relation of a conference held about religion, at London, by Edw. Stillingfleet, D.D. etc. with some Gentlemen of the Church of Rome). ⁴⁰³ Though both sides claimed victory, the Protestant and Roman Catholic accounts agree on the way the dispute was conducted. See respectively Patrick, ‘Autobiography’, 491–6, and [Thomas Godden], A Relation of a conference before his Majesty, and the Earl of Rochester, Lord High Treasurer; Concerning the Real Presence and Transubstantiation Nov. 30. 1686 (n.p., 1720). ⁴⁰⁴ Patrick, ‘Autobiography’, 495. For the Roman Catholic version, see Godden, Relation, 12–13. See above, Chapter 1 n. 34. The long-desired Greek text had been published by Pierre-Daniel Huet, … Origenis in sacras scripturas commentaria, quaecunque graece reperiri potuerunt (Rouen, 1668), i. 254. See Blok, Isaac Vossius, 205–6 and 409; J.-M. Mathieu, ‘Huet et Orig`ene’, in S. Guellouz (ed.), Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721): actes du colloque de Caen (12–13 novembre 1993) (Paris, 1994), 229–36; Quantin, ‘Philologie et th´eologie’, 109–10. ⁴⁰⁵ Patrick, ‘Autobiography’, 495. Compare Godden, Relation, 52–3.

A Patristic Identity

325

When Church of England divines thought that arguing with passages (‘one or two testimonies or scraps brought out of the Fathers’ writings and produced from both sides’) was not enough, their characteristic solution was to expand the historical enquiry in order to show exactly how and when popish errors had emerged.⁴⁰⁶ Henry Wharton, who advocated this method, followed it himself in his Treatise of the Celibacy of the Clergy, in which he proudly assured the reader that ‘of all the citations … no one is taken up at the second hand for the first 1300 years, and after that time no more than three Writers cited upon the Faith of others’.⁴⁰⁷ This style of historical controversy had been much practised by Huguenot scholars, including Daill´e, whose later career had been devoted to tracing in painstaking detail, with a wealth of patristic quotations, the development of the Roman Catholic devotional system. In contrast to The Use of the Fathers, these works found few readers. Indeed, Daill´e had great difficulties in getting them published.⁴⁰⁸ The most scholarly minded of English divines thought highly of them.⁴⁰⁹ During his stay in Paris from 1682 to 1685, William Wake, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘read over, and with great care abridged much of Monsr Daill´ees books, written with great judgment, against the errors of Popery’.⁴¹⁰ Huguenots, however, would ⁴⁰⁶ Wharton’s preface to James Ussher, Historia Dogmatica Controuersiae inter Orthodoxos et Pontificios de Scripturis et Sacris Vernaculis. Nunc Primum Edita (London, 1690), sig. a1r : ‘Quod quidem unico aut altero testimonio siue lacinia ex Patrum scriptis adducta atque hinc inde prolata parum efficitur.’ Wharton dedicated the work to Archbishop Sancroft, who had entrusted it to him. ⁴⁰⁷ [Henry Wharton], A Treatise of the Celibacy of the Clergy, wherein its Rise and Progress are historically considered (London, 1688), unnumbered preface. ⁴⁰⁸ See Sarrau to Isaac Vossius, 21 June 1647, RK, III E 8 (129): ‘Il [Mr Blaeuw] a promis il y a long temps a Mr Rivet d’imprimer le livre de Mr Dallaeus ou Daill´e comme nous l’appellons De Poenis et satisfactionibus: et cependant c’est sans aucun effet. Vous nous obliger´es extremement de bien vouloir solliciter.... Car on lui en enverra encores d’autres du mesme autheur sur des matieres examinees solidement par l’Escriture et par l’Antiquit´e ecclesiastique comme sont des traict´es entiers et achev´es De Extrema unctione, De Ieiuniis, De Confessione auriculari et autres semblables.’ For the difficult negotiations that followed, see Sarrau to Isaac Vossius, 8 November 1647 and 26 March 1650, RK, III E 8 (143) and III E 9 (4); Isaac Vossius to Saumaise, 4 July 1647 and 2 May 1648, BNF, MS Latin 8596, fos. 33r and 92v ; F. F. Blok, ‘Isaac Vossius and the Blaeus’, Quaerendo, 26 (1996), 81–4. ⁴⁰⁹ See e.g. J. Patrick, Full view, 141 and 146, referring to Daill´e as ‘a diligent Searcher of Antiquity’. ⁴¹⁰ William Wake, ‘Autobiography’, Christ Church, Oxford, MS 541A, 11. The first version (preserved in the same manuscript and quoted by N. Sykes, William Wake Archbishop of Canterbury 1657–1737, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1957), i. 16) ran thus: ‘all Mr Daill´ee’s works; the best I think that have been written against the papists.’ The books from which Wake’s notes have been preserved are De la cr´eance des P`eres sur le fait des images (1641, in the Latin translation, Leiden, 1642), De poenis et satisfactionibus humanis (1649), De duobus Latinorum ex unctione Sacramentis, confirmatione et extrema

326

A Patristic Identity

not have agreed with Wharton that, since both papists and Protestants had exhausted their reasons, and both clung tenaciously to their own interpretations of Scripture, the only way to settle controversies was ‘to call in the Fathers as umpires, to discard on both sides arguments drawn either from Scripture or from reason, to consult the oracles of the ancients, and to show the practice of the Church in the continuous course of history’.⁴¹¹ ut uocant unctione (1659), De sacramentali siue auriculari Latinorum confessione (1661), Aduersus Latinorum de cultus religiosi obiecto traditionem (1664): Christ Church, Wake Papers, xviii, fos. 79r –81v , 88r –90v , 99r –111v , 117r –127r . ⁴¹¹ Wharton’s preface to Ussher, Historia Dogmatica, sig. a1r–v : ‘Unicum id igitur nobis faciendum restabat … ut arbitri adhibeantur Patres; ut sepositis utrinque siue ex Scriptura, siue ex ratione ductis argumentis, Veterum Oracula consulantur; ut Ecclesiae praxis continuo Historiae filo demonstretur.’

6 The Case for Tradition The appeal to the Fathers, insistent as it became in some circles of the Restoration Church, was no proof in itself of a change of doctrine. What was really significant was that some members of the established Church were willing to confute books which had previously passed muster but which were now deemed incompatible with a redefined orthodoxy. This was especially the case with Daill´e’s Use of the Fathers, attitudes to which were a doctrinal litmus test. Answering it was comparatively easy. It was much more difficult to build a positive theory of tradition which would not be confused with Tridentine teaching and would be immune, at the same time, from the objections accumulated by generations of Protestant controversialists. Only two writers really rose to the task: Herbert Thorndike and Henry Dodwell. Thorndike had been trained in Laudian times and was a veteran of the controversies of the Interregnum. Dodwell belonged to a younger generation and lived long enough afterwards to become the ‘great lay dictator’ of the Nonjurors.¹ Both are notoriously difficult to understand and they did not exert much influence on the Restoration Church of England—Dodwell’s great hour came in the 1690s and Thorndike’s impact was limited until he was rescued from oblivion by the Tractarians and made a treasured link in their catena Patrum. Their works are nonetheless interesting inasmuch as they were attempts, by highly gifted divines who were at the same time eminent patristic scholars, to articulate a distinctly English theory of the appeal to the Fathers. Both men hoped to provide a coherent answer to the various challenges that faced their Church and, though their systems were idiosyncratic, they built on notions and principles which passed current in their milieu. 1. DEFENDING THE FATHERS Once the episcopal Church had been restored as an exclusive establishment, scepticism about patristic authority was pushed towards the margins. ¹ The Life of Robert Frampton Bishop of Gloucester deprived as a Non-Juror 1689, ed. T. S. Evans (London, 1876), 203. The text was written by an intimate friend of the Bishop, probably a layman, in the reign of George I.

328

The Case for Tradition

Daill´e’s Use of the Fathers pursued his English career among presbyterians, for whom this ‘exquisite Treatise’ was his chief title to fame.² It was by those who defended liberty of conscience against the Restoration settlement that Hales’s Tract concerning Schism was normally quoted.³ Robert Conold complained in 1676 that the book was ‘the fam’d Sanctuary of our dividing Parties’.⁴ Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying had a similar fate.⁵ Champions of the establishment now found Hales’s and Taylor’s works rather embarrassing.⁶ Some excused Taylor’s venture as a tactical move at a time when the Church ‘was in danger to be sunk’.⁷ The same plea could hardly be made for Hales, and one had to overlook chronology in order to be able, like the old Cavalier Laurence Womock, to discard the Tract of schisme as a product of youthful fancy: ‘I doubt not, when he came to a more mature judgment he took a solemn leave of many of those unhappy ² Translator’s dedication to Sir William Courtenay of XLIX Sermons upon the whole Epistle of the Apostle St. Paul to the Colossians. In Three Parts. By that famous Minister of the Reformed Church in Paris, Mr. John Daill´e, Author of that Incomparable Book, intituled, The right use of the Fathers. Translated into English by F.S. (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1672) sig. A2r . The book was advertised in the Term Catalogue for Hilary Term 1672 (TC, i. 95), i.e. a few months before the publication of Scrivener’s Apologia (see below). The translator, Francis Soreton, had been ejected for nonconformity in 1662 (The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, iv: The Reign of James II, 1687–1689, ed. S. Taylor (Woodbridge, 2007), 210, with editor’s note). Sir William Courtenay was the ‘leader of the country party in Devon’ in the 1670s and a future exclusionist (B. D. Henning, The House of Commons 1660–1690, ii (London, 1983), s.v., 144–6). As to Thomas Parkhurst, he was considered ‘the most eminent Presbyterian bookseller in the Three Kingdoms’ (H. R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1668 to 1725 (Oxford, 1922), s.v., 230–1). ³ The best-known instance is Andrew Marvell, The Rehearsal transpros’d (1672), ed. M. Dzelzainis, in Prose Works, 2 vols. (New Haven, 2003), i. 130–4. See also e.g. A Plea for the Non-conformists; tending to justifie them against the clamorous charge of Schisme. By a Doctor of Divinity. With two Sheets on the same Subject by another Hand and Judgment (London, 1674), 1st pagination, 13 and 17. The second text is signed I.H., i.e. ‘John Humfrey’; the first text (where Hales is quoted), was ascribed at the time to John Owen: see letter addressed to Robert Conold, signed W.C. [according to manuscript notes in the BL copy, shelfmark 1578/4461, this stands for W. Cook, eldest son of Sir W. Cook of Broom Hall, Norfolk], in Robert Conold, The Notion of Schism stated according to the Antients, and considered with Reference to the Non-Conformists: and the Pleas for Schismaticks examined: Being Animadversions upon the Plea for the Non-Conformists. With Reflections on that Famous Tract of Schism, Written by Mr Hales. In Two Letters to a very Worthy Gentleman. The Second Edition: With the Addition of a third Letter (London, 1677), 1, followed by Wood, Athenae, iii, col. 414. However, it is not included in the list of Owen’s works provided by Toon, God’s Statesman, 179–81. ⁴ Conold, Notion of Schism, 59. ⁵ See e.g. An Expedient or a sure and easy way of Reducing all Dissenters whatsoever to an exact and sincere Obedience both to an Ecclesiastical and Civil Governement (London, 1672), 3; Du Moulin, Short and True Account, 34–5. ⁶ See Elson, John Hales, 146–54. ⁷ Womock, Suffragium Protestantium, 31–2. See also 393–406.

The Case for Tradition

329

hallucinations, which had been more to his honour, if they had been buried in his ashes.’⁸ Some openly attacked the book. Thorndike is said to have discovered it a few weeks before his death, in 1672, and to have immediately begun to write ‘about the notion of a Church, and Schisme’—clearly against Hales’s views.⁹ The young George Hickes also began to write a confutation in 1673 but stopped when he learnt that someone else had forestalled him.¹⁰ Eventually another clergyman, Robert Conold, accomplished the task. Conold had been invited by a layman of fierce Cavalier views to vindicate the doctrine on schism of the primitive Fathers, those ‘Sacred Priests’, against a book ascribed to John Owen, A Plea for the Non-Conformists.¹¹ He decided to deal with Hales at the same time. While conceding that the Churches involved in the Easter controversy should have tolerated each other in their indifferent particular ceremonies,¹² he protested against Hales’s ‘severe Censure’ upon them.¹³ Both the Western and Eastern Churches ‘were not without some plausible reasons, for their different observance’.¹⁴ The ‘blind obedience’ with which Hales charged the primitive Christians was actually a virtue.¹⁵ As for Hales’s digression against the appeal to antiquity, Conold explained it by his having been a member of the Synod of Dort and having rightly recognized that the definitions of that assembly could not be reconciled with the ancient Fathers.¹⁶ At the time he wrote his Tract of Schism, of course, Hales had long said farewell to Calvin, but Conold’s explanation reveals the extent to which, in some Restoration minds, any criticism of patristic authority had come to be identified with Calvinism. Conold instanced Jewel’s appeal to the Fathers as proof of the Church of England’s reverence for antiquity,¹⁷ and then distinguished two cases. One could appeal to the Fathers in controversies of faith and here, though the fundamental articles of Christianity were founded upon Scripture, ‘my Perswasion is much help’d and establish’d by the universal consent of the old Catholick Church in the same Articles’. The authors of the first four centuries could not but understand the gospel better than the moderns, since they lived very near the first promulgation of Christianity, and the ⁸ Ibid. 33. ⁹ George Seignior to Sancroft, 19 December 1672, in The Theological Works of Herbert Thorndike, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1844–56; LACT), vi. 487. ¹⁰ [George Hickes], A Letter from beyond the Seas to One of the chief Ministers of the Non-conforming Party (n.p., 1674), 34. The addressee was Hickes’s own brother John; the letter was wrongly ascribed at the time to Clarendon. See Bedford, ‘Account of Hickes’s works’, Bodl., MS Eng. misc. e 4, fos. 29r –30r . ¹¹ Cook’s letter in Conold, The Notion of Schism, 1–2. On A Plea for the NonConformists, see above, n. 3. On Cook, Henning, Commons, ii, 118–19. ¹² Conold’s second letter to W.C., ibid. 66–7. ¹³ Ibid. 68. ¹⁴ Ibid. 75. ¹⁵ Ibid. 70. ¹⁶ Ibid. 71–3. ¹⁷ Ibid. 77.

330

The Case for Tradition

Greeks had moreover the advantage of having the New Testament in their native language.¹⁸ The Socinians’ artful attempts to evade scriptural testimonies made this ‘authority of the Antients’ all the more valuable.¹⁹ A second type of appeal to the Fathers concerned the government, customs, and discipline of the ancient Church and, on this point, there could be no reasonable dispute: ‘though we should grant, that the ancient Fathers were not wise enough to be Judges, yet sure their very antiquity makes them the most competent Witnesses of the Government and Practice of the Church, in the first Ages of Christianity’,²⁰ primarily, of course, of episcopacy. Conold ended up with a fantasy: Think out of the World all Councils and Fathers … Suppose this present Age of the Church to have no Monument of Christian Antiquity, but the Gospels and Epistles in Greek, and no skill in that Language, but what we learned from Pagan Orators, Poets and Philosophers: And at my next Visit pray acquaint [me] with the Result of your thoughts, Whether in those considerations you did not fancy a strange Darkness upon the face of Christendome, and see a necessity of a New Revelation to interpret the Old.²¹

These frightful perspectives did not prevent the Tract concerning Schism from being reprinted the following year (one would suspect, at some Dissenters’ initiative).²² Thomas Long, a zealous writer for conformity, who was later offered a bishopric during the Tory Reaction, immediately took exception to the work and published a confutation the following year.²³ He denounced Hales’s repudiation of antiquity as ‘a ὕψος [arrogance] beyond ¹⁸ The Notion of Schism, 78. ¹⁹ Ibid. 79. The Vincentian canon is alluded to in a paralipsis: ‘I was about to have concluded this with an old sentence of Vincentius Lyrinensis; but I consider’d, that to prove the Authority of the Antients, by an Antient Author, would be false Logick, and a gross impertinence.’ ²⁰ Ibid. 81. ²¹ Ibid. 83. ²² A Tract concerning Schisme and Schismaticks. Wherein is briefly discovered the Original Causes of all Schism. By the ever Memorable Mr. John Hales, of Eaton-Colledge, etc., never before printed by the Original Copy (n.p., 1677): there is no significant difference from the 1642 edition. This is one of several texts appended to John Hales, A Tract concerning the Sin against the Holy Ghost (London: printed for John Blyth, at Mr Playfords Shop, 1677). The pagination is continuous. In some copies (e.g. BL, shelfmark 1607/5330; BNF, shelmark D2 4927), the appended texts have a general title page (Several Tracts, by the ever Memorable Mr. John Hales, of Eaton-Colledge, etc., Printed in the Year 1677). The edition was not advertised in the Term Catalogues and its history is rather obscure. A Tract concerning the Sin against the Holy Ghost had been entered by Richard Marriott in the Stationers’ Registers on 17 May 1675 (E & R, ii. 510). Blyth does not appear in W. P. Williams (ed.), Index to the Stationers’ Register, 1640–1708 (La Jolla, Calif., 1980) nor in Plomer, Dictionary 1668–1725. ²³ Thomas Long, The Character of a Separatist: or Sensuality the Ground of Separation. To which is Added the Pharisees Lesson, on Matth. IX. XIII and an examination of Mr. Hales Treatise of Schisme (London, 1677), 95–102; id., Mr Hales’s Treatise of Schisme examined

The Case for Tradition

331

that of Abailardus’.²⁴ Only ‘enthusiasts’, pretending to some new revelation, or Socinians could object to the appeal ‘to Antiquity for resolution in controverted points of Faith’: For seeing there is scarce any point of Faith but some unhappy Wits have controverted it, and in defence of their Opinions have put the Scriptures on the rack to make them speak their own sense; how can points of Faith delivered in the Scriptures be better understood and confirmed than by the joynt consent of such Ancient Doctors who conversed with the Apostles or their immediate Successors, and are rightly called Apostolici … ? [They] have not only handed down to us the Scriptures themselves pure and incorrupt, but the proper and genuine sense of them.²⁵

Long was careful to ground this authority of the Fathers on purely natural endowments: their ‘great Learning and Eloquence’ which precluded any accusation of ignorance; their industry ‘in inquiring into the grounds of the Christian Faith’, for which most of them had laid down their lives. He stressed that the Fathers were not ‘Iudices but Indices fidei, not the Authors but the Witnesses to confirm and give evidence in matters of Faith’.²⁶ He claimed that such had been the constant judgement of Reformed divines, especially of those of the Church of England, and quoted Jewel’s challenge.²⁷ What Conold and Long stressed was what Daill´e had gone to such lengths to confute: the credit of the Fathers as witnesses of tradition. At Daill´e’s death in 1670, no Roman Catholic author, in England or elsewhere, had yet challenged him on this key question.²⁸ The task was eventually undertaken by Matthew Scrivener, who opened in 1672 the series of English confutations of The Use of the Fathers. According to his own account, his hostility to the book was due to the favour it had met with in presbyterian and censured. To which are Added Mr Baxter’s Arguments for Conformity, wherein the most Material Passages of the Treatise of Schisme are answered (London, 1678). On Long’s refusal, for financial reasons, of the bishopric of Bristol, see his letter to Sancroft, 15 April 1684, Bodl., MS Tanner 32, fo. 25r ; Lamplugh to Sancroft, 16 April 1684, ibid., fo. 30r ; Beddard, ‘Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions’, 24. ²⁴ Long, Hales’s Treatise of Schisme examined, 40 (the use of ὕψος to mean arrogance is patristic). On Abelard as a model of scorn for the Fathers, see above, 96. ²⁵ Ibid. 40–1. On ‘Apostolici’, see above, Chapter 1 n. 11; H. J. de Jonge, ‘On the Origins of the Term ‘‘Apostolic Fathers’’ ’, Journal of Theological Studies,  29 (1978), 503–5. ²⁶ Long, Hales’s Treatise of Schisme examined, 40–1. ²⁷ Ibid. 41–4. Long had already invoked Jewel the previous year ( Thomas Long, ‘The Picture and Character of a Separatist: shewing that Sensuality is the Ground of Separation’, in Character of a Separatist, 5). ²⁸ This has been shown above of Thomas White’s ‘Daill´e’s Arts discover’d’. For a similarly insubstantial reply by the French ex-Jesuit Franc¸ois V´eron, see Quantin, Catholicisme classique, 89–91.

332

The Case for Tradition

circles.²⁹ Thus, on the eve of the Restoration, Scrivener heard a presbyterian minister address a large meeting. The minister in question was anxiously foreseeing that things would go badly for his party (which indeed ‘happened afterwards with the help of God’).³⁰ To forestall the objection that could be levelled against him from ‘the universal voice of the best antiquity’, he referred his audience to Daill´e: ‘As for antiquity, we should not be too concerned about it, for Daill´e, a man very well versed in the ancient authors, has destroyed all its authority in a very learned treatise.’³¹ Nor was this appeal exceptional but ‘in the same way as goats are reported to make haste to their dittany when they have been hit by a lethal arrow, Puritans, when tormented by the weapons of the ancients, make haste to their Jean Daill´e’.³² Scrivener acknowledged that writers like Digby, Falkland, and Chillingworth also made use of Daill´e’s book against Romanists, but it eventually led them to Socinianism (Scrivener was ready to call Cressy as a witness here).³³ Already sixteenth-century continental Reformers had exalted the principle of sola Scriptura ‘with more vehemence than caution’,³⁴ although they had not been consistent in that respect and had been only too glad to resort to the Fathers against Anabaptists and other radicals.³⁵ Those who pretended to interpret Scripture according to their own private judgement did in religion what revolutionaries did in the state. The latter, the better ²⁹ Scrivener, Apologia pro Patribus, sig. A2r : ‘mihi eo (fateor) inuisius semper fuit, quo magis nostris Puritanis uehementius perplacuisse noueram.’ ³⁰ Ibid., sigs. A2v –A3r : ‘Minister quidam Presbyteralis Factionis celeberrimo confluxu Popularium meorum, sermonem e suggestu habens.’ The Latin is somewhat strange (no dictionary mentions any attestation of ‘confluxus’ to mean a meeting) but I would tend to understand here ‘Populares’ as parishioners (its use to mean lay people is common in Christian Latin). The episode is most likely to have taken place in April 1660, when presbyterians were dismayed by the success of Royalists in the elections for the Convention Parliament and ‘Presbyterian pulpits thundered against the elections’ (Abernathy, English Presbyterians, 54). Scrivener’s whereabouts between 1647 (when he proceeded MA in Cambridge) and 1666, when he became vicar of Haslingfield, are apparently unknown (see Alum. Cant., iv. 35; S. Handley, ODNB, xlix. 539). ³¹ Scrivener, Apologia pro Patribus, sig. A3r : ‘Quod ad antiquitatem attinet, non est quod nimis de ea simus solliciti: Dallaeus enim, Vir in Veteribus exercitatissimus, Doctissimo Tractatu, omnem eius fregit autoritatem.’ ³² Ibid.: ‘sed haud aliter feruntur ictae Lethali Arundine Capreae ad suum festinare Dictamnum, quam diuexati telis Antiquorum Puritani ad suum Joannem Dallaeum … ’ The plant dittany was believed to remove the arrows. The source is either Virgil, Aeneid, XII. 414–15, or Pliny, Natural history, l. 8, c. 41, § 97. ³³ Ibid., sig. A4r . On the contempt of the Fathers as the source of Socinianism, see also sigs. a3r –a4r . ³⁴ Ibid., sig. A4r . ³⁵ Ibid., sig. a1v and 47. Scrivener also pointed out quite rightly, sig. a2r – v , that Daill´e himself had changed track after his first book and, in his later works against Roman Catholics, had made massive use of the Fathers (above, 325).

The Case for Tradition

333

to have their King at their mercy, claimed that he had no need of force but should reign in the hearts of his subjects. The former maintained that Scripture did not need to be interpreted by the Fathers, ‘so that they might immediately force the naked word of God to lend support to their fancies’.³⁶ Having from the outset anchored his defence of the Fathers on a Cavalier stance in Church and state, Scrivener divided his book into two parts. The first part, or ‘general response’ to Daill´e, undertook to prove that ‘the Fathers and the traditions of the Catholic Church’ were the most adequate means of settling religious controversies. Scripture was indeed the Law but it could not ‘judge of its own sense’ or be its own interpreter, as Vincent of L´erins had shown from the contrarieties of heretical interpretations.³⁷ The Fathers were the judge, ‘in a metonymical sense’, since they ensured that ‘we judge aright of the points controverted among Christians by the rule of the truth, that is the divine Word’.³⁸ Scrivener gave seven arguments: the ‘first Doctors’ were closer to the source, that is to Christ; they were strangers to modern passions and prejudices; their moral virtues were highly conducive to the discovery of the truth; they were free from ‘that passion for disputation’ that possessed Scrivener’s contemporaries; they were much more versed in the sacred Scriptures; they were more abundantly assisted by the Holy Ghost; their chief care was to teach the right sense of Scripture against the heretics of their time.³⁹ Scrivener’s ‘particular response’, which made up the second part of his work, examined the arguments of The Use of the Fathers (in the Latin translation) one by one, in a thoroughly theological manner. Scrivener was neither a philologist nor a critic. A Nonconformist opponent (who may have been his contemporary at Cambridge) testified that his fellow students thought him ‘a close Student, and great Scholar’, but more inclined to scholastic than to ‘patristical’ theology.⁴⁰ Scrivener thus failed to observe that the progress of patristic studies since 1632 had made a number of Daill´e’s arguments obsolete and that, for instance, there was now a consensus on many pseudepigraphical texts which went across confessional boundaries. He preferred to quote Nicholas Ridley’s judgement on the Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum under the name of John Chrysostom (which ‘our ³⁶ Scrivener, Apologia, sigs. A4v –a1r : ‘ut ipsi continuo nudum uerbum Dei cogant suis inuentis suffragari.’ This political comparison was taken up by Reeves, Apologies, i, preface, p. xxxv. Although Scrivener is never cited, Reeves’s preface borrows largely from the Apologia. ³⁷ Scrivener, Apologia, 9, quoting Vincent of L´erins, Commonitorium, 2. 4 (CC 64, 148–9): see above, 139. ³⁸ Ibid. 34: ‘eo sensu iudicant Veteres (Metonymice scil.) quo, quod Effectus, Causae attribuitur. Faciunt enim Patres et Traditiones Ecclesiae Catholicae ut nos recte de capitulis inter Christianos controuersis ex Regula Veritatis, Verbo Diuino, iudicemus.’ ³⁹ Ibid. 34–8. ⁴⁰ Hickman, Nonconformists vindicated, 143 and 150.

334

The Case for Tradition

very Reverend bishop and martyr’ had brought against transubstantiation and which papists had been cavilling against as not being genuine): it was of little import whether the work was by Chrysostom or not, since it was certainly by a famous writer of Chrysostom’s time and had never been accused of error.⁴¹ But Ridley had written in 1555 and there had been many discussions on the Opus imperfectum since that time. All the critics agreed that it was the work of an Arian or, at least, had been interpolated by an Arian.⁴² It is also surprising that Scrivener included Stobaeus among the ‘ecclesiastical historians’ who quoted lost patristic writings of the first three centuries: there is not a single patristic quotation in Stobaeus.⁴³ Scrivener’s preferred way of arguing was to turn Daill´e’s arguments into syllogisms and then to show that they were not logically cogent.⁴⁴ They might be sufficient to prove that using the Fathers to settle present-day controversies was difficult and required eminent abilities; they did not prove that it was impossible, which was the real question.⁴⁵ As to Daill´e’s first book (on the difficulty of knowing the mind of the Fathers), Scrivener systematically observed that most of the arguments could be far more cogently used against Scripture: ‘the blind adorators of the Scriptures’ should see what blows they give them while aiming at the Fathers.⁴⁶ Some books of the Bible had perished as well as some patristic writings;⁴⁷ many modern controversies were no more handled in Scripture than in the Fathers;⁴⁸ many apocryphal books had been produced by heretics as canonical;⁴⁹ the same heretics had corrupted the genuine Scriptures;⁵⁰ no authors had a more figurative style and were more difficult to understand than the canonical writers.⁵¹ To Daill´e’s second book (on the lack of authority of the Fathers) Scrivener replied by quoting the conclusions of Cano’s De locis theologicis: individual Fathers and even a majority among them, if others were of a contrary opinion, were fallible: not so their unanimous interpretation of Scripture, ‘since the consensus of all the saints ⁴¹ Scrivener, Apologia, 89–90. See Ridley, De Coena Dominica, 85. ⁴² See e.g. Sixtus of Siena, Bibliotheca sancta, i. 413–14; Perkins, Problema, 26; Bellarmine, De scriptoribus, 96; Rivet, Critici sacri specimen, ‘271’ [371]–5; Philippe Labbe, De Scriptoribus ecclesiasticis, quos attigit Eminentiss. S.R.E. Card. Robertus Bellarminus, philologica et historica dissertatio, 2 vols. (Paris, 1660), i. 546–7. See above, Chapter 1 n. 82. ⁴³ Scrivener, Apologia, 81. Thomas Ittig, Oratio inauguralis, pro Ioh. Dallaei tractatu de Usu Patrum aduersus Matth. Scriveneri Apologiam pro S. Ecclesiae Patribus (Leipzig, 1697), sig. C4r – v , suggested that ‘Stobaeus’ might be a lapsus for Suidas. ⁴⁴ On Daill´e’s arguments being ‘implicit syllogisms’, see Scrivener, Apologia, 76–7. ⁴⁵ See ibid. 79–80. ⁴⁶ See e.g. ibid. 87: ‘uideant tandem caeci Scripturarum Veneratores quam exitialiore uulnere ipsas per Latera Traditionum hoc argumento traiiciant.’ ⁴⁷ Ibid. 82–3. ⁴⁸ Ibid. 87. ⁴⁹ Ibid. 91–4. ⁵⁰ Ibid. 96. ⁵¹ Ibid. 105–6 and 123–4.

The Case for Tradition

335

is the sense of the Holy Ghost himself ’. On points of faith, ‘they cannot err all together’. Scrivener referred his reader to Cano to see these conclusions fully proved.⁵² When one adds that Scrivener spoke quite harshly of continental Reformers (accusing Luther and Calvin of having been incensed against the Fathers because they could not find in their writings any mention of justification by faith, a dogma which those Reformers had actually invented without any ground in Scripture⁵³), it is no wonder that he was accused of Roman leanings. When the Lutheran Thomas Ittig was appointed extraordinary Professor of Theology at the University of Leipzig in 1697, he devoted his inaugural lecture to a defence of The Use of the Fathers against Scrivener. Whereas Daill´e had most ably expressed the doctrine of all Protestants (whether Lutherans or Calvinists),⁵⁴ Scrivener, ‘though no adherent of the pope’s religion, flirts signally with popery, as is the way of English episcopalians, and treats with the utmost scorn, not only Daill´e but all those whose faith does not rely on the judgement of the Fathers’.⁵⁵ At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Calvinist John Edwards—formally a member of the established Church but a Nonconformist in pectore— judged that Scrivener ‘seems to have designed his Book as an Apology for the Church of Rome, rather than for the Fathers, or for the Church of England’.⁵⁶ Scrivener’s position was actually quite different from the Tridentine doctrine. He insisted that the Church of England did not receive ecclesiastical traditions as the unwritten word of God ‘but as interpreters and witnesses of the right faith revealed in the written word of God’.⁵⁷ He argued the point at length in a later, less directly polemical, and therefore less unilateral, book, in which he put Bellarmine’s doctrine of tradition among ‘the heretical dogmes of the Roman Church’.⁵⁸ Cressy’s claim that tradition was safer than writing was an ‘intollerable Paradox’.⁵⁹ Basil’s meaning in De Spiritu Sancto could not be that traditions should be equally venerated with Scripture: For most things there by him instanced in, are apparently extrinsical to Faith. Therefore the true meaning is, That no good Son of the Catholick Church, can, ⁵² Ibid. 164–5. ⁵³ Ibid. 87–8. ⁵⁴ Ittig, Oratio pro Dallaeo, sig. B3r . ⁵⁵ Ibid., sig. B3v : ‘non papae quidem religioni addictus, sed tamen more Anglorum Episcopalium egregie papizans, et non Dallaeum modo sed etiam omnes, quorum fides Patrum iudicio non innititur, alto supercilio contemnens.’ ⁵⁶ Edwards, ‘Patrologia’, in Remains, 124–5. ⁵⁷ Scrivener, Apologia, 56: ‘nos Ecclesiasticas Traditiones non ut Verbum non Scriptum recipere, seu fundamentum Religionis: sed tanquam Interpretes, et testes Fidei sanae, reuelatae in Verbo Dei Scripto.’ ⁵⁸ Scrivener, Course of Divinity, sig. e1v . ⁵⁹ Ibid. 35. See Cressy, Exomologesis, esp. 114–22.

336

The Case for Tradition

or ought to refuse the customes, or practices, or forms of words concerning the doctrine of Christ, because they are not so express’d, or contain’d in Scripture as other matters are. And if we mark, we shall not find any one thing exacted of Christians in the purest and most flourishing state of the Church, as points of Faith, which only depended upon unwritten Tradition; and were not thought to have the written word of God for their warrant and foundation.⁶⁰

Scrivener did not ground the authority of the Fathers on the infallibility of the present visible Church but on their historical reliability as witnesses.⁶¹ Poor historian as he was himself, he thoroughly historicized tradition: ‘perpetual traditions’ he identified with ‘the decision and testimony of the ancients’.⁶² This was consonant with many tendencies of contemporary Gallican theology and Scrivener’s book was a success in France.⁶³ Sir Joseph Williamson, the under-secretary of state, sent it to his correspondents across the Channel, the learned Maurists Luc d’Achery (librarian of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pr´es) and Jean Mabillon.⁶⁴ Pasquier Quesnel, then a member of the Paris Oratory and later to become the leader of French Jansenists, asked Edward Bernard, one of Fell’s trusted collaborators at Oxford, to provide him with a copy.⁶⁵ Huguenots were of course indignant. Even Paul Colomi`es, who was already very much leaning towards English episcopalianism, deplored, in a book dedicated to the Bishop of London, that Scrivener had not confuted The Use of the Fathers ‘more mildly and more distinctly’.⁶⁶ Scrivener was keen to cite specifically English authorities. Whereas continental divines had handled the question ambiguously and obscurely, the Church of England had consistently paid a deep respect to genuine traditions.⁶⁷ In addition to the canon Concionatores of 1571, Scrivener quoted a long series of divines, from Jewel to Herbert Thorndike’s De ⁶⁰ Scrivener, Course of Divinity, 37–8. ⁶¹ Ibid. 3. For Scrivener’s rejection of recusant divines, especially of Henry Holden, see Apologia, 10–21. ⁶² Ibid. 34: ‘[modus controuersias definiendi] qui Traditiones perpetuas commendauit, uel (quod perinde mihi est) Veterum Suffragium, et Testimonium.’ ⁶³ Quantin, Catholicisme classique, 96. ⁶⁴ See letter of d’Achery to Williamson, n.d., BNF, MS Franc¸ais 17684, fo. 109r . ⁶⁵ See letters of Quesnel to Edward Bernard, 20 May and 1 June 1673, in H. Schmitz du Moulin, ‘Un correspondant anglais de Quesnel: lettres de Quesnel a` Edward Bernard, professeur d’astronomie a` Oxford’, Lias, 2 (1975), 303 and 304. ⁶⁶ Paul Colomi`es, Obseruationes sacrae (Amsterdam, 1679), 68: ‘quem utinam [Tractatum de usu Patrum] mitius ac dilucidius confutasset uir clarissimus Matthaeus Scrivenerus!’ See also Pierre Bayle’s letter to his father, 31 July 1673, Correspondance, ed. E. Labrousse et al., i (Oxford, 1999), 209. ⁶⁷ Scrivener, Apologia, 63.

The Case for Tradition

337

ratione ac iure finiendi controuersias Ecclesiae.⁶⁸ Through selective quotations he even managed to include Whitaker, though otherwise ‘too much inclined to Luther and Calvin’.⁶⁹ On the state of souls before the Last Judgement (a point on which Daill´e had accused the Fathers of error), Scrivener referred approvingly to Overall’s Cambridge disputation in Montagu’s Apparatus.⁷⁰ The elderly Clarendon in his French exile was outraged by Scrivener’s performance. He solemnly protested that he could not ‘but admire, and grieve’ that Cressy could have had so much credit with a member of the Church of England as to make him consider Falkland a Socinian ‘and that when no Person of the Church of Rome hath had the courage in so many years to attempt the answering that Book de usu Patrum, one of the other Church should think it necessary to take the quarrel upon him, and without any reason, or any instance of moment, reproach Mr Dallie with his light esteem of the Holy Fathers, in language not in any degree decent’.⁷¹ Such a controversy had no relevance at all to the case of the Church of England against Nonconformists. Clarendon extolled Daill´e’s book⁷² and reaffirmed Great Tew principles on tradition (instancing the Easter controversy).⁷³ The Fathers ‘are more diligently read and studied in our Church’ than in the Roman Church and more reverence is paid to them: no member of the Church of England ever spoke like Musso.⁷⁴ ‘Neither they, nor we, nor any other Christian Church in the World, do submit or concur in all that the Fathers have taught, who were never all of one mind, and therefore may very lawfully have their reasons examined by the reasons of other men.’⁷⁵ Clarendon however was now an old man in exile, and a layman too. He was defending the friends and ideas of his youth.⁷⁶ Thomas Barlow was privately scathing about Scrivener’s book,⁷⁷ but it has been seen that his views were out of touch with those of most of the Restoration clergy. Barlow ⁶⁸ Ibid. 57–63. ⁶⁹ Ibid. 59. ⁷⁰ Ibid. 189–90. See above, 126–7. ⁷¹ Clarendon, Animadversions, 193. ⁷² Ibid. 193–4. See also ‘200’ [192]. No copy of The Use of the Fathers (in either French, English or Latin) is listed in Bibliotheca Clarendoniana: A Catalogue of the valuable and curious library of the Right Honourable Edward, Earl of Clarendon [London, 1756]. ⁷³ Clarendon, Animadversions, 64–5. ⁷⁴ Ibid. 189. Clarendon quotes from Daill´e statements to the same effect by Salmeron, Maldonat, and Cajetan (ibid. 190–1). ⁷⁵ Ibid. 189. ⁷⁶ He had already done so in his 1670 essay ‘Of the Reverence due to Antiquity’, Collection of Tracts, 218–40. ⁷⁷ See Barlow’s note on the flyleaf of his copy (Bodl., shelfmark B 24.12 Linc., ‘Lib. Tho. Barlow XVI Cal. Jun. Ann. 1672’), which refers to Clarendon for ‘a just censure of this loose and impertinent Pamphlet’.

338

The Case for Tradition

too had frequented Great Tew before the Civil War.⁷⁸ The fact is that all the published answers which were opposed to the Apologia came from Nonconformists. Lewis Du Moulin went briefly out of his way to attack it in his book against John Durel. Although Du Moulin polemically declared Scrivener a man ‘tainted with popery’,⁷⁹ he correctly recognized that his position was different. Scrivener wanted to ascribe the supreme judgement of controversies neither to Scripture (as Daill´e did), nor to Reason (as did the Socinians), nor again to the Roman Church, the Pope, traditions, and councils, but to ‘the general, constant and perpetual consensus of the Fathers’. As such a consensus was almost impossible to know and even Roman Catholics did not put much faith in it, this was to establish the judgement of controversies on a most instable basis.⁸⁰ Scrivener’s Apologia was attacked at greater length in The Nonconformists vindicated. According to the title page, the book was written shortly after the publication of the Apologia, but it was not published until 1679. It is commonly attributed to Henry Hickman, who had been Scrivener’s contemporary at St Catherine’s Hall in Cambridge before moving to Oxford.⁸¹ Hickman maintained that The Use of the Fathers had merely echoed the traditional position of English Protestant divines—he instanced Jewel, Humphrey, Whitaker, Rainolds, Abbot, and Downe (but with no quotations or references). Daill´e had certainly ‘handled the point more copiously’ and with many more examples than they had, but he had not ‘brought the Fathers any one peg lower’.⁸² Hickman further hinted that Scrivener, like many others who invoked the Fathers all the time, was ⁷⁸ See Barlow, Remains, 329 and note his eulogy of Chillingworth, who ‘in all his Disputes against Popery, draws his Arguments not from Fathers or Councils, (though in several things they may be of good use, though they be not Infallible) but from the Sacred Scriptures; which being of Divine Authority, and Infallible, are a sure and just ground of that confidence we are speaking of ’ (349). ⁷⁹ Du Moulin, Patronus bonae fidei, epistola, 63: ‘Papismo incoctus’. ⁸⁰ Ibid. 66–7: ‘sed in consensu generali, constanti et perpetuo Patrum, positum esse: quae quidem consensio, cum ne uni doctori de centum millibus sit comperta, nec ei multum fidant Pontificii, quibus solenne est repudiare Patrum authoritatem, nec satis constet quinam de mille Scriptoribus ueteribus et neotericis, Patres computandi, planum est illud iudicium controuersiarum secundum Scriveneri Hypotheses tam instabili niti arena, quam multitudo muscarum, insidens asseri fluctuantis aquis.’ ⁸¹ See above, Chapter 5 n. 187. The book appeared anonymously in the Term Catalogue for Michaelmas 1680 but was ascribed to Hickman in Trinity 1681 (TC, i. 415 and 449). A biographical statement in Bonasus Vapulans is inconsistent with this attribution (Wood, Athenae, iv. 372) and Cox Macro, the 18th-century antiquary, noted (ibid. 373) that the book was actually by ‘Mr Barret of Nottingham’, i.e. John Barret (1631–1713). However, the reference in the second part to what Scrivener’s friends thought of him when a student at Cambridge (Nonconformists vindicated, 143 and 150) would fit Hickman much better. Could it be that the two parts are by different hands? ⁸² Hickman, Nonconformists vindicated, 144.

The Case for Tradition

339

not perhaps so well versed in their writings (the Apologia indeed afforded some ground for this accusation): ‘I suppose it would a little discompose his gravity to be catechized any whit strictly concerning the age, stile and design of some of the Fathers whom he undertakes to defend.’⁸³ But Hickman was careful not to tread on such thorny ground. Excusing himself by the assurance he had received that a French Calvinist would shortly write a defence of Daill´e, and also by his lack of access to an adequate library,⁸⁴ he confined himself to a few general comments. He had never in his life ‘met with any person of any persuasion whatsoever, that would recede from any opinion he had at first imbibed, because one or more Fathers were against him’. Papists were themselves the worst offenders, witness Musso and his like.⁸⁵ At best they imposed artificial senses on the texts (see the Belgian Index).⁸⁶ Most of the Fathers, if not all, Hickman argued, had made mistakes, and sometimes very gross ones, and one should build one’s faith on Scripture alone.⁸⁷ The main use of the Fathers therefore was negative, ‘to stop the mouth of gainsayers, especially those who glory in Antiquity, and make consent of Fathers their rule’.⁸⁸ Presbyterians could easily defend their cause from the Fathers, should they be willing to take upon themselves such a ‘tedious’ task.⁸⁹ All this was pretty stale stuff. There was only one point on which Hickman departed from previous discussions: in insisting that the Fathers were decisive against the Socinians. Some propositions of the ante-Nicene Fathers sounded problematic but they were easily reconciled with orthodoxy ‘if a man interpret their sayings candidly, and remember that the signification of some Theological terms is somewhat varied since their times’.⁹⁰ To argue for sola Scriptura from the deficient christology of the ante-Nicene Fathers had definitely become too dangerous a game.⁹¹ Scrivener’s Apologia did not stop the posthumous career of The Use of the Fathers. The English translation was reissued in 1675⁹² and there was also a new Latin edition at Geneva in 1686, copies of which made their ⁸³ Ibid. 150. ⁸⁴ Ibid. No Huguenot confutation of Scrivener was ever published. Matthieu de Larroque, pastor of Vitr´e in Britanny and one of the ablest French Protestant scholars, defended Daill´e against the criticisms of Pearson and Beveridge but declined to respond to Scrivener, who had written ‘tanta animi impotentia, ut conuitiis illum certare dixeris, potius quam rationum momentis’ ([Matthieu de Larroque], Obseruationes in Ignatianas Pearsonii Vindicias. Et in annotationes Beveregii in canones Sanctorum Apostolorum (Rouen, 1674), fo. a2v ). ⁸⁵ Hickman, Nonconformists vindicated, 151–2. ⁸⁶ Ibid. 153–5. ⁸⁷ Ibid. 162–3. ⁸⁸ Ibid. 163. ⁸⁹ Ibid. 176. ⁹⁰ Ibid. 164. Origen is justified on this point, 165–8. ⁹¹ See above, 261–2. ⁹² A Treatise concerning the Right Use of the Fathers, in the Decision of the Controversies that are at this day in Religion. Written in French by John Daille, Ministre of the Gospel in the Reformed Church at Paris (London: printed for John Martin, and are to be sold by Robert Boulter, 1675). It was advertised in the Term Catalogue for Hilary Term

340

The Case for Tradition

way to England.⁹³ Daill´e became henceforth a bugbear for episcopalian divines. Confutations of his work continued to come out until well into the nineteenth century, in several cases as introductions to patristic editions or translations.⁹⁴ Indeed, English patristic scholarship as a whole could be considered a confutation of Daill´e, since its main endeavour was to reconstruct true primitive Christianity through the study of the anteNicene Fathers—the very task that Daill´e had pronounced unfeasible. The rediscovery of their genuine writings was the best answer to his point that the most ancient and most authoritative Christian writers were all lost.⁹⁵ In 1672, at about the same time as Scrivener’s Apologia, John Pearson published a major confutation of Daill´e’s book on the Ignatian epistles. Although Pearson’s scholarship put him clearly in a different league from Scrivener, his Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatii were widely considered to 1675 (TC, i. 199). The text was reset but is otherwise identical to that of the 1651 edition (the Latin additions of 1655 were not incorporated). Isaac Newton owned a copy which shows several signs of his reading (J. Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1978), no. 482; S. Mandelbrote, ‘ ‘‘Than this nothing can be plainer’’: Isaac Newton Reads the Fathers’, in Frank, Leinkauf, and Wriedt (eds.), Die Patristik in der fr¨uhen Neuzeit, 289 n. 48). For the continued appeal to Daill´e by presbyterians, see e.g. Gilbert Rule, The Cyprianick-Bishop examined, and found not to be a Diocesan, nor to have Superior Power to a Parish Minister, or Presbyterian Moderator (Edinburgh, 1696), 35; [Thomas Forrester], Causa Episcopatus Hierarchici Lucifuga: or A Confutation of J. S.’s Vindication of the (pretended) Principles of the Cyprianic Age (Edinburgh, 1706), 23. See also Bodl., MS Rawl. C. 601, fos. 15r –36v , ‘Librorum duorum Joan. Dallaei De Usu Patrum, ad sedandas Controuersias, inter Pontificios et Protestantes, Synopsis’, a very careful summary of Daill´e (in the Latin translation) completed by Robert Fleming junior on 29 May 1713. ⁹³ Joannis Dallaei de usu Patrum ad ea definienda Religionis Capita, quae sunt hodie controuersa. Libri duo, Latine e Gallico a J. Mettayero redditi; Ab Auctore recogniti, aucti et emendati (Geneva, 1686). The text was reset but, apart from the restitution of ‘multitudo’, 7, none of the errata of the 1655 edition were taken into account. ⁹⁴ See Reeves, Apologies, i, pp. i–cvii; Sancti Clementis Romani ad Corinthios epistolae duae … Cum Msto Cod. accurate de nouo contulit, Notisque eas illustrauit, et textum plurimis in locis emendauit; Praefationem etiam de Usu Patrum praecipue Apostolicorum, ac Dissertationes duas, alteram de Diuinitus instituto Clero, de Unitate Ecclesiae alteram, praemisit Henricus Wotton (Cambridge, 1718); Blunt, Right Use of the Early Fathers. On Blunt, see above, 9. Henry Wotton was one of the Nonjuring fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge, who were expelled in 1717 (Alum. Cant., iv. 467); George Hickes and Francis Lee gave him help for his edition (Clementis epistolae, p. ccviii and 106 n. 1). Reeves had links to the Nonjurors: Hickes praised his work in advance, letter to Bedford in Baltus, Answer, sig. A3v . ⁹⁵ Hence the manuscript note in a copy of The Right Use of the Fathers (London, 1651: Bodl., shelfmark Douce 201), where Daill´e wrote that Justin was the oldest Father preserved (book I, 6): ‘Surely in this place St Ignatius epistles etc. shou’d have been mention’d.’ In his ‘Synopsis’, MS Rawl. C. 601, fo. 16r , Robert Fleming noted that Daill´e ignored Origen’s De oratione, first published by Fell—this was one of his so-called New Year Books: ’Ωριγένους περὶ εὐχ˜ης σύνταγμα μέχρι το˜υδε το˜υ χρόνου ἀνέκδοτον (Oxford, 1686).

The Case for Tradition

341

be a companion to the Apologia pro sanctis Patribus: the latter was ‘the general defence of the ancients’, the former a ‘particular’ one.⁹⁶ Both books came out just after Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence of 15 March 1672, at a time when Archbishop Sheldon, to whom Pearson’s Vindiciae were dedicated, was bracing himself to confront royal policy as soon as Parliament met again.⁹⁷ The established Church had to rely on its own strength and on the zeal of its Cavalier friends. The ante-Nicene Fathers now appeared to meet almost every requirement of Church of England apologetics. Ignatius proved the apostolical character of episcopacy, Cyprian the independency of bishops from the See of Rome. It is as the English Cyprian—the martyred primate of a national Church—that Heylyn chose to portray Laud in his influential biography.⁹⁸ Ignatius and Cyprian, together with Clement, were also great repositories of tirades against the heinous sin of schism—the charge tirelessly made against Dissenters.⁹⁹ It has been seen how the ante-Nicene Fathers provided a perfect model of non-resistance to persecuting princes. The marginalization of Calvinism in the established Church after 1660 increasingly made Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings irrelevant. Many conformists would have preferred to let the whole controversy on grace and predestination be buried in oblivion. Fell praised Allestree, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford from 1663 to 1679, for ‘never intermedling’ with it in his lectures.¹⁰⁰ Those who insisted on writing on these topics were often no great admirers of the Bishop of Hippo. George Bull declared that ‘the ante-Pelagian’ Augustine was to be preferred to the ‘anti-Pelagian’ one.¹⁰¹ ⁹⁶ Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatii. Autore Ioanne Pearson Presbytero. Accesserunt Isaaci Vossii Epistolae duae aduersus David Blondellum (Cambridge, 1672). See Scrivener, Apologia, sig. b3v : ‘Audito tamen, quod … Ioannes Pearsonus Cantabrigiensis, Vindicias doctissimas Ignatianarum Epistolarum … Praelo mandarat, peropportunum duxi lucubratiunculas nostras in Apricum proferre; et Generalem Veterum Defensionem Particulari illi adjungere.’ Both books were sold in London by the same booksellers (William Wells and Robert Scot) and they were advertised together in the Term Catalogue for Easter Term 1672 (TC, i. 105). Williamson significantly sent both books together to d’Achery (d’Achery to Williamson, n.d., BNF, MS Franc¸ais 17684, fo. 109r ). ⁹⁷ On the context, see Spurr, Restoration Church, 61–4; Hutton, Charles the Second, 284–5 and 292–8; De Krey, London and the Restoration, 119–25. ⁹⁸ Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus. By contrast, Ussher had been named ‘our Irish St. Austin’ (letter of Robert Boyle to Isaac Marcombes, 22 October 1646, in The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, ed. M. Hunter, A. Clericuzio, and L. M. Principe, 6 vols. (London, 2001), i. 40). ⁹⁹ See J. Spurr, ‘Schism and the Restoration Church’, JEH 41 (1990), 408–24. ¹⁰⁰ Fell’s preface to Allestree, Forty Sermons, sig. e1v . See Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford’, 835–7. For the marked difference between Oxford and Cambridge in this matter, see Tyacke, ‘Arminianism and the Restoration Church’, 320–39; for an overview, Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 158–90. ¹⁰¹ Bull, Examen Censurae, ‘Apologia’, 133.

342

The Case for Tradition

Far from clearing obscurities, the Pelagian controversy had ‘troubled the streams of purer and primitive doctrine’.¹⁰² Augustine had been ‘carried away’ by his zeal and had exaggerated on some points. He had ‘attempted to confute a new heresy on new grounds’, unknown to the earlier Fathers.¹⁰³ Thomas Tully, Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford—one of the last Oxford theologians to go into print to defend Calvinism—protested to no avail that Augustine ought to be preferred to all the previous Fathers, who were ‘more secure’ and ‘had only nibbled at such controversies’.¹⁰⁴ Bull pronounced this claim to be an instance of ‘amazing presumption’.¹⁰⁵ He had clearly been influenced by Vossius’ Historia Pelagiana, to which he repeatedly referred, without taking any account of Ussher’s criticisms.¹⁰⁶ On one point only were Restoration apologists obliged to seek for later authorities: the association between Church and state. Here, the Constantinian model of the godly prince was still needed. Against Dissenters’ pleas for liberty of conscience, Pearson appealed to the model of the fourth century, ‘that most happy century, when the kingdom of darkness was truly overthrown, and Christianity most increased’. Princes then became ‘nursing fathers’ of the Church, and they passed laws against schismatics.¹⁰⁷ Church of England divines still used in this context Augustine’s legitimization of coercion against the Donatists, which had provided the rationale for the ¹⁰² George Bull, Harmonia Apostolica (London, 1670), 112: ‘antequam purioris ac primitiuae doctrinae riuulos turbasset controuersia Pelagiana.’ ¹⁰³ Bull, Examen Censurae, ‘Examen’, 158: ‘quanquam bono zelo oppugnandi pestiferum Haeresiarcham abreptus in aliquibus modum excesserit [Augustinus], atque nouam Haeresim ex Fundamentis nouis … refutare aggressus fuerit.’ See also Harmonia Apostolica, 114. ¹⁰⁴ Thomas Tully, Iustificatio Paulina sine operibus ex mente Ecclesiae Anglicanae, omniumque reliquarum quae Reformatae audiunt, asserta et illustrata. Contra nuperos Nouatores (Oxford, 1674), 14: ‘qui aliud quasi agentes, et nullo prouocante securiores, eiusmodi controuersias summis tantum labris delibarent.’ On Tully’s efforts, in association with Barlow, to defend Calvinist orthodoxy at Oxford, see Du Moulin, Short and True Account, 31; Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, 606–9. ¹⁰⁵ Bull, Examen Censurae, ‘Apologia’, 46 (‘mira temeritate’). See also the prominence of John Chrysostom in Joseph Beaumont’s Cambridge lectures on the Epistle to the Romans ( Tyacke, ‘Arminianism and the Restoration Church’, 330). ¹⁰⁶ Bull, Harmonia, 114 and again Examen Censurae, ‘Examen’, 160, thus quoted from Vossius, Historia Pelagiana, liber 5us, pars prior, Antithesis VI, 487, as a genuine work of Augustine the ‘sermo 191 de tempore’, which is actually Pelagius’ libellus fidei (see references in Quantin, ‘L’Augustin du XVIIe si`ecle?’, 60–6). This embarrassing mistake had been noted by Ussher, Historia Gotteschalci, 13. ¹⁰⁷ Pearson, ‘Oratio V’ (held at the Cambridge Commencement, probably in 1668), in Minor theological works, i. 427–9 (‘in illo beatissimo seculo, quo regnum tenebrarum uere concidit, et res Christianae maximum incrementum ceperunt’). Pearson’s point that ‘amplissimorum regnorum principes facti sunt Ecclesiae nutritii’ refers to Isaiah’s prophecy (49: 23): ‘and kings shall be thy nursing fathers’. See also Saywell, Original of all Plots, 403–11.

The Case for Tradition

343

persecution of heretics in the Middle Ages and was to do the same against Protestants in Louis XIV’s France.¹⁰⁸ The potential contradiction between what might be called a Constantinian ecclesiology and a Cyprianic one only disappeared under James II, when the Church of England could fully identify with the suffering, and independent, Church of the first three centuries.¹⁰⁹ For orthodox Protestants, a major objection against reliance on the ante-Nicene Fathers had been their supposedly defective doctrine of the Trinity. Anti-Trinitarians had long appealed to them and this was done with unprecedented thoroughness by the German Arian Christoph Sand, in his Nucleus Historiae Ecclesiasticae, first published in 1669 and then, in an augmented edition, in 1676. In 1664, Sand’s father, who had instructed him ‘in the Socinian [or rather Arian] tenets’, had sent him to Oxford ‘to improve them by reading and studying’.¹¹⁰ The young Sand was thus able to ¹⁰⁸ For the assimilation of Dissenters to Donatists, see Thomas Long, The History of the Donatists (London, 1677); Conold, Notion of Schism, sigs. A4v –A5r ; M. Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in Grell, Israel, and Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration, esp. 335–45. Part of Augustine’s letter 93 [48 prior to the Maurists] to Vincent (CSEL 34, 445–96) was specially published in English translation ‘to Convince these who are yet of that Erronious Opinion [that Christians are not to be urged by penalties, but only by arguments], and incourage  to persist stedfast in the  of such , which have in all Ages been so Advantageous to the Peace and Quiet of  and ’ (The Judgment of the Learned and Pious St. Augustine, concerning penal lawes against Conventicles, and for unity in Religion. Deliver’d in his 48th Epistle to Vincentius (London, 1670), sig. A2v ). The same letter was later printed in French translation to legitimize the Revocation of ´ the edict of Nantes: Conformit´e de la conduite de l’Eglise de France, Pour ramener les ´ ´ Protestans: avec celle de l’Eglise d’Afrique, pour ramener les Donatistes a` l’Eglise Catholique (Paris, 1685). ¹⁰⁹ See M. Goldie, ‘The Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution’, in R. Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford, 1991), 102–36. For evidence that this identification with the pre-Constantinian Church was interiorized, see George Hickes to Edmund Bohun, 5 November 1687, published by C. H. Firth in Notes and Queries, 8th series 9 (1896), 203; Samuel Hill to Francis Turner and Thomas Ken, 4 June 1688, Bodl., MS Rawl. lett. 94, fo. 164r . ¹¹⁰ Wood, Fasti, ii. 280. See C. G. J¨ocher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon (Leipzig, 1750–1; repr. Hildesheim, 1961), iv, cols. 112–13; Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 30 (1890), 337–8; M. Mulsow, ‘The ‘‘New Socinians’’: Intertextuality and Cultural Exchange in Late Socinianism’, in id. and J. Rohls (eds.), Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Leiden, 2005), esp. 55–7. Sand’s Arian view of church history was an important influence on Isaac Newton (S. D. Snobelen, ‘Isaac Newton, Socinianism and ‘‘the One Supreme God’’ ’, ibid. 265–70). John Biddle had appealed to the Fathers of the first two centuries against the divinity of the Holy Ghost (McLachlan, Socinianism, 171–2 and 177). On the distinction between Arianism and Socianism, see M. Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries (Oxford, 1996), 68–9; according to Robert Nelson, The Life of George Bull [Works, ed. E. Burton, i] (Oxford, 1827), 240, ‘though the Socinians

344

The Case for Tradition

work in the Bodleian Library, where he consulted patristic manuscripts.¹¹¹ The Nucleus had obvious weaknesses from a scholarly point of view. It quoted without any reservation texts that all contemporary critics agreed to reject as spurious.¹¹² Its accumulation of materials was nonetheless impressive. Bull made it his primary target in his Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (completed in 1680 and eventually published ‘at the Theatre’ in 1685 under John Fell’s auspices).¹¹³ The aim was to free the ante-Nicene Fathers ‘from the Arian camp (where [they] had been forcibly detained like prisoners by some learned men) and [to restore] them to the Catholic Church’.¹¹⁴ Bull’s ‘critical discussions (which are most necessary to settle the question now under discussion)’¹¹⁵ need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that, judged by the standards of his own time, his work was superior to that of Sand but not above reproach. By his own account, Bull wrote his Defensio while he was busy as a parish priest, away from major libraries and from the company of learned men, ‘as if exiled from the literary world’.¹¹⁶ It was not surprising that he was unaware of important but not easily accessible publications from overseas.¹¹⁷ Philology, anyway, was very much for Bull a theological tool, which he wielded either to get rid of objections or to indeed were generally for having the controversy decided by Scripture and reason only, without regarding the testimony of the most ancient Christian writers; yet the Arians were herein of another mind’. ¹¹¹ See Sand, Nucleus, 277, on manuscripts of the Opus imperfectum. ¹¹² The most extreme case is the Chronicle of Pseudo-Dexter, one of the so-called ‘false cronicles’ fabricated by the Spanish Jesuit Jer´onimo Rom´an de la Higuera, about 1595. See J. Godoy Alc´antara, Historia crítica de los falsos cronicones (Madrid, 1868; repr. Granada, 1999); G. Cirot, Mariana historien (Bordeaux, 1904), 226–60; T. D. Kendrick, St James in Spain (London, 1960), esp. 116–27. Though a Jesuit himself, Labbe, De Scriptoribus ecclesiasticis, ii. 36, commented in 1660 that ‘omnes per Europam eruditione ac iudicio eximii’ regarded Pseudo-Dexter as an absurd fake. Sand, Nucleus, 175, quoted the text as if it were genuine. ¹¹³ Nelson, Life of Bull, 239–43. ¹¹⁴ George Bull, Defensio Fidei Nicaenae, ex scriptis, quae exstant, Catholicorum Doctorum, qui intra tria prima Ecclesiae Christianae secula floruerunt. In qua obiter quoque Constantinopolitana Confessio, de Spiritu Sancto, Antiquiorum testimoniis adstruitur. Editio secunda priori longe emendatior (Oxford, 1688), 259, speaking of Gregory of Neocaesarea: ‘ex Arianorum castris (ubi a uiris quibusdam doctis ui et quasi captiuus detinebatur,) tandem liberauimus, Ecclesiaeque Catholicae restituimus.’ On the composition and publication of the work, see preface, sigs. a3r –a4r . The 1688 edition corrects some misprints of the first but the text is otherwise unchanged. ¹¹⁵ Ibid., sect. II, c. XIII, 283. ¹¹⁶ Ibid., sigs. a4v –b1r . ¹¹⁷ A clear case is Hippolytus’ De Antichristo: Bull, ibid., sect. III, c. VIII, 369–71, used and unreservedly defended the interpolated version, whereas the genuine text had been published in Paris in 1661 by Marquardus Gudius (on the scarcity of this edition in England, see Quantin, ‘Anglican Scholarship gone Mad?’, 319 n. 77). Bull made much, on the other hand, of the difference between the Short and Long Recensions of Ignatius (sect. II, c. II, 78–81).

The Case for Tradition

345

buttress his own proofs. What distinguished his work was his thoroughness and the breadth of his coverage, but his method had nothing new in itself. He handled patristic passages in the old approved way, using some well-known hermeneutical rules and demonstrating a skill worthy of Martyr and Gardiner. Bull did not make the point that the Fathers had spoken obscurely or incautiously before heresies arose—this would have been too damaging an admission. For the same reason, he was careful not to say (as he had done in the case of Augustine’s doctrine on grace) that they had fallen into contrary extremes while disputing against contemporary heretics: on Dionysius of Alexandria, the standard instance, he did not use Basil’s explanation and preferred to follow Athanasius, according to whom Dionysius had been wrongly accused.¹¹⁸ Bull only used sparingly, and in a special sense, the distinction between ‘dogmatically’ and ‘in dispute’. When Tertullian argued against Hermogenes that ‘there was a time when the Son was not’, he was not speaking ‘in good faith and sincerely, but in dispute, in order to confute his adversary in whatever manner’. Tertullian knew perfectly well that this was false.¹¹⁹ Bull’s favourite hermeneutical tool was to distinguish between literal and figurative meanings. Tertullian said several times ‘that the Son was related to the Father as a portion is related to the whole’—he actually said that ‘the Son is a portion’, but Bull was happy to rewrite him. Now, this comparison, like all comparisons, held only partially, inasmuch as the Son is not the only person of the Trinity, and is derived from the substance of the Father. But it failed inasmuch as a portion is separate from the whole and inferior to it, whereas the Son is indivisible from the Father and equal to him.¹²⁰ The same distinction enabled Bull to neutralize at one go all the ante-Nicene Fathers who said that the Son, even as God, was born: they did not mean ‘a true and proper’, but ‘a figurative and metaphorical’ birth, that is the issuing forth (προέλευσις) of the Word to create the world.¹²¹ ¹¹⁸ Ibid., sect. II, c. XI, 235–40 and sect. III, c. IV, 329–31. See above, 221. Bull, 234, alluded to Basil’s famous letter (above, 65) but claimed that Basil had simply ignored the true facts of the case. ¹¹⁹ Ibid., sect. III, c. X, 399: ‘Quippe censeo Tertullianum ista, quae ex libro aduersus Hermogenem [3. 3–4 (CC 1, 399)] adduximus, haud bona fide et ex animo protulisse, sed ἀγωνιστικως, ˜ et contentiose, ut quocunque modo suum aduersarium constringeret.’ The only other use of this distinction concerned Gregory of Neocaesarea, on whom Bull, ibid., sect. II, c. XII, 257–8, quoted Basil (above, 64): Bull took ‘spoken in dispute’ to mean ‘quae [uerba] ille tantum ex hypothesi aduersariorum inter disputandum protulerat’. ¹²⁰ Ibid., sect. II, c. VII, 154–5, on Tertullian, Aduersus Praxean, 9. 2 (CC 2, 1168). ¹²¹ Bull, Defensio, sect. III, c. V, 337–77. See also c. X, 400: ‘Tertullian’s trick’ (‘Tertulliani dolus’) against Hermogenes was to pretend not to know that this issuing forth of the Son was no generation properly speaking.

346

The Case for Tradition

A side effect of Bull’s work was to justify the appeal to antiquity. In his prologue, he took Petau to task. Petau had dared to affirm in his Dogmata theologica that the ante-Nicene Fathers had taught the same doctrine as Arius on the production of the Son by the Father, ‘not from eternity but before he created the World’. Bull suspected that the Jesuit had meant thereby to serve the papal cause. If Petau’s claim were true, it would follow that ‘one should make little of the Fathers of the first three centuries, to whom Reformed Catholics are used to specially appealing, since they did not yet sufficiently understand and know the main articles of the Christian faith’, and that ecumenical councils have power to promulgate new articles of faith.¹²² Petau had been much used by Sand but he had also been quoted by Daill´e and Chillingworth.¹²³ Daill´e had himself adduced Arian-sounding passages from the ante-Nicene Fathers such as Tertullian’s saying that the Son is a portion of the Father, ‘which will hardly be reconciled to any good construction’.¹²⁴ To provide such a reconciliation was to confute The Use of the Fathers.¹²⁵ ¹²² Ibid., ‘Prooemium’, 9: ‘Patribus trium primorum saeculorum, quos imprimis appellare solent Catholici Reformati, parum tribuendum esse; utpote quibus nondum satis perspecta et patefacta fuerunt praecipua Christianae fidei capita.’ See also Johann Ernst Grabe’s preface to George Bull, Opera omnia (London, 1703), sig. b1r . Bull specially objected to the general statements in Denis Petau, Theologicorum Dogmatum tomus secundus. In quo de Sanctissima Trinitate agitur (Paris, 1644), l. I, c. 5, § 7, 29–30, and c. 8, § 2, 42. What Petau had been really aiming at is debatable: see M. Hofmann, Theologie, Dogma und Dogmenentwicklung im theologischen Werk Denis Petau’s: Mit einem biographischen und einem bibliographischen Anhang (Frankfurt, 1976); Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 58–60. It is at least clear that he had a positive, or progressive, view of time as unfolding truth, and that tradition was for him a living process rather than a closed corpus: see M. Fumaroli, ‘Temps de croissance et temps de corruption: les deux Antiquit´es dans l’´erudition j´esuite franc¸aise du XVIIe si`ecle’, XVII e si`ecle, 131 (1981), 149–68. ¹²³ For references to Petau’s Dogmata Theologica, see Sand, Nucleus, e.g. 77 (on Justin) and the general assessment, 156–7. Cf. Mandelbrote, ‘ ‘‘Than this nothing can be plainer’’ ’, 277–97, on the use of Petau by Newton. Petau anticipated his Dogmata Theologica in his edition of Epiphanius, where he observed: ‘Quod idem plerisque ueterum Patrum cum in hoc negotio [Trinitatis], tum in aliis fidei Christianae capitibus usuuenit: ut ante errorum atque Haereseon, quibus ea singillatim oppugnabantur, originem, nondum satis illustrata, ac patefacta rei ueritate, quaedam suis scriptis asperserint, quae cum orthodoxae fidei regula minime consentiant’ (Epiphanii, opera, ii, ‘Animaduersiones’, ad Haeresim LXIX, sep. pagination, 285). This note is quoted by Daill´e, Employ des Peres, 130–1; Use of the Fathers, book I, 80–1; Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, preface to the author of Charity Maintain’d, § 18, 17. ¹²⁴ Daill´e, Employ des Peres, 129; Use of the Fathers, book I, 79–80. Aduersus Praxean, 9. 2 had also been used by Milton, Of prelatical episcopacy, 645, against the reliability of Tertullian as a witness for episcopacy. ¹²⁵ Bull did not mention the book but he attacked Daill´e on the Ignatian letters (see Defensio, sect. II, c. VII, 153, and sect. III, c. I, 287–8 and 290).

The Case for Tradition

347

Bull reminded students that they should ‘begin their theological studies, after the holy Scriptures, with reading the Fathers’.¹²⁶ He claimed that he had himself done this, insisting on the Fathers of the first three centuries¹²⁷—he had in fact begun with ‘little systems of divinity’, during the Interregnum, but had soon reacted against them.¹²⁸ He solemnly warned students against Calvin, whose notion that the Son was αὐτόθεος, as Bull for once agreed with Petau, was a very grievous error.¹²⁹ Calvin had dared to criticize the Nicene Creed for its declaration that Christ was ‘God of God’. He had even, Bull claimed, called the Fathers of Nicaea ‘fanatics’:¹³⁰ We owe much to this learned man for the excellent work he performed in purging the Christian Church of Popish superstitions. Far be it from us, though, to hold him as our master or to swear allegiance to him or to be afraid of censuring freely, when it is necessary, his manifest errors and new-fangled tenets, which depart from the Catholic consensus. Anyone, however great in other respects, who despises the authority of the ancient Catholic Church, will to that extent deserve no credit or authority among us.¹³¹

Bull had almost certainly lifted his somewhat disingenuous case against Calvin from a Remonstrant apology by Arminius’ disciple Simon Episcopius. The Defensio was thus discreetly linked to the controversy on grace and predestination.¹³² In his response to Tully, Bull had already ¹²⁶ Ibid., sect. I, c. I, 13: ‘[lectio Patrum] a qua certe, secundum sacras Scripturas, studia sua Theologica incepisse debuerant.’ ¹²⁷ Bull, Examen Censurae, ‘Apologia’, 37–8. ¹²⁸ Nelson, Life of Bull, 20, specially instancing Wollebius. ¹²⁹ Bull, Defensio, sect. IV, c. I, 439, referring to Petau, Dogmata Theologica, ii, l. III, c. 3, 227–8; l. VI, c. 11, 616–23. Bellarmine, Disputationes, i, 2a controu. generalis, ‘De Christo capite totius Ecclesiae’, l. II, c. 19, cols. 409–11, thought that Calvin’s error was merely verbal. ¹³⁰ Ibid., sect. IV, c. I, 440: ‘primipilus et antesignanus eorum, qui istam sententiam propugnarunt non ueritus est sanctissimos et uenerandos Nicaeni concilii Patres fanaticos appellare, et formulam confessionis illorum, Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum uerum de Deo uero, duram uocare, in qua manifesta sit βαττολογία, quin et carmen potius cantillando aptum, quam confessionis formulam.’ Bull gives no reference and none is provided in Works, ed. Burton, v/2. 697. See below, n. 132. ¹³¹ Ibid., sect. IV, c. I, 440: ‘Multum quidem debemus uiro illi, ob operam egregiam in purganda Ecclesia Christi a papisticis superstitionibus nauatam. Absit tamen, ut pro Magistro illum habeamus, aut in uerba eius iuremus, aut denique errores eius manifestos, et nouitia placita, a Catholico consensu abeuntia, libere, ubi res postulauerit, notare reformidemus. Quisquis, quantuscunque alioqui sit, ueteris Ecclesiae Catholicae auctoritatem contempserit, eatenus nullam ipse apud nos fidem aut auctoritatem merebitur.’ As already observed by Grabe (see his note in Bull, Works, ed. Burton, v/2. 697), the last sentence is an echo of Saravia’s De diuersis gradibus (above, Chapter 2 n. 64). ¹³² Compare Bull (above, n. 130) and Simon Episcopius, Responsio Remonstrantium ad libellum cui titulus est, Specimen calumniarum atque heterodoxarum Opinionum, ex

348

The Case for Tradition

weighed Calvin against ‘the consensus of all antiquity’.¹³³ He deprecated the overlong dominance ‘in our schools and academies’ of ‘that systematic theology (patched together by recent doctors, and foreigners at that, who for the most part were not well-disposed for the doctrine and discipline of our Church)’.¹³⁴ He professed to revere next to Scripture, and ‘to follow Remonstrantium Apologia excerptarum, in id., Opera theologica, ii (Amsterdam, 1665), part II, 295: ‘Caluinus uocat Patres Concilii Nicaeni Fanaticos lib: de uera Eccles: Reformat: inter opuscula, pag: 480’; 306: ‘Formulam Symboli Nicaeni, Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, duram uocat Caluinus, et in qua manifesta battologia est, quin et carmen cantillando magis aptum, quam Confessionis formulam’ (no reference given). Calvin indeed wrote that Deum de Deo was ‘dura loquutio’ (Impietas Valentini Gentilis detecta et palam traducta [1561], CR 37, 368; the passage was also quoted by Petau, Dogmata Theologica, ii, l. III, c. 3, 227). The rest of the quotation comes from Calvin’s heated exchange with Pierre Caroli at the Lausanne Synod of 1537. See [Jean Calvin], Pro G. Farello et collegis eius aduersus Petri Caroli calumnias defensio Nicolai Gallasii [1545], CR 35, 315–16: ‘Vides autem in his uerbis esse battologiam, Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum uerum de Deo uero. Quorsum ista repetitio? An uel emphasim habet ullam, uel maiorem expressionem? Vides ergo carmen esse, magis cantillando aptum quam formulam confessionis, in qua syllabam unam redundare absurdum est.’ Because the book was published under Des Gallars’s name, it became extremely scarce and was not included in the collected editions of Calvin’s works until the 19th century. As for Caroli’s book, Refutatio blasphemiae Farellistarum in Sacrosanctam Trinitatem (Metz, 1545), which quoted what Calvin had said, it was long thought lost until a copy was rediscovered in the 1990s in the city library in Troyes. See ‘Prolegomena’, CR 35, pp. xxx–xxxi; E. B¨ahler, ‘Petrus Caroli und Johannes Calvin: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Kultur der Reformationszeit’, Jahrbuch f¨ur Schweizerische Geschichte, 29 (1904), 39–168; Nijenhuis, ‘Calvin’s Attitude towards the Symbols of the Early Church’; F. P. van Stam, ‘Le Livre de Pierre Caroli de 1545 et son conflit avec Calvin’, in O. Millet (ed.), Calvin et ses contemporains: actes du colloque de Paris 1995 (Geneva, 1998), 21–41. It may be therefore that Episcopius was already quoting at second hand, perhaps from one of the numerous Roman Catholic controversialists who had seized upon Calvin’s scandalous expressions. See e.g. Claude de Sainctes, Declaration d’aucuns atheismes de la doctrine de Calvin et Beze contre les premiers fondemens de la Chrestient´e (Paris, 1568), fo. 109v ; Guilielmus Damasus Lindanus [van der Linden], Dubitantius de uera certaque, per Christi Iesu Evangelium, salutis aeternae uia, Libris III. instructus (Cologne, 1571), 189–90; Louis Richeome, L’Idolatrie huguenote figur´ee au patron de la vieille payenne (Lyon, 1608), 226 (but all these authors quote only ‘battologia’ and not the complete text). As for Calvin’s calling the Fathers of Nicaea ‘fanatics’, this did not refer to the Nicene Creed but to the council’s attempt to order married clergy to put away their wives, against which Paphnutius had successfully argued. See Jean Calvin, Interim adulto-germanum: cui adiecta est uera Christianae pacificationis et Ecclesiae reformandae ratio [1549], CR 35, 669. The sources are Socrates, HE, i. 11 (GCS,  1, 42–3); and Sozomen, HE, i. 23 (GCS,  4, 44). Sand, Nucleus, 167, also wrote: ‘Caluinus patres Concilii Nicaeni uocat fanaticos, lib. de uera Eccles. Reform.’ In all likelihood, Sand had also borrowed his quotation from Episcopius. ¹³³ Bull, Examen Censurae, ‘Apologia’, 5. ¹³⁴ Ibid. 6: ‘Systematicam illam Theologiam (a Neotericis Doctoribus, iisque exteris, Ecclesiaeque fere nostrae tum Doctrinae, tum Disciplinae, minus fauentibus, consarcinatam) diutius in Scholis et Academiis nostris obtinere eatenus nolumus, ut contra eius Definitiones, Theoremata et Conclusiones ne hiscere quidem, uel mutire cuiquam

The Case for Tradition

349

devoutly the unanimous judgement of antiquity where it can be found (as it certainly is on all the most important questions)’.¹³⁵ To prove that the English Reformation had been conducted on these principles, he instanced the main elements of what had clearly become, by now, the distinct identity of the Church of England: the retention of episcopacy against ‘the new form of ecclesiastical government that, on Calvin’s advice, had prevailed in neighbouring Churches’; the Book of Common Prayer; the definition of ‘some ancient dogmas, though much at variance with Calvin’s doctrine’, such as universal atonement, the fallibility of justifying faith, the efficacy of baptism for the salvation of children.¹³⁶ Bull recalled the canon Concionatores and James I’s directions on theological studies (taken out of Heylyn’s Cyprianus Anglicus, whose interpretation he followed), and he cited the series of authorities that was now fairly standard, from Jewel to Hammond through Casaubon’s letters¹³⁷—a list into which Bull was himself later to be incorporated.¹³⁸ The Defensio needs to be understood in this context. It did not only aim at defending the ante-Nicene Fathers, it was also meant to be yet another demonstration of the Church of England’s unique devotion to antiquity. In 1678 William Beveridge published a defence of the Apostolic Canons against another book by Daill´e, De pseudepigraphis apostolicis. He prefixed to it a passionate defence of the authority of antiquity which took The Use of the Fathers as its main target.¹³⁹ One had come ‘in our delirious age’, he complained, ‘to such a degree of temerity’ that everything was now called liceat, aut S. Theologiae candidati illic studiorum suorum fundamenta iacienda esse, edoceantur.’ ¹³⁵ Ibid.: ‘quod post S. Scripturas primaeuam ac puriorem Antiquitatem unice colamus ac reuereamur ipsi, aliisque Authores simus, ut eius consentiens iudicium, ubi reperiri potest, (ut in omnibus certe reperitur, quae maioris momenti sunt … ) religiose sequantur.’ ¹³⁶ Ibid. 7. ¹³⁷ Ibid. 7–9. ¹³⁸ See the list in SS. Patrum Apostolicorum Barnabae, Hermae, Clementis, Ignatii, Polycarpi, Opera genuina, ed. Richard Russell, 2 vols. (London, 1746), i, pp. xv–xvi. On the editor, who was one of the Hanoverian Nonjurors, see H. Broxap, The Later Non-Jurors (Cambridge, 1924), 315; Hilkiah Bedford to Thomas Hearne, 8 December 1718, Bodl., MS Rawl. lett. 2, fo. 318r . ¹³⁹ William Beveridge, Codex Canonum Ecclesiae Primitiuae uindicatus ac illustratus (London, 1678). Jean Daill´e, De pseudepigraphis apostolicis, seu libris octo Constitutionum Apostolicarum apocryphis, libri III (Harderwijk, 1653), 412–687, had argued that the Apostolic Canons were a heretical forgery of the second half of the 5th century: Beveridge dated them to the 2nd or the 3rd century and considered that they were perfectly orthodox. He had already propounded this view in William Beveridge (ed.), =υνοδικόν siue Pandectae Canonum SS. Apostolorum, et Conciliorum ab Ecclesia Graeca receptorum, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1672), ii, ‘Annotationes’, sep. pagination, 4–8, and had been criticized on this account by Larroque (above, n. 84). The Codex Canonum uindicatus is therefore both a further confutation of Daill´e’s De pseudepigraphis apostolicis and a reply

350

The Case for Tradition

into question. Dogmas and rites that had been ‘received everywhere from the very beginnings of the Church’ were not spared, ‘as if we were the first Christians’ and all our ancestors had been mistaken.¹⁴⁰ Pretences to ‘new lights, new and greater gifts of the Spirit’ had fed a craze for novelty, which was the cause of ‘so many horrible schisms in the Church’.¹⁴¹ Scripture, though perfectly clear on precepts that were absolutely necessary to salvation, was otherwise open to various interpretations (Beveridge brought to bear here the usual quotation of Vincent of L´erins).¹⁴² One should therefore consult ‘that immense body of all Christians in all ages that is commonly called the Catholic or universal Church’ and whose consensus in all ages and places teaches ‘some common principles, as it were’, of all Christians.¹⁴³ Such were infant baptism, the keeping of the Sunday, the celebration of major festivals, the difference between bishops and simple priests.¹⁴⁴ The extant councils and works of the Fathers were sufficient to assess the sense of the universal Church. Even if one could doubt whether others, who either did not write or whose writings were not extant, might have felt otherwise, ‘since however this is not apparent, and not to be apparent in such cases is tantamount to not to be, whatever all those, or the majority of those, whose genuine works have been left to us, taught in common, that is to be held without doubt for the common and constant doctrine of the universal Church’.¹⁴⁵ The very fact that these councils and Fathers had been preserved ‘by God’s order’ proved the agreement of the universal Church with their doctrine: otherwise it would have buried their writings and even their names.¹⁴⁶ Beveridge was here confronting a standard Protestant argument,¹⁴⁷ and his response was exactly that of Stapleton.¹⁴⁸ Daill´e, to Larroque. The Right Use of the Fathers is not quoted by name but Beveridge makes a clear allusion to it, ‘Prooemium’, sig. b1r . ¹⁴⁰ Beveridge, Codex Canonum uindicatus, ‘Prooemium’, sig. a1v . ¹⁴¹ Ibid. ¹⁴² Ibid., sig. a2r . ¹⁴³ Ibid., sig. a1v : ‘certa quaedam quasi communia principia’. Cf. sig. a2v : ‘quasi communes notiones’. ¹⁴⁴ Ibid., sig. a2v . ¹⁴⁵ Ibid., sig. a4v : ‘cum id tamen non constet, et non constare in huiusmodi causis idem plane sit ac non esse, quicquid omnes uel maior pars eorum, quorum genuina nobis relicta sunt opera, tanquam in commune docuerunt, pro communi et constanti Ecclesiae uniuersalis doctrina sine dubio habendum est.’ ¹⁴⁶ Ibid., sig. a4v –b1r : ‘Praesertim cum ipsa etiam uniuersalis Ecclesia se in eam, quae in antiquis conciliorum patrumque scriptis conseruatur, doctrinam consensisse, abunde satis ex eo demonstrarit, quod ista, quibus continetur, scripta, nobis Deo ita disponente, conseruarit: aliorum interim, qui aliter senserunt, commentariis tanta obliuione obrutis, ut uix nomina eorum posteritati transmissa sint.’ ¹⁴⁷ See above, 56, for its use by Rainolds. ¹⁴⁸ Stapleton, De principiis fidei doctrinalibus, 256: ‘Sic enim fit ut eorum [Patrum] iudicium, totius Ecclesiae sit iudicium. Nam quemadmodum ueterum haereticorum

The Case for Tradition

351

of course, had since made the point that ancient orthodox writers had actually been suppressed after the corruptions of Rome had set in. Against the Protestant argument so refined, Beveridge’s answer logically supposed that God’s assistance to the hierarchical Church precluded its erring in fundamentals: a position which it was indeed hard to make sense of within a Protestant framework. Beveridge believed nonetheless that the Church, ‘like every commonwealth’, had progressively deserted its old institutions to adopt novelties.¹⁴⁹ The appeal to the universal Church had therefore to be specially understood of the primitive Church, which, according to Beveridge, had lasted for three centuries after the Apostles, that is four centuries after Christ. He could thus conclude that providence had preserved enough ancient writings for us to know the primitive Church.¹⁵⁰ The fourth century was also the century of the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople. What was then universally believed must have come from the Apostles: there had been insufficient time for anything else to obtain universal reception.¹⁵¹ This could be verified anyway in the monuments of the intermediate period, between the apostolic age and Nicaea, which providence had preserved for that purpose.¹⁵² As for the objection that the Fathers had both erred and contradicted themselves, Beveridge dismissed it summarily: ‘we do not speak of each Father separately but of all of them together.’ Their very disagreements strengthened their authority when they agreed.¹⁵³ Beveridge ended his preface by justifying his writing against Daill´e, a fellow Protestant. ‘We dispute against that learned man for no other reason than to defend our Church.’ Daill´e had professed to respect the Church of England but had attacked its rites and its discipline. He had everywhere denied the authority of bishops.¹⁵⁴ ‘Our French brothers knew very well’ that the Church of England was ‘harassed on both sides by domestic enemies, by Papists on one side, by sectarians on the other’. And with that knowledge, those ‘foreigners’ had attempted to weaken it!¹⁵⁵ The scripta ideo omnia perierunt, nec illi pro patribus haberi potuerunt, quia Ecclesia Dei et ipsos et ipsorum scripta damnauit, atque aboleuit; sic contra Sanctorum patrum scripta ideo ad nos usque peruenerunt, et ideo ipsi pro patribus hodie habentur, quia Ecclesia et ipsos, et ipsorum scripta conseruauit, et approbauit.’ ¹⁴⁹ Beveridge, Codex Canonum uindicatus, ‘Prooemium’, sig. b2r–v . ¹⁵⁰ Ibid., sig. b3r , with a list of the major Fathers of the 4th century, from Eusebius of Caesarea to Sulpicius Severus. ¹⁵¹ Ibid., sig. b3v . ¹⁵² Ibid., sigs. b3v –b4r , with a list of Fathers for the first three centuries, in reverse chronological order, from Lactantius and Arnobius to ‘ueneranda admodum S. Polycarpi, Ignatii et Clementis Romani (fortasse etiam et Hermae) opuscula, qui omnes cum ipsis Domini Apostolis conuersati sunt’. ¹⁵⁴ Ibid., sigs. c3r –c4r . ¹⁵⁵ Ibid., sig. c4v . ¹⁵³ Ibid., sig. b1v .

352

The Case for Tradition

established Church saw itself as a fortress under siege and the Fathers had become part of its fabric.

2. HIERARCHICAL TRADITION: THE SOLUTION OF HERBERT THORNDIKE The turmoils of the Civil War provided the context for the ecclesiology of Herbert Thorndike (who was deprived both of his parish and his Cambridge fellowship by Parliamentary authority).¹⁵⁶ He realized that all religious disagreements in England revolved round one central question: ‘to what extent it was necessary to recede from the doctrines and practices of the Roman See in order for the Church to be legitimately restored.’¹⁵⁷ Reformation could only be legitimate if it ‘stood within the boundaries fixed from the beginning by the faith and the laws of the whole Church’.¹⁵⁸ The unity of Christendom could never be restored until all parties agreed to take as their standard ‘the consensus of the whole Church from the beginning’.¹⁵⁹ Thorndike published a first massive synthesis of his thought in 1659¹⁶⁰ and then summed up his major ideas in 1662 in a shorter work, which is easier to read and appears to have had a reasonable circulation.¹⁶¹ The Church of England ‘is the same Church that it was’ before the Reformation, though it was then ill and is now cured. Conversely, the Church of Rome was, and still is, a true Church, though corrupt, and the Pope is not Antichrist.¹⁶² The case of the Church of England against Rome depends on the question ‘whether the change that is made hath restored that which ¹⁵⁶ Herbert Thorndike, De ratione ac iure finiendi controuersias Ecclesiae disputatio (London, 1670), sig. a3r . See also sig. b3v on the violence of ‘the tyrant Cromwell’. ¹⁵⁷ Ibid., sig. a3r : ‘Neque enim obscurum est, multas dissidiorum nostrorum causas illud unum habuisse, quatenus a R. Sedis dogmatibus institutisque discedendum sit, ut legitime instaurata uideatur Ecclesia.’ ¹⁵⁸ Ibid.: ‘intra fines, totius ab initio Ecclesiae Fide ac Legibus definitos.’ ¹⁵⁹ Ibid., sig. b1v : ‘quae spes est instaurandae Communionis, nisi in eam ueritatis legem modumque partes consentiant, quae totius ab initio Ecclesiae consensu definiri possit?’ ¹⁶⁰ Herbert Thorndike, An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England, being a Necessary Consideration and brief Resolution of the chief Controversies in Religion that divide the Western Church: Occasioned by the present Calamity of the Church of England; in three Books: viz. Of I. The Principles of Christian Truth. II. The Covenant of Grace. III. The Lawes of the Church (London, 1659). ¹⁶¹ Just weights and measures: That is, the present State of Religion, weighed in the Balance, and Measured by the Standard of the Sanctuary, according to the Opinion of Herbert Thorndike (London, 1662). There was a second edition (London, 1680), with the text unchanged. All references are to the first edition. ¹⁶² Thorndike, Weights and measures, 1–7.

The Case for Tradition

353

was in the beginning, or not. An issue not to be tried, but by going to trial, upon the particulars in which the change consisteth’.¹⁶³ The test, Thorndike argued, could not be Scripture alone, since, although everything necessary to be known was ‘not onely sufficiently, but abundantly contained in the Scripture’, it could not be known ‘clearly’ by Scripture without the ‘Tradition of Faith’.¹⁶⁴ There was an essential difference ‘between the sufficiency of the Scripture, for the salvation of all, and the clear evidence of all that is necessary to bee known, for the salvation of all, to all, in the Scriptures’. To claim that the sense of Scripture was to be determined by Scripture alone was in effect ‘to declare, that wee will submit to no other trial but our own sense’¹⁶⁵—Bramhall had made the same point against Baxter three years before.¹⁶⁶ We should on the contrary ‘submit our sense of all Scripture, that remains in question … to bee determined according to the sense and practice of the whole Church; that is, within the bounds of it’.¹⁶⁷ Not content with these publications in English, Thorndike decided to rework everything into a major Latin opus. He only published the first part, on the rule of faith, in 1670, two years before his death.¹⁶⁸ The work is written in very tortuous Latin and does not make easy reading. It offers nevertheless Thorndike’s ultimate view of the relation and respective authority of Scripture, tradition, and Fathers.¹⁶⁹ Thorndike’s originality was to make tradition prior both to Scripture and to the Church. He stressed that Scripture would not be believed and could not be understood without tradition. The credit of the New Testament was founded on the testimony of the faithful all over the world. In such cases human testimony was no less certain than the evidence of senses. Modern ¹⁶³ Ibid. 2. ¹⁶⁴ Ibid. 35–6. ¹⁶⁵ Ibid. 137. ¹⁶⁶ See Bramhall, Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication, 79 (written in 1659 but not published until 1672: above, Chapter 2 n. 362). ¹⁶⁷ Thorndike, Weights and measures, 138. ¹⁶⁸ Thorndike, De ratione ac iure, sig. a4v : ‘Institueram itaque, quae … uernaculo sermone scripseram, Latine tribus libris retractare, Ecclesiaeque, quae scriberem, cognitioni subiicere; Quorum primus hic habes. Secundus de lege foederis Euangelici futurus fuerat … Tertius de institutis Legibusque Ecclesiae Catholicae.’ These three parts were already those of the 1659 Epilogue, which the Latin work was meant to revise and refashion. For Thorndike’s insistence on Latin as the proper vehicle for his thought, see sig. b4r and cf. Epilogue, sig. a4v . Parts II and III were substantially finished at Thorndike’s death but remained in manuscript: they are preserved in the Chapter Library at Westminster (Lacey, Thorndike, 134 and 150–2). ¹⁶⁹ Presumably on account of its obscurity, the work was not included in the Tractarian edition of Thorndike in the LACT. This, however, could hardly be an excuse for Tavard, Quest for Catholicity, 71–80, omitting it altogether in his study of Thorndike. E. C. Miller, Jr., ‘The Doctrine of the Church in the Thought of Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672)’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1990), recognized its importance, 1–2, but only used it sporadically and did not refer to it at all in his chapters on Scripture and tradition, 23–93.

354

The Case for Tradition

Christians were as certain of the truth of Christianity as those were who stood by when Christ and his Apostles performed their miracles. ‘After the whole world has professed Christianity, those who from now on become Christians believe from now on according to the testimony of the whole world.’¹⁷⁰ Such faith was based on human testimony but should not on that account be called merely human: Thorndike argued, in accordance with the common epistemology of the Restoration Church, that it was certain enough to be a divine and saving faith.¹⁷¹ In that sense (if one took the Church to mean the consensus of the faithful), the credit of Scripture could be said to depend on the authority of the Church. Augustine therefore told the Manichees that he ‘would not believe the Gospel if he were not moved by the authority of the Church’.¹⁷² Already Tertullian, in his Prescriptions, had proved the right of the Church to bar an appeal to the Scriptures from heretics who pretended to have received new revelations from the Spirit in addition to Scripture—Cromwell and other ‘fanatics’ had recently made similar claims.¹⁷³ For Thorndike, the Scriptures did not contain clearly all things necessary to salvation, if only because they gave no criterion to distinguish between what was necessary and what was not.¹⁷⁴ Remarkably for someone who had been one of the contributors to Walton’s Polyglot Bible, Thorndike expressed a marked scepticism as to the religious effects of scholarly exegesis. Not only would the human means requisite to understand Scripture remain inaccessible to the mass of the unlearned, but ‘since the renaissance of letters, the more the sense of Scripture has been illuminated by the light of letters and scholarship, the more it has spread disputes rather than finished them’.¹⁷⁵ A superior principle of interpretation was needed. In addition to ¹⁷⁰ Thorndike, De ratione ac iure, 77–8: ‘Itaque toto Orbe Christianismum professo, totius Orbis testimonio deinceps credunt, qui deinceps Christiani fiunt.’ On consensus as the foundation of moral certainty, see Miller, ‘Doctrine of the Church’, 39–48. ¹⁷¹ De ratione ac iure, 79. ¹⁷² Ibid. 81–3. Augustine, Contra Epistolam Manichaei quam uocant Fundamenti liber unus, 5. 6 (CSEL 25, 197). ¹⁷³ Ibid. 85. ¹⁷⁴ Ibid. 95–7. Cf. Epilogue, 25–35. ¹⁷⁵ De ratione ac iure, 239: ‘Sensus Scripturarum, quanto clariori literarum et eruditionis luce perfusus est, a renatis melioribus literis, tanto plus ad serendas lites valuit, quam finiendas.’ This, however, was not the fault of scholarly exegesis per se: ‘Non quod metuendum unquam sit, ne sola per se Scriptura recte ratiocinantem in aliquam Haeresim impellat, adhibitis eis praesidiis quae diximus. Sed quod non omnium est, quorum salutis interest, uel idoneis praesidiis instructos esse, uel recte ratiocinari’ (241). On Thorndike’s contribution to the Polyglot Bible, see A. W. Haddan, ‘The Life of Herbert Thorndike’, in Theological works of Herbert Thorndike [LACT edition], vi. 202–7; on the theological implications of Walton’s work, one of which was to heighten the role of the clergy as interpreters of Scripture, see J. Bennett and S. Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Oxford,

The Case for Tradition

355

difficulties common to all ancient texts, there was one specific to Scripture, i.e. the relation of the two Testaments. All the reasonings of the New Testament, Thorndike argued, were based on the mystical interpretation of the Old. The ability to perceive the true, spiritual sense of the Old Testament was reckoned in the primitive Church among the gifts of the Holy Ghost.¹⁷⁶ Justin Martyr repeatedly represented to the Jew Trypho that Christians had received from God the grace of understanding the words and deeds of the Prophets, knowledge of which would otherwise be of no avail.¹⁷⁷ This was not to be understood of a direct inspiration granted to every Christian (several of Justin’s interpretations of the Old Testament were actually false, and Thorndike may also have been wary of falling into ‘enthusiasm’) but of the general rule of spiritual exegesis expressed in the inspired writings of the Apostles, which was to be carefully applied to individual texts.¹⁷⁸ ‘Absolutely and in everything, the Scriptures are only perspicuous to those who, after having first acquired a sufficient grounding in languages, skills, and human learning, make use of the hypothesis of the analogical correspondence between Old and New Testament in order to interpret the arguments drawn by the Apostles from the Old Testament.’¹⁷⁹ The Scriptures were not received in a vacuum. The Apostles sent epistles to communities that were already Christian and these epistles supposed ‘Christianity, that is Baptism; and Baptism supposed Catechism’.¹⁸⁰ Nobody was admitted to baptism without a profession of faith, the exact wording of which varied in local churches, but which everywhere expressed ‘the Rule of Faith, that is Catholic tradition’ received from the Apostles.¹⁸¹ 1998), no. 73, 177–9, and nos. 75–7, 181–4; P. Miller, ‘The ‘‘Antiquarianization’’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–1657)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2001), 463–82; S. Mandelbrote, ‘The Authority of the Word: Manuscript, Print and the Text of the Bible in Seventeenth-Century England’, in J. Crick and A. Walsham (eds.), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), 135–53, esp. 147–9. ¹⁷⁶ De ratione ac iure, 110–11. ¹⁷⁷ Ibid. 30, quoting four passages from Justin, Dialogue with Trypho (32, 58, 78, 92 = PG 6, 544–5, 608, 662, 694). ¹⁷⁸ Ibid. 111 and 29–31. ¹⁷⁹ Ibid. 111: ‘[ut Scripturae] Absolute autem, et in omnibus, non nisi eis perspicuae sint, qui linguarum primum, artiumque ac literarum humaniorum supellectilem idoneam nacti, hypothesim eius analogiae, qua Noua Scripturae Veteri respondet, ad interpretationem eorum, quae ab Apostolis ex ueteri disputantur, adhibeant.’ Even if one were to restrict the perspicuity of Scripture to points necessary to salvation, Scripture could only be perspicuous to those ‘qui summam Christianismi, ab Apostolis traditam, ad earum interpretationem afferunt.’ ¹⁸⁰ Ibid. 107 and 133–4. Cf. Epilogue, 40–44. ¹⁸¹ Thorndike, De ratione ac iure, 144–6 (‘Regula Fidei siue Traditio Catholica’).

356

The Case for Tradition

Catholic tradition was the norm for all interpretation of Scripture, in the sense that ‘the interpretation of Scripture was to be confined within the bounds of tradition’, and any interpretation contrary to tradition was to be rejected.¹⁸² Tertullian opposed this rule of faith to the heretics of his time in his Prescriptions. Irenaeus meant it when he spoke of those barbarian peoples who did not know writing but ‘held faith in their hearts’.¹⁸³ Tradition was not to be reduced to any set formulary, it was the Catholic faith from which all creeds had been deduced. Without the perpetual faith of the Church as supreme principle the mere words of the Creed would have been no more sufficient than Scripture to confute heresies like Arianism or Pelagianism.¹⁸⁴ To the objection that Justin had called millenarianism the belief of all fully orthodox Christians, Thorndike had replied in 1659 by the standard point that Justin also said that it was contradicted by other Christians.¹⁸⁵ He then recognized that this was not enough and imagined a new, original, solution. Justin’s words gave no difficulty if they were construed aright. They did not mean that Justin himself and all the orthodox held that there would be ‘a thousand years at Jerusalem’ but that ‘a thousand years at Jerusalem’ had been acknowledged by Ezekiel and Isaiah, according, that is, to the exegesis of Justin and others.¹⁸⁶ But particular interpretations of prophecies could not pertain to the common rule of faith.¹⁸⁷ As for infant communion, this had been indeed a ‘very general’, though not a universal, custom, but, contrary to baptism, it was ¹⁸² Thorndike, De ratione ac iure, 147: ‘Quod est dicere, intra fines Traditionis continendam esse interpretationem Scripturae.’ ¹⁸³ Ibid. 149. Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 3. 4. 2 (SC 211, 46). ¹⁸⁴ Ibid. 147–8. ¹⁸⁵ Thorndike, Epilogue, 175. ¹⁸⁶ De ratione ac iure, 280–1: ‘Idiotica oratio Iustini ad eosdem uidebatur fidem Millennii trahere, qui resurrectionem profitebantur. Et ita intelligendus esset, si ὡς οἱ Προφ η˜ ται vel si ἅ οἱ Προφ η˜ ται dixisset. Sed si nihil aliud dicat, quam Prophetas Ezechielem, Esaiam, alios idem agnouisse, nihil aliud dixerit, quam a se, et ab aliis eiusdem secum sententiae quibusdam, eos hoc dixisse intelligi.’ See Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 80 (Opera (Paris, 1615/1636), 307 = PG 6, 668): ’Εγὼ δὲ, καὶ εἴ τινές εἰσιν ὀρθογνώμονες κατὰ πάντα Χριστιανοὶ, καὶ σαρκὸς ἀνάστασιν γενήσεσθαι ἐπιστάμεθα· καὶ χίλια ἔτη ἐν ‘Ιερουσαλὴμ … , οἱ προφ η˜ ται ’Ιεζεκιὴλ, καὶ ’Ησαίας, καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι ὁμολογο˜υσιν ( Thorndike considers that χίλια ἔτη is governed by ὁμολογο˜υσιν, not by γενήσεσθαι ἐπιστάμεθα). This solution was adopted by the 18th-century apologist John Chapman, Primitive Antiquity Explained and Vindicated. Part II [1733], in Miscellaneous tracts relating to Antiquity (London, 1742), 4–5. The Nonjuror Samuel Jebb ignored it and only referred to the earlier treatment of the text in Thorndike’s Epilogue (Sancti Iustini Philosophi et Martyris cum Tryphone Iudaeo Dialogus, cum Latina Ioannis Langi uersione, quamplurimis in locis correcta (London, 1719), 243 note p). Although the text as it stands may be corrupted (later editors indeed corrected into ὡς οἱ ;ροφ η˜ ται: see note in PG and compare the Latin translation in the 1615 edition), the construction seems very forced. ¹⁸⁷ De ratione ac iure, 283.

The Case for Tradition

357

not regarded as necessary for salvation.¹⁸⁸ Augustine was the only Father to seem to say that it was, but his meaning was cleared by Fulgentius, the most faithful of his disciples, who taught that one should not fear for the salvation of a person who died after baptism, without having yet received the eucharist. Fulgentius expressly said, on Augustine’s authority, that ‘every faithful person actually partakes of the body and blood of Christ when he is made a member of Christ in baptism’.¹⁸⁹ Thorndike was here substantially repeating, with some minor refinements, the standard Roman Catholic answer, which had already been propounded by Aquinas.¹⁹⁰ Its full confutation by Daill´e was about to be published, in his posthumous work against Roman Catholic sacramental practices.¹⁹¹ Daill´e convincingly showed that Fulgentius’ text contained nothing to the purpose. Fulgentius meant that failure to take the eucharist would be excused in a case of absolute incapacity. This did not prevent the eucharist from being necessary, ‘in a slightly milder sense’, for the salvation of all baptized persons who could actually receive it. Chillingworth had made the same point in his as yet unpublished discourse on infant communion. Thorndike had not foreseen this objection.¹⁹² Thorndike clearly departed from the usual Reformed positions¹⁹³ and some of his arguments sounded Roman enough for Sergeant to claim with some plausibility that they had the same rule of faith, ‘which settled is apt to unite us in all the rest’.¹⁹⁴ In truth, however, Thorndike rejected the Tridentine notion of tradition. Tradition for him was a negative, or perhaps a defensive, principle. It contained nothing which ‘could not be shown in Scripture’, it did not even determine the right sense of all parts of ¹⁸⁸ Ibid. 284. ¹⁸⁹ Ibid. 285–6. Fulgentius, ep. 12 to Ferrandus, De salute Aethiopis moribundi (PL 65, 392): ‘unumquemque fidelium Corporis et sanguinis Dominici tunc esse participem, quando in Baptismate membrum efficitur Christi.’ ¹⁹⁰ See Aquinas, Summ. theol. IIIa, q. LXXIII, art. 3, ad 1um (ed. leonina, xii. 140), who quotes Fulgentius’ saying under the name of Augustine (via Gratian’s Decretum, c. 131 (Nulli est), De consecratione dist. IV, Friedberg, i. 1404)—Thorndike had himself fallen into that common mistake, Epilogue, 176–8, but made a full study of Fulgentius for De ratione ac iure. Aquinas’s solution was adopted by [White], Dialogues of William Richworth, 561–2. ¹⁹¹ Daill´e, De Cultibus religiosis, 577–90. ¹⁹² Ibid. 587–8. Whitby, De Scripturarum Interpretatione, 212–17, later quoted Daill´e to confute Thorndike on this point. Compare Chillingworth, ‘An Argument drawn from the admitting Infants to the Eucharist’, 170. ¹⁹³ The otherwise valuable study of Miller, ‘Doctrine of the Church’, fails to recognize this and wrongly connects Thorndike to the ‘Anglican’ theological method defined by McAdoo and supposedly derived from Jewel (see 55–6). ¹⁹⁴ John Sergeant, Errour Non-Plust, or Dr. Stillingfleet shown to be the Man of no Principles. With an Essay how discourses concerning Catholick grounds bear the highest Evidence (n.p., 1673), sig. a2r , with reference to Weights and measures.

358

The Case for Tradition

Scripture, it served to reject heretical interpretations of Scripture.¹⁹⁵ To use ‘the testimony of the tradition of the Church’ to interpret Scripture did not contradict Reformation principles. It was still ‘to follow the authority of Scripture only, that is of God only who inspires Scripture’.¹⁹⁶ ‘Ecclesiastical usages and rites that have been held from the beginning according to unwritten custom’ were not part of the tradition of faith, and could only be called ‘traditions’ in a lower sense. The fact of their having been historically practised, or at least connived at, by all Churches merely showed that they were not ‘contrary to the common Faith’. The Church had authority to change them.¹⁹⁷ In his Epilogue, Thorndike had quoted Basil’s list of traditions in De Spiritu Sancto to prove that ‘Christians had rules which they observed for Lawes in the exercise of their communion’, though Basil had actually mistaken ‘local customes for general’ in his instances. ‘Had there not alwaies been a Body, capable of being tied by general customes, there had been no room for this mistake.’¹⁹⁸ The rule of faith (tradition proper) was, at least logically, antecedent to the Church because it was the rule of the faithful as individuals, before they joined with others in the communion of the Church, although, of course, joining that communion was part of their duty as the faithful.¹⁹⁹ Infallibility belonged to tradition only, not to the decrees of the Church: ‘for the tradition of the Church established the Church, whereas a decree of the Church is established by the Church; tradition is prior to the Church itself and its profession established the Church, whereas decrees originate from the will of the Church and owe their strength to it’.²⁰⁰ As Thorndike put it, with more clarity than usual, in ‘a judgement of the Church of Rome’, which ‘he delivered in a paper to a Lady a little before his death’, ‘the truth of the Christian Religion, and of the Scripture is presupposed to

¹⁹⁵ De ratione ac iure, 241. Cf. 147: ‘Est enim magnopere animaduertendum, cum definiendam, ex Traditione Ecclesiae, Scripturae sententiam dico, non hoc me uelle, quasi teneri possit sensus Scripturae Traditione … sed quod recusandum sit, tanquam a uero Scripturae sensu alienum, quicquid in Traditionem incurrit.’ ¹⁹⁶ Ibid. 278. Cf. Bramhall, Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication, 38–39: ‘The sufficiency of Scripture is not inconsistent with prudential Government, or the necessary means of finding out the right sense of Scripture.’ ¹⁹⁷ De ratione ac iure, 242–3. ¹⁹⁸ Thorndike, Epilogue, 48–9. Thorndike was even ready to adopt here a quasiHobbesian position: see Weights and measures, 38: ‘The Rules, and Customs, and Rites of the Church which are called Traditions, are not commanded because good, but are good because commanded.’ ¹⁹⁹ Thorndike, De ratione ac iure, sigs. a3v –a4r and 135. ²⁰⁰ Ibid. 243: ‘Nam Traditio Ecclesiae Ecclesiam, decretum Ecclesiae Ecclesia constituit. Illa antiquior est ipsa Ecclesia, cuius professio Ecclesiam constituit; Haec a uoluntate Ecclesiae proficiscuntur, eique uim suam debent.’

The Case for Tradition

359

the Being of a Church, And therefore cannot depend upon the Authority of it.’²⁰¹ It is true that the consensus of the Catholic Church proves tradition (indeed Thorndike appears at some points to say that it is tradition),²⁰² but there are two notions of the Catholic Church: ‘one is restricted to the present time … The other comprehends the Churches of all times and places, and is seen in the first succession of the Apostles, which cannot be shown to have much deviated from what they had established, whether by way of addition, of substraction, or of mutation.’²⁰³ Failure to make that distinction had led many to call tradition everything they found practised by the Church of their time.²⁰⁴ When Tertullian and Augustine derived the authority of Scripture from the Church, they did not mean the present governors of the hierarchical Church but the consensus of all Christians. Tertullian did not appeal to the authority of the Church as judge of controversies for the faithful, but to ‘the faith and consensus of the Church as witness’ for those who did not yet believe.²⁰⁵ Roman Catholic controversialists were therefore mistaken when they tried to transpose Tertullian’s argument to present controversies.²⁰⁶ Only the Church of all times, not the present Church, was infallible. Thorndike stood here in clear opposition to Roman Catholic doctrine, even in its Gallican form—Gallican divines like Jean de Launoy, he thought, rightly proved from the Tradition of the Church that a general council was above the Pope, but they were mistaken when they claimed that a general council was infallible as such.²⁰⁷ The dogmatic authority of the Fathers—as opposed to the merely historical credit which they shared with any other writer when relating things that they had personally witnessed—derived from their relation to the tradition of the Church.²⁰⁸ Patristic testimonies might only be used ²⁰¹ Thorndike’s ‘judgement of the Church of Rome’, published by Stillingfleet, Several conferences, 85. ²⁰² See De ratione ac iure, 148 and 241. ²⁰³ Ibid. 244: ‘Itaque omnino duplex est Catholicae Ecclesiae definitio: Altera presenti seculo continetur … Altera omnium seculorum et locorum Ecclesias complectitur; cernitur autem in prima Apostolorum successione, quam diu ab eorum institutis, uel addendo, uel demendo, uel mutando discessum esse, ostendi non possit.’ ²⁰⁴ Ibid. 275–6. ²⁰⁵ Ibid. 80, 84, 87, 93. ²⁰⁶ Ibid. 87: ‘Non ualere autem Tertulliani praescriptionem, inter partes quarum controuersias finimus, facile constat; Inter quas, nullam aliam esse Fidei originem constat, a diuinis Scripturis earumque scriptoribus.’ See also 241. ²⁰⁷ Ibid. 245–7. See also Thorndike’s ‘judgement of the Church of Rome’, in Stillingfleet, Several conferences, 85. ²⁰⁸ Thorndike, De ratione ac iure, 489: ‘Huic etiam loco reseruauimus, quod de auctoritate Patrum, in eis quae de Fide, Canonicaque disciplina Ecclesiae in quaestionem ueniunt, statuendum uidetur. Nam quod eorum auctoritatem hactenus usurpari necesse fuit, testimonii auctoritas fuit, potius quam dogmatis Ecclesiastici. Communis est

360

The Case for Tradition

on the assumption that their authors did not deviate from the faith of the Church. Thus Vincent of L´erins in his ‘golden booklet’ contented himself with quoting ten writers in favour of the faith of Ephesus.²⁰⁹ His argument was valid because it appeared that those writers were received by the Church and that no writer received by the Church had taught otherwise. ‘For, unless there had been a law of Faith, upon the profession of which the Church and all teaching authority within the communion of the Church were based, ten doctors could not have taught the same thing without any contradiction.’²¹⁰ More specifically the authority of the Fathers was due to ‘the position they obtained in the hierarchy of the Church in their time’, which did not allow them to be ignorant of ecclesiastical tradition. Always wary of enthusiasm, Thorndike did not claim that bishops received special assistance from the Spirit but argued that one could hardly become a bishop, especially in the most important Churches, without having previously made a thorough study of the doctrine of the Church.²¹¹ Hilary of Poitiers expressly founded the authority of the Fathers on their place in an episcopal succession: modern bishops could not deviate from the faith of their predecessors without renouncing their own ordination.²¹² Subsequent approbation by the Church could make up for the lack of such position, as in the case of Jerome, who, though a mere priest, ranked as a Father of the Church.²¹³ Other writers, however learned and eloquent, who had had no teaching authority or whose writings had not been expressly approved by the Church, were not properly Fathers: Justin, for example, was ‘an eminent man’, but a mere layman who could not engage the authority of the Church; likewise, Arnobius had been only a catechumen at the time when he wrote; similar omnibus fere fundandis scientiis monimentorum Historiae Fides, ut uera credantur, quae ab eis gesta narrantur sua fide, quos latere uerum non potuerit.’ ²⁰⁹ ‘Aureolum libellum’—an epithet which was frequently applied to the Commonitorium by Counter-Reformation writers. See e.g. Caesar Baronius, Martyrologium Romanum, ad nouam Kalendarii rationem, et ecclesiasticae historiae ueritatem restitutum. Gregorii XIII Pont. Max. iussu editum. Secunda editio (Antwerp, 1589), 231. For Vincent’s text, see above, 216. ²¹⁰ Thorndike, De ratione ac iure, 148: ‘Nam nisi Lex fuisset Fidei; cuius professione constabat Ecclesia, omnisque in Ecclesiae Communione docendi auctoritas; nunquam idem docuissent decem Doctores nemine contradicente.’ ²¹¹ Ibid. 489. ²¹² Ibid. 490: ‘Idem ostendit grauior auctor S. Hilarius fine l. de Synodis [91, PL 10, 543–4]; Cogitemus tot Sacerdotes sanctos, et quiescentes iam. Quid de nobis Dominus iudicabit, si nunc anathematizentur a nobis? Quid nobis erit, qui rem eo deducimus, ut quia Episcopi non fuerunt, nos quoque non coeperimus? Ordinati enim ab his sumus, et eorum sumus successores. Renunciemus Episcopatui, quia officium eius ab Anathemate sumpserimus. Maioritatem Episcopatus, et successionem, pro ratione auctoritatis Patribus Ecclesiae tribuendae, adhiberi a tanto uiro, ut opinor, omnes intelligunt.’ ²¹³ Ibid. 491, 493, 500.

The Case for Tradition

361

reservations applied to Lactantius, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. Such writers, Thorndike argued, enjoyed no dogmatic authority and all weight they might have could only be based on their credit as witnesses or on the strength of their reasoning.²¹⁴ Fathers of undoubted standing had written some embarrassing passages (thus Dionysius of Alexandria and Gregory Thaumaturgus on the Trinity, Gregory of Nyssa on the eternity of Hell torments) but these were no objections against the perpetuity of the Tradition of the Church—although Daill´e was not named it is likely that Thorndike had him in mind here.²¹⁵ Tradition was the standard by which to judge individual authors.²¹⁶ Fourthcentury Fathers rightly told Arians that the Church had from the beginning adored equally the three persons of the Trinity: this ‘had always been manifest in the profession of faith, and in the administration and reception of baptism’, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.²¹⁷ When he wrote against Sabellius, Dionysius of Alexandria appeared to fall ²¹⁴ Ibid. 491–2: ‘Nam Tertullianus, quem S. Hieronymus [Aduersus Heluidium de Mariae uirginitate perpetua, 17; PL 23, 201], Ecclesiae hominem non fuisse, eleganter iudicat, tantum ualebit, quantum uel historiae fide refert, uel argumentando conficit.’ Cf. already, and more clearly, Epilogue, 48: ‘I claime as yet no other credit, not onely for Tertullian, who after hee turned Montanist, was not of the Church, but, for the Fathers of the Church, but that which common sense allowes men of common sense, in witnessing maters of historical truth. To wit, that they who published writings that are come to posterity, would not have alleged things for true, which every man might see to be false, in point of fact; Because, by so doing, common sense must needs tell them, that they must of necessity utterly discredit the cause which they meant to promote.’ ²¹⁵ Compare De ratione ac iure, 498 and Daill´e, De usu Patrum, 269–70, on the question whether Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus shared the error of Gregory of Nyssa. Thorndike warned in his preface that he would not name the modern writers he confuted (sig. b1r ). ²¹⁶ De ratione ac iure, 496. ²¹⁷ Ibid.: ‘Semper enim ualebit, quod Eunomio Gregorius Nyssenus initio primae aduersus ipsum disputationis, Basilium fratrem in libro de Spiritu Sancto secutus praescribit; Pariter ab initio unius ueri Dei gloriam Filio Spirituique Sancto ascriptam cum Patre; Quod et in professione Fidei, et in Baptismo siue conferendo, siue suscipiendo, semper manifestum fuerit.’ Thorndike is actually referring to the Refutatio confessionis Eunomii, which was then considered a part of a single work Contra Eunomium, of which it formed the first book in the 1615 Paris edition. The true book I, subsequently discovered by Gretser, was only published in an appendix (Paris 1618) and then in the 1638 edition, in which the Refutatio became book II. See S. Patris Gregorii Episcopi Nysseni, fratris Basilii Magni, opera omnia quae reperiri potuerunt, Graece et Latine nunc primum ex Mnss. codd. in lucem edita, et in duos tomos diuisa (Paris, 1615), 2–3 and 5 [= Refutatio confessionis Eunomii, 3 and 12, in Gregorii Nysseni opera, ii: Contra Eunomium libri. Pars altera, ed. W. Jaeger (Leiden, 1960), 313 and 317]. The argument drawn from baptism in the name of the three persons of the Trinity is indeed already in Basil, De Spiritu Sancto, 10. 26 (PG 32, 113). Thorndike also quotes a passage from Contra Eunomium, book III on the authority of Tradition ‘come to us from the Apostles by the Fathers’ (Paris, 1615, 126 = ed. Jaeger, ii. 84–5).

362

The Case for Tradition

into what was later called Arianism. But this very case (instanced against the appeal to the Fathers, not only by Daill´e, but also by Archbishop Matthew and Lord Falkland) proved the existence and authority of the rule of faith, since Dionysius was denounced by his clergy to the Bishop of Rome as infringing this rule and had to exculpate himself. ‘Who will then deny that all the writings of the ancients, whether high or low in the Church, which may seem to deviate from this Rule, should be judged by it?’²¹⁸ The authority of the Fathers was not engaged in passages where, before the growth of heresies, they had spoken less guardedly. They only enjoyed authority inasmuch as it could be surmised that they had not deflected from the authority of the Church, that is from the common faith.²¹⁹ Tradition was thus a hierarchical, not a historical principle. Rather than ground the authority of the Fathers merely on their reliability as witnesses, Thorndike took pains to give them a distinctly dogmatic authority, derived from the Church.²²⁰ He thereby got rid of a number of embarrassing objections, but paid for this by having to exclude from his definition of Fathers most ante-Nicene writers. How then could apostolic tradition be determined? Thorndike seemed at times to appeal to a retrospective orthodoxy. The list of apocrypha in ‘an outstanding monument of ecclesiastical antiquity, the decree of the council of Rome under Pope Gelasius I’,²²¹ proved sufficiently, Thorndike argued, that an author like Clement of ²¹⁸ De ratione ac iure, 497: ‘Quis sanus receptam Ecclesiae Regulam neget, ad quam exacta sint quae Dionysius scripserat? Quis ad eandem exigenda esse, quae ab antiquioribus scripta, siue humiliori, siue altiori Ecclesiae loco constitutis, inde aberrare uideri possint?’ Thorndike does not give any reference but his source is Athanasius, De sententia Dionysii, esp. 13 (Werke, ii 1, 55–6). See Matthew, Concio, 39–40; Falkland, Falkland, his Discourse of Infallibility, with an Answer to it: And his Lordships Reply, 78 (above, 219); Daill´e, Employ des Peres, 129 and 151–2 (Use of the Fathers, book I, 80 and 94–5). ²¹⁹ Ibid. 500. ²²⁰ The earlier version of Thorndike’s development on the Fathers, Epilogue, 165–8, gave equal importance to the Fathers’ credit ‘in point of historical truth, concerning the state of Christianity during those ages in which they lived, or which they might know’ and to their having taught within the communion of the Church. The stress on ecclesiastical hierarchy is unique to De ratione ac iure. ²²¹ De ratione ac iure, 491: ‘in egregio antiquitatis Ecclesiasticae monimento, Concilii Romani sub Gelasio P. I. [decreto], quod in farragine Conciliorum legitur, et apud Gratianum in decreto.’ See Gratian, Decretum, dist. XV, c. ultim. (Friedberg, i, cols. 38–9). For the editions of the Decretum Gelasianum in conciliar collections, see E. von Dobsch¨utz, Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis in kritischem Text herausgegeben und untersucht (Leipzig, 1912; TU , 3rd series 8/4), 202–5. Thorndike rightly commented that ‘apocrypha’ meant here, not only writings whose authors were unknown, ‘sed etiam quorum, etsi noti essent scriptores, suspensam tamen esse Fidem uoluit Synodus, neque ea se auctore legi’.

The Case for Tradition

363

Alexandria should not be considered a Father of the Church.²²² Origen died in the communion of the Church (c.254) because circumstances made appeasement advisable, but the Origenists were subsequently condemned by Theophilus of Alexandria (in 400), Pope Anastasius I (in 401), and the fifth ecumenical council (in 553), so that ‘the original faith of the Church was avenged’.²²³ This is somehow reminiscent of Du Perron’s use of the fourth and fifth centuries to illuminate the earlier period, and it is significant that Thorndike, who had attacked the idea as preposterous in his 1659 Epilogue, suppressed the passage from his Latin text: he may have come to recognize that his own final views were not so different.²²⁴ He still maintained at the same time, though, that the conversion of the Roman Empire had introduced considerable changes into the regulation of doctrine in the Church and that, as a result, ecclesiastical authority had been unduly extended.²²⁵ How could it be proved that the posthumous condemnations of Origen were not instances of such abuse of power? As for the Gelasian decree, ‘Of books to be received and not to be received’—the closest equivalent to an official list of the Fathers—its authority was still unchallenged when Thorndike wrote.²²⁶ But Pearson was about to demonstrate, by a ²²² De ratione ac iure, 492–3: ‘Cum Episcopi Eusebii, uel Fausti Presbyteri, Clementis, uel Tertulliani, Cassiani Diaconi scripta, Gelasii decretum pro Apocryphis haberi iubet, non esse Patrum scriptis annumeranda constat, quibus Ecclesia auctoritatem abrogat.’ ²²³ Ibid., 492–3: ‘Itaque cum ab initio, quoties partes facerent super eis [erroribus] in Ecclesia Origenis studiosi, toties damnati sunt, uel Alexandriae a Theophilo, uel Romae ab Anastasio, uel in Quinta Synodo Constantinopolitani, toties originariam Ecclesiae Fidem uindicatam censendum est.’ For a summary of this very complicated story, which was much discussed by 17th-century scholars, see G. Fritz, ‘Orig´enisme’, DTC, xi/2. 1565–88. ²²⁴ See Epilogue, 166–7: ‘And here, I must needs mervail at the Cardinal of Perrons demand, that the trial of what is to be thought Catholick, (or, universally received in the whole Church of God) should proceed chiefly, or at least necessarily, upon the testimonies of those Writers which lived about the fourth century of years from Christ, as that which flourished most for number and learning of Writers. For, seeing the authority of Church Writers is not grounded upon presumption of their learning; And, that the credit of historical truth cannot be denied even the single witnesse of those, that writ, when they were more scarce, and lesse knowing, at least in Secular studies; But what is primitive, what accessory, is not to be discovered, but by the state of those times which were before additions could be made; hee that demands to be tryed by the times of three hundred years distance from the original, (wherein, what change may have fallen out, not presumption but historical truth must determine) I say, hee that demands this tryal, demands not to be tryed.’ ²²⁵ De ratione ac iure, 275. ²²⁶ For the history of criticism, see CPL 1676; Dobsch¨utz, Das Decretum Gelasianum, 334–8 (according to modern scholars, the work is a private compilation of the early 6th century). Prior to Pearson, the standard handbooks did not even discuss the genuineness of the Decretum Gelasianum but used it as a reliable criterion to judge of other texts. See Perkins, Problema, 36; Bellarmine, De scriptoribus, 125; Rivet, Critici sacri specimen, 106

364

The Case for Tradition

thorough examination both of the text and the manuscript tradition, that it had nothing to do with Pope Gelasius. The alleged Roman council had never taken place.²²⁷ The author of the decree claimed to follow ‘in all things’ the judgement of Jerome. In fact, Pearson noted, there was a complete discrepancy between the two.²²⁸ For instance, the decree declared Clement of Alexandria’s works to be apocrypha whereas Jerome had highly praised Clement’s ‘outstanding books, full of learning and eloquence’.²²⁹ Thorndike restricted infallibility to the consensus of the Church in all ages but it looked as if he was actually manufacturing that consensus, including and excluding witnesses at will. This came dangerously close to a circular argument. In the present state of Christendom, anyway, after the Churches had all anathematized each other, how could their consensus be made effectual? Who had authority to say what was, or was not, Catholic tradition? One cannot help thinking of John Toland’s cruel analysis of High Church discourse, thirty years later: ‘the extraordinary prerogatives of the Catholic Church’ so much talked of were ‘the fancied excellences of an abstracted, and therefore an imaginary idea made up of no particular ideas, like all those charms, graces, and beauties, which the valiant Don Quixote adored in his beloved Dulcinea’.²³⁰ In modern parlance, the unceasing celebration of ‘catholicity’ was simply ideology. The criticism is partly answered if one accepts that Thorndike’s ultimate goal was a reconciliation of the major Churches and that he chose to take for granted the orthodox core on which they agreed.²³¹ Until reunion was achieved, though, his (reproduced unchanged in the 4th edn. of 1642, 99). The Gallican scholar, Jean-Baptiste Cotelier, still quoted the Decretum Gelasianum with no reservation in his authoritative edition of the Apostolic Fathers, SS. Patrum qui temporibus apostolicis floruerunt; Barnabae, Clementis, Hermae, Ignatii, Polycarpi; opera edita et inedita, uera et suppositicia. Una cum Clementis, Ignatii, Polycarpi Actis atque Martyriis. Iohannes Baptista Cotelerius Societatis Sorbonicae Theologus, ex MSS. Codicibus correxit, ac eruit; Versionibus, Notis et Indicibus illustrauit, 2 vols. (Paris, 1672), ii, notes, sep. numbering, cols. 7 and 327. ²²⁷ Pearson, Vindiciae Ignatianae, part 1, 44–55. ²²⁸ Ibid. 54. See Decretum Gelasianum, ed. Friedberg, i. 37–8. ²²⁹ Pearson, Vindiciae Ignatianae, part 1, 55: ‘Author Decreti, Opuscula Clementis Alexandrini apocrypha [Friedberg, i. 39]. Hieronymus in Catalogo [Jerome, Liber de uiris inlustribus, 38, ed. E. C. Richardson (Leipzig, 1896; TU 14/1), 26–7], Feruntur eius insignia uolumina, plenaque eruditionis et eloquentiae, tam de scripturis diuinis, quam de saecularis litteraturae instrumento. Adeo Decreti scopus, et quasi peculiaris tractatio, ab Hieronymi doctrina penitus abhorrent.’ Pearson’s position was fully espoused by Cave, Historia literaria, 374–5; Beveridge, Codex Canonum uindicatus, 75, considered that Pearson’s arguments made the genuineness of the Gelasian decree at least doubtful. ´ ²³⁰ John Toland, La Constitution primitive de l’Eglise chr´etienne/The Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church, ed. L. Jaffro (Paris, 2003), 161–2. ²³¹ He thus claimed, De ratione ac iure, 138, that there was a consensus of all Christians on the necessity of baptism for salvation. Thorndike’s interest in the reunion

The Case for Tradition

365

system was more or less a castle in the air. His arguments held only to the extent that one accepted his premisses, and Socinians certainly did not. Thorndike acknowledged that tradition, which had been a powerful argument against Arianism because the Church was then one, had failed in practice against Socinianism.²³² Was this not to say that, as things now were, Catholic tradition was a myth? As a myth, Thorndike’s system was seductive enough and—though his De ratione ac iure was everything but a success in commercial terms²³³—he found some adherents. Scrivener was said to have been ‘of Mr Thorndykes principles’²³⁴ and he certainly quoted him with admiration.²³⁵ Scrivener’s Apologia, however, did not owe much to Thorndike’s most original ideas and he preferred to stress more conventionally the credit of the Fathers as witnesses.²³⁶ It is not difficult to see why: Thorndike’s case for patristic of Churches is rightly stressed by Miller, ‘Doctrine of the Church’, 409–12. Haddan, ‘Life’, 216, claimed unconvincingly that Thorndike’s perspective was purely national (‘Both his duty and his hopes limited his efforts to his own country, and to the prospect, when (if ever) the Church should be reestablished, of combining the various sects within her fold, and of settling her upon an impregnable ground, both against dissenters at home and against the Roman Church’): I suspect that this was meant to free Thorndike from the odium of Romanizing. ²³² De ratione ac iure, 241: ‘Haec [Traditio Fidei] quia obtinebat, damnata est Haeresis tum Ariana, tum Pelagiana; Quia non obtinet, damnata quidem est Haeresis Sociniana … Sed damnata non extinguitur, quia non obtinet, quae obtinere debet.’ ²³³ The book was printed at Thorndike’s expense and sold poorly: see TC, i. 36 (Easter Term 1670); Haddan, ‘Life’, 150, with notes m–n, and 269. Lacey, Thorndike, 129–30, surmised that it was not even put on the market, but the Term Catalogue mentions the name of a bookseller. Newton read at least part of the work and even took notes from it (Mandelbrote, ‘ ‘‘Than this nothing can be plainer’’ ’, 287 n. 43). After Thorndike’s death, the unsold copies were acquired by the bookseller Robert Scott, who reissued them with a cancel title page, Origines ecclesiasticae; Siue De iure et potestate Ecclesiae Christianae, Exercitationes (London: Typis T. Roycroft, Prostant apud Rob. Scott, 1674; Wing, 1056), and managed to sell a number of them on the Continent: the Biblioth`eque Mazarine in Paris has two, one of which (shelfmark 2563 F ) belonged to the Parisian convent of Picpus ( Third Franciscan order), the other one (shelfmark D. 2563 F ) to the Duke of Montausier, governor of the Dauphin, Louis XIV’s son; there are also two at the Biblioth`eque de l’Arsenal (shelfmarks Fol. J 179 and Fol. J 180]). Only at that point did Quesnel get hold of the book (Sancti Leonis Magni Papae primi Opera omnia, 2 vols. (Paris, 1675), ii. 789). When it was eventually condemned by the Roman Congregation of the Index, in 1706, it was under the 1674 title (J. M. de Bujanda (ed.), Index librorum prohibitorum 1600–1966 (Sherbrooke, 2002), 880–1). ²³⁴ Manuscript note in the Bodleian copy, shelfmark folio Delta 620, of Scrivener, Course of Divinity. ²³⁵ Scrivener, Apologia, 62 and 194. See also Course of Divinity, fo. a1v . ²³⁶ It is remarkable that, among his seven grounds for the authority of the Fathers (see above, 333), Scrivener did not mention either their position in the hierarchy of the Church or their subsequent approbation by the Church. Echoes of Thorndike’s views may be found in some sermons, e.g. in Clifford, Power of Kings Asserted, 3: ‘I shall cite

366

The Case for Tradition

authority supposed a long and exhausting discussion on the Church, which was most unlikely to convince the adversaries of the Church of England—this was the very discussion that Du Perron had wanted to avoid when he had turned the Fathers into witnesses of matter of fact. To historicize tradition still appeared the only way to use the Fathers with any cogency in religious controversies.

3. HISTORICAL TRADITION: THE SOLUTION OF HENRY DODWELL It was left to Henry Dodwell, an Anglo-Irish scholar who settled permanently in England in 1674, to develop the most elaborate theory of the authority of antiquity on historical lines. His system was even more idiosyncratic than Thorndike’s and, when it became fully known, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, most members of the Church of England—whether of the establishment or of the little Nonjuring body to which he adhered from 1691 to 1710—refused to follow him. That his ideas could have been propounded at all, and did not prevent him from being highly regarded in Restoration Oxford, bore witness to the time.²³⁷ Looking back on Dodwell’s career, Edmund Calamy thought that his views would ‘hardly have been encouraged, or so much as borne with, in any Reformed Church, except our own’. Calamy commented tersely: ‘But the time has been when any thing would pass, that was levelled at the Dissenters.’²³⁸ The importance of antiquity for Dodwell was based on a fully articulated theory of revelation, which, while still in residence at Trinity College Dublin, he expounded in his very first work, the prolegomena to his former tutor John Stearne’s posthumous De obstinatione.²³⁹ These prolegomena, the Councils, and Fathers, as being the surest Witnesses in this Particular: and having been approved by the Universal Church of Christ, no good Man can have the latest occasion to doubt of their Fidelity.’ ²³⁷ For an overview, see T. Harmsen, ODNB, xvi. 445–8; Quantin, ‘Anglican Scholarship gone Mad?’ The recent studies by C. D. A. Leighton, ‘The Religion of the Non-Jurors and the Early British Enlightenment: A Study of Henry Dodwell’, History of European Ideas, 28 (2002), 247–62, and ‘Anciennet´e among the Non-Jurors: A Study of Henry Dodwell’, ibid. 31 (2005), 1–16, say hardly anything of what Dodwell was actually doing. ²³⁸ Edmund Calamy, An Historical Account of my own life, with some Reflections on the times I have lived in (1671–1731), 2 vols. (London, 1829), i. 284–5 (on Dodwell’s Separation of Churches). ²³⁹ On John Stearne, who had been Professor of Medicine at Trinity and the founder of the Dublin College of Physicians, see T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland (Oxford, 1991), iii. 450–1.

The Case for Tradition

367

which were a book in themselves, may be regarded as the foundation of all Dodwell’s subsequent writings. He certainly referred to them as such throughout his career.²⁴⁰ The central structure of his thought was the opposition between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Ordinary means Dodwell defined as ‘those that are directly and simply ordained to their end, without taking any account of particular circumstances’; extraordinary means as ‘those that, only when particular circumstances arise, make up for the lack of the ordinary means, which cannot otherwise be procured’. Means which were not tied to particular circumstances were necessarily less fallible, ‘since it is inconsistent with divine providence that in frequently recurring circumstances, the use of the ordinary means should cease’.²⁴¹ For Dodwell, revelation was economical. There was no use for it when the truths to be believed could equally well be known by natural reason²⁴² (thus, in natural theology, reason was the ordinary means, revelation the extraordinary, as it could not be attested without miracles, that is without a disruption of the ordinary course of providence, and God did not indulge in useless miracles²⁴³). Moreover, even in its proper sphere, revelation was adapted to the sense of the age in which it was first given: ‘the primary intention of the Holy Spirit was that Scripture should be understood by those to whom it was first delivered’,²⁴⁴ and through whom the right interpretation would then be transmitted to all subsequent ages. No new revelation was to be expected now and one had only ordinary means to ascertain the right sense of Scripture. Those are ‘the same means that we use to understand in an ordinary way any human writing, that is the meaning of words … such as may be presumed most appropriate to the mind of the writers’. This meaning could only be determined by referring to surviving ²⁴⁰ Dodwell, Separation of Churches, p. xx; A Preliminary Defence of the Epistolary Discourse, concerning the Distinction between Soul and Spirit (London, 1707), part I, 36. ²⁴¹ Henry Dodwell, ‘Prolegomena Apologetica, In quibus Usus Philosophicorum, Stoicorum praecipue, dogmatum in Theologia asseritur; firmissima Traditionis Ecclesiasticae in dogmatibus fidei adversus modernos Socinianos, aliosque fundamenta stabiliuntur; Stoica de Obstinatione sententia a Novatianismi et Pelagianismi suspicione uindicatur; quid senserint etiam Stoici de doloris simulatione, explicatur’, prefixed to John Stearne, De Obstinatione. Opus Posthumum, Pietatem Christiano-Stoicam, Scholastico more, suadens (Dublin, 1672), 66–7: ‘Media enim ordinaria sunt quae per se et simpliciter ordinantur ad finem, nulla particularium circumstantium habita ratione; extraordinaria autem non, nisi particularibus circumstantiis ingruentibus, defectum supplent mediorum ordinarium, quae aliter haberi non possunt....neque enim Diuinae Prouidentiae congruum est ut in circumstantiis saepe occurrentibus cesset usus mediorum ordinariorum.’ ²⁴² Ibid. 21. ²⁴³ Ibid. 65–72. ²⁴⁴ Ibid. 85: ‘Primariam Spiritus Sancti intentionem fuisse ut intelligeretur Scriptura ab iis quibus primum est tradita.’

368

The Case for Tradition

contemporary texts.²⁴⁵ Dodwell readily acknowledged that many ancient writers had been lost and that, at such a distance from the apostolic age, Scripture had become very difficult to understand. Indeed (in marked contrast to Thorndike or Stillingfleet), he did not shrink from admitting that the certainty of revelation diminished the further time advanced from the apostolic age. The original recipients of revelation believed it on the strength of pure divine authority, the auditors of the Apostles could rely on the authority of inspired men, the following age on ‘an authority which, though purely human, was the highest of all human authorities’, that of men who were no longer inspired, but who had known the Apostles and whose eminent sanctity put them above all suspicions. More modern people had only the testimony of men devoid of any special qualifications.²⁴⁶ The moral certainty afforded by such a testimony was however (and always would be) sufficient for practice according to the ordinary rules of human prudence.²⁴⁷ Should the Christians of the first ages have misunderstood Scripture, it would imply that it was not clear even then, and one could not expect to do better now. This Dodwell considered a full confutation of the Socinians’ (or indeed of anyone’s) pretensions to explain Scripture without recourse to antiquity.²⁴⁸ In his Separation of Churches, a massive work against Protestant Nonconformists which was ready for the press in 1678, he charged them with using ‘such means of understanding the Scripture, as must necessarily leave them ignorant of many things’ intended by the Holy Ghost: They are for expounding the Scriptures only by themselves, especially in matters doctrinal; without allusion to the sense of those times in terms of Art which were plainly suited to the capacities of them who used those terms; without allusion to the Notions and Doctrines of those times, which were either confirmed or confuted by the Sacred Writers, without allusion to the whole Systemes of Principles then mainteined, though they are very forward to expound difficult obscure passages by their modern Systemes … without allusion to the Systemes of the immediate succeeding Ages of the Church, who certainly took up their Systeme from what ²⁴⁵ Dodwell, ‘Prolegomera’ to Stearne, 86–7: ‘media ordinaria intelligendarum Scripturarum eadem esse quibus utimur in aliis scriptis humanis ordinario modo intelligendis; nempe uocum significationem … , qualem ad mentem scriptorum optime congruere praesumi possit.’ ²⁴⁶ Ibid. 26–7. ²⁴⁷ See ibid. 26–8 note z. Dodwell’s insistence on this point clearly differentiates his system from the later mathematical speculations of John Craig, for whom Christianity would cease at one point to be probable: see John Craig, Rules of historical evidence, from Joannis Craig Theologiae Christianae principia mathematica (Londinium … 1699) ( The Hague, 1964; History and Theory 4), esp. 26; C. Borghero, La certezza e la storia: Cartesianesimo, pirronismo e conoscenza storica (Milan, 1983), 195–8. ²⁴⁸ Dodwell, ‘Prolegomena’ to Stearne, 87–8.

The Case for Tradition

369

they understood of the Apostles minds from their Writings, and Preachings, and Conversations, to whose capacities the Sacred Writings themselves were more immediately accommodated than they were to ours.²⁴⁹

Since Scripture was meant to be understood by the primitive Christians, Providence made sure that they should enjoy every possible means, both ordinary and extraordinary, to discern its true meaning. The theme recurred constantly in Dodwell’s writings but received its fullest treatment in his Dissertationes in Irenaeum, a work which had been meant to accompany his planned edition of that Father and which was eventually published by itself in the summer of 1689, ‘at the Theatre’, with the Vice Chancellor’s imprimatur.²⁵⁰ Dodwell’s public stance against the oaths to William and Mary, and his ostentatious refusal to kneel at ‘the immoral prayers’ for the new sovereigns, had already pushed him to the margins of the established Church, but he still considered himself a member of it. He did not join the separate communion of the Nonjuring bishops until June 1691.²⁵¹ Dodwell’s first dissertation on Irenaeus was devoted to the ordinary means that enabled the Fathers of the second century—Irenaeus and his contemporaries—to know apostolic traditions. Dodwell’s main source here was Eusebius of Caesarea who, in the early years of the fourth century, had attempted to reconstruct ‘the successions of the apostles’ and the transmission of doctrine ‘in each generation’.²⁵² Eusebius quoted in his Ecclesiastical history many relevant passages from works by secondcentury writers, many of which had since been lost (such as Hegesippus’ Memoirs and Irenaeus’ letter against the heretic Florinus). Dodwell inferred from Eusebius that the pivotal point in the history of tradition was the reign of Trajan. It marked the end of the generation of the αὐτόπται, ‘eyewitnesses’, those who had seen Christ, whom Dodwell also called ‘the primary disciples’.²⁵³ Some longaeuissimi among them had been kept alive until then by providence,²⁵⁴ but the very last one must have been Simeon, ²⁴⁹ Dodwell, Separation of Churches, p. xix. ²⁵⁰ The imprimatur is dated 26 June. The book was advertised in Michaelmas Term 1689 (TC, ii. 288). Dodwell left Oxford in August (see next note) and one may plausibly surmise that he stayed until his book came out. ²⁵¹ See Hickes to Charlett, 29 April 1689, Bodl., MS Ballard 12, fo. 45r – v ; Wood, Life and Times, iii. 309, August 1689 (‘Mr. Henry Dodwell, much concern’d against those that take oaths; makes it his discourse so much in coffey houses in Oxford against them, that if he had not gon away in August Dr. Ironside the vice-chancellor would have talked with him about his freeness of speech and have desired him to absent himself from Oxon.’); below, n. 373. ²⁵² Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, ‘Dissertatio prima. Qua fide dignus in Apostolicarum Traditionum memoria conseruanda Irenaeus, et coaeui Irenaeo Secundi Seculi Patres, quoad Media cognoscendi traditiones Ordinaria’, ibid. 17. ²⁵³ Ibid. 17–19. ²⁵⁴ Ibid. 37.

370

The Case for Tradition

Bishop of Jerusalem, who, according to Hegesippus, reached the age of 120 and whose martyrdom Dodwell dated to 116.²⁵⁵ The next generation was that of their disciples, the αὐτοπτων ˜ μαθηταί or ‘hearers of the Apostles’, like Polycarp and Papias, who had not heard Christ himself and who were ‘the first succession’.²⁵⁶ Heretics began at that juncture to separate overtly from the Church (as attested by the famous text of Hegesippus). They circulated traditions under the Apostles’ names, causing the Church to investigate which traditions were genuinely apostolical.²⁵⁷ This inquiry took place under Trajan and Hadrian. Now the question could only be determined by the faithful testimony of the men of the first succession about the teaching that they had received. They passed this on in their turn to the generation of Irenaeus, ‘the second succession’, who were too late to know or hear any of the Apostles or primary disciples themselves.²⁵⁸ The case of Irenaeus himself was dubious, since it might be that he was old enough to belong to the ‘first succession’, but he never claimed in his extant writings to have personally heard any of the eyewitnesses.²⁵⁹ Rather, in his letter against the heretic Florinus, he appealed to his memory of Polycarp, whom he had heard as a child relate what he had heard himself from John and other ‘eyewitnesses’.²⁶⁰ Such ‘witnesses of apostolic tradition’ were those whom Irenaeus meant by presbyteri, a name which did not denote office (some were in fact bishops) but old age.²⁶¹ Ecclesiastical tradition, like any traditional knowledge, was thus conveyed by the succession of generations,²⁶² in a purely natural, rather than hierarchical, process (‘the testimony of an old priest should be more considered here ²⁵⁵ Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 18 and 37–8 and see the chronology at the end of the book, sig. 3T2r . On the death of Simeon, see Hegesippus in Eusebius, HE, 3. 32. 3 (SC 31, 143). ²⁵⁶ Ibid. 10–11 and 45 from Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 3. 37. 1 (SC 31, 151), on Quadratus and others τὴν πρώτην τάξιν τ˜ης των ˜ ἀποστόλων ἐπέχοντες διαδοχη˜ ς. ²⁵⁷ Ibid. 19–20, from Hegesippus as quoted by Eusebius, HE, 3. 32. 7–8 (SC 31, 144–5). ²⁵⁸ Ibid. 46. Cf. 50 and 60. ²⁵⁹ Dodwell’s hesitation was due to Eusebius’ statement, HE, 5. 20, 1 (SC 41, 60) that Irenaeus, in his lost treatise On the Ogdoad, ἐπισημαίνεται τὴν πρώτην των ˜ ἀποστόλων κατειληφέναι ἑαυτὸν διαδοχήν. For discussions of that expression, see Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 12, 42, 47. ²⁶⁰ Ibid. 5. Irenaeus’ letter is lost but the relevant passage has been preserved by Eusebius, HE, 5. 20. 5–7 (SC 41, 62). ²⁶¹ Ibid. 12, commenting on Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 4. 27. 1 [SC 100, 728] (‘quemadmodum audiui a quodam presbytero, qui audierat ab his qui Apostolos uiderant, et ab his qui didicerant’) and 5. 33. 3 [SC 153, 414] (‘quemadmodum Presbyteri meminerunt, qui Iohannem discipulum Domini uiderunt’). Dodwell referred for that interpretation to Pearson, Vindiciae Ignatianae, part 2, 167. ²⁶² Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 221: ‘generationes, quae quidem ad Traditionis conseruandae causam imprimis faciebant.’

The Case for Tradition

371

than that of a younger man, though a bishop’).²⁶³ Longevity was crucial: it was an effect of providence, ‘when the dispute against heretics concerned the genuine tradition of the Church, that the Church should never have lacked extremely old, and therefore utterly trustworthy, witnesses’.²⁶⁴ Though Dodwell did not make the point explicitly, this clearly echoed the standard apologetic argument from the long lives of the Old Testament patriarchs.²⁶⁵ This notion of an original truth conveyed by the memory of old men was not without political implications. The interest of High Churchmen in the patriarchal scheme in those years is well known. At the end of his life, Dodwell engaged in vast speculations on the origins of mankind in which he stressed the politico-religious authority of fathers of families: ‘the Laws of Nature and nations’ had been delivered by God to the patriarchs, ‘long before the invention of letters’, and transmitted in families by tradition.²⁶⁶ Dodwell’s considerable work on early Christian chronology was meant to buttress his scheme of oral tradition. He thus attempted to show that Irenaeus had been born as early as 97, two decades earlier than was usually believed.²⁶⁷ Johann Ernst Grabe, who eventually brought out the Oxford ²⁶³ Ibid. 461–2: ‘Norant illi [Veteres] Traditiones etiam Ecclesiasticas eodem modo ad posteros deducendas, quo et aliae quaeque deduci solerent maiorum Traditiones, Seniorum nempe Testimoniis. Norant itaque, in hac Argumentandi methodo, plus esse tribuendum testimonio senioris Presbyteri quam iunioris etiam Episcopi.’ For the same reasoning in the case of civil traditions, see [Henry Dodwell], Some Considerations of Present Concernment; how far the Romanists may be trusted by Princes of another Perswasion; Relating to the Design of the Controversial Letters, and some other Discourses lately published by that Party of them, who have concerned themselves in this Subject (London, 1675), 112–13, where he charges Thomas Becket with neglecting the testimonies of ‘the Old men’ of England in his conflict with King Henry II. ²⁶⁴ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 281: ‘Singulari enim Dei Prouidentia effectum est ut cum esset, aduersus Haereticos, de illibata Ecclesiae Traditione disputandum, ne deessent unquam Ecclesiae testes admodum longaeui, omnique adeo fide dignissimi.’ ²⁶⁵ The argument was common to Protestants and Catholics. See e.g. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae, or A Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith, as to the Truth and Divine Authority of the Scriptures, and the matters therein contained (5th edn., London, 1680; 1st edn. 1662), book 2, chapter 2, 132–3; Blaise Pascal, Pens´ees de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets qui ont est´e trouv´ees apr`es sa mort parmy ses papiers (2nd edn., Paris, 1670), 87–9 [= fragments Lafuma 290, 292, 296; Sellier 322, 324, 327]. On Stillingfleet as an apologist, see S. Hutton, ‘Science, Philosophy, and Atheism: Edward Stillingfleet’s Defence of Religion’, in R. H. Popkin and A. Vanderjagt (eds.), Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, 1993), 102–20. ²⁶⁶ See Henry Dodwell, ‘A Discourse concerning the Obligation to Marry within the True Communion’, in Charles Leslie, Concerning Marriages in Different Communions: In a Sermon at Chester (London, 1702), sep. pagination, 10–26, 139; Dodwell to John Falconar, 27 February 1711, MS St Edmund Hall 14, pp. 48–9; Francis Brokesby, The Life of Mr Henry Dodwell; with an Account of his Works, and an Abridgment of them that are Published, and of several of his Manuscripts (London, 1715), 499–501. ²⁶⁷ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, ‘Dissertatio tertia. Quo tempore natus, quo item mortuus, fuerit Irenaeus’, 219–85, and ‘Synopsis Chronologica’, sig. 3T1v . There

372

The Case for Tradition

edition of Irenaeus in 1702, refused to follow Dodwell on this point, since this would imply that Irenaeus was nearly 90 and ‘already decrepit’ when he wrote his last works, such as his treatise On the ogdoad.²⁶⁸ In Dodwell’s eyes, however, it was precisely this old age that conferred on Irenaeus an exceptional authority, when he ‘thus opposed in his old age his own testimony concerning the Polycarpian traditions to the testimony of old Florinus’.²⁶⁹ A further generation later, Clement of Alexandria took pains to gather oral traditions from the attestations of old men who had heard the Apostles: Dodwell recalculated his dates to make him live at as early a date as possible.²⁷⁰ Doctrine had been thus conveyed orally until the time of the Emperor Decius, that is until the middle of the third century.²⁷¹ What then of the instances of false traditions objected by ‘the learned adversaries of the Fathers’ (this must be an allusion to Daill´e)?²⁷² Dodwell’s is no evidence for Irenaeus’ date of birth apart from the few indications scattered in his writings. Halloix, Illustrium Ecclesiae Scriptorum qui secundo Christi saeculo floruerunt, uitae et documenta, 406 and 607–9, dated it to about 120. He was followed by Tillemont, Memoires, iii (1695), 79. Louis Ellies du Pin, Nouvelle Bibliotheque des Auteurs Ecclesiastiques, i (Paris, 1686), 190 and 201 note c, went as low as 140. ²⁶⁸ S. Irenaei Episcopi Lugdunensis Contra omnes Haereses libri Quinque. Textus Graeci partem haud exiguam restituit; Latinam Versionem antiquissimam e quatuor MSS Codicibus emendauit; Fragmenta aliorum Tractatuum deperditorum subiunxit; Omnia Notis Variorum, et suis illustrauit Joannes Ernestus Grabe (Oxford, 1702), p. xiii: ‘Quis autem illum adeo senem demum scribendo manum admouisse, et jam decrepitum tot tantosque libros elaborasse, facile sibi persuaserit?’ ²⁶⁹ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 434. Both Dodwell’s chronology and his conclusion were followed by John Sage, A Vindication of a discourse entituled the Principles of the Cyprianic Age, with regard to Episcopal Power and Jurisdiction (London, 1701), 21–2, which is much indebted to the Dissertationes in Irenaeum (see also the praise of Dodwell, 173). Sage was a Scottish Nonjuring bishop; on his relations with Dodwell, see [John Gillan], The Life of the Reverend and Learned Mr. John Sage (London, 1714), 32–3. Milton, Of prelatical episcopacy, 639–40, had insisted by contrast that Irenaeus was only ‘a Boy’ when he had met Polycarp. ²⁷⁰ Henry Dodwell, ‘Dissertatio. De uero huius Epistolae, quae Barnabam Auctorem praefert, Auctore Barnaba. Ad Cl. Virum Joannem Millium S. Th. Prof. Aulae Sanct-Edmondianae Principalem’ [1691], Bodl., MS St Edmund Hall 32, p. 2, alluding to Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1. 1. 11. 1–3 (GCS 52, 8–9 [4th edn.]). Cf. Andreas Adam Hochstetter’s account of a conversation with Dodwell in 1691, Stuttgart, W¨urttembergische Landesbibliothek, MS Cod. hist. 8◦ 8 (journal of Hochstetter’s literary journey in England), fo. 207v : ‘De Clemente Alexandrino dicebat, sibi uerisimillimum uideri, quod iam Anno post Natum Christum 130 uixerit. Illum omnium longe doctissimum fuisse, et in orales traditiones quam studiosissime inquisiuisse.’ I should like to thank Scott Mandelbrote for telling me about Hochstetter’s diary and his references to Dodwell. ²⁷¹ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 285. ²⁷² Ibid. 60: ‘Doctissimi alioqui Patrum aduersarii’. Dodwell mentioned only once Daill´e by name (significantly together with the two French chief champions of presbytery), in his preface, sig. a4r : ‘Proinde dicimus Interpretes Apostolorum magis idoneos habendos esse proximae ab Apostolis memoriae Patres quam Dallaeos, quam Salmasios, quam Blondellos, quam alios quoscunque hodiernorum saeculorum etiam literatissimos.’

The Case for Tradition

373

characteristic solution was to develop even further the classic distinction between doctors and witnesses. There were two categories of propositions delivered by the Fathers. ‘Some represent past actions nakedly and historically, without any admixture of reasoning; some represent certain consequences that the ancients thought could be inferred by firm reasonings from the actions of the Apostles.’²⁷³ Propositions of the first kind, like ‘all histories’, are to be believed or rejected on purely external criteria, that is according to the credit of their witnesses. Verisimilitude should not play any part when it comes to ‘historical faith’. In weighing testimonies ‘age is altogether the only point to consider’.²⁷⁴ Irenaeus’ contemporaries could not be mistaken on questions of pure fact. They could however draw false inferences,²⁷⁵ and this is what happened in the famous instance of Christ’s age. There never was any tradition on the exact number of years that Christ lived. There was the fact and two inferences.²⁷⁶ The fact witnessed by the Apostles was that Christ looked as if he was no longer young. Indeed, his severity and the austerity of his life could easily make him appear older than he was, as is confirmed by the Jews’ telling him that he was not yet 50 (John 8: 57). Irenaeus then inferred from what ‘his old men’ had told him that Christ must have been more than 40, against the Gnostics’ claim that Christ had died at 30.²⁷⁷ Dodwell calculated that the real age must have been 38. ‘There is thus no error at all in fact and only a very slight one in reasoning.’²⁷⁸ As for Irenaeus’ description of the millennium, the old men had merely ascribed to John expressions which could be interpreted in that sense: this was the fact. ‘Whether these old men have rightly caught the meaning of St John, this is not a question of fact, but of reasoning.’²⁷⁹ This solution had some success among orthodox apologists,²⁸⁰ though their adversaries persisted in using the passage on Christ’s age as a proof that ²⁷³ Ibid. 60: ‘Sunt enim in duplici discrimine Propositiones quas Patrum fide credendas accipimus. Aliae res gestas nude et Historice, nec ullis ratiociniis admixtas repraesentant; Aliae sequelas quasdam quas crediderint Veteres e rebus gestis Apostolorum colligi posse firmis ratiociniis.’ The point was already made by Dodwell in his Two short Discourses against the Romanists (London, 1676), ‘A Preface concernig the Usefulness of the following Hypothesis’, sig. A8r – v . ²⁷⁴ Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 61: ‘Est enim aetas in id genus Testimoniis uel unice spectanda.’ ²⁷⁵ Ibid. 79–80. ²⁷⁶ Ibid. 80–2. On Irenaeus’ text, see above, 57 and 243. ²⁷⁷ Ibid. 82–4. ²⁷⁸ Ibid. 84: ‘Est itaque error in Facto omnino nullus, in Ratiocinio leuissimus.’ ²⁷⁹ Ibid.: ‘Quod uero ad Factum in hac Traditione attinet, id nulla poterit certa ratione refelli. Rectene S. Ioannis sententiam illi Seniores assecuti sint; ea uero Quaestio non ad Factum, sed ad Ratiocinium, attinet.’ ²⁸⁰ See Daniel Waterland, The Importance of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity asserted, in Reply to some late Pamphlets (London, 1734), 435–6 note i; Waterland’s manuscript notes in his copy of Whitby, De Scripturarum Interpretatione [Bodl., 8◦ Rawl. 375], p. lxx.

374

The Case for Tradition

Irenaeus had ‘wholly deviated from the truth’ both in reporting apostolic tradition and in interpreting Scripture.²⁸¹ Dodwell insisted that he only claimed for the Fathers an authority ‘in historical questions’, which asked for no or very little reasoning.²⁸² He freely admitted that the Fathers had not been more learned or better thinkers than the moderns. On the contrary, the latter had a more solid way of arguing ‘than that loose, sophistical and declamatory method’ that the Fathers shared with all the writers of their time.²⁸³ Free-thinkers, for whom the ‘foolish reasonings’ of the Fathers could not but discredit Christianity as a whole, later seized upon this confession by ‘one of their most zealous admirers’.²⁸⁴ But Dodwell saw nothing to be afraid of there. Since (as he had shown in his prolegomena to Stearne) the Christian revelation was meant to be understood by those early ages, the Holy Spirit had adapted it to their ways and more particularly to the ‘mystical way of arguing’ then in fashion. Precarious as this might be in itself, it expressed the sense of the Holy Spirit,²⁸⁵ not only in the New Testament but also in the Old. Since the latter was ultimately meant for Christians, ‘mystical reasonings’ were legitimate to interpret it.²⁸⁶ The ordinary passage of tradition by human agency was guaranteed at the same time by the extraordinary assistance of the Holy Spirit. Dodwell’s second dissertation on Irenaeus, which built on an earlier essay in his 1682 Dissertationes cyprianicae,²⁸⁷ was an unsurpassed history of charisms and miraculous gifts in the Christian Church, as well as the ultimate expression of the doctrine that miracles had ended. It meant to inculcate yet again the unique status, and consequent authority, of the first centuries. The Fathers enjoyed not only superior ‘human means’ to understand Scripture but also ‘divine means’, which ought to rank higher and of which the moderns (and first of all ‘the Socinians, the most ²⁸¹ See Whitby, De Scripturarum Interpretatione, 220; Middleton, Free Inquiry, 46. ²⁸² Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, sig. d2r . Cf. 4. ²⁸³ Ibid., sig. d1v : ‘pressiorem nostris et solidiorem Argumentandi methodum agnoscimus quam sit alia illa laxior et Sophistica, et declamatoria, quae, non apud Patres duntaxat, sed et alios eorundem temporum Scriptores, erat receptissima.’ ²⁸⁴ Middleton, Free Inquiry, 57–8. ²⁸⁵ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, sig. d2v –d3r : ‘Genus tamen hoc [Mysticum], Argumentandi uniuersum, utcunque minus alioqui seuerum, in his tamen causis, solidum sit oportet, et ad Spiritus Sancti mentem accommodatissimum.’ ²⁸⁶ Ibid., sig. d3r : ‘Et cum Veteris quoque Testamenti Scripturas in eorum gratiam scriptas testetur Apostolus, qui Saeculo uixerint Apostolico [see Romans 4: 23–4]; proinde et in earum Interpretatione locum habeant oportet Mystica illa ratiocinia.’ ²⁸⁷ Henry Dodwell, Dissertationes Cyprianicae [Oxford, 1682], ‘Dissertatio Cyprianica IV. Ad Epistolam VIII. De uisionibus’, 10–18. The work was printed in folio in order to be bound with Fell’s edition and subsequently reprinted in octavo (Oxford, 1684).

The Case for Tradition

375

acute of innovators’) were utterly destitute.²⁸⁸ Dodwell put special stress on the testimony of Irenaeus, who attested that Christian Churches in his time were enjoying all the miraculous powers of the apostolic age, including the supreme one of raising the dead.²⁸⁹ This charism was the first to be lost, within the forty years that followed Irenaeus.²⁹⁰ Other charisms, especially the power of exorcizing devils, survived longer, but all had disappeared in the course of the fourth century, as Chrysostom testified on many occasions. A number of true miracles had still been performed at this late date, but it was very difficult to distinguish them from false ones. Fourth-century writers had been ‘much addicted to fables’.²⁹¹ After the Empire had become Christian under Constantine, it became advantageous to claim to work miracles. Moreover, pre-Constantinian miracles were only performed in case of necessity, whereas more recent ones had allegedly been worked for the slightest reasons.²⁹² In Europe at least (it might be different in regions where the gospel was now preached for the first time) miracles had been proper to the first centuries and had now ceased as superfluous.²⁹³ As Dodwell put it in a later work, in ‘that age of Extraordinaries … things were to be prov’d which were afterwards to be believ’d on the Credit of the Proofs then given in that first Age’.²⁹⁴ Such a stress on the divine assistance enjoyed by the Fathers involved the obvious risk of seeming to put them on a par with the Apostles. Dodwell ²⁸⁸ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, sig. a4r – v : ‘Media enim illa Extraordinaria Ordinariis quibusuis, quae sola uendicare possunt Doctores hodierni, sola certa adhibent Nouaturientium acutissimi Sociniani, nemo tamen sanus dubitat esse anteponenda.’ ²⁸⁹ Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 2. 31. 2 (SC 294, 328–9); 2. 32. 4 (SC 294, 340–2); 5. 6. 1 (SC 153, 74). All three texts are quoted in the original Greek by Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 5. 7 (SC 41, 33–4). ²⁹⁰ For Dodwell’s elaborate reasoning to prove this, see Quantin, ‘Anglican Scholarship gone Mad?’, 344. ²⁹¹ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 195, instancing no lesser authors than Athanasius in his Life of Antony, Jerome in his Life of Paul the Hermit, Palladius in his Historia lausiaca, Sulpicius Severus in his Dialogues. ²⁹² Ibid. 208–11. ²⁹³ Ibid. 116–17: ‘ut enim Deus non solet Ecclesiae suae deesse in necessariis, sic nec redundare in superfluis.’ According to Hochstetter’s account, Dodwell had told him in Oxford that Native Americans newly converted in Virginia had power to exorcize devils (Andreae Adami Hochstetteri Oratio de utilitate peregrinationis Anglicanae, ad d. XI Sextil. M DC XC VII recitata Tubingae, quum Eloquentiae et Poeseos Professionem Inclyta in Eberhardina auspicaretur ( T¨ubingen, n.d.), 15–16). ²⁹⁴ Henry Dodwell, Occasional Communion Fundamentally Destructive of the Discipline of the Primitive Catholick Church, and Contrary to the Doctrine of the Latest Scriptures, concerning Church-Communion (London, 1705), 139. Cf. 121: ‘that Age of the more Ordinary use of Extraordinaries’.

376

The Case for Tradition

explained his meaning in his preface, at the request of a friend.²⁹⁵ The point was not to compare the Fathers of the second and third centuries with the Apostles, but to contrast the Fathers and modern interpreters of the apostolic writings.²⁹⁶ It was presbyterians who opposed the Fathers to the Apostles, thereby doing a major disservice to the latter. Nothing survived from the Apostles apart from their writings, and those writings could only be distinguished from apocryphal ones by the testimony of the second and third centuries.²⁹⁷ All the other criteria that were alleged ‘savour of blatant enthusiasm’.²⁹⁸ The claim that the Canon of Scripture was founded on tradition had of course become commonplace, but there had been little attempt to investigate how the Canon had been formed. In order to prove that ‘the books of the Old and New Testament were never meant by God to be so full and ample Registers of all facts or stories, as that in them all should be recorded’, Hammond had instanced the agrapha preserved in apocryphal Gospels.²⁹⁹ But the line of investigation he opened was not immediately taken up. Stillingfleet had come close in 1665 to suggesting that ‘canonization’ had been a historical process: that is the true reason, why the Books of the New Testament were gradually received into the Canon, and some a great while after others … because at first, the Copyes being not so publickly dispersed, there was not that occasion ministred to the Church for examination of them; upon which, when by degrees they came to be more publick, it caused scruples in many concerning them, because they appeared no sooner: especially if any passages in them seemed to gratifie any of the Sects, then appearing; as the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Novatians; and the Apocalypse, the Millenary’s: But when upon a through search and examination of all circumstances, it did appear that these Copyes were authentical, and did originaly proceed from Divine Persons, then they came to be admitted and owned for such by the Universal Church, which we call being admitted into the Canon of the Scripture.³⁰⁰ ²⁹⁵ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, sig. a3v : ‘metuebat Amicus, ne parem Ecclesiarum illarum [Primaeuarum] fidem atque Apostolorum astruere uideremur, paremque adeo illarum Scriptis atque Apostolicis Auctoritatem.’ ²⁹⁷ Ibid., sig. a4v . ²⁹⁶ Ibid., sigs. a3v –a4r . ²⁹⁸ Ibid. 62: ‘Dico praeterea, ut alia solida ratio nulla est cur Canoni assentiamur, praeter Traditionem; sic Traditionem illam, qua N.T. Scripturis credimus, non esse utique firmiorem quam sit illa nostri Irenaei. Mitto hic rationes alias ab aliis assignatas quae manifestum sapiunt Enthusiasmum.’ ²⁹⁹ Hammond, Letter of resolution, 16, quoting ‘the Nazaren Gospel’ (actually the Gospel according to the Hebrews): ‘Nunquam laeti sitis, nisi cum fratres in charitate uideritis.’ The source is Jerome, Commentarius in Epistolam ad Ephesios, on Eph. 5: 4 (PL 26, 520). See J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1993), 9. ³⁰⁰ Stillingfleet, Rational Account, 172–3 (without any reference). On the Apocalypse and its use by millenarian heretics, see Eusebius, HE, 7. 24. 1–2 (SC 41, 201) and 25. 2–3 (SC 41, 204–5). Eusebius, HE, 3. 3. 5 (SC 31, 99) and 6. 20. 3 (SC 41, 120), mentions that the Epistle to the Hebrews was rejected by some of his contemporaries,

The Case for Tradition

377

But Stillingfleet only spoke of books that had been controverted in the first centuries (as was well known from Eusebius) and his point was to deny that the Canon had been ‘judicially and authoritatively’ determined by the Church.³⁰¹ Apart from those cases (which are ‘very few’), all the books of Scripture ‘have been unanimously received for theirs [the writers to whom they are ascribed] from the very time of their being first written’.³⁰² In 1688, Stillingfleet accused Sergeant, who made the certainty of the Scriptures depend on continuous oral tradition, of exposing them ‘to the Scorn and Contempt of Atheists and Infidels’.³⁰³ ‘One would think by his Objections, J.S. were preparing Matter for the Critical History of the New Testament, he seems so concern to lessen the Authority of it.’³⁰⁴ The Canon of the New Testament, Stillingfleet argued, was founded on the testimony of all Christian Churches from the beginning. ‘The Books were not kept up at first in a few hands, but dispersed abroad in multitude of Copies, and received with mighty Veneration … They were read both in Publick and in Private, they heard them in their Assemblies, and they made them their constant Imployment at home; they were their Rule of Life, as well as of Faith.’³⁰⁵ Dodwell’s very learned, and very daring, sketch subverted this reassuring picture. The Canon, he argued, had only been officially settled at the time of Trajan, or perhaps even of Hadrian. Until then there had been no clear-cut distinction between our present canonical Gospels and apocryphal ones.³⁰⁶ The Canon, exactly like the traditions of the first succession collected by Irenaeus, relied therefore on the credit of witnesses at a considerable distance from original events. There was no other foundation for ‘all the authority especially in the Church of Rome; according to Philastrius, Diuersarum haereseon liber, 89. 3 (CC 9, 256), one reason was that the epistle seemed to favour the Novatians on the question of penance. ³⁰¹ Stillingfleet, Rational Account, 172. ³⁰² Ibid. 204. ³⁰³ Stillingfleet, Nature and Grounds of the Certainty of Faith, 87. ³⁰⁴ Ibid. 92. The allusion is to Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), which had been translated into English in 1682. Simon’s subsequent Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament appeared in 1689 and was translated into English in the same year. On the impact of Simon’s work in England, see L. I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden: Studies in Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Thought (4th edn., Ann Arbor, 1966), 98–106 and 156–9; Carroll, Stillingfleet, 48; J. A. I. Champion, ‘ ‘‘Acceptable to inquisitive men’’: Some Simonian Contexts for Newton’s Biblical Criticism, 1680–1692’, in J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin (eds.), Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence (Dordrecht, 1999), 77–96. ³⁰⁵ Stillingfleet, Nature and Grounds of the Certainty of Faith, 94. ³⁰⁶ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 67–77. For details of Dodwell’s arguments, see J.-L. Quantin, ‘Apocryphorum nimis studiosi? Dodwell, Mill, Grabe et le probl`eme du canon n´eo-testamentaire au tournant du XVIIe et du XVIIIe si`ecle’, in S. C. Mimouni (ed.), Apocryphit´e: histoire d’un concept transversal aux Religions du Livre. En hommage a` Pierre Geoltrain ( Turnhout, 2002), 285–306.

378

The Case for Tradition

that the genuine writings of the Apostles subsequently enjoyed, and are still enjoying, in the Catholic Church’. Testimonies were no stronger in this case and were certainly liable to similar difficulties.³⁰⁷ For at least a century after the determination of the Canon, tradition was even more reliable than Scripture, as Tertullian argued in his Prescriptions. ‘It was indeed much more difficult for the Churches planted by the Apostles to agree in error, than for a pseudepigraph to appear under the name of the Apostles and to gain credit.’³⁰⁸ Dodwell also argued that one should allow for various degrees of prophecy: the Fathers of the second century had such a gift but not in as high a degree as the Apostles.³⁰⁹ There was a similar hierarchy to miracles, at least with regard to their certainty.³¹⁰ But anyway ‘I do not see any inconvenience or danger if we give the same credit to the primitive Church that we would have been ready to give to each individual apostle’, as distinguished, that is, from the apostolical college as a whole.³¹¹ There was still a difference in subjective certainty: Even allowing therefore that the revelations of the Apostles and those of the primitive Church should be equal in other respects, we have not today as certain arguments available to prove what God revealed to the primitive Church, as we have to prove what God revealed to the Apostles. For the writings that we own for canonical are those of the Apostles themselves. Of the Church we have no public writings for the centuries we are considering [i.e. before the first ecumenical councils], but only those of private individuals.... Therefore, granting that those primitive Churches were otherwise equal to the Apostles, it is for that reason more convincing to argue from the Scriptures than from the Fathers of the primitive Church.³¹²

The comparison here was no longer between Scripture and unwritten tradition but between two sets of writings, those of the Apostles and those of the ante-Nicene Fathers. Oral transmission of doctrine had been part of ³⁰⁷ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 65–6. ³⁰⁸ Ibid. 281–2: ‘Longe enim erat difficilius ut in errore consentirent plantatae ab Apostolis Ecclesiae, quam ut irreperet Apostolorum nomine inscriptum Pseudepigraphum, fidemque obtineret.’ ³¹⁰ Ibid., sigs. b2r –b3v . ³⁰⁹ Ibid., sigs. b1r –b2r . ³¹¹ Ibid., sig. c1r : ‘Non sane uideo incommodum aliquod, aut periculum, si parem adhibeamus Ecclesiae Primitiuae fidem, quam etiam singulis adhibituri fueramus Apostolis.’ ³¹² Ibid., sig. d1r : ‘Sic itaque ut pares essent alioqui Primaeuae Ecclesiae Apostolorumque Reuelationes; nulla tamen suppetunt nobis tam certa Argumenta, quibus probemus quae Primaeuae Deus Ecclesiae reuelauerit, quam sint illa quibus probare possumus quae Deus reuelauerit Apostolis. Nempe Apostolorum ipsorum Scripta sunt, quae pro Canonicis agnoscimus. Ecclesiae Scripta nulla habemus publica, sed singularium duntaxat, priuatorumque, his nempe, quae tractamus, Saeculis, hominum.... Itaque ut caetera pares essent cum Apostolis Primaeuae illae Ecclesiae, hoc ipso certe firmior est Argumentatio illa a Scripturis, quam a Primaeuae Ecclesiae Patribus.’

The Case for Tradition

379

the age of extraordinaries and had ended with it. After the middle of the third century, the writings of the ancients were the only source for apostolic traditions.³¹³ Oral tradition became unreliable, as it usually is in normal contexts, and gave rise to many fables as soon as the fourth century.³¹⁴ There was not now any apostolic teaching extant that was not in written form. This was Dodwell’s first major difference with Roman Catholic doctrine. For Dodwell, moreover, apostolic traditions never amounted to a second source of revelation. They concerned the transmission, and then the interpretation, of Scripture. Already in Irenaeus’ time the controversy with heretics focused on the meaning of words. Both sides agreed that the words Aeons, Word, Life, Truth, and so on were to be found in St John’s writings; the question was whether St John had meant by them the same thing as Valentinus. Such a debate could best be settled by recourse to tradition.³¹⁵ Another aspect was the mystical exegesis of the Old Testament. It has been seen that Dodwell in the Dissertationes in Irenaeum explained this as a product of the culture of the time. Later in his career he made it a charism properly speaking. ‘By the gift of the Baptismal Spirit (especially by a χάρισμα of it, which usually accompany’d the Graces of it in those first and happiest Times)’, Christians had been made able to understand mystical senses of the Old Testament,³¹⁶ which could never be found ‘by bare Grammatical Sagacity’.³¹⁷ These interpretations had then been conveyed by the oral teaching of the ‘old men’ to the generation of Irenaeus: And if so, these Interpretations must have had more Authority than that of being meerly Interpretations. Like that of a Letter from the Author discovering his own ³¹³ Ibid. 285: ‘Nec inde legimus [quemquam] qui Apostolorum Traditiones non scriptas aliunde quam e Vetustiorum Scriptis in Testimonium adducat.’ ³¹⁴ See Dissertationes Cyprianicae, ‘Dissertatio IV’, 13, and ‘Dissertatio XI’, 73 (‘ex orali duntaxat traditione fabularum matre foecundissima’), on Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus. It is remarkable that Dodwell was here more overtly sceptical than Daill´e himself (see Aduersus Latinorum de cultus religiosi obiecto traditionem disputatio, qua demonstratur uetustissimis ad A.D. CCC Christianis ignotos et inusitatos fuisse eos Cultus, quos nunc in Romana Communione solent Eucharistiae, Sanctis, Reliquiis, Imaginibus et Crucibus deferre (Geneva, 1664), 109). For Dodwell’s suspicion against oral transmission in general, see De Veteribus Graecorum Romanorumque Cyclis obiterque de Cyclo Iudaeorum aetate Christi, Dissertationes decem, cum Tabulis necessariis. Inseruntur Tabulis Fragmenta Veterum inedita, ad rem spectantia Chronologicam (Oxford, 1701), 675–7, on the origins of Rome, and also Exercitationes duae: Prima, de Aetate Phalaridis; Secunda, de Aetate Pythagorae Philosophi (London, 1704), 1. ³¹⁵ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 283. ³¹⁶ Henry Dodwell, The Scripture Account of the Eternal Rewards or Punishments of all that hear of the Gospel, without an Immortality necessarily resulting from the Nature of the Souls themselves that are concerned in those Rewards or Punishments (London, 1708), 72–3. ³¹⁷ Ibid. 75.

380

The Case for Tradition

Meaning of Phrases otherwise dubious, above that of the Sense of the same Letter collected only from the Importance of the Phrases themselves alone by the most sagacious Grammarian, but unassisted by the Author whose Phrases they were. Thus such Interpretations as these must have had a Divine Authority, not only of the Spirit which had suggested them, but also of the Persons who were known to have had that particular Gift of the Spirit for the Discovery of such Mystical Senses of the Scriptures of the Old Testament, attested by their own Credentials, and by the Judges of the Prophets, and by the Judgment of those who had the Gift of discerning Spirits, and the Consent of the Spirit of the whole Body, which, all put together, amounted to an Evidence of the highest Kind that could be expected, even in that happy Age of Extraordinaries.³¹⁸

George Hickes adopted, perhaps independently, the same position. In the original edition of his Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised, he had defined ‘the word of knowledge’ of 1 Corinthians 12: 8 as ‘Prophecy properly so called, or the revealed knowledge of secret, remote, and future things’.³¹⁹ In 1709, he entirely rewrote his text to make ‘the word of knowledge’ consist ‘chiefly in understanding, and teaching the hidden Sense, and Mysteries of the Old Testament relating to Christ, and the Evangelical State; more particularly in understanding the Types, Allegories, and Prophecies, and the typical, allegorical, and prophetical Passages of it, and in a Skill to interpret them’.³²⁰ The aim was to canonize patristic allegorical interpretations of Scripture, and the very principle of allegorical interpretation against ‘some late Latitudinarian Criticks’.³²¹ This was perhaps the only new development introduced by Nonjurors to the theory of tradition (as opposed to the inferences that they drew from it). As a move designed to exalt the authority of the Fathers as interpreters of Scripture, it completely backfired. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Middleton used Justin’s claims to understand Scripture by revelation to discredit the ‘enthusiastic turn of mind’ of the Fathers, who were so blind as to ‘mistake such fancifull expositions, for divine inspirations’.³²² Middleton’s opponents, who included Dodwell’s own son, found no solution but to empty Justin’s expressions of any special meaning: Justin never meant anything more than ‘the ordinary assistance of God’s Spirit’.³²³ ³¹⁸ Dodwell, Scripture Account, 78. Dodwell instanced Isa. 42: 5, according to the Septuagint (διδοὺς πνοὴν τῳ ˜ λαῳ ˜ τῳ ˜ ἐπ’ αὐτ˜ης καὶ πνε˜υμα το˜ι ς πατο˜υσιν αὐτήν), which Irenaeus, Aduersus haereses, 5. 12. 2 (SC 153, 144), and Tertullian, De anima, 11. 3 (CC 2, 797), understood to mean that the Spirit was only given to those who trampled upon terrestrial desires, i.e Christians. ³¹⁹ Hickes, Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised [1680], 11. ³²⁰ Ibid., [1709], 14. ³²¹ Ibid. 16–17. ³²² Middleton, Free Inquiry, 116–17. It has been seen that Thorndike felt unable to accept such claims literally: see above, 355. ³²³ Thomas Church, A Vindication of the Miraculous Powers, which subsisted in the Three First Centuries of the Christian Church. In Answer to Dr. Middleton’s Free Inquiry

The Case for Tradition

381

Dodwell accepted only one tenet on the sole testimony of antiquity, independent from Scripture: episcopacy. He went back to the old conformist position, that one should not look in Scripture for models of church government.³²⁴ Some of his arguments are quite Hookerian, though with a characteristic historicizing twist. God gave no special instructions on ecclesiastical government to the primitive Christians because he expected them to pay the same duties to the governors of the Church that they had paid to their secular governors, according to the common nature of every human government and more specifically to the customs and notions of the age. God would have interposed otherwise, according to the usual economy of revelation. ‘And therefore where something was necessary to be practised, and no new order was taken for the introduction of any thing new, there it was most natural to presume that Christ did not think fit to make any alteration, and therefore that he was pleased with what was already received.’³²⁵ This was all the more to be believed since an erroneous practice of the first age would have been very difficult to amend subsequently.³²⁶ Now, the ‘Eastern Nations’ in which the gospel was first preached were of monarchical principles.³²⁷ To give up in this way the scriptural basis of episcopacy was no doubt a major departure from what had become Church of England orthodoxy. At the same time, Dodwell went further than any conformist divine before him, since he not only asserted the divine right of episcopacy, but denied that sacraments, that is the sole ordinary means of grace, could be validly administered by people who were not episcopally ordained.³²⁸ To be separated from one’s bishop was to be in the very condition of the damned, ‘disunited from Christ’.³²⁹ Dodwell thought that the true case of the Church of England had been considerably weakened by an undue solicitude for the continental Reformation.³³⁰ When Bishop Compton of London objected to his book on schism on the ground that it implied the condemnation of foreign Protestants, Dodwell told the bishop bluntly that he was persuaded ‘of the

(London, 1750), 127–33; William Dodwell, A Free Answer to Dr. Middleton’s Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers of the Primitive Church (London, 1749), 57–63. ³²⁴ Dodwell, Separation of Churches, pp. xviii and 443. ³²⁵ Ibid. 464–5. ³²⁶ Ibid. 465. ³²⁷ Ibid. 452. ³²⁸ Ibid., esp. 91–171. ³²⁹ Henry Dodwell, A Discourse Concerning the One Altar and the One Priesthood insisted on by the Ancients in their Disputes against Schism. Wherein the Ground and Solidity of that Way of Reasoning is Explained, as also its Applicableness to the Case of our Modern Schismaticks, with particular Regard to some Late Treatises of Mr Richard Baxter. Being a Just Account concerning the true Nature and Principles of Schism according to the Ancients (London, 1683), 397–8. ³³⁰ Dodwell, Separation of Churches, 34–5.

382

The Case for Tradition

invalidity and sacrilegiousness of their Orders and Sacraments’.³³¹ There was no reason to ‘be more nice in dealing with them than they are in dealing with us’. Had not Beveridge observed that ‘several intire Discourses of Monsieur Daill´e’ against Roman Catholics actually affected the Church of England?³³² For Dodwell, episcopacy was not one article of religion among many. It was rather the fundamental structure of the Church, its organizing principle, in the same way as the Canon of Scripture was the rule of faith. The settlement of diocesan episcopacy, together with the promulgation of the Canon, marked the transition from the extraordinary to the ordinary state of Christianity. The theme appeared in most of Dodwell’s writings but he gave it its clearest expression in 1703, in a private letter to the young Benjamin Hoadly: ‘the Government intended for the Ordinary use of the Church as distinguished from the Extraordinaryes which were to expire with the Apostles, is not to be known but by the last Acts of the Apostles, long after the History of the Acts of the Apostles and St Pauls Epistles, and that of St Clement to the Corinthians.’³³³ Antiquity was authoritative because it had witnessed the gradual transformation of the extraordinary into the ordinary. In Dodwell’s view, ante-Nicene Christianity was the means to decide every controversy of modern Christendom. Primitive truth had been progressively obliterated in the Church, because its key—the writings of the ante-Nicene Fathers—had been neglected. Dodwell fully accepted Daill´e’s premisses concerning the fundamental discontinuity in the history of doctrine. Like Daill´e, he thought that Du Perron’s preference for the post-Nicene Fathers was a self-confession of defeat.³³⁴ Already Augustine (a regular target of Dodwell) ‘did not so concern himself to enquire into Original Tradition’,³³⁵ but ‘rather pleased himself in Reasoning from ³³¹ Dodwell to Compton, n.d., MS St Edmund Hall 14, p. 29. ³³² Ibid. For Beveridge’s work against Daill´e, see above, 351. On Dodwell’s troubles with Compton, who refused to license his book, see further William Lloyd to Dodwell, 3 September 1678, Bodl., MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo 75r ; Thomas Pierce to Dodwell, 4 January 1679, Bodl., MS Cherry 23, p. 319; Dodwell’s second letter to Compton, Bodl., MS Cherry 22, fo. 64r . See also John Beardmore’s memorials of Tillotson in Birch, Life of Tillotson, appendix I, 400–1, on Tillotson’s opposition to the book. Sherlock, Continuation and Vindication, 343–61, criticized it for failing to make allowance for necessity (the usual excuse) in the case of continental Protestants. ³³³ Dodwell to Benjamin Hoadly, 29 July 1703, Bodl., MS Cherry 23, p. 120. ³³⁴ Du Perron is clearly alluded to in Two short Discourses, ‘An Answer’, sep. pagination, 52: ‘their greatest Champions decline the trial, and complain of the defectiveness and obscurity of the Primitive Christian Writers, which they would not have reason to do if they thought them clear on their side.’ For Thorndike’s position, see above, 363. ³³⁵ Henry Dodwell, An Epistolary Discourse, Proving from the Scriptures and the First Fathers, that the Soul is a Principle Naturally Mortal; but Immortalized Actually by the Pleasure of God, to Punishment; or, to Reward, by its Union with the Divine Baptismal

The Case for Tradition

383

received Opinions, than in consulting Originals’.³³⁶ Later ages ‘took for their norm of orthodoxy the Fathers of the fourth and subsequent centuries’, who followed exactly new conciliar formulations, and ‘the ancients who had spoken with more freedom and simplicity’ became suspect. Greek councils cited Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, but not Clement of Rome, Barnabas, Ignatius, or Justin; Latin councils Hilary, Jerome, Ambrose, ‘above all others Augustine’, together with the subsequent writers, but not Irenaeus, Tertullian, Arnobius, or Lactantius, ‘very rarely Cyprian’. Instead of ‘framing their decrees after the old ante-Nicenes’, as they ought to have done, later generations criticized them in the name of newly received doctrines.³³⁷ People in the West were in any case no longer able to read the Greek Fathers—the most important for knowledge of apostolic tradition—in the original text.³³⁸ As for discipline and ceremonies, they rashly ascribed to the apostolic age everything that they found to have been practised for a long time in the Church. This was the Augustinian axiom (‘whatever is held by the universal Church and has not been instituted by any council but has always been preserved, is rightly believed to be of apostolic authority’) used by so many Church of England apologists³³⁹ but which Dodwell, at least at the end of his life, felt no qualms about repudiating openly: ‘Those Presumptive Reasons, however well intended for promoting a Reverence and Acquiescence in present received Customs, yet I cannot take them sufficient to assure of the Facts.’³⁴⁰ Spirit. Wherein is Proved, that None have the Power of Giving this Divine Immortalizing Spirit, since the Apostles, but only the Bishops (London, 1706), 303. See also 306. Dodwell’s dissatisfaction with Augustine’s doctrine of original sin was of long standing (see letter to Thomas Smith, 28 December 1667, Bodl., MS Smith 49, pp. 47–8). ³³⁶ Dodwell, Epistolary Discourse, 250. Compare Daill´e, De Cultibus religiosis Latinorum, 92: ‘Haec enim illius uiri [Augustini] fuit … facilitas, ut quae reperiret communi apud suos usu recepta, ea tolerare, tametsi haud usquequaque consentaneo mallet, quam reprehendere uel pulsare. In his, quoties deprehenditur, rebus per se absurdis ab ingenio, quod ei erat acutissimum, rationes petit.’ ³³⁷ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 408–9. ³³⁸ Dodwell, Considerations of present Concernment, 217, 334. ³³⁹ Augustine, De baptismo contra Donatistas, 4. 24. 31 (CSEL 51, 259). On the popularity of the text among Laudians, see above, 199; for its use by Hall for episcopacy, 269. See also e.g. Heylyn, Theologia ueterum, 13 (for the Apostles’ Creed); Peter Gunning, The Paschal or Lent-Fast Apostolical and Perpetual. At first Deliver’d in a Sermon preached before His Majesty in Lent, and since enlarged. Wherein the Judgment of Antiquity is laid down (London, 1662), 134–5. ³⁴⁰ Henry Dodwell, A Discourse concerning the Use of Incense in Divine Offices. Wherein it is Proved, that that Practice, taken up in the Middle Ages, both by the Eastern and Western Churches, is, notwithstanding, an Innovation from the Doctrine of the first and purest Churches, and the Traditions derived from the Apostles. Serving also to Evince, that even the Consent of those Churches of the Middle Ages, is no certain Argument, that even the

384

The Case for Tradition

The multiplication of ‘counterfeit Authors and Authorities’, the appeal to pretended miracles and revelations, ‘the Authority of the Pope, whereby it came to be in the power of a few to impose upon the whole’, made things even worse in the Western Church.³⁴¹ Only ‘the great modern Improvements of Ecclesiastical Learning’ provided people with the proper means to determine what was, and what was not, apostolic tradition. The Church of Rome itself was now much better equipped to judge of those matters, but its claim to be infallible forbade it ‘to submit those things as much as to a Review, in this Age of Knowledge, which were at first defined in Ages of very great Ignorance’.³⁴² The fundamental error of papists was the belief that there could be ‘a greater Infallibility in their Conclusions than their Premises could rationally account for’: that the Pope’s judgements (or for that matter those of general councils) had a certainty which did not depend on their conformity to ‘the Originals of Tradition’. This conformity was always ‘to be presumed’, it needed not to be proved ‘by Historical Testimonies’.³⁴³ This was indeed how the infallibility of the Pope was then understood at Rome by the popes themselves.³⁴⁴ Dodwell, of course, like Thorndike before him, refused to make any difference in this matter between the Pope by himself and a general council of the Church. The claim of the Church of Rome to be the judge of controversies deprived people ‘of the exercise of their own Judgments’:³⁴⁵ they ought not to enquire into the means used by the Church, but to presume them upon account of the judgment of the Church, that is to suppose that where Particulars, wherein they are supposed to Consent, were faithfully derived from the Apostles, against the modern Assertors of the Infallibility of Oral Tradition (London, 1711), 10 and again 165. At an earlier stage, Dodwell had, however, considered this way of arguing valid, precisely for the case of incense (see Henry Dodwell, A Treatise concerning the Lawfulness of Instrumental Musick in Holy Offices. The Second Edition, with large Additions (London, 1700), 121–5). ³⁴¹ Dodwell, Separation of Churches, pp. xvi–xvii; Two short Discourses, ‘An Account of the Fundamental Principle of Popery, as it is a Distinct Communion; and of the insufficiency of the Proofs which they have for it’, preface, sig. C12r – v . In letters to Edward Stephens of 29 November 1703 and 5 February 1704, Bodl., MS Cherry 23, pp. 200 and 205, Dodwell stressed that, as regarded pretended revelations and forged writings, the Eastern Church was as guilty as the Western. ³⁴² ‘An Account of the Fundamental Principle of Popery’, preface, sigs. C7v –C12r . ³⁴³ Ibid. 15; ‘A preface, with particular regard to the Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet]’s design in explaining the Doctrine of the Romish Church, and complaining of Misrepresentations’, prefixed to the 2nd edition (London, 1688), p. xii. On the ‘Expounding Controversie’, see Wake, Continuation, 12–15; G. Lambin, ‘Les Rapports de Bossuet avec l’Angleterre (1672–1704)’, Bulletin du bibliophile et du biblioth´ecaire (1909), 417–32 and 532–45. ³⁴⁴ See Innocent X’s answer to the Jansenist deputies, quoted above, 304–5. ³⁴⁵ Dodwell, Considerations of present Concernment, 336.

The Case for Tradition

385

Tradition is so necessary, that the Church could not define without it, there she certainly had Tradition, though it did not appear to private persons upon particular Enquiry, nay though the contrary should appear most probable.³⁴⁶

This was not a bad summary of what Counter-Reformation divines like Stapleton had actually taught.³⁴⁷ This was what recusants were still contending for in Restoration England: ‘The present Superiors living and speaking must conclude all Controversies, their Interpretation of Scripture and Fathers, their Testimony of Tradition must more then put to silence all contradiction of particular Persons or Churches, it must also subdue their minds to an assent.’³⁴⁸ A powerful strand within the Roman Catholic Church, especially in France, would have asked at least for serious qualifications,³⁴⁹ but Dodwell did not misrepresent the position of those Romanists with whom his Church had actually to deal. His position here was in strict accordance with Church of England orthodoxy. Like Thorndike and the generality of Restoration divines, he rejected the Roman Catholic analysis of faith, according to which the initial assent grounded on the evidences was somehow transfigured by an ‘influx of the Holy Ghost’.³⁵⁰ Dodwell’s originality was not his grounding the entire certainty of religion in history. It was his determination not to suffer his reading of early Christianity to be influenced by any retrospective orthodoxy. He remained all his life a layman because he could not find it in his conscience to ³⁴⁶ Ibid. 153–4. ³⁴⁷ Stapleton, ‘De principiis fidei doctrinalibus controuersia quarta’, Opera omnia, i. 284–5: ‘respondetur, Ecclesiam … in dubiis circa fidem discutiendis, immediata et sola reuelatione Spiritus Sancti non uti, sed facta inquisitione, et causae meritis expensis, adhibitis quoque mediis et subsidiis ad rem propositam idoneis, ut ante omnia Scripturis ipsis, deinde summorum Pontificum et Conciliorum decretis, Patrum sententiis, Regula fidei consulta, et similibus, … ad ueritatis certitudinem pervenire.... Cum ergo Christus Ecclesiae suae infallibilem Spiritus Sancti assistentiam promiserit, qui eam doceat omnem ueritatem; nec ea sine debitis et certis mediis doceatur; dubitandum non est, quin idem Spiritus ea omnia quoque media suggerat, et circa ipsa media sic infallibiliter eam dirigat, ut finem promissum infallibiliter consequatur.... Quae quum ita sint, bonus Ecclesiae filius, docentem Ecclesiam securus et tuto audiet; fretus promissione Christi et diuina prouidentia: nec sollicite laborans, (quia de hoc iudicare suum non est) an idonea media ad doctrinam suam tradendam Ecclesia adhibuerit nec curiose inquirens (quia hoc explorare sui muneris non est) an in ipsis mediis debitam diligentiam impenderit.’ Stapleton’s distinction between conclusions and means had already been confuted by Laud, Conference with Fisher (1639), 248–53. ³⁴⁸ Cressy, Roman-Catholick Doctrines no novelties, 97–8. ³⁴⁹ See e.g. Antoine Arnauld to ‘Mr N. Laique. Sur la signature du Formulaire du Clerg´e’, 9 June 1661, Œuvres, i. 248–50. ³⁵⁰ Dodwell, ‘Prolegomena’ to Stearne, 23: ‘contra eos qui dicunt induci nos quidem ad fidem per motiua credibilitatis, confirmari uero postea in eadem sine nouis rationibus per influxum Spiritus Sancti; idque eo discrimine; ut primus assensus, qui rationibus nititur, easdem non excedat; secundus uero non eas tantummodo, uerumetiam quantasuis Mathematicas demonstrationes.’

386

The Case for Tradition

take Holy Orders—in 1666 he resigned his fellowship at Trinity College Dublin rather than do so. The obstacle, as he explained to Thomas Barlow in 1671, was ‘the commonly reputed Athanasian Creed, which seems to make all those prudential inferences and modes of speaking contrived by the Fathers of later ages from the Nicene councill and downwards, but neither clearly expressed, at least, not in those terms, either in the Scriptures, or the earlyer Fathers, fundamentall’. It would even oblige one to condemn the Greek Church as heretical for its denying the double procession of the Holy Ghost. Now the Church, by inserting the Creed in its offices and enjoining even laymen to repeat it, seemed really to require an internal assent to it: ‘a bare exterior peaceable acquiescency, which is conceived sufficient for subscription of the Articles will hardly appear satisfactory here.’ To profess to believe the Creed while not being able to give an internal assent to all its clauses would be to deceive the Church.³⁵¹ Barlow’s solution was to distinguish in the Creed between the Symbolum Fidei, the articles proper, and the Iudicium Athanasii, that is the judgement of the Creed’s compiler as to the necessity for salvation to believe explicitly each of these articles. The Symbolum was to be believed ‘because (I conceive) each Article in it is contain’d in Scripture’, either in express words or by deduction, but there was no obligation to adhere to the Iudicium. This mollifying answer, developed at some length in an unfinished dissertation,³⁵² failed to satisfy Dodwell,³⁵³ but Barlow declined to engage in further discussion.³⁵⁴ He had probably gauged his correspondent’s character and understood that Dodwell would not allow anyone to relieve him of the difficulties he had formed and strengthened in his own mind. As his entire career testifies, Dodwell was the sort of man who could not be convinced. It would appear that he subsequently consulted Bishop Gunning of Ely, since ‘I find my self more inclinable to hope for satisfaction from those who defend the Creed than those who mollify it by a favourable exposition of the Churches design in imposing it’, but there is no evidence that he ever managed to overcome his scruples.³⁵⁵ Several years afterwards he was publicly denounced by Richard Baxter, who had seen a manuscript of ³⁵¹ Dodwell to Barlow, 26 February 1671, The Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 279, fos. 177r –178r . Dodwell had met Barlow when he stayed in Oxford in 1666, after resigning his Dublin fellowship (Wood, Fasti, ii, col. 404; Brokesby, Life of Dodwell, 38). ³⁵² The Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 279, paginated 1–77, beginning fo. 170r . ³⁵³ See Dodwell’s letters to Barlow of 26 July and 2 September 1672 (ibid., fos. 176r and 179r ) and especially of 29 April 1674 (fos. 180r –181v ): the Church really designed to oblige every person to own both the Symbolum and the Iudicium, and that by an internal assent. ³⁵⁴ Barlow to Dodwell, 13 March 1673 (ibid., fo. 193r ). ³⁵⁵ Dodwell to Thomas Smith, 22 June 1675 (Bodl., MS Smith 49, p. 119). See also Pierce to Dodwell, 15 March 1675 (Bodl., MS Cherry 23, p. 316).

The Case for Tradition

387

Barlow’s answer, and who derided this ‘strange kind of Nonconformist’.³⁵⁶ Dodwell was certainly not alone in the established Church in finding ‘the damnatory sentences to the particularities of Explication in the Athanasian Creed’ objectionable,³⁵⁷ but he seems to have been the only one in that period to go so far as to give up ordination on this account. One cannot help speculating whether he actually disagreed, not only with the damnatory clauses, but with some positive teachings of the Athanasian Creed.³⁵⁸ According to his own account, he began his theological studies ‘with many doubts which made me very uneasy’.³⁵⁹ Did they also concern the received doctrine of the Trinity? Dodwell wrote to Thomas Smith in 1675 that he suspected the genuineness of the Johannine Comma—the bulwark of orthodoxy—but that ‘other uncontroverted passages of Scripture, especially as expounded by certainly genuine Tradition’, would ‘sufficiently prove the Doctrine of the Trinity’. ‘In Tradition, there are especially three Practices received from the beginning in the Church grounded on their sense of that Doctrine which methinks could hardly have crept in among them if they had innovated therein: that of Baptizing, Swearing and Invocating the Trinity.’³⁶⁰ But was Dodwell’s Trinity a fully Athanasian one? He was ³⁵⁶ Richard Baxter, An Answer to Mr Dodwell and Dr Sherlocke; Confuting an Universal Humane Church-Supremacy, Aristocratical and Monarchical, as Church-Tyranny and Popery: And defending Dr Isaac Barrow’s Treatise against it. Preparatory to a fuller Treatise against such an Universal Soveraignty, as contrary to Reason, Christianity, the Protestant Profession, and the Church of England; though the Corrupters usurp that Title (London, 1682), ‘For the Learned Mr. Henry Dodwell (after a personal conference with him)’, 139. Dodwell and Baxter had engaged in an epistolary controversy in 1672 and 1673, when Dodwell was still in Dublin, and they had several verbal discussions ‘to little purpose’ after he had settled in England (ibid. 94). See also Richard Baxter, The true and only way of concord of all the Christian Churches (London, 1680), 3rd part, sep. pagination, 73–103; Henry Dodwell, A Reply to Mr Baxter’s Pretended Confutation of a Book Entituled, Separation of Churches from Episcopal Government, etc. proved Schismatical. To which are added, Three Letters written to him in the Year 1673, concerning the Possibility of Discipline under a Diocesan Government, (which though relating to the Subject of most of his late Books, have never yet been Answered) (London, 1681) [published in December 1680: TC, i. 425]; Richard Baxter, An Apology for the Nonconformists Ministry (London, 1681), 237–49. Dodwell’s views clearly drove Baxter to exasperation. ³⁵⁷ See Kettlewell’s letter ‘to an Inquiring Clergyman’ after 1690, printed in Lee, Kettlewell, 363. ³⁵⁸ In his letter to Barlow of 26 February 1671, The Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 279, fo. 178r , he hinted that he did. ³⁵⁹ Dodwell to Edward Stephens, 28 December 1703, MS Cherry 23, p. 217. See already Dodwell to Barlow, 26 February 1671, The Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 279, fo. 177r . ³⁶⁰ Dodwell to Thomas Smith, 17 April 1675, MS Smith 49, p. 115. In A Sermon of the Credibility of the Mysteries of the Christian religion, preached before a learned audience (London, 1675), ‘Appendix’, 57–76, Smith had defended the genuineness of 1 John 5: 7 and argued that it was more likely to have been suppressed by Arians than interpolated

388

The Case for Tradition

convinced that the Christian revelation had been accommodated to the notions prevalent at that time among Hellenistic Jews, for whom ‘the true Messias was to be the λόγος’,³⁶¹ and that the Apostles had recognized Christ as the Platonic Logos.³⁶² This Platonic reading of Christianity was partly meant to confute the Socinian thesis that Christianity had been corrupted by Platonism.³⁶³ Dodwell considered Socinianism to be a major threat³⁶⁴ and he condemned Socinians several times, both in private letters and in printed books, for their lack of respect for antiquity and their claim to understand Scripture without tradition.³⁶⁵ On the other hand, Neoplatonic speculations on the Trinity, especially when they equate the Son with the Platonic Logos, are known gateways to some form of subordinationist christology. Sand had identified Platonism with his own anti-Trinitarian theology.³⁶⁶ Dodwell praised Bull once, but it was for his defending the ante-Nicene Fathers against the criticisms of Photius.³⁶⁷ Another aspect of Dodwell’s ‘non-conformity’ was his view of the relation between Church and state or, more exactly, between bishop and by Catholics. On its importance in contemporary debates on the Trinity, see Champion, ‘Simonian Contexts’, 80–3. ³⁶¹ Dodwell, Separation of Churches, 241. ³⁶² Henry Dodwell, De Nupero Schismate Anglicano Paraenesis ad Exteros tam Reformatos quam etiam Pontificios Qua Iura Episcoporum uetera, eorundemque a Magistratu Seculari Independentia Omnibus asserenda commendantur (London, 1704), 12. ³⁶³ Henry Dodwell, Annales Velleiani, Quintilianei, Statiani. Seu Vitae P. Velleii Paterculi, M. Fabii Quintiliani, P. Papinii Statii, (obiterque Iuuenalis) pro tempore ordine, dispositae (Oxford, 1698), appendix II, sig. VV2v . ³⁶⁴ See Dodwell’s letters to Thomas Smith, 22 June and 3 July 1675, MS Smith 49, pp. 119 and 121. ³⁶⁵ See e.g. Dodwell’s letter to Friedrich Spanheim, 11 March 1685, MS St Edmund Hall 15, fo. 33v ; ‘Prolegomena’ to Stearne, 87–8; Dissertationes in Irenaeum, sig. a4v . I have no doubt that Dodwell was sincere. The rumour spread in Ireland in 1703 that he was a Socinian himself need not be taken seriously. The charge was easily made at the time and Dodwell, when he was informed of it, protested that he believed Socinians ‘guilty of many, not onely erroneous opinions, but Fundamental errors’ (see letter of William Palliser, Archbishop of Cashel, to Dodwell, 4 June 1703, MS Eng. lett. c. 28, fo. 62r , and Dodwell’s answer, 19 June 1703, MS Cherry 23, pp. 135–6). ³⁶⁶ See D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1972), 39–40; S. Hutton, ‘The Neoplatonic Roots of Arianism: Ralph Cudworth and Theophilus Gale’, in L. Szczucki (ed.), Socinianism and its Role in the Culture of XVIth to XVIIIth Centuries [sic] (Warsaw, 1983), 139–45; ead., ‘Platonism and the Trinity: Anne Conway, Henry More and Christoph Sand’, in Mulsow and Rohls (eds.), Socinianism and Arminianism, 209–24 (‘Sand’s Platonic-Arian convictions were not typical for the Socinian milieu’: Mulsow, ‘ ‘‘New Socinians’’ ’, 56); M. Mulsow, ‘A German Spinozistic Reader of Cudworth, Bull, and Spencer: Johann Georg Wachter and his Theologia Martyrum (1712)’, in Ligota and Quantin (eds.), History of Scholarship, 357–83. ³⁶⁷ Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 409: ‘Ita saepe seuerus Vetustissimorum Patrum censor est Photius, propterea a Clarissimo nostro Bullo merito castigatus.’

The Case for Tradition

389

king. Earlier, and more radically, than most members of the established Church, he gave up the ideal of the godly prince. When he was elected Camdenian Lecturer in History at Oxford, in April 1688, he had to take the oath of supremacy, but he only did so with explicit restrictions. ‘I protested … against his [James II’s] Power of discharging me from my Duty to the Bishops of our own Communion by a Lay-Deprivation.’³⁶⁸ ‘I likewise declared, that if any such sense should be insisted on for the future as should intitle the Magistrate to any Right in the purely Spirituals of the Church, I desired no benefit from my taking my Oath as I understood it then.’³⁶⁹ Such caveats could appear opportune at a time when James II’s Romanizing policy was provoking increasing worry at Oxford: witness the Vice Chancellor’s apparent willingness to let Dodwell’s restricted oath pass. Dodwell’s election had been carried against a powerful local rival, the Warden of All Souls, by the energetic campaigning of the church party.³⁷⁰ But Dodwell’s views were not merely circumstantial. A decade before James’s accession, he had told Baxter inter alia: II. That Diocesan Churches are the first in order of Divine Institution. III. That Diocesan Bishops by consent may make other Church-forms, as National, Patriarchal, etc. And that such Churches are not made by Princes, but by the consent of Prelates.... X. That in the case of Preaching the Gospel, Ministers may in many cases do it, though Emperours and Kings forbid them, (as in the days of Constantius, Valens, yea and better men); but not if the Bishops forbid them, or consent not. XI. That circa Sacra, if the King command the Churches for Uniformity, one Translation of the Bible, one Version or Meter of the Psalms, one Liturgy, one Time, or Place of Worship, etc. and the Bishop another, we ought to obey the Bishop against the command of the King.³⁷¹

Dodwell not only conceived of the Church as an independent spiritual society but of each bishop as an independent spiritual monarch in his ³⁶⁸ Dodwell to George Jones, 2 November 1701 (MS Cherry 23, p. 162). ³⁶⁹ Dodwell to Edward Stephens, 5 February 1704 (MS Cherry 23, p. 205). ³⁷⁰ On Dodwell’s election and university politics, see M. Goldie, ‘John Locke, Jonas Proast and Religious Toleration 1688–1692’, in Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor (eds.), Church of England, 149–50; William Lloyd to Archbishop Sancroft, 13 April 1688, Bodl., MS Tanner 28/1, fo. 15r ; undated letter of John Mill to Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, Bodl., MS Rawlinson Lett. 94, fo. 160r ; Lloyd to Dodwell, 22 April 1688, Bodl., MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 102r . ³⁷¹ Baxter, Answer to Dodwell, 128–9 (‘some of the Principles which I have heard from your mouth’). Baxter’s testimony is not above exception (he ascribed to his opponents what he considered to be the logical implications of their views) but Dodwell, who protested against several charges as calumnious, had no complaint on this point: see Dodwell, Discourse Concerning the One Altar, sigs. A6r –A7r .

390

The Case for Tradition

diocese. He was not absolutely alone in doing so, but such views were a clear departure from usual Church of England apologetics and were highly obnoxious to old episcopalians like Gunning.³⁷² These principles directed Dodwell’s attitude after the Revolution of 1688. Although he was all his life an outspoken, if politically quiescent, Jacobite, he differed from many Nonjurors in considering that ‘the immoral prayers’ were not a sufficient ground for separation. He remained in communion with the established Church, attending religious services in Oxford colleges, until the sees of the deprived bishops were filled.³⁷³ He henceforth considered the conforming clergy to be in a state of schism and appealed against them to the Fathers, especially to the writings of Cyprian.³⁷⁴ Before the Nonjuring bishops had been deprived, he had warned that a deprivation of bishops by the secular power ‘would be as perfect a nullity as if the same secular Magistracy in England should make laws for the United Provinces, that is for want of a competent Authority’.³⁷⁵ Bishops who accepted the lay deprivation of ³⁷² Such an ecclesiology was strongly defended by Barrow, Treatise of the Pope’s Supremacy (see esp. ‘A Discourse concerning the Unity of the Church’, sep. pagination) and was apparently favoured by Fell. See Fell’s intended dedication of his edition of Cyprian, MS Tanner 290, fo. 161r – v , and letter of Gunning to Sancroft, n.d., MS Tanner 290, fos. 162r –163r . Gunning’s enclosed memoir (‘my other papers’) against this ‘new sort of Independency in Church-Government’ is not to be found among Sancroft’s papers, presumably because Sancroft forwarded it to Fell (see Fell to Sancroft, 14 October 1681, MS Tanner 290, fo. 165r ) but there is a copy in BL, Add. MS 29546, fos. 96r –102r . Carter, History of Oxford University Press, 115–16, failed to understand this affair. ³⁷³ Dodwell to Hearne, 5 January 1706, Bodl., MS Rawlinson lett. 25, fo. 429r (‘I was at Oxford when the Schism commenced … at New Colledge Prayers at 4 of the Clock, that Whitsun Tuesday whereon the news came that Evening to the Cophee house, that the Altars were erected against the Old Altars on the Sunday before’ [31 May 1691]); Dodwell’s undated letter to an unknown correspondent, Bodl., MS Cherry 23, pp. 298–9 (‘as for the immoral Prayers I never separated for them whilest I was allowed to notify my dissent from them’, i.e. by refusing to kneel); Dodwell to George Jones, 2 November 1701 (MS Cherry 23, pp. 161–2). Cf. Brokesby, Life of Dodwell, 223. As Dodwell himself pointed out, he ‘differed from Mr Kettlewell in that particular’. See Lee, Kettlewell, 353–65. On Dodwell’s Jacobitism, see Wood, Life and Times, iii. 448; Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1885–1921), ix. 306. ³⁷⁴ See M. Goldie, ‘The Nonjurors, Episcopacy and the Origins of the Convocation Controversy’, in E. Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), 15–35; Quantin, ‘Anglican Scholarship gone Mad?’, 331–3. R. D. Cornwall, ‘Divine Right Monarchy: Henry Dodwell’s Defense of the Nonjuring Bishops’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 68 (1999), 37–66, merely paraphrases Dodwell’s printed English writings. ³⁷⁵ Henry Dodwell, A Cautionary Discourse of Schism with a particular regard to the case of Bishops who are suspended for refusing to take the New Oath, MS Rawlinson D 373 (autograph), fo. 9v . The tract was written in the six-month interval between the suspension of the Nonjuring bishops (1 August 1689) and their deprivation (1 February 1690). Other copies are Bodl., MS Eng. hist. e 183 (‘formerly belonging to Dr Hickes’) and Balliol College, Oxford, MS 346 (bequeathed to Balliol by Dr George Coningesby,

The Case for Tradition

391

their brethren would be schismatics.³⁷⁶ According to Dodwell, even an ecclesiastical synod could not deprive bishops: ‘This question also would be easily determined if it were to be decided (as I see no reason why it should not) by the primitive doctrine of the Catholic Church in the early age of St. Cyprian. They then believed that every Bishop was made by Christ and being once made was so immediately subjected to him, as to be liable to no other whatsoever human Jurisdiction.’³⁷⁷ Dodwell was unmoved when defenders of the established Church objected that these principles would make the Reformers guilty of schism: the Reformers had no weight against ‘the Primitive Catholic Church’.³⁷⁸ Dodwell believed indeed that the ‘Principles by which Archbishop Cranmer acted’ were destructive of the Church as a society.³⁷⁹ However, he argued, whatever one might think vicar of Bodenham, Herefordshire, in 1766). A note by Coningesby on this latter manuscript states that it ‘is printed’. R. A. B. Mynors, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Balliol College Oxford (Oxford, 1963), 344, following Coxe, Catalogus codicum in collegiis Oxoniensibus, i, sep. pagination, 108, specifies ‘London, 1691’; Harmsen, ODNB, xvi. 446, gives the same date. But we know for sure that the tract was ‘not yet in the Press’ on 21 December 1691 (see below, n. 381), by which date it was outdated. Brokesby, Life of Dodwell, 235, appears to mean that it was eventually printed (‘which [the Cautionary Discourse] by reason of its passing thro’ several Hands, while MS. was too long before ’twas published’), and so does Lee, Kettlewell, 315. But it is not recorded in Wing; Thomas Hearne did not include it in the very minute bibliography that he prefixed to Henry Dodwell, De Parma equestri Woodwardiana Dissertatio (Oxford, 1713) and he listed it elsewhere among Dodwell’s unprinted works (letter to Francis Cherry, 15 December 1712, printed in Remarks and Collections, iv. 32). It seems certain that it remained manuscript, because other Nonjurors found its doctrine objectionable (see below). ³⁷⁶ Bodl., MS Rawlinson D 373, fo. 11r : ‘even in Decius’s time the practices of Foelicissimus against St Cyprian and of Novatian against Cornelius were adjudged schismatical by the Church, tho’ the secular Laws were as much against St. Cyprian and Cornelius as against Foelicissimus and Novatian. So little did they then regard the secular laws in matters wherein the secular Authority had no power to intermeddle … ’ ³⁷⁷ Ibid., fo. 12r . ³⁷⁸ Daniel Whitby to Dodwell, 30 September 1691, Bodl., MS Cherry 23, p. 259; Dodwell’s answer, 5 October 1691, ibid. pp. 260–2; Dodwell to Humphrey Hody, 7 October 1691, ibid. p. 263. ³⁷⁹ [Henry Dodwell], ‘Preface. Wherein our Doctrine concerning the Independency of the Clergy on the Lay-Power, as to those Rights of theirs which are purely Spiritual, is reconciled with our Oath of Supremacy, and the Lay-Deprivations of the Popish Bishops in the beginning of the Reformation’ [a copy in Bodl., shelfmark 4◦ Rawl. 161 (1)], p. xix. The text was printed to be a preface to Dodwell’s A Defence of the Vindication of the Deprived Bishops. Wherein the Case of Abiathar is particularly considered, and the Invalidity of Lay-Deprivations is further proved, from the Doctrine received under the Old Testament, continued in the first Ages of Christianity, and from our own fundamental Laws. In a Reply to Dr Hody and another Author, but this work was seized by the governement; the preface escaped seizure and was issued as an independent work, The Doctrine of the Church of England, concerning the Independency of the Clergy … By the Author of the Vindication of the depriv’d Bishops (London, 1697 [1696]). The Defence was subsequently reprinted without the preface and with an imprint ‘London, 1695 [actually 1697]’. See [George

392

The Case for Tradition

of the way popish bishops had been deprived under Elizabeth, their title certainly ended with their death, which left Protestant bishops ‘in the sole possession of the Diocesane Jurisdictions’. From this time onwards, the papists’ ‘endeavours to keep up a distinct Communion, and sometimes to set up distinct Bishops in the same Dioceses fairly and canonically prepossessed by our Bishops, must make the Schism, and the erection of Altar against Altar, imputable to them … in the Reasoning of St Cyprian’s Age’.³⁸⁰ The ecclesiastical leaders of the Nonjurors were ready enough to accept Dodwell’s ideas on the spiritual power and on schism, but they baulked at his making every bishop independent. Dodwell, of course, held his ground, since ‘the Tradition of the Primitive Church … ought more to sway with true Catholicks than any whatsoever modern Opinions. Especially considering withall that there can be nothing pretended new in these Principles I insist on but the discovery of them to this present Age.’³⁸¹ Primitive principles, once again, had been lost and had to be rediscovered in the ante-Nicene writers. The most provocative of Dodwell’s discoveries was that immortality did not belong naturally to the soul but was preternaturally conferred on it by God, either as a reward for members of the Church, or to make it possible to damn eternally those who had refused to join its communion. Since the immortalizing Spirit was only conveyed through sacraments and since, as has been seen, no sacraments were valid outside episcopal communion, this was the highest possible case for episcopacy. Dodwell did not make his views public until 1706 and the ensuing controversy Hickes], ‘A reply to a pamphlet entituled the Bishop of Sarums vindication or Reflections upon a pamphlet entituled Some Discourses upon Dr. Burnet, and Dr. Tillotson, etc. By the Authour of those discourses’ (autograph), Bodl., MS Eng. th. c. 22, fos. 66r and 83r ; [Humphrey Hody], Reflexions on a Pamphlet entitled, Remarks on the Occasional Paper, Numb. VIII (London, 1698), 3–5 (for Hody’s authorship, see Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iv. 120); Brokesby, Life of Dodwell, 268; Goldie, ‘Nonjurors’, 24–5 and 34 n. 51. ³⁸⁰ Dodwell, ‘Independency of the Clergy’, pp. lxviii–lxxix. Dodwell had earlier suggested, pp. lxiii–lxviii, that the deprivation of popish bishops at the time of the Reformation was justified, because they belonged to a different communion. ³⁸¹ Dodwell’s letter, addressed ‘For John Higgins, Esquire’, 21 December 1691, Bodl., MS Eng. lett. e 94, fo. 27r – v , complaining that ‘the Cautionary Discourse is not yet in the Press’. ‘John Higgins’ does not appear anywhere else in the history of the Nonjurors and must have been a pseudonym, perhaps for Hickes or for Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, who were both at that time ‘obliged to abscond under borrowed Names’ (Lee, Kettlewell, 471). Francis Turner dealt with Dodwell’s later apology for the deprived bishops, Paraenesis ad exteros, to which he made several objections, and Dodwell complained: ‘this is now the second time your Lordship has disappointed me in work I have been employed on’, the first time being ‘the Cautionary Discourse suppressed by your Lordship’. See Turner’s letter to Dodwell, 10 February 1700, MS St Edmund Hall 10, pp. 11–20, and Dodwell’s reply (undated but transcribed by Cherry from the original on 29 February 1700), MS Cherry 23, pp. 303–7.

The Case for Tradition

393

need not concern us here. What should be stressed is that he had evolved these ideas much earlier. He had at least hinted at them in his Dublin writings,³⁸² and he made no mystery of them in conversation. In 1709, Archbishop William King of Dublin, who had been Dodwell’s pupil at Trinity College, recalled that he had been aware of them ‘above 36 years ago’.³⁸³ Had it not been for William Lloyd, Bishop of St Asaph, Dodwell’s closest friend after he had settled in England, they would have been published ‘above twenty years agoe’.³⁸⁴ They were common knowledge in Oxford about 1690, where they apparently intrigued rather than scandalized people.³⁸⁵ Dodwell was willing to accept without reservation, indeed to build upon those very patristic ideas that others found most embarrassing. Tertullian’s holding the soul to be corporeal and Clement of Alexandria’s making Christ and his Apostles preach to the souls in Hell had hitherto been ranked among the worst ‘blemishes’ of the Fathers, and used as arguments against their authority.³⁸⁶ Dodwell made them apostolic doctrines. ‘I know how severely this Doctrine [of Tertullian] is censur’d, by those who have more regard to the Consent of the present Churches, then the Original Tradition of the Primitive Church, with as unanimous Consent then, as can be pretended now.’³⁸⁷ Belief in the literal descent of Christ into Hell had withered away in the Church of England,³⁸⁸ largely because Bilson and early seventeenth-century divines had emptied it of any soteriological value.³⁸⁹ It could only serve as an anti-Calvinist shibboleth. During the Restoration, when the question of episcopacy had more or less eclipsed all other issues, there was no longer any need of such tokens. According to Pearson’s very influential commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, the article on the descent meant only that Christ’s ‘soul

³⁸² See Dodwell, ‘Prolegomena’ to Stearne, 133; id., Two Letters of advice. I. For the Susception of Holy Orders. II. For Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational (Dublin, 1672), 209–12. ³⁸³ William King to Dodwell, 17 July 1709, Bodl., MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 126v . ³⁸⁴ Hearne, Remarks and Collections, i. 211. ³⁸⁵ See Hochstetter’s journal, Stuttgart, W¨urttembergische Landesbibliothek, MS Cod. hist. 8◦ 8, fo. 182v , entry for 4 February 1691: ‘Clarissimus Derrius in nouo Collegio secum memorabat, istam H. Dodwello coniecturam esse, quod Gentiles isti, ad quos cognitio religionis Christianae non peruenit qui tamen honeste uixerunt, temporaneum bonorum suorum operum praemium sunt accepturi, postea annihilandi. Solos uero fideles Christianos immortales futuros, unde Paulus [2 Tim. 1: 10] dicat Christum istis per Evangelium uitam et immortalitatem attulisse.’ ³⁸⁶ See above, 232–3, on Daill´e. ³⁸⁷ Dodwell, Epistolary Discourse, 54. ³⁸⁸ Wallace, ‘Puritan and Anglican’, 282–3; Green, Christian’s ABC, 319. ³⁸⁹ For Bilson’s dismissal of patristic statements that Christ had delivered souls from Hell, see above, 124–5.

394

The Case for Tradition

was conveyed into such receptacles as the souls of other persons use to be’.³⁹⁰ The Fathers had made mistakes on this question, especially in their exegesis of 1 Peter 3: 18–20.³⁹¹ They had been misled by ‘Apocryphal writings’, such as The Shepherd of Hermas, ‘whereas the Book itself is of no good authority, and in this particular is most extravagant’.³⁹² Pearson freely confessed that many divines of the Church of England held that Christ had descended into Hell to triumph over Satan. But, Pearson commented, the defenders of this interpretation were inconsistent: ‘I cannot understand how they embrace this as the interpretation of the Fathers, who believe not that any of the Souls of the damned were taken out of the torments of Hell, or that the Souls of the Saints of old were removed from thence by Christ’s Descent; which were the reasons why the Fathers spake of such a triumphing in Hell.’³⁹³ Dodwell revived the local descent and made it central in his system, as the means to convey the immortalizing spirit to those who had died before the promulgation of the gospel, first of all to Jews: That therefore the deceased Members of the old Peculium, might be qualified for the Benefits of the new, it was requisite that they should believe the Gospel; and, in order thereunto, it was withal as requisite that they should hear it. This therefore was by the Antients believed to be the Cause of our Blessed Lord’s Descent into Hell, as Hell is taken for the common Receptacle of Souls, both good and bad; that is, that he might there preach the Gospel to them, who never heard of it while they were on Earth, to qualifie them for their final Sentence by their Faith or Disbelief of it. The Testimonies of Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen, are very plain and full to this Purpose, not now to mention the more numerous ones of lower Ages, which (I know) will be less regarded. The Foot-steps of this Opinion are so unanimous, and so near the Apostolical Original, and so agreeable to the Principles and Reasonings of the Apostolical Age, and so uncontradicted by any Monuments of those Times; that it is hard to conceive how they could have any other Original than Apostolical.³⁹⁴

Such was the meaning of 1 Peter 3: 18–20.³⁹⁵ But Christ did not merely preach to the souls in Hell, he also baptized them—in water, since souls ³⁹⁰ An Exposition of the Creed. By John Lord Bishop of Chester. The fifth edition, revised and now more enlarged (London, 1683), 251. This is the last edition published in Pearson’s lifetime. The section on the descent is unchanged from the first edition, An Exposition of the Apostles Creed (London, 1659), 508. ³⁹¹ Pearson, Exposition of the Creed, 228–9 (= 1659, 462–3). ³⁹² Ibid. 242 (= 1659, 491). Pearson’s subsequent discussion, Vindiciae Ignatianae, part 1, 39–44, of the status of The Shepherd in the ancient Church, is much more favourable to Hermas. ³⁹³ Pearson, Exposition of the Creed, 248 (= 1659, 502–3). The point is repeated, 249–50 (= 1659, 506–7). ³⁹⁴ Dodwell, Epistolary Discourse, 169–70, referring to Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 6. 6. 44–53 (GCS 52, 453–5 [4th edn.]) and Origen, Contra Celsum, 2. 43 (SC 132, 382). For other mentions of the descent by Origen, see Gounelle, Descente, 50. ³⁹⁵ Ibid. 170–2.

The Case for Tradition

395

are corporeal—as taught by ‘the Apostolical Hermas’, rightly interpreted by Clement of Alexandria.³⁹⁶ The Apostles subsequently did the same for the souls of the Gentiles.³⁹⁷ In 1703 Dodwell professed to ‘know no present Church on Earth that has not deviated from the Primitive Rule’.³⁹⁸ He was confident, though, that ‘such a Church as ours is which takes Antiquity for the true Rule, and professes herself fallible, may own the Truth at another time, when she is satisfyed that the Reasons from that Topick are convincing’.³⁹⁹ This is indeed what he hoped to achieve with his book on the mortality of the soul.⁴⁰⁰ But almost no English theologian was willing even to consider such a radical reconstruction of orthodoxy, and Dodwell, to his dismay, met everywhere with anathemas. Although the moral drawn by John Edwards, as to the ‘folly and danger’ of exalting the Church Fathers, expressed only Low Church opinion, few could have disagreed with Edwards’s complaint that ‘under their Patronages he [Dodwell] presents us with some of the most Heterodox Sentiments that this Age hath known’.⁴⁰¹ ³⁹⁶ Ibid. 176–7. Hermas, Pastor, 93 (Sim. 9. 16) [GCS 48, 89–90], partly quoted and commented by Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 2. 9. 43. 5–44. 4 (GCS 52, 136 [4th edn.]). The Greek original of Hermas was not discovered until the mid-19th century. Dodwell supplemented the extract in Clement by the Latin translation (uersio ´ Vulgata), first published by Lef`evre d’Etaples in 1513. See CPG 1052; Hermas, Pastor, ed. O. von Gebhardt and A. Harnack (Leipzig, 1877; Patrum Apostolicorum Opera, iii), ‘prolegomena’, pp. xii–xxiv. Cotelier’s edition gave both the uersio Vulgata and the extant Greek fragments: see Patrum qui temporibus apostolicis floruerunt opera, i. 75–6 for Sim. 9. 16. In the ‘Catalogue of the writings of such Christian Authors as flourished before the Conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity’, attached to his Two Letters of advice. I For the Susception of Holy Orders. II. For Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational. The Third edition Corrected and Improved (London, 1691), 109–10, Dodwell also recommended the new edition (without the Greek fragments) published by Fell. See Sancti Barnabae Apostoli, Epistola Catholica. Accessit S. Hermae Viri Apostolici Pastor (Oxford, 1685), sep. pagination, 171–3 for Sim. 9. 16. Fell, 171–2 note b, tried unconvincingly (following Cotelier, ii, notes, col. 76) to interpret the text metaphorically: ‘Siquidem ergo nos in isto fidei nostri signaculo [i.e. baptismo], mortem cum Christo profitemur undis submersi: ita ueteris Ecclesiae patres necesse habent per aquam ascendere, hoc est, per Christum saluari. Cum ergo dicitur, quod Apostoli et Doctores praedicauerunt iis qui ante obierunt, eadem mente uidetur dictum cum eo S. Petri 1. 3.19. quod Christus spiritibus qui in carcere erant, praedicauit.’ In his preface, sig. ∗ 2r , Fell stressed the authority of The Shepherd as ‘Auctoris Apostolici opus’. ³⁹⁷ Dodwell, Epistolary Discourse, 188–93. ³⁹⁸ Dodwell to Edward Stephens, 9 October 1703, Bodl., MS Cherry 23, p. 201. ³⁹⁹ Ibid., 2 November 1703, ibid. p. 203. ⁴⁰⁰ Dodwell, Preliminary Defence, sig. A5r – v . ⁴⁰¹ Edwards, ‘Patrologia’, in Remains, 113.

Conclusion A true ecclesiology was somewhat slow in developing [in England after the Reformation]. When it did emerge, principally in the writings of John Jewel and Richard Hooker, it had a distinctive character: it sought to avoid mere Erastianism and Popery or sectarianism by finding its authority in scripture as this was interpreted in the life and practice of the undivided Church of the first four centuries of the Christian era. Such a conservative ecclesiology, with its great stress on the institution of episcopacy and the independence of the local church, came to be recognised by other Christian denominations as a distinctive Anglican position, and there was wide respect for the achievement of Anglican scholars in their chosen field of patristic studies.¹

This account neatly encapsulates the Anglo-Catholic notion of an English religious exceptionalism born of, grounded on, and expressed by the study of the Church Fathers. As such, it is of great interest for the historian of religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England. As a summary of what really happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is patently misleading. Jewel made no reference to ‘the undivided Church’. As to Hooker, whatever may have been his negative importance in undermining the standard Reformed notion of the sufficiency of Scripture, he did not ascribe special authority to any period of the history of the Church. Seventeenth-century writers who attempted to show that their own devotion to the Fathers was rooted within a specifically English tradition never quoted Hooker. They appealed to Jewel, but their perspective was very different from the Bishop of Salisbury’s original challenge. They indeed considered ‘sectarianism’ as dangerous a peril as popery, which Jewel did not. Subsequently, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, the Nonjurors appealed to ‘all those Fathers and Councils who speak against the Regale, or Power of the Civil Government over the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, either ¹ Bennett, ‘Preface to Crockford’s Clerical Directory’, 191.

Conclusion

397

to Elect or Deprive their Bishops: To obstruct or overawe their Synods etc’.² Before 1689, though, ‘Erastianism’ did not figure prominently in the gallery of episcopalian bugbears. There was no continuous line of deference to the Fathers in the Church of England. Between the Reformation and the last years of the Restoration, from Jewel to Dodwell, the appeal to the Fathers in the Church of England changed its significance. In Elizabethan apologetics, the Fathers were read as testes ueritatis, members of a doctrinal succession which was considered sufficient to vindicate the Reformation from Roman charges of novelty. The representation of church history was otherwise profoundly discontinuous. On English soil, primitive truth had been submerged by the Norman conquest and only a handful of witnesses had kept it visible. The Reformation was a rising of the faithful against the papal Antichrist and, as such, the single most important event since the Apostles. Patristic testimonies had their use against Rome but doctrine was to be drawn from Scripture, interpreted according to the best continental Reformed divines, among whom Calvin took pride of place. Augustine was ranked above all the other Fathers for having formulated the scriptural doctrine of grace and predestination, which had not been clearly known before him, and had been obscured after him by the resurgence of Pelagianism in the Church of Rome. Even Augustine, though, ought to be given up when he taught unscriptural doctrines. Since the appeal to tradition either to supplement or to interpret Scripture was one of the most pernicious errors of the Church of Rome, it was essential to confute it and to stress that there was no such thing as an authoritative consensus of the Fathers. Episcopalian divines were soon obliged to fight simultaneously on another front, against advocates of a more thorough Reformation on continental lines. Only slowly, however, did the notion of a religious exceptionalism, of a via media legitimized by the appeal to antiquity, make its way into English Protestant discourse. The first clearly to express the idea were expatriates from the Continent, men like Isaac Casaubon or Marco Antonio De Dominis. These isolated figures, who were dissatisfied with the Church of their birth but could not bring themselves to cross the Rubicon of apostasy, felt constrained by confessional boundaries. They thought, with a great deal of illusion, that they would be able in England to get the best of both worlds. The ideal of the reunion of Churches had obvious attractions for men with their personal experience and background. They did not look to antiquity for dogmatic formulas, but for models of mutual ² [Charles Leslie], The Case of the Regale and of the Pontificat stated. In the Relation of a Conference concerning the Independency of the Church as to Her Purely Spiritual Power and Authority (n.p., 1700), 90.

398

Conclusion

forbearance and of a more open Christianity, before school definitions had been introduced. In addition to taking a personal interest in such religio-scholarly constructions, James I was well aware of the potential political benefit of irenicism both in his own kingdoms and in his European diplomacy. He therefore favoured the new brand of conformists like Lancelot Andrewes, who were prepared to value positively the pre-Reformation elements in the Church of England and thus to give actual content to the via media. For divines of that school, the appeal to antiquity was no longer merely tactical but was a key part of their self-definition. Their influence was carefully contained under James I but they came into their own after the accession of Charles I. Although they did not openly reject the principle of sola Scriptura, Laudians constantly invoked apostolic traditions, often in a distinctly un-Protestant manner, to legitimize the ritualistic campaign in the 1630s. In their drive to remove Calvinism from theological studies, they played the Fathers against continental, modern authors. Though a man of order, Laud tolerated within the established Church a variety of doctrinal stances. Conformist divines who wrote specifically of the authority of the Fathers like John Downe and Richard Holdsworth continued to echo Elizabethan Reformed orthodoxy. A line of non-dogmatic Christianity survived in figures like John Hales of Eton, Lord Falkland, or William Chillingworth, who promoted their own liberal version of sola Scriptura. In the late 1630s, Falkland and Chillingworth welcomed the Huguenot Jean Daill´e’s Traict´e de l’employ des Saincts Peres, a formidable assault against the use of patristic testimonies in religious controversies. This doctrinal relativism survived the fall of the Caroline regime and was given its most enduring expression in Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying. Only after the Restoration did the reference to antiquity become essential to the new synthesis which, by that time, can fairly be called Anglicanism. Divines specifically appealed to ‘the consensus of the Fathers’, that is the very principle that Reformed controversialists had been at such pains to deconstruct. Patristic studies were regarded as a bulwark against enthusiasm, that new bˆete noire, which lumped together Roman Catholic claims to perform miracles and radical ideas of direct inspiration and inner lights. Attacks against the authority and reliability of patristic testimonies now appeared a badge of nonconformity. Daill´e —who had done his best to preserve amicable relations with English episcopal divines—was regarded as an arch-enemy of the Church of England. Matthew Scrivener published in 1672 the first English confutation of the Traict´e de l’employ des Saincts Peres. He was to have many followers up to the middle of the nineteenth century. The difficulty was to build a systematic case for the appeal to the Fathers while steering clear of Roman Catholic doctrines of tradition. Few

Conclusion

399

Restoration divines really rose to the challenge. Herbert Thorndike and later Henry Dodwell, who did, ended up with highly idiosyncratic systems, which, especially in Dodwell’s case, were hardly compatible with any received confessional orthodoxy, whether Roman Catholic or Reformed. The immediate influence of such views was probably not very great but they reflected the climate of the time. In the 1670s and 1680s, English divines gave to patristics the very highest of missions. Defective knowledge and insufficient study of the Fathers were denounced as the origin of both popery and schism. In that late age of Christianity—so the idea ran—now that charisms had been withdrawn and miracles had ceased, the exploration of ancient texts (‘that kind of grammatical and historical learning which is only fit to qualifie a person to judge of Ecclesiastical Tradition’³) was the only reliable route to truth. As the identity of the Church of England was thus redefined, its past was reinvented. Reverence for antiquity, it was now claimed, had been its defining feature ever since the Reformation. Testimonies were adduced, usually in chronological order, often out of context, to evidence its special relationship to the Fathers. By 1690, the list had become fairly standard: all these texts would later reappear in the catenae of the Tractarians. Discussions on the authority of the Fathers, like most early modern controversies, deployed a limited and largely stable corpus of texts and instances. An incontrovertible evidence of doctrinal change in the Church of England is the way arguments against tradition—the case of millenarianism and infant communion, Irenaeus’ assertion that Christ died at 50—were transformed into objections to answer. Conversely, the notion that the certainty of the Canon of Scripture was based on tradition, which had been a popish objection in Elizabethan England, became the supreme argument for the appeal to the Fathers in Restoration theology. The refashioning of orthodoxy meant that ideas that had been confined to the margin, barely tolerated, moved into the mainstream. Hence the crucial role of what has been aptly called ‘avant-garde conformity’,⁴ which, as it were, tested ‘advanced’ doctrines and made some of them religiously and socially acceptable. Dodwell was an extreme form of this phenomenon and Baxter’s complaint accurately described at least its structural function: it’s a useful way, to set such an one as you to do mens business, and to boast, as Dr Sherlock and Mr Morrice [Maurice] do, of your performance, and yet to disown ³ Dodwell, Two short Discourses, ‘An Answer to Six Queries proposed to a Gentlewoman of the Church of England, by an Emissary of the Church of Rome’, 59. ⁴ The phrase has been coined by Lake, ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity’, and has been adopted e.g. by Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored.

400

Conclusion

you when their cause requireth it. But it is an abuse of us that dissent from you, to connive only at your published Books, and then to boast of them as unanswerable.⁵

The same role was played on a larger scale after 1690 by the separate communion of Nonjurors, which was ‘kept up, as a Witnessing Church’,⁶ and infiltrated many of its ideas into the Anglican main body. Jansenists in France had an analogous position in relation to their Church. Despite the new stress on antiquity, Restoration divines preserved the letter, if hardly the spirit, of the sixth article: Scripture could still be said to contain all things necessary to salvation, since tradition was appealed to as an interpreter, not a supplement. This was a major difference, if not from the decree on tradition of the Council of Trent (which is more or less susceptible of such an interpretation), at least from the common post-Tridentine position. Even more importantly, the appeal to the Fathers in the Church of England was never grounded on the infallibility of the present Church, as it was for post-Tridentine theologians such as Stapleton or Bellarmine. Since recusant theology in the seventeenth century laid ever more stress on this point, to the extent of eventually defining tradition without any reference to antiquity, Church of England divines and their immediate opponents were probably further apart about 1690 than they had been one hundred years before. The conclusion would be rather different if the comparison were made, not with recusants, but with contemporary Gallicans, whose reliance on antiquity was widely acknowledged to give them a specific position within the Roman Catholic communion. Indeed Leibniz opposed ‘the Gallican resolution of the faith’, which was ultimately ‘in the historical tradition of ecclesiastical antiquity’—since the fact of revelation was known to us through historical tradition—and ‘the Roman or curial resolution’, which was in the present infallibility of the Pope.⁷ Gallicans appealed to the Fathers as reliable witnesses of what the Church had believed and practised in their time, according to Du Perron’s rationale. Daill´e had attempted to counter this and his warning, for many today, would appear unanswerable: ‘It is a very hazardous business, to take Eight or Ten Men, how Holy and Learned soever they may have been, as Sureties for all the Doctors of the Church Universal, that lived in their Age.’ Although Daill´e’s impact was much greater in England than in France, most Restoration divines ⁵ Baxter, Answer to Dodwell, sig. c3v . ⁶ Lee, Kettlewell, 349. ⁷ ‘Leibnitiana siue Meditationes, Obseruationes et Crises uariae Leibnitianae Gallico et Latino sermone expressae. Ex Otio Hanouerano Felleri’ (1st pub. 1718), repr. in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Opera omnia, ed. L. Dutens, 6 vols. (Geneva, 1768), vi/1. 307–8: ‘Ergo ultima Analysis fidei Gallicanae est in antiquitatis ecclesiasticae historicam traditionem.’ Joachim Friedrich Feller was Leibniz’s amanuensis in 1696–8, and the conversations that he recorded date from that period.

Conclusion

401

chose to ignore him and substantially espoused Du Perron’s position. It was the easiest, perhaps even the only, way to give any real content to the appeal to the Fathers, since their doctrinal consensus, understood literally, was impossible to prove—it was, as Rainolds had expressed it, ‘a Phoenix, [which] never will be found’.⁸ This historicizing move also accorded with fundamental trends of the time, such as the stress on general providence rather than on immediate divine interventions. Now that the Canon of Scripture was no longer witnessed by the Spirit in every believer, it had to be based on historical tradition. And this tradition could not be made good unless patristic testimonies were held as reliable. Theologians and scholars had regular exchanges across the Channel, and, in the last decades of the seventeenth century, they were to some extent drawn together by their textual, documentary understanding of tradition, and their devotion to antiquity.⁹ The most famous instance is Bossuet, who thought highly of Bull’s Defensio fidei Nicaenae and repeatedly appealed to it against the Huguenot Pierre Jurieu.¹⁰ Bull’s next work—his demonstration that the ante-Nicene Fathers had not merely believed in Christ’s divinity, but held that belief to be necessary for salvation—Bossuet esteemed ‘admirable’: ‘the subject could not be explained more learnedly and more thoroughly.’ In 1700, he asked Robert Nelson to pass on to Bull ‘the sincere congratulations of the whole French clergy’, which were then holding one of their quinquennial assemblies, for his ‘service to the Catholic Church’.¹¹ On the other side, a collected edition of Jean de Launoy’s ultraGallican letters was published in Cambridge in 1689: the editor, William ⁸ Rainolds, Conference with Hart, 747. ´ ⁹ This was pointed out by B. Neveu, ‘L’Erudition eccl´esiastique du XVIIe si`ecle et ´ la nostalgie de l’antiquit´e chr´etienne’ (1981), repr. in id., Erudition et religion, 365–83, esp. 349–52. ¹⁰ Jacques-B´enigne Bossuet, Premier Avertissement aux Protestans sur les lettres du Ministre Jurieu contre l’Histoire des Variations. Le Christianisme fl´etri, et le Socinianisme autoris´e par ce Ministre (Paris, 1689), 50; L’Antiquit´e ´eclaircie sur l’immutabilit´e de l’Estre divin, et sur l’´egalit´e des trois personnes. L’´etat present des Controverses et de la Religion Protestante, contre la sixi´eme, septi´eme et huiti´eme Lettre du Tableau de M. Jurieu. Sixieme et dernier Avertissement (Paris, 1691), 479 and 579. ¹¹ Bossuet to Robert Nelson, 24 July 1700, BL, Add. MS 4277, fos. 38v –39r (original), about George Bull, Iudicium Ecclesiae catholicae trium primorum seculorum, de necessitate credendi quod Dominus noster Iesus Christus sit uerus Deus (Oxford, 1694): ‘la matiere qu’il traite ne pouvoit estre expliqu´ee plus savamment et plus a fond. c’est ce que je vous supplie de vouloir bien luy faire savoir et en mesme temps les sinceres congratulations de tout le clerg´e de France assembl´e en cette ville pour le service qu’il rend a l’´eglise catholique.’ Bossuet’s letter was published with an English translation in Several Letters which passed between Dr. George Hickes, and a Popish Priest, 227–31, which is the source of the edition in Correspondance de Bossuet, ed. C. Urbain and E. Levesque, 15 vols. (Paris, 1909–25), xii, no. 2020, 322–5. On the continuous use of Bull by Gallican divines, see J.-L. Quantin, ‘La Crise jans´eniste de la th´eologie gallicane: Dom Bernard

402

Conclusion

Saywell, claimed that they were ‘keys to ecclesiastical tradition’, and models of the right method ‘to illuminate Catholic truth’.¹² Despite their shared theological outlook, Anglicans and Gallicans differed on many fundamental points, first of all on the eucharist. Gallicans found the Fathers to be clearly for transubstantiation, except in a few obscure passages that required to be carefully explained.¹³ Anglicans considered transubstantiation so indefensible for any learned person that they could not help suspecting that many Gallicans secretly disbelieved it.¹⁴ There could have been no better illustration of Daill´e’s point that the Fathers were of no use to settle religious controversies. On one major question Anglicans and Gallicans fully agreed: that no foundation at all could be found in antiquity for papal infallibility, and quite a number of historical instances against it. In July 1684, Wake attended a Sorbonne disputation on Pope Honorius and Monothelism, and he noted with great satisfaction that ‘upon the whole the Pope was certainly sufficiently proved guilty of Haeresie, and condemnd by the Council [the third council of Constantinople, sixth ecumenical council], whose authority was asserted superiour to his; and so the infallibility and supremacy of his Holynesse shrewdly attacked’.¹⁵ The formidable patristic evidence marshalled for instance in Launoy’s letters could not prevent dogma, in Cardinal Manning’s famous phrase, from conquering history at the first Vatican council. One reason for the very different conclusions reached by Anglicans and Gallicans in their exploration of antiquity is that they did not mean quite the same thing by ‘antiquity’. Gallicans followed Du Perron and preferred the fourth- and fifth-century Fathers. As Antoine Arnauld put it, ‘the primitive Church is nothing else but the Church in the time of St. Basil, of St. Ambrose, of St. Augustine … which is the time when the Mar´echal et sa Concordance des Saints P`eres (1739)’, Revue b´en´edictine, 106 (1996), 361. See further N. Sykes, From Sheldon to Secker (Cambridge, 1959), 113–21. ¹² Preface to Launoy, Epistolae, sig. b2r–v : ‘Claues Traditionis Ecclesiasticae’; ‘Nec solum in tot Quaestionibus illustrandis, sed etiam in Methodo delineanda, per quam ueritas Catholica in aliis rebus dilucidaretur, rem literariam egregie auxit [Launoius].’ For Saywell’s appreciation of Launoy, see also his Original of all Plots, 187. Daniel Whitby was a subscriber (see his letter to Arthur Charlett, 9 April 1689, Bodl., MS Ballard 34, fo. 16r ). George Hickes subscribed two copies, one for himself and one for Worcester Cathedral library (Hickes to Charlett, 11 March [1690], Bodl., MS Ballard 12, fo. 55r ). ¹³ See esp. vols. ii (1672) and iii (1674) of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La ´ Perp´etuit´e de la foi de l’Eglise catholique touchant l’Eucharistie d´efendue. ¹⁴ See esp. [William Wake], A Discourse of the holy Eucharist, in the two great points of the Real Presence and the Adoration of the Host. In Answer to the two Discourses lately printed at Oxford on this Subject. To which is prefixed a large Historical Preface relating to the same Argument (London, 1687), preface, pp. vi–xxvi. ¹⁵ Wake, ‘Autobiography’, Christ Church, Oxford, MS 541A, p. 95.

Conclusion

403

Church showed itself fully formed in the perfection of its virtue and in the order of its discipline’.¹⁶ Church of England writers consistently baulked at this definition. They agreed with Daill´e that the ante-Nicene Fathers were those to whom one should primarily appeal—their disagreement was whether such an appeal was at all possible. These different chronologies were reflected in attitudes towards Augustine. The seventeenth century in France has been famously characterized as ‘the century of St. Augustine’, and the name is quite appropriate at least for the second half of the century.¹⁷ In the Church of England, by contrast, the status of Augustine went steadily down. That his having confuted Pelagius made him ‘the doctor of grace’, whose authority should prevail over all the earlier Fathers, had been axiomatic for Elizabethan conformists, as it still was for Gallicans. A powerful strand within the Church of England still believed it under the early Stuarts; after 1660, the notion ceased to be part of the doctrinal mainstream. Many seventeenth-century controversies revolved around the reality, and indeed the very possibility, of theological change in the past. Had Athanasius and his followers departed from the previous doctrine of the Trinity? Could the whole Church have changed its belief on the eucharist and started at some point to believe in the Real Presence whereas it had previously believed in the Real Absence (this was how the Port-Royalists put it in their Perp´etuit´e de la foi)? Seventeenth-century divines were also extremely concerned about doctrinal corruption in their own times and took great pains to document the extent to which their opponents were refashioning orthodoxy.¹⁸ They offered however very few explanations of this process, apart from citing the usual perversity of heretics. In his 1688 Histoire des Variations des Eglises protestantes, Bossuet famously argued that ‘variation’ was the special curse of Protestantism. The evolution of the seventeenth-century Church of England, had he considered it (he did not go beyond Elizabeth), would no doubt have struck him as a perfect illustration of his thesis. Since, however, ‘variation’ demonstrably affected Roman Catholicism as well, and in Bossuet’s lifetime, the idea is not very helpful. Why did doctrine change in established Churches where every precaution had apparently been taken ¹⁶ Antoine Arnauld, De la Frequente Communion. Ou les sentimens des Peres, des Papes et des Conciles touchant l’usage des Sacremens de Penitence et d’Eucharistie, sont fidelement ´ exposez (Paris, 1643), preface, sig. iii4r : ‘l’Eglise Primitive n’est autre chose, que l’Eglise du temps de S. Basile, du temps de S. Ambroise, du temps de S. Augustin … qui est le temps o`u l’Eglise a paru toute form´ee au dehors dans la perfection de sa vertu et dans l’ordre de sa discipline.’ ¹⁷ J. Dagens, ‘Le XVIIe si`ecle, si`ecle de saint Augustin’, Cahiers de l’Association ´ Internationale des Etudes Franc¸aises, 3–5 ( July 1953), 31–8. ¹⁸ See e.g. Jenkyn, Celeusma, seu Clamor, which puts in parallel columns, 49–110, ‘Dogmata Orthodoxa Ecclesiae Anglicanae’ and ‘Heterodoxa Nouatorum’.

404

Conclusion

against change? The limits of orthodoxy were defined by officially binding confessions and catechisms, theology students were constantly cautioned against ‘innovation’, heterodox writing and preaching was suppressed by the state, the peril of hidden dissent was guarded against by compulsory subscription at every stage of a clerical career. The Thirty-Nine Articles had loopholes and deliberate ambiguities—the descent into Hell is a case in point. The same could be said of the decrees of the council of Trent, on the direct or indirect jurisdiction of bishops, the necessity of the love of God for the remission of sins, the efficacy of grace. But the ambiguities of official confessions merely left the door open for future doctrinal controversies; they did not explain why the dominant doctrine actually changed. A first, general answer, is that orthodoxy was inherently unstable because it was inscribed within a complex polemical configuration. Arguments that did very well on one front could turn out to be disastrous on another. To stress that the ante-Nicene Fathers had an Arian or Arian-looking christology might be a valid point against the popish reliance on tradition, but it played into Socinians’ hands. No confession in the seventeenth century was wholly immune from this difficulty but it affected the Church of England more than others, because of the accidental incompleteness of its Reformation. Between 1600 and 1640, before the Jansenist crisis, the Gallican Church was largely able to concentrate on Calvinism as its primary adversary. The Church of England during that period had consistently to contend with both Roman Catholics and Puritans. Its orthodoxy was redefined as the respective seriousness of those two threats was reassessed and Laudians decided that Puritanism had to be extirpated up to its Calvinist roots. The mid-seventeenth-century crisis of the British monarchy—to which Laudianism contributed—was also a decisive factor. It became impossible to define the Church of England by its coextensiveness with the nation, as Hooker had done under Elizabeth—‘there is not any man of the Church of England, but the same man is also a member of the Commonwealth, nor any man a member of the Commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England’¹⁹—or as Laud had under James I—‘the same men, which in a temporal respect make the Common-wealth doe in a spirituall make the Church’.²⁰ Episcopalians comforted themselves with their conformity to the past and their linear descent from the Fathers. Laud had died on the scaffold but Ignatius had been resurrected. Even after its restoration, the Church never recovered its official monopoly. Dissent was visible, organized, and, at times, when the Stuart kings thought they could have their way, officially ¹⁹ Hooker, Lawes, VIII. 1. 2 [Works, iii. 319]. ²⁰ William Laud, A Sermon preached before His Majesty, on Tuesday the nineteenth of June, at Wansted. Anno Dom. 1621 (London, 1621), 6. See also 34.

Conclusion

405

tolerated. Antiquity made up for extension, according to a logic that was later to reach its extreme limits in the Nonjuring ‘faithful remnant’.²¹ Another factor, which calls for further investigation, was the development of English patristic scholarship. Not that this was necessarily linked to a high notion of patristic authority. The Laudian Montagu as well as the sceptical Hales began their career as contributors to Sir Henry Savile’s Greek Chrysostom, the first major work of patristic scholarship to be published in England. Savile was careful, partly for commercial reasons, to ban theological controversy from his edition. In his dedication to James I, he congratulated him for paying to antiquity ‘that respect that it is fair to pay to it and that it requests for itself ’: a studiously ambiguous expression but one which, for a Protestant reader, amounted to a discreet reminder that the Fathers had made Scripture the supreme judge of their own writings.²² Restoration patristics, though, were clearly rooted in a theology of tradition: scholars like Fell, Pearson, Cave, or Dodwell collated manuscripts, engaged in critical discussions, and reconstructed the chronology of the first centuries because they thought that antiquity was a source of religious truth. The converse was also true. It needed the personal and familial commitment to religious enquiry of Lord Falkland—and also his detachment as a layman and an aristocrat—‘to endure endlesse volumes of commentaries, the harsh Greeke of Evagrius, and the as hard Latine of Irenaeus, and be pained by distinguishing between different senses and various lections’, and eventually to conclude that patristic tradition was not reliable.²³ It was already noticed at the time that scholars were prone to magnify their own pursuits, and, in a confessional age, the best way to assert the prominence of one’s field was to make it the touchstone of confessional disputes. When Sixtinus Amama, Professor of Hebrew at Franeker University, claimed ‘that the chiefest Errors in Popery proceed from the ignorance of the Hebrew idiom, the Man spoke according to his Study and Art’.²⁴ He was campaigning, and quite successfully so, for the knowledge of Hebrew to be made ²¹ On this duality as a structural tension of Church of England orthodoxy, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy’, in Lund (ed.), Margins of Orthodoxy, 33–54. ²² Ioannis Chrysostomi Opera Graece, i, sig. ¶2r : ‘Qui uenerandae antiquitati eam tribuis, quam tribuere aequum est, et ipsa sibi concedi postulat, reuerentiam.’ Compare James I’s own profession of faith, Apologia pro Iuramento Fidelitatis, praefatio monitoria, sep. pagination, 38: ‘Patribus autem eam uenerationem exhibeo, qua nec ipsi maiorem optarent, nec Iesuitae parem unquam detulerunt.’ ²³ Falkland, ‘Of the Infallibilitie of the Church of Rome’, 12. ²⁴ John Edwards, A Free Discourse concerning Truth and Error, especially in Matters of Religion (London, 1701), 380. Edwards gives no reference but the idea often recurs in Sixtinus Amama, Anti-Barbarus Biblicus (Amsterdam, 1628). See e.g. 81.

406

Conclusion

an essential requirement for all future Dutch pastors.²⁵ It would be naivety parading as demystification to claim that his main point was that professors of Hebrew should be paid all due respects, perhaps even a higher salary, but the implication was there. When Scaliger famously said that ‘religious disputes had no other cause but ignorance of grammar’, he was asserting the qualification of people like Casaubon and himself—‘critics’ whom their adversaries put down as mere ‘grammarians’—to handle theological questions.²⁶ In England, especially during the Restoration, the exaltation of patristic learning as the key to the right understanding of Scripture had a deep social significance. This was tantamount to saying that religious truth was to be preserved and dispensed by professionals, who had acquired esoteric knowledge through a lengthy apprenticeship. Elizabethan presbyterianism had appeared at one stage to offer exactly this: an expression of ‘the professional pride and self-esteem of a close-knit group of university-trained intellectuals’.²⁷ But presbyterianism failed to offer any viable alternative to the career structure of the established Church. Elizabethan conformists even feared, and with some reason, that presbyterianism would actually lead to the expropriation by the laity of the remaining wealth of the Church and to a further degradation of the status of the clergy.²⁸ Patristic episcopalianism was much better suited to clerical aspirations. This massive patristic investment, as it were, brought undeniable rewards. It boosted the self-confidence of the episcopalian clergy and helped them through difficult times, during the Interregnum and again under James II. The new Anglican identity was attractive and plausible enough to survive in some quarters of the Church of England until the nineteenth century, when it was taken up by Tractarians. In that late, somewhat modified version, it is still alive today. This reinvention, though, came at a cost. Its damaging effects on the relationship between the Church of England and continental Protestant Churches are difficult to assess in strictly historical terms. One may only note that they worried many contemporaries, although others clearly thought that the price was worth paying. It was said of Hickes that he was ‘better pleas’d that foreign Divines should speak well of our Constitution than we of theirs, though I am apt to think he would not be ²⁵ J. Platt, ‘Sixtinus Amama (1593–1629): Franeker Professor and Citizen of the Republic of Letters’, in G. T. Jensma, F. R. H. Smit, and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585 –1811: Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool (Leeuwarden, 1985), 236–48. ²⁶ Scaligerana ou bons mots, rencontres agreables, et remarques judicieuses et sc¸avantes de J. Scaliger (Cologne, 1695), 177: ‘Porro quicunque Doctos uiros, Grammaticos pour tout potage uocant, sunt ipsi indoctissimi, idque semper obseruabis. Non aliunde dissidia in Religione pendent, quam ab ignoratione Grammaticae.’ ²⁷ Lake, Moderate Puritans, 88–90. ²⁸ Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 114–19.

Conclusion

407

very much displeas’d if they treated us ill, provided that would induce us to speak less respectfully of them’.²⁹ But it became obvious in the altered circumstances of the 1690s that the appeal to the Fathers failed to provide the Church of England itself with an enduring common ground and rather exacerbated inner tensions. The Nonjuring crisis and then the Trinitarian controversy opened a long series of intestine quarrels, which were largely conducted in the shared language of antiquity, but which resulted in making the Restoration style of patristic theology the preserve of what was now called the High Church—a party within the Church of England.³⁰ The Calvinist John Edwards so much resented this that he regretted the use of the Fathers in old Protestant apologetics: I know there are some excellent Writers of the Protestant Communion, as Whitaker, Jewel, Willet, Forbes, Stillingfleet, Wake, and others who have endeavoured to confute the Papists from the Fathers Writings, and they have done this with some good Success; but I conceive not with full Satisfaction to those that are Impartial Readers of the Fathers; for such Persons can’t but know, that the Determinations and Solutions given by the Fathers do often contradict one an other, and sometimes they favour, yea plainly assert the Doctrines of the Church of Rome, and at other times they speak the Language of our Reformers. So that we can’t rely upon the Writings of these Ancients in the Points controverted between us and them.³¹

Antiquity proved a Pandora’s box. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, it had been a conservative reference, meant to legitimize the existing structures and liturgy of the established Church. Laudians began to change the agenda and to invoke the Fathers to restore disappeared or disused observances, which, for many contemporaries, were simply innovations. The tiny community of Nonjuring ‘Usagers’ in the eighteenth century pushed liturgical antiquarianism to the limit, even defending as an apostolic tradition ‘the equal Necessity of Infant Communion with that of Infant Baptism’—for so long an instance against tradition.³² The main result of their uncompromising stance (‘for I can never with a good conscience comply with any thing contrary to the Catholick Tradition of ²⁹ Letter of George Smalridge to Arthur Charlett, 22 April 1708, Bodl., MS Ballard 7, fo. 16r–v . ³⁰ J. C. Findon, ‘The Nonjurors and the Church of England, 1689–1716’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1978); Goldie, ‘Nonjurors’; D. W. Dockrill, ‘The Authority of the Fathers in the Great Trinitarian Debates of the Sixteen Nineties’, Studia patristica, 18/4 (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1990), 335–47; G. V. Bennett, ‘University, Society and Church 1688–1714’, in L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, v (Oxford, 1986), 393–400. ³¹ Edwards, Remains, 116. ³² Thomas Deacon to Thomas Brett, 25 September 1731, Bodl., MS Eng. Th. c. 31, p. 273.

408

Conclusion

Infant Communion’) was to split irremediably ‘the faithful remnant’, but it was a logical, if suicidal, outcome.³³ Middleton seized upon it to illustrate the evil consequences of the appeal to the Church Fathers: Tradition, wherever it is admitted into a partnership of autority with the Scriptures, instead of serving as it’s handmaid, as some of our Divines affect to call it, has always acted the Mistress, taken the lead, and got the ascendant so far, as to eclipse the credit of the written word, reduce it as it were to a dead letter, and even banish it at last from the use of the people.³⁴

Middleton affected to speak the language of Protestant sola Scriptura but he was actually a free-thinker.³⁵ The exaltation of the Fathers as interpreters of Scripture did not only provoke charges of Romanism, it exactly fitted the representation of ‘priestcraft’ as a usurpation, all the more so as many of the doctrines actually propounded on the Fathers’ authority were of a markedly sacerdotalist character.³⁶ Toland, who defined popery as ‘the Clergy’s assuming a Right to think for the Laity’,³⁷ complained that ‘a Layman is always referr’d to ’em [the Fathers] when he starts any Difficulties, which makes him sooner acquiesce and swallow what he cannot chew than get Information at so dear a rate’.³⁸ Burnet’s testimony is by no means unbiased but he had a point when he deplored that ³³ Deacon to Brett, 25 September 1731, Bodl., MS Eng. Th. 31, p. 273. See H. Broxap, A Biography of Thomas Deacon, the Manchester Non-Juror (Manchester, 1911); id., The Later Non-Jurors (Cambridge, 1924), esp. 35–65 and 199–203. R. D. Cornwall, ‘The Later Non-Jurors and the Theological Basis of the Usages Controversy’, Anglican Theological Review, 75 (1993), 166–86, contributes nothing new. ³⁴ Conyers Middleton, Reflections on two Pamphlets lately published against Dr. Middleton’s Introductory Discourse.... With a Preface to these Remarks, Giving a brief Account of a certain Book, which professes to exhibit a full, true, and comprehensive View of Christianity, etc. (London, 1748), p. xxxv, commenting on [Thomas Deacon], A full, true and comprehensive view of Christianity, in two catechisms (London, 1747). ³⁵ This has been denied by Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 75, but, even apart from the unmistakable hints in Middleton’s published writings, see his dissertation on ‘the power of miracles to prove a religion’, which was suppressed after his death (BL, Add. MS 32459, fo. 156r ) but a draft of which is preserved ibid., fos. 21r –25v : it argues that Christ’s miracles have no better evidence than pretended pagan ones. ³⁶ See M. Goldie, ‘Ideology’, in T. Ball, J. Farr, and R. L. Hanson (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989), 266–91; id., ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 209–31; J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660 –1730 (Cambridge, 1992). ³⁷ [John Toland], An Appeal to Honest People against Wicked Priests: or, the very Heathen Laity’s Declarations for Civil Obedience and Liberty of Conscience, contrary to the Rebellious and Persecuting Principles of some of the old Christian Clergy; With an Application to the Corrupt Part of the Priests of this present Time, publish’d on Occasion of Dr. Sacheverell’s last Sermon (London, n.d. [1713]), 38. For Toland’s professed ‘soverain contemt for most of the Fathers’, see his Tetradymus (London, 1720), pp. xv–xvi. ³⁸ [John Toland], Amyntor: or, a Defence of Milton’s Life (London, 1699), 16.

Conclusion

409

‘Dodwell’s extravagant notions’ on Church authority, the priesthood, and the sacraments, ‘which have been too much drunk in by the clergy in my time, have weakened the power of the church, and soured men’s minds more against it, than all the books wrote, or attempts made against it, could ever have done’.³⁹ The more Anglican divines overmastered their opponents in the historical field, the greater the risk that these opponents would, as it were, refuse to play by the rules. The easiest answer to patristic apologetics was to reject the authority of antiquity. Free-thinkers did so systematically in the eighteenth century. Daill´e’s Use of the Fathers then entered the final stage of its career, as a catalogue of the errors and frauds of ‘priestcraft’ in all ages: How unhappy were we of the Laity, had we not the Reason and Nature of things (which no Priests can alter) to depend on; and were intirely oblig’d to take our religious sentiments from Men, who as far as we have any account of things, have, even from the earliest times, not scrupl’d to forge not only whole passages, but whole books, and left nothing entire on which they cou’d lay their foul hands? Which, as that great and honest Critick Daill´e observes, ‘has rendered the writings and venerable monuments of antiquity so imbroil’d and perplex’d, that it will be the hardest matter in the world for any Man to make out any clear or perfect discovery of those things, which so many several Artists have endeavour’d to conceal from us’.⁴⁰

Such comments, of course, were really aimed at the writings of the New Testament. The association, which Anglican theologians and scholars had so much laboured to tighten, between the Canon of Scripture and the credit of the Fathers was turned against the truth of Christianity. An important school of eighteenth-century apologetics therefore considered that the Fathers were a liability and had better be thrown away in order to save the essentials.⁴¹ ³⁹ Burnet, History of my own Time, vi. 194. ⁴⁰ Matthew Tindal, Christianity as old of the Creation: or, the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature (London, 1731), 146, quoting Daill´e, Use of the Fathers, book I, 68 [= Employ des Peres, 112–13]; for other references, see 124, 140, 144, 207. Hence the complaint of the Anglican apologist Zachary Brooke, fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, that Daill´e’s ‘very honest and laudable design of doing a singular service to the cause of true Religion’ had ‘oftentimes of late years been perverted to the base purposes of infidelity’ (An Examination of Dr. Middleton’s Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers of the Primitive Church (Cambridge, 1750), 208). Daill´e was also appealed to by Unitarians: see [John Disney], A Letter to the Students in Divinity of the Diocese of Chester (London, 1792), 9. ⁴¹ Typical examples include Edmund Law, Considerations on the state of the world with regard to the theory of religion … Being the substance of some sermons preach’d before the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1745); [John Douglas], The Criterion: or, Miracles Examined (London, 1754), 362–400.

410

Conclusion

Moreover, there was a ‘grey area’ where radical orthodoxy was no longer discernible from extreme heterodoxy.⁴² When outraged critics accused him of Socinianism for his views on the soul, Dodwell protested: ‘the Topick insisted on by me for proving the Natural Mortality of Humane Souls is not Reason, which might have been used by Socinus as well as me. I have urged Authorities, and those of that kind which were very little regarded by Socinus.’⁴³ This was quite true but did not make the threat less serious. The question of ‘the orthodox sources of disbelief ’ will best be considered in relation to patristic scholarship, since it was works of scholarship such as Dodwell’s history of the Canon that free-thinkers mined for arguments.⁴⁴ Concentration on the ante-Nicene Fathers made historical enquiry especially dangerous for received Christianity, many fundamental doctrines of which had been historically defined by the great doctors and councils of the fourth and fifth centuries—although the Jansenist exclusive devotion to Augustine had as damaging consequences for the Roman Catholic Church. Discrepancies were bound to appear. Retrospective orthodoxy might have some partial success in glossing them over, but some were too glaring to be denied, all the more so as a number of scholarly theologians felt it a conscientious duty to point them out. In the same way as radical orthodoxy turned into heterodoxy, the exploration of the Christian past became a major source of doctrinal innovation. Dodwell recognized that ‘the seeming Novelty of the truly Ancient Notions advanced by’ him might ‘be taken for Novelty indeed by them who take lower Antiquity for the Standard of Antiquity’.⁴⁵ Jansen was equally aware that true Augustinian doctrine, ‘because of its ancient novelty, so to speak, might offend and scandalize the doctors of our age who are ignorant of its antiquity’.⁴⁶ Neither refrained from publishing what they considered to be uncontrovertibly warranted by authoritative texts. Jansen was confident ⁴² I borrow the expression from A. Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), 23 and 411. See also H. Barr and A. M. Hutchison (eds.), Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson ( Turnhout, 2005). ⁴³ Dodwell, Preliminary Defence, part II, sep. paginated, 60. ⁴⁴ John Toland, Nazarenus, ed. J. Champion (Oxford, 1999) (see editor’s introduction, esp. 49–67); J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696 –1722 (Manchester, 2003), 190–212; Levine, ‘From Tradition to History’, 200; Quantin, ‘Anglican Scholarship gone Mad?’, 308. ⁴⁵ Dodwell, Preliminary Defence, sig. A5v . ⁴⁶ Cornelius Jansen, Augustinus (Louvain, 1640), ii, ‘De statu naturae lapsae’, l. IV, c. XXVII, col. 675: ‘quae [Augustini sententia] uetusta quasi nouitate nostri temporis Doctores uetustatis eius inscios offenderet scandaloque perturbaret.’

Conclusion

411

that the Pope, as soon as he saw the truth ‘fortified by the weapons with which the Fathers defended it’, would gladly embrace it.⁴⁷ Dodwell was ‘in hopes that God will not suffer his own Cause of retrieving Primitive Doctrine and Discipline … to be overborn with Popular Clamors and Prejudices’.⁴⁸ ⁴⁷ Ibid., col. 676.

⁴⁸ Dodwell, Scripture Account, 293.

Chronology 1533 1534 1545 1546 1547 1549 1551–2 1552 1553 1558 1559

1559–60 1561 1563 1565–6 1571 1572 1575 1577

Thomas Cranmer Archbishop of Canterbury Act of Supremacy Opening session of the council of Trent Fourth session of the council of Trent (April); decree on Scripture and traditions Death of Henry VIII (28 January); Edward VI King of England First Book of Common Prayer (March); Oxford disputation on the eucharist (May) Work on canon law reform (Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum) Second Book of Common Prayer (October) Publication of the Forty-Two Articles (May); death of Edward VI (6 July); Mary I proclaimed Queen in London (19 July) Death of Mary (17 November); Elizabeth Queen of England Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity (April); Matthew Parker appointed Archbishop of Canterbury ( July); John Calvin publishes in Geneva the final edition of his Institutio religionis christianae Jewel’s challenge Laurence Humphrey Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford Thirty-Nine Articles adopted by convocation (February); final session of the council of Trent (December) Vestiarian Controversy Final version of the Thirty-Nine Articles adopted by convocation and promulgated; A Booke of Certaine Canons published John Field and Thomas Wilcox, An Admonition to the Parliament; beginning of the presbyterian controversy Edmund Grindal appointed Archbishop of Canterbury Archbishop Grindal sequestered

Chronology 1580 1581 1583 1586–93 1593 1595 1597–1611 1598–1603 1603 1604

1606–10 1610 1611 1615 1618 1618–19 1622

1624 1625 1626 1628 1632

413

William Whitaker Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge Edmund Campion, Rationes decem John Whitgift appointed Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes de controuersiis christianae fidei, aduersus huius temporis haereticos Richard Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, books I–IV; Thomas Bilson, The Perpetual Governement of Christes Church Controversy over predestination at Cambridge; Lambeth Articles (November); John Overall Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge (December) Controversy over Christ’s descent into Hell Controversy over John Darrell’s Puritan exorcisms Death of Elizabeth (24 March); James I King of England Hampton Court conference (14–18 January); Book of Canons approved by southern convocation (May); Richard Bancroft appointed Archbishop of Canterbury (October) Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance Arrival of Isaac Casaubon in England (October) George Abbot appointed Archbishop of Canterbury (February); Authorized Version published Irish Articles Bohemian rebellion; beginning of the Thirty Years War Synod of Dort (November–May) John Knight’s Oxford sermon on the right of resistance (April); Laud’s conference with Fisher (May); David Pareus’ commentary on the Epistle to the Romans burnt in Cambridge, London, and Oxford ( June) Richard Montagu, A new Gagg for an old Goose (February) Death of James I (27 March); Charles I King of England; Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem (May) York House conference (February) Royal declaration against controversies (November) Jean Daill´e, Traict´e de l’employ des Saincts Peres

414 1633 1637 1639 1640 1641 1642 1643 1644 1645 1646 1648 1649 1651 1653 1655 1658 1659 1660

1661 1662 1663 1664 1670

Chronology William Laud appointed Archbishop of Canterbury (August) Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne sentenced by the Star Chamber ( June); Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants a Safe way to Salvation (end of the year) First Bishops’ War Second Bishops’ War (August); Long Parliament meets (3 November); Laud impeached (18 December) Debates on the Root and Branch bill (May–August) Outbreak of the Civil War; Charles I raises his standard at Nottingham (22 August) Westminster Assembly meets (1 July) Laud’s trial (12 March–11 October) Laud executed (10 January); Ussher’s edition of Ignatius’ letters published (March) Surrender of Oxford to the Parliament ( June); formal abolition of episcopacy (October) Westminster Confession of Faith approved by Parliament ( June); Pride’s Purge (December) Execution of Charles I (30 January); Commonwealth proclaimed (19 May) Henry Hammond, Dissertationes quatuor Dissolution of the Rump (20 April); Barebones Parliament ( July–December); establishment of the Protectorate (12 December) Jean Daill´e, De usu Patrum Death of Oliver Cromwell (3 September); Savoy Declaration of the Independent churches (12 October) Richard Cromwell resigns (25 May) Long Parliament restored (February–March); Declaration of Breda (4 April); Convention Parliament meets (25 April); restoration of Charles II (May); Declaration of Worcester House (25 October); Edward Stillingfleet, Irenicum (November) Savoy Conference (April–July); Cavalier Parliament meets (8 May); Peter Gunning Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge ( June) Act of Uniformity (19 May); ejection of presbyterian ministers (24 August) Gilbert Sheldon appointed Archbishop of Canterbury Conventicle Act Conventicle Act renewed (March); Herbert Thorndike, De ratione ac iure finiendi controuersias Ecclesiae (Easter Term)

Chronology 1672 1673 1677 1678

1679–81 1679 1680

1681 1681–5 1682 1683 1685

1686 1687 1688

415

Declaration of Indulgence (March); John Pearson, Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatii; Matthew Scrivener, Apologia pro S. Ecclesiae Patribus (Easter Term) Declaration of Indulgence withdrawn (8 March); first Test Act William Sancroft appointed Archbishop of Canterbury (December) Popish Plot ‘revealed’ (August); second Test Act (November); Henry Dodwell, Separation of Churches from Episcopal Government, as practised by the present Non-Conformists, proved Schismatical (December) Exclusion Crisis Cavalier Parliament dissolved ( January); first Exclusion Parliament meets (March); assassination of Archbishop Sharp (May); first Exclusion Parliament dissolved ( July) Whig ‘monster petition’ in London ( January); Edward Stillingfleet, The Mischief of Separation (11 May); George Hickes, The Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised (11 July); second Exclusion Parliament meets (21 October) Second Exclusion Parliament dissolved ( January); third Exclusion Parliament meets in Oxford and is dissolved (March) Tory Reaction John Fell’s edition of Cyprian published Rye House Plot revealed ( June); Oxford decree ‘against certain Pernicious Books and Damnable Doctrines’ (21 July); Algernon Sidney executed (December) Death of Charles II (6 February); James II King of England; Monmouth’s rebellion ( June–July); Louis XIV revokes the edict of Nantes (October); George Bull, Defensio Fidei Nicaenae Bishop Compton suspended (September); Earl of Rochester resigns from the Treasury (December) Declaration of Indulgence (4 April); affair of the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford (April–November) Declaration of Indulgence reissued (27 April); seven bishops committed to the Tower (8 June) and acquitted (30 June); landing of William of Orange (5 November); flight of James II (23 December)

416 1689

1690

Chronology William III and Mary II proclaimed King and Queen of England (13 February); Toleration Act (24 May); Nonjuring bishops and clergy suspended (1 August); Henry Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum (August?); failure of comprehension (December) Nonjuring bishops and clergy deprived (1 February)

Bibliography PRIMARY SOURCES I. Manuscript sources Amsterdam, Universiteitsbiblioteek RK, III E 8–10 (correspondence of Isaac Vossius). Cambridge, St John’s College MS S. 60: ‘The Right Usage of the Fathers’. Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.1.29: miscellaneous theological papers, chiefly by John Overall. Add. MS 7113: Samuel Clarke’s papers. Dublin, Trinity College MS 6: Catalogue of Ussher’s library as given to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1666. London, British Library Add. MS 4277: collections of Ralph Thoresby, including letter of Bossuet to Robert Nelson (original). Add. MS 21078–82: notebooks of Henry Dodwell. Add. MS 29546: papers collected by George Harbin, including ‘A Copy of a Letter written by Dr Gunning bishop of Ely to his Grace of Canterbury concerning Bishop Fell’s preface before the edition of S. Cyprian’. Add. MS 32459: essays and other papers of Conyers Middleton. Burney MS 362, papers of M´eric Casaubon, including an account of the York House Conference. Burney MS 363–6: correspondence of Isaac Casaubon. Cotton MS Julius C.iii: original letters to Sir Robert Cotton. Harleian MS 6866: theological tracts, including an account of the York House conference. Harleian MS 7019: miscellaneous papers, including ‘Innovations in Religion and Abuses in Government in the University of Cambridge’. Harleian MS 7038: Thomas Baker’s collections relating to Cambridge University. Lansdowne MS 960: commonplace book of White Kennett when a young man. London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 935: miscellaneous collections of Edmund Gibson, including an account of the York House conference. MS 943: a collection of papers formerly belonging to Archbishop Laud, together with papers of William Chillingworth. MS 1741: letters to Edmund Gibson.

418

Bibliography

MS 1742: papers of Edmund Gibson, including John Cosin, ‘The Differences in the Chiefe points of Religion between the Roman Catholiques and us of the Church of England, Together with the agreements which wee for our parts profess and are ready to embrace if they for theirs, were as ready to accord with us in the same’. London, Warburg Institute Walker Archive, files A 6. 1–11: D. P. Walker’s notes for a book on the cessation of miracles. London, Doctor Williams’s Library MS 59: correspondence of Richard Baxter. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ballard 7: letter of George Smalridge to Arthur Charlett (1704–19). MS Ballard 12: letters of George Hickes to Arthur Charlett (1684–1715). MS Ballard 34: correspondence of Arthur Charlett, including letters from Daniel Whitby. MS Barlow 54, miscellaneous papers, including ‘Oratio pro Defunctis. That we maie and ought to pray for the dead without any reference to Popish Purgatory. By Dr Page fellow of All Souls Coll. Oxon. 1635’. MS Bodley 878: papers relating to the formation of the library of Christopher Lord Hatton. MS Casaubon 3: notes of Isaac Casaubon, chiefly on Baronius’ Annales. MS Casaubon 14: notes of Isaac Casaubon, chiefly on Baronius’ Annales. MS Casaubon 28: notebook of Isaac Casaubon. MSS Cherry 22–3: copies by Francis Cherry of correspondence of Henry Dodwell. MS Eng. hist. e. 183: Henry Dodwell, A Cautionary Discourse of Schism with a particular regard to the case of Bishops who are suspended for refusing to take the New Oath (copy). MSS Eng. lett. c. 28–9: correspondence of Henry Dodwell, 1675–1710. MS Eng. lett. e. 94: guard-book of letters, 17th–20th centuries. MS Eng. misc. e 4: papers relating to George Hickes, including Hilkiah Bedford, ‘An account of the several works of the very Revd Dr George Hickes Dean of Worcester, with the time and occasion of publishing each of them’. MS Eng. misc. f. 5, ‘Memoirs of the Life of Dr Hen: Maurice communicated by Dr Wynne, Chancellor of St Asaph, 1742’. MS Eng. th. c. 22: [George Hickes], ‘A reply to a pamphlet entituled The Bishop of Sarums vindication or Reflections upon a pamphlet entituled Some Discourses upon Dr. Burnet, and Dr. Tillotson, etc. By the Authour of those discourses’ (autograph). MS Eng. th. c. 31: papers of Thomas Brett. MS Rawl. C. 601: notebook of Robert Fleming, including ‘Librorum duorum Ioan. Dallaei De Usu Patrum, ad sedandas Controuersias, inter Pontificios et Protestantes, Synopsis’. MS Rawl. D 373: miscellaneous theological papers, chiefly relating to the Nonjurors, including Henry Dodwell, A Cautionary Discourse of Schism with a particular regard to the case of Bishops who are suspended for refusing to take the New Oath (autograph).

Bibliography

419

MS Rawl. D. 692: miscellaneous papers, including John Overall, ‘super quaestione, Utrum animae Patrum ante Christum defunctorum in caelo fuerant?’ MS Rawl. D. 857: miscellaneous papers, including ‘Excerpta ex oratione doctissimi Overalli ad filios suos’. MS Rawl. D. 1001: ‘Decretum Uniuersitatis Oxoniensis damnans propositiones Neotericorum infrascriptas siue Iesuitarum siue Puritanorum, siue aliorum cuiuscunque scriptorum’ (25 June 1622). MS Rawl. letters 2: letters to Thomas Hearne. MS Rawl. letters 25: letters from Henry Dodwell to Thomas Hearne. MS Rawl. letters 89: letters to, with drafts of letters from, James Ussher. MS Rawl. letters 94: letters to Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely. MS Sancroft 109: extracts and notes by Richard Holdsworth from the works of Basil of Caesarea. MS Sancroft 117: extracts and notes by Richard Holdsworth from various patristic works, including Vincent of L´erins’s Commonitorium. MSS Smith 49, 50, 54: letters to Thomas Smith. MS Smith 73: correspondence of John Bois. MS Tanner 28: collection of letters and papers during the year 1688. MS Tanner 32: collection of letters and papers during the year 1684. MS Tanner 39: collection of letters and papers chiefly during the year 1678. MS Tanner 70–1: collection of letters and papers during the years 1629–36, including letters of James Ussher to Samuel Ward. MS Tanner 233: papers of William Chillingworth. MS Tanner 290: miscellanies, including John Fell’s intended dedication of his edition of Cyprian. MS Tanner 303: miscellanies, including John Cosin, ‘The sum and substance of the conferences lately had at York House concerning Mr. Mountague’s books’. MS Wood F. 42: letters to Anthony Wood. Oxford, Balliol College MS 346: Henry Dodwell, A Cautionary Discourse of Schism with a particular regard to the case of Bishops who are suspended for refusing to take the New Oath (copy). Oxford, Christ Church MS 541A: William Wake, ‘Autobiography’. Wake Papers, xviii: papers of William Wake. Oxford, The Queen’s College MS 247: miscellaneous papers, including ‘Some reasons objected against Dr Pages book manuscript, concerning the catholique rule of Expounding Scripture, which rule he conceives the consent of fathers of the first four Centuries’. MS 279: papers of Thomas Barlow, including correspondence with Henry Dodwell on the Athanasian Creed. Oxford, St Edmund Hall (deposited in the Bodleian library) MS St Edmund Hall 10: correspondence of Henry Dodwell. MS St Edmund Hall 14: correspondence of Henry Dodwell.

420

Bibliography

MS St Edmund Hall 15: correspondence of Henry Dodwell. MS St Edmund Hall 32: Henry Dodwell, ‘Dissertatio. De uero huius Epistolae, quae Barnabam Auctorem praefert, Auctore Barnaba. Ad Cl. Virum Joannem Millium S. Th. Prof. Aulae Sanct-Edmondianae Principalem’ [1691]. Oxford University Archives register Tb: Register of Convocation 1671–83. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale de France Franc¸ais 17684: correspondence of Dom Luc d’Achery, including drafts of letters to Sir Joseph Williamson. Latin 8596: ‘Isaaci Vossii ad Claudium Salmasium epistolae’. Rome, Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Index, Diari, viii (1682–8). Index, Protocolli T2; Protocolli V2 (censura of Fell’s Cyprian). Rome, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana Barberinianus latinus 2181: correspondence of Lucas Holstenius. Stuttgart, W¨urttembergische Landesbibliothek MS Cod. hist. 8◦ 8 (Andreas Adam Hochstetter’s journal of his literary journey in England, 1690–1). II. Printed Sources 1. Editions and translations of patristic and other ancient texts (including medieval authors who were not considered as Fathers strictly speaking but might be cited as authorities) Ælfric, A Testimonie of antiquitie, shewing the auncient fayth in the Church of England touching the sacrament of the body and bloude of the Lord here publikely preached, and also receaved in the Saxons tyme, above 600 yeares agoe (London, [1566]). Alan of Lille, Opus aduersus Haereticos, et Valdenses, qui postea Albigenses dicti, ed. Jean-Baptiste Masson (Paris, 1612). Antidotum contra diversas omnium fere saeculorum haereses, ed. Ioannes Sichardus (Basle, 1528). Augustine, Opera omnia, ed. Erasmus, 10 vols. (Basle, 1528–9). Opera tomis decem comprehensa, ed. Louvain divines, 10 vols. (Antwerp, 1576–7). Opera, tomis decem comprehensa … Additis nonnullis aliis homiliis Lutetiae nunc primum editis (Paris, 1586). Of the Citie of God: with the learned Comments of Io. Lod. Vives. Englished first by J.H. (London, 1610). Of the Citie of God: with the learned Comments of Io. Ludovicus Vives. Englished first by J.H. And now in this second Edition compared with the Latine Originall, and in very many places corrected and amended (London, 1620). The Judgment of the Learned and Pious St. Augustine, concerning penal lawes against Conventicles, and for unity in Religion. Deliver’d in his 48th Epistle to Vincentius (London, 1670).

Bibliography

421

´ Conformit´e de la conduite de l’Eglise de France, Pour ramener les Protestans: ´ ´ avec celle de l’Eglise d’Afrique, pour ramener les Donatistes a` l’Eglise Catholique (Paris, 1685). Confessions, rev. trans. E. B. Pusey (Oxford, 1838). Barnabas, Epistola Catholica. Accessit S. Hermae Viri Apostolici Pastor, ed. John Fell (Oxford, 1685). et al., SS. Patrum qui temporibus apostolicis floruerunt; Barnabae, Clementis, Hermae, Ignatii, Polycarpi; opera edita et inedita, vera et suppositicia. Un`a cum Clementis, Ignatii, Polycarpi Actis atque Martyriis. Iohannes Baptista Cotelerius Societatis Sorbonicae Theologus, ex MSS. Codicibus correxit, ac eruit; Versionibus, Notis et Indicibus illustrauit, 2 vols. (Paris, 1672). et al., SS. Patrum Apostolicorum Barnabae, Hermae, Clementis, Ignatii, Polycarpi, Opera genuina, ed. Richard Russell, 2 vols. (London, 1746). Basil of Caesarea, En amice lector, Thesaurum damus inaestimabilem, D. Basilium uere magnum sua lingua disertissime loquentem quem hactenus habuisti Latine balbutientem, ed. Erasmus (Basle, 1532). Opus argutum ac pium De Spiritu sancto, ad Amphilochium, trans. Erasmus (Basle, 1532). Opera omnia, ed. Fronton Du Duc, 2 vols. (Paris, 1618). Clement of Rome, … Clementis ad Corinthios epistola prior. Ex laceris reliquiis uetustissimi exemplaris Bibliothecae Regiae, eruit, lacunas expleuit, Latine uertit, et notis breuioribus illustrauit Patricius Junius (Oxford, 1633). Epistolae duae ad Corinthios. His subnexae sunt epistolae aliquot Singulares, uel nunc primum editae, uel non ita facile obuiae, ed. Paul Colomi`es (London, 1687). Ad Corinthios epistolae duae, ed. Henry Wotton (Cambridge, 1718). Cyprian, Opera, ed. Erasmus (Basle, 1521). Opera … Editio ultima prioribus emendatior: cui nunc primum accesserunt … Responsiones passim interiectae ad ea quae Pamelius pro dogmatum Pontificiorum confirmatione ex Cypriano et ueteribus Theologis protulit, ed. Simon Goulart ([Geneva], 1593). Opera Recognita et Illustrata, ed. John Fell (Oxford, 1682). Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical lectures, trans. R. W. Church (Oxford, 1839). Epiphanius, Contra octoaginta haereses opus, Pannarium, siue arcula, aut capsula Medica appellatum, trans. Ianus Cornarius (Paris, 1544). … Contra octoginta haereses Opus eximium, Panarium siue capsula Medica appellatum, ed. Ioannes Oporinus (Basle, 1544). Opera omnia, ed. Denis Petau, 2 vols. (Paris, 1622). Eusebius of Caesarea, Chronica trium illustrium auctorum Eusebii Pamphili episcopi Caesariensis D. Hieronymo interprete. D. Eusebii Hieronymi presbyteri. D. Prosperi Aquitanici episcopi Regiensis ab Abraham ad an. Christi 449, ed. Arnauld Pontac (Bordeaux, 1604). The Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories of the first six hundred yeares after Christ, wrytten in the Greeke tongue by three learned Historiographers, Eusebius, Socrates, and Evagrius. Whereunto is annexed Dorotheus Bishop of Tyrus, of the lives of the Prophets, Apostles and 70 Disciples, trans. Meredith Hanmer (London, 1577).

422

Bibliography

Eutychius, … Ecclesiae suae Origines, ed. John Selden (London, 1642). Geoffrey of Monmouth, Britanniae utriusque regum et principum Origo et gesta insignia (Paris, 1508). Gregory of Nyssa, … Ad Eustathiam, Ambrosiam et Basilissam epistola, ed. Isaac Casaubon (Paris, 1606). Opera omnia quae reperiri potuerunt, Graece et Latine nunc primum ex Mnss. codd. in lucem edita, ed. Fronton Du Duc, 2 vols. (Paris, 1615). Appendix ad Sancti Gregorii Episcopi Nysseni Opera Graece et Latine, non ita pridem euulgata, ed. Jakob Gretser (Paris, 1618). Historiae Anglicanae scriptores X, ed. Roger Twysden (London, 1652). Ignatius of Antioch, … Quae exstant omnia, in duos libros distincta, quorum prior continet epistolas genuinas, alter supposititias, cum XII Exercitationibus in eundem Ignatium pro antiquitate Catholica aduersus Baronium et Bellarminum, ed. Nicolas Vedel (Geneva, 1623). Polycarpi et Ignatii Epistolae … Accessit et Ignatianarum Epistolarum uersio antiqua alia, ex duobus Manuscriptis in Anglia repertis, nunc primum in lucem edita. Quibus praefixa est … Iacobi Usserii Archiepiscopi Armachani Dissertatio (Oxford, 1644). Epistolae genuinae; quae nunc primum lucem uident ex bibliotheca Florentina, ed. Isaac Vossius (Amsterdam, 1646). Irenaeus, Libri quinque Aduersus portentosas haereses Valentini et aliorum, accuratius quam antehac emendati, additis Graecis quae reperiri potuerunt, ed. Nicolas Des Gallars ([Geneva], 1570). Aduersus Valentini et similium Gnosticorum Haereses, Libri quinque: Iam denuo diligenti editorum codicum facta collatione, et uetustissimi praesertim cuiusdam manuscripti, ab innumeris erroribus repurgati, multisque locis et capitibus aucti, ed. Franc¸ois Feu-ardent (Paris, 1575). Contra omnes Haereses libri, ed. Johann Ernst Grabe (Oxford, 1702). Jerome, Opera, ed. Erasmus, 10 vols. (Basle, 1524–6). John Chrysostom, Opera, quae hactenus uersa sunt omnia, ad Graecorum codicum collationem multis in locis per utriusque linguae peritos emendata, ed. Erasmus, 5 vols. (Basle, 1530). Opera Graece, ed. Henry Savile, 8 vols. (Eton, 1613). Justin Martyr, Opera (Paris, 1615). Cum Tryphone Iudaeo Dialogus, ed. Samuel Jebb (London, 1719). Leo I, Opera omnia, 2 vols. (Paris, 1675). Origen, Fragmentum Commentariorum in Euangelium secundum Matthaeum, Erasmo Roterodamo interprete. Opus antehac non excusum [Basle, 1527]. Opera omnia, ed. Erasmus, 2 vols. (Basle, 1536). Opera omnia, ed. Laurence Humphrey, 2 vols. (Basle, 1557). … Contra Celsum libri octo. Eiusdem Philocalia, ed. William Spencer (Cambridge, 1658). … In sacras scripturas commentaria, quaecunque graece reperiri potuerunt, ed. Pierre-Daniel Huet, 2 vols. (Rouen, 1668). ;ερὶ εὐχης ˜ σύνταγμα μέχρι το˜υδε το˜υ χρόνου ἀνέκδοτον, ed. John Fell (Oxford, 1686).

Bibliography

423

Pseudo-Prosper, Chronicon Prosperi Tironis Aquitani, a morte Valentis Imp. ad captam a Genserico urbem, ed. Pierre Pithou (n.p., 1588). Reeves, William, The Apologies of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Minucius Felix in defence of the Christian religion with the commonitory of Vincentius Lirinensis, translated with a preliminary discourse upon each author. Together with a prefatory dissertation about the right use of the Fathers, 2 vols. (London, 1709). Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronicon ab anno 381 ad 1113, ed. Antoine Le Roux (Paris, 1513). Tertullian, Opera, quae hactenus reperiri potuerunt omnia, ed. Jacques de Pam`ele (Paris, 1584). Apologeticus, ed. Didier H´erauld (Paris, 1613). Theodoret of Cyrrhus, … Dialogi tres contra quasdam Haereses (Rome, 1547). Eranistes.... Quae omnia nunc primum in lucem exeunt, a Gentiano Herveto Aurelio latine uersa (Venice, 1548). In quatuordecim Sancti Pauli epistolas Commentarius, nunc primum Latine uersus, Gentiano Herveto Aurelio interprete (Florence, 1552). 2. Other printed sources Abbot, George, The Reasons which Doctour Hill hath brought, for the upholding of Papistry, which is falsely termed the Catholike Religion: Unmasked, and shewed to be very weake, and upon examination most insufficient for that purpose. The first part (Oxford, 1604). [ ], A Treatise of the Perpetuall Visibilitie, and Succession of the True Church in all Ages (London, 1624). Abbot, Robert, A Defence of the Reformed Catholicke of M. W. Perkins, lately deceased, against the bastard Counter-Catholicke of D. Bishop, Seminary Priest. The First Part (London, 1606). The Second Part of the Defence of the Reformed Catholicke (London, 1607). The Third Part of the Defence of the Reformed Catholicke (London, 1609). De gratia et perseuerantia sanctorum, exercitationes aliquot habitae in Academia Oxoniensi (London, 1618). Allestree, Richard, Forty Sermons (Oxford, 1684). Alley, William, ;τωχομουσε˜ι ον. The poore mans Librarie. Rapsodiae G.A. Byshop of Exceter upon the first Epistle of S. Peter, read publickely in the Cathedrall Church of Saint Paule, within the Citie of London 1560 (London, 1571). Amama, Sixtinus, Anti-Barbarus Biblicus (Amsterdam, 1628). Andrewes, Lancelot, Opuscula quaedam posthuma (London, 1629). Preces Privatae, trans. F. E. Brightman (London, 1903). Responsio ad Apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini, quam nuper edidit contra Praefationem Monitoriam Serenissimi ac Potentissimi Principis Iacobi, Dei Gratia Magnae Britanniae, Franciae, et Hiberniae Regis, Fidei Defensoris, omnibus Christianis Monarchis, Principibus, atque Ordinibus inscriptam (London, 1610). Arnauld, Antoine, De la Frequente Communion. Ou les sentimens des Peres, des Papes et des Conciles touchant l’usage des Sacremens de Penitence et d’Eucharistie, sont fidelement exposez (Paris, 1643). Œuvres, 43 vols. (Paris, 1775–83).

424

Bibliography

Arnauld, Antoine, [and Nicole, Pierre], La Perpetuit´e de la foy de l’Eglise catholique touchant l’Eucharistie, deffendue contre le livre du sieur Claude, Ministre de Charenton, 3 vols. (Paris, 1669–74). Articuli Lambethani (London, 1651). Ashe, Simeon, Gray Hayres crowned with Grace. A Sermon preached at Redrish near London Aug. 1. 1654. At the Funerall of that Reverend, eminently Learned and faithfull Minister of Jesus Christ Mr Thomas Gataker (London, 1655). Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (London, 1950). [Baddeley, Richard], The Boy of Bilson: or, a true Discovery of the late notorious impostures of certain Romish Priests in their pretended Exorcisme, or expulsion of the Divell out of a young Boy, named William Perry, sonne of Thomas Perry of Bilson, in the County of Stafford, Yeoman (London, 1622). Baillie, Robert, Letters and Journals, ed. D. Laing, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1841–3). [ ], Ladensium αὐτοκατάκρισις, The Canterburians self-conviction. Or an evident demonstration of the avowed Arminianisme, Poperie, and tyrannie of that Faction, by their owne confessions. With a Post-script to the Personate Jesuite, Lysimachus Nicanor, a prime Canterburian ([Amsterdam], 1640). [Baker, Thomas], Reflections upon Learning (2nd edn., London, 1700). Bale, John, Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae, quam nunc Angliam et Scotiam uocant: Catalogus (Basle, 1557). Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae posterior pars, quinque continens Centurias ultimas (Basle, 1559). [Baltus, Jean-Franc¸ois], An Answer to Mr. de Fontenelle’s History of Oracles, trans. Hilkiah Bedford (London, 1709). Bancroft, Richard, A Sermon preached at Paules Crosse the 9 of Februarie … 1588 (London, 1588). A Survay of the pretended Holy Discipline (London, 1593). Baring-Gould, Sabine, The Church Revival: Thoughts thereon and Reminiscences (London, 1914). Barksdale, Clement, A Sermon Preached upon the Fifth of November, 1679. In the Cathedrall Church at Gloucester (Oxford, 1680). Barlow, Thomas, Genuine Remains (London, 1693). Barlow, William, A Defence of the Articles of the Protestant Religion, in aunsweare to a libell lately cast abroad, intituled, Certaine Articles, or forcible reasons, discovering the palpable absurdities, and most intricate errours of the Protestantes Religion (London, 1601). The summe and substance of the conference, wh. it pleased his Majestie to have with the Lords Bishops, and other clergie at Hampton Court (London, 1604). One of the foure Sermons preached before the Kings Maiestie, at Hampton Court in September last. This concerning the Antiquitie and Superioritie of Bishops. Sept. 21. 1606 (London, 1606). Barne, Miles, A Discourse Concerning the Nature of Christ’s Kingdom, with Relation to the Kingdoms of this World; in two Sermons Preach’d at St Maries before the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1682). Baronius, Caesar, Martyrologium Romanum, ad nouam Kalendarii rationem, et ecclesiasticae historiae ueritatem restitutum. Gregorii XIII Pont. Max. iussu editum (Antwerp, 1589).

Bibliography

425

Annales ecclesiastici una cum critica historico-chronologica P. Antonii Pagii, 38 vols. (Lucca, 1738–59). Barrow, Isaac, A Treatise of the Pope’s Supremacy. To which is added a Discourse concerning the Unity of the Church (London, 1680). Baxter, Richard, The true and only way of concord of all the Christian Churches (London, 1680). Church-History of the Government of Bishops and their Councils abbreviated. Including the chief Part of the Government of Christian Princes and Popes, and a true account of the most troubling Controversies and Heresies till the Reformation (London, 1680). A Treatise of Episcopacy; confuting by Scripture, Reason, and the Churches Testimony, that sort of Diocesan Churches, Prelacy, and Government, which casteth out the Primitive Church-Species, Episcopacy, Ministry and Discipline, and confoundeth the Christian World by Corruption, Usurpation, Schism, and Persecution. Meditated in the Year 1640 when the Et caetera Oath was imposed. Written 1671 and cast by. Published 1680, by the importunity of our Superiours, who demand the Reasons of our Nonconformity (London, 1681). An Apology for the Nonconformists Ministry (London, 1681). An Answer to Mr Dodwell and Dr Sherlocke; Confuting an Universal Humane Church-Supremacy, Aristocratical and Monarchical, as Church-Tyranny and Popery: And defending Dr Isaac Barrow’s Treatise against it. Preparatory to a fuller Treatise against such an Universal Soveraignty, as contrary to Reason, Christianity, the Protestant Profession, and the Church of England; though the Corrupters usurp that Title (London, 1682). Against the Revolt to a Foreign Jurisdiction, which would be to England its perjury, Church-ruine, and Slavery (London, 1691). Reliquiae Baxterianae: or, Mr. Richard Baxter’s narrative of the most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times. Faithfully Publish’d from his own Original Manuscript, by Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696). Bayle, Pierre, Correspondance, ed. E. Labrousse et al. (Oxford, 1999–). Bedell, William, Some Original Letters, concerning the Steps taken toward a Reformation of Religion at Venice, upon Occasion of the Quarrel between that State and the Pope Paul V (Dublin, 1742). Bedford, Thomas, Vindiciae Gratiae sacramentalis (London, 1650). Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche, ed. E. F. K. M¨uller (Leipzig, 1903). Bellarmine, Robert, Disputationes de controuersiis christianae fidei, aduersus huius temporis haereticos, 4 vols. (Ingolstadt, 1601). Apologia pro Responsione sua ad librum Iacobi Magnae Britanniae Regis, cuius titulus est, Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus (2nd edn., Rome, 1610). De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (Lyon, 1613). Bernard, Nicholas, The Life and death of the Most Reverend and Learned Father of our Church, Dr. James Usher, Late Arch-Bishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland. Published in a Sermon at his Funeral, at the Abby of Westminster, Aprill 17. 1656. And now re-viewed with some other Enlargements (London, 1656). The Judgement of the Late Arch-Bishop of Armagh, and Primate of Ireland, 1. Of the Extent of Christs death, and satisfaction, etc. 2. Of the Sabbath, and observation of the Lords day. 3. Of the Ordination in other reformed Churches (London, 1657).

426

Bibliography

Bertius, Petrus, Hymenaeus desertor. Siue de sanctorum apostasia problemata duo (Frankfurt, 1612). Beveridge, William (ed.), =υνοδικόν siue Pandectae Canonum SS. Apostolorum, et Conciliorum ab Ecclesia Graeca receptorum, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1672). Codex Canonum Ecclesiae Primitiuae uindicatus ac illustratus (London, 1678). Beza, Theodore (ed.), >˜ης καιν˜ης /ιαθήκης ἅπαντα. Nouum D.N. Iesu Christi Testamentum, a Theodoro Beza uersum, ad ueritatem Graeci sermonis e regione appositi: cum eiusdem annotationibus, in quibus ratio interpretationis redditur (Basle, 1560). Volumen Tractationum Theologicarum (Geneva, 1570). A booke of Christian Questions and answers, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1574). Correspondance, ed. F. Aubert et al. (Geneva, 1960–). Bilson, Thomas, The true Difference betweene Christian subjection and Unchristian rebellion (Oxford, 1585). The Perpetual Governement of Christes Church. Wherein are handled; the fatherly superioritie which God first established in the Patriarkes for the guiding of his Church, and after continued in the Tribe of Levi and the Prophetes; and lastlie confirmed in the New Testament to the Apostles and their successours: As also the points in question at this day … concerning the Pastorall regiment of the house of God (London, 1593). De perpetua Ecclesiae Christi gubernatione (London, 1611). The effect of certaine Sermons touching the full Redemption of mankind by the death and bloud of Christ Jesus: wherein besides the merit of Christs suffering, the manner of his offering, the power of his death, the comfort of his Crosse, the glorie of his resurrection, are handled, what paines Christ suffered in his soule on the Crosse: together with the place and purpose of his descent to hel after death: Preached at Paules Crosse and else where in London (London, 1599). The Survey of Christ’s sufferings for mans redemption: and of his descent to Hades or Hell for our deliverance (London, 1604). Birch, Thomas, The Life of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (2nd edn., London, 1753). Bisbie, Nathaniel, The Modern Pharisees: or a Sermon … shewing the Principles of the present Jesuites, and Puritans, to be of the same evil influence with the ancient Pharisees; and equally vexatious and destructive to Government (London, 1683). [Bishop, William], The Second Part of the Reformation of a Catholike deformed: by Master W. Perkins (n.p., 1607). Blondel, David, De la primaut´e en l’Eglise: Traitt´e o`u sont confrontees, avec la Response du Serenissime Roy de la grand’Bretagne, les Annales du Card. Baronius, les Controverses du Cardinal Bellarmin, la Replique du Cardinal Du Perron, etc. (Geneva, 1641). Apologia pro sententia Hieronymi de episcopis et presbyteris (Amsterdam, 1646). Blunt, John James, Two introductory lectures on the study of the early Fathers delivered in the University of Cambridge (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1856). On the Right Use of the early Fathers: two series of lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge (2nd edn., London, 1858).

Bibliography

427

Bossuet, Jacques-B´enigne, Premier [-Sixi`eme] Avertissement aux Protestans (Paris, 1689–91). Boyle, Robert, Works, 5 vols. (London, 1744). Correspondence, ed. M. Hunter, A. Clericuzio, and L. M. Principe, 6 vols. (London, 2001). Bradford, John, Writings, ed. A. Townsend (Cambridge, 1853; PS). Bramhall, John, Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication of himself and the Episcopal Clergy, from the Presbyterian Charge of Popery, as it is managed by Mr. Baxter in his Treatise of the Grotian Religion. Together with a Preface shewing what Grounds there are of Fears and Jealousies of Popery (London, 1672). A Breife Narration of the possession, dispossession, and, repossession of William Sommers: and of some proceedings against Mr John Dorrell preacher, with aunsweres to such obiections as are made to prove the pretended counterfeiting of the said Sommers (n.p., 1598). Breuiarium ad usum insignis Ecclesiae Sarum, ed. F. Procter and C. Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1879–86). Bridges, John, A Defence of the government established in the Church of Englande for ecclesiasticall matters (London, 1587). Brightman, F. E., The English Rite: Being a Synopsis of the Sources and Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer, 2 vols. (London, 1915). Brokesby, Francis, The Life of Mr Henry Dodwell; with an Account of his Works, and an Abridgment of them that are Published, and of several of his Manuscripts (London, 1715). Brooke, Zachary, An Examination of Dr. Middleton’s Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers of the Primitive Church (Cambridge, 1750). Broughton, Hugh, Works (London, 1662). Bruce, Titus, Monarchy Maintained. In a Sermon preached at St. Anne Blackfryers (London, 1682). Buchanan, George, De Iure Regni apud Scotos, Dialogus (Edinburgh, 1579). Bujanda, J. M. de (ed.), Index librorum prohibitorum 1600–1966 (Sherbrooke, 2002). Bull, George, Harmonia Apostolica (London, 1670). Examen Censurae: siue Responsio ad quasdam animaduersiones, antehac ineditas, in librum cui titulus Harmonia Apostolica, etc. Accessit Apologia pro Harmonia eiusque Authore contra Declamationem Thomae Tullii (London, 1676). Defensio Fidei Nicaenae, ex scriptis, quae exstant, Catholicorum Doctorum, qui intra tria prima Ecclesiae Christianae secula floruerunt. In qua obiter quoque Constantinopolitana Confessio, de Spiritu Sancto, Antiquiorum testimoniis adstruitur (2nd edn., Oxford, 1688). Iudicium Ecclesiae catholicae trium primorum seculorum, de necessitate credendi quod Dominus noster Iesus Christus sit uerus Deus (Oxford, 1694). Opera omnia, ed. Johann Ernst Grabe (London, 1703). Works, ed. E. Burton, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1827). Bullinger, Heinrich, The Decades. Translated by H.I., ed. T. Harding, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1849–52; PS).

428

Bibliography

[Burnet, Gilbert], A Relation of a conference held about religion, at London, the Third of April 1676. By Edw. Stillingfleet, D.D. and Gilbert Burnet, with some Gentlemen of the Church of Rome (London, 1676). A Letter writ by the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, to the Lord Bishop of Cov. and Litchfield, concerning A Book lately Published, called, A Specimen of some errors and defects in the History of the Reformation of the Church of England, by Anthony Harmer (London, 1693). A Sermon preached at the funeral of the Most Reverend Father in God John, by the Divine Providence, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1694). History of [my] own time, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1833). The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, ed. N. Pocock, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1865). Burton, Edward, An Inquiry into the heresies of the apostolic age, in eight sermons preached before the University of Oxford [Bampton Lectures 1829] (Oxford, 1829). Burton, Henry, For God, and the King. The summe of two sermons preached on the fifth of November last in St Matthewes Friday-Streete. 1636 (n.p., 1636). Cajetan, Thomas de Vio, Commentarii illustres planeque insignes in Quinque Mosaicos libros (Paris, 1539). Calamy, Benjamin, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, and the Court of Aldermen, at Guild-Hall Chappel, upon the 30th of January 1683 (London, 1683). Calamy, Edmund, An Historical Account of my own life, with some Reflections on the times I have lived in (1671–1731), 2 vols. (London, 1829). Calfhill, James, An Aunswere to the Treatise of the Crosse: wherin ye shal see by the plaine and undoubted word of God, the vanities of men disproved: by the true and Godly Fathers of the Church, the dreames and dotages of other controlled: and by lawfull Counsels, conspiracies overthrown (London, 1565). Calovius, Abraham, Dissertationes Theologicae Rostochienses (Rostock, 1637). Cambridge University, Cambridge University Transactions during the Puritan controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries, ed. J. Heywood and T. Wright, 2 vols. (London, 1854). Camden, William, V. Cl. Gulielmi Camdeni, et illustrium uirorum ad G. Camdenum epistolae, ed. Thomas Smith (London, 1691). Campion, Edmund, Opuscula omnia (Paris, 1618). Cano, Melchior, De locis Theologicis libri duodecim (Salamanca, 1563). Cardenas, Juan de, Crisis theologica, in qua plures selectae difficultates ex morali theologia ad Lydium ueritatis lapidem reuocantur ex regula morum posita a SS. D.N. Innocentio XI. P. M. in Diplomate damnante sexaginta quinque Propositiones (Cologne, 1702). Carleton, Dudley, Letters from and to Sir Dudley Carleton, Knt. during his embassy in Holland (2nd edn., London, 1775). Carleton, George, Iurisdiction Regall, Episcopall, Papall. Wherein is declared how the Pope hath intruded upon the Iurisdiction of Temporall Princes, and of the Church. The intrusion is discovered, and the peculiar and distinct Iurisdiction to each properly belonging, recovered (London, 1610). Consensus Ecclesiae Catholicae contra Tridentinos (Frankfurt, 1613).

Bibliography

429

Carlile, Christopher, A Discourse concerning two divine Positions. The first effectually concluding, that the soules of the faithfull fathers, deceased before Christ, went immediately to heaven. The second sufficientlye setting foorth unto us Christians, what we are to conceive, touching the descension of our Saviours Christ into Hell: Publiquely disputed at a Commencement in Cambridge, Anno Domini 1552 (London, 1582). Cartwright, Thomas, Cartwrightiana, ed. A. Peel and L. H. Carlson (London, 1951; Elizabethan Nonconformist Texts I). Casaubon, Isaac, Ad epistolam Illustr. et Reuerendiss. Cardinalis Perronii, Responsio (London, 1612). De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis Exercitationes XVI. Ad Cardinalis Baronii Prolegomena in Annales, et primam eorum partem, de Domini Nostri Iesu Christi Natiuitate, Vita, Passione, Assumtione (London, 1614). Epistolae (Rotterdam, 1709). Ephemerides, ed. J. Russell, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1850). Casaubon, M´eric, A Vindication of the Lords Prayer, as a formal prayer, and by Christ’s institution to be used by Christians as a Prayer: against the Antichristian Practice and Opinion of some men. Wherein, Also their private and ungrounded zeal is discovered, who are very strict for the observation of the Lord’s Day, and make so light of the Lords Prayer (London, 1660). Cave, William, Chartophylax ecclesiasticus (London, 1685). Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Historia literaria, a Christo nato usque ad saeculum XIV (London, 1688). Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Historia literaria … Pars altera (London, 1698). Cecil, Robert, ‘Letters from Sir Robert Cecil to Sir Christopher Hatton, 1590– 1591’, ed. P. E. J. Hammer, in I. W. Archer (ed.), Religion, Politics, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2003: Camden 5th series 22), 197–267. Chamier, Daniel, Panstratiae catholicae, siue Controuersiarum de Religione aduersus Pontificios Corpus, 4 vols. (Geneva, 1626). Chapman, John, Miscellaneous tracts relating to Antiquity (London, 1742). Chemnitz, Martin, Examinis Concilii Tridentini, opus integrum: quatuor partes, in quibus praecipuorum capitum totius doctrinae Papisticae, firma et solida refutatio, tum ex sacrae scripturae fontibus, tum ex orthodoxorum Patrum consensu, collecta est; uno Volumine complectens. Ad ueritatis Christianae, et Antichristianae falsitatis cognitionem, perquam utile et necessarium (Frankfurt, 1574). Chemnitz, Martin, A discouverie and batterie of the great Fort of unwritten Traditions, otherwise, An examination of the Counsell of Trent, touching the decree of Traditions, trans. Robert Vaux (London, 1582). Cheynell, Francis, Chillingworthi nouissima. Or, the Sicknesse, Heresie, Death, and Buriall of William Chillingworth (London, 1644). The Divine Triunity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: or, the blessed Doctrine of the three Coessential Subsistents in the eternall Godhead without any confusion or division of the distinct Subsistences, or multiplication of the most single and entire Godhead, acknowledged, beleeved, adored by Christians, in opposition to Pagans, Jewes, Mahumetans, blasphemous and Antichristian Hereticks, who say they are Christians, but are not (London, 1650).

430

Bibliography

Chillingworth, William, The Religion of Protestants a Safe way to Salvation. Or An Answer to a Booke entitled Mercy and Truth, Or, Charity maintain’d by Catholiques, Which pretends to prove the Contrary (Oxford, 1638). Works (10th edn., London, 1742). Chowney, Thomas, Collectiones theologicarum quarundam conclusionum, ex diuersis Authorum sententiis, perquam breues sparsim excerptae (London, 1635). Church, Thomas, A Vindication of the Miraculous Powers, which subsisted in the Three First Centuries of the Christian Church. In Answer to Dr. Middleton’s Free Inquiry (London, 1750). Church of England, Tudor Church Reform: The Henrician Canons of 1535 and the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum, ed. G. Bray (Woodbridge, 2000; CERS 8). Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum, ex authoritate primum Regis Henrici 8 inchoata: Deinde per Regem Edouardum 6 prouecta, adauctaque in hunc modum, atque nunc ad pleniorem ipsarum reformationem in lucem aedita, ed. John Foxe (London, 1571). Articuli de quibus conuenit inter Archiepiscopos, et Episcopos utriusque prouinciae, et Clerum uniuersum in Synodo, Londini An. 1562 (Oxford, 1636). The Canons of 1571 in English and Latin, ed. W. E. Collins (London, 1899). The Anglican Canons 1529–1947, ed. G. Bray (Woodbridge, 1998; CERS 6). The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619), ed. A. Milton (Woodbridge, 2005; CERS 13). Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, ed. K. Fincham, 2 vols. (Woodbridge, 1994–8; CERS 1 and 5). [Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of], Animadversions upon a Book, Intituled, Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed to the Catholick Church, by Dr Stillingfleet, and the Imputation Refuted and Retorted by S.C. By a Person of Honour (London, 1673). A Collection of several Tracts (London, 1727). Bibliotheca Clarendoniana: A Catalogue of the valuable and curious library of the Right Honourable Edward, Earl of Clarendon [London, 1756]. Life … Written by himself. Now for the first time carefully printed from the original ms. preserved in the Bodleian Library, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1857). Clarke, Samuel, A Generall Martyrologie (3rd edn., London, 1677). Clerke, John, A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Rochester, on the 29th of May, 1684. Being the Anniversary of His Most Sacred Majesty’s Birth and happy Restauration to these his undoubted Realms and Dominions (London, 1684). Clifford, William, The Power of Kings, Particularly the British Monarchy Asserted and Vindicated (London, 1682). Coccius, Josse, Thesaurus catholicus, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1600–1). Cochlaeus, Ioannes, De Canonicae Scripturae, et Catholicae Ecclesiae authoritate, ad Henricum Bullingerum (Rome, 1544). Collier, Jeremy, An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, chiefly of England, 2 vols. (London, 1708–14). Colomi`es, Paul, Obseruationes sacrae (Amsterdam, 1679). Conant, John, The Life of the Reverend and Venerable John Conant, D.D., Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, Regius Professor of Divinity in that University, ed. W. Stanton (London, 1823).

Bibliography

431

Concina, Daniel, Ad Theologiam Christianam dogmatico-moralem apparatus, 2 vols. (Rome, 1751). Confessio Doctrinae Saxonicarum Ecclesiarum Synodo Tridentinae oblata, Anno Domini M.D.LI. (Basle, 1552). Confessio piae doctrinae, quae nomine Illustrissimi principis ac domini D. Christophori Ducis Wirtembergensis … die XXIIII mensis Ianuarii, Anno MDLII congregationi Tridentini Concilii proposita est ( T¨ubingen, n.d.). Conold, Robert, The Notion of Schism stated according to the Antients, and considered with Reference to the Non-Conformists: and the Pleas for Schismaticks examined: Being Animadversions upon the Plea for the Non-Conformists. With Reflections on that Famous Tract of Schism, Written by Mr Hales. In Two Letters to a very Worthy Gentleman. The Second Edition: With the Addition of a third Letter (London, 1677). Conry, Florence, Tractatus de statu paruulorum sine baptismo decedentium ex hac vita iuxta sensum B. Augustini (Louvain, 1624). Constantine, Henry, A Sermon Preached at the Assises held at York, July the 23d 1683. Not long after the Discovery of the late Horrid Conspiracy against His Majesties Person and Government (London, 1683). The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660, ed. S. R. Gardiner (3rd edn., Oxford, 1906). Cooke, Robert, Censura quorundam scriptorum, quae sub nominibus sanctorum et ueterum auctorum, a Pontificiis passim in eorum scriptis, sed potissimum in quaestionibus hodie controuersis citari solent (London, 1614). Cooper, C. H., Annals of Cambridge, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1842–52). Cosin, John, Works, ed. J. Sansom, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1843–55; LACT ). Correspondence: together with other papers illustrative of his life and times, ed. G. Ornsby, 2 vols. (Durham, 1869–72; Publications of the Surtees Society 52 and 55). Covell, William, A Iust and temperate defence of the five books of Ecclesiastical Policie: written by M. Richard Hooker (London, 1603). Craig, John (1512–1600), A Short Summe of the whole Catechisme, wherein the Question is propounded and answered in fewe words, for the greater ease of the common people and Children (London, 1589). Craig, John (d. 1731), Rules of historical evidence, from Joannis Craig Theologiae Christianae principa mathematica (Londinium … 1699) ( The Hague, 1964; History and Theory 4). Cranmer, Thomas, A Defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our saviour Christ, with a confutation of sundry errors concernyng the same, grounded and stablished upon Goddes holy woorde, and approved by ye consent of the moste auncient doctors of the Churche (London, 1550). An Answer … unto a crafty and sophisticall cavillation devised by Stephen Gardiner doctour of law, late byshop of Winchester, agaynst the trewe and godly doctrine of the moste holy Sacrament of the body and bloud of our Saviour Iesu Christe (London, 1551). Remains, ed. H. Jenkins, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1833). Crashaw, William, Romish Forgeries and Falsifications: Together with Catholike Restitutions. The first Booke of the first Tome. Observed, collected, and now

432

Bibliography

discovered for the use and honour of the Catholike Church, and to the iust rebuke of the Romish Sinagogue (London, 1606). [Craufurd, James], A serious expostulation with that party in Scotland commonly known by the name of Whigs (London, 1682). The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches, ed. P. Schaff (London, 1877). [Cressy, Serenus (Hugh Paulinus)], An Epistle Apologetical of S.C. to a Person of Honour: Touching his Vindication of Dr. Stillingfleet (n.p., 1674). Exomologesis (2nd edn., Paris, 1653). Roman-Catholick Doctrines no novelties: or an Answer to Dr. Pierce’s CourtSermon, Mis-call’d The Primitive Rule of Reformation. By S.C. a Roman-Catholick (n.p., 1663). Fanaticism Fanatically imputed to the Catholick Church by Doctour Stillingfleet: And the Imputation refuted and retorted by S.C. a Catholick O.S.B. (n.p., 1672). Crispe, Samuel, A Sermon Preach’d at the Primary Visitation of the Right Reverend Father in God, William Lord Bishop of Norwich. Held at Beccles the 23d of April, 1686 (London, 1686). Crompton, William, Saint Austins Summes: or, the Summe of Saint Austins Religion: Collected Verbatim from his owne undoubted Writings, wherein the Reader may plainely and evidently see this Conclusion proved, that S. Austin (who lived neere Twelve Hundred Yeeres before the time of Luther) agreed with the Church of England in all the maine Poynts of Faith and Doctrine. In Answer to Mr. Iohn Breerely, Priest (London, 1625). Daill´e, Jean, Traict´e de l’employ des Saincts Peres, pour le jugement des differends, qui sont aujourd’huy en la Religion (Geneva, 1632). A Treatise concerning the Right Use of the Fathers, in the Decision of the Controversies that are at this day in Religion (London, 1651). De usu Patrum ad ea definienda religionis capita, quae sunt hodie controuersa, trans. Jean Mettayer (Geneva, 1655). De poenis et satisfactionibus humanis, libri VII (Amsterdam, 1649). An Apologie for the Reformed Churches; wherein is shew’d the Necessitie of their separation from the Church of Rome; against those who accuse them of making a Schisme in Christendome. Translated out of French. And a Preface added; containing the Judgement of an University-man, concerning Mr. Knot’s last book against Mr. Chillingworth (Cambridge, 1653). De pseudepigraphis apostolicis, seu libris octo Constitutionum Apostolicarum apocryphis, libri III (Harderwijk, 1653). Exposition de l’epistre de S. Paul a Tite en dix-huit sermons, prononc´es a` Charanton, l’an 1652. 1653. et 1654 (Charenton, 1655). De duobus Latinorum ex unctione Sacramentis, confirmatione et extrema ut uocant unctione disputatio (Geneva, 1659). Replique … aux deux livres que Messieurs Adam et Cottiby ont publiez contre luy (Geneva, 1662). Aduersus Latinorum de cultus religiosi obiecto traditionem disputatio, qua demonstratur uetustissimis ad A.D. CCC Christianis ignotos et inusitatos fuisse eos Cultus, quos nunc in Romana Communione solent Eucharistiae, Sanctis, Reliquiis, Imaginibus et Crucibus deferre (Geneva, 1664).

Bibliography

433

De scriptis, quae sub Dionysii Areopagitae et Ignatii Antiocheni nominibus circumferuntur, libri duo. Quibus demonstratur illa subdititia esse, diu post Martyrum, quibus falso tribuuntur, obitum ficta (Geneva, 1666). Les deux derniers sermons de Mr Daill´e, prononcez a` Charenton le jour de Pasques sixi´eme Avril 1670 et le Jeudy suivant. Avec un Abreg´e de sa Vie, et le Catalogue de ses Oeuvres (Charenton 1670). De Cultibus religiosis Latinorum libri nouem. I. De Baptismi Caerimoniis. II. De Confirmatione. Reliqui VII de Eucharistiae Ritibus. Quibus demonstratur nouitas Caerimoniarum, quae ad duo Sacramenta a Christo instituta, praesertim ad Eucharistiam in Communione Romana adiectae sunt. Opus posthumum (Geneva, 1671). XLIX Sermons upon the whole Epistle of the Apostle St. Paul to the Colossians, trans. Francis Soreton (London, 1672). Darrell, John, A true narration of the strange and grevous vexation by the devil, of 7 persons in Lancashire, and William Somers of Nottingham. Wherein the doctrine of possession and dispossession of demoniakes out of the word of God is particularly applyed unto Somers, and the rest of the persons controverted: togeather with the use we are to make of these workes of God (n.p., 1600). [ ], A Detection of that sinnful, shamful, lying, and ridiculous discours, of Samuel Harshnet. entituled: A Discoverie of the fraudulent practises of John Darrell (n.p., 1600). A Survey of certaine Dialogical Discourses: written by John Deacon and John Walker, concerning the doctrine of Possession and Dispossession of Divels (n.p., 1602). Davenant, John, Determinationes Quaestionum quarundam Theologicarum (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1639). Dissertationes duae: prima de morte Christi, quatenus ad omnes extendatur, quatenus ad solos Electos restringatur. Altera de praedestinatione et reprobatione (Cambridge, 1650). Deacon, John, and Walker, John, Dialogicall Discourses of Spirits and Divels (London, 1601). A Summarie Answere to all the material points in any of Master Darel his bookes (London, 1601). [Deacon, Thomas], A full, true and comprehensive view of Christianity, in two catechisms (London, 1747). ´ Dechamps, Etienne, De haeresi Ianseniana ab apostolica Sede merito proscripta libri tres (Paris, 1654). ‘A declaration of the conference had before the king … ’, in R. G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church (New York, 1910), ii, appendix, 341–54. De Dominis, Marcantonio, De Republica ecclesiastica, 3 vols. (London, 1617–20; Hanau, 1622). Marcus Antonius de Dominis Archiepiscop. Spalaten. Sui reditus ex Anglia Consilium exponit (Rome, 1623). Dering, Edward (1598–1644), A Collection of Speeches in matter of Religion (London, 1642). [Dering, Edward (1540?–76), More, John, and Stockwood, John], A short Catechisme for Househoulders (London, 1580).

434

Bibliography

Des Maizeaux, Pierre, The Life of William Chillingworth, ed. J. Nichols (London, 1863). Dey, Richard, Two Lookes over Lincolne, or, a view of his Holy Table, name, and thing, discovering his erronious and Popish Tenets and Positions (London, 1641). Dietelmaier, Joh. Augustin, Historia dogmatis de descensu Christi ad inferos litteraria (Nuremberg, 1741). Digby, George, Letters between the Lord George Digby, and Sir Kenelm Digby knight concerning Religion (London, 1651). [Digges, Dudley], The Unlawfulnesse of Subjects taking up Armes against their Soveraigne, in what case soever (n.p., 1643). [Disney, John], A Letter to the Students in Divinity of the Diocese of Chester (London, 1792). Doctrinae Iesuitarum praecipua capita, 5 vols. (La Rochelle, 1585–9). Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, ed. E. Cardwell, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Oxford, 1844). Dodwell, Henry, Two Letters of advice. I. For the Susception of Holy Orders. II. For Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational (Dublin, 1672). Two Letters of advice. I For the Susception of Holy Orders. II. For Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational. The Third edition Corrected and Improved (London, 1691). [ ], Some Considerations of Present Concernment; how far the Romanists may be trusted by Princes of another Perswasion; Relating to the Design of the Controversial Letters, and some other Discourses lately published by that Party of them, who have concerned themselves in this Subject (London, 1675). Two short Discourses against the Romanists (London, 1676). Two short Discourses against the Romanists.... With a new Preface particularly relating to the Bishop of Meaux, and other Modern Complainers of Misrepresentation (London, 1688). Separation of Churches from Episcopal Government, as practised by the present Non-Conformists, proved Schismatical from such Principles as are least controverted, and do withal most popularly explain the Sinfulness and Mischief of Schism (London, 1679). A Reply to Mr Baxter’s Pretended Confutation of a Book Entituled, Separation of Churches from Episcopal Government, etc. proved Schismatical (London, 1681). Dissertationes Cyprianicae [Oxford, 1682]. A Discourse Concerning the One Altar and the One Priesthood insisted on by the Ancients in their Disputes against Schism. Wherein the Ground and Solidity of that Way of Reasoning is Explained, as also its Applicableness to the Case of our Modern Schismaticks, with particular Regard to some Late Treatises of Mr Richard Baxter. Being a Just Account concerning the true Nature and Principles of Schism according to the Ancients (London, 1683). De Iure Laicorum Sacerdotali, ex sententia Tertulliani aliorumque Veterum Dissertatio, in Hugo Grotius, De Coenae Administratione, ubi Pastores non sunt, Item An Semper Communicandum per Symbola? Dissertatio. Cum diuersorum Responsionibus (London, 1685). Dissertationes in Irenaeum (Oxford, 1689).

Bibliography [

435

], The Doctrine of the Church of England, concerning the Independency of the Clergy … By the Author of the Vindication of the depriv’d Bishops (London, 1697 [1696]). [ ], A Defence of the Vindication of the Deprived Bishops. Wherein the Case of Abiathar is particularly considered, and the Invalidity of Lay-Deprivations is further proved, from the Doctrine received under the Old Testament, continued in the first Ages of Christianity, and from our own fundamental Laws. In a Reply to Dr Hody and another Author (London, 1695 [1697]). Annales Velleiani, Quintilianei, Statiani. Seu Vitae P. Velleii Paterculi, M. Fabii Quintiliani, P. Papinii Statii, (obiterque Iuuenalis) pro tempore ordine, dispositae (Oxford, 1698). A Treatise concerning the Lawfulness of Instrumental Musick in Holy Offices. The Second Edition, with large Additions (London, 1700). De Veteribus Graecorum Romanorumque Cyclis obiterque de Cyclo Iudaeorum aetate Christi, Dissertationes decem, cum Tabulis necessariis. Inseruntur Tabulis Fragmenta Veterum inedita, ad rem spectantia Chronologicam (Oxford, 1701). Exercitationes duae: Prima, de Aetate Phalaridis; Secunda, de Aetate Pythagorae Philosophi (London, 1704). De Nupero Schismate Anglicano Paraenesis ad Exteros tam Reformatos quam etiam Pontificios Qua Iura Episcoporum uetera, eorundemque a Magistratu Seculari Independentia Omnibus asserenda commendantur (London, 1704). Occasional Communion Fundamentally Destructive of the Discipline of the Primitive Catholick Church, and Contrary to the Doctrine of the Latest Scriptures, concerning Church-Communion (London, 1705). An Epistolary Discourse, Proving from the Scriptures and the First Fathers, that the Soul is a Principle Naturally Mortal; but Immortalized Actually by the Pleasure of God, to Punishment; or, to Reward, by its Union with the Divine Baptismal Spirit. Wherein is Proved, that None have the Power of Giving this Divine Immortalizing Spirit, since the Apostles, but only the Bishops (London, 1706). A Preliminary Defence of the Epistolary Discourse, concerning the Distinction between Soul and Spirit (London, 1707). The Scripture Account of the Eternal Rewards or Punishments of all that hear of the Gospel, without an Immortality necessarily resulting from the Nature of the Souls themselves that are concerned in those Rewards or Punishments (London, 1708). A Discourse concerning the Use of Incense in Divine Offices. Wherein it is Proved, that that Practice, taken up in the Middle Ages, both by the Eastern and Western Churches, is, notwithstanding, an Innovation from the Doctrine of the first and purest Churches, and the Traditions derived from the Apostles. Serving also to Evince, that even the Consent of those Churches of the Middle Ages, is no certain Argument, that even the Particulars, wherein they are supposed to Consent, were faithfully derived from the Apostles, against the modern Assertors of the Infallibility of Oral Tradition (London, 1711). De Parma equestri Woodwardiana Dissertatio, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1713). Dodwell, William, A Free Answer to Dr. Middleton’s Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers of the Primitive Church (London, 1749). [Douglas, John], The Criterion: or, Miracles Examined (London, 1754).

436

Bibliography

Downe, John, Certaine Treatises (Oxford, 1633). A Treatise of the true Nature and Definition of justifying faith; together with a Defence of the same, against the Answere of N. Baxter (Oxford, 1635). Downham, George, A Defence of the Sermon Preached at the Consecration of the Bishop of Bath and Welles (London, 1611). Two Sermons, the one commending the Ministerie in Generall: the other defending the Office of Bishops in particular (London, 1608). Du Moulin, Lewis, A Short and True Account of the several Advances the Church of England hath made towards Rome (London, 1680). [ ], Patronus bonae fidei, in causa Puritanorum contra Hierarchicos Anglos (n.p., 1672). Du Moulin, Pierre, ‘Autobiographie. 1564–1658’, Bulletin de la Soci´et´e de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Franc¸ais, 7 (1858), 170–82; 333–44; 465–77. Apologie pour la saincte Cene du Seigneur. Contre la presence corporelle, et transsubstantiation. Item contre les messes sans communians (2nd edn., La Rochelle, 1609). Defense de la foy catholique contenue au livre de trespuissant et Serenissime Jaques I. roy de la grand’Bretagne et d’Irlande, defenseur de la Foy, contenue en trois Livres. Contre la Response de F.N. Coeffeteau Docteur en Theologie, et Vicaire general des Freres Prescheurs (n.p., 1612). De la Vocation des Pasteurs (Sedan, 1618). Du Perron, Jacques Davy, Lettre Envoy´ee au Sieur Casaubon en Angleterre (Paris, 1612). A Letter written from Paris, by the Lord Cardinall of Peron, to Monsr Casaubon in England, trans. Thomas Owen (n.p., 1612). Replique a la Response du Serenissime Roy de la Grand Bretagne (Paris, 1620). The Reply of the most illustrious Cardinall of Perron, to the Answeare of the most excellent King of Great Britaine. The first tome, trans. Lady Falkland (Douai, 1630). Traitt´e du sainct sacrement de l’Eucharistie (Paris, 1622). Du Plessis d’Argentr´e, Charles (ed.), Collectio iudiciorum de nouis erroribus, 3 vols. (Paris, 1728–36). Du Plessis-Mornay, Philippe, De l’Institution, usage, et doctrine du sainct Sacrement ´ de l’Eucharistie, en l’Eglise Ancienne (2nd edn., La Rochelle, 1598). Durel, John, A View of the Government and Publick Worship of God in the Reformed Churches beyond the Seas. Wherein is shewed their Conformity and Agreement with the Church of England, as it is established by the Act of Uniformity (London, 1662). Sanctae Ecclesiae Anglicanae aduersus iniquas atque inuerecundas schismaticorum criminationes, Vindiciae (London, 1669). Eck, Johannes, Enchiridion locorum communium aduersus Lutherum et alios hostes ecclesiae (1525–1543), ed. P. Fraenkel (M¨unster in West., 1979; Corpus Catholicorum 34). Edwards, John, A Free Discourse concerning Truth and Error, especially in Matters of Religion (London, 1701). Remains (London, 1731). Episcopius, Simon, Opera theologica, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1650–65). Epistolae Tigurinae de rebus potissimum ad Ecclesiae Anglicanae reformationem pertinentibus conscriptae A.D. 1531–1558, ed. PS (Cambridge, 1848).

Bibliography

437

Erasmus, Opera omnia (Amsterdam, 1969–). An Expedient or a sure and easy way of Reducing all Dissenters whatsoever to an exact and sincere Obedience both to an Ecclesiastical and Civil Governement (London, 1672). ‘Extracts from wills’, Etoniana, 59 (30 July 1935), 140–1. Falkland, Lucius Cary, Viscount, Discourse of Infallibility, with an Answer to it: And his Lordships Reply. Never before published. Together with Mr. Walter Mountague’s Letter concerning the changing his Religion. Answered by my Lord of Falkland (London, 1651). Featley, Daniel, Cygnea Cantio: or, Learned Decisions and most Prudent and Pious Directions for Students in Divinitie; Delivered by our late Sovereign of Happie Memorie, King James, at White Hall a few weekes before his Death (London, 1629). ], Parallelismus nou-antiqui erroris Pelagiarminiani (London, 1626). [ Sacra Nemesis (Oxford, 1644). [Fell, John], The Life of the most Learned, Reverend and Pious Dr H. Hammond (London, 1661). Ferne, Henry, Of the division between the English and Romish Church upon the Reformation (London, 1652). Certain Considerations of present Concernment: touching this Reformed Church of England. With a particular Examination of An: Champny (Doctor of the Sorbon) his exceptions against the Lawful Calling and Ordination of the Protestant Bishops and Pastors of this Church (London, 1653). Field, Richard, Of the Church, five bookes (London, 1606). The fifth booke of the Church. Together with an Appendix, containing a defense of such partes and passages of the former Bookes, as have bene either excepted against, or wrested, to the maintenance of Romish errours (London, 1610). Fisher, John, De ueritate corporis et sanguinis Christi in Eucharistia aduersus Iohannem Oecolampadium (Cologne, 1527). Flacius Illyricus, Mathias, Catalogus testium veritatis, qui ante nostram aetatem reclamarunt Papae. Opus uaria rerum, hoc praesertim tempore scitu dignissimarum, cognitione refertum, ac lectu cum primis utile atque necessarium (Basle, 1556). et al., Ecclesiastica Historia, 11 vols. (Basle, 1559–74). Forbes, John, Irenicum amatoribus ueritatis et pacis in Ecclesia Scoticana (Aberdeen, 1629). [Forrester, Thomas], Causa Episcopatus Hierarchici Lucifuga: or A Confutation of J. S.’s Vindication of the (pretended) Principles of the Cyprianic Age (Edinburgh, 1706). Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church, … from the yeare of our Lorde a thousande, unto the tyme now present (London, 1563). The First (Second) Volume of the Ecclesiasticall history contayning the Actes and Monuments … (London, 1570). Franciscus a Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia. Siue Tractatus, de Praedestinatione, de Meritis et peccatorum remissione, seu de Iustificatione, et denique de Sanctorum Inuocatione. Ubi ad trutinam Fidei Catholicae examinatur Confessio Anglicana et ad singula puncta, quid teneat, qualiter differat, excutitur … Accessit paraphrastica Expositio reliquorum Articulorum Confessionis Anglicae (Lyon, 1634).

438

Bibliography

Franciscus a Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia.... Tertia editio multo auctior, pluribus materiis Theologicis illustrior, et in articulorum discussione clarior, et fusior. Praemittitur Epistolium Apologeticum Lectori Catholico, in quo ratio totius operis exhibetur (Lyon, 1635). Fulke, William, A Retentive, to stay good Christians, in true faith and religion, against the motives of Richard Bristow (London, 1580). The text of the New Testament of Iesus Christ, translated out of the vulgar Latine by the Papists of the traiterous Seminarie at Rhemes … with a Confutation of all such arguments, glosses, and annotations, as conteine manifest impietie, of heresie, treason and slander, against the Catholike Church of God, and the true teachers thereof, or the Translations used in the Church of England: Both by auctoritie of the holy Scriptures, and by the testimonies of the ancient fathers (London, 1589). Fuller, Thomas, The Holy State (Cambridge, 1642). Abel redeuiuus; or, the dead yet speaking. The lives and deaths of the moderne divines (London, 1651). The Church History of Britain, ed. J. S. Brewer, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1845). The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662). Gardiner, Stephen, A Detection of the Devils Sophistrie, wherwith he robbeth the unlearned people, of the true byleef, in the most blessed Sacrament of the aulter (London, 1546). An explication and assertion of the true Catholique fayth, touching the moost blessed Sacrament of the aulter with confutation of a booke written agaynst the same [Rouen, 1551]. Confutatio Cauillationum, quibus sacrosanctum eucharistiae sacramentum, ab impiis Capernaitis, impeti solet, Authore Marco Antonio Constantio, Theologo Louaniensi (Paris, 1552). Gataker, Thomas, De Baptismatis Infantilis ui et efficacia disceptatio, priuatim habita, inter … Samuelem Wardum … et Thomam Gatakerum (London, 1652). [Gee, Edward], Veteres uindicati, in an Expostulatory letter to Mr. Sclater of Putney upon his Consensus ueterum (2nd edn., London, 1687). [ ], An Answer to the Compiler of Nubes testium: Wherein is shewn that Antiquity (in relation to the Points of Controversie set down by Him) did not for the first five hundred years Believe, Teach or Practise, as the Church of Rome doth at present Believe, Teach and Practise (London, 1688). G´en´ebrard, Gilbert, De S. Trinitate libri tres contra huius aeui Trinitarios, Antitrinitarios et Autotheanos (Paris, 1569). [Gerberon, Gabriel], Memorial historique de ce qui s’est pass´e depuis l’ann´ee 1647. jusques a` l’an 1653. touchant les cinq Propositions, tant a` Paris qu’`a Rome (‘Cologne’, 1676). Geree, John, =ινιορραγία, The Sifters Sieve broken (London, 1648). Gibson, Edmund, Codex iuris ecclesiastici Anglicani (London, 1713: 2nd edn., Oxford, 1761). [Gifford, George], A Catechisme conteining the summe of Christian Religion giving a most excellent light to those that seeks to enter the pathway to salvation (London, 1586). [Gillan, John], The Life of the Reverend and Learned Mr. John Sage (London, 1714).

Bibliography

439

[Godden, Thomas], A Relation of a conference before his Majesty, and the Earl of Rochester, Lord High Treasurer; Concerning the Real Presence and Transubstantiation Nov. 30. 1686 (n.p., 1720). Goodwin, John, Anti-Cavalierisme, or, Truth pleading as well the Necessity, as the Lawfulnesse of this present Warre, for the suppressing of that Butcherly brood of Cavaliering Incendiaries, who are now hammering England, to make an Ireland of it (London, 1642). ’,πολύτρωσις ’,πολυτρώσεως or Redemption Redeemed (London, 1651). ;λήρωμα τὸ ;νευματικόν. Or, a being filled with the Spirit (London, 1670). Gorin de Saint-Amour, Louis, Journal de ce qui s’est fait a` Rome dans l’Affaire des Cinq Propositions (n.p., 1662). [Gother, John], Nubes testium: or a Collection of the Primitive Fathers, giving Testimony to the Faith once deliver’d to the Saints. Being a Full Discovery of the Sentiments of the Ancient Fathers in the Chief Points of Controversie at present under Debate (London, 1686). Graham, T., and Watson, A. G., The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge, 1998). Grotius, Hugo, Sensus librorum sex, quos pro ueritate religionis Christianae Batauice scripsit Hugo Grotius (Leiden, 1627). De ueritate religionis Christianae. Editio secunda, priore auctior et emendatior (Leiden, 1629). True religion explained and defended against the Arch-enemies thereof in these times. In six Bookes. Written in Latine by Hugo Grotius, and now done in English for the common good (London, 1632). De ueritate religionis christianae. Editio Noua, additis annotationibus in quibus testimonia (Paris, 1640). Dissertatio de Coenae administratione ubi Pastores non sunt. Item an semper communicandum per symbola (Amsterdam, 1638). Annotationes in libros Euangeliorum (Amsterdam, 1641). Briefwisseling, 17 vols. ( The Hague, 1928–2001). De Imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra, ed. H.-J. van Dam, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2001). Gunning, Peter, The Paschal or Lent-Fast Apostolical and Perpetual. At first Deliver’d in a Sermon preached before His Majesty in Lent, and since enlarged. Wherein the Judgment of Antiquity is laid down (London, 1662). Hacket, John, Apology for Cathedral establishments, by Dr. John Hacket, afterwards Lord Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. Extracted from ‘The Prebendary’, Part II (London, 1838). Scrinia Reserata: a Memorial Offer’d to the Great Deservings of John Williams, D.D.... Containing a Series of the Most Remarkable Occurrences and Transactions of his Life, in Relation both to Church and State (London, 1693). Hales, John, A Sermon preached at St Maries in Oxford upon Tuesday in Easter Weeke, 1617. Concerning the abuses of obscure and difficult places of holy Scripture, and remedies against them (Oxford, 1617).

440

Bibliography

[Hales, John], A Tract concerning Schisme and Schismatiques wherein is briefly discovered the originall causes of all Schisme. Written by a Learned and Judicious Divine (London, 1642). Golden remains (London, 1659). Golden remains (2nd edn., London, 1673). Sermons preach’d at Eton. Not till now Published (London, 1660). Sermons preach’d at Eton. The Second Edition (London, 1673). A Tract concerning the Sin against the Holy Ghost (London, 1677). Several Tracts … To which is Added, His Letter to Archbishop Laud, occasion’d by his Tract of Schism; never before published among his Works (n.p., 1716). Works, 3 vols. (Glasgow, 1765). Hall, Joseph, Columba Noae oliuam adferens iactatissimae Christi Arcae. Concio Synodica, ad Clerum Anglicanum (Prouinciae prasertim Cantuariensis) habita, in Aede Paulina Londinensi. Feb. 20 1623 [–24] (London, 1624). Episcopacie by Divine Right asserted (London, 1640). The Invisible world, discovered to spiritual eyes, and reduced to usefull Meditation (London, 1659). The Shaking of the Olive-Tree (London, 1660). Halloix, Pierre, Illustrium Ecclesiae Orientalis Scriptorum, qui sanctitate iuxta et eruditione, secundo Christi saeculo floruerunt, uitae et documenta (Douai, 1636). Hammond, Henry, Of resisting the Lawfull Magistrate upon colour of Religion (London, 1643). [ ], A View of some exceptions which have beene made by a Romanist to the Lord Viscount Falkland’s Dicourse of the Infallibilitie of the Church of Rome. Submitted to the Censure of all sober Christians, Together with the Discourse it selfe of Infallibilitie prefixt to it (London, 1646). Of Resisting the Lawfull Magistrate under colour of Religion, and appendant to it, of the word KPIMA, rendred damnation, Rom. 13 reprinted. Also, of the Zelots among the Jewes. Of taking up the Crosse. A vindication of Christians reprehending Saint Peter, from the exceptions of Master Marshall. Augmented by the Author (n.p., 1647). Dissertationes quatuor, quibus Episcopatus Iura ex S. Scripturis et Primaeua Antiquitate adstruuntur, contra sententiam D. Blondelli et aliorum. Quibus praemittitur dissertatio prooemialis, de Antichristo, de Mysterio Iniquitatis, de Diotrephe, et ἐν παρόδῳ, de Gnosticis, sub Apostolorum aeuo se prodentibus (London, 1651). A Letter of resolution to six quaeres, of present use in the Church of England (London, 1653). A Paraphrase, and Annotations upon all the Books of the New Testament (London, 1653). An Answer to the Animadversions on the dissertations touching Ignatius’s Epistles and the Episcopacie in them Asserted (London, 1654). A Vindication of the Dissertations concerning Episcopacie: from the Answers, or Exceptions offered against them by the London Ministers, in their Ius Diuinum Ministerii Euangelici (London, 1654). A Continuation of the Defence of Hugo Grotius, in an Answer to the Review of his Annotations (London, 1657).

Bibliography

441

The Dispatcher Dispatched. Or, an Examination of the Romanists Rejoynder to the Replies of D.H. Being a Third Defence of the Treatise of Schisme. Wherein is inserted a View of their Possession and Oral Tradition in the way of M. White (London, 1659). Aάρις καὶ εἰρήνη, or A Pacifick Discourse of Gods Grace and Decrees: in a Letter, of full Accordance written to the Reverend, and most learned, Dr. Robert Sanderson (London, 1660). [Harsnett, Samuel], A Discovery of the fraudulent practises of John Darrel Bacheler of Artes, in his proceedings concerning the pretended possession and dispossession of William Sommers at Nottingham: of Thomas Darling, the boy of Burton at Caldwall: and one Katherine Wright at Mansfield, and Whittington: and of his dealings with one Mary Couper at Nottingham; detecting in some sort the deceitfull trade in these latter dayes of casting out Devils (London, 1599). [ ], A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, to with-draw the harts of her Maiesties Subjects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian Religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out devils (London, 1603). Harwood, T., Alumni Etonenses (Birmingham, 1797). Hearne, Thomas, Remarks and Collections, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1885–1921). Henry VIII, Assertio septem sacramentorum aduersus Martinum Lutherum, ed. P. Fraenkel (M¨unster in West., 1992; Corpus Catholicorum 43). [Henry, Matthew], An Account of the Life and Death of Mr. Philip Henry, Minister of the Gospel, near Whitchurch in Shropshire. Who Dyed June 24. 1696 in the Sixty fifth Year of his Age (2nd edn., London, 1699). Heylyn, Peter, A Briefe and Moderate Answer, to the seditious and scandalous Challenges of Henry Burton (London, 1637). Antidotum Lincolniense. Or an Answer to a Book entituled, the Holy Table, Name, and Thing, etc. said to be written long agoe by a Minister in Lincolnshire, and Printed for the Diocese of Lincolne, A◦ 1637 (London, 1637). Theologia ueterum: or the Summe of Christian Theologie, Positive, Polemical, and Philological, contained in the Apostles Creed, or reducible to it: according to the tendries of the Antients, both Greeks and Latines (London, 1654). A Full Relation of two Journeys: the one into the main-land of France. The other, into some of the adjacent Ilands (London, 1656). Respondet Petrus: or, the Answer of Peter Heylyn D.D. To so much of Dr. Bernard’s Book Entituled, The Judgement of the late Primate of Ireland, etc. As he is made a Party to by the said Lord Primate in the Point of the Sabbath, and by the said Doctor in some others (London, 1658). Certamen Epistolare, or the Letter-Combate (London, 1659). Examen historicum: or a Discovery and Examination of the Mistakes, Falsities, and Defects in some modern Histories. Occasioned by the Partiality and Inadvertencies of their Severall Authours (London, 1659). Historia Quinqu-Articularis: Or, a Declaration of the Judgment of the Western Churches, and more particularly of the Church of England, in the five controverted points, reproched in these last times by the name of Arminianism (London, 1660). Ecclesia Restaurata: or, the History of the Reformation of the Church of England (London, 1661).

442

Bibliography

Heylyn, Peter, Cyprianus Anglicus: or, the History of the Life and Death, of the most Reverend and Renowned Prelate William by Divine Providence Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1668). Aerius rediuiuus: or, The History of the Presbyterians (Oxford, 1670). [Hickes, George], A Letter from beyond the Seas to One of the chief Ministers of the Non-conforming Party (n.p., 1674). The Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised: In a Sermon Preached Before the University of Oxford, on Act-Sunday, July 11 1680 (London, 1680). The Spirit of Enthusiasm exorcised: In a Sermon Preach’d Before the University of Oxford, etc. the Fourth Edition, much enlarg’d (London, 1709). Peculium Dei, A Discourse about the Jews, as the Peculiar People of God. In a Sermon Preached before the Honourable the Aldermen and Citizens of London, On the Sixth of February, 1680/81 (London, 1681). [ ], Ravaillac rediuiuus: being a Narrative of the Late Tryal of Mr James Mitchel a Conventicle Preacher, Who was executed the 18th of January 1677 for an Attempt which he made on the Sacred Person of the Arch-Bishop of St. Andrews.... In a Letter from a Scottish to an English gentleman (2nd edn., London, 1682). Several Letters which passed between Dr. George Hickes, and a Popish Priest, upon occasion of a young Gentlewoman’s departing from the Church of England to the Church of Rome.... With an Appendix containing several remarkable Papers (London, 1705). A Second Collection of Controversial Letters Relating to the Church of England, and the Church of Rome (London, 1710). letter to Edmund Bohun, 5 November 1687, ed. C. H. Firth, Notes and Queries, 8th series 9 (1896), 203. Hickman, Henry, ;ατρο-σχολαστικο-δικαίωσις, Or a Justification of the Fathers and Schoolmen: Shewing, That they are not Self-condemned for denying the Positivity of Sin. Being an Answer to so much of Mr. Tho. Pierce’s Book, called ,υτοκατάκρισις, as doth relate to the foresaid Opinion (Oxford, 1659). Laudensium Apostasia: or a Dialogue in which is shewen, That some Divines risen up in our Church since the greatness of the late Archbishop, are in sundry Points of great Moment, quite fallen off from the Doctrine received in the Church of England (London, 1660). [ ], Bonasus Vapulans: or, Some Castigations given to Mr. John Durell, for fouling himself and others in his English and Latin Book. By a Country Scholar (London, 1672). Historia Quinqu-Articularis Exarticulata; or Animadversions on Dr. Heylyn’s Quinquarticular History (n.p., 1673). [ ], The Nonconformists vindicated from the abuses put upon them by Mr. Durel and Scrivener. Being some short Animadversions in their Books soon after they came forth: In two Letters to a Friend (who could not hitherto get them Published). Containing some Remarques upon the Celebrated Conference at Hampton-Court. By a Country Scholar (London, 1679). Higgons, Theophilus, The first motive of T.H. Maister of Arts, and lately Minister, to suspect the integrity of his Religion; which was detection of falsehood in D. Humfrey, D. Field, and other learned Protestants, touching the question of Purgatory, and Prayer for the dead (n.p., 1609).

Bibliography

443

Hill, Thomas, A Quartron of Reasons of Catholike Religion, with as many briefe reasons of refusall (Antwerp, 1600). Historiae Augustae Scriptores VI, ed. Claude Saumaise (Paris, 1620). Hoard, Samuel, The Churches Authority asserted: in a Sermon preached at Chelsmford, at the Metropoliticall Visitation of the most Reverend Father in God, William, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury his Grace, etc. March 1. 1636 (London, 1637). Hochstetter, Andreas Adam, Oratio de utilitate peregrinationis Anglicanae, ad d. XI Sextil. M DC XC VII recitata Tubingae, quum Eloquentiae et Poeseos Professionem Inclyta in Eberhardinˆa auspicaretur ( T¨ubingen, n.d.). [Hody, Humphrey], Reflexions on a Pamphlet entitled, Remarks on the Occasional Paper, Numb. VIII (London, 1698). Holdsworth, Richard, ‘Directions for a Student in the Universitie’, in H. F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, ii: The Cambridge University Period 1625–32 (Urbana, Ill., 1961), appendix II, 623–55. Praelectiones Theologicae, habitae in Collegio Greshamensi apud Londinenses (London, 1661). Hooker, Richard, Works (London, 1662). Works, 7 vols. (Folger Library edn., Cambridge, Mass., 1977–98). Hooper, John, Later writings, ed. C. Nevinson (Cambridge, 1852; PS). Horneck, Anthony, An Account of Mr. Edward Sclater’s Return to the Communion of the Church of England: and of the Publick Recantation he made at the Church of St Mary Savoy, the 5th of May, 1689 (London, 1689). Horsley, Samuel, On Christ’s Descent into Hell, and the intermediate state. A Sermon on 1 Peter III. 18,19,20 (London, 1804). Hottinger, Johann Heinrich (the elder), Analecta Historico-theologica (Zurich, 1652). Howson, John, ‘John Howson’s answers to Archbishop Abbot’s accusations at his ‘‘trial’’ before James I at Greenwich, 10 June 1615’, ed. N. Cranfield and K. Fincham, Camden Miscellany, 29 (1987) [Camden 4th series 34], 320–41. The humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, Now by Authority of Parliament sitting at Westminster, concerning a Confession of Faith, with the Quotations and Texts of Scripture annexed. Presented by them lately to both Houses of Parliament (London, [1647]). Humphrey, Laurence, Ioannis Iuelli Angli episcopi Sarisburiensis uita et mors, eiusque uerae doctrinae defensio (London, 1573). Iesuitismi Pars Secunda: Puritanopapismi, seu doctrinae Iesuiticae aliquot Rationibus ab Ed. Campiano comprehensae, et a Ioan. Duraeo defensae, Confutatio: et ex iisdem Fundamentis Reformatae nostrae Religionis Assertio (London, 1584). [Hutchinson, William], A Rational Discourse concerning Transubstantiation. In a Letter to a Person of Honor, from a Master of Arts of the University of Cambridge (n.p., 1676). Hutton, Matthew, Breuis et dilucida explicatio uerae, certae et consolationis plenae doctrinae, de electione, praedestinatione ac reprobatione, ed. A. Thysius (Harderwijk, 1613). Hyll, Adam, The Defence of the Article: Christ descended into Hell. With Arguments obiected against the truth of the same doctrine: of one Alexander Humes. All which reasons are confuted, and the same doctrine cleerely defended (London, 1592).

444

Bibliography

‘I.H. of Cardington, in the County of Bedford, Gentleman’, The Petition and Articles, or severall Charge exhibited in Parliament against John Pocklington, Doctor in Divinity, Parson of Yelden in Bedfordshire, Anno 1641 Mense Ian. Together with a Collection of his Jewish, Popish, Superstitious and Antichristian Doctrines, gathered verbatim out of his own Books, and exhibited against him in Parliament (London, 1641). Index expurgatorius librorum (Antwerp, 1571). Ittig, Thomas, Oratio inauguralis, pro Joh. Dallaei tractatu de Usu Patrum aduersus Matth. Scriveneri Apologiam pro S. Ecclesiae Patribus (Leipzig, 1697). Ius Diuinum Ministerii Euangelici. Or the divine Right of the Gospel-Ministry … Together with an Appendix, wherein the Judgement and Practice of Antiquity about the whole matter of Episcopacy, and especially about the Ordination of Ministers, is briefly discussed. Published by the Provincial Assembly of London (London, 1654). [Jacob, Henry], A Treatise of the sufferings and victory of Christ, in the work of our redemption: Declaring by the Scripturs [sic] these two questions: That Christ suffered for us the wrath of God, which we may well terme the paynes of Hell, or Hellish sorrowes. That Christ after his death on the crosse, went not into Hell in his Soule. Contrarie to certaine errours in these points publiklie preached in London: Anno 1597 (n.p., 1598). A Defence of a Treatise touching the sufferings and victorie of Christ in the worke of our redemption. Wherein is confirmed, 1 That Christ suffered for us, not only Bodily griefe, but also in his Soule an impression of the proper wrath of God, which may be called the paines of Hell. 2 That after his death on the Crosse he went not downe into Hell (n.p., 1600). James I, An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance. First set foorth without a name: And now acknowledged by the Author … Together, with a Premonition of his Maiesties, to all most mightie Monarches, Kings, free Princes and States of Christendome (London, 1609). Apologia pro Iuramento Fidelitatis. Primum quidem ἀνώνυμος: nunc uero ab ipso Auctore … denuo edita. Cui praemissa est praefatio monitoria, Sacratiss. Caesari Rodolpho II. Semper Augusto, Caeterisque Christiani Orbis Sereniss. ac Potentiss. Monarchis ac Regibus: Illustriss. Celsissimisque Liberis Principibus, Rebus publicis atque Ordinibus inscripta (London, 1609). Apologie pour le serment de fidelit´e que le Serenissime Roy de la grand’Bretagne requiert de tous ses sujets … Ensemble un ample avertissement, ou Preface dudit Seigneur Roy (London, 1609). Workes (London, 1616). Opera, ed. James Montagu (London, 1619). James, Thomas, A Treatise of the Corruption of Scripture, Councels, and Fathers, by the Prelats, Pastors, and Pillars of the Church of Rome, for maintenance of Popery and irreligion (London, 1611). Jansen, Cornelius, Augustinus (Louvain, 1640). [Jenkin, Robert], Defensio S. Augustini aduersus Joannis Phereponi in eius Opera Animaduersiones (Cambridge, 1707). Jenkins, Thomas, An Impartial Examination of the Free Inquiry: the Primitive Fathers vindicated, and the Necessity of Miracles maintain’d, to the Conclusion of the Third Century. In a Letter to Dr Middleton (Cambridge, 1754).

Bibliography

445

[Jenkyn, William], Celeusma, seu Clamor, ad Theologos Hierarchiae Anglicanae, Sanctitate Doctrinae, et Vitae, Conspicuos (London, 1679). A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion’s Debates at the Tower of London in 1581, ed. J. V. Holleran (New York, 1999). Jewel, John, Works, ed. J. Ayre, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1845–50). Joliffe, Henry, Responsio uenerabilium sacerdotum, Henrici Ioliffi et Roberti Ionson, sub protestatione facta, ad illos articulos Ioannis Hoperi, Episcopi Vigorniae nomen gerentis, in quibus a Catholica fide dissentiebat: Una cum Confutationibus eiusdem Hoperi, et Replicationibus … Stephani Gardineri, Episcopi Vintoniensis, tunc temporis pro confessione fidei in carcere detenti (Antwerp, 1564). Katona, Emericus, Tractatus de Patrum, Conciliorum, Traditionum Authoritate circa Fidei Dogmata (Frankfurt, 1611). Keble, John, A Postscript to the third edition of the sermon, entitled, ‘Primitive tradition recognised in Holy Scripture’. To which is subjoined Catena Patrum. no. III. being no. LXXVIII of the ‘Tracts for the Times’ (London, 1837). Keckermann, Bartholomaeus, Systema logicae tribus libris adornatum (2nd edn., n.p., 1603). Keeble, N. H., and Nutall, G. F., Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1991). Kendall, George, 3εοκρατία: Or, a Vindication of the Doctrine commonly Received in the Reformed Churches concerning Gods Intentions of Special Grace and Favour to his Elect in the Death of Christ (London, 1653). Sancti Sanciti. Or, the common Doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints (London, 1653). Labbe, Philippe, De Scriptoribus ecclesiasticis, quos attigit Eminentiss. S.R.E. Card. Robertus Bellarminus, philologica et historica dissertatio, 2 vols. (Paris, 1660). The Lady Falkland: her life. From a MS. in the Imperial Archives at Lille (London, 1861). Lamplugh, Thomas, A Sermon Preached before the House of Lords on the 5th of November, in the Abby Church at Westminster (London, 1678). Lapide, Cornelius Cornelii a, In omnes diui Pauli epistolas Commentaria (Lyon, 1644). [Larroque, Matthieu de], Obseruationes in Ignatianas Pearsonii Vindicias. Et in annotationes Beveregii in canones Sanctorum Apostolorum (Rouen, 1674). Laubrussel, Ignace de, Trait´e des abus de la critique en matiere de Religion, 2 vols. (Paris, 1710). Laud, William, A Sermon preached before His Majesty, on Tuesday the nineteenth of June, at Wansted. Anno Dom. 1621 (London, 1621). A Sermon preached at White-Hall, on the 24. of March 1621, being the day of the beginning of his Maiesties most gracious Reigne (London, 1622). A Relation of the Conference betweene William Lawd, Then, Lord Bishop of St Davids; now Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury: and Mr. Fisher the Jesuite (London, 1639). The History of the troubles and tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God, and Blessed Martyr, William Laud, Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury. Wrote by Himself, during his Imprisonment in the Tower. To which is prefixed the Diary of his own

446

Bibliography

Life faithfully and entirely Published from the Original Copy, ed. Henry Wharton (London, 1695). The Second Volume of the Remains of the Most Reverend Father in God, and Blessed Martyr, William Laud, ed. Henry and Edmund Wharton (London, 1700). Works, ed. W. Scott and J. Bliss, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1847–60). Launoy, Jean de, Epistolae Omnes, ed. William Saywell (Cambridge, 1689) Laurence, Richard, An Attempt to illustrate those Articles of the Church of England, which the Calvinists improperly consider as Calvinistical, in eight sermons preached before the University of Oxford, in the year MDCCCIV, at the lecture founded by J. Bampton (new edn., Oxford, 1820). [Laurence, Roger], Lay Baptism Invalid: or, an Essay to prove that such Baptism is null and void; especially to those who know that ’twas Administer’d to them, in opposition to the Divine Right of the Apostolical Succession (London, 1708). Laurentius, Gaspar, Catholicus ueterum, qui Patres uocantur, ex uerbo diuino, cum superiori confessionum fidei Syntagmate, in omnibus Fidei Christianae articulis Consensus, at the end of Corpus et Syntagma confessionum Fidei (Geneva, 1612). Laurentius, Jacobus, Conscientia Iesuitica cauteriata (Amsterdam, 1615). Reuerentia Ecclesiae Romanae, erga Sanctos Patres Veteres subdola, ex ipsorum Pontificiorum Iesuitarumque libris certis atque euidentibus testimoniis demonstrata, et in XII Articulos distributa. Cui accedit Tractatus de uera ac legitima, quae Sacrae Scripturae, et quae sanctis Patribus atque illorum Scriptis debetur, Auctoritate, Honore, Reuerentia (Leiden, 1624). Law, Edmund, Considerations on the state of the world with regard to the theory of religion … Being the substance of some sermons preach’d before the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1745). Le Nain de Tillemont, S´ebastien, Memoires pour servir a` l’histoire ecclesiastique des six premiers siecles, 16 vols. (Paris, 1693–1712). Lee, Francis, Memoirs of the Life of Mr John Kettlewell (London, 1718). Leedham-Green, E. S., Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-Lists from ViceChancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986). Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, ‘Leibnitiana’, in Opera omnia, ed. L. Dutens, 6 vols. (Geneva, 1768), vi/1. [Leslie, Charles], The Case of the Regale and of the Pontificat stated. In the Relation of a Conference concerning the Independency of the Church as to Her Purely Spiritual Power and Authority (n.p., 1700). Letters addressed to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library, ed. G. W. Wheeler (Oxford, 1933). Liddon, Henry Parry, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 4 vols. (London, 1893–7) The Life of Robert Frampton Bishop of Gloucester deprived as a Non-Juror 1689, ed. T. S. Evans (London, 1876). Lindanus, Guilielmus Damasus, Dubitantius de uera certaque, per Christi Iesu Evangelium, salutis aeternae uia, Libris III. instructus (Cologne, 1571). Lipsius, Justus, Diua Virgo Hallensis. Beneficia eius et miracula fide atque ordine descripta (Antwerp, 1604). Diua Sichemiensis siue Aspricollis: Noua eius Beneficia et Admiranda (Antwerp, 1605).

Bibliography

447

Lloyd, David, Memoires of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings and Deaths of those noble, reverend, and excellent personages, that suffered Death, Sequestration, Decimation, or otherwise, for the Protestant Religion, and the great Principle thereof, Allegiance to their Soveraigne, in our late Intestine Wars … (London, 1668). Lloyd, William, An Historical Account of Church-Government as it was in GreatBritain and Ireland, when they first received the Christian Religion (London, 1684). Long, Thomas, The History of the Donatists (London, 1677). The Character of a Separatist: or Sensuality the Ground of Separation. To which is Added the Pharisees Lesson, on Matth. IX. XIII and an examination of Mr. Hales Treatise of Schisme (London, 1677). Mr Hales’s Treatise of Schisme examined and censured. To which are Added Mr Baxter’s Arguments for Conformity, wherein the most Material Passages of the Treatise of Schisme are answered (London, 1678). Lowth, Simon, Of the Subject of Church-Power, in whom it resides, its force, extent, and execution, that it opposes not civil government in any one instance of it (London, 1685). A Letter to Edw. Stillingfleet, D.D. etc. in answer to the Epistle Dedicatory before his sermon, preached at a Publick Ordination at St. Peter’s Cornhill, March 15th 1684–5 (London, 1687). Lucas Brugensis, Franciscus, Notationes in sacra Biblia (Antwerp, 1580). Luckock, Herbert Mortimer, Studies in the history of the Book of Common Prayer (2nd edn., London, 1882). Maldonat, Jean, Commentarii in quatuor Euangelistas (Pont-`a-Mousson, 1596). Marvell, Andrew, Prose Works, 2 vols. (New Haven, 2003). Matthew, Tobie, Concio apologetica aduersus Campianum (Oxford, 1638). [Maurice, Henry], A Vindication of the Primitive Church, and Diocesan Episcopacy (London, 1682). Mede, Joseph, Works, ed. John Worthington (London, 1672). [ ], Clauis Apocalyptica. Editio secunda (Cambridge, 1632). [Middleton, Conyers], An Introductory Discourse to a larger Work Designed hereafter to be Published, concerning the Miraculous Powers, which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church, from the Earliest Ages, through several successive Centuries (London, 1747). Reflections on two Pamphlets lately published against Dr. Middleton’s Introductory Discourse.... With a Preface to these Remarks, Giving a brief Account of a certain Book, which professes to exhibit a full, true, and comprehensive View of Christianity, etc. (London, 1748). A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers, which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church, from the Earliest Ages, through several successive Centuries. By which is shewn, That we have no sufficient Reason to believe, upon the Authority of the Primitive Fathers, that any such Powers were continued to the Church, after the Days of the Apostles (London, 1749). Milton, John, Complete Prose Works, ed. D. M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, 1953–82). Minutes of the sessions of the Westminster Assembly of divines while engaged in preparing their directory for Church government, Confession of faith, and Catechisms (November 1644 to March 1649), ed. A. F. Mitchell and J. Struthers (Edinburgh, 1874).

448

Bibliography

Montagu, Richard, Diatribae upon the first part of the late History of Tithes (London, 1621). Analecta Ecclesiasticarum Exercitationum (London, 1622). Immediate addresse unto God alone. First delivered in a Sermon before his Majestie at Windsore. Since revised and inlarged to a just Treatise of Invocation of Saints. Occasioned by a false imputation of M. Antonius De Dominis upon the Authour (London, 1624). A Gagg for the new Gospel? No: a new Gagg for an old Goose. Who would needes undertake to stop all Protestants mouths for ever, with 276 places out of their owne English Bibles. Or An Answere to a late Abridger of Controversies, and Belyar of the Protestants Doctrine (London, 1624). Appello Caesarem. A Iust Appeale from two unjust Informers (London, 1625). Apparatus ad origines ecclesiasticas (Oxford, 1635). De Originibus Ecclesiasticis Commentationum tomus primus (London, 1636). 3εανθρωπικο˜υ seu de Vita Iesu Christi Domini nostri Originum Ecclesiasticarum pars posterior (London, 1640). Moraines, Antonin, Anti-Iansenius. Hoc est, selectae disputationes de haeresi Pelagiana et Semipelagiana: deque uariis statibus naturae humanae: et de Gratia Christi Saluatoris. In quibus uera de illis doctrina proponitur, et Cornelii Iansenii Iprensis falsa Dogmata refutantur (Paris, 1652). More, P. E., and Cross, F. L. (eds.), Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1935). Morrice, Roger, The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, ed. M. Goldie, 6 vols. (Woodbridge, 2007). [Morton, Thomas], A Direct Answer unto the scandalous exceptions, which Theophilus Higgons hath lately obiected against D. Morton (London, 1609). Mozley, Thomas, Reminiscences, chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, 2 vols. (London, 1882). Musso, Cornelius, In B. Pauli Apostoli Epistolam ad Romanos Absolutissima Commentaria (Venice, 1588). [A new Confession of Faith, or the first Principles of the Christian Religion] [London, 1654]. Newman, John Henry, Apologia pro vita sua, ed. M. J. Svaglic (Oxford, 1967). The New Testament of Iesus Christ, translated faithfully into English, out of the authentical Latin … With Arguments of bookes and chapters, Annotations, and other necessarie helpes, for the better understanding of the text, and specially for the discoverie of the Corruptions of divers late translations, and for clearing the Controversies in religion of these daies: In the English College of Rhemes (Rheims, 1582). [Newton, William], The Life of the Right Reverend Dr. White Kennett, Late Lord Bishop of Peterborough (London, 1730). ´ [Nicole, Pierre, and Arnauld, Antoine], La Perpetuit´e de la foy de l’Eglise catholique touchant l’Eucharistie. Avec la Refutation de l’Ecrit d’un Ministre contre ce Trait´e (Paris, 1664). Nowell, Alexander, Catechismus, siue prima Institutio, Disciplinaeque pietatis Christianae, Latine explicata (London, 1570).

Bibliography

449

Nutall, G. F., ‘A Transcript of Richard Baxter’s Library Catalogue’, JEH 2 (1951), 207–21; 3 (1952), 74–100. Oecolampadius, Joannes, De genuina uerborum Domini, Hoc est corpus meum, iuxta uetustissimos authores expositione liber (Basle, 1525). Quid de Eucharistia ueteres tum Graeci, tum Latini senserint, Dialogus in quo Epistolae Philippi Melanchthonis et Ioannis Oecolampadii insertae (n.p., 1530). Original Letters, illustrative of English History, ed. H. Ellis, 2nd series, 4 vols. (London, 1827). Overall, John, Bishop Overall’s Convocation-Book, M DC VI concerning the governement of God’s catholick Church, and the Kingdoms of the whole World (London, 1690). Owen, David, Herod and Pilat reconciled: or, The Concord of Papist and Puritan (against Scripture, Fathers, Councels, and other Orthodoxall Writers) for the Coercion, Deposition, and Killing of Kings (Cambridge, 1610). A Perswasion to Loyalty, or the Subjects dutie. Wherein is proved that resisting or deposing of Kings (under what specious pretences soever couched) is utterly unlawfull (London, 1642). [Owen, John], Proposals for the furtherance and propagation of the Gospell in this Nation. As the same were humbly presented to the Honourable Committee of Parliament by divers Ministers of the Gospell, and others. As also, some Principles of Christian Religion, without the beliefe of which, the Scriptures doe plainly and clearly affirme, Salvation is not to be obtained. Which were also presented in explanation of one of the said Proposals (London, 1653). The Doctrine of the Saints perseverance Explained and Confirmed.... In a Full Answer to the Discourse of Mr John Goodwin against it, in his Book Entituled Redemption Redeemed (Oxford, 1654). Of Schisme (Oxford, 1657). Exercitations on the epistle to the Hebrews, 4 vols. (London, 1668–84). ?], A Plea for the Non-conformists; tending to justifie them against the clamorous [ charge of Schisme. By a Doctor of Divinity. With two Sheets on the same Subject by another Hand and Judgment (London, 1674). The Reason of Faith. Or an Answer unto that Enquiry, Wherefore we believe the Scripture to be the Word of God. With the Causes and Nature of that Faith wherewith we do so (London, 1677). Bibliotheca Oweniana (London, 1684). Oxford University, The Answere of the Vicechancelour, the Doctors, both the Proctors, and other the Heads of Houses in the Universitie of Oxford … To the humble Petition of the Ministers of the Church of England, desiring Reformation of certain Ceremonies and Abuses of the Church (Oxford, 1603). Statuta antiqua Uniuersitatis Oxoniensis, ed. S. Gibson (Oxford, 1931). The Register of the Visitors of the University of Oxford, from A.D. 1647 to A.D. 1658, ed. M. Burrows (London, 1881; Camden Society  29). Iudicium et Decretum Uniuersitatis Oxoniensis Latum in Conuocatione habita Jul. 21. An. 1683. Contra quosdam Perniciosos Libros et Propositiones Impias, quae Capitibus sacratissimorum Principum, eorum Statui et Regimini, et omni Humanae Societati exitium intentant (Oxford, 1683).

450

Bibliography

Page, William, A Tract concerning Schisme and Schismatiques. Wherein, is briefly discovered the originall causes of all Schisme. Written by a Learned and Judicious Divine. Together with certain Animadversions upon some Passages thereof (Oxford, 1642). Pareus, David, In diuinam ad Romanos S. Pauli Apostoli epistolam commentarius (Heidelberg, 1613). Paris University, Registre des proc`es-verbaux de la Facult´e de Th´eologie de Paris, i: 1505–1523, ed. A. Clerval (Paris, 1917). Registre des proc`es-verbaux de la Facult´e de Th´eologie de l’Universit´e de Paris de janvier 1524 a` novembre 1533, ed. J. K. Farge (Paris, 1990). Parker, Matthew, Correspondence, ed. J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne (Cambridge, 1853; PS). [ ], De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae et Priuilegiis Ecclesiae Cantuariensis, cum Archiepiscopis eiusdem 70 ([Lambeth], 1572). [Parker, Robert], A scholasticall discourse against symbolizing with Antichrist in ceremonies: especially in the signe of the Crosse (n.p., 1607). De Politeia Ecclesiastica libri tres [Leiden, 1616]. Parkes, Richard, A Briefe Answere unto certaine Objections and Reasons against the descension of Christ into hell, lately sent in writing unto a Gentleman in the Country (Oxford, 1604). Parkes, Richard, An Apologie of Three Testimonies of holy Scripture, concerning the Articles of our Creed, He Descended into Hell (London, 1607). Parr, Richard, The Life of the Most Reverend Father in God, James Usher, Late Lord Arch-Bishop of Armagh, Primate and Metropolitan of all Ireland (London, 1686). Pascal, Blaise, Pens´ees de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets qui ont est´e trouv´ees apr`es sa mort parmy ses papiers (2nd edn., Paris, 1670). [Patrick, John], A full view of the Doctrines and Practices of the Ancient Church relating to the Eucharist. Wholly different from those of the present Roman Church, and inconsistent with the belief of Transubstantiation. Being a sufficient Confutation of Consensus Veterum, Nubes Testium, and other Late Collections of the Fathers pretending to the contrary (London, 1688). Patrick, Simon, Works, ed. A. Taylor, 9 vols. (Oxford, 1858). Paxillus, Bernardus, Monomachia pro Defensione Fidei SS. Trinitatis, i (Cracow, 1616). Payva d’Andrada, Diego, Defensio Tridentinae fidei catholicae, et integerrimae (Ingolstadt, 1580). Pearson, John, Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatii (Cambridge, 1672). An Exposition of the Apostles Creed (London, 1659). An Exposition of the Creed (5th edn., London, 1683). Minor theological works, ed. E. Churton, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1845). Pelling, Edward, A Sermon Preached on the Thirtieth of January, 1678/9 (London, 1679). A Sermon Preached before the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen, at St Mary le Bow, on Nov. 5 1683 (London, 1683). [ ], The Antiquity of the Protestant Religion: with an Answer to Mr. Sclater’s Reasons, and the Collections made by the Author of the Pamphlet entitled Nubes testium. In a Letter to a Person of Quality. The First Part (London, 1687).

Bibliography

451

Perkins, William, Armilla aurea, id est, miranda series causarum et Salutis et Damnationis iuxta uerbum Dei (Cambridge, 1590). A Golden Chaine, or the description of Theologie, containing the order of the causes of Salvation and Damnation, according to Gods woorde (London, 1591). A Reformed Catholike (Cambridge, 1598). Problema de Romanae Fidei ementito Catholicismo. Estque Antidotum contra Thesaurum Catholicum Iodoci Coccii. Et ;ροπαιδεία Iuuentutis in Lectione omnium Patrum (Cambridge, 1604). Workes, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1608–9). The Work of William Perkins, ed. I. Breward (Appleford, 1970). [Persons, Robert], A Treatise tending to mitigation towardes Catholicke-Subjects in England (n.p., 1607). Petau, Denis, Dissertationum ecclesiasticarum libri duo, in quibus de Episcoporum dignitate ac potestate; deque aliis Ecclesiasticis dogmatibus disputatur (Paris, 1641). Theologica Dogmata, 5 vols. (Paris, 1644–50). Pierce, Thomas, A Collection of Sermons upon Several Occasions (Oxford, 1671). Pithou, Pierre, Opera, sacra, iuridica, historica, miscellanea (Paris, 1609). Pits, John, Relationum historicarum de rebus Anglicis tomus primus (no more published) (Paris, 1619). Plume, Thomas, An Account of the Life and Death of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Hacket, late Lord Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, ed. M. E. C. Walcott (London, 1865). Pocklington, John, Sunday no Sabbath. A Sermon preached before the Lord Bishop of Lincolne, at his Lordships visitation at Ampthill in the County of Bedford, Aug. 17 1635. Second edition corrected (London, 1636). [Pocock, N.], ‘Illustrations of the State of the Church during the Great Rebellion’, Ecclesiastic and Theologian, 6 ( July–December 1848), 1–12, 65–80, 161–75, 212–26, 297–310; 7 ( January–June 1849), 47–64, 118–29, 137–52, 276–93, 373–85; 8 ( July–December 1849), 158–68; 9 ( January–June, 1850), 113–25, 288–98; 10 ( July–December 1850), 321–30; 11 ( January–June 1851), 87–102, 242–54; 12 ( July–December 1851), 86–96, 161–74, 364–77; 13 ( January–June 1852), 238–50, 323–31; 14 ( July–December 1852), 156–64, 320–31; 15 ( January–December 1853), 179–87, 224–32, 456–66, 555–65; 16 ( January–December 1854), 187–94. Porson, Richard, Letters to Mr. Archdeacon Travis, in answer to his defence of the three heavenly witnesses, I John V. 7 (London, 1790). Possevino, Antonio, Bibliotheca selecta qua agitur de ratione studiorum in Historia, in Disciplinas, in Salute omnium procuranda (Rome, 1593). Praestantium ac eruditorum uirorum epistolae ecclesiasticae et theologicae, ed. Philippus van Limborch (3rd edn., Amsterdam, 1704). Preston, John, Riches of Mercy to men in Misery (London, 1658). Prideaux, John, Lectiones decem. De totidem religionis capitibus praecipue hoc tempore controuersis prout publice habebantur Oxoniae in Vesperiis (2nd edn., Oxford, 1626). Viginti-duae Lectiones de totidem religionis capitibus, praecipue hoc tempore controuersis prout publice habebantur Oxoniae in Vesperiis. Quibus accesserunt

452

Bibliography

Tredecim Orationes Inaugurales … Subnectuntur Sex Conciones pro more habitae, ad Artium Baccalaurios in die Cinerum (Oxford, 1648). The Principles of Faith, presented by Mr. Tho. Godwin … and other Ministers, to the Committee of Parliament for Religion, by way of explanation to the Proposals for propagating of the Gospel (London, 1654). Prynne, William, Histrio-mastix. The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragædie (London, 1633). [ ], The unbishoping of Timothy and Titus. Or a briefe elaborate Discourse, proving Timothy to be no Bishop (much lesse any sole, or Diocaesan Bishop) of Ephesus, nor Titus of Crete; and that the power of ordination, or imposition of hands, belongs Iure Divino to Presbyters, as well as to Bishops, and not to Bishops onely. Wherein all Objections and Pretences to the contrary are fully answered; and the pretended superiority of Bishops over other Ministers and Presbyters Iure Divino, (now much contended for) utterly subverted in a most perspicuous maner (n.p., 1636). Canterburies Doome. Or the first part of a compleat History of the Commitment, Charge, Tryall, Condemnation, Execution of William Laud, late Arch-Bishop of Canterbury.... Wherein this Arch-Prelates manifold Trayterous Artifices to usher in Popery by Degrees, are cleerly detected, and the Ecclesiasticall History of our ChurchAffaires, during his Pontificall Domination, faithfully presented to the publike View of the World (London, 1646). Puller, Timothy, The moderation of the Church of England; considered as useful for allaying the present distempers which the indisposition of the Time hath contracted (London, 1679). Rainolds, John, Summa colloquii Iohannis Rainoldi cum Iohanne Harto de Capite et Fide Ecclesiae, trans. Henry Parry (Oxford, 1610). The Summe of the Conference betwene John Rainoldes and John Hart: touching the Head and the Faith of the Church (London, 1584). De Romanae Ecclesiae idololatria, in cultu sanctorum, reliquiarum, imaginum, aquae, salis, olei, aliarumque rerum consecratarum, et sacramenti Eucharistiae (Oxford, 1596). Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes (n.p., 1599). A Letter of Dr. Reinolds to his friend, concerning his advice for the studie of Divinitie (London, 1613). ´ Ricardus, Antonius [Etienne Dechamps], Defensio Censurae Sacrae Facultatis Parisiensis, latae XXVII. Iunii anno MDLX. seu disputatio theologica de libero arbitrio, editio tertia prioribus multo auctior (Paris, 1646). Richeome, Louis, L’Idolatrie huguenote figur´ee au patron de la vieille payenne (Lyon, 1608). Ridley, Nicholas, De Coena Dominica assertio, contra sceleratam illam transsubstantiationis haeresim (Geneva, 1556). Rivet, Andr´e, Critici sacri specimen. Hoc est, Censurae Doctorum tam ex Orthodoxis quam ex Pontificiis, in Scripta quae Patribus plerisque priscorum et puriorum seculorum, uel affinxit incogitantia, uel supposuit impostura: Collectae, expensae, defensae, uel explosae [Heidelberg, 1612]. Critici sacri libri IV. In quibus expenduntur, confirmantur, defenduntur, vel reiiciuntur Censurae Doctorum tam ex Orthodoxis quam ex Pontificiis, in Scripta

Bibliography

453

quae Patribus plerisque priscorum et puriorum seculorum, incogitantia uel error affinxit, aut dolus malus supposuit. Tertia editio iusta accessione aucta et recognita (Geneva, 1626). Rogers, Thomas, The Faith, doctrine and religion, professed and protected in the Realme of England, and dominions of the same: Expressed in 39 Articles, concordablie agreed upon by the reverend Bishops, and Clergie of this Kingdome, at two severall meetings, or Convocations of theirs, in the yeares of our Lord, 1562, and 1604 … Perused, and by the lawfull authoritie of the Church of England, allowed to be publique (Cambridge, 1607). Rule, Gilbert, The Cyprianick-Bishop examined, and found not to be a Diocesan, nor to have Superior Power to a Parish Minister, or Presbyterian Moderator (Edinburgh, 1696). Rushworth, William, The Dialogues of William Richworth. Or, the judgmend of common sense in the choice of Religion (Paris, 1640). and White, Thomas, Rushworth’s Dialogues. Or, the Judgment of common sence in the choyce of Religion. Last Edition, corrected and enlarged (Paris, 1654). Sage, John, A Vindication of a discourse entituled the Principles of the Cyprianic Age, with regard to Episcopal Power and Jurisdiction (London, 1701). Sainctes, Claude de, Declaration d’aucuns atheismes de la doctrine de Calvin et Beze contre les premiers fondemens de la Chrestient´e (Paris, 1568). [Saint-Cyran, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abb´e de], Petri Aurelii Theologi Opera, iussu et impensis Cleri Gallicani denuo in lucem edita (Paris, 1642). Sainte-Marthe, Denys de, R´eponse aux plaintes des protestans touchant la pr´etendu¨e Pers´ecution de France (Paris, 1688). Histoire de S. Gregoire le Grand, Pape et Docteur de l’Eglise (Rouen, 1697). Sand, Christoph (junior), Nucleus Historiae Ecclesiasticae, exhibitus in Historia Arianorum (2nd edn., Cologne, 1676). Sanford, Hugh, and Parker, Robert, De Descensu Domini nostri Iesu Christi ad Inferos (Amsterdam, 1611). Saravia, Adrianus, De diuersis ministrorum Euangelii gradibus, sicut a Domino fuerunt instituti, et traditi ab Apostolis, ac perpetuo omnium Ecclesiarum usu confirmati (London, 1590). Defensio Tractationis de diuersis ministrorum Euangelii gradibus, ab Hadriano Saravia editae contra Responsionem Clarissimi uiri D. Theodori Bezae (London, 1594). The Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order 1658, ed. A. G. Matthews (London, 1959). Saywell, William, The Original of all Plots in Christendom; with the Danger and Remedy of Schism (London, 1680). Evangelical and Catholick Unity, maintained in the Church of England: or an Apology for her Government, Liturgy, Subscriptions, etc. (London, 1682). Scaliger, Joseph, Scaligerana ou bons mots, rencontres agreables, et remarques judicieuses et sc¸avantes de J. Scaliger (Cologne, 1695). Schmitz du Moulin, H., ‘Un correspondant anglais de Quesnel: lettres de Quesnel a` Edward Bernard, professeur d’astronomie a` Oxford’, Lias, 2 (1975), 281–312. Sclater, Edward, Consensus ueterum: or, the Reasons of Edward Sclater Minister of Putney, for his Conversion to the Catholic Faith and Communion (London, 1686).

454

Bibliography

Scrivener, Matthew, Apologia pro S. Ecclesiae Patribus, aduersus Joannem Dallaeum De Usu Patrum, etc. Accedit Apologia pro Ecclesia Anglicana aduersus nuperum schisma (London, 1672). A Course of Divinity: or, an Introduction to the Knowledge of the True Catholick Religion; especially as Professed by the Church of England (London, 1674). Scultetus, Abraham, Medulla Theologiae Patrum: qui a temporibus Apostolorum ad Concilium usque Nicenum floruerunt. Methodo analytica et synthetica expressa, in gratiam eorum, qui uel ob Codicum temporisue defectum Patres ipsi legere non possunt, uel eosdem cum fructu euoluere uolunt (Amberg, 1598). De curriculo uitae [suae], inprimis uero de actionibus Pragensibus … narratio apologetica (Emden, 1625). A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters: the one whereof was sounded by a reverend Byshop dead long since; the other by a worshipful and zealous Gentleman now alive (n.p., 1580). Sergeant, John, Sure-footing in Christianity, or Rational Discourses on the Rule of Faith (2nd edn., London, 1665). [ ], Faith vindicated from Possibility of Falshood (Louvain, 1667). Errour Non-Plust, or Dr. Stillingfleet shown to be the Man of no Principles. With an Essay how discourses concerning Catholick grounds bear the highest Evidence (n.p., 1673). ‘The Literary Life of the Rev. John Serjeant, written by himself, and never before published’, Catholicon: or, the Christian Philosopher, 2 (December 1815– July 1816), 132–6, 169–76, 217–24; 3 ( July–December 1816), 9–16, 55–64, 97–104, 121–7. Sharp, John, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, and Aldermen of London, at Bow-Church (London, 1676). Sheldon, Richard, A survey of the miracles of the Church of Rome, proving them to be Antichristian. Wherein are examined and refuted the six fundamentall Reasons of John Flood Ignatian, published by him in defence of Popish Miracles (London, 1616). Sherlock, William, A Continuation and Vindication of the Defence of Dr. Stillingfleet’s Unreasonableness of Separation: in answer to Mr. Baxter, Mr. Lob, etc. Containing a further Explication and Defence of the Doctrine of Catholick Communion (London, 1682). Sidney, Algernon, Court Maxims, ed. H. W. Blom, E. H. Mulier, and R. Janse (Cambridge, 1996). Sixtus of Siena, Bibliotheca sancta, ex praecipuis catholicae Ecclesiae authoribus collecta, 2 vols. (Venice, 1566). Skinner, Robert, The Speech of Dr. Robert Skinner, Lord Bishop of Bristol, at the Visitation at Dorchester, September 18. 1637. Earnestly and humbly recommended to the serious Perusal of the Clergy of the present Age by their humble servant, Philo-Clerus (London, 1744). Smectymnuus, An Answer to a Book entituled, an Humble Remonstrance (n.p., 1641). Smith, Thomas, Vitae quorundam eruditissimorum et illustrium uirorum (London, 1707). A Sermon of the Credibility of the Mysteries of the Christian religion, preached before a learned audience (London, 1675).

Bibliography

455

Admodum Reuerendi et Doctissimi Viri D. Roberti Huntingtoni, Episcopi Rapotensis, epistolae … Praemittuntur D. Huntingtoni et D. Bernardi Vitae (London, 1704). Smith, William, A Sermon preached in the Cathedral Church of Norwich, on the 9th of September 1683 (London, 1683). Smyth, Richard, The Assertion and Defence of the sacramente of the aulter (London, 1546). A brief treatyse settynge forth divers truthes necessary both to be beleved of chrysten people, and kepte also, whiche are not expressed in the scripture but left to ye church by the apostles tradition (London, 1547). A godly and faythfull Retractation made and published at Paules crosse in London, the yeare of oure Lorde God 1547. the 15. daye of May (London, 1547). A playne Declaration made at Oxforde the 24. daye of July (London, 1547). Confutatio eorum, quae Philippus Melanchthon obiicit contra Missae sacrificium propitiatorium. Cui accessit et repulsio calumniarum Ioannis Caluini, et Musculi, et Ioannis Iuelli, contra Missam, eius canonem, et Purgatorium, denuo excusa (Louvain, 1562). De infantium baptismo, contra Ioannem Caluinum, ac de operibus supererogationis, et merito mortis Christi, aduersus eundem Caluinum, et eius discipulos (Louvain, 1562). Stapleton, Thomas, Opera omnia, 4 vols. (Paris, 1620). Stationers’ Company, A Companion to Arber, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford, 1967). Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602–1640, ed. W. A. Jackson (London, 1957). Stearne, John, De Obstinatione. Opus Posthumum, Pietatem Christiano-Stoicam, Scholastico more, suadens (Dublin, 1672). Stephen, Thomas, 6όγοι ὡρα˜ι οι. Three seasonable Sermons. The First preach’t at St. Mary’s in Cambridge, May 31. 1642. The Others designed for publick Auditories, but prevented (London, 1660). Stillingfleet, Edward, Irenicum. A weapon-salve for the Churches Wounds. Or the divine right of Particular Forms of Church-Government; Discussed and examined according to the Principles of the Law of Nature, the positive Laws of God, the practice of the Apostles and the Primitive Church, and the judgement of Reformed Divines. Whereby a foundation is laid for the Churches peace, and the accommodation of our present differences (London, 1661). An Answer to several late Treatises, Occasioned by a Book entituled a Discourse concerning the Idolatry practised in the Church of Rome, and the Hazard of Salvation in the Communion of it. The first part (London, 1673). An Answer to Mr. Cressy’s Epistle Apologetical to a Person of Honour: Touching his Vindication of Dr. Stillingfleet (London, 1675). A Letter to a Deist, in Answer to several Objections against the Truth and Authority of the Scriptures (London, 1677). [ ], Several conferences between a Romish Priest, a Fanatick Chaplain, and a Divine of the Church of England, concerning the Idolatry of the Church of Rome (London, 1679).

456

Bibliography

Stillingfleet, Edward, Origines sacrae, or A Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith, as to the Truth and Divine Authority of the Scriptures, and the matters therein contained (5th edn., London, 1680). The Mischief of Separation. A Sermon Preached at Guild-Hall Chapell, May 11. MDC.LXXX (London, 1680). Origines Britannicae, or, the Antiquities of the British Churches (London, 1685). A Sermon preached at a Publick Ordination at St. Peter’s Cornhill, March 15th 1684–5 (London, 1685). A Discourse concerning the Nature and Grounds of the Certainty of Faith (London, 1688). Strype, John, The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke (London, 1705). Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion, 4 vols. (London, 1709–31). The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker (London, 1711). The Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, D.D., the Third and Last Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1718). The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, 2nd edn., ed. J. P. Kenyon (Cambridge, 1986). Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. J. F. Larkin and P. L. Hughes, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1973–83). Su´arez, Francisco, Defensio Fidei Catholicae et Apostolicae aduersus Anglicanae sectae errores, cum responsione ad Apologiam pro iuramento Fidelitatis, et Praefationem monitoriam Serenissimi Iacobi Magnae Britanniae Regis (Cologne, 1614). Sully, Maximilien de B´ethune, baron de Rosny, duc de, M´emoires, vi: L’Ambassade vers Jacques Ier d’Angleterre (Clermont-Ferrand, 2006). Summa conciliorum omnium, ed. Louis Bail (Paris, 1645). Sutcliffe, Matthew, De Presbyterio, eiusque noua in Ecclesia Christiana Politeia (London, 1591). De recta studii theologici ratione (London, 1602). Synodalia, ed. E. Cardwell, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1842). [Taylor, James], A Letter of Enquiry to the Reverend Fathers of the Society of Jesus, written in the Person of a Dissatisfied Roman Catholick (London, 1689). Taylor, Jeremy, 3εολογία ἐκλεκτική. A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying. Shewing the unreasonablenes of prescribing to other mens Faith, and the Iniquity of persecuting differing opinions (London, 1647). Whole Works, ed. C. P. Eden, 10 vols. (London, 1847–54). Thomson, George, Vindex ueritatis aduersus Iustum Lipsium Libri duo. Prior insaniam eius religionem politicam, fatuam nefariamque de Fato, sceleratissimam de Fraude doctrinam refellit. Posterior ψευδοπαρθένου Sichemiensis, id est, Idoli Aspricollis, et Deae ligneae miracula conuellit. Uterque Lipsium ad orco Gentilismum reuocasse docet (London, 1606). Thorndike, Herbert, An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England, being a Necessary Consideration and brief Resolution of the chief Controversies in Religion that divide the Western Church (London, 1659).

Bibliography

457

Just weights and measures: That is, the present State of Religion, weighed in the Balance, and Measured by the Standard of the Sanctuary, according to the Opinion of Herbert Thorndike (London, 1662). De ratione ac iure finiendi controuersias Ecclesiae disputatio (London, 1670). Theological works, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1844–56; LACT ). [Thorold, Thomas], Labyrinthus Cantuariensis: or Doctor Lawd’s Labyrinth. Being an answer to the late Archbishop of Canterburies relation of a conference between himselfe and Mr. Fisher (Paris, 1658). Tillotson, John, The Protestant Religion vindicated, from the charge of singularity and novelty: in a sermon preached before the King at White-hall, April the 2d 1680 (London, 1680). Tindal, Matthew, Christianity as old of the Creation: or, the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature (London, 1731). Toland, John, Amyntor: or, a Defence of Milton’s Life (London, 1699). [ ], An Appeal to Honest People against Wicked Priests: or, the very Heathen Laity’s Declarations for Civil Obedience and Liberty of Conscience, contrary to the Rebellious and Persecuting Principles of some of the old Christian Clergy; With an Application to the Corrupt Part of the Priests of this present Time, publish’d on Occasion of Dr. Sacheverell’s last Sermon (London, n.d. [1713]). Nazarenus, ed. J. Champion (Oxford, 1999). Tetradymus (London, 1720). ´ La Constitution primitive de l’Eglise chr´etienne/The Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church, ed. L. Jaffro (Paris, 2003). Torres, Francisco, Contra Andream Volanum Polonum Caluini Discipulum de sanctissima eucharistia tractatus (Rome, 1576). Tossanus, Daniel, Oratio panegyrica in obitum Reuerendi et Clarissimi Viri, Domini M. Jo. Jacobi Frey, Professoris Graeci in Academia patria, et Designati Decani Armachani, in Hibernia (Basle, [1636]). ´ Tous les Synodes Nationaux des Eglises Reform´ees de France; auxquels on a joint des mandements roiaux, et plusieurs lettres politiques, sur ces Matieres Synodales, ed. Jean Aymon, 2 vols. ( The Hague, 1710). Toussaint, Daniel, Synopsis de Patribus, siue praecipuis et uetustioribus Ecclesiae Doctoribus, nec non de Scholasticis: quantum eis deferendum: quo tempore uixerint: qua cum cautione legendi, quaeque eorum dotes et naeui fuerint (Heidelberg, 1603). A Synopsis or compendium of the Fathers, or of the most Famous and Ancient Doctors of the Church, as also of the Schoolmen (London, 1635). A true Relation of the life and death of the Right Reverend Father in God William Bedell, ed. T. Wharton Jones (London, 1872; Camden Society  4). A true report of the Disputation or rather private Conference had in the Tower of London, with Ed. Campion Iesuite, the last of August, 1581. Set downe by the Reverend learned men them selves that deal therein. Whereunto is ioyned also a true report of the other three dayes conferences had there with the same Iesuite. Which nowe are thought meete to be published in print by authoritie (London, 1583). Tully, Thomas, Iustificatio Paulina sine operibus ex mente Ecclesiae Anglicanae, omniumque reliquarum quae Reformatae audiunt, asserta et illustrata. Contra nuperos Nouatores (Oxford, 1674).

458

Bibliography

Turner, John, A Sermon Preached at Epsom upon the 9th of September, Being the Day of Thanksgiving Appointed by His Majesty for the Discovery and Disappointment of the Republican Plot (London, 1683). Twisse, William, Ad Iacobi Arminii collationem cum Francisco Junio; et Iohan. Arnoldi Coruini Defensionem sententiae Arminianae … animaduersiones (Amsterdam, 1649). Two Biographies of William Bedell, Bishop of Kilmore, with a Selection of his Letters and an Unpublished Treatise, ed. E. S. Shuckburgh (Cambridge, 1902). Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward, ed. M. M. Knappen (Chicago, 1933). Ussher, James, Grauissimae quaestionis, de Christianarum Ecclesiarum, in Occidentis praesertim partibus, ab Apostolicis temporibus ad nostram usque aetatem, continua successione et statu Historica Explicatio (London, 1613). An Answer to a Challenge made by a Jesuite in Ireland. Wherein the iudgement of Antiquity in the points questioned is truely delivered, and the Noveltie of the now Romish doctrine plainly discovered (Dublin, 1624). Gotteschalci, et Praedestinatianae controuersiae ab eo motae, historia: una cum duplice eiusdem Confessione, nunc primum in lucem edita (Dublin, 1631). Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates. Quibus inserta est pestiferae aduersus Dei Gratiam a Pelagio Britanno in Ecclesiam inductae Haereseos Historia (Dublin, 1639). Historia Dogmatica Controuersiae inter Orthodoxos et Pontificios de Scripturis et Sacris Vernaculis. Nunc Primum Edita (London, 1690). Whole Works, ed. C. R. Elrington, 17 vols. (Dublin, 1847–64). Vadian, Joachim, Die Vadianische Briefsammlung der Stadtbibliothek St. Gallen, ed. E. Arbenz and H. Wartmann, 7 vols. (St Gallen, 1890–1913). Vermigli, Peter Martyr, Tractatio de sacramento eucharistiae, habita in celeberrima uniuersitate Oxoniensi in Anglia. Ad hec. Disputatio de eodem eucharistiae sacramento, in eadem Uniuersitate habita (London, 1549). A Discourse or traictise of Petur Martyr Vermilla Florentine, the publyque reader of divinitee in the Universitee of Oxford wherin he openly declared his whole and determinate iudgemente concernynge the Sacrament of the Lordes supper in the sayde Universitee (London, [1550]). Defensio Doctrinae ueteris et Apostolicae de sacrosancto Eucharistiae Sacramento … aduersus Stephani Gardineri, quondam Wintoniensis Episcopi, librum … [Zurich, 1559]. Dialogus de utraque in Christo natura, quomodo coeant in unam Christi personam inseparabilem, ut interim non amittant suas proprietates: ideoque humanam Christi naturam propter personalem unionem non esse ubique (Zurich, 1561). Loci communes, ed. Robert Masson (London, 1576). Common Places, trans. Anthonie Marten (London, 1583). An unpublished letter … affording additional proof of the meaning of the Articles, ed. W. Goode (London, 1850). Life, Early Letters and Eucharistic Writings, ed. J. McLelland and G. E. Duffield (Abingdon, 1989). Vernon, George, The Life of the Learned and Reverend Dr. Peter Heylyn, Chaplain to Charles I and Charles II Monarchs of Great-Britain (London, 1682).

Bibliography

459

Viva, Domenico, Damnatae Theses ab Alexandro VII. Innocentio XI. et Alexandro VIII. necnon Iansenii ad Theologicam trutinam revocatae juxta pondus Sanctuarii (Padua, 1717). Vossius, Gerardus Joannes, Historiae de Controuersiis, quas Pelagius eiusque reliquiae mouerunt, libri septem (Leiden, 1618). De Historicis Latinis libri tres (Leiden, 1627). Dissertationes tres de tribus symbolis, Apostolico, Athanasiano, et Constantinopolitano (Amsterdam, 1642). Epistolae, ed. Paul Colomi`es (London, 1690). Wake, William, A Defence of the Exposition of the Doctrine of the Church of England, against the Exception of Monsieur de Meaux, Late Bishop of Condom, and his Vindicator (London, 1686). ], A Discourse of the holy Eucharist, in the two great points of the Real Presence [ and the Adoration of the Host. In Answer to the two Discourses lately printed at Oxford on this Subject. To which is prefixed a large Historical Preface relating to the same Argument (London, 1687). [ ], A Continuation of the Present State of the controversy, between the Church of England, and the Church of Rome. Being A Full Account of the Books that have been of late Written on both sides (London, 1688). Walton, Izaak, The Life of Dr. Sanderson, Late Bishop of Lincoln (London, 1678). Warburton, William, Julian, or a Discourse concerning the Earthquake and firey Eruption, which defeated that Emperor’s Attempt to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem (2nd edn., London, 1751). Ward, John, The Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (London, 1740). Ward, Samuel, Gratia discriminans. Concio ad Clerum, habita Cantabrigiae in Ecclesia B. Mariae, Ian. 12 1625 (London, 1626). Opera nonnulla, ed. Seth Ward (London, 1658). Warwick, Philip, Memoirs of the reigne of King Charles I with a continuation to the Happy Restauration of King Charles II (London, 1701). Waterland, Daniel, The Importance of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity asserted, in Reply to some late Pamphlets (London, 1734). Wells, Edward, Remarks on Dr Clarke’s introduction to his Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1713). Wendelin, Marcus Friedrich, Christianae theologiae libri II. Methodice dispositi (Amsterdam, 1639). The Westminster Confession of Faith, ed. S. W. Carruthers, (Manchester, [1937]). [Wharton, Henry], A Treatise of the Celibacy of the Clergy, wherein its Rise and Progress are historically considered (London, 1688). Whitaker, William, Ad rationes decem Edmundi Campiani Iesuitae, quibus fretus certamen Anglicanae ecclesiae ministris obtulit in causa fidei, Responsio (London, 1581). Ad Nicolai Sanderi demonstrationes quadraginta … quibus Romanum Pontificem non esse Antichristum docere instituit, responsio (London, 1583). Praelectiones. In quibus tractatur Controuersia de Ecclesia contra Pontificios, inprimis Robertum Bellarminum … Exceptae primum ab ore authoris, deinde cum aliis exemplaribus collatae, et post eius mortem ad breues illius Annotatiunculas examinatae (Cambridge, 1599).

460

Bibliography

Whitaker, William, Opera theologica, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1610). Praelectiones de Sacramentis in Genere, et in Specie de SS. Baptismo et Eucharistia (Francfort, 1624). Whitby, Daniel, /ὸς πο˜υ στω. ˜ Or, An Answer to Sure Footing (Oxford, 1666). [ ], The Protestant Reconciler, Humbly Pleading for Condescention to Dissenting Brethren, in Things Indifferent and Unnecessary for the Sake of Peace: and shewing how Unreasonable it is to make Such Things the Necessary Conditions of Communion (London, 1683). A Treatise of Traditions. Part I. (London, 1688). A Treatise of Traditions. Part II. Shewing the Novelty of the pretended Traditions of the Church of Rome (London, 1689). Dissertatio de S. Scripturarum Interpretatione secundum Patrum commentarios (London, 1714). White, Francis, A Replie to Iesuit Fishers answere (London, 1624). White, Thomas, An Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues. Wherin the Exceptions of the Lords Falkland and Digby are answer’d: and the Arts of their commended Daill´e Discover’d (Paris, 1654). Sonus buccinae: siue tres tractatus; de uirtutibus fidei et theologiae, de principiis earundem, et de erroribus oppositis (Paris, 1654). Whitgift, John, Works, ed. J. Ayre, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1851–3; PS). Willet, Andrew, Synopsis Papismi (3rd edn., London, 1600). ], Limbo-mastix: that is, a Canvise of Limbus Patrum, shewing by evident places [ of Scripture, invincible reasons, and pregnant testimonies of some ancient writers, that Christ descended not in soule to Hell, to deliver the Fathers from thence (London, 1604). [Wilson, Matthew, aka Edward Knott], A Direction to be observed by N. N. if hee meane to proceede in Answering the Booke intituled Mercy and Truth, or Charity Maintained by Catholiks etc (n.p., 1636). Wolf, Johann Christoph, Casauboniana siue Isaaci Casauboni uaria de Scriptoribus Librisque iudicia, Obseruationes Sacrae in utriusque Foederis loca, Philologicae item et Ecclesiasticae, ut et Animaduersiones in Annales Baronii Ecclesiasticos ineditae, ex uariis Casauboni MSS. in Bibliotheca Bodleiana reconditis nunc primum erutae (Hamburg, 1710). [Womock, Laurence], The Verdict upon the Dissenters Plea, occasioned by their Melius Inquirendum (London, 1681). Suffragium Protestantium. Wherein our Governours are Justifyed in their Impositions and Proceedings against Dissenters. Meisner also and the Verdict rescued from the Cavils and Seditious Sophistry of the Protestant Reconciler (London, 1683). Wood, Anthony, Life and Times, ed. A. Clark, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1891–5). The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, ed. J. Gutch, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1792–6). Young, Patrick, Patricius Junius (Patrick Young) Bibliothekar der K¨onige Jacob I und Carl I von England. Mitteilungen aus seinem Briefwechsel, ed. J. Kemke (Leipzig, 1898).

Bibliography

461

SECONDARY SOURCES Abernathy, G. R., The English Presbyterians and the Stuart Restoration, 1648–1663 (Philadelphia, 1965; Transactions of the American Philosophical Society  55, part 2). Allison, A. F., ‘Richard Smith’s Gallican Backers and Jesuit Opponents’, Recusant History, 18 (1986–7), 329–401; 19 (1988–9), 234–85; 20 (1990–1), 164–206 and 493–4. Anderson, M., ‘Rhetoric and Reality: Peter Martyr and the English Reformation’, SCJ 19 (1988), 451–69. Anstruther, G., The Seminary Priests, i: Elizabethan 1558–1603 (Ware, 1969). Armogathe, J.-R., L’Ant´echrist a` l’ˆage classique: ex´eg`ese et politique (Paris, 2005). Armstrong, B., ‘Pierre Du Moulin and James I: The Anglo-French Programme’, in De l’Humanisme aux Lumi`eres: Bayle et le protestantisme. M´elanges en l’honneur ´ d’Elisabeth Labrousse (Paris, 1996), 17–29. ‘The Changing Face of French Protestantism: The Influence of Pierre Du Moulin’, in R. V. Schnuker (ed.), Calviniana: Ideas and Influence of John Calvin (Kirksville, Mo., 1988; Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies X), 131–49. Aschcraft, R., ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History’, in R. Kroll, R. Aschcraft, and P. Zagorin (eds.), Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 1992), 151–77. Atherton, I., Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: The Career of John, First Viscount Scudamore (Manchester, 1999). Atkins, J. M., ‘Calvinist Bishops, Church Unity, and the Rise of Arminianism’, Albion, 18 (1986), 411–27. Atkinson, N., Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason: Reformed Theologian of the Church of England? (Carlisle, 1997). Aubert, R., Le Probl`eme de l’acte de foi: donn´ees traditionnelles et r´esultats des controverses r´ecentes (2nd edn., Louvain, 1950). Babbage, S. B., Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962). ´ Backus, I., ‘Franc¸ois Feu-ardent e´diteur d’Ir´en´ee: le triomphe de la grande Eglise et le rejet du mill´enarisme’, in L. Deitz (ed.), Tempus edax rerum: le bicentenaire de la Biblioth`eque nationale de Luxembourg (Luxembourg, 2001), 11–26. ‘Irenaeus, Calvin and Calvinist Orthodoxy: The Patristic Manual of Abraham Scultetus (1598)’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 1 (1999), 41–53. ‘The Church Fathers and the Canonicity of the Apocalypse in the Sixteenth Century: Erasmus, Frans Titelmans, and Theodore Beza’, SCJ 29 (1998), 651–65. ‘The Fathers and Calvinist Orthodoxy: Patristic Scholarship’, in ead. (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists (Leiden, 1997), ii. 842–65. Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden, 2003). Lectures humanistes de Basile de C´esar´ee: traductions latines (1439–1618) (Paris, 1990).

462

Bibliography

B¨ahler, E., ‘Petrus Caroli und Johannes Calvin. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Kultur der Reformationszeit’, Jahrbuch f¨ur Schweizerische Geschichte, 29 (1904), 39–168. Barbiche, B., and Dainville-Barbiche, S. de, Sully: l’homme et ses fid`eles (Paris, 1997). Barnard, J., ‘Politics, Profit and ?Idealism: John Norton, the Stationers’ Company, and Sir Thomas Bodley’, Bodleian Library Record, 17 (2002), 385–408. and McKenzie, D. F. (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv (Cambridge, 2002). Barnard, L. W., ‘The Use of the Patristic Tradition in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century’, in R. Bauckham and B. Drewery (eds.), Scripture, Tradition and Reason: A Study in the Criteria of Christian Doctrine. Essays in Honour of Richard P. C. Hanson (Edinburgh, 1998), 174–203. Barr, H., and Hutchison, A. M. (eds.), Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson ( Turnhout, 2005). Bauckham, R., ‘Hooker, Travers and the Church of Rome in the 1580s’, JEH 29 (1978), 37–50. Beal, P., ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in W. S. Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (Binghamton, NY, 1993), 131–47. Beddard, R., ‘Sheldon and Anglican Recovery: Review Article’, HJ 19 (1976), 1005–17. ‘The Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions, 1681–84: An Instrument of Tory Reaction’, HJ 10 (1967), 11–40. Bedouelle, G., and Roussel, B. (eds.), Le Temps des R´eformes et la Bible (Paris, 1989; Bible de Tous les Temps V). Belligni, E., Auctoritas e potestas: Marcantonio de Dominis fra l’inquisizione e Giacomo I (Milan, 2003). Bendall, S., Brooke, C., and Collinson, P., A History of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (Woodbridge, 1999). Benedetti, M., Il ‘santo bottino’: circolazione di manoscritti valdesi nell’Europa del Seicento ( Turin, 2006). Bennett, G. V., ‘Patristic Tradition in Anglican Thought 1660–1900’, in G. Gassmann and V. Vajta (eds.), Tradition in Luthertum und Anglikanismus [OEcumenica 1971/2] (G¨utersloh, 1972), 63–85. To the Church of England (Worthing, 1988). Bennett, J., and Mandelbrote, S., The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1998). Benrath, G. A., Reformierte Kirchengeschichtschreibung an der Universit¨at Heidelberg im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Speyer am Rhein, 1963). Bernard, G. W., ‘The Making of Religious Policy, 1533–1546: Henry VIII and the Search for the Middle Way’, HJ 41 (1998), 321–49. The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven, 2005). Beumer, J., La Tradition orale (Paris, 1967). ‘Res fidei et morum: Die Entwicklung eines theologischen Begriffs in den Dekre¨ ten der drei letzten Okumenischen Konzilien’, Annuarium historiae conciliorum, 2 (1970), 112–34.

Bibliography

463

Bill, E. G. W., Education at Christ Church Oxford 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1988). Binns, J. W., Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990). Blair, A., ‘Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’, Critical Inquiry, 31 (2004–5), 85–107. ‘Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 11–28. Blok, F. F., Isaac Vossius and his Circle: His Life until his Farewell to Queen Christina of Sweden, 1618–1655 (Groningen, 2000). ‘Isaac Vossius and the Blaeus’, Quaerendo, 26 (1996), 77–84 and 87–93. Booty, J. E., John Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England (London, 1963). Borghero, C., La certezza e la storia: Cartesianesimo, pirronismo e conoscenza storica (Milan, 1983). Bosher, R. S., The Making of the Restoration Settlement: The Influence of the Laudians 1649–1662 (New York, 1951). Bouhot, J.-P., Ratramne de Corbie (Paris, 1976). Brachlow, S., The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988). Brautigam, D., ‘Prelates and Politics: Uses of ‘‘Puritan’’, 1625–40’, in L. L. Knoppers (ed.), Puritanism and its Discontents (Newark, Del., 2003), 49–66. Bredvold, L. I., The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden: Studies in Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Thought (4th edn., Ann Arbor, 1966). Brink, J. R., ‘ ‘‘Fortress of Fathers’’: An Unpublished Sixteenth-Century Manuscript Relating to Patristic Writing on the Eucharist’, SCJ 10/1 (1979), 83–8. Bromiley, G. W., Baptism and the Anglican Reformers (London, 1953). Bromwich, J., ‘The First Book Printed in Anglo-Saxon Types’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 3 (1959–63), 265–91. Brook, V. J. K., A Life of Archbishop Parker (Oxford, 1962). Brooke, J., and Maclean, I. (eds.), Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion (Oxford, 2005). Brownlow, F. W., Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (Newark, Del., 1993). Broxap, H., A Biography of Thomas Deacon, the Manchester Non-Juror (Manchester, 1911). The Later Non-Jurors (Cambridge, 1924). Brydon, M., The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses, 1600–1714 (Oxford, 2006). Bush, S., Jr., and Rasmussen, C. J., The Library of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1584–1637 (Cambridge, 1986). Butterfield, H., The Whig Interpretation of History (New York, 1965: 1st edn. 1931). Cameron, E., ‘Medieval Heretics as Protestant Martyrs’, in D. Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies (Oxford, 1993; SCH 30), 185–207. Capern, A. L., ‘The Caroline Church: James Ussher and the Irish Dimension’, HJ 39 (1996), 57–85. Cargill Thompson, W. D. J., ‘A Reconsideration of Richard Bancroft’s Paules Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/89’, JEH 20 (1969), 253–66.

464

Bibliography

Carley, J. P., ‘Books Seen by Samuel Ward ‘‘in Bibliotheca regia’’, circa 1614’, British Library Journal, 16 (1990), 89–98. Carroll, R. T., The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stillingfleet, 1635–1699 ( The Hague, 1975). Carruthers, S. W., The Everyday Work of the Westminster Assembly (Philadelphia, 1943). Carter, H., A History of the Oxford University Press, i (Oxford, 1975). Certeau, M. de, ‘L’histoire religieuse du XVIIe si`ecle: probl`emes de m´ethode’, Recherches de science religieuse, 57 (1969), 231–50. Ceyssens, L., ‘Le cˆot´e juridique des premi`eres difficult´es jans´enistes’, in Reformata reformanda: Festgabe f¨ur Hubert Jedin (M¨unster, 1965), ii. 401–13. Chadwick, H., ‘The Status of Ecumenical Councils in Anglican Thought’, in D. Neiman and M. Schatkin (eds.), The Heritage of the Early Church: Essays in Honor of the Very Reverend Georges Vasilievich Florovsky (Rome, 1973), 393–408. ‘Gregory the Great and the Mission to the Anglo-Saxons’, in Gregorio Magno e il suo tempo: XIX incontro di studiosi dell’antichit`a cristiana in collaborazione con ´ l’Ecole Franc¸aise de Rome, Roma, 9–12 maggio 1990 (Rome, 1991), i. 199–212. Chadwick, O., From Bossuet to Newman (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1987). The Mind of the Oxford Movement (London, 1960). Champion, J. A. I., ‘ ‘‘Acceptable to inquisitive men’’: Some Simonian Contexts for Newton’s Biblical Criticism, 1680–1692’, in J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin (eds.), Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence (Dordrecht, 1999), 77–96. ‘ ‘‘To know the edition’’: Erudition and Polemic in Eighteenth-Century Clerical Culture’, in M. McCarthy and A. Simmons (eds.), The Making of Marsh’s Library: Learning, Politics and Religion in Ireland, 1650–1750 (Dublin, 2004), 117–45. ‘An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie: Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Barlow, and the Restoration Debate over ‘‘Heresy’’ ’, in D. Loewenstein and J. Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 221–53. Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696– 1722 (Manchester, 2003). The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660– 1730 (Cambridge, 1992). Chaney, E., The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and ‘The Voyage of Italy’ in the Seventeenth Century (Geneva, 1985). Chenu, M.-D., ‘Authentica et Magistralia’, in id., La Th´eologie au XIIe si`ecle (3rd edn., Paris, 1976). Cirot, G., Mariana historien (Bordeaux, 1904). Clancy, T. H., ‘Papist—Protestant—Puritan: English Religious Taxonomy 1565– 1665’, Recusant History, 13 (1975–6), 227–53. Clarke, T. E. S., and Foxcroft, H. C., A Life of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (Cambridge, 1907). Clifford, A. C., Atonement and Justification: English Evangelical Theology 1640–1790: An Evaluation (Oxford, 1990).

Bibliography

465

Coffey, J., ‘A Ticklish Business: Defining Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution’, in D. Loewenstein and J. Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 108–36. John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2006). Cogswell, T., ‘England and the Spanish Match’, in R. Cust and A. Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London, 1989), 107–33. Collins, J. R., ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History, 87 (2002), 18–40. Collins, W. E., Queen Elizabeth’s Defence of her Proceedings in Church and State (London, 1899). Collinson, P., ‘England and International Calvinism 1558–1640’, in M. Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985), 197–223. ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’, in O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel, and N. Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), 51–76. ‘The Jacobean Religious Settlement: The Hampton Court Conference’, in H. Tomlinson (ed.), Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government (London, 1983), 27–51. Archbishop Grindal 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979). Elizabethans (London, 2003). Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983). The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley, 1967). Rex, R., and Stanton, G., Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge, 1502 to 1649 (Cambridge, 2003). Como, D. R., ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London’, HJ 46 (2003), 263–94. ‘Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), 64–87. Condren, C., ‘The Creation of Richard Hooker’s Public Authority: Rhetoric, Reputation and Reassessment’, Journal of Religious History, 21 (1997), 35–59. Congar, Y. M.-J., La Tradition et les traditions: essai historique (Paris, 1960). Corda, S., Veritas Sacramenti: A Study in Vermigli’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper (Zurich, 1975). Cornwall, R. D., ‘The Later Non-Jurors and the Theological Basis of the Usages Controversy’, Anglican Theological Review, 75 (1993), 166–86. ‘Divine Right Monarchy: Henry Dodwell’s Defense of the Nonjuring Bishops’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 68 (1999), 37–66. Coster, W., ‘Tokens of Innocence: Infant Baptism, Death and Burial in Early Modern England’, in B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), 266–87.

466

Bibliography

Cˆot´e, D., Le Th`eme de l’opposition entre Pierre et Simon dans les Pseudo-Cl´ementines (Paris, 2001). Craig, J. S., ‘The ‘‘Cambridge Boies’’: Thomas Rogers and the ‘‘Brethren’’ in Bury St Edmunds’, in S. Wabuda and C. Litzenberger (eds.), Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from his Students (Aldershot, 1998), 154–76. Cressy, D., Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997). Cross, F. L., The Oxford Movement and the Seventeenth Century (London, 1933). ‘Patristic Study at Oxford: Presidential Address (read in substance, Oct. 21 1948)’, Oxford Society of Historical Theology: Abstract of Proceedings for the Academic Year 1948–1949 (Oxford, for private circulation, n.d.), 5–26. Cross, M. C., ‘The Incomes of Provincial Urban Clergy 1520–1645’, in R. O’Day and F. Heal (eds.), Princes and Paupers in the English Church 1500–1800 (Leicester, 1981), 65–89. Crouse, R. D., ‘ ‘‘Deepened by the study of the Fathers’’: The Oxford Movement, Dr. Pusey and Patristic Scholarship’, Dionysius, 7 (1983), 137–47. Dagens, J., ‘Le XVIIe si`ecle, si`ecle de saint Augustin’, Cahiers de l’Association ´ Internationale des Etudes Franc¸aises, 3–5 ( July 1953), 31–8. Davies, C., A Religion of the World: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester, 2002). Davies, J., The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism (Oxford, 1992). De Jonge, H. J., ‘On the Origins of the Term ‘‘Apostolic Fathers’’ ’, Journal of Theological Studies,  29 (1978), 503–5. De Jongh, H., L’Ancienne Facult´e de th´eologie de Louvain au premier si`ecle de son existence (1432–1540): ses d´ebuts, son organisation, son enseignement, sa lutte contre ´ Erasme et Luther. Avec des documents in´edits (Louvain, 1911). De Krey, G. S., London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2005). De la Mare, A. C., and Hellinga, L., ‘The First Book Printed in Oxford: The Expositio symboli of Rufinus’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 7 (1977–80), 184–244. Dent, C. M., Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford, 1983). De Quehen, H., ‘Politics and Scholarship in the Ignatian Controversy’, Seventeenth Century, 13 (1998), 69–84. Deuschle, M. A., Brenz als Kontroverstheologe: Die Apologie der Confessio Virtembergica und die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Johannes Brenz und Pedro de Soto ( T¨ubingen, 2006). Dibon, P., Regards sur la Hollande du Si`ecle d’Or (Naples, 1990). Dixon, R. W., History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1878–1902). Dockrill, D. W., ‘The Fathers and the Theology of the Cambridge Platonists’, Studia patristica, 17/1 (Oxford, 1982), 427–39. ‘The Authority of the Fathers in the Great Trinitarian Debates of the Sixteen Nineties’, Studia patristica, 18/4 (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1990), 335–47.

Bibliography

467

Dodaro, R., and Questier, M., ‘Strategies in Jacobean Polemic: The Use and Abuse of St Augustine in English Theological Controversy’, JEH 44 (1993), 432–49. Donagan, B., ‘The York House Conference Revisited: Laymen, Calvinism and Arminianism’, Historical Research, 64 (1991), 312–30. Donnelly, J. P., Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace (Leiden, 1976). and Kingdon, R. M., A Bibliography of the Works of Peter Martyr Vermigli (Kirksville, Mo., 1990). ´ Doucette, L. E., Emery Bigot Seventeenth-Century French Humanist ( Toronto, 1970). Douglas, D. C., English Scholars 1660–1730 (2nd edn., London, 1951). D’Oyly, G., The Life of William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury (2nd edn., London, 1840). Duncan-Jones, A. S., Archbishop Laud (London, 1927). Dupront, A., Gen`eses des temps modernes: Rome, les R´eformes et le Nouveau Monde (Paris, 2001). Eire, C., War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986). Elson, J. H., John Hales of Eton (New York, 1948). Elton, G. R., ‘Lex Terrae Victrix: The Triumph of Parliamentary Law in the Sixteenth Century’, in D. M. Dean and N. L. Jones (eds.), The Parliaments of Elizabethan England (Oxford, 1990), 15–36. Estes, J. M., Christian Magistrate and Territorial Church: Johannes Brenz and the German Reformation ( Toronto, 2007). Fairfield, L. P., John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (West Lafayette, Ind., 1976). Farge, J. K., Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden, 1985). Feingold, M., ‘Isaac Barrow’s Library’, in id. (ed.), Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow (Cambridge, 1990), 333–72. Ferguson, A. B., ‘The Historical Perspective of Richard Hooker: A Renaissance Paradox’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 3 (1973), 17–49. Ferrell, L. A., Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625 (Stanford, Calif., 1998). Fincham, K., ‘Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), 125–58. ‘Prelacy and Politics: Archbishop Abbot’s Defence of Protestant Orthodoxy’, Historical Research, 61 (1988), 36–64. ‘Ramifications of the Hampton Court Conference in the Dioceses, 1603– 1609’, JEH 36 (1985), 208–27. Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990). and Lake, P., ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism in the 1630s: Joseph Hall Explains Himself ’, EHR 111 (1996), 856–81. ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, JBS 24 (1985), 169–207. and Tyacke, N., Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford, 2007).

468

Bibliography

Fletcher, A., The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981). Ford, A., James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in early-modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007). Foster, M., ‘Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65) as Man of Religion and Thinker’, Downside Review, 106 (1988), 35–58 and 101–25. Foucault, M., Dits et ´ecrits, 1954–1988, 4 vols. (Paris, 1994). Le Pouvoir psychiatrique: cours au Coll`ege de France, 1973–1974, ed. J. Lagrange (Paris, 2003). Fouke, D., The Enthusiastical Concerns of Dr. Henry More: Religious Meaning and the Psychology of Delusion (Leiden, 1997). Fraenkel, P., Testimonia Patrum: The Function of the Patristic Argument in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon (Geneva, 1961). Fransen, P. F., Hermeneutics of the Councils and Other Studies (Leuven, 1985). Freeman, T., ‘Demons, Deviance and Defiance: John Darrell and the Politics of Exorcism in Late Elizabethan England’, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), 34–63. Freeman, T. S., ‘ ‘‘The Reformation of the Church in this Parliament’’: Thomas Norton, John Foxe and the Parliament of 1571’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), 131–47. Friedman, J., ‘Christ’s Descent into Hell and Redemption through Evil: A Radical Reformation Perspective’, ARG 76 (1985), 217–30. Frost, F., ‘Patristique et œcum´enisme’, in L’Influence de la patristique sur la pens´ee religieuse anglaise (Paris, 1983), 33–58. Frye, R. M., Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton, 1963). Fumaroli, M., ‘Temps de croissance et temps de corruption: les deux Antiquit´es dans l’´erudition j´esuite franc¸aise du XVIIe si`ecle’, XVII e si`ecle, 131 (1981), 149–68. Gallo, E., The Poetria nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine ( The Hague, 1971). Ganoczy, A., La Biblioth`eque de l’Acad´emie de Calvin: le catalogue de 1572 et ses enseignements (Geneva, 1969). Garber, D., and Ayers, M. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1998). Gascoigne, J., Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989). Gaskell, P., Trinity College Library: The First 150 Years. The Sandars Lectures 1978–9 (Cambridge, 1980). Gerrish, B. A., Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Edinburgh, 1993). Gibson, E. C. S., The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (2nd edn. rev., London, 1898). Gibson, M., Possession, Puritanism and Print: Darrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy (London, 2006). Gilliam, E., and Tighe, W. J., ‘To ‘‘Run with the Time’’: Archbishop Whitgift, the Lambeth Articles, and the Politics of Theological Ambiguity in Late Elizabethan England’, SCJ 23 (1992), 325–40.

Bibliography

469

Gillingham, J., ‘The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 13 (1990), 99–118. Godfrey, W. R., ‘John Hales’ Good-Night to John Calvin’, in C. R. Trueman and R. S. Clark (eds.), Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle, 1999), 165–80. Godoy Alc´antara, J., Historia crítica de los falsos cronicones (Madrid, 1868). Goldie, M., ‘John Locke, Jonas Proast and Religious Toleration 1688–1692’, in J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (eds.), The Church of England c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), 143–71. ‘Danby, the Bishops and the Whigs’, in T. Harris, P. Seaward, and M. Goldie (eds.), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), 75–105. ‘Ideology’, in T. Ball, J. Farr, and R. L. Hanson (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989), 266–91. ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 209–31. ‘The Nonjurors, Episcopacy and the Origins of the Convocation Controversy’, in E. Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), 15–35. ‘The Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution’, in R. Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford, 1991), 102–36. ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel, and N. Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), 331–68. Gorce, D., ‘Les P`eres et le Mouvement d’Oxford’, in K. Aland and F. L. Cross (eds.), Studia patristica, i: Papers Presented to the Second International Conference on Patristic Studies Held at Christ Church, Oxford, 1955 (Berlin, 1957), 621–32. Gordon, B., and Marshall P. (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000). Gorham, G. C., Gleanings of a few scattered ears, during the period of the Reformation in England and of the times immediately succeeding (London, 1857). Gounelle, R., La Descente du Christ aux Enfers: institutionnalisation d’une croyance (Paris, 2000). Grafton, A., ‘Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 46 (1983), 78–93. Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983–93). Grane, L., Schindler, A., and Wriedt, M. (eds.), Auctoritas Patrum (Mainz, 1993). (eds.), Auctoritas Patrum II (Mainz, 1998). Grayson, C., ‘James I and the Religious Crisis in the United Provinces 1613–19’, in D. Baker (ed.), Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c1500–c1750 (Oxford, 1979; SCH. Subsidia 2), 195–219. Green, I., The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996). Green, I. M., The Re-establishment of the Church of England 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1978). Greenblatt, S., Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988).

470

Bibliography

Greenslade, S. L., ‘The Authority of the Tradition of the Early Church in Early Anglican Thought’, in G. Gassmann and V. Vajta (eds.), Tradition in Luthertum und Anglikanismus [OEcumenica 1971/2] (G¨utersloh, 1972), 9–33. The English Reformers and the Fathers of the Church: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 10 May 1960 (Oxford, 1960). Greig, M., ‘Gilbert Burnet and the Problem of Non-conformity in Restoration Scotland and England’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire, 32 (1997), 1–24. ‘The Reasonableness of Christianity? Gilbert Burnet and the Trinitarian Controversy of the 1690s’, JEH 44 (1993), 631–51. Gr`es-Gayer, J., ‘Un th´eologien gallican, t´emoin de son temps: Louis Ellies Du Pin ´ (1657–1719)’, Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, 72 (1986), 67–121. Griffin, M. I. J., Jr., Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England (Leiden, 1982). Hammond, P., ‘Thomas Smith: A Beleaguered Humanist of the Interregnum’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 56 (1983), 180–94. Hardwick, C., A History of the Articles of Religion, 3rd edn., rev. Revd. F. Procter (London, 1876). Harrison, J., The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1978). Hart, A. T., William Lloyd 1627–1717: Bishop, Politician, Author and Prophet (London, 1952). Hartmann, M., Humanismus und Kirchenkritik: Matthias Flacius Illyricus als Erforscher des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 2001). Haugaard, W. P., ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship and Theology in SixteenthCentury England’, SCJ 10/3 (1979), 37–60. Elizabeth and the English Reformation: The Struggle for a Stable Settlement of Religion (Cambridge, 1968). Haykin, M., ‘John Owen and the Challenge of the Quakers’, in R. W. Oliver (ed.), John Owen—the Man and his Theology: Papers Read at the Conference of the John Owen Centre for Theological Study September 2000 (Darlington, 2002), 133–55. Hayward, J. C., ‘New Directions in Studies of the Falkland Circle’, Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), 19–48. Headley, J. M., Luther’s View of Church History (New Haven, 1963). Heal, F., ‘Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the National Past’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68/1–2 (2005), 109–32. ‘Economic Problems of the Clergy’, in R. O’Day and F. Heal (eds.), Church and Society in England: Henry VIII to James I (London, 1977), 99–118. Heering, J. P., Hugo Grotius as Apologist for the Christian Religion: A Study of his work De ueritate religionis christianae (1640), trans. J. C. Grayson (Leiden, 2004). Heintz, F., Simon ‘le magicien’: Actes 8, 5–25 et l’accusation de magie contre les proph`etes thaumaturges dans l’Antiquit´e (Paris, 1997; Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 39). Hennig, G., Cajetan und Luther: Ein historischer Beitrag zur Begegnung von Thomismus und Reformation (Stuttgart, 1966). Heyd, M., ‘Be sober and reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, 1996).

Bibliography

471

Hieronymus, F., Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen (Basle, 1992). Highley, C., and King, J. N. (eds.), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, 2002). Hill, C., Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London, 1972). Hirst, D., ‘The Defection of Sir Edward Dering, 1640–1641’, HJ 15 (1972), 193–208. Hodges, G. F., Bishop Guest, Articles Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine (London, 1894). Hofmann, M., Theologie, Dogma und Dogmenentwicklung im theologischen Werk Denis Petau’s: Mit einem biographischen und einem bibliographischen Anhang (Frankfurt, 1976). Holifield, E. B., The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven, 1974). ¨ Holl, K., Die handschriftliche Uberlieferung des Epiphanius (Ancoratus und Panarion) (Leipzig, 1910; TU 3rd series 6/2). Horie, H., ‘The Lutheran Influence on the Elizabethan Settlement, 1558–1563’, HJ 34 (1991), 519–37. Horne, B., ‘Church and Nation: Newman and the Tractarians’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 5 (2005), 25–40. Horst, U., ‘Der Streit um die hl. Schrift zwischen Kardinal Cajetan und Ambrosius Catharinus’, in L. Scheffczyck, W. Dettloff, and R. Heinzmann (eds.), Wahrheit und Verk¨undigung: Michael Schmaus zum 70. Geburtstag (Paderborn, 1967), 551–77. Horwitz, H., ‘Protestant Reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis’, JEH 15 (1964), 201–17. Houlbrooke, R., Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation 1520– 1570 (Oxford, 1979). ´ Hoven, R., ‘Notes sur Erasme et les auteurs anciens’, L’Antiquit´e classique, 38 (1969), 169–74. Hoyle, D., ‘A Commons Investigation of Arminianism and Popery in Cambridge on the Eve of the Civil War’, HJ 29 (1986), 419–25. Hudson, A., The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988). Hughes, A., ‘Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena and Heresiological Traditions’, in D. Loewenstein and J. Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 137–59. Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). Hughes, S. F., ‘The Problem of ‘‘Calvinism’’: English Theologies of Predestination c.1580–1630’, in S. Wabuda and C. Litzenberger (eds.), Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from his Students (Aldershot, 1998), 229–49. Hunt, A., ‘Laurence Chaderton and the Hampton Court Conference’, in S. Wabuda and C. Litzenberger (eds.), Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from his Students (Aldershot, 1998), 207–28. Hunt, E. W., The Life and Times of John Hooper (c.1500–1555) Bishop of Gloucester (Lewiston, NY, 1992).

472

Bibliography

Hutton, R., Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford, 1989). Hutton, S., ‘Platonism and the Trinity: Anne Conway, Henry More and Christoph Sand’, in M. Mulsow and J. Rohls (eds.), Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in 17th-Century Europe (Leiden, 2005), 209–24. ‘The Neoplatonic Roots of Arianism: Ralph Cudworth and Theophilus Gale’, in L. Szczucki (ed.), Socinianism and its Role in the Culture of XVIth to XVIIIth Centuries [sic] (Warsaw, 1983), 139–45. ‘Plato in the Tudor Academies’, in Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Aldershot, 1999), 106–24. ‘Platonism and the Trinity: Anne Conway, Henry More and Christoph Sand’, in M. Mulsow and J. Rohls (eds.), Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in 17th-Century Europe (Leiden, 2005), 209–24. ‘Science, Philosophy, and Atheism: Edward Stillingfleet’s Defence of Religion’, in R. H. Popkin and A. Vanderjagt (eds.), Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, 1993), 102–20. ‘The Appropriation of Joseph Mede: Millenarianism in the 1640s’, in J. E. Force and R. H. Popkins (eds.), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, iii: The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dordrecht, 2001), 1–13. Hyman, E. H., ‘A Church Militant: Scotland, 1661–1690’, SCJ 26 (1995), 49–74. Ingram, R. G., ‘William Warburton, Divine Action, and Enlightened Christianity’, in W. Gibson and R. G. Ingram (eds.), Religious Identities in Britain (Aldershot, 2005), 97–117. Jackson, C., Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003). Jackson, J. F., ‘Law and Order: Vermigli and the Reform of Ecclesiastical Laws in England’, in F. A. James III (ed.), Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations: Semper Reformanda (Leiden, 2004), 267–90. Jacquin, M., ‘A` quelle date apparaît le terme ‘‘Semip´elagien’’?’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et th´eologiques, 1 (1907), 506–8. Jedin, H., Girolamo Seripando: Sein Leben und Denken im Geisteskampf des 16. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (W¨urzburg, 1937). Jenkins, G., ‘Peter Martyr and the Church of England after 1558’, in F. A. James III (ed.), Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations: Semper Reformanda (Leiden, 2004), 47–69. Johnson, J., and Gibson, S., Print and Privilege at Oxford to the Year 1700 (Oxford, 1946; Publication of the Oxford Bibliographical Society 7). Jones, J. R., The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis 1678–1683 (London, 1961). Jones, N. L., ‘Matthew Parker, John Bale, and the Magdeburg Centuriators’, SCJ 12/3 (1981), 35–49.

Bibliography

473

Jordan, W. K., The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols. (London, 1932–40). Jue, J. K., Heaven upon Earth: Joseph Mede (1586–1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism (Dordrecht, 2006). Kearney, H., Scholars and Gentlemen: Universities and Society in Pre-industrial Britain, 1500–1700 (London, 1970). Keeble, N. H., ‘ ‘‘Take heed of being too forward in imposinge on others’’: Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Baxterian Tradition’, in D. Loewenstein and J. Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 282–305. Kelly, J. N. D., Early Christian Creeds (3rd edn., London, 1972). The Athanasian Creed: The Paddock Lectures for 1962–3 (London, 1964). Kendall, R. T., Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Carlisle, 1997). Kendrick, T. D., St James in Spain (London, 1960). Kennedy, W. M., The ‘Interpretations’ of the Bishops and their Influence on Elizabethan Episcopal Policy (London, 1908). Ker, N. R., ‘Oxford College Libraries in the Sixteenth Century’, Bodleian Library Record, 6 (1959), 459–515. Knapp, H. M., ‘John Owen’s Interpretation of Hebrews 6: 4–6: Eternal Perseverance of the Saints in Puritan Exegesis’, SCJ 34 (2003), 29–52. Knights, M., Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994). Knoppers, L. L. (ed.), Puritanism and its Discontents (Newark, Del., 2003). Kroll, R., Aschcraft, R., and Zagorin, P. (eds.), Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 1992). Labrousse, E., ‘Calvinism in France, 1598–1685’, in M. Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985), 285–314. Lacey, T. A., Herbert Thorndike, 1598–1672 (London, 1929). Lake, P., ‘Business as Usual? The Immediate Reception of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity’, JEH, 52 (2001), 456–86. ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635’, Past and Present, 114 (February 1987), 32–76. ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I’, in L. L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), 113–33. ‘Matthew Hutton: A Puritan Bishop?’, History, 64 (1979), 182–204. ‘Moving the Goal Posts? Modified Subscription and the Construction of Conformity in the Early Stuart Church’, in id. and M. Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), 179–205. ‘Predestinarian Propositions’, JEH 46 (1995), 110–23. ‘Robert Some and the Ambiguities of Moderation’, ARG 71 (1980), 254–78. ‘Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson’, JBS 27 (1988), 81–116. ‘The ‘‘Anglican Moment’’? Richard Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590s’, in S. Platten (ed.), Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition: Continuity, Change and the Search for Communion (Norwich, 2003), 90–121.

474

Bibliography

Lake, P., ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in K. Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Houndmills, 1993), 161–85. ‘The Laudians and the Argument from Authority’, in B. Y. Kunze and D. D. Brautigan (eds.), Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early Modern British History in Honour of Perez Zagorin (Rochester, 1992), 149–75. ‘The Moderate and Irenic Case for Religious War: Joseph Hall’s Via Media in context’, in S. D. Amussen and M. A. Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), 55–83. ‘The Significance of the Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist’, JEH 31 (1980), 161–78. Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988). Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982). and Questier, M. (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000). ‘Prisons, Priests and People’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London, 1998), 195–233. ‘Puritans, Papists, and the ‘‘Public Sphere’’ in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), 587–627. Lamb, J., An Historical Account of the Thirty-Nine Articles from the first promulgation of them in M.D.LIII. to their final establishment in M.D.LXXI. with exact copies of the Latin and English manuscripts (Cambridge, 1829). Lambert, S., ‘Richard Montagu, Arminianism and Censorship’, Past and Present, 124 (August 1989), 36–68. Lambin, G., ‘Les Rapports de Bossuet avec l’Angleterre (1672–1704)’, Bulletin du bibliophile et du biblioth´ecaire (1909), 417–32, 532–45, 612–21; (1910), 31–7 and 70–87. Lamont, W., Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–60 (London, 1969). Lamont, W. M., Richard Baxter and the Millenium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution (London, 1979). ´ Le Boulluec, A., ‘Le Probl`eme de l’extension du Canon des Ecritures aux premiers si`ecles’, Recherches de science religieuse, 92 (2004), 45–87. Le Brun, J., ‘Orthodoxie et h´et´erodoxie: l’´emergence de la notion dans le discours th´eologique a` l’´epoque moderne’, in S. Elm, E. Rebillard, and A. Romano (eds.), Orthodoxie, christianisme, histoire (Rome, 2000), 333–42. Lehmberg, S. E., Cathedrals under Siege: Cathedrals in English Society, 1600–1700 (Exeter, 1996). Leighton, C. D. A., ‘Anciennet´e among the Non-Jurors: A Study of Henry Dodwell’, History of European Ideas, 31 (2005), 1–16. ‘The Religion of the Non-Jurors and the Early British Enlightenment: A Study of Henry Dodwell’, History of European Ideas, 28 (2002), 247–62. Levine, J. M., ‘From Tradition to History: Chillingworth to Gibbon’, in A. T. Grafton and J. H. M. Salmon (eds.), Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY, 2001), 181–210.

Bibliography

475

Lewis, R., ‘Of ‘‘Origenian Platonism’’: Joseph Glanvill on the Pre-existence of Souls’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 69 (2006). 267–300. Lightfoot, J. B., The Apostolic Fathers, 5 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1889–90; repr. Peabody, Mass., 1989). Lipsius, R. A., Die apokryphen Apostelgeschichten und Apostellegenden: Ein Beitrag zur altchristlichen Literaturgeschichte, 4 vols. (Brunswick, 1883–90). Litzenberger, C., ‘Richard Cheyney, Bishop of Gloucester: An Infidel in Religion?’, SCJ 25 (1994), 567–84. Lloyd Jukes, H. A., ‘Peter Gunning, 1613–84: Scholar, Churchman, Controversialist’, in C. W. Dugmore and C. Duggan (eds.), SCH i (London, 1964), 222–32. Loades, D. (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 1997). (ed.), John Foxe: An Historical Perspective (Aldershot, 1999). Loewenstein, D., ‘Writing and the Persecution of Heretics in Henry VIII’s England: The Examinations of Anne Askew’, in id. and J. Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 11–39. L¨owe, J. A., ‘ ‘‘The bodie and bloude of Christ is not carnallie and corporallie in the bread and wine’’: The Oxford Disputation Revisited: Zwinglian Traits in the Eucharistic Theology of Pietro Martire Vermigli’, in A. Schindler and H. Stickelberger (eds.), Die Z¨urcher Reformation: Ausstrahlungen und R¨uckwirkungen (Bern, 2001), 317–26. Richard Smyth and the Language of Orthodoxy: Re-imagining Tudor Catholic Polemicism (Leiden, 2003). Lunn, D., ‘Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (1586/7–1639)’, Royal Stuart Papers, 11 (1977). Luoma, J. K., ‘Who Owns the Fathers? Hooker and Cartwright on the Authority of the Primitive Church’, SCJ 8/3 (1977), 45–59. McAdoo, H. R., John Bramhall and Anglicanism: 1663–1963 (Dublin, 1964). The Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1965). McCabe, R. A., Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford, 1982). McCoog, T. M., ‘ ‘‘Playing the Champion’’: The Role of Disputation in the Jesuit Mission’, in id. (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits. Essays in Celebration of the First Centenary of Campion Hall, Oxford (1896–1996) (Woodbridge, 1996), 119–39. MacCulloch, D., ‘Peter Martyr and Thomas Cranmer’, in E. Campi (ed.), Peter Martyr Vermigli: Humanism, Republicanism, Reformation (Geneva, 2002), 173–201. ‘Richard Hooker’s Reputation’, EHR 117 (2002), 773–812. The Later Reformation in England 1547–1603 (New York, 1990). Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, 1996). Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (Harmondsworth, 2001; 1st edn. 1999). McCullough, P. E., ‘Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626–1642’, HJ 41 (1998), 401–24. Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998).

476

Bibliography

Macek, E. A., The Loyal Opposition: Tudor Traditionalist Polemics, 1535–1558 (New York, 1996). Mack, P., Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992). McKelvie, C., ‘Jeremy Taylor’s Recommendations for a Library of Anglican Theology (1660)’, Irish Booklore, 4 (1980), 96–103. McLachlan, H. J., Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1951). Maclean, I., Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge, 1992). Macleane, D., A History of Pembroke College, Oxford, anciently Broadgates Hall (Oxford, 1897; Oxford Historical Society 33). Malcolm, N., De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and Relapsed Heretic (London, 1984). Maltby, J., Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998). Mandelbrote, S., ‘ ‘‘Than this nothing can be plainer’’: Isaac Newton Reads the Fathers’, in G. Frank, T. Leinkauf, and M. Wriedt (eds.), Die Patristik in der fr¨uhen Neuzeit: Die Relekt¨ure der Kirchenv¨ater in den Wissenschaften des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2006; Melanchthon-Schriften der Stadt Bretten 10), 277–97. ‘Pierre Des Maizeaux: History, Toleration, and Scholarship’, in C. Ligota and J.-L. Quantin (eds.), History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute (Oxford, 2006), 385–98. ‘Religious Belief and the Politics of Toleration in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Dutch Review of Church History, 81 (2001), 93–114. ‘The Authority of the Word: Manuscript, Print and the Text of the Bible in Seventeenth-Century England’, in J. Crick and A. Walsham (eds.), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), 135–53. Marshall, J., ‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-Men 1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and ‘‘Hobbism’’ ’, JEH 36 (1985), 407–27. Marshall, P., ‘ ‘‘The map of God’s word’’: Geographies of the Afterlife in Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), 110–30. ‘Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus: The Intellectual Origins of a Henrician Bon Mot’, JEH 52 (2001), 512–20. ‘The Debate over ‘‘Unwritten Verities’’ in Early Reformation England’, in B. Gordon (ed.), Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, i: The Medieval Inheritance (Aldershot, 1996), 60–77. Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002). Martin, A., ‘The End of History: Thomas Norton’s ‘‘v Periodes’’ and the Pattern of English Protestant Historiography’, in C. Highley and J. N. King (eds.), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, 2002), 37–53. Maskell, J., ‘George Hickes the Nonjuror’, Notes and Queries, 6th series 12 (1885), 401–3.

Bibliography

477

Mason, A. J., The Church of England and Episcopacy (Cambridge, 1914), Massingberd, F. C., A Letter to the Rev. William Goode (London, 1850). Mathieu, J.-M., ‘Huet et Orig`ene’, in S. Guellouz (ed.), Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721): actes du colloque de Caen (12–13 novembre 1993) (Paris, 1994), 229–36. Mathisen, R. W., Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul (Washington, 1989). Merkle, S., ‘Ein patristischer Gew¨ahrsmann des Tridentinums’, in A. M. Koeniger (ed.), Beitr¨age zur Geschichte des christlichen Altertums und der Byzantinischen Literatur: Festgabe Albert Ehrhard (Bonn, 1922), 342–58. Merritt, J. F., ‘The Cradle of Laudianism? Westminster Abbey, 1558–1630’, JEH 52 (2001), 623–46. Micaelli, C., ‘Il ‘‘De Trinitate’’ di Novaziano da Mesnart a Pamelius: problemi testuali ed esegetici’, in M. Cortesi (ed.), ‘Editiones principes’ delle opere dei Padri greci e latini: atti del convegno di studi … Firenze, 24–25 ottobre 2003 (Florence, 2006), 179–203. Middleton, A., Fathers and Anglicans: The Limits of Orthodoxy (Leominster, 2001). Miller, P., ‘The ‘‘Antiquarianization’’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–1657)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2001), 463–82. Milton, A., ‘ ‘‘Anglicanism’’ by Stealth: The Career and Influence of John Overall’, in K. Fincham and P. Lake (eds.), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), 159–76. Milton, A., ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’, HJ 41 (1998), 625–51. ‘The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach’, in T. Cogswell, R. Cust, and P. Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), 162–84. Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995). Laudian and royalist polemic in seventeenth-century England: The career and writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007). Milward, P., Shakespeare’s Religious Background (London, 1973). Morgan, I., Prince Charles’s Puritan Chaplain (London, 1957). Morison, Stanley, John Fell, the University Press and the ‘Fell’ Types: The Punches and Matrices Designed for Printing in the Greek, Latin, English, and Oriental Languages Bequeathed in 1686 to the University of Oxford by John Fell, D.D. Delegate of the Press, Dean of Christ Church, Vice-Chancellor of the University and Bishop of Oxford (Oxford, 1967). Muller, J. A., Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction (London, 1926). Muller, R. A., After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2003). Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC, 1986). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 4 vols. (2nd edn., Grand Rapids, Mich., 2003).

478

Bibliography

Mulsow, M., ‘A German Spinozistic reader of Cudworth, Bull, and Spencer: Johann Georg Wachter and his Theologia Martyrum (1712)’, in C. Ligota and J.-L. Quantin (eds.), History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute (Oxford, 2006), 357–83. ‘The ‘‘New Socinians’’: Intertextuality and Cultural Exchange in Late Socinianism’, in id. and J. Rohls (eds.), Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in 17th-Century Europe (Leiden, 2005), 49–78. Neale, J. E., Elizabeth I and her Parliaments 1559–1581 (London, 1953). Neelands, W. D., ‘Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and ‘‘Tradition’’ ’, in A. S. McGrade (ed.), Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Ccommunity ( Tempe, Ariz., 1997), 75–94. Nellen, H. J. M., ‘Disputando inclarescet ueritas: Grotius as a Publicist in France (1621–1645)’, in id. and E. Rabbie (eds.), Hugo Grotius Theologian: Essays in Honour of G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden, 1994), 121–44. Nelles, P., ‘Du savant au missionnaire: la doctrine, les mœurs et l’´ecriture de l’histoire chez les j´esuites’, XVIIe si`ecle, 237 (2007), 669–89. Neveu, B., ‘Histoire religieuse et spiritualit´e dans XVIIe si`ecle (1949–1997)’, XVIIe si`ecle, 203 (1999), 261–312. ‘Orthodoxie et innovation’, in S. Elm, E. Rebillard, and A. Romano (eds.), Orthodoxie, christianisme, histoire (Rome, 2000), 375–87. ´ Erudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe si`ecles (Paris, 1994). L’Erreur et son juge: remarques sur les censures doctrinales a` l’´epoque moderne (Naples, 1993). Newsome, D., The Convert Cardinals: John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning (London, 1993). Nicolson, M., ‘Christ’s College and the Latitude-Men’, Modern Philology, 27 (1929–30), 35–53. Nijenhuis, W., ‘Calvin’s Attitude towards the Symbols of the Early Church during the Conflict with Caroli’, in id., Ecclesia Reformata: Studies on the Reformation (Leiden, 1972). Adrianus Saravia (c.1532–1613): Dutch Calvinist, First Reformed Defender of the English Episcopal Church Order on the Basis of the Ius Diuinum (Leiden, 1980). Nockles, P. B., The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1837 (Cambridge, 1994). ‘Survivals or New Arrivals? The Oxford Movement and the NineteenthCentury Historical Construction of Anglicanism’, in S. Platten (ed.), Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition: Continuity, Change and the Search for Communion (Norwich, 2003), 144–91. Nussbaum, D., ‘Whitgift’s ‘‘Book of Martyrs’’: Archbishop Whitgift, Timothy Bright and the Elizabethan Struggle over John Foxe’s Legacy’, in D. Loades (ed.), John Foxe: An Historical Perspective (Aldershot, 1999), 135–53. Nuttall, G. F., The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1946). Oberman, H. A., The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). Ollard, R., Clarendon and his Friends (London, 1987).

Bibliography

479

Orcibal, J., Correspondance de Jans´enius [Les Origines du jans´enisme, i] (Louvain, 1947). Jans´enius d’Ypres (1585–1638) (Paris, 1989). Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abb´e de Saint-Cyran, et son temps (1581–1638) [Les Origines du jans´enisme, ii–iii] (Louvain, 1947–8). Orr, R. R., Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford, 1967). Packer, J. W., The Transformation of Anglicanism 1643–1660 with Special Reference to Henry Hammond (Manchester, 1969). Papy, J., ‘Lipsius and Marcus Welser: The Antiquarian’s Life as Via Media’, Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 68 (1998) [M. Laureys (ed.), The World of Justus Lipsius: A Contribution towards his Intellectual Biography], 173–90. Parker, T. M., ‘The Rediscovery of the Fathers in the Seventeenth-Century Anglican Tradition’, in J. Coulson and A. M. Allchin (eds.), The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium (London, 1967), 31–49. Parkin, J., ‘Hobbism in the Later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’, HJ 42 (1999), 85–108. Parry, G., ‘John Foxe, ‘‘Father of Lyes’’, and the Papists’, in D. Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 1997), 295–305. Patterson, W. B., ‘The Anglican Reaction’, in L. W. Spitz and W. Lohff (eds.), Discord, Dialogue and Concord: Studies in the Lutheran Reformation’s Formula of Concord (Philadelphia, 1977), 150–65. King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997). Pattison, M., Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) (2nd edn., Oxford, 1892). Paul, R. S., The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate’ (Edinburgh, 1985). Penny, A., ‘John Foxe, the Acts and Monuments and the Development of Prophetic Interpretation’, in D. Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 1997), 252–77. Perrott, M. E. C., ‘Richard Hooker and the Problem of Authority in the Elizabethan Church’, JEH 49 (1998), 29–60. Peters, R., ‘John Hales and the Synod of Dort’, in G. J. Cuming and D. Baker (eds.), Councils and Assemblies: Papers Read at the Eighth Summer Meeting and the Ninth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Cambridge, 1971; SCH 7), 277–88. Petitmengin, P., ‘De Th´eodore de B`eze a` Jacques Godefroy: travaux protestants sur Tertullien et Cyprien’, in I. Backus (ed.), Th´eodore de B`eze (1519–1605): actes du colloque de Gen`eve (septembre 2005) (Geneva, 2007), 309–37. ‘Une nouvelle e´dition et un ancien manuscrit de Novatien’, Revue des ´etudes augustiniennes, 21 (1975), 256–72. Pettegree, A., ‘The Reception of Calvinism in Britain’, in W. H. Neuser and B. G. Armstrong (eds.), Calvinus sincerioris religionis vindex/Calvin as Protector of the Purer Religion (Kirksville, Mo., 1997), 267–89. Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986). Pfaff, R. W., ‘Anglo-American Patristic Translations 1866–1900’, JEH 28 (1977), 39–55.

480

Bibliography

Pfaff, R. W., ‘The Library of the Fathers: The Tractarians as Patristic Translators’, Studies in Philology, 70 (1973), 329–44. Pickering, W. S. F., Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity (London, 1989). Pilarz, S., ‘ ‘‘Campion dead bites with his friends’ teeth’’: Representations of an Early Modern Catholic Martyr’, in C. Highley and J. N. King (eds.), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, 2002), 216–231. Pinnington, J., Anglicans and Orthodox: Unity and Subversion 1559–1725 (Leominster, 2003). Platt, J., ‘Eirenical Anglicans at the Synod of Dort’, in D. Baker (ed.), Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c1500–c1750 (Oxford, 1979; SCH. Subsidia 2), 221–43. ‘Sixtinus Amama (1593–1629): Franeker Professor and Citizen of the Republic of Letters’, in G. T. Jensma, F. R. H. Smit, and F. Westra (eds.), Universiteit te Franeker 1585–1811: Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de Friese hogeschool (Leeuwarden, 1985), 236–48. Plomer, H. R., A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who Were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London, 1907). A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who Were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1668 to 1725 (Oxford, 1922). Pocock, J. G. A., ‘Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy’, in R. D. Lund (ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), 33–54. Pointer, S. R., ‘The Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Election of 1622: The Constraints of a Puritan Institution’, in L. L. Knoppers (ed.), Puritanism and its Discontents (Newark, Del., 2003), 106–21. Porter, H. C., Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958). Posthumus Meyjes, G. H. M., ‘Hugo Grotius as an Irenicist’, in The World of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645): Proceedings of the International Colloquium Organized by the Grotius Committee of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Rotterdam 6–9 April 1983 (Amsterdam, 1984), 43–63. Prior, C. W. A., Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge, 2005). Purcell, M., ‘ ‘‘Useful weapons for the defence of that cause’’: Richard Allestree, John Fell and the Foundation of the Allestree Library’, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 21 (1999), 124–47. Quantin, J.-L., ‘Anglican Scholarship gone Mad? Henry Dodwell (1641–1711) and Christian Antiquity’, in C. Ligota and J.-L. Quantin (eds.), History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute (Oxford, 2006), 305–56. ‘Apocryphorum nimis studiosi? Dodwell, Mill, Grabe et le probl`eme du canon n´eo-testamentaire au tournant du XVIIe et du XVIIIe si`ecle’, in S. C. Mimouni (ed.), Apocryphit´e: histoire d’un concept transversal aux Religions du Livre. En hommage a` Pierre Geoltrain ( Turnhout, 2002), 285–306. ‘Conscience, autorit´e et c´er´emonies dans l’Angleterre de la Restauration: le Protestant Reconciler de Daniel Whitby et la r´eaction tory (1682–1685)’, in B. Barbiche, J.-P. Poussou, and A. Tallon (eds.), Pouvoirs, contestations et

Bibliography

481

comportements dans l’Europe moderne: m´elanges offerts au Professeur Yves-Marie Berc´e (Paris, 2005), 955–84. ‘De l’histoire de l’´erudition eccl´esiastique a` l’histoire de l’orthodoxie religieuse: Bruno Neveu et le catholicisme’, in id. and J.-C. Waquet (eds.), Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne: m´elanges a` la m´emoire de Bruno Neveu (Geneva, 2006), 1–21. ‘Document, histoire, critique dans l’´erudition eccl´esiastique des temps modernes’, Recherches de science religieuse, 92 (2004), 597–635. ‘Du Chrysostome latin au Chrysostome grec: une histoire europ´eenne (1588–1613)’, in M. Wallraff and R. Br¨andle (eds.), Chrysostomosbilder in 1600 Jahren: Facetten der Wirkungsgeschichte eines Kirchenvaters (Berlin, 2008), 267–346. ‘Entre Rome et Paris, entre histoire et th´eologie: les Selecta historiae Ecclesiasticae capita du P. No¨el Alexandre et les ambiguït´es de l’historiographie gallicane’, M´emoire dominicaine, 20 (2006) [Dominicains, th´eologiens et historiens: colloque en l’honneur du P. Guy Bedouelle], 67–99. ‘L’Augustin du XVIIe si`ecle? Questions de corpus et de canon’, in Augustin au XVIIe si`ecle: actes du colloque organis´e par Carlo Ossola au Coll`ege de France les 30 septembre et 1er octobre 2004 (Florence, 2007), 3–77. ‘L’Orthodoxie, la censure et la gloire: la difficile e´dition princeps de l’´epître de Barnab´e, de Rome a` Amsterdam (1549–1646)’, in M. Cortesi (ed.), ‘Editiones principes’ delle opere dei Padri greci e latini: atti del Convegno di studi … Firenze, 24–25 ottobre 2003 (Florence, 2006), 103–62. ‘La crise jans´eniste de la th´eologie gallicane: Dom Bernard Mar´echal et sa Concordance des Saints P`eres (1739)’, Revue b´en´edictine, 106 (1996), 356–85. ‘Les J´esuites et l’´erudition anglicane’, XVIIe si`ecle, 237 (2007), 691–711. ‘Philologie et th´eologie: les textes patristiques dans les controverses religieuses (XVIe –XVIIe si`ecles)’, Studia Borromaica, 21 (2007). ‘The Fathers in Seventeenth-Century Anglican Theology’, in I. Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists (Leiden, 1997), ii. 987–1008. ‘Un manuel anti-patristique: contexte et signification du Trait´e de l’emploi des saints P`eres de Jean Daill´e (1632)’, in G. Frank, T. Leinkauf, and M. Wriedt (eds.), Die Patristik in der fr¨uhen Neuzeit: Die Relekt¨ure der Kirchenv¨ater in den Wissenschaften des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2006; MelanchthonSchriften der Stadt Bretten 10), 299–325. Le Catholicisme classique et les P`eres de l’Eglise: un retour aux sources (1669– 1713) (Paris, 1999). (with P. Petitmengin et al.), ‘Ir´en´ee de Lyon entre humanisme et R´eforme: les citations de l’Aduersus haereses dans les controverses religieuses de Johann Fabri a` Martin Luther (1522–1527)’, Recherches augustiniennes, 27 (1994), 131–84. Quentin, H., Jean-Dominique Mansi et les grandes collections conciliaires (Paris, 1900). Questier, M. C., Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006). Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996).

482

Bibliography

Rabbie, E., ‘Nobis modica theologia sufficit: il contesto europeo dell’irenismo di Grozio’, Rivista storica italiana, 106 (1994), 243–61. Rademaker, C. S. M., Life and Work of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577–1649) (Assen, 1981). Ratcliff, E. C., ‘The Savoy Conference and the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer’, in G. F. Nuttall and O. Chadwick (eds.), From Uniformity to Unity 1662–1962 (London, 1962), 89–148. Redworth, G., In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford, 1990). Rehnman, S., Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2002). Rex, R., ‘The Polemical Theologian’, in B. Bradshaw and E. Duffy (eds.), Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher (Cambridge, 1989), 109–30. The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1991). Reynolds, M., Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c.1560–1643 (Woodbridge, 2005). Rivers, I., Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, i: Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge, 1991). Robinson, B. S., ‘John Foxe and the Anglo-Saxons’, in C. Highley and J. N. King (eds.), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, 2002), 54–72. Rogers, G. A. J., ‘Locke and the Latitude-Men: Ignorance as a Ground of Toleration’, in R. Kroll, R. Aschcraft, and P. Zagorin (eds.), Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 1992), 230–52. Rubin, M., Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991). Russell, C., The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991). Ryrie, A., ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, JEH 53 (2002), 64–92. Schindler, A., ‘Vermigli und die Kirchenv¨ater’, in E. Campi (ed.), Peter Martyr Vermigli: Humanism, Republicanism, Reformation (Geneva, 2002), 37–43. Schmitt, C. B., John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, 1983). Schochet, G., ‘Samuel Parker, Religious Diversity, and the Ideology of Persecution’, in R. D. Lund (ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), 119–48. Schwartz, M. L., ‘Lay Anglicanism and the Crisis of the English Church in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Albion, 14 (1982), 1–19. Scott, J., Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge, 1988). Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991). Scott Pearson, A. F., Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism 1535–1603 (Cambridge, 1925). Selwyn, D. G., The Library of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1996). Shapiro, B. J., Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton, 1983).

Bibliography

483

Sharpe, K., Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, 2000). Shogimen, T., ‘William of Ockham and Conceptions of Heresy, c.1250–c.1350’, in I. Hunter, J. C. Laursen, and C. J. Nederman (eds.), Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2005), 59–70. Shriver, F., ‘Hampton Court Re-visited: James I and the Puritans’, JEH 33 (1982), 48–71. Simon, M., ‘Isaac Casaubon, Fra Paolo Sarpi et l’Eglise d’Angleterre’ in Aspects de l’anglicanisme: colloque de Strasbourg (14–16 juin 1972) (Paris, 1974), 39–66. Sinnema, D., ‘Beza’s View of Predestination in Historical Perspective’, in I. Backus (ed.), Th´eodore de B`eze (1519–1605): actes du colloque de Gen`eve (septembre 2005) (Geneva, 2007), 219–39. Sladden, J. C., ‘The Appeal to the Fathers in John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, 1560–1571’, Studia patristica, 9 (Berlin, 1966), 594–9. Smith, C. I., ‘Descendit ad Inferos—Again’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967), 87–8. Smith, D. L., Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c.1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994). Snape, M. F., The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2003). Snobelen, S. D., ‘Isaac Newton, Socinianism and ‘‘the One Supreme God’’ ’, in M. Mulsow and J. Rohls (eds.), Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in 17th-Century Europe (Leiden, 2005), 241–98. Somerville, M. R., ‘Richard Hooker and his Contemporaries on Episcopacy: An Elizabethan Consensus’, JEH 35 (1984), 177–87. Sommerville, C. J., ‘Interpreting Seventeenth-Century English Religion as Movements’, CH 69 (2000), 749–69. Southgate, B. C., ‘A Note on the Authorship of Rushworth’s Dialogues’, Notes and Queries, 226 (1981), 207–8. Spalding, J. C., The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws of England, 1552 (Kirksville, Mo., 1992). Spellman, W. M., The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Athens, Ga., 1993). Spinks, B. D., Sacraments, Ceremonies and the Stuart Divines: Sacramental Theology and Liturgy in England and Scotland 1603–1662 (Aldershot, 2002). Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology: Sacraments and Salvation in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker (Lanham, Md., 1999). Spurr, J., ‘ ‘‘A special kindness for dead bishops’’: The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68/1–2 (2005) [The Uses of History in Early Modern England], 327–34. ‘ ‘‘Latitudinarianism’’ and the Restoration Church’, HJ 31 (1988), 61–82. ‘Schism and the Restoration Church’, JEH 41 (1990), 408–24. ‘The Church of England, Comprehension and the Toleration Act of 1689’, EHR 104 (1989), 927–46. The Restoration Church of England 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991).

484

Bibliography

Staehelin, E., ‘Kirchlisch-menschliche Beziehungen im Zeitalter der Orthodoxie und des beginnenden Pietismus nach den Stammb¨uchern des Frey-Gryn¨aischen Institutes in Basel’, ARG 38 (1941), 133–50. Das theologische Lebenswerk Johannes Oekolampads (Leipzig, 1939). Stanwood, P. G., ‘Community and Social Order in the Great Tew Circle’, in C. J. Summers and T.-L. Pebworth (eds.), Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England (Columbia, Mo., 2000), 173–86. Steinmetz, D. C. (ed.), Die Patristik in der Bibelexegese des 16. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1999). Strehle, S., Calvinism, Federalism, and Scholasticism: A Study of the Reformed Doctrine of Covenant (Bern, 1988). Sutherland, L. S., and Mitchell, L. G. (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, v (Oxford, 1986). Sykes, N., From Sheldon to Secker (Cambridge, 1959). William Wake Archbishop of Canterbury 1657–1737, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1957). Symonds, H. E., The Council of Trent and Anglican Formularies (London, 1933). Tallon, A., Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe si`ecle (Paris, 2002). La France et le concile de Trente (1518–1563) (Rome, 1997). Tavard, G. H., The Quest for Catholicity: A Study in Anglicanism (London, 1963). The Seventeenth-Century Tradition: A Study in Recusant Thought (Leiden, 1978). ´ Thils, G., Les Notes de l’Eglise dans l’apolog´etique catholique depuis la R´eforme (Gembloux, 1937). Thomas, K., ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (April 1958), 42–62. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1991). Thomas, S., Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge, 1991). Thornton, R. H., ‘John Hales, of Eton’, Notes and Queries, 9th series 4 ( July– December 1899), 106. Todd, M., ‘ ‘‘All One with Tom Thumb’’: Arminianism, Popery, and the Story of the Reformation in Early Stuart Cambridge’, CH 64 (1995), 563–79. ‘ ‘‘An Act of Discretion’’: Evangelical Conformity and the Puritan Dons’, Albion, 18 (1986), 581–99. ‘Anti-Calvinists and the Republican Threat in Early Stuart Cambridge’, in L. L. Knoppers (ed.), Puritanism and its Discontents (Newark, Del., 2003), 85–105. ‘Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward’, JBS 31 (1992), 236–64. ‘The Samuel Ward Papers at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1985), 582–92. Toomer, G. J., ‘Selden’s Historie of Tithes: Genesis, Publication, Aftermath’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 65 (2002), 345–78. Toon, P., God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen, Pastor, Educator, Theologian (Exeter, 1971).

Bibliography

485

Tournoy, G., ‘ ‘‘Ad ultimas inscitiae lineas imus’’: Justus Lipsius and Isaac Casaubon in the Changing World of Classical Scholarship’, Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 68 (1998) [M. Laureys (ed.), The World of Justus Lipsius: A Contribution towards his Intellectual Biography], 191–208. Towers, S. M., Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2003). Townshend, D., The Life and Letters of the Great Earl of Cork (London, 1904). Trentman, J. A., ‘The Authorship of Directions for a Student in the Universitie’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 7 (1977–80), 170–83. Trevor-Roper, H., Archbishop Laud, 1573–1645 (3rd edn., Houndmills, 1988). Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays (London, 1987). From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (London, 1992). Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (3rd edn., London, 1984). Trueman, C. R., The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle, 1998). Tudor-Craig, P., ‘Charles I and Little Gidding’, in R. Ollard and P. Tudor-Craig (eds.), For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History (London, 1986), 175–87. Tulloch, J., Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the 17th Century, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1874). Turrell, J. F., ‘ ‘‘Until such time as he be confirmed’’: The Laudians and Confirmation in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England’, Seventeenth Century, 20 (2005), 204–22. Twigg, J., The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution 1625–1688 (Woodbridge, 1990). Tyacke, N., ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism’, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), 5–33. Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (paperback edn., Oxford, 1990; 1st edn. 1987). Aspects of English Protestantism c.1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001). Vallance, E., ‘Preaching to the Converted: Religious Justification for the English Civil War’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 65 (2002), 395–419. Van der Weyer, R., ‘Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding: A Reappraisal’, in R. Ollard and P. Tudor-Craig (eds.), For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History (London, 1986), 152–72. Van Leeuwen, H. G., The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 1630–1690 ( The Hague, 1963). Van Stam, F. P., ‘Le Livre de Pierre Caroli de 1545 et son conflit avec Calvin’, in O. Millet (ed.), Calvin et ses contemporains: actes du colloque de Paris 1995 (Geneva, 1998), 21–41. Vessey, M., ‘English Translations of the Latin Fathers, 1517–1611’, in I. Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists (Leiden, 1997), ii. 775–835. Vivanti, C., Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento ( Turin, 1974).

486

Bibliography

Voak, N., Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford, 2003). Vogelsang, E., ‘Weltbild und Kreuzestheologie in den H¨ollenfahrtstreitigkeiten der Reformationszeit’, ARG 38 (1941), 90–132. Wabuda, S., and Litzenberger, C. (eds.), Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from his Students (Aldershot, 1998). Wadkins, T. H., ‘The Percy–‘‘Fisher’’ Controversies and the Ecclesiastical Politics of Jacobean Anti-Catholicism’, CH 57 (1988), 153–69. Wainwright, J. P., Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-century England: Christopher, First Baron Hatton (1605–1670) (Aldershot, 1997). Walker, D. P., The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1972). ‘The Cessation of Miracles’, in I. Merkel and A. G. Debus (eds.), Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe (Washington, 1988), 111–24. ‘Valentine Greatrakes, the Irish Stroker and the Question of Miracles’, in M´elanges sur la litt´erature de la Renaissance a` la m´emoire de V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva, 1984), 343–56. Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1981). Wallace, D. D., Jr., ‘Puritan and Anglican: The Interpretation of Christ’s Descent into Hell in Elizabethan Theology’, ARG 69 (1978), 248–87. Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982). Walsh, J., Haydon, C., and Taylor, S. (eds.), The Church of England c.1689–c.1833. From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993). Walsh, K. J., ‘Cranmer and the Fathers, especially in the Defence’, Journal of Religious History, 11 (1980), 227–47. Walsham, A., ‘ ‘‘Frantic Hacket’’: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’, HJ 41 (1998), 27–66. Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999). Waquet, F., Le Latin ou l’empire d’un signe XVIe–XXe si`ecle (Paris, 1998). Warfield, B. B., The Westminster Assembly and its Work (New York, 1931). Weber, K., Lucius Cary Second Viscount Falkland (New York, 1940). Webster, T., Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement (Cambridge, 1997). Weir, D. A., The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought (Oxford, 1990). Welsby, P. A., Lancelot Andrewes 1555–1626 (London, 1958). Welti, E., Der Basler Buchdruck und Britannien: Die Rezeption britischen Gedankenguts in den Basler Pressen von den Anf a¨ ngen bis zum Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts (Basle, 1964). West, W. M. S., ‘John Hooper and the Origins of Puritanism’, Baptist Quarterly,  15 (1953–4), 346–68; 16 (1955–6), 22–46 and 67–88. White, P., Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992).

Bibliography

487

Whiteman, A., ‘The Restoration of the Church of England’, in G. F. Nuttall and O. Chadwick (eds.), From Uniformity to Unity 1662–1962 (London, 1962), 19–88. Whiting, C. E., Studies in English Puritanism (London, 1968). Wiles, M., Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries (Oxford, 1996). Williams, G., Reformation Views of Church History (London, 1970). Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff, 1967). Williams, G. H., The Radical Reformation (3rd edn., Kirksville, Mo., 2002). Williams, R., ‘Newman’s Arians and the Question of Method in Doctrinal History’, in I. Ker and A. G. Hill (eds.), Newman after a Hundred Years (Oxford, 1990), 263–85. Woolf, D. R., ‘In Praise of Older Things: Notion of Age and Antiquity in Early Modern England’, in A. T. Grafton and J. H. M. Salmon (eds.), Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY, 2001), 123–53. Worden, B., ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration (Oxford, 1984; SCH 21), 199–233. Wormald, B. H. G., Clarendon: Politics, Historiography and Religion 1640–1660 (Cambridge, 1989). Yates, N., Building, Faith, and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600–1900 (rev. edn., Oxford, 2000). Yould, G. M., ‘The Duke of Lauderdale’s Religious Policy in Scotland, 1668–79: The Failure of Conciliation and the Return to Coercion’, Journal of Religious History, 11 (1980–1), 248–68. Young, B. W., ‘Religious History and the Eighteenth-Century Historian’, HJ 43 (2000), 849–68. Unpublished theses Findon, J. C., ‘The Nonjurors and the Church of England, 1689–1716’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1978). Hoyle, D. M., ‘ ‘‘Near Popery yet no Popery’’: Theological Debate in Cambridge 1590–1644’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1991) [now published as Reformation and religious identity in Cambridge 1590–1644 (Woodbridge, 2007)]. Macauley, J. S., ‘Richard Mountague, Caroline Bishop, 1575–1641’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1964). Miller, E. C., Jr., ‘The Doctrine of the Church in the Thought of Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672)’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1990). Van Dixhoorn, C. B., ‘Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly 1643–1652’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 2004).

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Abbot, George (1562–1633), abp. of Canterbury from 1611, brother of next 59n, 61n, 70n, 71, 84n, 109–10, 160n, 166n, 177n, 190n, 338 Abbot, Robert (1560–1618), bp. of Salisbury 63n, 71n, 84n, 114, 129n, 162, 184, 185–6 Abelard, Peter (1079–1142/3) 96, 331 Achery, Luc d’ (1609–85), Maurist 336, 341n Acontius, Jacobus [Jacopo Aconcio] (c.1520–1566/7?) 262 Ælfric (c.955–c.1020), ‘the Grammarian’ 77–8 Aerius (c.300–c.375) 102, 103, 235, 245n, 268 Alan of Lille [Alanus ab Insulis] (c.1125/30–1203) 83n Alexander (d. 328), bp. of Alexandria from 312 315 Alexandre, No¨el [Natalis Alexander] (1639–1724), Dominican 322 Allam, Andrew (1655–85) 293–4 Allenson, John (d. 1619) 82n Allestree, Richard (1621/2–81), provost of Eton College 291n, 309n, 311n, 341 Alley, William (1510/11–70), bp. of Exeter 60, 62–3, 79, 120 Amama, Sixtinus(1593–1629) 405–6 Ambrose of Milan (c.339–97) 22, 23, 123, 208, 256, 383, 402 ps.-Ambrose [Alcuin?] 62n Ambrosiaster (fl. c.375) 99–100, 104, 278–81, 312, 315 Anabaptists 50, 61, 152, 164n, 332 Anacletus, bp. of Rome [false decretals ascribed to] 32n Anastasius I (d. 402), pope from 399 363 Andrew, Passion of 320 Andrewes, Lancelot (1555–1626), bp.

of Winchester 5, 66n, 100, 144, 145n, 155–9, 168, 172, 195n, 196, 312 devotions 21, 159n and episcopacy 102–5, 151, 156–7 Anselm (1033–1109), abp. of Canterbury from 1093 74, 75, 159n ante-Nicene Fathers 9, 65n, 79, 138, 210, 216–17, 221, 227, 229, 231, 234, 246, 250–1, 257, 261–2, 265, 286, 339, 340, 341, 343–7, 351, 360–4, 374–5, 378–9, 382–3, 386, 388, 401, 403, 410 Antichrist 68–70, 76, 78, 96, 136–7, 167, 201, 204, 212, 294, 299–300, 352 Apollonius (fl. 196–7), anti-Montanist writer 250 Apostles’ Creed 43, 46, 115–17, 119–20, 123, 129, 140, 194, 199, 242, 245, 249, 288 Apostolic Canons 349 Apostolic Fathers (Apostolici) 25n, 32, 351n, 364n, 370, 395n Aristotle (384–322 ) 54–5, 168, 226 Arius (c.260–336) 14n, 102, 221 Arians 38n, 44, 61n, 65, 211, 228, 240n, 246, 261–2, 263, 276, 281n, 334, 356, 361, 362, 365 Semi-Arians 42n early modern Arians 221, 343–4, 388 Arles, council of (314) 233n Arminius, Jacobus [Jakob Hermansz] (1560–1609) 162, 185, 209n, 347 Arnauld, Antoine (1612–94), brother of next 305n, 323, 324n, 385n, 402–3 Arnauld, Henri (1597–1692), bp. of Angers 305n

490 Arnobius of Sicca [Arnobius the elder] (fl. c.304–10) 123, 209n, 351n, 360, 383 Arnoux, Jean (1575–1636), Jesuit 103 Articles of faith see Confessions of faith Arundel, Henry Fitzalan, earl of (1512–80) 79n Ashe, Simeon (d. 1662) 184n Athanasius of Alexandria (295–373) 383 De decretis Nicaenae synodi 42n De sententia Dionysii 221, 345, 362n Historia Arianorum 281n Vita Antonii 375n ps.-Athanasius, ep. ad Marcum 320–1 Athanasian Creed (symbol Quicunque uult) 43, 46–7, 194, 228, 246, 263, 288, 386–7 Athenagoras (2nd cent.) 265n Aubrey, John (1626–97) 227n, 240n Augustine of Canterbury (d. between 604 and 609) 75–6, 78–9, 202 Augustine of Hippo (354–430) 8, 32n, 73, 79, 159n, 166–7, 205, 208, 212, 216, 256, 311, 402, 410 on authority of the Fathers 55, 59n, 123, 185, 230, 249, 258 on descent into Hell 118, 120, 124–6, 129 on efficacy and necessity of baptism 80–82, 107, 108n, 182–4, 185 on eucharist 27, 35, 37–9, 143 on grace and predestination 35n, 80, 170–82, 185–91, 206, 218, 220, 244, 259–60, 341–2, 383n, 403 on heresy 46, 65, 201, 212, 221, 258n, 263, 342–3 on infant communion 185, 222–3, 258, 295, 357 on miracles 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 304 on tradition 62, 63–4, 91–92, 95, 97, 193, 199, 222, 243, 269, 383 editions of 35n, 176n, 188n, 279n Confessiones 4n, 8n Contra Adimantum 27, 37n, 38 Contra duas epistolas Pelagianorum 100

Index Contra epistolam Fundamenti 47, 49, 224, 354, 359 Contra epistolam Parmeniani 107n, 108n Contra Iulianum 65, 221 Contra litteras Petiliani 212n Contra Maximinum Arianum 43n, 261n Contra secundam Iuliani responsionem imperfectum opus 100n, 280n De baptismo contra Donatistas 64, 92n, 97, 199, 222, 243, 249, 269, 383 De ciuitate Dei 136–7, 138, 186–7 De correptione et gratia 171n De doctrina christiana 67, 68 De dono perseuerantiae 80, 178 De gratia et libero arbitrio 80 De Genesi ad litteram 62, 63–4, 193 De haeresibus 258n De peccato originali 178n De peccatorum meritis 223n De praedestinatione sanctorum 80, 178 De uera religione 132n, 134n, 135n, 136n Enarrationes in Psalmos 46, 82 ep. 54 ad Ianuarium 92n ep. 82 ad Hieronymum 123n, 185, ep. 98 ad Bonifacium 27, 37n, 182n ep. 93 ad Vincentium 55, 185n, 343n ep. 105 ad Donatistas 263 ep. 164 ad Euodium 118, 124–5, 126, 129 ep. 187 ad Dardanum 35n ep. 194 ad Sixtum 171 ep. 238 ad Pascentium 42n, 261n Psalmus contra partem Donati 201n sermo 294 81n Tractatus in Ioannem 35, 37 De Trinitate 55, 185n ps.-Augustine, sermo 191 de tempore 342n ps.-Augustine see Ambrosiaster, Lanfranc Aylmer, John (1521–94), bp. of London 57n Aymon, Jean (1661–after 1730) 143n Baddeley, Richard (fl. 1622) 137–8 Bail, Louis (1610–69) 23n Baillie, Robert (1602–62) 168, 191

Index Baius, Michael [Michel de Bay] (1513–89) 182 Baker, Samuel (d. 1658) 221n Baker, Thomas (1656–1740) 187n, 315n, 318n Bale, John (1495–1563), bp. of Ossory 75n, 76, 319n Ball, Thomas (1589/90–1659) 163n, 198n Baltus, Jean-Franc¸ois (1667–1743), Jesuit 272n, 340n Bancroft, John (1574–1641), bp. of Oxford, nephew of next 130 Bancroft, Richard (1544–1610), abp. of Canterbury from 1604 5, 60, 95, 96n, 97, 98, 100n, 101, 102n, 133, 139, 142, 278 B´an˜ ez, Domingo (1528–1604), Dominican 181 baptism 62, 63–4, 80–2, 91, 95, 106–8, 182–5, 193, 266, 349, 364n, 361, 379, 387, 394–5 rebaptism 59n, 143, 208, 233, 245–6, 265n, 297n Baring-Gould, Sabine (1834–1924) 5–6, 11n Barksdale, Clement (1609–87) 151n, 291n Barlow, Thomas (1608/9–91), bp. of Lincoln 140n, 163n, 201n, 219n, 222n, 294, 337–8, 342n, 371, 386–7 Barlow, William (c.1565–1613), bp. of Lincoln 71, 96n, 97n, 101n, 106n, 129n, 142n, 278n Barnabas, epistle of (c.130?) 383 Barne, Miles (d. 1709?) 292n Baro, Peter (1534–99) 127 Baronio, Cesare [Caesar Baronius] (1538–1607), cardinal 58n, 110, 145, 232n, 314, 320, 360n Barret, John (1631–1713) 338n Barrett, William (c.1561-in or after 1630) 171–2 Barrow, Henry (1550?–93) 120n Barrow, Isaac (1630–77) 296n, 305, 390n Basil of Ancyra (fl. 336–63) 42n Basil of Caesarea (c.330–79) 206n, 383, 402 ep. 9 ad Maximum 65, 145–6, 345

491 ep. 210 ad primores Neocaesareae 64, 66n, 231, 345n De Spiritu Sancto 52n, 62–3, 96n, 195, 196–8, 199, 205, 244, 258, 297, 335–6, 358 ps.-Basil, In Isaiam 250 editions of 62n, 111n, 144n, 197 Baxter, Richard (1615–91) 40, 108n, 151, 255, 256, 262–3, 265–6, 311–12, 314–17, 319, 353, 386–7, 389, 399–400 Bayle, Jean (1609–85), father of next 336n Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706) 336n Beardmore, John (fl. 1651–98) 382n Beaumont, Joseph (1616–99), master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Regius Professor of Divinity from 1674 342n Becket, Thomas (d. 1170), abp. of Canterbury from 1162 180n, 371n Bede (c.673–735), ‘the Venerable’ 74, 75, 76n Bedell, William (1571–1642), bp. of Kilmore and Ardagh 135n, 183–4 Bedford, Hilkiah (1663–1724), Nonjuror bp. 272n, 303n, 308n, 309n, 329n, 340n, 349n Bedford, Thomas (d. 1653) 183n, 184n Bellarmine, Robert (1542–1621), cardinal 30, 41n, 66, 71, 75, 93, 100, 125–6, 128n, 129, 156, 182, 188, 195, 198, 217n, 269, 270n, 292–3, 321, 334n, 335, 347n, 363n Berengar of Tours [Berengarius] (c.1010–88) 69, 323 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) 72, 73n, 74, 75, 96, 167 Bernard, Edward (1638–96), Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford 264n, 336 Bernard, Nicholas (d. 1661) 85n, 180n Bernardini, Paolino (1619–1713), Dominican 313n Bertius, Petrus (1565–1629) 143n, 173n

492 Beveridge, William (1637–1708), bp. of St Asaph 1, 339n, 350–1, 364n, 382 Beza, Theodore [Th´eodore de B`eze] (1519–1605) 36n, 86, 97, 119, 121n, 124n, 127, 140n, 147, 165, 166, 168, 170n, 188, 253, 264 Biddle, John (1615–62) 263n, 343n Bignon, J´erˆome (1589–1656) 268n, 286 ´ Bigot, Emery (1626–89) 30n Bill, John (d. 1630), printer 145n, 148n, 149n Billy, Jacques de [Iacobus Billius] (1535–81), Benedictine 197n Bilson, Thomas (1546/7–1616), bp. of Winchester 42n, 63–4, 91, 106, 110n, 168, 196, 198, 212n on descent into Hell 114–15, 121–6, 127, 129, 130, 200, 393 on episcopacy 96–7, 100–2, 151, 200 Binius, Severinus (1573–1641) 314 Birch, Thomas (1705–66) 213n, 221n, 225n, 228n Bisbie, Nathaniel (1635–95) 291n Bishop, William (c.1554–1624), bp. of Chalcedon 128n Bisset, George (fl. 1655–70), Jesuit, Rector of the Scots College in Rome 276n Blaeu, Joan (1596–1673), printer in Amsterdam 325n Blondel, David (1591–1655) 233n, 257, 268n, 279n, 280, 281, 315, 316, 319, 372n Blunt, John James (1794–1855) 9, 40n, 272n, 340n Boetzelaer, Gideon, baron van den (1569–1634) 150n Bohun, Edmund (1645–99) 343n Boileau, Jacques (1635–1716), ‘Boileau de la Sainte-Chapelle’ 233n Bois, John (1561–1644) 110n, 141n Bonaventure (c.1217–74), ‘Doctor seraphicus’ 72, 75 Boniface III (d. 607), pope from 606 70n Book of Common Prayer 5, 12, 39, 46–7, 106–8, 128n, 144n, 151, 168, 201, 241, 245, 283–4, 349

Index Bossuet, Jacques B´enigne (1627–1704), bp. of Meaux 321n, 384n, 401, 403 Bower, Walter (1385–1449) 316n Boyle, Richard (1566–1643), 1st earl of Cork, father of next two 238 Boyle, Richard (1612–98), Viscount Dungarvan, then 2nd earl of Cork 238 Boyle, Robert (1627–91) 341n Bradford, John (1510?–55) 82n Bradwardine, Thomas (c.1295–1349), abp. of Canterbury in 1349 260 Bramhall, John (1594–1663), abp. of Armagh 151n, 177, 353, 358n Bray, William (d. 1643) 201n Brenz, Johannes (1499–1570) 48 Brett, Thomas, of Spring Grove (1667–1744), Nonjuror bp. 407n, 408n Bretton, Clement (d. 1669) 198–9 Bridges, John (1535/6–1618), bp. of Oxford 48n Bristow, Richard (1538–81) 57n Brokesby, Francis (1637–1714) 371n, 386n, 390n, 391n, 392n Brooke, Samuel (c.1575–1631), master of Trinity College, Cambridge 206 Brooke, Zachary (1716–88) 409n Broughton, Hugh (1549–1612) 121, 253 Brownrigg, Ralph (1592–1659), bp. of Exeter 165, 206 Bruce, Titus (b. 1654) 310 Bucer, Martin (1491–1551) 32, 86 Buchanan, George (1506–82) 270n Buckeridge, John (1562?–1631), bp. of Ely 157 Buckingham, Mary Villiers (c.1570–1632) countess of, mother of next 192 Buckingham, George Villiers (1592–1628), 1st duke of 16, 175, 192 Bull, George (1634–1710), bp. of St David’s 1, 10, 89n, 341–2, 344–9, 388, 401 Bullinger, Heinrich (1504–75) 81, 116 Burnet, Gilbert (1643–1715), bp. of Salisbury 286n, 287n, 288n, 289n, 318, 323–4, 408–9

Index Buridan, Jean (1300–58) 181n Burton, Edward (1794–1836) 7n, 272n Burton, Henry (1578–1648) 169, 202n Buxtorf, Johann, the younger (1599–1664) 239n Cajetan, Thomas de Vio [Caietanus] (1469–1534), cardinal 55–6, 59n, 208, 337n Calamy, Benjamin (1642–86), uncle of next 291n Calamy, Edmund (1671–1732) 366 Calfhill, James (1529/30–70) 55n, 56n, 62n, 140 Calovius [Calov], Abraham (1612–86) 261–2 Calvin, Jean (1509–64) 57, 58, 70n, 106, 140n and ancient Creeds 44, 347 and baptism 81, 82, 184 and Canon of Scripture 47, 49n, 50, 94 and descent into Hell 116, 118, 119, 128, 129 and miracles 131 political theology 163 on Christ as autotheos 253, 261n, 347 influence in England 12, 82, 85–6, 90n, 97, 161, 162, 166–7, 170, 183, 188, 190n, 259, 260, 263–4 criticism of 127, 143, 156, 159–60, 161, 165–6, 168, 170–3, 174, 181, 185, 187, 209, 311, 329, 335, 337, 347–8 Cambridge University 9, 22, 49, 66n, 71, 86, 102, 105, 111n, 113, 116, 126–7, 139–40, 160, 161–3, 165, 176, 177, 178, 181, 186, 192, 198–9, 201n, 264, 293n, 341n, 342n University sermons 171, 292n, 294, 310n, 342n Cambridge Platonists 287, 288, 308 Camden, William (1551–1623) 138, 162n Campion, Edmund (1540–81), Jesuit 24n, 37–9, 51n, 57–9, 107n, 120n, 244n, 312

493 Cano, Francisco Melchor [Melchior Canus] (1509?–60), bp. of the Canary islands 53, 56, 117n, 204n, 207, 334–5 Canon of Scripture 47–50, 93–4, 96, 195, 198, 199, 204–5, 224, 225, 237, 244, 248, 254, 263, 269–70, 273, 290, 298, 301, 307, 376–8, 382, 401, 409, 410 canon law (medieval) 62n, 164n. See also Gratian Canons of 1571 2, 4, 6, 39–43, 94, 127, 139, 150, 191, 194, 202, 264, 291, 293, 320, 336, 349 Canons of 1604 39, 41 Canons of 1606 43–4, 46, 198–9 C´ardenas y C´espedes, Juan de (1612–84), Jesuit 306n Carleton, Dudley, Viscount Dorchester (1574–1632), cousin of next 130n, 210n Carleton, George (1557/8–1628), bp. of Chichester 130n, 196n, 212n Carlile, Christopher (d. 1588?) 116n Caroli, Pierre (fl. 1505–50) 44, 348n Cartwright, Thomas (1535–1603) 85, 89, 92, 107n, 152 Casaubon, Isaac (1559–1614), father of next 108n, 136n, 142–8, 150–1, 153, 197, 216–17, 227, 232, 236, 286, 314, 320, 349, 406 Casaubon, M´eric (1599–1671) 152 Cassian, John (c.360-after 430) 175, 176n, 189, 363n Cave, William (1637–1713) 1, 313, 320, 321n, 364n Cecil, William (1520/1–98), 1st Baron Burghley, father of next 36, 37n, 51 Cecil, Robert (1563–1612), 1st earl of Salisbury 132n Celestine I (d. 432), pope from 422 182 Centuriators of Magdeburg (1559–74) see Flacius Illyricus Cerinthus (fl. c.100) and Cerinthians 44 Cervini see Marcellus II Chaderton, Laurence (1536?–1640), master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge 67n Chalcedon, council of (451) 45, 73

494 Challoner, Luke (1550–1613), vice-chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin 110n Chamier, Daniel (1565–1621) 91, 269 Chapman, John (1704–84) 356n Charles I (1600–49), king of England from 1625 15, 16, 158, 181n, 189–90, 245, 276 Charles II (1630–85), king of England from 1660 277, 285, 287, 288, 289, 293n, 341 Charlett, Arthur (1655–1722), master of University College, Oxford 290n, 369n, 402n, 407n Cheke, Sir John (1514–57) 27, 116n Chemnitz, Martin (1522–86) 48n, 49n, 54n, 63n, 64n, 65, 84, 90, 132n, 161 Cherry, Francis (1667–1713) 391n, 392n Cheynell, Francis (1608–65) 260–3, 307 Cheyney, Richard (d. 1579), bp. of Gloucester 36n, 50–1, 77, 120n Chillingworth, William (1602–44) 202, 211, 213–15, 216n, 221–8, 239–40, 241–2, 246, 262, 263, 270, 285, 286n, 287, 305, 306, 307, 308, 332, 338n, 346, 357 Chowney, Thomas [Chouneus] (b. 1582/3) 191–2 Christian IV (1577–1648), king of Denmark from 1588 60n Church, Richard William (1815–90) 4n, 15n Church, Thomas (1707–56) 380n Cicero (106–43 ) 281n, 311 Clarendon see Hyde Clarke, Samuel (1599–1682), presbyterian clergyman 133n, 163n, 184n Clarke, Samuel (1675–1729), rector of St James’s, Westminster 228n Clayton, Richard, master of University College, Oxford (1602/3–76) 163n Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215) 129, 232, 237, 257, 265n, 361, 362–3, 372, 394, 395

Index Clement of Rome (fl. c.96) 9, 25n, 141n, 144n, 166n, 268, 286n, 340n, 341, 351n, 382, 383 ps.-Clement (‘Clementines’) 62n Clerke, John (b. 1649/50) 292 Clifford, William (fl. 1682) 292n, 365n Clogie, Alexander (1614–98) 184n Coccius, Josse (fl. c.1575–99) 320, 321n Cochlaeus, Ioannes (1479–1552) 41n Collier, Jeremy (1650–1726) 12–13 Colomi`es, Paul (1638–92) 144n, 146n, 336 Compton, Henry (1632–1713), bp. of London 290n, 302n, 321, 336, 381–2 Conant, John (1608–94), rector of Exeter College, Oxford, father of next 264n Conant, John (1653/4–1723) 264n Concina, Daniel (1687–1756), Dominican 23n Confessions of faith (English) Ten Articles (1536) 43, 81n Six Articles (1539) 78 Bishops’ Book (1537) 178n King’s Book (1543) 178 Forty-Two Articles (1553) 33–4, 43, 80, 81, 90n, 117–18 Thirty-Nine Articles (1563/71) 34, 35–7, 39, 43–4, 47–9, 80, 81, 90–1, 128, 168, 189, 194, 197, 214, 228, 252–3, 400, 403 Lambeth Articles (1595) 128, 172 Irish Articles (1615) 48, 49n, 253 see Westminster Confession Confessions of faith (Lutheran) Augsburg Confession (1530) 46n, 81n Confessio Saxonica (1551) 46n, 48n Confessio Virtembergica (1551) 46n, 48 Formula of Concord (1576–7) 44n, 46n, 118n Confessions of faith (Reformed) 85, 264 Consensus Tigurinus (1549) 81 Confession of La Rochelle (1559) 44n, 46n, 47n, 94n

Index Confessio belgica (1561) 44n, 47n, 94n Second Helvetic Confession (1566) 60n Coningesby, George (c.1693–1768) 390n Conold, Robert (fl. 1676–7) 328, 329–30, 331 Conry, Florence (d. 1629), RC abp. of Tuam 185n Constantine, Henry (fl.1675–86) 291n Constantine I (c.272/3–337), Roman emperor, father of next 70, 155, 246, 262, 343 Constantius II (317–361), Roman emperor from 337 281n, 389 Constantinople, 1st council of (381) 45, 344n, 351 Constantinople, 2nd council of (553) 363 Constantinople, 3rd council of (680–1) 402 Cook, Sir William (c.1630–1708) 328n, 329 Cooke, Alexander (1564–1632), brother of next 215n Cooke, Robert [Cocus] (1549/50–1615) 99n Cornarius, Ianus [Johann Hainpol] (c.1500–58) 42n Cornelius (d. 253), bp. of Rome from 251 391n Cosin, John (1594–1672), bp. of Durham 5, 110n, 155n, 159n, 187n, 193–4, 197n, 198n, 203n, 215n, 276–7, 280n, 282n, 311–12 Cossart, Gabriel (1615–74), Jesuit 311 Cotelier Jean-Baptiste (1629–86) 364n, 395n Cotton, Sir Robert (1571–1631) 316n councils 23, 31, 160n, 161, 168, 264n, 280n, 311, 330, 385n authority of 31–2, 33, 51, 98, 194, 211, 223, 233, 243, 244n, 248, 254, 265n, 275n, 338, 346, 350, 366n, 384 editions of 244n, 311, 314–15 first four ecumenical councils 45, 73–74, 140, 155, 156, 157n, 194n, 246, 247, 262, 288, 378 Courtenay, Sir William (1628–1702) 328n

495 Covell, William (d. 1613) 93–4 Cox, Richard (1500–81), bp. of Ely 31–3, 41 Craig, John (1512?–1600) 119n Craig, John (c.1663–1731) 368n Cranmer, Thomas (1489–1556), abp. of Canterbury from 1533 6, 14, 22, 24–7, 29, 33, 46, 54n, 72, 73n, 79–80, 90n, 117–18, 285n, 391 Crashaw, William (1572–1626) 84n, 186–7, 292n Craufurd, James (fl. 1680) 301n Cressy, Hugh Paulinus, in religion Serenus, dean of Leighlin, then Benedictine (1605–74) 239–40, 296, 332, 335, 337, 385n Crispe, Samuel (fl. 1662–1717) 292n Crompton, William (1599/1600–1642) 49n, 64n Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658), Lord Protector of England 312, 352n, 354 Cudworth, Ralph (1617–88) 308 Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258) 18, 123, 134, 148, 208, 217, 235, 298, 383 and episcopacy 147, 341, 372n, 390–1, 392 and rebaptism 59n, 143, 233, 245–6, 265n editions of 146–7, 298, 312–13, 374n, 390n Ad Demetrianum 165n ep. 63 ad Caecilium 297n ps.-Cyprian see Rufinus Cyril of Jerusalem (c.315–87) 4n, 8n, 40n Daill´e, Jean (1594–1670), father of next 248, 249, 250, 275n, 276–84, 325, 349, 357, 379, 382 Use of the Fathers 3, 7, 32–3, 74, 228–40, 243n, 247–51, 264–7, 273, 275–6, 286, 294, 295, 297, 298, 327, 328, 331–40, 346, 350–1, 361, 362, 372, 400, 403, 409 Daill´e, Adrien (1628–90) 229n, 248n Danby, earl of see Leeds, duke of Dantiscus, Joannes (1485–1548) 63n Darrell, John (c.1562–c.1607) 132–5

496 Davenant, John (c.1572–1641), bp. of Salisbury 105–6, 139n, 176, 181, 183, 190, 259 Deacon, John (fl. 1568–1601) 132n, 134, 136 Deacon, Thomas (1697–1753), Nonjuror bp. 407–8 ´ Dechamps, Etienne [aka Antonius Ricardus] (1613–1701), Jesuit 182n Decius (c.190–251), Roman emperor from 249 312, 372, 391n De Dominis, Marcantonio, abp. of Spalato (c.1560–1624) 147–8, 153–4 Dering, Edward (1540?–76) 119n, 128n Dering, Sir Edward (1598–1644) 112–13 descent into Hell 114–30, 143, 144, 149, 167–8, 232, 242, 253, 393–5 Des Gallars, Nicolas [Gallasius] (c.1520–c.1580) 58n, 348n Des Maizeaux, Pierre (1673–1745) 213n, 214n, 263n Descartes, Ren´e [Cartesius] (1596–1650) 281n Dexter (fl. 392) [spurious chronicle ascribed to] 344n Dey, Richard (fl.1641) 206n Dietelmaier [Dietelmair], Johann Augustin (1717–85) 115n, 120n Dieu, Lodewijk de (1590–1642) 239n Digby, George (1612–77), second earl of Bristol, cousin of next 240, 265, 332 Digby, Sir Kenelm (1603–65) 214n, 220n, 240 Digges, Dudley (1613–43) 271n Dionysius of Alexandria (d. 264/5) 65, 145, 221, 345, 361–2 ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite (early 6th cent.) 32n, 90n Disney, John (1746–1816) 409n Dodwell, Henry (1641–1711), father of next 1, 9, 21, 152n, 327, 366–95, 399–400, 409, 410–11 and Nonjurors 327, 366, 369, 390–2 on Athanasian Creed 386–7 on Canon of Scripture 376–8, 382 on descent into Hell 393–5

Index on Dissenters 107n, 318, 366, 368–9, 381–2 on episcopacy 318–9, 381–2, 388–92 on miracles 367, 374–5, 378, 384 on mortality of the soul 392–3, 395, 410 on Socinians 368, 374–5, 410 Dodwell, William (1709–85) 380 Donatists 212, 342–3 Dort, synod of (1618–19) 130, 139n, 153, 173, 175, 176–7, 209, 274n, 329 Doublet [Doubleth], George Rattaler (1600–55) 163n, 165n Douglas, John (1721–1807), bp. of Salisbury 409n Downe, John (1570?–1631) 203–5, 231, 248, 338 Downham, George (d. 1634), bp. of Derry 96n, 97n, 100n, 101n, 102, 278 Du Duc, Fronton [Fronto Ducaeus] (1559–1624), Jesuit 143, 144, 197, 295n Du Moulin, Pierre [Petrus Molinaeus] (1568–1658), father of next 102–5, 137n, 143–4, 158, 238–9 Du Moulin, Lewis [Louis] (1605?–1680) 202n, 268n, 277n, 294, 328n, 338, 342n Duns Scotus, Johannes (c.1265–1308) 117n Du Perron, Jacques Davy [Perronius] (1556–1618), cardinal 30n, 100, 108n, 143, 144, 195n, 196, 197n, 216–7, 221, 222, 227, 231, 234, 250–1, 268, 312, 363, 400–1, 402 Du Pin, Louis Ellies (1657–1719) 320, 321n, 372n Du Plessis-Mornay, Philippe (1549–1623) 30n Du Puy, Cl´ement (d. 1598), Jesuit 295n Durel, John (1625–83) 146n, 152, 277, 338 Easter controversy (between the Roman Church and the Asiatic Churches in the late 2nd cent.) 59n, 212, 258, 286, 297n, 329, 337

Index Ebionites 44 Eck, Johannes (1486–1543) 117n Eckersall, James (fl. 1680–93) 268n Edward VI (1537–53), king of England from 1547 2, 5, 14, 27, 34, 43, 53n, 285n Edwards, John (1637–1716) 107n, 335, 395, 405n, 407 Edwards, Thomas (1599–1647) 258n Elizabeth I (1533–1603), queen of England 2, 5, 14, 22, 30, 44, 45, 79n, 115, 226 Elizabeth, Princess (1596–1662), queen of Bohemia and electress palatine 155 Ephesus, council of (431) 45, 73, 216, 360 Epiphanius of Salamis (c.315–403) 42n, 102, 232n, 235, 240n, 346n Episcopius, Simon [Bischop] (1583–1643) 209n, 347 Erasmus, Desiderius (1466/9–1536) 32n, 43n, 47, 115, 117, 118n, 209, 215 patristic editions of 29n, 35n, 38n, 58n, 62n, 63, 115n, 176n, 196–7, 250n, 279, 324 Essex, Robert Devereux, earl of (1566–1601) 133 eucharist 24–30, 35–9, 51, 66, 67–8, 69, 72–3, 77, 143, 144, 148, 156, 169, 184, 284, 313, 319–20, 323, 324, 402 necessity for infants 183–4, 185, 205, 208, 221, 222–3, 233, 243, 258, 266, 273, 295, 356–7, 407–8 Eunomius (d. 394) and Eunomianism 44, 63, 361n Eusebius of Caesarea (c.260–c.340) 351n, 363n, 369 Contra Marcellum 141n De ecclesiastica theologia 141n Demonstratio euangelica 141n Historia ecclesiastica 314 HE, 3.3 376n HE, 3.24 47 HE, 3.25 47 HE, 3.32 71, 370n HE, 3.37 370n HE, 5.7 375n HE, 5.18 250n

497 HE, 5.20 370n HE, 5.24 212 HE, 6.20 376n HE, 7.24 376n HE, 7.25 47, 376n Eusebius of Vercelli (d. 371) 43n Eutropius presbyter (fl. c.430) 314n Eutyches (c.378–454), archimandrite at Constantinople, and Eutychianism 44, 228 Eutychius (877–940), Melkite patriarch of Alexandria 315, 317–8 Evagrius Scholasticus (c.536–600) 405 Falconar, John [Falconer] (d. 1723), Scottish bp. 371n Falkland, Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess (1585–1639), mother of next 215, 218 Falkland, Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount (1609/10–43), father of next 215–21, 222, 235n, 239–40, 241–2, 247, 272, 285, 287n, 295, 332, 337, 362, 405 Falkland, Henry Cary, 4th Viscount (1634–63) 215n Farindon, Anthony (1598–1658) 209n, 211n Faustus of Riez (d. c.490) 180, 363n Featley, Daniel (1582–1645) 66n, 108n, 162n, 252n, 253n Fell, Samuel (1584–1649), dean of Christ Church, Oxford, father of next 221n Fell, John (1625–86), bp. of Oxford 1, 166n, 291n, 312–13, 336, 340n, 341, 344, 374n, 390n, 395 Feller, Joachim Friedrich (1673–1726) 400n Ferne, Henry (1602–62), bp. of Chester 273 Feu-ardent, Franc¸ois (1539–1610), Franciscan 58n, 210n, 218n Field, Richard (1561–1616) 91n, 128–9, 137, 168, 224n Finch, Leopold (1662–1702), warden of All Souls College, Oxford 389n Fisher, John (1469–1535), bp. of Rochester 27, 67 Flacius Illyricus, Mathias (1520–75) 57, 60, 69, 75–6, 201 Fleming, Robert, the younger (c.1660–1716) 340n

498 Florence, council of (1438–45) 233–4 Florinus (2nd cent.), Gnostic heretic 369, 370 Felicissimus (fl. 251) 391n Forbes, John (1593–1648) 316n, 407 Fordun, John of (d. in or after 1363) 316n, 319 Forrester, Thomas (1635?–1706) 340n Foxe, John (1516–87) 26n, 29, 34, 40, 69–70, 78, 79, 131–2, 314 Frampton, Robert (1622–1708), Nonjuring bp. of Gloucester 327n Franciscus a Sancta Clara [Christopher Davenport, in religion] (c.1595–1680), Franciscan 91, 197, 214 Frederick V (1596–1632), elector palatine from 1610 155, 156 Frey, Johann Jakob (1606–36) 238–9 Fulgentius of Ruspe (468–533) 175, 181, 357 Fulke, William (1538–89) 38, 54n, 57n, 69n, 114n, 132, 136n, 169n, 312 Fuller, Thomas (1608–61) 86n, 138–9, 158–9, 162n, 177n, 185n, 194n Gaisford, Thomas (1779–1855), dean of Christ Church, Oxford 3 Gallicans 1, 4, 9, 233n, 281, 282n, 304–5, 321n, 322, 336, 359, 364n, 400–3 Gardiner, Stephen (c.1497–1555), bp. of Winchester 25, 26, 29–30, 38n, 61, 67, 101, 320n Garthwait, Timothy (d. 1669), bookseller 209n, 274n Gataker, Thomas (1574–1654) 86n, 133n, 184–5 Gauden, John (1605–62), bp. of Worcester 206n Gawen, Thomas (1612–84) 276n Gee, Edward (1657–1730) 321n Gelasius I (d. 496), pope from 492 29n, 37n Gelasian decree [De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis] (early 6th cent.) 362–4 G´en´ebrard, Gilbert (c.1537–97), abp. of Aix-en-Provence 43n Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1154) 76n

Index Geoffrey of Vinsauf (fl. 1200) 114n George of Laodicea (fl. 325–60) 42n Gerberon, Gabriel (1628–1711), Maurist 305n Geree, John (1599/1600–1649) 108–9 Gerson, Jean (1363–1429) 137n Gibson, Edmund (1669–1748), bp. of London 39n, 43n, 45n, 47n, 193n Gifford, George (1547/8–1600) 119, 128n Gillan, John (d. 1735), bp. of Dunblane 372n Goad, Thomas (1576–1638) 177n Godden, Thomas (1624–88) 324n Goode, William (1801–68) 82n Goodman, Christopher (1520?–1603) 299n Goodwin, John (1594?–1665) 258–9, 263, 270–1, 299–300 Gordon, John (1544–1619), dean of Salisbury 107 Gore, Charles (1853–1932), bp. of Oxford 10 Gorham, George Cornelius (1787–1857) 82n Gorin de Saint-Amour, Louis (1619–87) 305n Gother [Goter], John (d. 1704) 322 Gottschalk [Godescalc] of Orbais (c.804–c.869) 174–5, 179 Goulart, Simon (1543–1628) 146–7 Grabe, Johann Ernst (1666–1711) 9, 346n, 347n, 371–2 Graham, Thomas (fl. 1655–61) 39n Gratian [Flauius Gratianus] (359–83), Roman emperor in the West from 375 44 Gratian (fl. 1120–40), medieval canonist 26, 38, 55, 63n, 357n, 362n Greek Fathers 79, 80, 118, 150, 173, 174, 175, 186, 192n, 205, 209, 217, 238, 239, 330, 383 Gregory I (c.540–604), ‘the Great’, pope from 590 32n, 70, 75, 79, 123, 159n, 201, 205, 249–50, 256, 259n Dialogi 249 Registrum epistularum 250n Homilia in Euangelia 136n, 137–8 Moralia in Iob 137n, 250n

Index Gregory of Nazianzus (329/30–389/90) 110n, 383 oratio II apologetica 14n, 169 oratio IV contra Julianum I 165 oratio XX de dogmate et constitutione episcoporum 14n oratio XXXII de moderatione in disputando 275 Gregory of Nyssa (c.330–c.395) 144n, 150n, 361, 379n, 383 Gregory Thaumaturgus (of Neocaesarea) (c.213–c.270) 64, 344n, 345n, 361, 379n Gretser, Jakob (1562–1625), Jesuit 361n Grindal, Edmund (?1519–1583), abp. of Canterbury from 1575 58n Grotius, Hugo [De Groot] (1583–1645) 149–50, 151–3, 226, 268, 284, 286 Gude, Marquard [Gudius] (1635–83) 344n Guest, Edmund (1518–77), bp. of Rochester, then of Salisbury 36, 77 Guitmond of Aversa [Guitmundus] (d. 1094) 184 Gunning, Peter (1614–84), bp. of Ely 247n, 274, 280, 383n, 386, 390 Hacket, John (1592–1670), bp. of Coventry and Lichfield 111–12, 141n, 161n, 176 Hacket, William (d. 1591) 132n Haddon, Walter (1516–72) 34n Hadrian (76–138), Roman emperor from 117 377 Hales, John (1584–1656) 209–13, 224n, 228, 241, 286, 273–5, 405 criticism of 328–31 Hall, Joseph (1574–1656), bp. of Norwich 11, 113–14, 135–6, 146, 157, 256, 258, 267, 269, 313 Hallier, Franc¸ois (1585–1659), bp. of Cavaillon 282n Halloix, Pierre (1571–1656), Jesuit 232n, 372n Hammond, Henry (1605–60) 1, 146, 151, 161n, 216n, 217n, 218n, 221n, 247n, 248, 269–70,

499 271–2, 278n, 286, 300–1, 309, 318, 322, 349 on Canon of Scripture 270, 376 on confirmation 279–83 on Ignatius’ letters 166, 267–8, 321n on Jean Daill´e 275–6, 279 Hanmer, Meredith (1543–1604) 70n, 314 Harding, Thomas (1516–72) 204n Harsnett, Samuel (1561–1631), abp. of York 132n, 133–5, 139 Hart, John (d. 1586), seminary priest, then Jesuit 56 Hartlib, Samuel (c.1600–62) 181n, 248n Hatton, Sir Christopher (c.1540–91), lord chancellor, cousin of next 132n Hatton, Christopher, first Baron (1605–70) 247 Hearne, Thomas (1678–1735) 145n, 349n, 390n, 391n, 392n, 393n Hegesippus (fl. c.180) 70–1, 208, 234, 272, 276, 369, 370 Heidelberg Catechism see Ursinus Heinsius, Daniel (1580/1–1655) 144n Helvidius (fl. c.380) 91n, 200 Henchman, Humphrey (1592–1675), bp. of Salisbury, then of London 275n, 276n, 280 Henry II (1133–89), king of England from 1154 371n Henry VIII (1491–1547), king of England from 1509 2, 13–14, 22, 23, 24, 77, 91n, 226, 283, 285n Henry IV (1553–1610), king of France from 1589 142 Henry, Philip (1631–96), father of next 318n Henry, Matthew (1662–1714) 318n H´erauld, Didier [Desiderius Heraldus] (1579–1649) 231–2 Hermas (fl. c.140) 351n, 394, 395 Hermes Trismegistus (Corpus Hermeticum) 147 Herod (c.73–4 ), ‘the Great’, king of Judaea from 37  236 Hervet, Gentien [Gentianus Hervetus] (1499–1584) 36n, 65n

500 Heylyn, Peter (1600–62) 13, 19n, 31n, 40, 121n, 127, 154, 158n, 159, 161–2, 163n, 181, 191, 199, 200, 248–9, 260n, 277, 312, 383n biography of Laud 13, 127n, 162n, 166, 181n, 200, 202, 213n, 315n, 341, 349 Hickes, George (1642–1715), Nonjuror bishop, brother of next 167n, 193n, 194n, 264, 272n, 290, 329, 340n, 343n, 369n, 390n, 392n, 401n, 402n, 406–7 on charisms 301–4, 308–9, 380 Hickes, John (1633–85), Nonconformist minister 329n Hickman, Henry (d. 1692) 162n, 243n, 257, 260, 254, 284, 312, 333n, 338–9 Higgons, Theophilus (1578?–1659) 128n Higuera, Jer´onimo de la (1538–1611), Jesuit 344n Hilarius, Roman deacon (fl. 354–60) 100, 280n Hilary of Poitiers (c.315–67/8) 22, 281n, 360, 383 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) 138–9 Hildersham, Arthur (1563–1632) 85n Hill, Samuel (1648–1716) 343n Hill, Thomas (1564–1644), seminary priest, then Benedictine 59n, 109 Hippolytus of Rome (c.170–c.236) 344n Hoadly, Benjamin (1676–1761), bp. of Winchester 382 Hoard, Samuel (1599–1658) 199–200 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679) 227, 358n Hochstetter, Andreas Adam (1668–1717) 372n, 375n, 393n Hody, Humphrey (1659–1707) 391n, 392n Holdsworth, Richard (1590–1649) 54n, 66, 74, 83n, 84n, 169–70, 205–9, 214n, 320 Holland, Guy (1585/6–1660), Jesuit 219n Holstenius, Lucas [Holste] (1596–1661) 141n

Index Hone, Thomas (fl. c.1655) 265 Honorius I (d. 638), pope from 625 402 Honorius Augustodunensis (1st half of the 12th cent.) 175n Hooker, Richard (1553/4–1600) 5, 82n, 86, 89–94, 107n, 114, 132, 141, 152, 161, 168, 195, 224, 226n, 278, 286, 306n, 314, 396, 404 Hooper, John (c.1495–1555), bp. of Gloucester and Worcester 29n, 43n, 81n, 116n Horneck, Anthony (1641–97) 322n Horsley, Samuel (1733–1806), bp. of St Asaph 120n Hottinger, Johann Heinrich, the elder (1620–67) 264 Howse, Walter (d. 1610) 126n Howson, John (1557?–1632), bp. of Oxford 109n Huet, Pierre-Daniel (1630–1721), bp. of Avranches 324n Huguenots 91, 101, 102–5, 142, 143, 150, 154, 233n, 238–9, 249, 257, 276–7, 281, 282, 284, 298, 325–6, 336, 339, 351, 382, 401 Hume, Alexander (fl. 1590–4) 120n, 128n Humfrey, John (1621–1719) 328n Humphrey, Laurence (1525/6–89) 56–8, 59–60, 61, 114, 140, 230, 338 Hus, Johann (c.1369–1415) and Hussites 69, 70, 71 Hutchinson, William (fl. 1676–1679) 324n Hutton, Matthew (1529–1606), abp. of York 107, 113n, 171n Hyde, Edward (1609–74), earl of Clarendon, father of next 155n, 209n, 213n, 215n, 217n, 239, 284–5, 311, 329n, 337 Hyde, Laurence (1641–1711), earl of Rochester 324 Hyll [Hill], Adam (d. 1595) 120–1 Ignatius of Antioch (c.35–c.107) 105, 166, 181n, 267–8, 284, 294, 321, 340, 341, 344n, 346n, 351n, 383 Innocent I (d. 417), pope from 402 221n, 222, 295

Index Innocent III [Lotario di Segni] (1160/1–1216), pope from 1198 114n Innocent X [Giambattista Pamfili] (1574–1655), pope from 1644 304–5 Innocent XI [Benedetto Odescalchi] (1611–89), pope from 1676 305 Irenaeus of Lyon (c.130–c.200) 9, 58, 208, 212, 219, 259, 265n, 369–70, 371–2, 379–80, 383, 405 Aduersus haereses, 2.22 (on age of Christ) 57, 232, 243, 258, 265n, 373–4 Aduersus haereses, 2.27 139 Aduersus haereses, 2.31 375n Aduersus haereses, 2.32 132, 375n Aduersus haereses, 3.3 96, 201, 238 Aduersus haereses, 3.4 356 Aduersus haereses, 4.27 370n Aduersus haereses, 5.6 375n Aduersus haereses, 5.12 380n Aduersus haereses, 5.33 (on millenium) 210, 218, 220, 370n, 373 editions of 58n, 210n, 218n Ironside, Gilbert (1632–1701), bp. of Hereford 369 Isidore of Seville [Isidorus Hispalensis] (c.560–636) 259n Ittig, Thomas (1643–1710) 334n, 335 Jacob, Henry (1563–1624) 121–4 James I (1566–1625), king of England from 1603 66n, 98, 103, 106–8, 136, 142, 144, 148, 150n, 155, 158, 161–2, 176–7, 189–90, 192, 193n, 200, 216–17, 259 Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance 74–5, 156, 157, 405n dedications of books to 64n, 102n, 110–11, 140–1, 145–6, 160n, 405 James II (1633–1701), king of England 1685–8 289, 290, 296, 319, 324, 343, 389 James, Thomas (1573?–1629) 110n, 292n Jane, William (1645–1707), Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford from 1680 324

501 Jansen, Cornelius (1585–1638), bp. of Ypres 181, 182, 185n, 191, 410–11 Jansenists 20, 260, 304–5, 323, 336, 400 Jebb, Samuel (1694–1772), Nonjuror 356n Jenkin, Robert (1656–1727) 271n Jenkins, Thomas (1697–1756) 272n Jenkyn, William (1613–85) 202n, 403n Jerome (c.345–420) 32n, 205, 237, 256, 297n, 304, 318, 360, 383 on episcopacy 99–101, 102, 235 (see also ep. ad Euangelum) Aduersus Heluidium 64, 66n, 361n Altercatio Luciferiani et Orthodoxi 100n Apologia aduersus libros Rufini 221, 231 ep. 53 ad Paulinum 275 ep. 108 (Epitaphium sanctae Paulae) 123 ep. 112 ad Augustinum 286n ep. 129 ad Dardanum 47 ep. 146 ad Euangelum [‘Euagrium’] 99, 100–1, 104n, 315 In Ezechielem 169 In IV epistulas Paulinas 99, 101n, 104n prologus in libros Salomonis 35n De uiris inlustribus 364 Vita S. Pauli 375n ps.-Jerome see Rufinus Jewel, John (1522–71), bp. of Salisbury 30, 35, 42, 43n, 63, 72, 91n, 95, 168, 203, 338, 407 challenge 2, 4, 5, 6, 31, 32, 56–8, 73, 74, 140–1, 159n, 204, 329, 331, 336, 349, 396 John Chrysostom (c.347–407) 8, 14n, 18, 22, 32n, 62n, 65, 137, 209, 256, 304, 312, 342n, 375 De incomprehensibili Dei natura 135n In Matthaeum 134n In Iohannem 134n In epist. ad Galatas 297n In epist. 1 ad Corinthios 134n, 135n In epist. 2 ad Thessalonicenses 136n ps.-Chrysostom, epistula ad Caesarium 29n, 30n, 62n, 180n

502 John Chrysostom (cont.) ps.-Chrysostom, Opus imperfectum 38, 137n, 333–4, 344n Savile’s edition of 110, 210, 405 John Damascene [John of Damascus] (c.655–c.750) 72, 74, 159n, 208 Joliffe, Henry (d. 1573) 29n, 81n Jones, George (fl. 1701) 389n, 390n Joscelyn, John (1529–1603) 77 Julian (332–63), ‘the Apostate’, Roman emperor from 361 165, 263 Julian of Eclanum (fl. 408–39) 96 Jurieu, Pierre (1637–1713) 401 Justin Martyr (c.100–c.165) 208, 218, 219, 220n, 223, 231–2, 233, 236, 257, 265n, 271–2, 273, 340n, 346n, 355, 356, 360n, 380, 383 Juxon, William (1582–1663), abp. of Canterbury from 1660 130n, 221n Katona, Emericus (1571/2–1610) 71n, 294n Keble, John (1792–1866) 4n, 15, 40n Keckermann, Bartholomaeus (c.1571–1608/9) 73 Ken, Thomas (1637–1711), Nonjuring bp. of Bath and Wells 343n Kendall, George (1610–63) 259n, 263n Kennett, White (1660–1728), bp. of Peterborough 213n, 293–4 Kettlewell, John (1653–95), Nonjuror 21n, 387n, 390n King, William (1650–1729), abp. of Dublin 393 Knight, John (b. 1591/2) 163, 165, 189, 190n Labbe, Philippe (1607–67), Jesuit 311, 334n, 344n Lactantius (c.250–c.325) 232n, 262, 265n, 351n, 361, 383 Lake, Arthur (1569–1626), bp. of Bath and Wells 110 Lambe, Sir John (c.1566–1646) 206n Lamplugh, Thomas (1615–91), abp. of York 301, 331n Lanfranc (c.1010–89), abp. of Canterbury from 1070 38–9, 184

Index Lapide, Cornelius Cornelii a [Cornelis Cornelissen van den Steen] (1567–1637), Jesuit 298n Larroque, Mathieu de (1619–84) 339n, 349n Lateran council, 4th (1215) 164 Latitudinarians 5n, 287–90, 307n, 380 Laubrussel, Ignace de (1663–1730), Jesuit 1, 3 Lauderdale, John Maitland, duke of (1616–82) 302 Laud, William (1573–1645), abp. of Canterbury from 1633 5, 12, 15, 146, 151, 152, 165, 166n, 200, 206, 245, 256, 285n, 305, 306, 341, 385n definition of orthodoxy 16–17, 130n, 157–8, 160, 404 and Great Tew circle 202, 212–13, 221n, 241, 285n on grace and predestination 175, 188–191 on tradition 192–3, 195–6 Launoy, Jean de (1603–78) 40n, 233n, 359, 401–2 Laurence, Richard (1760–1838), abp. of Cashel 48n Laurence, Roger (1670–1736), Nonjuror bp. 107n Laurentius, Gaspar [Gaspard Laurent] (1556–1636), rector of the academy of Geneva 264n Laurentius, Jacobus (1585–1644), pastor in Amsterdam 165n, 230 Lavington, George (1684?–1762), bp. of Exeter 302 Law, Edmund (1703–87), bp. of Carlisle 409n Lee, Francis (1661–1719), Nonjuror 21n, 340n, 387n, 390n, 391n, 392n Leeds, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby and duke of (1632–1712) 301 ´ Lef`evre d’Etaples, Jacques [Iacobus Faber Stapulensis] (c.1455–1536) 395n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716) 400 Le Nain de Tillemont, S´ebastien (1637–98) 233n, 372n Leo I (d. 461), ‘the Great’, pope from 440 32n

Index Le Roux, Antoine [Antonius Rufus] (fl. 1513) 175n Leslie, Charles (1650–1722) , Nonjuror 371n, 396–7 Liberius (d. 366), pope from 352 281n Liddon, Henry Parry (1829–90) 3, 4n, 9n Lightfoot, John (1602–75) 252n, 253 Limborch, Philippus van (1633–1712) 127n, 143n Lindanus, Guilielmus Damasus [Willem Damasz. van der Linden] (1525–98), bp. of Ruremonde 348n Lipsius, Justus (1547–1606) 135–6 liturgy 46–7, 151, 182, 228, 361, 387 English liturgy see Book of Common Prayer Lloyd, David (1635–92) 160n Lloyd, William (1627–1717), bp. of Worcester 318–19, 389n, 393 Long, Thomas (1621–1707) 330–1, 343n Louis XIII (1601–43), king of France from 1610 163n Louis XIV (1638–1715), king of France from 1643 30n, 343, 365n Lowth, Simon (1636–1720), Nonjuror 284n, 290 Lucaris, Cyril (1572–1638), patriarch of Constantinople 150, 264 Lucas Brugensis, Franciscus (1549–1619) 99 Lucifer of Cagliari (d. 370/1) and Luciferians 100, 281n Luckock, Herbert Mortimer (1833–1909) 5n Luther, Martin (1483–1546) 23, 24, 57, 70n, 71, 86, 118n, 140n, 164n, 283, 335, 337 Lutherans and Lutheranism 11, 14, 25, 35, 36n, 44, 46n, 47n, 48–9, 81, 115–16, 118n, 261, 335 Mabillon, Jean (1632–1707), Maurist 336 Macedonius (d. c.362) and Macedonians 44, 228, 263 Macro, Cox (1683–1767) 338n Maldonat, Jean [Juan Maldonado] (1533–83), Jesuit 295, 337n

503 Mani (216–76) and Manichees 44, 49, 228n, 354 Manning, Henry Edward (1808–92), cardinal 4, 5, 6, 7, 402 Marcellus II [Marcello Cervini] (1501–55), pope in 1555 63n Marcellus of Ancyra (d. 374) 141n Marcion (fl. 144) and Marcionists 44, 61 Marcombes, Isaac (fl. 1636–46) 341n Marcus, pope in 336 320 Marriott, Charles (1811–58) 4 Marriott [Marriot], Richard (fl. 1645–79), bookseller 274n, 330n Martial of Limoges [letters ascribed to] 262n Marvell, Andrew (1621–78) 328n Mary I (1516–58), queen of England from 1553 54n Mary II (1662–94), queen of England from 1689 369 Masson, Jean-Baptiste (d. 1627), brother of next 83n Masson, Papire [Jean, aka] (1544–1611) 83n Masson, Robert (fl. 1576) 118n Masson, Samuel (d. 1742?) 298 Matthew, Tobie (1546–1628), abp. of York 58–9, 61n, 82n, 140, 207, 362 Maurice, Henry (1648–91) 314–5, 399 Meddus, Samuel (fl. 1629) 223n Mede, Joseph (1586–1638) 223 Melanchthon, Philipp (1497–1560) 24, 27, 118n Mettayer, Jean (d. 1668) 249 Micron, Marten [Micronius] (d. 1559) 81n, 116n Middleton, Conyers (1683–1750) 2, 22, 26, 272n, 374n, 380, 408 Mill, John (1644/5–1707) 389n Millenarians (chiliasts) 58, 59n, 149, 205, 208, 210, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222–3, 232, 233, 243, 258, 272, 273, 276, 295, 297n, 356, 373 Milton, John (1608–74) 8, 256–7, 272n, 346n, 372n Mitchell, James (d. 1678) 303, 310 Minucius Felix (3rd cent.) 123

504 miracles 2n, 3n, 77n, 130–9, 225, 261, 271, 272n, 302–4, 306–7, 308, 310, 317, 354, 367, 374–5, 378, 384 Molina, Luis de (1535–1600), Jesuit, and Molinism 173, 181, 218, 220 Montagu, James (1568–1618), bp. of Bath and Wells, then of Winchester 144n, 145n Montagu [Mountague], Richard (1577–1641), bp. of Chichester, then of Norwich 5, 110–11, 126n, 127n, 142n, 147–8, 151, 153n, 159, 167–8, 190n, 215n, 291, 337 as patristic scholar 111n, 141n, 197, 405 on theological studies 160, 166, 167, 169 on tradition 196–8, 214n Montanus (2nd cent.) and Montanism 59n, 249, 250, 271, 361n Montausier, Charles de Sainte-Maure, duc de (1610–90) 365n Moraines, Antonin [Jean Martinon, Jesuit] (1586–1662) 182n More, George (fl. 1590–1600) 134 More, Henry (1614–87) 308 More, John (c.1542–92) 119n, 128n Morrice, Roger (1628–1702) 328n Morton, Thomas (1564–1659), bp. of Durham 128n Mozley, Thomas (1806–93) 3 Musculus, Wolfgang (1497–1563) 161 Musso, Cornelius (1511–74), bp. of Bitonto 205, 208, 230, 337, 339 Naylor, Oliver (1579/80–1636) 203n Needham, William (d. 1727) 298n Nelson, Robert (1656–1715), Nonjuror 343n, 344n, 347n, 401 Nestorius (c.381–after 451) and Nestorianism 44, 216, 228 Newman, John Henry (1801–90), cardinal 1n, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 40n New Testament of Rheims 62n, 63n, 69n, 90n, 91n, 131, 169n Newton, Sir Adam (d. 1630) 183n

Index Newton, Isaac (1642–1727) 340n, 343n, 346n Newton, William (d. 1744) 213n Nicaea, 1st council of (325) 45, 46, 233n, 246, 315, 347, 348n, 351 Nicene Creed 43, 46, 194, 253, 347, 348n Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopoulos (c.1256–c.1335) 65n Nicole, Pierre (1625–95) 323, 402n Nonjurors 19, 366, 369, 380, 390–2, 400, 405, 407–8 Norton, John (d. 1612), bookseller 60n Novatian (fl. c.250) 164, 391n Nowell, Alexander (c.1507–1602) 119 Odo [Oda] (d. 958), abp. of Canterbury from 942 131 Oecolampadius, Ioannes (1482–1531) 24, 27–9, 38n, 67, 78 ps.-Oecumenius (catena on Paul) 297n Oporinus, Ioannes [Johann Herbst] (1507–68) 42n Origen (c.185–c.254) 250, 257, 288, 339, 361, 363 Contra Celsum 248n, 271n, 394 De oratione 340n In Ezechielem 78 In Matthaeum 29n, 37n, 62n, 324 ps.- Origen [Adamantius], De recta in Deum fide 61 Origenists 263, 363 Overall, John (1560–1619), bp. of Norwich 5, 66n, 113n, 114, 126–7, 141–2, 144, 148n, 151, 176, 243, 337 on canon Concionatores 127, 139–41, 150 on predestination 139n, 172–3, 178, 187 Convocation-Book see Canons of 1606 Owen, David (d. 1623), bp. of St Asaph 74n, 164–5, 270, 290 Owen, John (1616–83) 255–6, 259–60, 262, 263, 264–5, 272n, 291n, 307–8, 328n, 329 Owen, Thomas (1557–1618), Jesuit 216n Oxford University 3, 5, 11–12, 22, 25, 27, 30n, 58, 61, 71, 86n, 111,

Index 160, 161–2, 164n, 165–6, 181n, 190n, 201, 221, 238, 260, 263n, 264, 291n, 293–4, 299, 341, 343, 344, 369, 371–2, 374n, 389 Bodleian Library 60n, 110n, 238, 344 University sermons 59, 61, 163, 274–5, 301–4, 310 Pacian of Barcelona (4th cent.) 19n Page, William (1590–1663) 192, 200, 213 Palladius of Helenopolis (c.364–between 420 and 430) 375n Palladius (5th cent.), 1st bp. of the Irish 316n Palliser, William (1646–1727), abp. of Cashel 388n Pam`ele, Jacques de Joigny de [Iacobus Pamelius] (1536–87), bp. of Saint-Omer 147, 164n Paphnutius (d. c.360), bp. in the Upper Thebaid 348n Papias of Hierapolis (c.70–c.130) 218, 219, 243, 295, 370 Pareus, David (1548–1622) 71n, 161n, 163, 165, 189, 190n Parker, Matthew (1504–75), abp. of Canterbury from 1559 6, 22–3, 34, 35–7, 39, 41, 76–9, 120 Parker, Robert (1564–1614) 95–6, 108, 114n, 122 Parker, Samuel (1640–88), bp. of Oxford 289n, 316–17 Parkes, Richard (b. 1558/9) 114n, 123–6, 128, 129 Parkhurst, Thomas, bookseller (c.1632–1711) 328n Parr, Richard (1617–91) 110n, 112n, 177n, 179n, 180n, 181n, 183n, 215n, 238n, 239n, 267n Parry, Henry [Parraeus] (1561–1616), bp. of Worcester 60 Pascal, Blaise (1623–62) 371n Patrick, John (1632–95), brother of next 322n, 325n Patrick, Simon (1626–1707), bp. of Ely 258, 303n, 309n, 324 Pawlett [Pawlet], Robert (d. 1683), bookseller 274n

505 Paxillus, Bernardus [Bernard Kotek] (d. 1629/30), Dominican 262 Payva d’Andrada, Diego [Andradius] 56n, 123–4, 126n Pearson John, bp. of Chester (1613–86) 1, 211n, 274n, 275, 294, 318n, 339n, 340–1, 343, 363–4, 393–4 Pearson, Richard (d. 1668) 54n Pelagius (fl. 380–418) and Pelagians 65, 80, 82, 173–4, 176, 177, 178, 180, 186, 187–8, 191, 206, 221, 241, 257, 258, 259, 281, 342, 356, 365n, 403 Semi-Pelagians (Massilienses) 80, 173–6, 177, 178, 179, 182n, 186 Pelling, Edward (d. 1718) 291n, 301n, 322n Percy, John [aka Fisher] (1569–1641), Jesuit 192–3, 195, 305 Perkins, William (1558–1602) 50, 54n, 71n, 72, 83n, 86, 114, 119–20, 168, 173n, 177, 178, 183n, 185, 231, 264 patristic handbook 64–6, 80, 159n, 176n, 334n, 363n Perne, Andrew (1519?–89), master of Peterhouse, Cambridge 116n Persons [Parsons], Robert (1546–1610), Jesuit 140 Petau, Denis (1583–1652), Jesuit 42, 101n, 232n, 240n, 276, 318, 346, 347, 348n Peter Lombard (c.1100–60) 86, 188, 209n Peter Martyr see Vermigli Peterborough, Henry Mordaunt, earl of (1623–97), husband of next 194n Peterborough, Penelope O’Brien (c.1622–1702), countess of 194n Pett, Sir Peter (1630–99) 294n Philastrius [Filastrius] of Brescia (fl. 381–91) 377n Phocas (547–610), Byzantine emperor from 602 70n Photius (c.810–c.895), patriarch of Constantinople 388 Pierce, Thomas (1622–91), dean of Salisbury 161n, 260, 295–6, 310, 386n Piscator, Johannes (1546–1625) 264n Pithou, Pierre (1539–96) 179n

506 Pits, John [Ioannes Pitseus] (1560–1616) 316n, 319n Pius V [Michele Ghislieri] (1504–72), Dominican, pope from 1566 37, 46n Pius IX [Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti] (1792–1878), pope from 1846 4 Plato (c.429–347 ) 168, 388 Playfere, Thomas (d. 1609) 126 Plume, Thomas (1630–1704) 112n Pocklington, John (d. 1642) 192, 201–2 Polycarp of Smyrna (d. c.155) 25n, 59n, 105, 351n, 370, 372n Pontac, Arnauld (d. 1605), bp. of Bazas 179n Porson, Richard (1759–1808) 37 Possevino, Antonio [Possevinus] (1534–1611), Jesuit 23n, 57n Powel, Gabriel (1576–1611) 121n Predestinarians 174–5, 179–80, 182, 189 Preston, John (1587–1628) 162–3, 166–7, 197–8 Prideaux, John (1578–1650) 71, 162, 166, 180–1, 186, 200, 201, 221n Prochorus (Acta Ioannis ascribed to) 262n Prosper of Aquitaine (c.390–c.463) 174n, 175, 178n, 181, 183, 259n Prosper?, ‘Capitula Caelestini’ see Celestine I ps.-Prosper 179 Prynne, William (1600–69) 16–17, 108, 146n, 202n, 256 Ptolemy II Philadelphus (d. 246 ), king of Egypt from 285  236 Puller, Timothy (1637/8–93) 89n, 146n, 291–2, 302, 308 Pusey, Edward Bouverie (1800–82) 4, 5, 8 Quadratus (fl. c.120) 370n Quakers 256, 299n, 305 Quesnel, Pasquier (1634–1719), Oratorian 336, 365n Qui˜nones, Francisco de (1480–1540), cardinal 46n

Index Rainolds [Reynolds], John (1549–1607), president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford 42, 55n, 56, 59, 60, 68n, 71n, 84, 86n, 95, 108n, 109n, 114, 123–4, 129, 205, 230, 263, 338, 350n, 401 Ratramnus [Bertramus] of Corbie (c.825–c.867) 72–3, 84, 205, 208, 324 Rawlinson, Richard (1690–1755), Nonjuror bp. 168n Reeves, William (1667–1726) 272n, 333n, 340n Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum (1552) 33–4, 39, 40, 82 Regino of Pr¨um [Regino Prumiensis] (d. 915) 63n Richard of Saint-Victor (d. 1173) 32n Richeome, Louis (1544–1625), Jesuit 348n Ridley, Nicholas (c.1500–55), bp. of London 22, 25–6, 27, 73, 333–4 Rivet, Andr´e (1572–1651) 65–6, 70, 73, 132n, 205n, 230, 268, 294n, 363n Rochester see Hyde Rogers, Thomas (c.1553–1616) 128 Rosweyde, Heribert (1569–1629), Jesuit 148n Rufinus of Aquileia (c.345–411) 115, 242n Rule, Gilbert (1629?–1701) 340n Rushworth, William (d. 1637) 214, 219–20 Russell, Richard (b. 1685/6), Nonjuror 349n Ryves, Sir Thomas (d. 1652) 138n Sage, John (1652–1711), Scottish bp. 372n Sabellius (3rd cent.) and Sabellianism 14n, 44, 65, 361 Sainctes, Claude de (1525–91), bp. of ´ Evreux 348n Saint-Cyran, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abb´e de [aka Petrus Aurelius] (1581–1643) 281 Sainte-Marthe, Denys de (1650–1725), Maurist 1, 3 Salmer´on, Alfonso (1515–85), Jesuit 337n

Index Salvian of Marseilles (c.400–c.480) 108n, 259n Sancroft, William (1617–93), abp. of Canterbury from 1677 197n, 205, 213, 225n, 291, 301, 308, 314, 321, 325n, 331n, 389n, 390n Sand, Christoph (the elder) (1611–86), father of next 251n, 343 Sand, Christoph (the younger) [Sandius] (1644–80) 251n, 343–4, 346, 348n, 388 Sanderson, Robert (1587–1663), bp. of Lincoln 161 Sanford, Hugh (d. 1607) 114n, 122 Saravia, Adrianus (1530–1612) 95, 96n, 97–8, 102n, 111n, 127, 142, 144, 171, 347n Sarpi, Pietro [fra Paolo] (1552–1623), Servite 183 Sarrau, Claude [Claudius Sarrauius] (c.1600–51) 276n, 325n Saumaise, Claude [Claudius Salmasius] (1588–1653) 145n, 232n, 329n, 372n Savile, Sir Henry (1549–1622) 110, 153n, 210, 405 Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order (1658) 256, 307n Saywell, William (1642/3–1701), master of Jesus College, Cambridge 40n, 113, 233n, 193, 342n, 401–2 Scaliger, Joseph Juste (1540–1609) 406 Schoolmen 59, 60n, 72, 86, 89, 92, 108, 129, 161, 166n, 168, 169, 177, 179, 224n, 260, 310, 333 Sclater, Edward (1623–1698x1700) 319–21 Scory, John (d. 1585), bp. of Hereford 80 Scot [Scott], Robert, bookseller (d. 1709/10) 341n Scrivener, Matthew (1622?–88) 89n, 149n, 229n, 230, 231, 247n, 248, 264, 275, 331–9, 340–1, 365 Scudamore, John (1601–71), viscount 152n Scultetus, Abraham (1566–1624) 65, 70, 71n, 73, 80, 156, 230n, 231 Seignior, George (d. 1678) 329n Selden, John (1584–1654) 111, 315, 316n, 317, 318, 319

507 Septuagint 184, 236, 380n Sergeant, John (1623–1707) 220n, 306, 308, 322–3, 324n, 357, 377 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) 18, 138 Sharp, James (1618–79), abp. of St. Andrews 303, 311 Sharp, John (1645–1714), abp. of York 292–3 Sheldon, Gilbert (1598–1677), abp. of Canterbury from 1663 201, 213, 225n, 228n, 284–5, 341 Sheldon, Richard (1570?–1651?) 136–7 Sherlock, William (1639/40–1707) 107n, 399 Sibylline Oracles 147–8, 236 Sichardt, Johannes [Sichardus] (c.1499–1552) 29n, 54n Sidney, Algernon (1622–83) 266 Sigebert of Gembloux (c.1030–1112) 73n, 174–5, 179 Simeon (early 2nd cent), bp. of Jerusalem 369–70 Simon Magus (fl. c.34) 231–2, 271–2 Simon, Richard (1638–1712), Oratorian 377n Sirmond, Jacques (1559–1651), Jesuit 314 Sixtus I, bp. of Rome [false decretals ascribed to] 32n Sixtus of Siena [Sixtus Senensis] (1520–69), Dominican 65, 66, 334n Skinner, Robert (1591–1670), bp. of Bristol, then of Worcester 168, 183n Smalridge, George (1663–1719), bp. of Bristol 406–7 Smiglecki, Marcin [Smiglecius] (1563–1618), Jesuit 181n Smith, Peter (fl. 1634) 83n Smith, Richard, bp. of Chalcedon (1567–1655) 281 Smith, Thomas (1623/4–1661), of Christ’s College, Cambridge 146n, 216n, 240n, 247–8, 277n, 282 Smith, Thomas (1638–1710), of Magdalen College, Oxford, Nonjuror 138n, 155n, 194n, 264n, 268n, 302n, 319n, 386n, 387, 388n

508 Smith, William (b. 1616?) 292n Smyth, Richard (1499/1500–1563) 42, 52–3, 62n, 63, 81n, 90n, 91n, 117, 118n, 320 Socinus, Faustus [Fausto Paolo Sozzini] (1539–1604) 240n, 410 Socinians 227, 239, 261, 262, 330, 331, 332, 337, 338, 339, 343n, 365, 368, 374–5, 388 Socrates (c.380–450), Church historian 246n, 348n Some, Robert (1542–1609), master of Peterhouse, Cambridge 72n Soreton, Francis (c.1622–89) 328n Sozomen (early 5th cent.), Church historian 348n Spang, William (1607–64) 168n Spanheim, Friedrich [Fridericus Spanhemius] (1632–1701) 317n, 319n, 388n Sparrow, Anthony (1612–85), bp. of Norwich 39 Spencer, William (d. 1714) 248n Stapleton, Thomas (1535–1598) 41n, 53, 62, 63n, 66, 91n, 350, 385n Stearne, John (1624–1669) 366 Stephen (d. 257), bp. of Rome from 254 233, 245–6 Stephens, Edward (1633–1706) 384n, 387n, 389n, 395n Stephens, Thomas (d. 1677) 310n Stillingfleet, Edward (1635–99), bp. of Worcester 289–90, 293, 302, 306–7, 319n, 322, 323–4, 359n, 371n, 407 on Canon of Scripture 196n, 290, 376–7 Irenicum 285–7, 290, 318 Stobaeus (early 5th cent.) 334 Stockwood, John (d. 1610) 119n Strype, John (1643–1737) 27n, 34n, 37n, 51n, 79n, 86n, 107n, 120n, 121n, 171n Su´arez, Francisco (1548–1617), Jesuit 128n Suda [Suidas] (c.1000) 334n Sully, Maximilien de B´ethune, baron de Rosny, duc de (1559–1641) 142 Sulpicius Severus (c.360–c.430) 351n, 375n

Index Sutcliffe, Matthew [Matthaeus Sutliuius] (1549/50–1629), dean of Exeter 83n, 84, 85, 102n, 111n, 128n Tabor, James (d. 1645), registrary of Cambridge University 192n Taylor, James (fl. 1687–9) 322n Taylor, Jeremy (1613–67), bp. of Down and Connor 10, 39, 242–7, 279n, 282n, 328 Tertullian (c.160–c.225) 25n, 134, 232n, 257, 265n, 361, 363n, 383 Montanism of 59n, 250, 271, 361n Ad Scapulam 165n Aduersus Hermogenem 345 Aduersus Marcionem 97, 233 Aduersus Praxean 345, 346 Apologeticum 232n, 270–1 De anima 168n, 233, 380n De corona 89–90 De exhortatione castitatis 152 De praescriptione haereticorum 201n, 238, 323, 354, 356, 359, 378 Tertullian? Aduersus Iudaeos 78 ps.-Tertullian, De Trinitate see Novatian Theodoret of Cyrrhus (c.393–c.460) Eranistes 28–9, 37n, 64–5, 66n, 67–8, 143, 231, 321 Haereticarum fabularum compendium 259n In epistolas Pauli 36, 297n Theodosius, Roman emperor from 379 44 Theophilus of Antioch (later 2nd cent.) 262, 265n Theophilus (d. 412), patriarch of Alexandria from 385 363 Theophylact (c.1050/60–after 1125) 297n Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–74) 72, 75, 83, 86n, 118n, 270n, 357 Thomson, George, of St Andrews, pastor in France (fl. 1602–8) 136 Thorndike, Herbert (1598–1672) 327, 329, 336–7, 352–66 and baptism 355n, 364n and Church of Rome 352, 357, 358–9, 364 definition of Fathers 360–4

Index Thorold, Thomas [aka Cardwell] (c.1600–64), Jesuit 306n Thou, Jacques-Auguste de [Iacobus Augustus Thuanus] (1553–1617) 153n Thys, Anthony [Thysius] (1565–1640) 172n Tilenus, Daniel (1563–1633) 143n Tillotson, John (1630–94), abp. of Canterbury from 1691 287, 288, 306n Timothy, disciple of Paul, regarded as 1st bp. of Ephesus 96, 97, 98, 104, 105 Tindal, Matthew (1657–1733) 409 Titus, companion of Paul, regarded as 1st bp. of Crete 96, 98, 99, 104, 105 Toland, John (1670–1722) 364, 408, 410n Torres, Francisco [Franciscus Turrianus] (1509–84), Jesuit 30n Tossanus, Daniel [Toussaint], the elder (1541–1602), pastor in France, then professor at Heidelberg, uncle of next 70, 209 Tossanus, Daniel, the younger (1590–1655), rector of the college of Basle 239n Trajan (c.53–117), Roman emperor from 98 234, 369, 377 Trent, council of (1545–63) 40, 48, 51–2, 53, 199, 292–3, 400, 403 Tresham, William (1495–1569) 29 Trinity, doctrine of the 14n, 41–2, 43, 44, 53, 73, 91, 149, 207, 227–8, 246, 253, 260–3, 339, 343–7, 362–3, 386–8, 407 Triplet, Thomas (1602/3–70) 215n, 218n Tully, Thomas (1620–76), principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford 342, 347 Turner, Thomas (1592–1672), dean of Salisbury, father of next 166n Turner, Francis (1637–1700), Nonjuring bp. of Ely 343n, 389n, 392n Turner, John (fl. 1683) 291n Twisse, William (1578?–1646) 85n, 180

509 Twysden, Sir Roger (1597–1672) 316n Tychonius (2nd half of the 4th cent.), Donatist 67 Ursinus, Zacharias (1534–83) 119n, 264 Ussher, James [Iacobus Usserius] (1581–1656), abp. of Armagh 12–3, 84–5, 110n, 124n, 177n, 183, 206, 215n, 325n, 326n, 341n scholarly work of 112n, 179–81, 182, 189, 190, 267, 294, 316, 317, 321n, 342n and Continental protestants 189n, 238–9 Wtenbogaert, Johannes (1557–1644) 127n, 143n, 147n Vadian, Joachim [von Watt] (1484–1551) 25n Valens (c.328–378), Roman emperor in the East from 364, brother of next 389 Valentinian I (321–75), Roman emperor in the West from 364 44 Valentinus (2nd cent.), Gnostic heretic, and Valentinians 44, 379 Vatican council, 1st 5, 402 Vaux, Robert (d. 1604) 90n Vedel, Nicolas [Vedelius] (1596–1642) 188n Vermigli, Pietro Martire (1499–1562) 27–30, 31–3, 35, 36n, 38n, 61, 66, 67–8, 73n, 81–2, 86, 101, 118, 132n, 161, 324 Vernon, George (1637–1720) 200n V´eron, Franc¸ois (c.1575–1649), Jesuit, then vicar of Charenton 331n Victor I (d. 198), bp. of Rome from 189 59n, 212 Victorinus Afer [Caius Marius Victorinus] (fl. 354–62) 123 Villagarcia, Juan de (d. 1564), Dominican 26 Vincent (fl. 407/8), Donatist bp. of Cartennas 55, 185n, 343n

510 Vincent of L´erins [Vincentius Lirinensis] (d. before 450) 4, 53–4, 57, 124, 139, 148–9, 173, 193, 206n, 216, 234, 243, 304, 330n, 333, 350, 360 Viva, Domenico (1647–1726), Jesuit 306n Vossius, Gerardus Joannes (1577–1649), father of next 149n, 163n, 165n, 177–8, 179, 189, 239n, 246n, 319n Historia Pelagiana 173–6, 178, 179, 188, 259, 342 Vossius, Isaac (1618–89) 267, 276n, 294, 314, 325n Wake, William (1657–1737), abp. of Canterbury from 1716 30n, 323, 325, 402, 407 Waldenses 69, 71 Walker, John (fl. 1601) 132n, 134, 136 Walton, Brian (1600–61), bp. of Chester 354 Walton, Izaak (1593–1683) 162n Warburton, William (1698–1779), bp. of Gloucester 3, 238, 240n Ward, John (1679?–1758) 54n, 206n Ward, Samuel (1572–1643), master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge 64, 82n, 124n, 176, 177–80, 181–5, 187–8, 190, 206 Ward, Seth (1617–1689), bp. of Salisbury 178n Warwick, Philip, Sir (1609–83) 20, 206 Waterland, Daniel (1683–1740) 10n, 47n, 373n Watson, Richard (1611/12–85) 194n Wells, Edward (1667–1727) 40n Wells, William (d. 1673), bookseller 341n Wendelin, Marcus Friedrich (1584–1652) 170 Westminster Assembly 252–4, 260, 262 Westminster Confession 94n, 243, 254–5, 256, 270, 307 Wharton, Edmund (1635?–1717), father of next 161n Wharton, Henry (1664–95) 16n, 158n, 161n, 165n, 192n, 193n, 197n, 225n, 322n, 325–6

Index Whichcote, Benjamin (1609–83) 308 Whitaker, William (1548–95) 41–2, 57–8, 59, 62n, 63n, 71–2, 86n, 95, 102, 114, 140, 176, 185n, 186, 205, 230, 337, 338, 407 on Antichrist 69, 70n, 212 on baptism 82, 182, 184 on Canon of Scripture 49, 93 on descent into Hell 126n on grace and predestination 171–2, 178 Whitby, Daniel (1637/8–1726) 284n, 295–6, 296–9, 323n, 357n, 373n, 374n, 391n, 402n White, Francis (1564?–1638), bp. of Ely 193n White, Thomas [aka Blacklo] (1592/3–1676) 214n, 218–20, 249, 276, 306, 357n Whitgift, John (1530?–1604), abp. of Canterbury from 1583 86, 95, 107, 113n, 115, 120n, 121n, 133, 146–7, 171–2 Willet, Andrew (1561/2–1621) 82, 83n, 91n, 94, 107n, 114, 123n, 124n, 125, 126n, 128, 168, 407 William III (1650–1702), king of England from 1689 369 Williams, John (1582–1650), abp. of York 34, 141, 158, 160–1, 176, 206 Williamson, Sir Joseph (1633–1701) 336, 341n Williamson, Robert (1597/8–1662?) 183n Wilson, Matthew [aka Edward Knott] (1582–1656), Jesuit 202, 215n, 221, 223, 224, 225n, 227, 305 Wolf, Johann Christoph (1683–1739) 146n, 232n Wolleb, Johannes [Wollebius] (1586–1629) 264, 347n Womock [Womack], Laurence (d. 1686), bp. of St David’s 282n, 301n, 328–9 Wood, Anthony (1632–95) 116n, 121n, 160n, 161n, 162n, 163n, 165n, 166n, 294n, 302n, 303n, 310, 338n, 343n, 369n, 386n, 390n Worthington, John (1618–71), master of Jesus College, Cambridge 223n

Index Wotton, Henry (1687?–1754), fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, Nonjuror 340n Wotton, William (1666–1727), prebendary of Salisbury 321n Wren, Matthew (1585–1667), bp. of Ely 187–8 Wright, Thomas (1561–1624), Jesuit, then secular priest 71 Wycliffe, John (c.1330–84) and Wycliffites 69, 70, 71

511 Wynne, William (1692–1765) 314n Young, John (c.1532–1605), bp. of Rochester 160n Young, Patrick [Patricius Junius] (1584–1652) 9, 141n, 166n, 268 Ysambert, Nicolas (d. 1642) 60n Zanchi, Girolamo [Hieronymus Zanchius] (1516–90) 161 Zwingli, Huldrych (1484–1531) 81n