A VISION OF THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION?

James Ussher, Irish primate and Archbishop of Armagh by Sir Peter Lely - National Portrait Gallery, London

[Archbishop of Canterbury William] Laud's interference in the affairs of the Church of Ireland, aided by [King]Charles [I]'s high-handed Lord Deputy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford, likewise angered the Irish primate, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh. Ussher was a rare figure as a member of an old Irish family which had become firmly Protestant, for the established Church had failed to carry more than a minority of the people of Ireland with it away from Catholicism. He is now unfairly remembered only for the misguided humanist historical precision of his calculation that God created the world on the night preceding 23 October 4004 BCE, but he was a formidable scholar who wanted to defend the independence of his Protestant Church. Ussher knew the Irish Church's weakness was the result of a badly funded and badly administered Reformation, in a country in which English colonial interference produced a state of permanent crisis, but nevertheless he saw it as a potential vehicle of proper Reformation in Ireland. He was very consciously part of an international Reformed Protestant world, but in his discreet efforts to maintain his position against Archbishop Laud, Ussher might also be seen as the first senior churchman to have a vision of episcopally governed sister Churches which might cooperate in a common identity across national boundaries, without any single leader to tell them what to do. Without knowing the later phrase, he was envisioning the worldwide Anglican Communion. (My emphasis)

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch, p. 651.

I must say that I was pretty excited when I read the paragraph above. Archbishop Ussher was a true visionary way back in the 18th century. At present, we're still fighting the battle to resist the Archbishop of Canterbury's attempt to force the centralization of power on the churches in the communion with the Anglican Covenant.

Image from Wikipedia Commons.

THUS THE HORNS ON MOSES

Michelangelo Buonarroti - Moses - San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome

A good many years ago, during my visit to San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, I remember how stunned I was when I came upon the magnificent, enormous (over seven and a half feet tall, and he is sitting down!) sculpture of Moses by Michelangelo. I was taken by surprise either because I did not know the statue was in the church or because I did not know of its size. And then, Moses with horns? I recall my puzzlement over the horns. I believe I was alone, with no one to ask about the horns, and I never sought more information. Now I know, thanks to Diarmaid MacCulloch in his excellent tour de force, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

Medieval Western Christianity knew the Bible almost exclusively through the Vulgate, the fourth-century Latin translation made by Jerome. Humanist excavations now went behind the Vulgate text to the Tanakh and its principal Greek translation, the Septuagint. Jerome had done his considerable best to re-examine the Hebrew text behind the Septuagint, nevertheless, faults remained. Some of the mistranslations in the Old Testament were more comic than important. One of the most curious was at Exodus 34, where the Hebrew describes Moses' face as shining when he came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Jerome, mistaking particles of Hebrew, had turned this into a description of Moses wearing a pair of horns - and so the Lawgiver is frequently depicted in Christian art, long after humanists had gleefully removed the horns from the text of Exodus. They are sported by Michelangelo's great sculptured Moese now in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli ('Saint Peter in Chains')....

MacCullough breaks his very serious history with anecdotes such as the quote above, which keep the story moving along at a good pace. Here's another snippet from the author's account of the humanist scholar, Erasmus, which I found quite amusing:

Erasmus would never travel very far east of the Rhine, although he was frequently prepared to risk the English Channel. Instead, people came to Erasmus as devotees. He constructed a salon of the imagination, embracing the entire continent in a constant flow of letters to hundreds of correspondents, some of whom he never met face to face. Erasmus should be declared the patron saint of networkers, as well as of freelance writers.

A 'salon of the imagination'. Is that not wonderful writing? And think of it! Bloggers now have a patron saint.

Oh, read the book! It's long, and it's taking me a while, but it's well worth the time and effort.

Image from Wikipedia.

WHOSE HUMANISM?

From the fourteenth century, there developed in Italy a new way of looking at the world which has come to be called humanism. Humanism can seem a difficult phenomenon to pin down and define, not least because no one used the word at the time. Early nineteenth-century historians newly coined it from words actually in use in the late fifteenth century, when it became common to talk about the liberal non-theological arts subjects in a university curriculum as 'humanae litterae' (literature human rather than divine in focus), while a scholar with a particular enthusiasm for these subjects was called a 'humanista.' A further complication is that 'humanist' has come to be used in modern times for someone who rejects the claims of revealed religion. This was not a feature of the movement we are considering. The vast majority of humanists were patently sincere Christians who wished to apply their enthusiasm to the exploration and proclamation of their faith. They were trying to restore a Christian perfection to humanity.

Diarmaid MacCullough in his massive and excellent book titled Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years

The 'new atheists' claim 'humanism' and 'humanist' for their exclusive use, but the terms originated in a Christian context. Not only did Christians have the terms first, early humanists knew their theology, which is not the case with a good many of the new atheists of today, those who wish to stamp out religion as an all-around pernicious influence throughout the world.

'Know your enemy,' as Sun Tzu said in The Art of War.