British Saints and Orthodoxy
British Saints and Orthodoxy
Walsingham is a thin place: a place where there is little to separate man and God. It is a place where England’s religious history – good, bad, and very ugly – is tangible. Just behind St Seraphim’s is the ‘Martyrs’ Field’ where Nicholas Mileham, sub-prior of Walsingham Priory, and a local merchant, George Guisborough, were executed in 1537 for expressing in the mildest of terms their opposition to Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries. Suspected of fomenting a rebellion against Henry’s religious policies akin to the recent Lincolnshire Rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace, this unfortunate pair were hung, drawn, quartered, and, for good measure, beheaded.
When the Marian shrine was revived in the 1920s under the great Anglo-Catholic cleric Fr Hope Patten, it was not long before the (Roman) Catholics joined in on the act by restoring worship and pilgrimage at the Slipper Chapel, just a holy mile away from the recently-built shrine in the centre of the village of Little Walsingham. Fr Hope Patten was convinced that his shrine was the truly Catholic shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham whereas the ‘Romans’, as he called them, frequently looked down on his shrine, like Anglican Orders in general, as effectively null and void. Indeed it seems that Fr Patten’s invitation to the Orthodox to establish a chapel within what he only with great reluctance called the ‘Anglican’ shrine was intended as a counterweight to Roman Catholic competition. This atmosphere of rivalry and mutual non-recognition has significantly improved in recent years, particularly after the opening up of the Catholic Church to ecumenical involvement instigated at Vatican II, but the spectre of the Reformation still looms large over this little village.
As I mentioned in the last post, one of the great and perhaps unique virtues of Walsingham is that it is a place where Anglicans, Catholics, and Orthodox gather in honour of the Virgin Mary. It is thus a place of huge ecumenical significance and ongoing potential for the further discovery and exploration of common roots, of underlying catholicity – the shared tradition of all Christians in these lands. One aspect of this ecumenical pursuit is the cultivation of the memory and veneration of the local saints of Britain and Ireland. It is not only in Walsingham that one can see tangible reminders of our Christian inheritance. Virtually every corner of these sainted isles has its local saint or holy place if only one looks hard enough. Ancient churches stud the landscape with many villages, towns, and cities possessing miracles of medieval architecture raised up to the glory of God. All places are potentially thin places, places where there is little betwixt heaven and earth – it’s just that this is more difficult to see and experience in some places than others. And, lest I seem unduly focussed on my own homeland, let me stress that this applies throughout the world. As St Jerome put it: ‘Access to the courts of heaven is as easy from Britain as it is from Jerusalem; for the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21).’
I appreciate, while anticipating other possible complaints, that talk of the Virgin Mary and the saints will not be especially congenial to those of a resolutely Protestant persuasion. Indeed I am reminded, if you will forgive me, of the story of a grizzled churchwarden of the Church of Scotland objecting to some ‘Popish’ innovation on the part of a new and very moderately Catholic-minded minister – no more than a passing mention of a Marian feast – with the unforgettable retort: ‘While I’m churchwarden here, there’ll be neither saint nor virgin in this church’. With repeated apologies, and moving on, there are of course ample grounds for including even the most hardened of Protestants in this talk of the Virgin Mary and the saints. The Virgin Mary is depicted in the Orthodox icon (not that I shall be getting onto icons right now) as Hodegetria: the one who shows the way or, better, the one who shows the Way (and the Truth and the Life). Equally there is only one Saint, properly speaking. As the Orthodox liturgy puts in: ‘One is holy (agios, also the Greek word for saint), one is the Lord, Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father’. The saints, again, point us to the Saint.
But in our own secular landscape in England, Protestant objections are not likely to be the main factor at play. More and more we are dealing with ‘nones’, those with little or no religious background. And for these nones (not to be confused with nuns), an introduction to the saints of these lands may the just the ticket as they seek to discover meaning and purpose in what can seem a harsh and meaningless material world. Indeed, connecting with the saints of these isles may be just what many people thirst for: a sense of historical continuity and incorporation into a living tradition that spans the ages.
It was precisely the pursuit of a living tradition that animated the founders of St Seraphim’s, the ‘Orthodox station’. Fr David Meyrick (or Fr Mark as he first was) and his fellow workers devoted, as I mentioned last time, much of their efforts to the hymnography and iconography of the saints of Britain and Ireland. This vision is given splendid form in Fr David’s icon of All Saints of Britain and Ireland:
I plan to say much more about Fr David and his work next time but for now let me just comment on the heading of this piece: ‘British Saints and Orthodoxy’. It will be clear from my opening remarks that I see the work of St Seraphim’s in an ecumenical context: this could hardly be otherwise in a place like Walsingham. I would also stress that the British saints are, potentially at least, the common inheritance of all Christians (and indeed all ‘nones’). Orthodox in this this country have often been at the forefront of efforts to restore and revitalise the veneration of the local saints. But there has sometimes been a temptation to regard these saints as ‘ours’ in an exclusive sense as if with a bolt of lightning in 1054 (the commonly adduced date of the schism between East and West) these lands suddenly ceased being Orthodox and became Roman Catholic before further splitting into various forms of Protestantism or, as some Anglicans would say, reformed Catholicism. It is doubtful that anyone in England heard of the exchange of anathemas in 1054 until long after the fact and even in the great ecclesiastical centres of Rome and Constantinople there was no inkling that this event, which was in any case of dubious validity and reach, constituted a definitive breach between rival and incompatible versions of Christianity. For this reason, the fact that vision of the Mother of God at Walsingham by the Lady Richeldis took place in 1061 (according to the traditional dating) should surely not put it out entirely out of the realm of Orthodox acceptance. Equally, is it not a little churlish for the Orthodox to deny Edward the Confessor, who died in 1066, the title of saint?
Be that as it may, my purpose here is not to litigate the exact date of the schism which was in any case more of a long process of estrangement than something that took place on single date. What I want to underline is that the study and veneration the saints of the first millennium (and we can use 1054 for convenience without taking it as an exact historical marker) is something to which the Orthodox have a particular vocation. Orthodoxy has a living tradition of saints and elders which makes establishing a relationship with the saints of these lands through icons, hymns, and personal prayer the most natural thing in the world. The Church of England has not canonised saints since the Reformation (although it has produced many holy men and women – some of whom I have met myself). It does commemorate later saints and martyrs (including, in recent times, martyrs on both sides of the Reformation) but this is not quite the same thing. The Catholic Church does, of course, continue to make saints in the formal sense of canonisation but its historical experience in this part of the world has often tended to lead to a focus on the saints it does not have in common with the Anglicans, that is to say those martyred in the Reformation era. The Orthodox Church thus has the capacity to remind Catholics and Anglicans alike of a deeper shared past.
As for the Orthodox, veneration of the British saints of can be a salutary reminder that the Church has not always looked exactly it does now. A contemporary Orthodox Christian being parachuted back in time into an Anglo-Saxon or Celtic liturgy would doubtless find the atmosphere familiar but also rather strange: Latin worship and unheard-of melodies, loyalty expressed to the Pope of Rome, and no trace of the liturgy of St John Chrysostom. The capacity to recognise Orthodoxy in unfamiliar garb is something we should all try to cultivate.
These preliminary remarks are offered as a brief indication of some of the ways in which the veneration of the British saints can help bring Christians together in this rather fractured day and age, as well as connecting us all to something infinitely precious in our history. I shall turn next time to the life and work the man who started it all at St Seraphim’s: Archimandrite David.
Next time: Fr David of Walsingham.