The Church of England is confused. In truth, it has been ever since the Act of Supremacy and King Henry VIII’s removal of the prayers for the Pope from the Mass (at the time, remarkably sacramentalist and still in Latin). Always a rather ephemeral thing, it has wrestled back and forth in a perpetual identity crisis.
It has, at times, produced virtuous men and women of sincere piety – even beautiful poetry and music attempting to render sincere honour and worship to Jesus Christ. Yet, with the appointment of Dame Sarah Mullally to the see of Canterbury, perhaps the starkest sign has finally arrived which reveals to all who care to ponder that this institution is essentially cut off from the living apostolic heritage of the old Christian world, that England’s institutions have snipped themselves from her past, and that we are possessed by ever more perilous gender confusion.
Mullally now occupies a position almost as symbolically important as it is institutionally consequential. Hence, her enthronement represents something far more than the smashing of some arbitrary glass ceiling or the heartwarming tale of a former nurse rising to high ecclesiastical office. Instead, it draws into question, and potentially brings to a close, a modestly long chapter in the story of English Christianity: the debate surrounding who really are the true heirs of our past, forebears and religious foundation.
To understand why her appointment matters, one must begin with the simple historical fact that the English Church was not born Anglican. It was born plainly and identifiably Catholic. The Faith that St Augustine of Canterbury brought from the San Gregorio al Cielo monastery in Rome (where the first five archbishops of Canterbury and the first archbishop of York were monks), on the orders of Pope St Gregory the Great, bore the traditional four marks and many of those things Anglicans would later repudiate: the invocation of the saints, a sacerdotal and sacrificial understanding of the Mass, prayers for the dead, monasticism and Petrine authority.
When Augustine arrived in Kent in 597, he did not inaugurate a national Church governed by local preference. Sed contra. The body he founded established a local expression of a universal body whose authority lay beyond kings and assemblies. The same was true for the religion he introduced. The priesthood he brought with him – without exception, male – was a fixed inheritance, not a flexible office subject to cultural negotiation.
That inheritance endured for nearly a thousand years without serious challenge to its basic form. It survived Viking invasions, dynastic wars and social upheaval. It endured because English rulers and clergy alike understood that the Church was not theirs to redesign. The inheritance would provide their nation with apostolic continuity and divine blessing so long as they honoured and preserved it.
Nor was the native Celtic Church which existed in Ireland, Iona, Scotland and Northumbria – whom many Anglicans like to cite as their forerunners to justify the schism with Rome – a proto-Anglican body waiting to throw off Roman control. Accidentally separated from the continent by lack of contact, they became insular. They operated independently of Petrine authority, like the Maronites of Lebanon did for a few centuries in the Middle Ages, incidentally rather than by act of deliberate separation and rejection.
The modern myth that these were forerunner Protestants collapses upon inspection. The monks of Iona and Lindisfarne differed from Rome on certain customs, but not on the priesthood, not on the sacraments and certainly not on the sex of bishops. When contact with the continent was re-established and disputes arose – most famously over the dating of Easter – they submitted to council and authority. The Synod of Whitby settled the matter because continuity mattered more than independence. Besides, if the Celtic Christians really safeguarded a dormant Protestant seed, does it never strike these historiographical revisionist fantasists as strange that the true base and germinated soil of the Celtic branch, Ireland, along with the North of England, firmly rejected the Reformation rather than embraced it?
Besides, the kings who built England understood the need for continuity instinctively. Alfred the Great, facing cultural annihilation at the hands of the Danes, did not attempt to modernise Christianity or democratise the clergy. He restored monasteries, translated ancient Christian texts and insisted upon discipline among priests. His programme of renewal was predicated on recovery more than innovation – looking to the greatness of Rome (living up to ideals rather than changing them and calling it progress, as Chesterton intoned). He believed civilisation depended upon fidelity to what had been handed down.
In the preface to his translation of St Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, Alfred enshrined this mentality fairly explicitly: ‘Our forefathers, who formerly held these places, loved wisdom, and through it they obtained wealth and bequeathed it to us. In this we can still see their tracks, but we cannot follow them, and therefore we have lost both the wealth and the wisdom, because we would not incline our hearts after their example.’
At Alfred’s time, once again, all the English clergy were most certainly sacramentalist. All were male. All lived a religion in which the invocation of the saints featured and papal supremacy was acknowledged. Alfred, after his decisive victory at Edington, stopped the longstanding practice of paying barbarous pirates terrorising his nation – the Danegeld. This was Alfred, the same who walked on foot to Rome in pilgrimage, where he was blessed and confirmed by Pope Leo IV. Alfred, the father of England. What would he have thought of Mullally? A woman, in pretence as a bishop, who seeks to pay millions in ‘reparations’ to foreign peoples for ‘crimes’ it is doubtful the people of her institutions even committed, all while in schism with the Holy Father in Rome. Englishmen could do worse than to reflect upon and ask themselves this.
A generation later, Athelstan – the first king to rule all England – surrounded himself with bishops and abbots whose authority derived from apostolic succession, not political fashion. A charismatic warrior-king, Alfred’s triumphant grandson honoured difficult ancient Christian teachings dividing the sexes with discipline and was a lifelong celibate – leading later scholars to speculate (unfairly and all too boringly) whether he was homosexual. Gay or not, whether he swallowed swords as much as he fought with them is for now unimportant; it is known his clerics were – without exception once again – all male. The Mass he attended was the same in essential form as the Latin one, celebrated by a man with apostolic authority, that traditional Catholics attend today. His charters, laws and councils reveal a society that understood religion as the sacred, inviolable foundation of public life. They governed as Christian princes because they believed the Church embodied an inherited order older than themselves. England in the 10th century was hardly a society experimenting with religious equality. Her entire civilisational order was convinced that hierarchy was part of the fabric of reality.
That conviction endured into the late medieval period. One need only consider the career of Reginald Pole, the last Catholic archbishop of Canterbury before the Elizabethan rupture. Pole was a Renaissance scholar, a diplomat and a reformer. Yet he never in his wildest dreams imagined that reform meant altering the nature of the priesthood or the structure of authority. His mother, Margaret Pole, went to her death rather than accept the king’s claim to spiritual supremacy. Her martyrdom and his exile too were not about ritual minutiae. They were instead guided by the simple principle that the Church was not a creature of the state and that its constitution could not be rewritten at will. If they were willing to call Henry VIII a heretic (who believed virtually all doctrines Catholics today hold to bar the authority of the Pope), what would they have thought of Mullally?
This is the point modern commentators so often evade. The pre-Reformation Church in England was not Anglican in any recognisable sense. It did not believe doctrine could be altered by legislative vote. It did not imagine bishops as administrators chosen to reflect social progress. And it did not – at any moment in its long history – consider ordaining women to the priesthood.
That last fact is really the crux of the point. St Paul’s injunction in Scripture is rather unambiguous and clear: he does not permit a woman to teach in Church. Moreover, mainline and historical Protestantism often liked to pride itself upon supposedly repudiating illegitimate traditions and returning to the purity of Christian antiquity. The fact remains that although there is nebulous evidence of female deaconesses (really glorified churchwardens), no ancient apostolic body of Christians – neither Ethiopians, Indians nor oriental Nestorians – consecrate women as priests. This is an innovation. A shameless one, whose justifications appear to rest upon vague zeitgeist emancipatory, gender-critical and egalitarian sentiments, certainly more than fidelity to Scripture or what was handed down.
Mullally’s appointment is illuminating, for it represents a decisive break. It is a highly visible rupture in the English story on three fronts: a fracturing of the harmony between the Anglo and his past; the Christian and his living apostolic root; and between men and women in a complementary social order.
What we find in the Church of England is a departure: an attempt to escape an established, harmonious, complementary understanding of gender and sex – the transition from institutions as custodians of ancient order and duty to self-definition. I hope for the reassertion of nature and the wisdom and beauty of history. Mullally, it seems, is the very opposite of what our transvestite and transhumanist era needs, however pleasant and well-intentioned a lady she likely is.
To illustrate this, I’d like to make a comparison and recount the tale of two women. Rising to international prominence roughly a century apart, one offered an antidote to the ideational confusions and pathologies (particularly surrounding sex and gender) of modernity, while the other resembles a wholehearted surrender to it.
The novelist and historian Sigrid Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. A Danish-born Norwegian convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism, her spiritual trajectory was lambasted and widely regarded as betrayal and backwardness in her contemporary Scandinavian milieu. A champion of women and critic of feminism, she went against the grain and had an unusual gift for making modern readers see the merit in the medieval world, yet doing so without sentimentality. She admired its discipline but did not romanticise it; she recognised the strength of its women without pretending that they occupied (or were suited to occupy) the same offices as men.
Her most famous work, Kristin Lavransdatter, portrays a remarkable and yet quite ordinary protagonist. She is flawed, psychologically complex and gifted. Undset believed this particular bag of human contradictions was possible, and even common, for both men and women. She rejected and did not believe the notion that history, with its concurrent distinctions in defined male and female roles, was historically oppressive for either gender. Undset frankly shows how Kristin was able to manage the farm and estate in Husaby better than her husband, whose gifts lay elsewhere – in traits such as his exceeding charisma, bravado and open-heartedness: the reasons she fell in love with him in the first place and yet the grounds on which she comes to resent him. Undset understood that it is not that women may not be conceptually competent at any given male job, but the question lay whether they were most fitted for it in the broader picture.
In Undset’s tale, Kristin is a tragic but ultimately redeemable character, for as an otherwise upstanding and virtuous soul, her inability to let go of an all-devouring grudge for decades consumes her marriage, injuring the childhood of their offspring and going much distance towards the destruction of their family. Kristin was possessed by a partially legitimate disdain for her husband’s lacklustre economic efforts, his carelessness and his recklessness. Knowing who and what she married, she never came to terms with his flaws (which she chose), and this is presented as a self-defeating pride, for her husband is not a wholly bad character and she was made aware of who he was well before insisting on him eagerly.
Still yet, in Undset’s world of high medieval Norway, it is shown how persons of each sex were understood to fail by not succeeding to live up to their social roles. They did not fail – as is the case in the thinking of the Church of England since the 1990s – by failing to circumvent or redefine these. For Undset, Kristin faltered as a wife and mother by her coldness, grudges and her unwillingness to recognise, encourage and support her husband’s significant virtues and potential. Erlend, her spouse, nearly succeeds in launching a bold and ambitious coup d’état, which would have heightened the family and nation’s fortunes, after rallying much support from powerful local earls. His plot is foiled indirectly but largely due to an avoidable domestic argument of which Kristin’s miserable and unforgiving soul is largely to blame.
Erlend, on the other hand, is not without fault. His lack of diligence, his impulsiveness and his tendency to squander opportunities through his recklessness all contribute to the family’s woes. Yet Undset does not dissolve the marital bond or suggest that Kristin should have assumed the role of political plotter or public leader in his stead. Instead, the tragedy unfolds precisely because each fails to complement the other within the ordered vocations given by God, nature, history and custom. Kristin’s strength as manager and mother is real; Erlend’s charisma and courage are real. Their sins lie in refusing to honour the complementarity that might have redeemed them both.
Contrast this profound understanding with the trajectory embodied by Sarah Mullally. Her enthronement as the ostensible first female Archbishop of Canterbury stands as the ultimate emblem of Anglicanism’s long-developing discontinuity with the religion of Alfred the Great, Athelstan, Augustine of Canterbury and the unbroken apostolic line they defended. From the Roman mission of 597 that planted a universal, Petrine, sacerdotal and male-ordered faith on English soil – where the harmony between men and women reflected divine order rather than interchangeable roles – through the restorative fidelity of Alfred, who recovered ancestral wisdom without innovation, to Athelstan’s unified Christian kingdom built on inviolable hierarchy and complementarity, and even to the unyielding and inflexible witness of Reginald and Margaret Pole under persecution, the English Church thrived when it saw itself as custodian of an inherited order, not its reinventor or master.
This continuity prized complementarity between the sexes as part of the sacred fabric of reality: distinct vocations equally capable of sanctity and achieving divine beatitude, with the male priesthood iconically representing Christ the Bridegroom to His Bride the Church. Virtually every figure from Augustine to Pole would have regarded the theological premises enabling Mullally’s elevation as heretical – a rupture. Undset’s characters once again provide a lesson for our confused age here: flawed yet noble souls found tragedy when they failed to honour God-given, complementary vocations. As birth rates continue to plummet and the use of SSRIs and antidepressants among women continues to rise, are we experiencing the same as we transgress boundaries in the name of abstracted, utopian, egalitarian, reality-denying and historically novel sensibilities? Do we not succeed by being better men and women, rather than by removing the standards and definitions in order that we can, rather comfortingly, no longer fail to live up to them? To say this makes for a rather shallow Pyrrhic victory would be an understatement.
In contrast, Mullally’s enthronement – coupled with contemporary priorities such as expansive reparations initiatives – embodies the opposite trajectory: a Church increasingly defined by self-expression, inclusivity as the highest good and adaptation to secular progress narratives that dissolve the very complementarity that once sustained the social and spiritual order.
What began with the Act of Supremacy’s assertion of royal headship has flowered into an institution where the see of Augustine can be occupied in a manner that severs the Anglo from his past, the Christian from his apostolic root and men and women from their harmonious, ordered relationship. The debate is not really ultimately about one capable former nurse or pleasant personality. Far, far more important is the question whether the Church of England remains a living branch of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church – or has exposed itself as a partially noble but ultimately doomed, ill-fated, severed experiment, sometimes beautiful in its music and occasional piety, yet cut off from the vital root that once sustained it.
In Mullally’s enthronement, that triple rupture is no longer abstract and has been visibly, historically and theologically enthroned. Englishmen (and Anglicans worldwide) who cherish their forebears’ tracks would do well to ponder Alfred’s warning: without inclining our hearts after their example, we risk losing both the wisdom and the inheritance.
Appreciating women as women and men as men in our difference might be old-fashioned, but I believe it, in the end, will save us. (For one, my favourite thing about a woman is that she is not a man.) Perhaps also by finally putting to bed a near five-hundred-year-old pretence, and returning to Rome, following in the footsteps of her greatest king, will England recover the sanity of her past and divine beatitude once more.
