Anglican Spiritual Patrimony I

An extraordinary consistency in maintaining the speculative-affective synthesis; the theological and the emotional, doctrine and devotion, fact and feeling. This, I suggest, is the deepest meaning of the Anglican via-media; it is the insistence that prayer, worship, and life itself, are grounded upon dogmatic fact, that in everyday religious experience head and heart are wedded. English Christianity has consistently rejected the ecstatic, spectacular, and baroque, not because they are "Roman", or because of "superstition" and "enthusiasm", or even because "one should not go too far" - they are but passing manifestations - but because of this deep-rooted ascetical principle, of which our saints and teachers will never let go. On the other hand (one obvious exception notwithstanding) we have never been happy with the cold rationalism of an Abelard.

The supreme exponent of this spiritual harmony is St Anselm. Our greatest single work, illustrative of it, is probably the Revelations of Divine Love, in which Julian of Norwich combines the most vivid, most disturbingly affective meditation on every distressing detail of the Passion with almost a treatise on the doctrine of the Atonement. The strain continues with what the Prayer Book so simply calls "true piety and sound learning", but we must be careful to interpret "and" as a conjunction of synthesis, not of duality: to be a trifle pedantic, true piety "with", "from", or "based upon" sound learning would be more accurate.

Martin Thornton, 1915-1986