We're Never Going To Get Clarity Over What "Anglican" Means

My wife commented yesterday that her family has roots from pre-Revolutionary times in coastal Maryland, but ever since there's been a United States, they've called themselves Episcopalians. "Anglican" would never have computed with them. And outside English or History departments, the term "Anglican" was not in use in the US. (Within academic departments, the term would have been used chiefly in service of the Whig Interpretation.) It became common with the "continuing" movement in 1977, largely as a legal device to avoid infringement on the Episcopalian franchise.

As a theological term, it has little precision. Denominations that call themselves Anglican are not necessarily "in communion" with each other, while Episcopalians are "in communion" with Lutherans, and there is no effective catechism or other definition of Anglican doctrine. It isn't even useful as a historical term, since "Anglican" denominations sprout up de oovo with no reference to any previous Church of England affiliation.

This brings me to the peculiar artifact that emerged from the Charles Coulombe essay that I linked yesterday, the title "Be England Thy Dowry". While it stands out as exceptionally bad poetry, my regular correspondent and I independently looked it up and found that it's a line from the so-called “Lourdes Hymn” (“Immaculate Mary”) published in Catholic Church hymnals at least from 1898, which of course explains the late Victorian diction. But inexplicably, I have never encountered anything about England thy dowry in any US hymnal, no matter how awful the Dan Schutte songs it may contain. Why is that, I wonder? Of course, many Americans, whatever their heritage, have never had particular fondness for the English, and a line like that would not play well with Irish Catholics in particular.

So why is Mr Coulombe flaunting it in his title? Certainly his audience is heavily American and presumably Catholic. I think this reflects something of the agenda behind "Anglican" in the context of the ordinariates. This goes as well for the reading list Mr Coulombe proposes in his piece, "Anglican" authors, not even Catholics, who may offer insights. We've already shown how T S Eliot and Dorothy Sayers provided a deep understanding of what marriage means to the Anglican faith, which both earnestly professed.

But what of another name on that list, Arthur Machen? As an American bumpkin, I'd simply never heard of him, but thanks to Wikipedia, I discover

He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language."

. . . Machen, brought up as the son of a Church of England clergyman, always held Christian beliefs, though accompanied by a fascination with sensual mysticism; his interests in paganism and the occult were especially prominent in his earliest works. Machen was well read on such matters as alchemy, the kabbalah, and Hermeticism, and these occult interests formed part of his close friendship with A. E. Waite.

In other words, he was a perfectly good Anglican of a certain sort, since occultism seems always to have been a sideline of English clergy -- James Pike began his final disintegration under the influence of priests in England whom he found especially helpful in contacting his dead son.

I notice that the motto of Anglican Embers, the former journal of the Anglican Use Society, was "Keeping the embers of Anglicanism alive in the Catholic Church". Indeed. Perhaps we can hold a seance to contact those embers more fully.

But why should Mr Coulombe, a cradle Catholic of French Canadian heritage, be so intent on convincing other Catholics to become more Anglican? Frankly, there's a payoff here somewhere. After only a short time, the Crisis piece has attracted many comments from enthusiastic readers who seem pretty unanimous in saying yes, this is all a refreshing change from the banality of the post-Conciliar Church.