by Joshua Shaw
The distance between our previous few posts – those on Westcott and Hort – and the Christmas season is not so far as you might think. These men did not lead cloistered lives, however much they learned from monks and monastic life. One legacy they left has to do with the well-known “Lessons and Carols” service. A quick search online about its origin will bring up the name Edward Benson, the Bishop of Truro, and something about an attempt to get men out of the Cornish pubs into the church. But is this all?
A truer explanation begins with Westcott’s conviction that “the great churches are the sermons of the middle ages.”
It is by their buildings and by their sculpture that the men of the middle ages hold converse with us now. They wrote on parchment in a foreign language, but they wrote in a universal language on stone, as men cannot write now. When men built out of the fulness of their hearts, they put their deepest thoughts into their buildings. Sometimes they expressed things just and lovely, sometimes things false and hateful. But with whatever message, they do still speak to us for encouragement and for warning.[i]
This conviction, whatever its source, was made while young and Westcott constantly obeyed its dictate by the careful study of cathedrals, abbeys, cloisters with which he came into contact, most often aiding reflection through able sketches of some portion of the building.[ii] This passion for the message of architecture he shared with his life-long friend and Godfather of (some of) his children, Edward White Benson.
These men wrote continually on the subject of cathedrals and how they might be revived to the good use of the church as centers of theological education and culture, as well as centers of evangelical outreach – as they were originally designed to be.[iii] The “healing of the nations,” whatever good should come from outside the church, must essentially arise from within it; both men believed Cathedrals had a role to play.[iv]
However, I have been so much moved during my month’s residence that I think I must find expression for my feelings in a little paper on Cathedral work. It may be wholly too late to attempt anything, but I am sure that Cathedrals can do what is nowhere done, and what is more than ever of critical importance to the Faith.
The Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, vol. I, 297.
The fertile exchanges that passed between these men produced, during Westcott’s canonry at Peterborough Cathedral, the essays just mentioned. For now we can only note the conclusions about the nature of the life and work of a Cathedral :
Four great principles… underlie [Cathedrals]… Two contain the theory of cathedral life; two contain the theory of cathedral work. The life is framed on the basis of systematic devotion and corporate action; the work is regulated by the requirements of theological study and religious education… At last (Cathedrals) were definitely regarded as centres of all the civilizing influences, material, intellectual, and spiritual, by which the great English Reformers sought to mould in a religious type the new world to which they looked.
Brooke Foss Westcott. “On Cathedral Work,” Sect. I, p. 247 in Macmillan’s Magazine vol. 21 (Jan. 1870) : 247-251.[v]
In this paper and the following, Westcott drew on the original charters from the English Reformers, Henry VIII, and the subsequent changes of Queen Elizabeth I. In them the spirit of the medieval cloister is revived and enlarged. There is much of interest here (perhaps another post), but having seen something of the larger backdrop, we must turn to consider one unlooked for success, a fragment broken off the larger vision: the lessons and carols service.
Years later, Westcott’s one-time pupil and admirer, later his dearest friend, had become Bishop of Truro. This Bishop, Edward White Benson, endeavoured to make Cathedrals cherished havens of rest. So it was that in 1880, musing on ways to invigorate these theories of Cathedral work, he decided on readings (“inspired by ancient sources”) and gathered carols recently penned or collected and wrote the first Lessons and Carols service.
My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve – nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop. This service was afterwards used at Addington, and has spread I believe to other places.
The Life and Letters of Edward White Benson, Vol. I, 484.
Yes, I do believe these “nine carols and nine tiny lessons” and, to some small degree, the dreams of Cathedral work and Christian society of Westcott and Benson which they embody, “have spread to other places.” When Benson became Archbishop of Canterbury, he took this liturgy with him, though he attributes more importance to Westcott:
Our cathedrals are in themselves a great lessons of the unity of the Church during the past ages, and I attribute the spread of the desire for their restoration largely to the publication some thirty years ago of a series of articles by Canon Westcott, when he first came to Peterborough from Harrow, in Macmillan’s Magazine.
The Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, vol. II, 135
And so perhaps we should end where we began:
“The great churches are the sermons of the middle ages, and we would do well to study them.”
[i] Quoted in “A Minster Memory” (ch. 7 of The Life and Letters) by Dr. Stephen Phillips from a writing of Westcott’s which I have not yet discovered. There were many many sermons and short writings printed privately for circulation among friends, and yet Phillip’s quotes it as though it might be publicly known. Mostly likely it will be discovered upon further searching. The same author quotes it also here in a collection of excerpts from Westcott, but the origin is there also unmarked. It might therefore be from the “Sermons, essays, and addresses hitherto known only to a few” mentioned in the preface of that work.
[ii] His talent can be seen from his sketch (at 21) of the Great Court of Trinity College Cambridge here.
[iii] As the following pages reveal, 296-7, 298-299, 302-303. 307-314, 318, 352-356 (in vol. I of the Life and Letters). An examination of the corresponding Life and Letters (of Benson) reveals the other half.
[iv] Here I refer to Henry Sidgwick’s acknowledgement that Benson’s (and therefore Westcott’s) mind was “totally alien from his” – while he, reading Comte through Mill, believed in a scientific and humanistic revision of society, they continued to believe in the efficacy of God’s Spirit working good through his church, filling “all in all.” See pp. 249-250 of the Life and Letters of Edward White Benson, 1899.
[v] He goes on to write (and quote) some remarkable words in a footnote, which bear not a little on our work at the Regensburg Forum: “The comprehensiveness of the objects of Henry the Eighth’s Foundations is nobly expressed in a clause from their charters (A.D. 1541), which cannot be too often quoted or too carefully weighed: – Nos… divina clementia inspirante, nihil magis ex animo affectantes quam ut vera religio, verque Dei cultus,… non modo inibi [ i.e. in the site of the late monastery] no aboleatur, sed in integrum potius restituatur et ad primitivam suae genuinae sinceritatis normam reformetur… operam dedimus, quatenus humana prospicere potest infirmitas, ut in posterum ibidem sacrorum eloquiorum documenta et nostrae redemptionis sacramenta pure administrentur, bonorum morum disciplina sincere observetur, juventus in litteris liberaliter instituatur, senectus viribus defectiva, eorum praesertim qui circa personam nostram, vel alioquin circa regni nostri negotia publice et fideliter nobis servierint, rebus ad victum necessariis condigne foveatur, ut deniue eleenosinarum in pauperes Chrisi largitiones, viarum pontiumque reparationes, et cetera omnis generis pietatis officia illinc exuberanter in omnia vicina loca longe lateque dimanen ad Dei Ominpotentis gloriam, et ad subditorum nostrorum communem utilitatem.” In other words, the Cathedrals were designed by the Reformers to continue and restore the work of monasteries to their original purity, not abolish them (non modo inibi non aboleatur, sed in integrum potius restituatur et ad primitivam suae genuinae sinceritatis normam reformetur.). For a sample of Westcott’s appreciation of the old English monastic life see Thoughts on Revelation and Life, p. 149f. (on the Benedictine Rule).