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The Title of Article 27 (26): Cranmer, Durandus and Pope Innocent III

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2013

STEPHEN MARK HOLMES
STEPHEN MARK HOLMES*
Affiliation:
School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, New College, Mound Place, Edinburgh EH1 2LX; e-mail: S.M.A.Holmes@sms.ed.ac.uk
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Note and Document
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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 357 - 364
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Thomas Cranmer's Forty-Two Articles of 1553, which became the Thirty-Nine Articles finalised in 1571, are one of the most important doctrinal statements of the English Reformation and have long been a defining document for the Church of England and international Anglicanism. In the preface to the 2011 second edition of his book on the Articles, Oliver O'Donovan noted that I had uncovered the source of the title of Cranmer's twenty-seventh article and, as it reveals something of Cranmer's method, it thus seemed appropriate to publish the details.Footnote 1

The Forty-Two Articles

The Forty-Two Articles, a concise statement of the doctrine of the reformed Church of England, were, together with the revision of canon law and the Book of Common Prayer, a key aspect of Cranmer's reform programme in the early 1550s. During the reign of Edward vi there were plans to establish in England a formula of belief comparable to the Augsburg Confession. Cranmer's original aim was for an ecumenical statement rivalling the documents of Augsburg and Trent but his hopes for an ecumenical council failed as also, in summer 1552, did his plans for a reform of canon law which would have had a substantial doctrinal content. After this, and using work from his previous projects, he turned his energies to a national statement of belief.Footnote 2 These forty-two new doctrinal articles were composed by Cranmer in English and turned ‘into the best humanist Latin’ by Sir John Cheke.Footnote 3 John Knox and other royal chaplains were invited to comment on them in October 1552 and they were published in English in May 1553, appearing in Latin and English with the new catechism in the same year.Footnote 4

Article twenty-seven concerns the ministry of word and sacraments performed by evil men and presents Augustine's teaching from the time of the Donatist controversy that, in the words of the article's heading, ‘The wickedness of the Ministres dooeth not take awaie the effectuall operation of Goddes ordinances.’ The substance of the body of the article is taken from the end of the fifth of the ‘thirteen articles’ composed by Cranmer during discussions with the German Lutherans in 1538 and is based on the eighth article of the Augsburg Confession.Footnote 5 It became the twenty-sixth of the Thirty-Nine (Thirty-Eight) articles of 1563 and 1571, prepared under the direction of Archbishop Matthew Parker, where there are minor adaptations in the body of the text and changes to the title in both English and Latin.

Cranmer's marginalia in his copy of the ‘Rationale’

Diarmaid MacCulloch notes of Cranmer that ‘the margins of the surviving books from his great library (clearly one of his passions) are frequently covered with his notes’ and that this systematic use of marginalia was ‘part of his elaborate classified filing-system for research’.Footnote 6 The Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durandus of Mende (c. 1230–96) was the most important late medieval/early modern commentary on the Latin liturgy. Two printed copies belonging to Cranmer survive in the British Library.Footnote 7 The 1506 edition, which an inscription after the colophon identifies as having previously belonged to the Benedictine Abbey of Burton upon Trent, contains marginal notes in Cranmer's hand.

Cranmer's notes mainly consist of underlining and marginal subheadings in sections dealing with the parts of the divine office in book v of the Rationale and with the Easter vigil and rogation processions in book vi. He marks where popes are said to have influenced the liturgy, writing ‘ffabula de officio Gregoriano et Ambrosiano’ by a story from the Golden Legend (46,18) about the preservation of the Ambrosian rite (fo. 89r; Rationale 5.2.5) and ‘ffabula’ by a story about Pope Gregory vii and a simoniac archbishop (fo. 90r; Rationale 5.2.20). He also reveals his dislike of allegorical interpretation and elaborate church music by writing ‘ridiculum’ where the three ways of starting the office are related to three ways of sinning (fo. 89v; Rationale 5.2.8), and ‘ridiculum’ where the melisma (many notes on a single syllable) in Gregorian chant is said to represent spiritual joy (fo. 91r; Rationale 5.2.33). The latter is an expression of Cranmer's impatience with all but the simplest of church music; as he said of the English processional, ‘the song that shall be made thereunto would not be full of notes, but, as near as may be, for every syllable a note’.Footnote 8 Robert Richardson, the Scottish Augustinian canon and Catholic reformer who became a pillar of the reformed Church of England, made a similar point in his 1530 Exegesis in canonem divi Augustini where he speaks of a reform movement in Scottish Catholic church music at this time.Footnote 9 Cranmer and Richardson were both part of a humanist tradition of hostility to elaborate church music, associated with Erasmus and rooted in the Fathers, that was common to Catholic and Protestant reformers.Footnote 10

Most of the marginal annotations, however, systematically indicate the parts of the divine office, ‘Deus in adiutorium meum intende’, ‘gloria patri’, ‘antiphone’, ‘versiculus’ etc., which suggests that they were made as part of one of his schemes for breviary revision, either 1538–9 or the mid-1540s, or even the final construction of matins and evensong for the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.Footnote 11 That he makes a mark by the quotation of Psalm cxviii.62, 64, which gives a biblical warrant for an eight-fold office, may indicate that his marginalia are from the time when he was composing the more conservative eight-fold scheme in the mid-1540s, rather than the two-fold offices of 1538–9 and the late 1540s. Burton Abbey was dissolved in 1539, was reconstituted as a collegiate church in 1541, but was again dissolved in 1545 when it was granted to Cranmer's close associate Sir William Paget.Footnote 12 Although David Selwyn warns against presuming that all Cranmer's monastic books came to him after the dissolution, he is referring to university textbooks, and it does seem likely that Cranmer obtained this book after one of the dissolutions, most likely that of 1545, which dates his marginalia to between 1539 and 1552, probably c. 1546.Footnote 13

The title of Article 27 (26)

In one of his few notes in book iv of the Rationale on the mass, Cranmer writes ‘opus operans et operatum’ by a section in the prologue (fo. 32v; Rationale 4.1.18) on celebration by unworthy priests in which the words ‘opus operans’ and ‘opus operatum’ occur. By this marginal note he underlines in the text the sentence, ‘non ergo sacerdotis iniquitas impedit effectum sacramenti, sicut nec medici infirmitas virtutem impedit medicine’ (‘the iniquity of the priest does not therefore impede the effect of the sacrament, just as the infirmity of the doctor does not impede the power of the medicine’). The marginal note refers to the scholastic distinction that the validity of a sacramental rite (opus operatum) is independent of the disposition, though not necessarily the intention, of the celebrant (opus operans). In Davril and Thibodeau's critical edition of the Rationale the sentence underlined by Cranmer is not given a source, but the same words are also found at the end of Pope Innocent iii's De sacro altaris mysterio 3.5, written a century before, where he teaches that the priest can say ‘we offer’ because he does not offer the sacrifice of the mass in his own persona but in that of the Church: ‘Non ergo sacerdotis iniquitas effectum impedit sacramenti, sicut nec infirmitas medici virtutem impedit medicinae’.Footnote 14 Innocent's sentence is thus the unattributed source of this part of the general prologue of book iv of the Rationale. An examination of the first part of Rationale 4.1.18 shows that Durandus took this section from the end of De sacro altaris mysterio 3.5 as his source and then, noticing that a quotation in it is attributed by the Corpus iuris canonici to Augustine (it is actually from Paschasius Radbertus), he added this attribution and inserted into the middle of the quotation from Innocent other relevant passages from the decretals where they draw on Augustine's anti-Donatist writings (see appendix). Cranmer's underlining in his copy of the Rationale suggests that his source for the heading was Durandus, not Innocent.Footnote 15

Cranmer's system of marginal notes was a systematic research index and the phrase ‘opus operans et operatum’ is theological shorthand for the subject matter of the twenty-seventh of his Forty-Two Articles. Thus it is reasonable to suppose that he used the text that he had earlier underlined as the source for its heading. The parallels can be seen when Cranmer's text is set against that of Durandus/Innocent. Cranmer's heading was retained in English and Latin in the Thirty-Eight Articles of 1563 when it became article twenty-six, but there was an interesting change in the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571:

  • Durandus:  Non ergo sacerdotis iniquitas impedit effectum sacramenti.

  • Article 27 (1553):  The wickedness of the Ministres dooeth not take awaie the effectuall operation of Goddes ordinances.

  • Article 27 (1553):  Ministrorum malitia non tollit efficatiam institutionum divinarum.

  • Article 26 (1571):  Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinder not the Effect of the Sacraments.

  • Article 26 (1571):  De vi institutionum divinarum, quod eam non tollat malitia Ministrorum.

We can see the close relationship of Cranmer's English to the phrase he underlined in the Rationale and the increased distance when Cheke translates this phrase back into Latin. With the new English version of the heading added in 1571 the first part moves away from Durandus by changing ‘wickedness’ (iniquitas) into ‘unworthiness’ (while the Latin retains Cheke's malitia), but the second part is brought closer to Durandus' text with ‘hinder not the effect of the sacraments’ being closer to his ‘non … impedit effectum sacramenti (sacrament being put in the plural in English because of the context) than to the Latin of either 1553 or 1571. It looks as though whoever was responsible for the English version of 1571 knew that it was taken from Durandus despite the fact that the Latin revision of the same year simply perfected Cheke's text. If it was Archbishop Parker, we know that his large library included three copies of the Rationale, though none has 4.1.18 marked by him.Footnote 16

The ‘Rationale’ and the Reformers

On the title page of his 1506 copy of the Rationale, Parker wrote ‘Huius generis scriptores possunt lectori testari abunde, quae fuerat doctrinae forma per totam ecclesiam confirmata quo tempore hic author claruit et vel ob hac causam servandus est’ (‘Writers of this kind can give the reader abundant evidence about what was the form of doctrine throughout the whole church at the time when this author flourished, and whether for this reason he is to be preserved’). The Rationale is no longer, as it was before the Reformation, an authoritative compendium of tradition and the bearer of an allegorical method which can be used creatively in new situations. It is a relic of a past age of the Church which is under the judgement of the present and can thus be used by the critical scholar both as an example of false doctrine and as a quarry for facts about the past. Cranmer's marginalia show that he used it in both of these ways. From the Rationale he took information about worship for his liturgical reforms and the decidedly Augustinian heading for one of his doctrinal articles, but in it he also condemned aspects of its teaching as ‘ridiculum’. The former is a part of his eclecticism, as he used the Quiñones Breviary, Josse van Clichtove's Elucidatorium ecclesiasticum, Bugenhagen's Danish Lutheran church order and Hermann von Wied's Pia declaratio in his liturgical projects; but it is also a sign of a common heritage of church reform on which both ‘evangelicals’ and ‘catholic reformers’ drew, as we have seen in the case of Cranmer's opinions on church music.Footnote 17

Looking forward in the British Reformations, this attitude continues to be found and not just among defenders of the Elizabethan settlement and Laudians. In Scotland, for example, copies of the Rationale were associated with pre-Reformation Catholic reformers and continued to be used into the seventeenth century by Protestants such as David Calderwood (1575–1650) and David Lindsay, bishop of Edinburgh (c. 1575–1639/40).Footnote 18 Calderwood called Durandus ‘one of the more tolerable sort of idolaters’ and used him in the same way as Cranmer, condemning the errors in the Rationale while using him as a source for the history of the liturgy.Footnote 19

Parker and Calderwood flourished at a time of clearly defined boundaries between Protestant and Catholic. Cranmer saw these boundaries form and made a firm decision for one side, but he still inhabited the same humanist, patristic and conciliarist thought-world as the more moderate Catholic reformers. Common sources and habits of mind, aided by the common use of Latin, remained among the scholars of the different Christian factions of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, and the overthrow of an Anglo-Catholic historiography of the English Reformation should not obscure continuities in early British Protestantism. It is thus not surprising that Cranmer could use the writings of a medieval bishop as a source for the heading of one of his doctrinal articles. Given the hostility to the papacy reflected in his marginalia, however, it is more of a surprise, and somewhat ironic, that the ultimate source for the title of his article twenty-seven was one of the architects of the papalist religious system that Cranmer hated, Pope Innocent iii.Footnote 20

Appendix

The Sources of Durandus, Rationale 4.1.18 (lines 181–96)

Passages taken from Innocent iii are given in bold; for other sources see footnotes).

In sacramento autem corporis Christi secundum Augustinum ‘nil a bono magis, nil a malo minus perficitur sacerdote’,Footnote 1 dummodo ille cum ceteris in archa consistat et formam observet traditam a columba, quia non in merito sacerdotis, sed in verbo conficitur creatoris; aurum enim eque verum est in archa furis sicut in thesauro regis.Footnote 2 Unde et Cayphas pontifex, persecutor unius et verissimi sacerdotis, quamvis ipse verax non esset, quod dedit tamen verum fuit, sed non suum dedit sed Dei, id est in forma ecclesie.Footnote 3Non ergo sacerdotis iniquitas effectum impedit sacramenti, sicut nec medici infirmitas virtutem impedit medicine. Quamvis igitur opus operans aliquando sit immundum, opus tamen operatum semper est mundum, sed sicut omnia sunt munda mundis, sic omnia sunt immunda immundis. Malus ergo cum vitam accipit mortem incurrit, sicut contra bonus cum mortem sustinet vitam acquirit; nam qui manducat indigne iudicium sibi manducat.Footnote 4

Footnotes

1 O'Donovan, Oliver, On the Thirty-Nine Articles: a conversation with Tudor Christianity, 2nd edn, London2011, pp. ix–xi.

2 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Thomas Cranmer: a life, New Haven1996, 503–4; Hardwick, Charles, A history of the articles of religion, Cambridge1859, 79–84.

3 MacCulloch, Cranmer, 524.

4 Footnote Ibid. 527.

5 Bray, Gerald, Documents of the English Reformation, Cambridge1994, 184–221 at p. 190; Gibson, Edgar C. S., The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, London1897, 616.

6 MacCulloch, Cranmer, 2. On this use of marginalia see William Sherman, Used books: marking readers in renaissance England, Philadelphia 2008.

7 BL, C.77.d.17, Lyons 1506; 468.a.14, Lyons 1508; Selwyn, David G., The library of Thomas Cranmer, Oxford1996, 29–30, nos 93, 94. The critical edition is Guillelmi Duranti Rationale divinorum officiorum, CCSL, Continuatio Mediaevalis cxl, cxlA, cxlB, ed. Anselme Davril and Timothy M. Thibodeau, Turnhout 1995–2000. See also Gy, Pierre-Marie (ed.), Guillaume Durand, évêque de Mende (v. 1230–1296): canoniste, liturgiste et homme politique, Paris1992.

8 MacCulloch, Cranmer, 330.

9 ‘Cantus alius commendabilis etiam est, ubi littera una intelligitur cum nota’: Commentary on the Rule of St Augustine by Robertus Richardinus, ed. G. G. Coulton (Scottish Historical Society 3rd ser. xxvi, 1935), 80–1, where he commends masses composed on this principle by the abbot of Inchcolm and Alexander Paterson: see Preece, Isobel Woods, Our awin Scottis use: music in the Scottish Church up to 1603, Glasgow2000, 89–95, and Durkan, J., ‘Scottish evangelicals in the patronage of Thomas Cromwell’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society xxi (1981–3), 127–56 at pp. 134–7, 148–9.

10 Hyun-Ah Kim, Humanism and the reform of sacred music in early modern England: John Merbecke the Orator and The Booke of Common Praier noted (1550), Aldershot 2008, 65–96; Wegman, Rob C., The crisis of music in early modern Europe, Abingdon2005; le Huray, Peter, Music and the Reformation in England, Cambridge1978, 4–12; Miller, Clement A., ‘Erasmus on music’, Musical Quarterly lii (1966), 332–49. Later in the century Gregory xiii's 1577 brief to Palestrina and Zoilo concerning the reformation of plainsong called for the removal of elaborate melismas: Hayburn, Robert F., Papal legislation on sacred music, Collegeville1979, 37; Monson, Craig A., ‘The Council of Trent revisited’, Journal of the American Musicological Society lv (2002), 1–37 at pp. 4–5.

11 Fos 89r–92v. For the breviary reforms see Legg, J. Wickham, Cranmer's liturgical projects (Henry Bradshaw Society, 1915); Cuming, G. J., The godly order: texts and studies relating to the Book of Common Prayer, London1983, 1–23; and MacCulloch, Cranmer, 221–6.

12 ‘Houses of Benedictine monks: the abbey of Burton’, in M. W. Greenslade (ed.), The Victoria history of the counties of England: Staffordshire, iii, London 1970, 199–213. On Cranmer and Paget see MacCulloch, Cranmer, 251, 275–6, 329–30, 337, 351.

13 Selwyn, The library of Thomas Cranmer, pp. lxii, lxv.

14 From the critical edition provided in David Frank Wright, ‘Innocent iii, a medieval commentary on the mass: particulae 2–3 and 5–6 of the De missarum mysteriis (ca. 1195) of Cardinal Lothar of Segni (Pope Innocent iii)’, unpubl. PhD diss. Notre Dame 1977, 191. It is substantially the same as that given in PL ccxvii.844D, which is also used in Innocenzo III: il sacrosanto misterio dell'altare, ed. and trans. Stanislao Fioramonti, Rome 2002. The phrase also recalls the heading of letter 2 of Bishop Marbode of Rennes (d. 1123), PL clxxi.1472B–1473D, ‘Quod improbitas ministri non impedit veritatem sacramenti’, but these words are not in the text and it is not certain when they were added.

15 Cranmer's library has been scattered but Innocent's treatise is not among the surviving works listed in Selwyn, The library of Thomas Cranmer.

16 All of these are in the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: ms 502, fifteenth-century; EP.G.14, Venice 1482; SP.51, Lyons 1503.

17 John Foxe (1517–87) also seems to have valued the Rationale so much that he borrowed a copy but did not return it: Durandus, Rationale, Cologne 1475, Lambeth Palace Library [ZZ]1475.3.

18 See Stephen Mark Holmes ‘Liturgical interpretation in the Scottish Reformations’, in John McCallum (ed.), Scotland's long Reformation: new perspectives on Scottish religion, c. 1500–1660, Farnham forthcoming.

19 David Calderwood, A defence of our arguments against kneeling in the act of receiving the sacramentall elements of bread and wine impugned by Mr. Michelsone, [Amsterdam] 1620 (RSTC 4354), 36. He uses the Rationale as a source in his A solution of Doctor Resolutus, his resolutions for kneeling, [Amsterdam] 1619 (RSTC 4364), 12, 32, and The re-examination of two of the articles abridged [Holland?] 1636 (RSTC 4363.5), 20, 40. Durandus is attacked in his The altar of Damascus, Amsterdam 1621 (RSTC 4352), 185–6.

20 For the tension which exists in the Rationale itself between papalist and patristic ecclesiologies see Holmes, Stephen Mark, ‘Reading the Church: William Durandus and a new approach to the history of ecclesiology’, Ecclesiology vii (2010), 29–49.

References

1 ‘Intra catholicam ecclesiam in misterio corporis Christi nihil a bono maius, nihil a bono minus perficitur sacerdote, quia non in merito consecrantis, sed in verbo efficitur Creatoris, et virtute Spiritus sancti’: Corpus iuris canonici, De consecratione D.2 c.72 (Corpus iuris canonici, ed. E. A. Friedberg and A. L. Richter, Leipzig 1879–81, i. 1342). Based on Paschasius Radbertus, De corpore et sanguine Domini 4, ed. B. Paulus, CCSL, CM xvi, Turnhout 1969, 27–31.

2 ‘Item aurum eque verum est in arca furis, sicut in thesauris regis’: Corpus iuris canonici, C.1 q.1 c.97 d.p.c. (Friedberg-Richter edn, i. 395).

3 ‘Qui autem solo sacramento sacerdos est, sicut fuit pontifex Caiphas, persecutor unius et verissimi sacerdotis, quamvis ipse verus non est, quod dat tamen verus est, si non det suum sed Dei’: ibid. C.1 q.1 c.87 (Friedberg-Richter edn, i. 389). From Augustine, De unico baptismo Contra Petilianum 2.30 (69) (CSEL lii. 58): ‘Ita istud dicis, quasi modo quaeramus quis sit verus sacerdos et non quid sit verum baptisma. Ut enim sit quisque verus sacerdos, oportet ut non solo sacramento, sed iustitia quoque induatur, sicut scriptum est: sacerdotes tui induantur iustitia. Qui autem solo sacramento sacerdos est, sicut fuit pontifex Caiphas, persecutor unius et verissimi sacerdotis, quamvis ipse non sit verax, quod dat tamen verum est, si non det suum sed Dei, sicut de ipso Caipha dictum est: Hoc autem non a se dixit, sed cum esset pontifex, prophetavit.’

4 ‘Quapropter in sacramento corporis Christi nihil a bono maius, nihil a malo minus perficitur sacerdote, dum ergo sacerdos cum caeteris in arca consistat, et formam observet traditam a columba, quia non in merito sacerdotis, sed in verbo conficitur creatoris. Non ergo sacerdotis iniquitas effectum impedit sacramenti, sicut nec infirmitas medici virtutem medicinae corrumpit. Quamvis igitur opus operans aliquando sit immundum, semper tamen opus operatum est mundum. Sed sicut omnia sunt munda mundis, sic omnia sunt immunda immundis. Malus ergo cum vitam accipit, mortem incurrit: sic econtra, bonus cum mortem sustinet, vitam acquirit: nam qui manducat indigne, iudicium sibi manducat’: Innocent iii, De sacro altaris mysterio 3.5; Wright, ‘Innocent iii, a medieval commentary on the mass’, 191; PL ccxvii.844D.