A flyer for a recent conference boldly announced that it was ‘Saving the Soul of Anglicanism’. Accompanying the strap-line was a picture of a three-legged stool. Each leg was predictably labelled ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’ and ‘reason’. This monumental book by Jean-Louis Quantin implies that such a soul is by no means immortal.
Quantin’s scope and achievement is vast. He aims to analyse the use of patristic authors within the Church of England in the century and a half after the Reformation and the authority which the patriarchs were accorded. In doing so he seeks to answer even larger questions about Anglican self-understanding. As a Frenchman playing away from home and in his second language his achievement is all the greater.
The Church of England and Antiquity conforms to recent patterns of early modern scholarship. Quantin grapples with diffuse ‘trends’ rather than rigid ‘parties’. He accepts the view that the Elizabethan Church was at one with continental Calvinism on key points of doctrine despite obvious differences in organizational structure. He reaches away from anachronistic presentations of, for example, Richard Hooker, and he is not alone in working on the significance of patristics in this period.
Quantin’s central thesis is that the Church of England never held a uniform outlook on the writers of the ancient Church. Chapter 1 on the late sixteenth century asserts that patristic studies are not inherently ‘Catholic’ because, in union with their continental Reformed brethren, English Churchmen affirmed the principle of sola scriptura, but nonetheless used the fathers to confirm doctrines which they thought had been established from scripture. Chapter 2 disconnects the growing episcopalian emphases of the early seventeenth century from any change in attitude to Scripture and tradition. Likewise practices such as signing the cross in baptism and the resilience of the Lutheran concept of Christ’s physical descent into hell were not accompanied by developing distinctiveness on the authority of tradition. Rather, it is in those idiosyncratic continental Protestants to whom the Church of England appealed, most notably Isaac Casaubon, that Quantin finds the earliest expressions of the principle that the Church of England stood ‘in the gap’ between popery and puritanism. The next chapter notes that, despite taking soundings in private, Laudian writers did not publicly challenge the received outlook on Scripture and tradition. Although chapters 2 and 3 are the most engaging, they would have even stronger traction with reference to the political changes highlighted by Anthony Milton which drove the Church of England away from its Reformed roots.
Quantin asserts that the crucial shift in views on the authority of Scripture happened after the Restoration. This was a response to the cataclysmic events of the Civil Wars and the adoption by puritans of the arguments of Jean Daillé against the usefulness of patristics. Just as the Church now found itself as a via media between Roman Catholicism and dissent, so its use of the fathers needed to assert a role for the fathers which did not tip into the Tridentine understanding of tradition. ‘Avant-garde conformity’ developed in the wake of arguments such as Henry Hammond’s view that the canon of Scripture was grounded on patristic testimonies. The Restoration period also saw a shift away from the Calvinist interest in Augustine and towards the ante-Nicene fathers since these better conformed to contemporary Anglican needs: Ignatius’s assertion of episcopacy, Cyprian’s claims for episcopal independence from Rome, and Clement’s tirades against schism all neatly fitted the cavalier agenda. Throughout the book the reader is left with the impression that the use of patristics did not lead debate but followed it.
As implied at the beginning, this book is only ostensibly about the early modern period. Quantin is not Professor of Early Modern History but Professor of the History of Early Modern Scholarship. His introduction and conclusion consider how later Anglicans received their early modern predecessors’ views about the early Church. By studying the reception of patristics in the early modern period in its own terms, Quantin convicts nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-Catholicism of whiggery — namely, taking the Restoration churchmen’s reverence for the fathers and making it a defining characteristic of the whole English Church since the Reformation. By uncovering the shifting views about which fathers were useful, the uses to which they were put, and the extent to which they carried authority, Quantin undermines a mythical historiography which falsely claims a unified Anglican ‘patristic mind’. Sceptics might claim this renders Anglican orthodoxy inherently unstable. More positively, it may open new opportunities for ecumenical dialogue. The price of this book will exclude it from many private readers’ shelves but accompanied with its significance this will only serve to increase its thumbing in libraries around the world.
