In this book, John Shepherd, the Emeritus Dean of Perth, Western Australia, shows the precision of his expertise in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English theology of music. This is an account of how Reformation and post-Reformation thinkers first adamantly rejected, then slowly rehabilitated and finally embraced music as a legitimate aspect of Christian worship. The basic plot is the familiar story of Anglicanism overcoming Puritanism and reaffirming its Catholic roots, but here the tale is told with constant reference to the question, should Christians sing in Church? And if so, why?

The first figure discussed, the conservative Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, provides an example of liturgical theology under Henry VIII. Shepherd relates Gardiner’s understanding of sacramental participation to the Tudor polyphony of John Taverner and Thomas Tallis. Protestant theology then intervenes. Works of beauty are condemned in the sermons of Edwin Sandys, and singing in the vernacular is introduced as essential for edification. Whereas worship had once conveyed mystery, it now conveyed meaning (p. 58). Henry Bullinger’s objections to singing receive particular attention. Bullinger’s quite ridiculous insistence that the hymn singing described in Matthew 26:30 and Mark 14:26 did not ‘constitute singing as distinct from saying’ (p. 73) is indicative of Reformation philistinism: ‘Preferably there would be no singing whatsoever’ (p. 76). Thereafter, organs and instrumental music are condemned, and John Jewel decides that cathedral churches are ‘nothing else but dens of thieves, or worse’ (p. 83).

Things begin to change with Matthew Parker’s version of the metrical psalms. Indeed, Parker’s justification of music – drawing on Basil, Augustine, and Chrysostom, as well as Josephus and Philo of Alexandria – begins to move Anglicanism into closer re-engagement with the ancient roots of tradition (pp. 104–105). Through the ecclesiastical historians Eusebius and Socrates Scholasticus, Parker recovered Nicephorus’ description of Ignatius of Antioch’s vision of angels singing responsively (p. 108). Antiphonal singing was rediscovered. Parker prepared the way for John Whitgift’s defence of ornate and figurative singing in worship.

Shepherd includes a useful discussion of Richard Hooker, whose understanding of mystical participation in Christ through the sacraments grounded a renewed Anglican theology of liturgical offering. Music became something which can be offered to God the Father as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, united with the reality of Christ’s sacrifice. Shepherd shows how Hooker developed a theological metaphysics of music: ‘the soul itself by nature is, or has in it in harmony’, wrote Hooker; it is ‘that very part of man which is most divine’ and transports us in ecstasy to ‘heavenly joy’ (pp. 136–136). According to Lancelot Andrewes, the music of King David did ‘teach men how to keep themselves in tune’ (p. 154); and John Buckeridge declared that ‘true religion is no way a gargleism only, to wash the tongue and mouth, to speak good words; it must root in the heart and then fructify in the hand, else it will not cleanse the whole man’ (p. 163). The whole self – body and soul – was invited to participate in divine worship, transformed and deified by the liturgical reality of Christ’s presence. Christ is born, wrote John Donne, and it is ‘by sounding that string in your ears, become we musicum carmen, true musick, true harmony, true peace to you’ (p. 190).

A recurring theme of the book is Anglican engagement with Patristic sources, most notably Basil the Great on the Psalms (curiously, Basil is listed twice in the index, once as Basil of Caesarea and once as Basilius Magnus). Shepherd is guided by the sources he has selected to what might be described as a Christian-Platonist theology of music. Through liturgical worship, the Christian is ‘brought into contact with the substance of the divine life and, in the language of the patristic writers, divinized’ (p. 1). At the end of the book, Shepherd draws on the work of the Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, to illuminate the Anglican musico-theological position he has expounded:

Given this theological understanding of music, it is perhaps curious that Shepherd does not discuss the broader and deeper development of distinctively Anglican Christian-Platonism in the seventeenth century. I had anticipated a discussion of the Cambridge Platonists on music, but found none; this is a shame because they fall within the period discussed and indicate the existence of a wider intellectual scheme potentially important to the overall theme of the book. Consider the example of Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), an Anglican writer who discerned how the ‘Mind of a Rational and Intellectual Being’ could be ‘ravished and Enthusiastically transported’ through the contemplation of cosmic harmony, ‘and, of its own accord, dance to the Pipe of Pan, Nature’s Intellectual Musick and Harmony’ (The True Intellectual System of the Universe, IV.II.15). Consider also Henry More (1614–1687) on Pythagorean musical rapture in his Platonick Song of the Soul and Defence of the Threefold Cabbala. These seventeenth-century examples point to the existence of an Anglican mysticism of music; it is something of a shame that Shepherd does not bring it into his discussion, as I am sure it would have added something important, viz., a developed account of pansacramental ontology in which intellect and emotion are harmonized.

This is a good book which deserves the attention of clergy, church musicians, and those interested in Anglican spirituality in the English tradition.