thread: 2007-02-13 : Exorcism
On 2007-02-23, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
I'm Anglican (Episcopalian) myself. I confess it's rather relaxing to be part of the only major denomination I know of which splintered off from Rome as part of a complex (occasionally cynical) compromise, rather than out of an eruption of uncompromising fervor.
Remember that Henry VIII, cynical bastard that he was, didn't found the Church of England as we know it. As I understand it, he simply tried to exploit rising Protestant-leaning discontent in England to defy the Pope over his remarriage—and over monastic property—and put himself at the head of a national church independent from Rome but otherwise organized on Roman lines. (The French monarchy succeeded at doing something very similar, without taking the step of a formal break with Rome—Cardinal Richeliu of Three Musketeers fame being the best-known example of the successful marriage between the French monarchy and the French Catholic hierarchy).
But Henry VIII couldn't control what he had helped to unleash. His son Edward died young, there was a bitter pro-Roman backlash under his daughter Mary, a pro-Protestant counterbacklash under his other daughter Elizabeth, and finally the extinction of his dynasty (and, with it, of English's move towards royal absolutism on French lines) and the succession of James (James VI of Scotland, James I of England), who seems to be have fairly cynically areligious himself but who had plenty of hardline Protestants of various types in both England and Scotland to deal with, and who commissioned what's now called the King James Bible.
The Anglican Church was created out not only out of compromise, but out of the failure of any religious faction in Britain—Lutherans, Calvinists (e.g. Puritans), Scottish Presbyterians, crypto-Catholics and outright pro-Romans—to prevail and impose its will on the population. The result was, and still is, a church which has deep and troubling internal divisions precisely because it tries to keep its dissenters in the communion rather than expelling them or letting them schism off. (Witness "High Church" vs. "Low Church" in England, or the gay rights controversy in the US Episcopal Church today). There's a tradition of compromise, agreeing to disagree, and (relatively) rational argument—trying to give due weight to all three of "Scripture, Tradition, and Reason"—that is distinctly messy but, in my mind, profoundly healthy.
