THE
HIGH CHURCH TRADITION

by

G. W. O. ADDLESHAW, M.A., B.D.

Chapter 3

EDIFICATION

The celebrated principle of edification, ‘whereunto’, as the Prayer Book says, ‘all things done in the Church (as the Apostle teacheth) ought to be referred’, was one of which our forefathers regarded as of vital importance in liturgical worship. Modern writers on liturgy dislike the phrase, and the emphasis laid on it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been the subject of considerable criticism. It is said that the principle makes the liturgy more concerned with man’s moral and mental uplift, the improvement of the congregation than the worship of God. One modern writer, in an important article in Laudate on the relationship between the Prayer Book and the Liturgical Movement, speaks of the Prayer Book as displaying ‘a manward movement intent first of all on the edification of the worshipping individual, and even so over-emphasizing words at the expense of the whole make-up of man’. [Laudate, Vol. XVI, p. 13.] If this is true, Anglican liturgical thought becomes fundamentally anthropocentric, and our claim to possess a liturgy in the technical sense of the word is made very questionable.

Nor can it be denied that a number of weighty arguments can be brought up in support of this view of Anglican worship. The lengthy readings from scripture, and the exhortations which form a large part of the Prayer Book rite, seem to lay a disproportionate emphasis on instruction. The modern craze for devising services which will attract nominal Christians encourages the idea that the first object of divine worship is something to do with man and his needs; while the unfortunate habit prevalent amongst Anglican clergy and laity, of judging every service by whether it has been helpful and uplifting would seem to give the whole case away.

The manward attitude to worship can be fully accounted for by the infiltration of alien elements into the thought of the church in modern times. It need not necessarily be due to an inherently false idea of worship held in the Church of England since the Reformation. When we turn to the explanations of the principle of edification given by the classical liturgists, we find three things which go a long way to show that the modern criticism of the word is misplaced when it is leveled at the Anglicanism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

First Thorndike, in discussing Saint Paul’s rule ‘let all things be done unto diefying’ (1 Cor. 14:26), expressly says that it is wrong to limit the word ‘edification’ to mental improvement, what he calls ‘the information of the mind and understanding in matters of religion belonging to knowledge’. To him edification covers ‘whatsoever is a fit means to train and guide us in the way of godliness’. [Works, I, p. 222.] His distinction between what informs the mind and what leads us in the way of godliness is not altogether clear. Light is thrown on the matter by Beveridge; like Thorndike he says it is a mistake to speak of men being edified only by what they hear; the word includes everything which makes men more holy and more perfect, more like to God than they were before until they come ‘unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’; and he quotes in this connection Ephesians 4:12-13. [Works, VI, pp. 369-70.] To him edification when applied to the liturgy means something far more than mental or moral uplift; it is the building up of the whole personality in Christ, the development of the process of sanctification, begun in us at our baptism and which ends at the beatific vision.

Secondly, this conception of the term edification, which is far deeper than the sense usually attached to it by modern critics of the Prayer Book, is never by our classical liturgists treated in isolation apart from the main end of the liturgy, the glory of God. A liturgy must help to build up the personality of the faithful in Christ, not because this is the main end of the liturgy, but because unless the liturgy does edify or help and lead men to live the life presupposed by the liturgy, it will never fulfil its primary function of being something offered in worship to God. Accordingly Comber in the opening sentences of the introduction to his great work, speaks of divine worship, with an acknowledgment to Augustine, as having two principal ends: ‘the glory of Him that is worshipped, and the benefit of the worshippers’. [op. cit., Preface.] A little later he speaks of public prayer as doing two things, expressing and advancing God’s glory and tending to man’s good. Jebb echoing this tradition describes the two great objects sought by the daily offices as the glory of God and the edification of man. [op. cit., p. 186.] A grave injustice is done to the seventeenth-century liturgists unless we remember the intimate connection in their minds between edification and the real purpose of the liturgy, the worship of God. They never think of edification apart from the latter.

Thirdly, even the most ardent admirers of the liturgy as an act of worship must admit that it is something temporal and will cease with this world. The moments of the highest ecstasy which it affords here on earth are but a faint foretaste of that which belongs to the eternal liturgy of heaven. The earthly liturgy can never be an end in itself; when compared with that of heaven it must become a means to an end. This thought lies behind Beveridge’s remark that a service is edifying when it sends us home wiser and better men than when we entered the church. On the face of it this and other similar remarks scattered through the writings of the period appear to give the whole case away; liturgy is nothing more than a kind of askesis. But to Beveridge, the liturgy must not only deify so as to be a fit vehicle for the praises of the Church Militant; his mind is filled with the glory of the beatific vision, and a liturgy that deifies trains us for the worship of heaven. The liturgy must edify and lead us from strength to strength, from one degree of grace to another ‘until at length we arrive at glory and perfection in the highest heavens where we shall spend eternity itself in praising and adoring the most high God’. [Works, VI, p. 398.] The same thought comes out in a sermon of the middle of the last century, preached by James Skinner, the great moral theologian, at an English Church Union festival. ‘Edifying’, he says, ‘the worship of God must be. But it is edifying in the real sense; it is for the edification or building up of souls through their subjugation to the obedience, and their adaptation to the blessed harmonies of heaven.’ [A Plea for the Threatened Ritual of the Church of England, 1865, p. 16.]

The importance attached by the seventeenth-century liturgists to the question of edification was due to a deep-seated sense that worship must be real. They felt that the liturgy was nothing apart from the Church; unless the truths which it expressed were being carried out in the life of the Church, it was nothing but a formality, a sham. They realized that it was hard for the ordinary man to worship, let alone live the kind of life presupposed by the liturgy. The principle of edification means that the liturgy, if it is to be the prayer of the Church, must be something which will help the average man to worship as a member of the Church, and inspire him to lead a life which is true to the ideals of the liturgy, so that he may attain his destiny as a child of God. Coleridge calls the liturgy ‘a grand composition of devotional music, gradually attuning, preparing, animating, and working up, the feelings of men to public and common prayer, and thanks and glory-giving.’ [op. cit., I, p. 27.]

On the principle that a liturgy must edify, the school justify the large part played in the Prayer Book by the scriptural passages and exhortations which modern critics declare make the book an anthropocentric production. In their view the liturgy will never lead men to worship God in the way it demands unless it instructs. Christian worship and the Christian life are rooted in divine truth which man must appropriate and make his own. Woodd says that it is impossible for man to glorify God unless he is instructed; he accordingly describes the liturgy as ‘a standing Christian sermon’ [The Excellence of the Liturgy, 1810, p. 4], ‘a summary of our most holy religion’. He speaks of it setting before us great Christian truths: ‘the character of God whom we worship; the state of man as transgressor of the divine law; the provision of the everlasting gospel for his redemption; the pardoned penitent drawing nigh to his reconciled Father’. [Ibid., p. 10.] But the instructional side of the liturgy is not its main end; to Woodd the way in which the liturgy proclaims eternal truth makes it what he calls ‘an exercise of rational, pure and exalted devotion’. [Ibid., p. 18.] In his veneration for Christian truth he would not have regarded the liturgy as a fit medium for worship at all, unless the truth radiated from every page. The classical liturgists found nothing extraordinary in the passages from scripture and the exhortations in which the Prayer Book abounds; for they had a deep-rooted conviction that catholic worship depends on the catholic faith.

The seventeenth-century liturgists were constantly called upon to defend the ceremonial, which starting in Andrewes’s chapel finally became customary in the churches under their influence: the altar arrangements, the use of lighted candles, incense, copes, the gestures adopted by clergy and laity at the liturgy. Their defence is a commentary on Cranmer’s Of Ceremonies in the Prayer Book.

They argued that man is not only instructed by what he hears; he can learn through other bodily senses. To Thorndike [Works, I, pp. 300-7; cf. Hooker: Ecclesiastical Polity, IV, I; Cosin: Works, V, pp. 14-15], who lays special emphasis on this point, material things are a powerful means of leading men in the way of godliness. A dignified and solemn ceremonial proclaims the majesty and holiness of God; the beauty of disciplined and ordered actions reflects a beauty that is eternal; the priestly vestments by their very difference from the clothes of ordinary life arouse in the mind an awe and reverence for divine things.

But ceremonial does something more than edify by what it teaches. The unity of man’s nature, the interaction of body and spirit, give to all liturgical actions a peculiar importance. Bodily actions become a real help to worship and make it easier for the faithful to take their full share in the service. It was a grasp of this unity which made the seventeenth-century liturgists lay emphasis on such ceremonies as kneeling for communion, bowing to the altar and at the name of Jesus, turning to the east for the Gospel and Creed. Ceremonial became a valuable means of teaching this unity in man’s nature, in the face of the manichean conception of the body and material things which Puritanism was engaged in propagating.

The presence in the liturgy of bodily actions proclaims that it is the whole of man’s nature, body and soul, which is to be offered to God, and that there is no part of man’s life which cannot be redeemed. In picturesque English Andrewes stresses this point in reference to the irreverent Puritan habit of refusing either to remove a hat or kneel in church. ‘If He breathed into us our soul, but framed not our body (but some other did that), neither bow your knee nor uncover your head, but keep on your hats and sit even as you do hardly. But if He hath framed that body of yours, and every member of it, let Him have the honour both of head and knee, and every member else.’ He goes on to point out that if our worship is inward only, ‘with our hearts and not our hats’, we are not worshipping God with the whole of our being. Ceremonial brings the whole man in worship to God. It is a logical consequence of the Incarnation. ‘Christ hath now a body’, as Andrewes says, ‘for which, to do Him worship with our bodies’. [Sermons, I, pp. 263-4; cf. Beveridge: Works, VI, pp. 391-2.]

The seventeenth-century liturgists are aware of certain dangers to which ceremonial is prone and which can prevent it serving the purpose for which, as they held, it was intended: the teaching of divine truth, the leading of men to worship with their souls and bodies. It can fail to teach divine truth, and the message it is meant to convey become obscured by over-elaboration. The elaboration can reach such a point that the church is turned into a theatre, the congregation is distracted and is no longer able to take its share in the service. Often the love of ceremonial for its own sake will mean the introduction of things which convey an erroneous impression of Christian truth and are unbecoming to the worship of God. [Thorndike, Works, I, p. 307; cf. Brett: A Collection of the Principal Liturgies, ed. 1838, pp. 395-6.] Since they were convinced that later medieval ceremonial had fallen into these errors, they felt that the Church had done right in discarding so much of it at the Reformation. The following quotation from Bishop Bull is a restrained and balanced statement of their attitude towards ceremonial, both what was abolished and what was retained. The Church, he says, ‘hath also shaken off ... that intolerable yoke of ceremonies, many of which were perfectly insignificant and ridiculous, some directly sinful, and in their number in the whole so great, as to require that attention of mind, which ought to be employed about more weighty and important matters, yet retaining still (to shew that she was not over nice and scrupulous) some few ceremonies, that had on them the stamp of venerable antiquity, or otherwise recommended themselves by their decency and fitness’. [Works, II, p. 210.] Unless ceremonial comes up to these standards, it can never play its proper part in the liturgy: expressing the truths of the Gospel through material things, helping to build up the faithful in the likeness of Christ, and enabling them to offer in worship to God the whole of their humanity.

They also use the principle of edification to justify the adoption of a vernacular liturgy. It is interesting to find that the saner of our seventeenth-century theologians have little theological objection to the Latin rite. Field in his great work on the Church, gives one of the best rationales of the canon of the Latin Mass in the English language. Rightly understood, he maintains, there is nothing in it ‘contrary to the rule of faith, and the profession of the protestant churches’. [Of the Government of the Church, III, Appendix.] The English Church discarded it at the Reformation for two reasons. The later Middle Ages had wrongly interpreted it and overloaded it with a ceremonial which conveyed erroneous ideas of the Christian faith; it was in a language which the ordinary laity could not understand. They were no longer able to take any part in it; they stood round as onlookers while the priest did something by himself at the altar.

But the liturgy, if it is to be the worship of the whole Church, must be something in which the individual can join and take his part. His share in a corporate act of worship will be very little if he cannot understand a word of what is going on. Such a service, the seventeenth-century liturgists would have said, cannot edify or lead men to worship. On this ground they justified the adoption of a vernacular liturgy at the Reformation, one which would enable each individual to take his due and proper part in the worship of God as a member of Christ’s mystical body.

The question of edification, in the sense adopted by this school, is one of prime importance in liturgical matters. Modern liturgists have frequently been so overcome by the beauty or antiquity of a rite that they have never bothered to consider whether the rite in question is one in which the ordinary Christian can join as a worshipping member of the Church. They forget that he probably has little sense of the peculiar beauty of the liturgy or its history. Living a very ordinary life in the world and up against constant difficulties in practising his religion, it is about as much as he can do to keep to the Faith; when he comes to church, he wants to be able to join in the service. From the point of view of structure, aesthetics, or doctrine, a rite may be quite perfect; but it may be one in which the ordinary Christian, whose life prevents him acquiring the necessary cultural background, can never be more than a spectator. The very perfection of the rite can prevent him entering into its full meaning.

It is the merit of the seventeenth-century liturgists that they realized this problem, the problem of how the liturgy while remaining the act of the whole body, being one and the same wherever it is offered, and bearing the impress of continuity downward from the primitive church, can be something in which the ordinary Christian can share. They would have said that unless a liturgy was something which helped the ordinary man to worship, it was not fulfilling its proper function as the prayer of the Church. Their treatment of the principle of edification was the answer they gave to this problem. It is a problem which has to be faced by every generation of Christians who take liturgy seriously; it is one which the Liturgical Movement is facing today. But the Liturgical Movement did not first raise the problem; they are merely continuing the work of the seventeenth-century liturgists.

Obviously the principle of edification is open to misuse and misunderstanding, especially amongst such inveterate Pelagians as the English. In the hands of the seventeenth-century liturgists the principle was safe. They expounded it with a deep sense of the liturgy as something offered by the whole Church to the glory of God. In fact the principle is only intelligible against such a background. It is bound up with a magnificent conception of God as truth, and of His wanting the whole of man’s humanity to be surrendered in obedience to Him. Modern Anglicanism has forgotten the theological background of those who developed the principle; and in doing so it has signally failed to grasp what they intended it to mean. The principle has been made to justify the shifting of the emphasis of the service on to the thoughts and feelings of the worshipper. But this is not the classical meaning of edification, the meaning it has in Anglican liturgical thought; a liturgy edifies, so our forefathers taught, when it leads the worshipper to lose himself more easily in all its movements and actions, to forget self in the glory of Catholic worship.

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