In an essay (1) published in the volume "Open to Judgement", the Archbishop-elect of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, described his revered predecessor Michael Ramsey, as a "passionate Anglican". The expression might give rise to some astonishment, even on the part of many Anglicans, for Anglicanism is not a phenomenon with which passion is readily associated. A British sovereign may (or indeed may not) (2) have died in its defence in the middle of the 17th century, and one or two rare spirits like the 19th century writer George Borrow may have expressed more than ordinary enthusiasm for the Anglican Church, when wandering through the craggy mountains of Welsh Protestantism with an earnest zeal to convert the sceptical inhabitants to "the true church". But in general Anglicanism is associated with a kind of reserved and sober moderation, in which passion is an uneasy and at times downright unwelcome intruder. That great 18th century Anglican, Dr Johnson, is said to have remarked of enthusiasm that it is "a very dreadful thing". Some people might find in this a kind of epitome of Anglicanism, sober, understated, sensible and above all free from passion. The stereotypical Anglican, an image carried to the farthest corners of the world in the 19th century by British colonialism, is of a kindly, benevolent and perhaps rather complacent white person, charitable (within limits), tolerant (within limits), little concerned with theological nicety; much concerned with the social value of religious belief and practice, and loyal (of course) to the Crown.

If such a stereotype ever had real validity (and there is considerable reason to question even that), it is very improbable that it corresponds today to anything more than a tiny and dwindling minority of actual Anglicans. Even in the late 18th century world when the Church of England stood almost alone in representing a kind of semi-rational Christian moderation in the world of zelotry which was beginning to return, after a historic pause, to both Catholic and Protestant causes, it was probably not applicable to more than a small hierarchy of the church's spiritual and intellectual leadership. But since those days Anglicanism has undergone a massive transformation which has left it, in many ways like Britain itself, in a strange and contradictory tension between an ill-defined modern vocation and a history and tradition much subject to dispute.

In the first place, we have to remember that in speaking about Anglicanism in the 21st century we are no longer talking about that characteristic English phenomenon which made it so easily definable and identifiable until well into the 19th. In the present global Christian statistics, there are a total of a little less than 78 million people in all parts of the world whose religious identity is defined as "membership of the Anglican Communion". Of these, 26 million (a high proportion of them purely nominal) are to be found in Great Britain (not only England, of course, since there are Anglican minorities in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland); 2.4 million in the Episcopal Church of the USA, about 5 million in the former British Dominions (dominated by white majorities of British origin), and an astonishing 35 million in the African continent. The remaining 10 million or so are scattered throughout the countries of Asia, Latin America and the Indian sub-continent..

It must be obvious, therefore, that Anglicanism must be viewed today as a global phenomenon; numerically small in comparison with the vast ranks of Roman Catholics or Moslems, but not inconsiderable, even so, in overall terms, and often with an influence in the moral and cultural spheres well beyond their limited numbers. To give some kind of definition and common image to this sizeable community of believers is not easy; under any circumstances it would be difficult, but given the peculiarly elusive character of Anglicanism, it is exceptionally so. No central point of reference such as that represented by the Papacy exists in the Anglican Church, nor is it bound together by a commonly shared biblicism to which all else must be referred. Although it is not true that, as is sometimes said, "anything goes" under the umbrella of Anglicanism, it is a fact that quite a sizeable number of its adherents act as if this were so, and a few may even believe it. Historically, Anglicanism has a distinctive and at times surprisingly severe series of formularies, beginning with the notorious "Thirty-nine Articles" of Elizabeth I's reign, and running through an impressive accumulated body of Canon Law and doctrinal interpretation right into the twentieth century. The fact is, though, that in most cases of doubt and dispute, Anglicans are traditionally reluctant to resort to legalistic or dogmatic solutions, and usually react negatively to the over-assertion of the undoubted powers that their bishops enjoy. What is achieved in the way of order is most often achieved by way of compromise and informal negotiation. This is perhaps less true of the American Episcopal Church, which follows the national trend in having a greater recourse to (and perhaps enjoyment of) legal wrangling; however, the ethos of Anglicanism in general shies away from that juridical rigidity which is the product of doctrinal dogmatism, and favours the empirical route, in this as in most things.

Organisationally, the Communion is best described as a 'family'. There are in all 37 Provinces, and each of these is virtually self-governing, with its own regulations, its own archbishop and bishops, and its own very strong local traditions, liturgical, theological and moral. The provinces do have a kind of "Summit" body, the decennial "Lambeth Conferences", when primates and other representatives of the local churches meet and deliberate on issues of common concern and current importance; however, the Conference has no authority or machinery to impose its decisions on provinces which dissent, as was clearly seen at the last (1998) Lambeth Conference over issues such as the ordination of women and the status of homosexuals in the ecclesiastical community. Attempts made, especially in the "Anglican Consultative Council" which has a wider span of representation, to produce a "common mind" of Anglican thinking on major social and moral issues, have had very limited success.

The Anglican Church has no "head" in the sense that the Roman Catholic Church does; the Archbishop of Canterbury is certainly no "Anglican Pope" - and most of the holders of the throne of Canterbury, (including the present Archbishop-elect), have been careful and specific in rejecting any such role. The Archbishop is the Primate of the whole Church in England (only) and the "Primus inter pares" (a characteristically Anglican paradox) as far as the rest of the Communion is concerned. He presides over the Consultative Council and is the "final point of appeal" in matters which continue to defy resolution, but he does not possess overall authority, and cannot rule for other provinces on his own initiative. In no way can Canterbury be seen as a small reflection of Rome in terms of either doctrinal finality or disciplinary practice.

Much confusion, too, exists about the role of the British sovereign in the Anglican Communion, and the Italian press in particular ritually reproduces two major errors about this, describing the Queen as "Head of the Anglican Church". This she certainly is not. In fact the title of the British Sovereign is "Supreme Governor of the Church in England" and that is the simple limit of the role played by this authority. Elizabeth I rejected, specifically, the arrogant title of "Head" of the Church assumed by her autocratic parent, pointing out that the Church "had but one head on earth as in heaven, and that is Jesus Christ". She ascribed to herself, instead, the role of "governor" of the Church in her realms, which then included Ireland; subsequently even that role has shrunk, since the Church of Ireland ceased to be a state church in the 19th century, and so did the Church in Wales in 1922, leaving the British Monarch with sole governing authority over the Church in England. The situation in Scotland, unaffected by Elizabeth's legislation, of course, is more complex; there by inheritance from their Scots forebears, the British rulers have a wary kind of governorship of the Church, which, however, in Scotland is not Anglican but Presbyterian. In no other part of the Anglican Communion, even in the few surviving loyalist areas (notably Canada) does the British sovereign have any direct or effective authority over the church whatsoever, and the churches of the Anglican Communion in all countries are subject to the laws governing religious tolerance and practice prevailing in their homelands. If some isolated pockets of the church remain fiercely loyalist and royalist, it would be true to say that the far more common ethos is one of cautious liberalism, and in some specific areas, the church has acquired a radical and socially pugnacious character far removed from the middle-class comfort of its old image. This is not without its critics; indeed some theologians, notably Edward Norman of Cambridge, have accused the Anglican Church of selling out its vital Christian heritage in exchange for a loose adherence to western humanism, thereby sacrificing its vocation to contemporary expediency. The debate continues, but I think it would be true to say that in general terms, and despite a recent revival in evangelical fervour in some quarters, the liberal ethos still prevails.

Its character as a loose federation, with each element tending to go its own way and with no "politically" uniting factor, makes it particularly difficult to give any sort of an accurate description of this "Anglican ethos". And yet the fact is that an Anglican travelling from London to Lagos, from Calcutta to Cape Town, from Sydney to San Francisco, could always find - sometimes perhaps after a somewhat exacting search - a Church where she or he would "belong", where the services would be more or less recognisable and intelligible, (though with considerable local variations) and where the clergy would enjoy an immediately recognisable status quite distinct from either the Catholic priest or the Protestant minister. The most obvious factor bringing all this together is, naturally, the language; although Anglicanism in Africa in particular has made great efforts in recent decades to "naturalise" the church, including the use of local languages and dialects in worship, English does remain a binding link for the whole communion, and at least in major centres, some churches holding some services in English can usually be found. Strangely enough, in fact, the Anglican Communion has become more genuinely "catholic" in this respect than the Roman Church, since the linguistic bond of Latin disappeared from that Church's public worship. A further bond uniting world-wide Anglicans is the use of one version or another of the basic liturgy of the Anglican Church, the "Book of Common Prayer". Some Anglicans today lament the passing of the standard and single liturgy that they believe (not quite accurately) was once the universal usage of the church, but despite this nostalgia, the fact remains that the shape and form, if not the words, of the Eucharist, the central act of worship, remain unchanged and immediately recognisable in whatever linguistic and cultural environment one happens to find oneself.

Over and beyond the obvious cultural factors (and they do weigh heavily) that bind Anglicans together as a result of shared history, language and liturgy, what can be said to be the distinctive ethos of Anglicanism, that still attracts not only intellectuals and spiritual giants but, apparently, millions of ordinary and unsophisticated people to find their home in it, in a world which increasingly looks on all religious belief and practice with scepticism or worse? A church which, moreover, lacks all the massive glamour, the powerful certainties and stagy assertions of rectitude possessed by Rome, and the immediate dynamism of the simple, direct and unchallengeable reassurance of biblical fundamentalism? Certainly it is not the church's doctrinal and philosophical stance; Anglican empiricism may in some ways be a philosophical statement in itself, but the church as an institution has always shied away from commitment to rigorous philosophical analysis or even sharp doctrinal definition, and while it is just possible to imagine the discussion of deconstruction which appeared in Issue 72 of this magazine taking place between theology dons in an Oxford or Cambridge common-room, it is extremely unlikely to be the material of discussion at a Lambeth conference or any kind of gathering of ordinary educated Anglicans. The Church and its tradition may have taken some of the basis of its attitude and thinking from the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement, elements of both of which still play some part in conditioning the writing and teaching of Anglican leaders today, but one will search in vain for the adoption of any systematic and clearly definable "school of thought" at the heart of Anglicanism. This strong aversion to definition has often been mocked, and with some justice, since at worst it produces that "wooliness" of which the church is so often accused; however, it should also be remembered that in the 19th century it saved Anglicanism from the disastrous intellectual morass into which Pius IX led the Roman Church by his blanket condemnation of almost all forms of progressive thought in the infamous 'Syllabus of Errors'. It even enabled the Church, (despite the fatuities of the then Bishop of Oxford in his debate with Huxley), to respond more swiftly than other Christian bodies to the challenge of Darwinian thought and to arrive at a saner and more credible approach to the relationship between faith and biological and anthropological science - still, even today, a stumbling-block for protestant fundamentalists, and an area on which even the Roman church continues to show an extraordinary and perplexing ambiguity. And the diffidence towards fine theological and philosophical dispute does not mean that the Anglican Church has lacked, or lacks today, a varied and in some ways remarkable intellectual life. For instance, combination of this intellectual openness and a deep and lasting tradition of sober piety brought about a remarkable revival and flowering of Anglican intellectual life in the 1930s and 40s, when among many others, T.S.Eliot (before his 'conversion'), W.H.Auden, C.S.Lewis, and the almost forgotten but brilliant Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple represented a revival in the kind of intellectual, imaginative and spiritual vigour which gives a church a particular stamp in a given age. It is no accident that Eliot entitled the last, and perhaps most significant, of his "Four Quartets" after Little Gidding, the quiet country house where the first moves to revive monastic spirituality in the Anglican church were made in the later 17th century. He wrote:

…….You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity,
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid, and prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

Here, I find somewhat elusively, a momentary glimpse of that inner voice of Anglicanism, combining the "prayer beyond words" with the spiritual safety of "proven validity", both of which seem to play their role in forming a basic Anglican spirituality, differing in kind and character from the rigours of Roman mysticism and the sentimental brutalities of protestant pietism. In terms of a broader appeal, one can still find it affecting a large number, including many of the unchurched, in a feeling of timelessness and quietude, still to be found, despite the crowds and mindless gawping, in the great Anglican cathedrals when they are used as they were meant to be for a round of worship, characterised by an aesthetic and ethereal quality far removed from the tawdriness and vulgarity found elsewhere. There is no doubt that this ethos at its best has an appeal which can act as an antidote to both intellectual and spiritual malaise - though sceptics would point immediately to its opiate character.

It might be thought from this that Anglicanism is an elitist cult, surviving largely to provide solace and escape for the dwindling number of intellectuals and aesthetes who still seek some kind of spiritual dimension to life, and seek it more in the realm of the imagination and the mystical than in the ruthless rigour of philosophical analysis . It may, indeed, have this dimension in places and at times, but we always have to keep in mind those 78 million members, most of whom are certainly not engaged in this kind of a search, and yet who nevertheless find in the contradictions and anomalies which anyone can easily point out, a spiritual home, which offers them an opening to grace and fulfilment denied them by the more exclusive and rigorist versions of Christianity, and apparently does not leave them unsatisfied at the challenges of militant secularism. To return to the words of the Archbishop-elect once again, writing of the vocation of Anglicanism:

"to be no less committed to the riches and glory of God's dealings with us in Christ for being able to bear patiently with all those asking angrily how these connected with the secular confusions of our time. There would be no glib and point-scoring riposte, nor would there be a despairing abandonment to that anger and confusion, only a steady witness to the open door in heaven, shown in a life that spoke of open doors: the opening to ecumenism; the deep commitment to reconciliation with the (Protestant) Free Churches as well as the 'historic' communions of eastern and western Europe; the opening up to a share in painful theological debate…. The opening up to the experience of the oppressed, especially where (Michael Ramsey's) denunciation of the tyrannies of white Rhodesia and South Africa earned him the contempt and hostility of the unthinking Right…." (3)

The new archbishop's high vision of a Church with a vocation as a reconciler, and open door to doubt and inquiry and a bridge not only between seemingly opposed Christian traditions but a ready vehicle for dialogue between faiths, uniquely placed as it is with footholds in all the main Moslem, Hindu and Buddhist cultures, is certainly a demanding one. There is something of a reverse trend to be found, in England and elsewhere. On the one hand the new fundamentalist fervour which has crept in in certain quarters views the open door with deep suspicion and seeks to identify the Anglican Church with the kind of 'go-it-alone' Protestantism that inspires the religious Right in the USA; on the other hand, in several areas of the Communion where the Catholic tradition in Anglicanism is dominant, there is concern and at times strong reaction at 'desertion' or 'betrayal' of long-established orthodoxies, especially in the matter of the ordination of women. The Anglican Church faces three quite distinct possibilities: it can rise to the vision of its new archbishop and rediscover its distinctiveness and role in a far broader context than that assigned to it by history; it can break up into three or more factions, warring with each other, and all doomed in one way or another to vanish as separate entities, or it can muddle along indecisively until it dwindles away through lack of conviction and vocation. There is no knowing at the moment which of these fates actually lies in wait, but there can be no doubt that this century will witness some sort of a transformation greater than any that has taken place in its past. "Part of choice and commitment is the death of some hopes and projects - a death to be accepted, because it is the death of that infantile aspiration to omnipotence which longs to live without boundaries, without human, finite identity. A death to be welcomed; yet recognised by us for what it is, a tragic thing (in the strictest sense) that can only feel - most of the time - like a diminution of (our) reality and (our) freedom." (4)

1. Rowan Williams: Open to Judgement - sermons and addresses. D.L.T., London, 1994. p.224 Back
2. There is, of course, great debate as to whether Charles I did or did not "die for the Anglican Church". The ambiguity of much of his behaviour, and the fact that at various times he toyed with the idea of returning the British monarchy to the Roman fold, call into question the real nature of his adherence to Anglicanism; it may well have been for him mainly an assertion of order and religious conformity in opposition to the growing anarchy of British Protestantism, rather than a deep allegiance to its ethos and beliefs. Back
3. Ibid. Back
4. Ibid, p.183 Back to top

This article was written for publication, in Italian translation, in the magazine "Lettera Internazionale", edited by Federico Cohen. It was therefore intended mainly for an Italian-speaking public with limited knowledge of Anglicanism, and it was meant to be a contribution to a running series of discussions in the magazine on the state of religious belief and practice today. Although it may have some general interest, therefore, I did not intend it to be a kind of "Anglican Manifesto" for our own Church, and I realise that there are many things that would need expanding, modifying or developing in a different context.

Brian Williams,
Rome, December 2002