The fracturing church

The two decades before the Civil War (1642-1649) were a time of multiple religious views in England. The Church of England had been increasingly Calvinistic in its doctrine and practices since the turn of the 17th century. With Archbishop William Laud (1633-1645) this changed. Calvinist doctrine and worship were challenged by Laud’s Arminianism.

Arminianism was nothing new in England. Since the Reformation there had been a minority of dissenters in England, generally called Lutherans, who did not hold Calvinist doctrine; by Laud’s time they had been given a name Arminian after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (d. 1609). The political power needed to alter the course for Arminians came with the succession of Charles I (1625-1649), and the final change occurred with Archbishop Laud. Laud started to reform the Church according to Arminian ideas.

Despite differences in doctrine and worship between Calvinists and Arminians, the Church remained fairly united. The controversy between the two sides was expressed mainly in the political field. In Parliament, the question was among other things about the governing of the Church, which also created factions among the Calvinists who were now called Puritans by the Laudian side. This in part led to the Civil War, when for a while Calvinism was once again dominant.

However, a growing number of people were leaving the Church and forming their own separate congregations, at first in secret and later more openly. One option was offered from the early 1640s onward by the Baptists. Operating in England in two different and rivalling groups, the Particular Baptists and the General Baptists, they gained growing support. Both groups were essentially Calvinist in their doctrine, but General Baptists rejected the orthodox Calvinist view that Christ died to save only the pre-Elected few for the belief in the potential of all to be saved, thus offering a real alternative to Puritanism.

Dissatisfaction with existing forms of worship drove people into religious seeking. Seekers had tried all existing forms of worship within the Church, but had not found what they were looking for. During the Civil War, when official control was looser, religious seeking was very common throughout the country, but especially in the North. Seekers would form loose congregations or wander from group to group, trying to find solutions to their religious troubles.

The multitude of groups with the same background meant that actual differences between sects were not always obvious. Some differences diminished or disappeared as people moved from one sect to another or when groups merged together. On the other hand, the members of the sects came from various social backgrounds and had different political interests and attitudes, making it difficult to establish coherence within a sect.

Consequently, it was not always easy for people outside the sects to distinguish the different groups. The two groups of English Baptists, for instance, differed in their doctrine and their church ordinances, but most contemporaries failed to recognise the distinction. Thus the sects were thought to be the same and were treated as such, especially by legislators and Justices.

For the members of a given sect, however, it was essential to define their group as apart from others. Peoples’ souls were at stake, and each group felt it to be their responsibility to show others the right way – their way – to redemption.

A catalogue of the sects in England, 1647.

Apocalyptic expectations

Integral to the Salvation history was the notion of the world as finite. The world would end in some not so remote future date with consequences to the believers. Christians’ expectation of the end directed their understanding of the future. As long as the belief in the Apocalypse remained firm, there could be no other kind of future. Christians were unable to expect anything new from the future. There could be no change. The 16th and 17th centuries even saw an upsurge in apocalyptic thinking, so strong was the belief in the end of the world.

Millennialism, the expectation of Christ’s immediate return and the Millennium that would follow, was especially popular among the small Reformed sects in continental Europe. The tenet had been considered heretical since the St Augustine’s time, so the sects were persecuted, but little by little Millennialism spread among the Calvinists too. Signs were studied that would reveal the exact date of Christ’s return. Especially the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) with pestilence, hunger, and death that followed it – the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – made people believe that the end had come.

Millennialism landed in England a little later than in continental Europe. There it was adopted especially by the Puritans. When Charles I began to persecute them, they identified the Antichrist, one of the signs, with him. The King’s execution in 1649 signalled the start of the end of the world for them. Already before its abolition, there were dozens of independent and separatist sects outside the Church, too,  that waited for the immediate return of Christ. During the Civil War and Interregnum period, some of these became mass movements that actively tried to bring about the end of the world.

Most of these movements died after the Restoration, actively persecuted by the Church, and eventually people ceased from expecting the immediate return of Christ. But the belief that the world would end as told in the Book of Revelation was slow to die. Newton knew that the world would end; he simply postponed it to the 20th century.

It was only after people stopped expecting the end of the world that they could start expecting something new. Until then, there could be no change, and the concept of time would remain static.

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528):
The Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Salvation history and the static concept of time

Christian salvation history was pivotal in upholding the static concept of time well into the early modern period. It is a universal history that covers the entire history of humankind from its beginning to the end, and even beyond. All history was understood to be part of the salvation history, or seen in relation to it. More importantly for the static concept of time, it doesn’t assume, or allow, change.

Salvation history had to be immutable, because it was the story of the salvation of the humankind. Every historical event, as told in the Bible, was an expression of the ongoing battle between good and evil over the souls of humans. The battle is eternal, meaning it is outside time, even though it is fought in the temporal world. Therefore, it is always the same battle. The battle doesn’t evolve or progress, the battle is until it is brought to the climax at the end of time in the Apocalypse. Then the good will finally defeat the evil.

In a similar manner than the past could be consulted for the benefit of the present, in salvation history, the past was given religious meaning in the present. They were interpreted as part of the salvation history. In the early modern period, it was especially popular to look for signs about the approaching end of the world, equally visible in the past.

Even historical events not described in the Bible were given meaning as part of the salvation history, or seen as the signs of the coming end of the world. Reinhart Koselleck uses as an example of such treatment of history The Battle of Alexander at Issus (Alexanderschlacht), a 1529 painting by  Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538), that depicts Alexander the Great defeating the Persian army in 333 B.C.

For us, that signals the start of Hellenism. For Altdorfer and his contemporaries – the commissioner of the painting, Duke William IV of Bavaria, included – “it was one of the few events between the beginning of the world and its end that also prefigured the fall of the Holy Roman Empire.” So the painting is heavy with Christian themes. “Heavenly and cosmic forces were participants in such a battle, expressed as Sun and Moon, powers of Light and Darkness” making the painting an “archetype of the final struggle between Christ and Antichrist.” All that in one painting.

What seems anachronistic to a modern viewer was of great historical – and salvation historical – importance for the early modern people. And it was the importance of salvation that maintained the static concept of time.

Altdorfer: The Battle of Alexader at Issus

Preaching at the St Paul's Cross

Happy New Year, everyone. I’ll start the year with something lighter – after a fashion: a sermon held by John Donne in 1622 commemorating the Gunpowder Plot. It’s a virtual acoustic model created by the literature and architecture researchers at the North Carolina State University that is meant to demonstrate how the sermon would have sounded from different vantage points within the St Paul’s courtyard.

The sermon is long – for a modern audience, but often Donne’s sermons could take hours – and somewhat difficult to hear. But it’s not the content that I find interesting. It’s the setting. A courtyard filled with people who are milling about, trying to fit in, trying to get as close to the speaker as possible. One couldn’t see properly; one could barely hear a thing. One had to stand through the proceedings, perhaps in direct sunlight even – or rain, as the sermon was held in November. It must have made for an exhausting, uncomfortable experience.

The congregation is politely quiet in this virtual reconstruction, but I seriously doubt they were so at the time. There would have been some commentary from the congregation that the others would have shushed. Scuffles and fights would have erupted, and children would have been crying or making other noises. All the natural sounds of a busy city are absent, iron rims of wheels clacking against cobblestones on the nearby streets for example, as are the birds and the wind. On top of that, St. Paul’s was notorious for the low-lives that filled the cathedral’s galleries. More than likely they wouldn’t have quieted for the sermon but would have continued to sell their wares.

An open air sermon was therefore a challenge for the congregation and for the preacher too. Donne was a popular preacher so he must have handled these occasions well enough. Also, as the virtual model revealed to its creators, the courtyard space allowed sound to reverberate, which amplified the voice of the speaker, making the task a little easier.

I can’t help wondering though, what it must have been like, standing in the middle of a large crowd, delivering a sermon that wasn’t necessarily popular in order to allay fears over the Spanish marriage of Charles I. Was the audience hostile, interrupting the sermon, or were they, as the virtual model suggests, reverent, barely making a sound. For an eight-minute piece, it gives quite a lot of food for imagination.