How to do things with the Church Fathers: Mary Magdalene and anti-Calvinist court rhetoric in Lancelot Andrewes’s Easter Sermons (1620-22)

ABSTRACT

Mary Magdalene was one of the most controversial Scriptural figures in Post-Reformation England. This article draws attention to a remarkable moment in the early 1620s when Lancelot Andrewes decided to preach on Mary Magdalene not once but three consecutive times. Crucially, he did so during the highest point in the Christian calendar, Easter Sunday, and in the locus classicus of political power, the Royal Court. In so doing, Andrewes deliberately challenged a tradition of Reformed Protestant biblical commentaries which saw Magdalene’s femininity as intimately tied to her inability to trust Christ’s promise that he would rise from the grave. For the first time, I uncover how these three sermons constitute a trilogy (I term them the “Magdalene Triptych”). Moreover, I contextualise them within an ascendent English anti-Calvinist movement which began to weaponize the nascent field of patristic scholarship to specific confessional and political ends.

KEYWORDS:

• Lancelot Andrewes
• England
• sermon studies
• reformation
• patristics

Introduction

The study of patristic reception in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has, in the last couple of decades, undergone something of a scholarly revolution. The editors of the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (LACT) undeniably made a significant contribution to scholarship in identifying numerous patristic allusions made by Andrewes which John Buckeridge’s and William Laud’s XCVI Sermons (1629) had failed to trace.¹ Nevertheless, LACT’s editors had confessional biases which cannot be ignored: for them, Andrewes’s use of the Church Fathers was the hallmark of his status as a latter-day patristic figure who embodied an unchanging “Anglican” spirit within the post-Reformation English church.² In the twentieth-century, T.S. Eliot and Nicholas Lossky while crucial in reassessing Andrewes’s work, nevertheless fundamentally upheld the problematic historiographical assumptions of LACT’s editors when it came to thinking about patristic reception.³ Fortunately, over the last twenty years, this imbalance has been amply redressed. Peter McCullough’s edition of Andrewes’s Selected Sermons and Lectures has identified numerous new patristic sources, as well as setting a new editorial standard for not only Andrewes’s sermons but early modern preaching in general.⁴ Jean-Louis Quantin has complicated the position of the early Church Fathers in English Protestant discourse, showing how patristic allusion was never a neutral act, but was always embedded within a preacher’s wider theological commitments.⁵ Katrin Ettenhuber has drawn from Quantin’s theological work and inaugurated the move to uncover the literary usage of patristic allusion as a resource “for polemical argument and rhetoric” in the aftermath of the Edwardian reforms.⁶ In tandem, valuable work has sketched the contours of English anti-Calvinism which became a prominent force in the 1610s and 1620s. Peter Lake’s coining of the term “avant-garde conformity” was a watershed moment in grouping together the theological impulses and aims of Jacobean anti-Calvinists like Andrewes.⁷ Anthony Milton, meanwhile, has uncovered the natural association which began to develop between anti-Calvinism and patristic authority from the mid-1610s.⁸

Andrewes’s 1620 Easter Sermon has become one of his most closely-analysed works. Its critical status is unsurprising: a highly self-conscious reflection on the nature of Christian redemption, the Easter narrative, is interwoven with what McCullough has cogently identified as a dramatic quality which – in its prosopopoeia and sub-plots – parallels Shakespeare’s late plays Cymbeline, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale.⁹ However, scholarship is yet to position Andrewes’s 1620 Easter Sermon as the first in a triptych which all focus on the Easter account of Mary Magdalene at Christ’s tomb (John 20:11–17) – what I term Andrewes’s “Magdalene triptych”. This article will reveal just how interconnected these three sermons are and, when placed within their context, how they all use their profound debt to patristic sources to further Andrewes’s polemical anti-Calvinism. Specifically, this article will uncover how Andrewes makes a case for Magdalene’s motive – love – which exonerates her from Reformed critiques of her character. Andrewes’s portrayal of Magdalene sharply contradicts John Calvin’s depiction of her as a symbol for the totally depraved believer consumed by superstitious, earthly desires. Andrewes relies on Quintilian’s categories of technical proof, particularly motive (causa), deploying them alongside the Church Fathers throughout the three sermons in order to first vindicate and, then, exemplify Magdalene’s character as one rooted in a profound, if deeply mistaken, love. In so doing, Andrewes not only refutes Calvin’s assessment of her causa but transforms Magdalene into a model for his distinctly anti-Calvinist form of Christianity.

Solaecismus amoris: defending Mary Magdalene’s diligent love

It is difficult to overstate the cultural prominence of the Easter account of Mary Magdalene by Christ’s tomb in early modern England.¹⁰ For one, its place in John’s Gospel made it particularly influential: Paul Cefalu has recently demonstrated how John’s narratives had a centrality in early modern theological discourse due to the attraction of the Gospel’s “manifestly literary qualities”.¹¹ Moreover, Magdalene’s position as the last disciple to leave the tomb and the first to behold the risen Christ formed a natural locus for theological speculation.¹²

The prominence of Magdalene did not, however, mean that she was universally celebrated. For Reformed theologians, Magdalene was first and foremost a figure to be condemned.¹³ John Calvin, in his Commentary on the Gospel of John (1534), provided the starkest expression of this view. Calvin, departing from Augustine’s identification of her “ardent love” as the reason why she alone remained at the tomb, held that Magdalene must have remained with the other women. Moreover, it was not love that kept them there but “sola eas superstitio cum affect carnali” (“it was superstition alone, with carnal feelings”).¹⁴ Calvin argued that while one may be tempted to credit Magdalene with greater perseverance than the male disciples who immediately fled when they saw the empty tomb, “non est quòd magnopere præ illis laudentur” (“that is not instead greatly to be commended”) as the women only remain to “in fletu mani & superuacuo se occupant” (“torment themselves by idle and useless weeping”).¹⁵ In Calvin’s eyes, Magdalene’s desire to see Christ’s dead body is not a poignant expression of love but an obsession with what is “nisi terrestre” (“only earthly”): Magdalene symbolises the totally depraved believer consumed by ignorant superstition.¹⁶ From the 1580s, the English Church saw itself as part of an international Reformed movement, finding unity around Calvin’s works: the English episcopate’s default position was to “appeal to, and defer to, the authority of Calvin as a symbol of Reformed identity”.¹⁷ Such a consensus among English bishops was clearly not an exception when it came to Magdalene: while a pre- and Counter-Reformation saint in the Catholic Church, Magdalene was not in the 1604 Book of Common Prayer’s list of saints.

As Andrewes mounted the pulpit at Whitehall’s Chapel Royal that Easter morning in 1620, he had prepared to preach on a highly provocative text. Not only does John 20:11–17 focus on the contested figure of Magdalene, it also neglects the set Gospel reading for Easter Sunday in the Propers (John 20:1–10): in fact, it begins where the Propers had just ended. Andrewes’s exordium begins with a highly self-conscious appeal to how, “It is Easter Day abroad: And it is so in the Text”.¹⁸ In good Reformed spirit, Andrewes signals his modest desire to follow scripture alone (sola scriptura) and to take Magdalene “as wee find her in the Text”.¹⁹ Andrewes alludes to Luke’s Gospel to define her motive: “Quia dilexit multum, Because shee loved much”; this motive allows Andrewes to craft the ten epigrammatic “characters” of her love (“Amor”) which structure the sermon as a whole.²⁰ With Luke’s scriptural authority, which allows Andrewes to identify the abundance (“multum”) of Magdalene’s love, he returns to John’s account to vividly set the scene. Andrewes does not depart from what the Gospel narrative describes, but he does begin to interpret it through the lens of forensic rhetoric. Specifically, he turns to Quintilian’s categories of technical proof which, in the Institutio Oratoria, play a key part in legal argumentation: “causa tempus locus occasio instrumentum modus et cetera” (“motive, time, place, opportunity, means, method and the like”).²¹ In determining a party’s innocence or guilt, causa (motive) takes its place alongside environmental factors including locus (place), modus (manner) and occasio (occasion). These technical proofs are, according to Quintilian, to be artfully assembled by the orator in order to construct a case on the accused or accuser’s behalf. Andrewes does precisely this for Magdalene, pointing out: her manner (modus) – “stabat juxta” (standing by), her place (locus) – “monumentum” (sepulchre), “A place, where faint love loves not to stand”, the occasion (occasio) – after the Crucifixion, “Stand by Him dead”.²² Only after this point does Andrewes make an appeal to patristic testimony:

and of the true multum of it. Ut prosit nobis ejus stare, ejus plorare, & quaerere (saith Origen) that her standing, her weeping, and seeking, wee may take some good by them. I doubt, ours will fall short. Stay by Him alive, that we can, juxta mensam: but juxta monumentum, who takes up his standing there? And our love, it is dry eyed, it cannot weepe, it is stiffe-joynted, it cannot stoupe to seeke. If it doe, and wee hit not on Him at first, away wee goe, with Peter and John; wee stay it not out with Mary Magdalen²³

Andrewes has already used Luke’s Gospel to incontrovertibly demonstrate Magdalene’s causa, her love. Now, however, Andrewes looks to establish the “multum of it”: its quantity and, by extension, quality. Origen, with the full force of patristic authority, allows Andrewes to point out Magdalene’s three-part modus: “her standing, her weeping, and seeking”. From there, Andrewes is able to make the more daring claim that there is something exemplary in her modus: “wee may take some good by them”. Modus, in Quintilian fashion, reflects Magdalene’s well-intentioned causa. However, Magdalene’s modus is not, in itself, that exceptional as the audience can also: “Stay by Him alive, that we can, juxta mensam: but juxta monumentum, who takes up his standing there”. The paronomasia on “juxta” likens the modus of his audience to that of Magdalene’s only to more sharply reveal how modus is meaningless when not considered alongside locus: it is easy to stand by the altar (mensam), as Andrewes’s congregation does, but to stand alone by Christ’s empty tomb (monumentum) is an altogether different affair.

While Calvin uses Magdalene’s locus – remaining at the tomb – to invalidate her love and expose it as mere superstition, Andrewes uses Magdalene’s location to argue precisely the opposite. Magdalene’s profound love, in fact, reveals what ought to be condemned: the superficial “juxta” of his audience. They can adopt the same modus as Magdalene but their locus manifests the inferiority of their causa: “our love, it is dry eyed, it cannot weepe, it is stiffe-joynted, it cannot stoupe to seeke”. Standing moves into Magdalene’s next modus: to “stoupe to seeke” for Christ’s body in the tomb once more. The “stiffe-joynted” love of his audience not only invokes modus to illustrate his audience’s deficient causa but, with its bodily metaphor, also carries a clear polemical edge. One of the key issues which occupied English theological controversy was that of kneeling for communion. Reformed theologians rejected the act as an example of pre-Reformation practices which created a distance between the sacerdotal office and the laity.²⁴ In 1620, the controversy around kneeling for communion was particularly fresh on the audience’s minds: only three years earlier, James I, as part of his royal visit to Scotland, had made kneeling for communion mandatory, forbidding the previous custom of distributing the host around a table.²⁵ Magdalene’s modus (“stoupe to seeke”) as proof of her genuine causa, love, is interwoven with a polemical anti-Calvinist emphasis on liturgy as a form of modus which promotes and reflects a true love for God.²⁶

In describing Magdalene’s love, Andrewes, must, nevertheless, tackle a significant obstacle: vindicating the quality of her love, he must still confront the fact that it was rooted in doubt. Calvin and other Reformed commentators relished the opportunity to point out that Magdalene’s motives were utterly mistaken: Christ had risen.²⁷ Andrewes turns to Augustine not to deny her error but to unravel it rhetorically:

Non credens suscitatum, credidit sublatum, for want of beliefe He was risen, shee beleeved, He was caried away. Shee erred in so beleeving, there was errour in her love, but there was love in her errour too²⁸

Andrewes’s allusion to Augustine allows him to deploy chiasmus: “there was errour in her love, but there was love in her errour too”. Crucially, the figure of chiasmus, with its aural symmetry, can easily be mistaken for tautology. Here, however, the conventional, Calvinist point “there was errour in her love” is transposed with the subtle but provocative “there was love in her errour too”. In this slight move, Andrewes creates a radical space where works (“love”) and lack of faith (“errour”) can intermingle. Moreover, the preacher’s simultaneous claim that “for wante of beliefe […] shee beleeved” strikingly brings belief and unbelief together, admitting no clear distinction between the two. Such an opening ruptures Calvinist moral theology’s elevation of faith over works. Specifically, Andrewes delivers a blow to the idea of irresistible grace which holds that the elect can never lose God’s grace and, by extension, their faith. Irresistible grace was at the heart of the failure of the recent Synod of Dort (1618–19) which had aimed to end division within the Reformed church between Arminians, who rejected the doctrine, and Calvinists.²⁹ Andrewes had expressed to James I his disagreement with the doctrine but this was such an extreme position that the king had told the prelate to remain silent on the matter.³⁰ Andrewes uses Augustine’s patristic authority to treat the exact subject he had been told to remain silent about: chiasmus allows Andrewes to hold up Magdalene’s love precisely because of the doubt it contains.

The rhetorical opportunity which chiasmus affords is not left here but plays an integral part in the sermon’s progression through Andrewes’s three next characters of love. Ultimately, these culminate in Bernard’s appeal on Mary Magdalene’s behalf: “Domine, propter te est extra se, saith Bernard, Amor extasin patiens”.³¹ Magdalene’s love, the sermon’s personified “Amor”, is mistaken but her despair is what allows her to experience selfless, agonising love: “Amor extasin patiens”. Love’s suffering ecstasy contains the highly evocative “patiens” which equates Magdalene’s state with Christ’s passion – the supreme example of Christian righteousness: Magdalene’s causa (“Amor”) produces an interior passion which mirrors the very Crucifixion which she now mourns. Crucially, without her erroneous love, Bernard’s “patiens” could not be undergone. And, as with Christ, so with Magdalene: without the passion, there can be no resurrection. Magdalene’s love, precisely because it is mistaken, creates the space for Christ’s grace to resurrect her anew.

The intensity of Magdalene’s “patiens” allows Andrewes to explain her temerity in confronting Christ, who has appeared disguised as a gardener. Once more, Andrewes draws on Bernard’s testimony to explain the scene:

But, to Christ shee seems somewhat more harsh, then to the Angels […] But pardon love: as it feares where it needs not, so it suspects oft where it hath no cause. He, or any that comes in her way, hath taken him away, when love is at a losse. But Bernard speakes to Christ for her; Domine, amor quem habebat in Te, & dolor quem habebat de Te, excuse team apud Te, si forte erravit circa Te: That the love she bare to Him, the sorrow shee had for Him, may excuse her with Him, if she were in any error concerning Him, in her saying, Si tu sustulisti³²

Quintilian describes the act of bearing witness as a very powerful form of “nontechnical proof”: while deploying testimony “involve[s] no art”, the words of the witness are so persuasive that “all of the powers of eloquence are nevertheless required to refute them”.³³ Bernard’s prosopopoeia (“speakes to Christ for her”) clearly parallels legal argument: “Domine” (“Lord”), he pleads, Magdalene’s causa “amor quem habebat in Te” (“for the love she had towards you”) will “excuse team apud Te” (“excuse her with you”). Andrewes deploys Bernard as both witness and advocate and, by exploiting his patristic authority, Andrewes crafts artful testimony. Andrewes weaves patristic allusion with his own justification for her, not distinguishing between his paraphrase of Bernard and his final addition: “in her saying, Si tu sustulisti”. Bernard’s testimony is used to redeem the most mistaken comment Magdalene makes in the whole scene, her asking Christ where he has lain his own body: “Si tu sustulisti”. Patristic testimony has allowed Andrewes to elevate this moment of error into her interior “patiens” which her love has sparked. Andrewes does not call his audience to follow the error in Magdalene’s love, but he certainly promotes the love in Magdalene’s error as necessary for the soul’s redemption and regeneration.

Touching on the Fathers: Textual and bodily senses

The Church Fathers were an unavoidable presence in the Jacobean church and court. The study of patristic sources, reputed witnesses to Christian Antiquity, was upheld by all English Protestant divines as a noble and essential pursuit.³⁴ In the absence of a central Papal authority, Jacobean clerics, of varying theological commitments, resorted to the Church Fathers to construct the church’s confessional identity. George Abbot, that titan of moderate episcopal Calvinism, extolled the Church Fathers’s place in the cleric’s theological training, while lamenting that patristic editions could cost the eye-wateringly expensive sum of nine pounds (the value of a pair of oxen).³⁵

From the late 1610s, however, patristic authority began to reveal a “combative exclusivity” with Calvinism, reflecting the English church’s frayed unity.³⁶ The roots of this alliance between patristic allusion and anti-Calvinist rhetoric can be traced back to Isaac Casaubon’s arrival at the English court in 1610. In 1603, the French Reformed Church’s national synod mandated that preachers could no longer quote the Church Fathers due to their appropriation by Catholic controversialists: for Casaubon, however, Christian Antiquity allowed for a return to the state of the Apostolic church. Casaubon’s outrage led him to the English court where, he gushed to his friend Claude Saumaise, “totius Reformationis pars integerrima est in Anglia” (“the soundest part of the Reformation is in England”) where “cum studio ueritatis uiget stuidium Antiquitatis” (“the love of Truth flourishes together with the love of Antiquity”).³⁷ Such praise, from one of Europe’s most celebrated humanist scholars, unsurprisingly, flattered James I. Pivotally, while at the English court, Casaubon became associated with English anti-Calvinism, befriending Adrian Saravia, Andrewes, and John Overall among others.³⁸

As a result, the Jacobean project to self-fashion the English church in the light of Christian Antiquity began to take a distinctly anti-Calvinist hue. A year after Casaubon’s death, James I commissioned Richard Montagu, an outspoken anti-Calvinist, to write the Analecta Ecclesiasticarum Exercitationum (1622). The Analecta’s paratextual dedication to James I pays special homage to Casaubon, while the work itself stresses the English church’s primitive purity in comparison to the ecclesiology of Lutherans, Zwinglians and Calvinists.³⁹ Patristic allusion and English anti-Calvinism were, by the early 1620s, becoming ever more intertwined: the stage was set for the Caroline controversies of the 1630s.⁴⁰

Within this context, Andrewes’s 1621 Easter sermon is particularly striking. In the sermon, Andrewes does not tone down his recourse to patristic sources. On the contrary, Andrewes places them at the centre of his divisio: the Church Fathers allow him, through the rhetorical figures of syllepsis and polyptoton, to reflect on the very act of scriptural interpretation and confirm his own authority as an interpreter of the Bible. Whereas in 1620, Andrewes had focused on Magdalene’s seeking and finding Christ by the tomb, 1621 sought to explain Christ’s rebuke when Magdalene tries to touch him (“noli me tangere”). Andrewes begins by explaining how, in this sermon, he will merely unpack the arguments of the Church Fathers on this issue:

Three senses I will give you, and they have great Authors, all three, Chrysostome, Gregorie, Augustine. I will touch them all three; and you must take your choice of them; or, if you please, take them all⁴¹

Sophie Read has observed how, for Andrewes, wordplay is a serious business constituting a form of “devotional archaeology” which will “turn up shards of revelatory meaning”.⁴² Excavation is particularly pertinent here as Andrewes touches on how a text’s meaning is found: his syllepsis on “senses” links the act of patristic interpretation, the senses (interpretations) they give to Scripture, with discovering the true sense (meaning) of the scriptural passage. The syllepsis takes on a further embodied resonance as it is the significance of Magdalene’s desire to feel (to sense) Christ with her hands that is the sermon’s interpretative issue: Andrewes explicitly draws out the bodily implications of “senses” with his self-professed intention to “touch them all three”. The haptic dimensions of the sermon would make it remiss not to turn to Joseph Moshenska’s characteristically illuminating analysis of Andrewes’s sermon. Moshenska traces how each of the patristic sources Andrewes invokes allow him to understand the nature of touch itself and the various injunctions surrounding it which, ultimately, reflect the “underlying unity of all contact – whether physical, spoken or only willed, whether it is the touch of the body or the touch of faith”.⁴³ However, we can build on Moshenska’s work by thinking about what, on a foundational level, it means for Andrewes to “touch” on the Fathers’s “senses” as a formal and rhetorical act.

Sense is a particularly evocative, and yet fraught word for Andrewes throughout his career. In his Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine, a series of lectures given at Cambridge in the late 1570s, Andrewes asks the question of how one can find Scripture’s true sense.⁴⁴ Andrewes draws on Hilary of Poitiers to counter Catholic criticism of sola scriptura, stressing how the interpreter need only: “(as Hilary saith) referre sensum Scripturis, non auferre, to give Scripture its proper sence, not take it away, or devise one for it”.⁴⁵ For Thomas Stapleton, the Catholic theologian who acts as the lecture’s doctrinal foil, it is impossible to discover the “proper sence” of Scripture without ultimately relying on extra-scriptural authority such as the Vatican’s magisterium.⁴⁶ The irony of the Pattern is that in trying to justify sola scriptura, Andrewes continually relies on the mediating senses that the Church Fathers give to the act of scriptural interpretation. Moreover, Andrewes confines scriptural sense-making to a select few: “God hath given the gift of interpretation to some”.⁴⁷ In the 1621 Easter Sermon, Andrewes uses syllepsis on “senses” to simultaneously introduce the interpretative lens of patristic authority and to reinforce his own authority as an interpreter. Andrewes claims that the “senses” he has invoked “have” three “great Authors”: “great Authors” is a flick away from polyptoton, their “great” status implying that they are also authorities: both author and authority share the same Latin root, auctor (an originator or promoter).⁴⁸ The Bishop of Winchester looks to “touch them all three”, evoking the haptic laying on of hands which confers his episcopal office with the gift of apostolic authority and, now, allows him to familiarly touch the Fathers (all bishops themselves) without fearing Christ’s rebuke: Andrewes becomes an auctor who discovers and weaves Patristic senses of Scripture together, “the human preposition […] binding man and God together”, from the authority of the court pulpit.⁴⁹

As both auctor and authority, Andrewes deploys these three patristic authorities (Chrysostom, Gregory, Augustine) to develop his specific anti-Calvinist divisio. Andrewes starts with Chrysostom’s interpretation which argues that Magdalene’s desire to touch Christ contained a certain impropriety: “all was not well; somewhat amisse; she is something to blame in the manner of her offer”.⁵⁰ While Andrewes initially remains close to Chrysostom’s reading, he then turns back to what he had so forcefully drilled into his auditory a year earlier: Magdalene’s causa. Chrysostom’s verdict forces Andrewes to state in unequivocal terms: “It is no excuse to say, all was out of love”.⁵¹ Such a sharp rebuke seems to mark a complete reversal from what Andrewes had extolled in Magdalene only a year earlier. However, Andrewes soon qualifies Magdalene’s love rather than denying it altogether: if it were purely improper, then there hangs a “clowd still: all is not cleere”.⁵² Drawing from Chrysostom, Andrewes moves into his own metaphors which exemplify the sermon’s use of patristics as a consummate exercise in imitatio:

The eye is a most excellent part; but withal so tender, so delicate, it may not indure to be touched […] The Matters likewise, Princes affaires, Secrets of State, David calleth them magna & mirabilia super se, and so super nos: points too high, too wonderfull for us to deale with. To these also, belongs this Touch not⁵³

Chrysostom’s authority is seamlessly integrated with two metaphors loaded with contemporary significance: the audience have swiftly moved from the world of Christian Antiquity back to Jacobean England.⁵⁴ In so doing, Andrewes will argue that Magdalene’s impropriety ironically mirrors that of Calvin and his followers. Both the eye and the state were at the centre of early modern theological controversy. For Calvinists, the eye was a deceitful sense: Wolfgang Musculus, a major Reformed commentator, stresses how it is only after “audita uoce familiari” (“hearing the familiar voice”) that “Christus esse cognosceret” (“Christ is recognised”) by Magdalene.⁵⁵ Within the English church, the role of hearing the Gospel versus communion was a highly fraught one.⁵⁶ English Calvinists stressed the pre-eminence of preaching over ceremonial liturgy, to the ire of avant-garde conformists like Andrewes.⁵⁷ On Whit-Sunday 1618, preaching before the king at Greenwich, Andrewes went to great pains to show how: “It is the Oratorie of Prayer powred out of our hearts, shall save us; no lesse then the Oratorie of preaching powred in at our eares”.⁵⁸ For Andrewes, the “Oratorie of Prayer” signified the integrated liturgical act which relied on invoking God and ultimately expressed itself in the visible “Sacrament of His bloud powred out” for all believers.⁵⁹ Meanwhile, James I’s actions (“Princes affaires”) were subject to sustained, vocal criticism in the 1620s.⁶⁰ For one, James’s attempt to broker the Spanish Match between his heir, Charles, and the Catholic Infanta of Spain attracted widespread indignation from both Parliament and episcopal Calvinists; Andrewes, meanwhile, not only vocally supported the match but would (in 1623) preside over its ratification ceremony.⁶¹ Moreover, James’s resolution to stay out of the Thirty Years War and his refusal to protect his daughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia, were seen as a blatant reneging of England’s duty to protect its Protestant brethren.⁶² The theocratic Republic of Geneva, the locus par excellence of European Calvinism, did not exactly match James’s vision of the divine right of kings either.⁶³ Andrewes, drawing on Chrysostom’s argument about Magdalene’s impropriety, elevates both the “eye” and the “Secrets of the State” to the level of Christ: the former, “so tender, so delicate, it may not indure to be touched”, while the latter “points too high, too wonderfull for us to deale with”. Andrewes relates Christ’s proscription, “Touch not”, to these two issues and, thus, delivers a polemical blow against James I’s Calvinist critics. Andrewes’s allusion to Chrysostom allows him to use patristic authority to rebuke Magdalene’s intimacy as a lack of “decorum” and to condemn those who overstep the decorum owed to liturgy and the state.

In so doing, Andrewes ironically brings Magdalene and Calvin (strange bedfellows indeed) together: just as Magdalene lacked “decorum” in trying to hold onto Christ, so Calvin’s and his followers’ blasé touching on liturgy and matters of state shows a similar impropriety towards the divine order. However, Andrewes does not forget Magdalene’s causa and redeems her: in the process landing a further polemical sting against Calvin, whom he does not absolve. Magdalene is to be excused because she failed only “in tanto”, while Andrewes leaves it open to the imagination as to what “shall He say to them that faile both in tanto and in toto”.⁶⁴ To make Christ’s redemption of Magdalene clear, Andrewes turns to Augustine. If Chrysostom played a key role in qualifying Magdalene’s love, then Augustine is used to position her once more as a model believer. Sense and touch are now fully reconciled as Magdalene is given: “Mitte fidem & tenuisti: It is Saint Augustine. It is a touch, to which there is never a Noli: feare it not”.⁶⁵ Christ, in the final instance, does not just rebuke Magdalene’s love but redirects it towards a greater touch than the one she has been denied. While Thomas needs to physically touch Christ, “his faith in his fingers’ ends”, Magdalene’s love has already made her believe: as Moshenska correctly observes, the touch’s “value fluctuates” according “to the motives of the touching subject”.⁶⁶ Magdalene’s motives, which we have vividly seen over the last two years’ sermons, do not need the physical touch she desired. Once more, her noble motive has led her into error but, again, Christ corrects and redirects her love. His rebuke, noli me tangere, is contingent and not a final condemnation: it is necessary for Magdalene to be directed to a touch which neither she nor the audience should ever fear. Andrewes will wait until Easter 1622 to reveal that truer touch: to bear the good news of the Resurrection.

Apostolorum Apostola: the true sense of Easter Day

In 1622, Andrewes, unconventionally, preached on Magdalene for yet a third consecutive Easter Sunday (John 20:17). Over the previous two years, Andrewes had carefully vindicated and qualified Magdalene’s causa, her love. This time Andrewes prepared to take an even more provocative position, bringing together the argumentative force which he had so meticulously crafted in his two previous sermons. Taking to the pulpit once more, Andrewes brings the full weight of patristic authority to bear, declaring,

The Fathers say, that by this word, she was, by CHRIST, made an Apostle. Nay Apostolorum Apostola, an Apostle to the Apostles themselves. An Apostle: For, what lackes she? 1. Sent first, immediately from CHRIST Himselfe: And what is an Apostle but so? 2. Secondly, Sent to declare and make knowne: and what difference between Ite praedicate, and Vade & dic, but onely the number? The thing is the same. 3. And last, what was shee to make knowne? CHRISTS rising and ascending: And what are they but Evangelium, the Gospell, yea the very Gospell of the Gospell?⁶⁷

Andrewes masks an allusion to Gregory the Great’s famous epithet for Magdalene, “Apostle to the Apostles”, by endowing it with full patristic consensus: “The Fathers say”.⁶⁸ This rhetorical manoeuvre has a clear polemical edge, pronouncing patristic consensus (what theologians in the period called consensus patristicum) on the matter in order to leverage the Church Fathers’ authority to present a stridently anti-Calvinist elevation of Magdalene. Moreover, it provides Andrewes with the opportunity to uncover its implications. First, Andrewes invokes the Greek etymology of Apostle, she was “Sent”, that is, an Apostolos (a messenger). And as a messenger, she is “to declare and make knowne” Christ’s message. This sets up Andrewes’s polyptoton which connects Apostle to both evangelism and the Gospel: “Evangelium, the Gospell”. “Evangelium” means good news and is the root of the word “Gospell”; Magdalene is an Apostle because she carries good news. Polyptoton then moves into antanaclasis: “yea the very Gospell of the Gospell”. Here, the sense of “Gospell” as good news is merged with the sense of “Gospell” as a narrative of Christ’s life: Magdalene bears the good news which lies at the very essence of the New Testament itself – the Resurrection.

Andrewes’s patristic wordplay leads to the most polemical claim he will make, regarding Magdalene, in any of the three sermons. Building on the etymology of apostle which leads to the polyptoton and antanaclasis of “Evangelium” and “Gospell”, Andrewes first compares the Magdalene narrative with the set Gospel reading in the Propers:

This day, with CHRISTS rising, beginnes the Gospell: Not, before. Crucified, dead and buried, no good newes, no Gospell they, in themselves. And them, the Iewes beleeve as well as we⁶⁹

Bringing together the two senses of “Gospell”, as both good news and as the scriptural narrative of Christ’s resurrection, Andrewes dares to claim that only here: “beginnes the Gospell: Not, before”. John 20:1–10, the appointed Gospel reading for the day, contains: “no good newes, no Gospell they, in themselves”. Magdalene’s report of “CHRISTS rising” is what “beginnes the Gospell”, not the Propers: without Magdalene, the Propers have no place within the Easter narrative. Magdalene is no longer just a part of the Paschal mystery but unequivocally at its centre: an evangelist equal to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Pivotally, this sets up the most audacious declaration Andrewes will make in any of the three sermons. Deploying antanaclasis on the word “Gospell” once more, he proclaims:

The first Gospell of all, is the Gospell of this day, and the Gospell of this day is this Marie Magdalens Gospell, εὐαγγέλιον, the prime Gospell of all, before any of the other foure. That CHRIST is risen, and upon His ascending? and she the first, that ever brought these glad tydings. At her hands the Apostles themselves received it first. And, from them, we all⁷⁰

Andrewes, in a breath-taking moment, declares: “the Gospell of this day” is “Marie Magdalens Gospell, the prime Gospell of all, before any of the other foure”. Magdalene is no longer only the bearer of good news (Gospel) but the pre-eminent narrative of Christ’s resurrection: “Marie Magdalens Gospell”; the Four Evangelists cannot compete with this “prime Gospell of all” which precedes them. Andrewes’s audience cannot have moved further from Calvin’s claim that Magdalene deserved no great praise for staying at the tomb when the other disciples had fled. Magdalene’s causa, love, which compelled her to stay by the tomb (locus) allows her to become the Gospel: her figurative hands able to touch the Apostles and, through them, every subsequent Christian (including Andrewes’s auditory). Magdalene’s original ego tollam, her mistaken desire to carry Christ’s body, was rooted in profound, if mistaken, love. Christ does not rebuke that love but, now, resurrects it and gives her love, and the touch it desires, a new sense: “carry newes, that I am alive: And you shall better please me with this ego tollam”.⁷¹ Andrewes’s patristic wordplay (“Apostle”, “Evangelium”, “Gospell”) allows him to radically elevate Magdalene into a model, distinctly anti-Calvinist, believer. Even in her doubt and error, God’s grace is able to redeem her because of the one essential motive which she alone retained at the empty tomb when no-one else dared to stand by it: love.

Structuralism with patristic touches

Stanley Fish’s magisterial claim – writing on Andrewes’s 1620 sermon – that “Christianity is structuralism with a transcendental subject” could not be more accurate.⁷² For Fish, the Christian preacher is embedded within a religion where redemption is already pre-ordained and, as a result, so is its ultimate formal expression: the sermon. In other words, there is no escaping the Easter narrative as:

Within a Christian framework, however, the plot is fortunate by divine fiat, and one reaches a point not because he chooses, but because he was chosen, that is, redeemed. The price we pay for this redemption is the illusion of self-sufficiency and independence⁷³

While Fish is completely right in pointing out that within Christianity “one reaches a point not because he chooses, but because he was chosen”, he misses a crucial element in his analysis of Christian redemption and, by extension, Andrewes’s view on the purpose of the Easter Sermon. Andrewes’s investment in Magdalene is what she tells his audience about a central aspect of Christian redemption: the how. As we have seen, the event at the centre of Christianity’s plot was subject to highly divergent interpretations: the sense of scripture and the implications it carries are far from pre-determined. Andrewes uses the Church Fathers to vindicate Magdalene’s causa, her love, and to show how it cultivates the ground for Christ – the allegorical gardener – to redeem and resurrect her faith. Andrewes’s elevation of human love as a prerequisite for God’s cooperative grace, radically juxtaposes Calvinist moral theology where redemption occurs despite humanity’s total depravity and where God’s monergistic grace must impose itself on the weak, human will. For Andrewes, however, the sense of Christianity invariably relies on constructing Scripture’s patristic touch. The full weight of patristic authority carries the believer to act with the causa of love beyond the pew and pulpit: to become, in the final instance, an Apostle who carries the gravity of the Word out into the world.

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to my supervisor, Professor Peter McCullough, who first sparked my love for Andrewes's sermons and invaluably guided the writing of this article. I am also especially grateful to my anonymous reader who provided highly insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by Trinity College, Cambridge under an Alice and James Penney Ph.D. studentship in English or European Literature.

Notes

1. The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology produced a monumental eleven volume edition of Andrewes’s surviving works between 1841-1854. See Andrewes, Ninety-six Sermons, Parker (ed.).

2. Victorian re-printing of early modern sermons, ironically, rehearsed the same divisions which challenged the fraught Elizabethan Settlement in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology was established to counter the evangelical Parker Society which published volumes such as Sandys, The Sermons of Edwin Sandys; and Jewel, The Works of John Jewel. While both fell into historical presentism, there was something profoundly early modern in their mutual insistence that they alone represented the true legacy of the Church of England.

3. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes (1926)”, in Selected Essays. While Lossky writes from an Orthodox (rather than Anglo-Catholic perspective), his comments on the Bishop of Winchester can often be indistinguishable from the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. For instance, Lossky describes Andrewes as one of the “initiators of a way of thinking that represents the intellectual basis of the Church of England” and as one of the “real founders of the celebrated Via Media” (alongside, unsurprisingly, Richard Hooker). Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, the Preacher, 1.

4. Andrewes, Selected Sermons and Lectures, McCullough (ed.)

5. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity.

6. Ettenhuber traces the increasing recourse to the Fathers to John Jewel’s famous Challenge Sermon (1559) which played a foundational role in establishing how the nascent Elizabethan Church would deploy patristics to counter Roman Catholic justifications of doctrine rooted in ecclesiastical history. Ettenhuber, “The Preacher and Patristics”, 36. For more on how patristics was integral to constructions of early modern authorship, see Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine.

7. Lake, “Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I”. Peter McCullough has aptly described this ecclesiological appellation as “minted in pure gold”. McCullough, “‘Avant-Garde Conformity’ in the 1590s”, 380.

8. Milton, Catholic and Reformed.

9. For a reflection on the literary implications of the Easter narrative see Fish, “Structuralist Homiletics”. Connections between Andrewes’s 1620 sermon and Shakespeare are explored in McCullough, “Headnote”, 448-9.

10. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible, 167–91; and Badir, Maudlin Impression.

11. Cefalu, The Johannine Renaissance, 14.

12. The material world of the Renaissance also attests to the fascination towards Mary Magdalene as both an individual and a source of devotion. For one, John Donne’s bedroom tellingly only contained one portrait, which was of Magdalene. See Shuger, The Renaissance Bible, 167–91; and Badir, Maudlin Impression. Meanwhile, Matthew Parker (Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury and noted book collector) had three sixteenth-century treatises on Mary Magdalene bound together: John Fisher’s De Vnica Magdalena (Paris, 1519), Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples’ De Maria Magdalena (Paris, 1518) and Josse Clichtove’s Disceptationis de Magdalena defensio (Paris, 1519). This miscellany is currently held at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Parker Library, SP. 193(1)).

13. For example, see Calvin, “Commentariorvm in Evangelivm Secvndvm Ioannem”; and Musculus, “Capvt XX.”

14. Calvin, “Commentariorvm in Evangelivm Secvndvm Ioannem”, 588.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 424.

18. Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on Easter Day 1620”, 225.

19. Ibid., 228.

20. Ibid., 227.

21. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 212.

22. Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on Easter Day 1620”, 228.

23. Ibid., 229.

24. McCullough, Sermons at Court, 114. For more on the relationship between religious embodiment and the political, see Ferrell, “Kneeling and the Body Politic”, 77-79. Andrewes’s preoccupation with kneeling can be famously seen in his 1614 Easter Sunday sermon where God “will not have us worship Him like Elephants, as if we had no ioynts in our knees’ but instead will have us bow the knees. And let us bow them in GOD’s Name.” See, Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on Easter Day 1614”, 475-76.

25. Fincham and Tyacke, “Avant-Garde Conformity and the English Church, c.1590-1625”, 116.

26. On forensic rhetoric and its formative role in dramatic works which are linked to the period’s centres of legal power, see Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion. For its place in the ars disserendi (art of discourse) “anchored in the study of literature”, see Hutson, “Rhetoric and Law”, 401.

27. Calvin, “Commentariorvm in Evangelivm Secvndvm Ioannem”, 588.

28. Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on Easter Day 1620”, 233.

29. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 413-15.

30. McCullough, Sermons at Court, 141.

31. Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on Easter Day 1620”, 234.

32. Ibid., 239.

33. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 157.

34. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 447.

35. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 110.

36. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 447.

37. Casaubon, “to Claude Saumaise, 8 November 1612”, 489.

38. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 143-6.

39. Montagu, Analecta Ecclesiasticarum Exercitationum: Collectore Richardo Montacutio 1622 (London, 1622), a3^r; A1^v.

40. Peter McCullough provides evidence that even in the early seventeenth century “at least in Laud’s Oxford” a “‘Leo’ was a slang term for an avant-garde conformist who rhapsodized about the authority of the ancient Catholic fathers”. See McCullough, “Making Dead Men Speak”, 414.

41. Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on A.D. MDCXXI, being EASTER DAY”, 546.

42. Read, “Puns: Serious Wordplay”, 84. Read has cogently demonstrated that “pun” is an anachronistic term in the early-seventeenth century. Following Read’s lead, I diagnose instances of Andrewes’s wordplay according to their corresponding early modern rhetorical figure.

43. Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures, 79.

44. Andrewes’s Pattern has often been neglected in studies of the prelate because of its unreliable provenance (they derive from students’ notes which were edited considerably later). Peter Heylyn claims that Andrewes “professedly disavowed” the lectures first hand due to their being “taken from his mouth by some ignorant hand”. Heylyn, Cyprianus anglicus (1668), 166. Specifically, Joseph Ashmore explains the lectures’ jarring tendency to “express a form of Calvinism which sits uneasily alongside Andrewes’s later theological stances”. Ashmore, “Faith in Lancelot Andrewes’s Preaching”, 123. However, as we will see, the latter reservation does not apply to Andrewes’s treatment of Scriptural exegesis as precisely what he is doing is subtly undermining Calvinist claims to unmediated Scriptural access on its own terms. Specifically, Andrewes demonstrates how uncovering the plain, proper senses of the Bible relies on gifted sense-makers (namely, patristic sources and the English episcopacy). In so doing, Andrewes elevates an alternate Protestant exegesis (through familiar Reformed terminology) which is at once more nuanced and yet also firmly sacerdotal.

45. Andrewes, “Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine”, 6.

46. Thomas Stapleton became one of the most prolific Elizabethan Catholic controversialists. While a number of his works were apologies for Catholicism, he also wrote a number of polemical tracts against English Protestants. Most pertinently, Antidota Evangelica (Antwerp, 1595); Antidota Apostolica contra nostri Temporis Hæreses (Antwerp, 1595); Antidota Apostolica in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos (Antwerp, 1595).

47. Andrewes, “Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine”, 6.

48. Crucially, of course, Andrewes’s wordplay also appeals to the medieval and Scholastic notion of auctoritas. See Chenu, “Authentica et Magistralia”.

49. Reisner, “Textual Sacraments”, 678.

50. Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on A.D. MDCXXI, being EASTER DAY”, 546.

51. Ibid., 547.

52. Ibid., 548.

53. Ibid.

54. While contemporary scholarship has rightly focused on Augustine as the pre-eminent patristic figure of the period, Chrysostom’s status as Archbishop of Constantinople (an ecclesiastical office which meant he had to negotiate with the civil authority of the Byzantine Emperor) made him a prominent Father in his own right in an Elizabethan and Jacobean church looking to define the contours of monarchical and clerical power. Moreover, his epithet Χρυσόστομος (literally “golden-mouthed”) testified to the rhetorical flair which he reputedly displayed in his homilies. See Collinson, “Andrew Perne and His Times”.

55. Musculus, “Capvt XX.”, 748.

56. Lake, “Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I”.

57. Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 21; and Noam Reisner, “Textual Sacraments”, 664.

58. Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on Whit-Sunday 1618”, 221.

59. Ibid., 224.

60. Contemporaneously, Andrewes’s epistolary responses to Pierre Du Moulin (a Reformed Huguenot and resident by invitation at James’s court) stressed both the king’s supremacy in both temporal and spiritual affairs, as well as Andrewes’s access to the king. The Bishop of Winchester makes clear that “[James’s] affairs: (for Ours He accounts His)”. Later, in the same work, Andrewes invokes their collective unity of mind and will in princely affairs to reprimand Du Moulin, “if for the future you would let Our affairs alone”. Andrewes and Du Moulin, Of episcopacy three epistles, 9; 24.

61. McCullough, Sermons at Court, 205; and McCullough (ed.), Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures, lx.

62. Fincham and Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I”, Journal of British Studies, 184.

63. Most explicitly mentioned by James I in Basilikon dōron Devided into three bookes. Andrewes in his exchange with Du Moulin rebukes the magistrates of Geneva. While kings are often called pastors, Andrewes argues that “Nor do I think that at Geneva he is call’d a Pastor who is the chief Magistrate”. See Andrewes, Of Episcopacy three epistles, 61.

64. Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on A.D. MDCXXI, being EASTER DAY”, 549.

65. Ibid., 551.

66. Joseph Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures, 75.

67. Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on A.D. MDCXXII, being EASTER DAY”, 556.

68. Gregory, “Homilia XXV”.

69. Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached on A.D. MDCXXII, being EASTER DAY”, 556.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 557.

72. Fish, “Structuralist Homiletics”, 1208.

73. Ibid., 1220.