Christian history – KPB Stevens

John Cassian was only twenty years old when he set off to Bethlehem with his friend Germanus. Germanus was older, although how much older is unknown. I imagine that John was a pious and enthusiastic young man, attracted, like many were, by the stories of monasticism, especially Egyptian monasticism, that circulated in his native Scythia. Justo Gonzalez says that there were, at one time, more than 20,000 people living as monks and nuns in one region of the Egyptian desert alone. Many of the people who showed up at the monasteries, hoping to live as desert ascetics, needed to be baptized first, since the allure of monasticism was so powerful that even pagans were drawn to it. But John and Germanus went to Bethlehem before they went to Egypt. They lived there for five years, sharing a cell and a life of prayer and devotion. It was there that they met a fugitive abbot from Egypt, one Pinufius, who had fled from the administrative tasks of his position. Still, he must have spoken in glowing terms about life in the desert. When his fellow monks showed up to take him back to Egypt (and it’s hard not to imagine this as a comic scene), he left John and Germanus in a state of eagerness to follow.

John and Germanus were very popular in Bethlehem. Their fellow monks made them promise to return there after they’d gone to Egypt, and they did, but only for a short visit after seven years. And when they had fulfilled this obligation, they scooted right back to the Egyptian desert. What made life in the desert so attractive to so many people? To begin with, this was an uncertain time for the Roman Empire. Visigothic invasions were rendering things unstable. And the establishment of Christianity as the state religion was changing the daily practices of Christians and leading people to seek power in a way that was far removed from the apostolic ideal. The monks represented a purity movement. They were pioneers at the far reaches of habitable land, and pioneers in the far reaches of the soul.

They lived either as hermits or in communities. If hermits, they lived by themselves, although within walking distance of other hermits, whom they would gather together with on Sundays for church. They cultivated small patches of land and wove baskets, singing psalms and reciting scripture as they worked. They ate mostly bread, owned almost nothing, and slept on rough mats, which John Cassian found sufficiently comfortable. If the monks lived in communities, they lived in walled enclosures that were divided into many small buildings, which included a church, a meeting hall, a storehouse, and a refectory. Everyone shared in performing even the humblest tasks, and they prayed ceaselessly as they did so. Whether they lived as hermits or in communities, most of the desert monks were illiterate. This meant that the scripture they learned was memorized and spoken aloud with great frequency, so that others could memorize it.

John Cassian was not illiterate. He was fluent in two languages, Latin and Greek. And as he went among the desert fathers, he recorded their sayings. It’s because of him that we know so much about their spirituality. Its clear from the discussions that he and Germanus had with the monks that the men and women who lived in the desert were seeking purity of heart above all else. Abbot Moses puts it best. The ultimate goal of a Christian is to live within the Kingdom of God. But human beings need more concrete, less idealistic goals to aim for in our everyday lives. The metaphor that Moses uses is that of an archer. If one wants to learn marksmanship, it doesn’t do any good to shoot arrows into the blank sky. One needs to shoot at a target that is visible. Purity of heart, for the monks and nuns, was the visible target. We might find this to be a fairly idealistic goal in itself, but the desert fathers and mothers lived in a way that made it attainable to them.

At least some of the time. Because they were isolated and largely illiterate, they weren’t always aware of what was going on in the wider world of Christianity. Ideas that the church councils had rejected still drifted among them, and gained traction. And because the monks lived in a way that was considered more holy than the sophisticated, city dwelling Christians’ say of life, they couldn’t understand why decisions made by those urban Christian councils should trump their own understanding of orthodox faith. In 399 A.D., the theological divisions between the monks and the bishops exploded, and monks who held Origenist views were driven out of Egypt. Origenists believed in the pre-existence of the soul and that Christ would restore everything when he came again, rescuing even those parts of creation that had been proven to be evil. John and Germanus apparently sympathized with this point of view, or were at least disheartened to see the persecution of the monks, because they left Egypt in that year and went to Constantinople to seek refuge from John Chrysostom.

But John Chrysostom had problems of his own. He was in a life and death struggle with the Imperial family, and although he paused in his struggles to ordain John as a deacon, it wasn’t long before he was exiled and sent on the enforced march that took his life. But before Chrysostom died in his own wilderness he sent John and Germanus to plead his case before the Bishop of Rome. They never went back. In fact, at this moment Germanus disappears from John Cassian’s life. We don’t know if he died or if they simply parted ways. The next eleven years of John’s biography are a blank. John, the most private and reticent of men, didn’t return to the attention of other people until 415 A.D., when he went to Massilia (present day Marseilles) to found a monastery of his own. It was there, during the next ten years, that he wrote the two books that he is famous for. The first was The Institutes, which create a rule of life for his monks to live by. The second was The Conferences, which recorded his conversations with the desert fathers so long ago.

Why was John so shy of talking about himself? It puzzles historians, who look to the example of Augustine and sigh, wishing that John had been more like him. But John wasn’t just self-effacing. He may have been wounded by the Origenist controversy, and hurt by what happened to John Chrysostom. Seeing the end effects of the church’s political and theological disputes may have convinced him to stay out of them. Still, I think there’s more to it than that. If John truly believed what he reported in The Conferences, then what was the merit of his going into details of his life? He didn’t want to do anything for human glory, or lay up treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume. He was seeking purity of heart, with the ultimate goal of living within the Kingdom of God. When he was convinced to enter into a controversy, by writing a series of tracts that were opposed to the Nestorians, he failed miserably. It’s hard to imagine that he had much enthusiasm for the task. He was content to live at Massilia with his monks, and the rule of life that they established there had more influence than any theological argument he ever made in a public dispute. Saint Benedict would read his Institutes a hundred years later, and use them as the basis for creating the Benedictine rule.

Further Reading

Cassian, John, Colm Luibhéid, and Eugène Pichery. Conferences. New York: Paulist, 1985. Print.

González, Justo L. The Story of Christianity. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984. Print.

Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.

When Thomas Bray was born in 1656, England was under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. The theaters were closed, public entertainment was severely limited, and church-going was mandatory. Much of the public was still illiterate, and national and political news mostly came from the pulpit. Clergy had a privileged place in society. They were among the most educated, well-informed, and politically astute members of the British public. However, there were very few of them on the continent of North America.

Bray was educated at All Soul’s College, Oxford, and graduated from there in 1678, eighteen years after Oliver Cromwell died and Charles II was restored to the throne of England. This was an age of preferment, when one’s career as a priest depended on family connections and personal influence. Bray had enough influence to become a country curate and chaplain, and eventually to obtain the rectorship of Sheldon, Warwickshire. It was there, in 1690, that he wrote his Catechetical Lectures, a book of instructions for teaching the catechism. It was a successful book, and brought Bray to the attention of the Bishop of London, who appointed him the Ecclesiastical Commissary for Maryland. The colonies had no bishops of their own, and these Ecclesiastical Commissaries were the closest they would get until after the revolution. They could do everything that a bishop could do, except perform confirmations and ordinations.

Maryland’s first settlers were English Catholics, led by Leonard Calvert, and although Protestant settlers soon followed, the colony was predominantly Roman Catholic through much of the 17th century. A good number of Quakers settled there. In 1649 the colony passed the Maryland Toleration Act, which protected Catholics and Quakers from Anglican discrimination, and which lent some of its language to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution more than one hundred and fifty years later. But the law was repealed in 1692, after the Glorious Revolution pushed the Catholic James II off of the throne of England and brought in the Protestant supported William and Mary. This is somewhat ironic, since William was a champion of toleration, but Maryland’s new governor, Francis Nicholson, was not. In 1696, Nicholson led the colonial assembly in the passage of a law that would establish Anglicanism as the state religion of the colony. It was the passage of this law that prompted the Bishop of London to offer Thomas Bray the appointment of Ecclesiastical Commissary.

But the law had a problem. It was obnoxious to both Quakers and Catholics, and the Quakers could block it’s ratification in England. The law required that every citizen of Maryland pay forty pounds of tobacco per year as a tax that would support the Anglican church. It also required a pledge of loyalty to the church. Quakers refused to make this pledge, and their refusal barred them from holding political office or representing themselves in court. But since King William was a strong advocate of toleration, they were able to use their influence in England to keep the law from being enacted in Maryland.

This meant that for the first three years of his appointment, Thomas Bray had nothing to do. However, he was one of the most dauntless men in the world. Rather than sitting on his hands, he set about studying and predicting the challenges he would face when he reached Maryland. The major challenge was that there were very few priests in the colony. In 1694 there were only three, and although this number increased a little every year, it was obvious that the Anglican congregations were underserved. Parishes were usually geographically large, and priests found themselves having to travel twenty or thirty miles to visit sick parishioners. To do this, they had to own a horse or two, which was expensive, particularly since they didn’t get paid much and had to supplement their incomes by working plantations of their own. They usually left their families back in England, and the hardship and loneliness must have been severe. Needless to say, not many priests were eager to go to the colonies, and those who went usually did so because they had no other choice. Lacking a church in England, and any influence that could help them obtain a church, their options were severely limited. The priests who did go to Maryland were sometimes men who had lost their preferment by their own fault, and they arrived in the colony with a reputation for scandalous behavior and every intention of continuing in that behavior in their new home.

Bray wanted to correct these problems, and he put his faith in education as the means of correction. During the three years he spent waiting to finally go to Maryland, he established the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). His plan was to establish libraries in every parish in Maryland. His society grew and gathered money, and was open to some criticism. Why, people asked, were they collecting money to establish parish libraries in the colonies, when many parishes in England didn’t have libraries, and had clergy as ignorant and disreputable as any colonial parson? Bray accepted this critique and made sure that the SPCK’s work also benefitted people at home. His grand vision was of having at least one good library per rural deanery, where the clergy could gather to read and discuss the books, and support each other in their ministries.

In 1699, at the age of 43, Bray finally got tired of waiting and left for Maryland, where he hoped to hurry along the process of revising the Act of Establishment so that it would meet with King William’s approval. On his way out of the country, he stopped at three seaport towns, establishing libraries as he went. His luggage must have been comprised mostly of books, because when he arrived in Maryland he presented a library to each of the thirty-one parishes that then existed. He found seventeen clergy waiting for him, and a Colonial Assembly that was more than willing to accept his help in revising the law. He set to work, meeting with the governor and the assemblymen, visiting parishes, and taking his own census of the number of Anglicans, Quakers, and Catholics in the colony. On the political front, he found speedy success. On the parochial front, he sometimes had to be quite severe with his priests, especially one who was a known polygamist. The political and the parochial worlds were deeply intertwined, because the Act of Establishment concerned itself with the nitty gritty of parish life, dictating how many times vestries must meet, how clergy could be chosen, and other internal matters of the parishes. One provision of the law was for insuring the morality of clergymen by appointing committees to meet each incoming ship that carried a clergyman and interview the captain and other passengers to ascertain the appropriateness of the clergyman’s behavior while he was on board. Bray also established the first missionary effort of the colony, but it wasn’t for the benefit of the Native Americans or African slaves. Missionaries were supposed to go into Pennsylvania and convert the Quakers.

By the summer of 1700, Bray had the new law neatly in hand and took ship to England, where he could use his influence to get it ratified by parliament. His experiences in the colony had convinced him that the spread of Anglicanism required people as well as books, and he established a new organization, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. This group became the backbone for Anglican missionary efforts throughout the world. The English system of engaging in missionary activity was wholly different from the French or the Spanish. Many of the English colonies had been established as business ventures. The people who put up the capital for these ventures saw no need to supply priests, or to worry about missionary activity. Ferdinand and Isabella might send out missionaries to convert the heathen, but the English trading companies failed to see how it would benefit the bottom line. If missionary activity was to succeed, it wouldn’t be because it was instigated by the crown, but by confederations of individuals like Bray and his supporters.

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was tremendously successful, but the revised law to establish Anglicanism as the religion of Maryland was not. Once again, Quaker interests blocked its ratification, and it had to be revised for a third time by the Maryland Assembly. Finally, in 1702, a version that tolerated Quakerism was past, and was accepted by King William and his parliament. He died that year, and his wife Mary’s younger sister, Anne, became Queen.

Bray never went back to Maryland. Once the law was finally past, he found a worthy successor and settled down in London, accepting the living of Saint Botolph without Aldgate in 1707. He lived there until his death in 1730, working with feverish and committed energy in his parish and in the wider church. He continued to be interested in libraries, and in 1724 created the Dr. Bray Associates, a group dedicated to founding clerical libraries. The Church of England remained as the established church in Maryland until 1776.

But Bray’s real legacy wasn’t the establishment of Anglicanism as a state religion in one of England’s colonies. It was the culture that he brought to that colony, and to the seedbed of the future United States, when he went about establishing his libraries. At a time when few people could read, it became part of the clergy’s care of souls to educate their parishioners, to make them aware of the important political and cultural issues of the time, and to bind them together into a citizenry by propagating a common culture. It was also a way of honoring the inherent intelligence of the illiterate colonists, who could come and discuss important ideas with their clergymen, and argue points from books that they couldn’t read, but that a good, caring priest would willingly read for them.

Sources

Klingberg, Frank Joseph. Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York,. Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1940. Print.

Click to access bray.pdf

Samuel Clyde McCulloch. Dr. Thomas Bray’s Trip to Maryland: A Study in Militant Anglican Humanitarianism. The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1945), pp. 15–32