Our debt to Thomas Cranmer

T S Eliot and the Book of Common Prayer

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

‘I sometimes think that our debt to Cranmer can hardly be exaggerated.’

T S Eliot made this remark in 1932 when speaking on ‘The Bible as Scripture and as Literature.’ His audience was the Women’s Alliance at King’s Chapel, a Christian Unitarian church in Boston. I came across this speech when paging through Eliot’s collected works several years ago and was intrigued to see his regard for the Book of Common Prayer.

Eliot began his address with a verse from Revelation 5.4.

And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon.

He then developed this idea in an unexpected way, saying that ‘from the point of view of literature there is no Bible.’ What he meant was that the Bible is such a wide-ranging work, its authors and genres so various, and its subject matter so profound, that it was impossible to regard it as a book like other books. In a sense, it is a book we cannot read, a book that eludes us.

The Book of Common Prayer, however, was another matter. It was for this reason, Eliot thought Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) deserved our gratitude. For it was his ‘prayerbook of 1549 which… set the standard for all later English liturgical practice.’ As Eliot continued:

‘However much our language owes to the regular reading aloud of Bible passages in private families… I think that we owe still more to the public repetition of the liturgy… surely, throughout a period of three hundred years or so, and especially during the earlier part of that time, when the language was in quicker process of formation, the regular audition of the lessons, the collects and the prayers, must have produced a gentle and insensible saturation of the minds not only of the truly devout, but of all the steady congregation, with the beauty of some of the finest sentences and periods in the whole of English prose. The fall of these words upon the ear, as they follow their due and appointed order in the service and the cyclic recurrence of the services according to the seasons, enters into the whole rhythm of the Christian’s life with an unconscious compulsion. The rhythm of life is deeper than the rhythm of prose or of verse; in the metric in which a man lives, if he is a good writer, so will he write; and the style of the Church collects is different from that of Mr. Ernest Hemingway.’

I happen to love Ernest Hemingway—his short stories of course but also his novels including some of his lesser-known works like To Have and Have Not and Islands in the Stream, so I was somewhat pained to see him singled out for criticism—but I understand Eliot’s point. Hemingway made literature out of ordinary words and phrases, conveying much with terse, athletic dialogue. Yet our manner of speaking to the Divine, says Eliot, should be different. Different in manner, style, register, and tone.

Cranmer’s prayer book, says Eliot, is different first because of chronology. The first edition, published in 1549, was the first prominent translation of Christian worship in English. Aside from pride of place, it emerged during a critical point in history, the daring age of exploration when Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) sailed the seas and William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote his plays. An age that corresponded with the genesis of the novel: Rabelais’ publication of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1564) and Cervantes Don Quixote (1605). Cranmer’s English had to demonstrate it was worthy not only to be used in Divine worship but also as a work of art.

Accordingly, Cranmer’s English is beautiful. It has, as Eliot says, ‘some of the finest sentences and periods in the whole of English prose’, beautiful in their sound and in their ‘due and appointed order’. One example of this, in my opinion, is the Collect for Purity which occurs early in Cranmer’s Communion Service. When literally translated the original Latin text which Cranmer inherited, reads:

God, to whom every heart is open and every wish speaks, and from whom no secret lies hid; purify by the inpouring of the Holy Spirit the thoughts of our heart; that we may deserve to perfectly love and worthily praise thee. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.

But, as Anglicans today know, Cranmer rendered it thus:

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Eliot’s point about the sound of the text is very true. ‘Be open’ falls better on the ear than ‘is open’. So too the hard consonants of ‘all desires known’ instead of the muddled ‘every wish speaks’, although more liberty is taken with translation there. Cranmer’s omission of ‘deserve’, apparently reasonable on literary grounds according to the Tutorial Prayer Book, has even more theological significance. Regarding register, words like ‘Almighty,’ ‘magnify,’ and the use of ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ demonstrate Eliot’s point about Cranmer’s language being unlike that of Hemingway. Yet it must also be said that Cranmer’s prayer is clear and direct, a fitting opening to a service of Holy Communion.

As Eliot mentions, repetition is also important. And, in his case, the Prayer Book had been in use for more than three centuries. When used, one begins to memorise its prayers and responses, its turns of phrase, its emotions and its generous quotations from Scripture. These do enter into the whole rhythm of one’s life, as Eliot says, changing how sin is confessed and forgiveness is received, how God is understood to be God and man is known as man. The repetition becomes all the more interesting in contrast to our contemporary fad for change and constant updates, as if our liturgy is a software program rather than a book outside of time, a book that allows us to read what we would otherwise be unworthy to look thereon. In repeating Cranmer’s prayers, we saturate our minds with beauty, we change the rhythm of our lives. We also find ourselves in prayer alongside past and future generations.