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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2011
Lex orandi — lex credendi. The interdependence of cult and creed was a truth well known to Archbishop Cranmer and the English Reformers. If Christian belief was to be restored to its evangelical purity, then the mode and content of public worship must be reformed accordingly. So far as the Eucharist was concerned, any major change would have to be in the Canon of the Mass, which was its ritual and doctrinal center. Changes there were; and, as events were to prove, the Canon of 1549 was only a beginning. But those influences which affected the center were felt elsewhere in the service as well. Among other things they account for a number of changes in those much admired prayers which Cranmer derived from the Roman rite, the collects. In this study I would like to examine the influence of Reformed doctrine on the composition of these prayers in the first Book of Common Prayer of 1549. The hundred-odd collects in the first Prayer Book fall into two classes: some sixty-seven which are fairly close translations of Latin originals as they were found in the Sarum service books, and the rest which are either completely new with Cranmer or have only a slight connection with a Latin collect. I shall deal with the effects of Reformed doctrine first on the translated and then on the new — or nearly new — collects of the Prayer Book.
1 The most convenient text is the Everyman's Library edition of The First and Second Prayer Books of King Edward the Sixth (London, 1921). My quotations of both English and Latin collects will be from the parallel text edition of Brightman, F. E., The English Rite, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1921).Google Scholar
2 “Gelasius' Sacramentary … was composed quite at the close of the fifth century. Now it is one of the recorded facts of the life of Gelasius that, finding the Pelagian heresy to be reviving in Picenum, a maritime district in Central Italy, he addressed himself to the bishops of that district in a circular letter (still extant in Baronius) representing the taint of this heresy as a greater calamity than the invasion of the barbarians.” From Goulburn, Edward, The Collects of the Day (London, 1880), II, 118–19.Google Scholar
3 In the Sunday Next before Easter, XIV Trinity, and the prayer for purity at the beginning of the Holy Communion.
4 The question is discussed in Cranmer's Liturgical Projects, ed. Legg, J. Wickham, The Henry Bradshaw Society, L (London, 1915), lxxi.Google Scholar In his preliminary sketches of a reformed liturgy Cranmer substituted the word valeo for mereor wherever the latter appeared in his sources.
5 Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. Cox, John Edmund, The Parker Society (Cambridge, 1846), p. 131.Google Scholar
6 In the second collect for Evensong and on Whitsunday.
7 See Oberman, Heiko A., “Facientibus Quod in Se Est Deus non Denegat Gratiam: Robert Holcot, O. P., and the Beginnings of Luther's Theology,” HTR 55 (1962), 317–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Miscellaneous Writings, p. 41.
9 Ibid., p. 143.
10 In The Two Liturgies: A. D. 1549, and A. D. 1552; with other Documents in the Reign of King Edward VI, ed. Ketley, Joseph, The Parker Society (Cambridge, 1844), p. 528.Google Scholar
11 Miscellaneous Writings, p. 136.
12 Ibid., p. 140.
13 The Anti-Pelagian Works of St. Augustine, tr. Holmes, Peter (Edinburgh, 1908), I, 263–64.Google Scholar
14 Summa Theologica, Ia IIae, q. 111, a. 3.
15 The Two Liturgies, p. 528.
16 Miscellaneous Writings, p. 135.
17 The Two Liturgies, p. 530.
18 The Collects of the Day, I, 242.
19 For recent discussions of the subject see Dugmore, C. W., The Mass and the English Reformers (London, 1958)Google Scholar; and Clark, Francis, Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation (Westminster, Maryland, 1960).Google Scholar
20 Miscellaneous Writings, p. 150.
21 Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer … Relative to the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, ed. Cox, John Edmund, The Parker Society (Cambridge, 1846), p. 345.Google Scholar
22 Writings and Disputations, p. 346.
23 Ibid., p. 352.
24 In Epiphany, II Epiphany, Sexagesima, V Lent, Next Before Easter, I Trinity, and St. Michael.
25 In Evensong (third Collect).
26 In XV Trinity.
27 In IV Advent.
28 This need not mean that Cranmer believed that the Eucharist was a “bare memorial” and nothing more. If, as Cyril Richardson says, “Cranmer emphasized an instrumental connexion between the sacrament and the working of God's grace” (in Zwingli and Cranmer on the Eucharist [Evanston, Illinois, 1949], p. 34), it would follow that each celebration of the Eucharist is a new occasion for men to benefit by Christ's saving death, and in that sense, at least, a renewal of His sacrifice.
29 Hodie is omitted in Epiphany, Easter (at the first Communion), Ascension, the Conversion of St. Paul, and St. Bartholomew. It is translated in Holy Innocents, Whitsunday, and the Purification.
30 See The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, ed. William Rastell (London, 1557), pp. 405–24.
31 The Two Liturgies, p. 531.
32 Ibid., p. 513.
33 See ibid., p. 511.
34 The Heritage of the Reformers, revised ed. (Glencoe, Illinois, 1961), p. 104.
35 Miscellaneous Writings, p. 116.
36 Ibid., p. 117.
37 The Prayer Book: Its History, Language, and Contents, 23rd ed. (London, 1907), p. 157.Google Scholar
38 See Leclercq, Henri, “Pontifex,” Dictionnaire d'Archéologie Chrétienne et de Liturgie, ed. Cabrol, Fernand and Leclercq, Henri, XIV, part 1 (Paris, 1938), 1423–27.Google Scholar
39 The Collects of the Day, I, 33–34.
40 “On the Collects,” in Prayer-Book Commentary for Teachers and Students, ed. Warren, F. E., 2nd ed. (London, 1913), p. 91.Google Scholar
41 From “Articles Agreed upon in the Convocation, and Published by the King's Majesty,” in The Two Liturgies, p. 527.
42 Bromiley, G. W., Thomas Cranmer Theologian (New York, 1956), pp. 12–16.Google Scholar
43 Found in Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 1–67.
44 In The English Rite, II, 552.
45 See Ridley, Jasper, Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1962), p. 264.Google Scholar
46 Found in Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 507–08.
47 Neil, Charles and Willoughby, J. M., The Tutorial Prayer Book (London, 1959), p. 165.Google Scholar