Sermon for the first Sunday after Trinity

In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti amen.

We have done with dogma and divinity,
Easter and Whitsun past,
The long, long Sundays after Trinity,
Are with us at last;
The passionless Sundays after Trinity,
Neither feast-day nor fast.

Christmas comes with plenty, 
Lent spreads out its pall
But these are five and twenty,
The longest Sundays of all;
The placid Sundays after Trinity,
Wheat-harvest, fruit-harvest, Fall.

Thank you for inviting me to speak today, as the English church moves into the English summer. Trinity Sunday is past, and summer eights are over, but most of the summer is still before us. And the dog rose and the elder are in bloom along the river.

I am acutely aware of my shortcomings: it is as well that you have invited me now, in the “passionless Sundays after Trinity” when we are “done with dogma and divinity,” as dogma and divinity are by no means my strong points. If I may I will speak instead about things with which I feel more at home: poetry and history and memory. And, as I have all my life, I will focus on an instance where memory and history have gone wrong in an act of wrongful or unjust forgetting. 

I have made something of a habit, even a career, of re-examining such wrongful or unjust forgettings, especially if they are caused by retrospective falsification of history. (Or, as we’ll hear later, by a Saint jumping to a conclusion.) The past is anything but fixed: it changes with the preoccupations of the present. To offer the simplest example: we tend endlessly to impose the geography of the present onto the past, thus imposing a post-railway sense of centre and periphery, metropolis and province, on the infinitely scattered, water-travelling past. 

Let me turn to my main and most important example. This is the fate of the writings of St Robert Southwell, who lived from 1561 to 1595, a religious poet of extraordinary accomplishment, who wrote towards the end of the sixteenth century, and who was also (this complicates things), a Jesuit and a Catholic martyr, executed at Tyburn in 1595. Now comes the really extraordinary thing: from the 1590s until the Civil wars of the 1640s, Southwell’s poems circulated freely in England, in licensed, selective editions, openly published in London for an Anglican readership. They were widely popular, indeed they were just about the MOST popular printed poetry in England, outsold only by Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. There were twenty two London editions of his poems, all aimed at Anglican readers, who it seems could hardly get enough copies of them. In the same years, Southwell’s prose meditation Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears was reprinted seven times: copies of it, quotations from it, seem to have been everywhere, on everybody’s lips, in everybody’s memories, Shakespeare’s and George Herbert’s included. 

Southwell had finished his education in Rome in the 1580s, and brought much international sophistication of imagery and thought with him when he returned to England, along with much beauty of diction, and passion and sincerity of feeling. The audience for his verse went far, far beyond the recusant Catholics to whom he ministered as a mission priest. (The recusants circulated Southwell’s more overtly Eucharistic, Marian, and political poems, in manuscripts amongst themselves in that secret England of dark corners and Pennine manor houses, of Byrd masses sung in cold candlelit attics, of exquisite vestments hidden in concealed presses, of sentries in the lanes.) But Southwell’s most important verse including the still-heartbreaking St Peter’s Complaint – perhaps the greatest poem in English about guilt, repentance and healing -- circulated openly. It was scriptural, proverbial, elegant, memorable. It was available to all. George Herbert often imitates it, remembers it, and is touched by it in his own verses.

Let us hear Southwell’s distraught, lamenting St Peter:

All weeping eyes resigne your teares to me:
A sea will scantly rinse my ordur’de soule:
Huge horrours in high tides must drowned bee,
Of every teare my crime exacteth tole.
These staines are deepe: few drops, take out no such:
Even salve with sore: and most, is not too much.
How can I live, that thus my life deni’d?
What can I hope, that lost my hope in feare?
What trust to one, that truth it selfe defi’de?
What good in him, that did his God forsweare?

Let’s pause there, honouring the beauty and the affect of this repenting verse. But also let us consider how these verses lived in the memories and imaginations of those who came soon after Southwell.  In those lines alone, quoted from a poem of nearly 800 lines, we find words which prefigure the sleepwalking, guilty Lady Macbeth. We also find the kind of urgent dialogue of choppy half lines which characterise some of the most heartfelt poems of George Herbert.

But, in our time, Southwell has almost entirely vanished. If any of his verses are familiar to us at all, they are the two Christmas pieces: The Burning Babe and Britten’s setting of This litte babe so few days old / has come to rifle Satan’s fold. Southwell’s St Peter and Mary Magdalen have vanished almost without trace, indeed the only modern edition of Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears is on my hard drive and those of my fellow editors of the Oxford University Pres edition of Southwell. I would go beyond this and say not only has Southwell vanished, he has been wilfully caused to disappear. As I said before, history is always in flux and the meanings of the past are contingent meanings for the changing present. But we have here a extremely complex case of an unjust forgetting.        

What happened to this vastly popular English poet to cause his work to disappear from memory, canon and syllabus? The wars of the three kingdoms in the mid-seventeenth century, the religious tensions which boiled over in the revolution of 1688 and the subsequent division of the polity, all tended to polarise, to emphasise division and difference between Christian confessions. There were no Georgian reprints of Southwell. Centuries of penal laws against Catholics removed the Catholic community from official life, enforced a degree of cultural division between cosmopolitan Catholics and rooted Anglicans, which had been unknown in the century after the reformations. This was the foundation of a most celebrated description of the nature and identity of the British Catholic community, as utterly divided from English society, and expressed in beautiful and memorable words, by St. John Henry Newman, in his second spring sermon. 

An old-fashioned house of gloomy appearance, closed in with high walls, with an iron gate, and yews, and the report attaching to it that "Roman Catholics" lived there; but who they were, or what they did, or what was meant by calling them Roman Catholics, no one could tell;—though it had an unpleasant sound, and told of form and superstition.’

There are two problems here: that a considerable ongoing Catholic cultural contribution from architects (including the architect of the Radcliffe Camera), art dealers, garden designers, and even wine merchants is erased. And this passage is so memorable as to foster a retrospective impression that this state of utter division between communities has been going on for a long time, possibly ever since the reigns of the Tudors. So much so that it becomes hard to believe that so many seventeenth century Anglican readers derived solace and delight from poetry by a Jesuit. 

All of which has contributed to Southwell’s disappearance, except perhaps in the memory of the British Catholic community, so much so that when the literary canon of for the comparatively new university discipline of English literature was being formed in the early twentieth century, it was easy for Sir Herbert Grierson to exclude Southwell from the Canon on the grounds (essentially) of being insufficiently English. Educated abroad, Catholic, Jesuit, Italianate, and therefore hectic, conceited, and overwrought. 

But what have we lost by this erasure? Well, I think we have lost a great deal, not least the daily beauty and consolation of reading Southwell’s verse and prose. And we have lost an important chapter in the history of Anglican spiritual reading and thinking, that near half-century from the 1590s to the Civil Wars when Southwell was England’s favourite poet, and indeed one of the vanishing small number of vernacular writers to make an impression in austerely Latinate Scotland. But histories change as the present changes: and the drawing together of the Anglican and Roman Catholic communities in the last thirty years, has been so notable as to suggest that such a fruitfully shared spirituality of the past might become once more visible and legible to our present. This is a history which could still change for the better in an era which, in this respect, is showing already some characteristics of a longed-for Third Spring.

In nomine patis, et filii et spiritus sancti, AMEN.