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Divine Visitation: The 1662 Prayer Book’s Theology of Sickness and Plague
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2021
Abstract
When it began to be clear that COVID-19 was a global phenomenon, clerics were scrambling for liturgical ways to address the crisis. But it turned out that most twentieth-century Anglican Prayers Books have few, if any, prayers for times of plague or great sickness. This was not always the case. In light of the current pandemic and the pastoral challenges it has introduced, this article explores the theology of sickness and plague in the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer in light of the devastating history of plagues and sicknesses in England, both before and after the sixteenth-century reformations. This exploration makes use of the lens of ‘divine visitation’ as an ordering principle, one of the distinctive phrases that the Prayer Book uses repeatedly to speak of bodily illness.
Keywords
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- Research Article
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- © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
1
Matthew S. C. Olver is Assistant Professor of Liturgics and Pastoral Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, Nashotah, WI, USA. An earlier and shorter version of this material was presented on September 5, 2020, as part of the conference titled ‘In Time of Plague or Sickness,’ hosted by The Prayer Book Society, UK. The conference was entirely on YouTube because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The author wishes to thank Prudence Dailey, Iain Milne, Jon Riding, and The Prayer Book Society (UK) for the kind invitation to give this keynote address; Jack Franicevich and Micah Hogan for their assistance in preparing the article for publication; and Elisabeth Kincaid, Brian Douglas, and the peer reviewers who all provided very helpful suggestions for improving this article.
References
2 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London (Everyman’s Library 289; London: J.M. Dent, 1908), pp. vii-ix.
3 Thomas Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City (London?, 1667), p. 6, quoted in Christi Keating Sumich, ‘A Broom in the Hand of the Almighty: The Plague and the Unruly Poor’, in Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers: How Practicing Medicine Became a Respectable Profession (Clio Medica, 91; (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), p. 216.
4 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (ed. Henry B. Wheatley; 18 vols.; New York: Croscup & Sterling, 1900), IX, p. 62 (September 4, 1665); IX, pp. 39-40 (August 10, 1665); VIII, p. 234 (September 24, 1664).
5 Massey Hamilton Shepherd, The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 308. Marion Hatchett’s assessment in his commentary on the 1979 American Prayer Book is similar: ‘The essential theme is that sickness is God’s chastisement to correct sinful humanity’; Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), pp. 460-61.
6 There are some exceptions. For example, the thanksgiving for Fair Weather in the 1928 American BCP begins, ‘O Lord God, who hast justly humbled us by thy late visitation of us with immoderate rain and waters’ (oddly, the 1662 BCP uses the term ‘plague’ instead of ‘visitation’); The 1928 Book of Common Prayer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 51.
7 N.T. Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2020).
8 James Martin, SJ, ‘Where Is God in the Pandemic?’, New York Times, March 22, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/opinion/coronavirus-religion.html (accessed September 3, 2020).
9 See Bryan Spinks, ‘Evaluating Liturgies of the Reformation: The Limitations of the Comparative Methods of Baumstark’, in Robert F. Taft and Gabriele Winkler (eds.), Comparative Liturgy Fifty Years after Anton Baumstark (1872–1948): Acts of the International Congress, Rome, 25–29 September 1998 (Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 265; Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 2001), pp. 283-303.
10 Richard Mant (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer and the Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: According to the Use of the United Church of England and Ireland, Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, Pointed as They Are to Be Sung or Said in Churches : The Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining, and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, and the Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical: With Notes Explanatory, Practical and Historical, from Approved Writers of the Church of England (London: Gilbert & Rivington, for J.G.F. & J. Rivington, 1840), p. 409.
11 ‘If the sicke person desyre to be annoynted, then shal the priest annoynte him upon the forehead or breast only, makyng the signe of the crosse, saying thus,
As with this visible oyle thy body outwardly is annoynted: so our heavenly father almyghtye God, graunt of his infinite goodnesse, that thy soule inwardly may be annoynted with the holy gost, who is the spirite of al strength, coumforte, reliefe, and gladnesse. And vouchesafe for his great mercy (yf it be his blessed will) to restore unto thee thy bodely helth, and strength, to serve him, and sende thee release of al thy paines, troubles, and diseases, both in body and minde. And howsoever his goodnesse (by his divyne and unserchable providence) shall dispose of thee: we, his unworthy ministers and servaunts, humbly beseche the eternall maiestie, to doe with thee according to the multitude of his innumerable mercies, and to pardon thee all thy sinnes and offences, committed by all thy bodily senses, passions, and carnall affeccions: who also vouchsafe mercifully to graunt unto thee gostely strength, by his holy spirite, to withstand and overcome al temptacions and assaultes of thine adversarye, that in no wise he prevaile against thee, but that thou mayest have perfit victory and triumph against the devil, sinne, and death, through Christ our Lord: Who by his death hath overcomed the Prince of death, and with the father, and the holy gost evermore liveth and reigneth God, worlde without ende. Amen.’ Brian Cummings (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (repr.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 78.
12 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 443.
13 John Henry Blunt (ed.), The Annotated Book of Common Prayer: Being an Historical, Ritual, and Theological Commentary on the Devotional System of the Church of England (new edn; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892), p. 460.
14 The 1560 Latin version of the Prayer Book does not contain any substantive differences in the rite; see Frank Streatfeild, Latin Versions of the Book of Common Prayer (London: A.R. Mowbray for the Alcuin Club, 1964), pp. 3-4.
15 https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html (accessed August 28, 2020).
16 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, VI, p. 337.
17 Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891), p. 5; Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (ed. D.H. Farmer; trans. Leo Sherley-Price and R.E. Latham; rev. edn; London: Penguin Books, 1990), III.27, pp. 194-95.
18 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, III.30, p. 200.
19 Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made (New York: Perennial/HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 11-13. Some of the effects in England are startling. A generation after the plague had ravaged England, ‘in the 1370s, the Black Death had caused a critical labor shortage, especially in rural areas. Peasants took advantage of the labor market operating in their favor to demand steep increases in wages from landlords. The aristocracy and gentry responded by using Parliament to force through laws holding down workers’ wages against the inflationary labor market. This government intervention was a prime cause of the outbreak of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in eastern England, the greatest proletarian rising before the eighteenth century. Urged on by radical clerics, the rebellious peasants came close to bringing down the government and establishing a Christian socialist regime’ (Cantor, Plague, p. 24).
20 For more on its history, see John Aberth, The Black Death, The Great Mortality of 1348–1350: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2nd edn, 2017).
21 Creighton, Epidemics in Britain, pp. 69-113; see also Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006).
22 The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (repr.; Everyman’s Library 448; London and New York: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd and E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938), p. 422; see Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 170 (1559 edn) and p. 450 (1662 edn).
23 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 742.
24 Drawn from Creighton, Epidemics in Britain.
25 Michael C. Sansom, ‘Liturgical Responses to (Natural) Disaster in Seventeenth-Century England’, Studia Liturgica 19.2 (1989), pp. 179-96 (179).
26 Sansom, ‘Liturgical Responses’, p. 180.
27 Sumich, ‘A Broom in the Hand of the Almighty’, pp. 216, 217.
28 Sansom, ‘Liturgical Responses’, p. 182.
29 See Natalie Mears, Alasdair Raffe, Stephen Taylor and Philip Williamson (eds.), National Prayers: Special Worship since the Reformation. I. Special Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings in the British Isles, 1522–1688 (Church of England Record Society, 22; Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), which is an updating and expansion of William Keatinge Clay (ed.), Liturgical Services: Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1847). As an example of these prayers, here is ‘A short meditation to be sayde of such as be touched in affliction’ from the 1563 royal injunction of services and weekly fasts during the plague epidemic: ‘O Father, doubtlesse our owne wickednes do rewarde vs; but do thou, O Lorde, according to thy name. Our oft transgressions & sinnes be many. Agaynst thee haue we sinned, yet art thou the conforter and helper of thy humble subiectes, in the time of theyr trouble. For thou O Lorde, art in the myddes of vs, and thy name is called vpon vs. Forsake vs not O God, forsake vs not for the merites of thy only sonne our Sauiour Jesus Christ, to whom with thee and the holy ghost be all honour nad glorye. Amen’ (Mearswil et al., National Prayers, p. 68).
30 Natalie Mears, ‘Special Nationwide Worship and the Book of Common Prayer in England, Wales and Ireland, 1533–1642’, in Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie (eds.), Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History; Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 33.
31 January 15, 1661/62, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, III, p. 161.
32 Mears, ‘Special Nationwide Worship’, p. 33.
33 Mears, ‘Special Nationwide Worship’, p. 34; see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
34 Sansom, ‘Liturgical Responses’, p. 205.
35 Ole Peter Grell, ‘Plague, Prayer and Physic: Helmontian Medicine in Restoration England’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scholars Press/Ashgate, 1996), p. 204.
36 Grell, ‘Plague, Prayer and Physic’, p. 205.
37 Sumich, ‘A Broom in the Hand of the Almighty’, p. 220. See R. Palmer, ‘The Church, Leprosy and Plague in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, in W.J. Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), p. 88.
38 John Cragge, Great Britains Prayers in This Dangerous Time of Contagion: Together Vvith a Congratulatory for the Entertainment of His Majesty out of Scotland (1641), cited in Sumich, ‘A Broom in the Hand of the Almighty’, p. 220. See also Voice to the City, or, a Loud Cry from Heaven to London, Setting before Her Her Sins, He Sickness, Her Remedies (1665); Flagellum Dei: Or a Collection of the Several Fires, Plagues, and Pestilential Diseases That Have Hapned in London Especially, and Other Parts of This Nation, from the Normal Conquest to The Present, 1668 (1668), whose main lens for the disasters was divine wrath; W.C., Londons Lamentations for her Sinnes: A Complaint to the Lord Her God (1625).
39 Sumich, ‘A Broom in the Hand of the Almighty’, p. 220.
40 Robert Johnson, Enchiridion Medicum, or, A Manual of Physick: Being a Compendium of the Whole Art, in Three Parts … : Wherein Is Briefly Shewed 1. the Names, 2. the Derivation, 3. the Causes, 4. the Signs, 5. the Prognosticks, and 6. a Rational Method of Cure (London, 1684).
41 For the sake of ease, the term ‘Office’ in this article is shorthand for the Office of the Visitation to the Sick in the 1662 BCP, unless otherwise noted.
42 At Matins on February 24, June 17, and October 15.
43 ‘Forasmuch as all mortal men be subject to many sudden perils, diseases, and sicknesses, and ever uncertain what time they shall depart out of this life; therefore, to the intent they may always be in a readiness to die, whensoever it shall please Almighty God to call them, the Curates shall diligently from time to time (but especially in the time of pestilence, or other infectious sickness) exhort their Parishioners to the often receiving of the holy Communion of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ, when it shall be publickly ministered in the Church; that so doing, they may, in case of sudden visitation, have the less cause to be disquieted for lack of the same’; Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 449.
44 ‘An action, on the part of one in authority, or of a duly qualified or authorized person, of going to a particular place in order to make an inspection and satisfy himself that everything is in order’; The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), II:3643 (henceforth OED).
45 The earliest use in English of the term in this way is recorded by the OED in 1340; OED, II:3643.
46 OED, II:3643.
47 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 357; Lk. 7.16.
48 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 271.
49 For example, see one of the collects in Compline, ‘Visit this place, O Lord, and drive far from it all snares of the enemy’; Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer [1979] (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 133, p. 140 (henceforth BCP79). This is the collect for Compline in the Roman breviary (Hatchett, Commentary, p. 147). The request that God might ‘visit the lonely’ is a petition that was added to the 1979 version of Litany (BCP79, p. 151). ‘Daily visitation’ is the principal petition in the new collect for the fourth Sunday of Advent, which is ‘a revised version of William Bright’s translation of a Gelasian collect (no. 1127)’ and which can also be found ‘in the Gregorian sacramentary under “Other Prayers for Advent” (no. 809)’ and ‘in the Missale Gallicanum vetus as the collect in the first of three Advent Masses (no. 40)’ (Hatchett, Commentary, p. 167). The only use of the term in the Visitation of the Sick is in an optional collect, ‘We humbly beseech thee to behold, visit, and relieve thy sick servant N. for whom our prayers are desired’ (BCP79, p. 458). This collect was also included in the 1928 American BCP in the ‘Occasional Prayers’ printed after the Offices (but not in the Visitation of the Sick). A longer version of the prayer had been ‘created by joining portions of three prayers from the 1662 office for the visitation of the sick [and] was among four occasional prayers introduced in the 1789 American Book’ (Hatchett, Commentary, p. 468). Psalms in the Burial office use the language of visitation to speak of God’s presence: ‘to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and to visit his temple’ (Ps. 27.2); ‘O visit me with thy salvation’ (Ps. 106.4). Collect for cities and jails: ‘Behold and visit, we pray, the cities of the earth’ (BCP79, p. 825); ‘Visit our jails and prisons with your pity and judgment’ (BCP79, p. 826).
50 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 329. This passage is never read in the Sunday and Holy Day lectionary of the 1979 BCP, except in the votive for Vocation in Daily Work (p. 932). 1 Peter is read through, beginning Easter 2 in Year 2 (2.11 is read on Thursday) and also on the week of Proper 29, Year 1 (2.11 is read on Thursday).
51 OED, II:3643.
52 Thomas Purfoote, The Interlude of the Trial of Treasure, reprinted from The Black Letter edition, 1567 (London: Printed for the Percy Society by Richards, 1850), p. 37; cited in the OED, II:3643.
53 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, pp. 438-39, 463. The Psalms are 86.2; 20.2; 89.23; 61.3; 102.1.
54 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 715.
55 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 73.
56 This type of use can be categorized as ‘pattern’, which is an appeal ‘to a pattern of divine activity, which is the basis for the request that God will respond to the present petition’; see Matthew S. C. Olver, ‘A Classification of a Liturgy’s Use of Scripture: A Proposal’, Studia Liturgica 49.2 (2019), pp. 220-45 (233).
57 This prayer was not edited in the 1604 Jacobean Prayer Book.
58 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 443.
59 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 443.
60 Hatchett, Commentary, p. 461. He also points out that in the first American Prayer Book of 1789, Psalm 71 is replaced by Psalm 130, following the Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (V.7).
61 Wheatly points out that this exhortation ‘exactly agrees with the heads [sic] of Exhortation, which the Priest was ordered to use to the Sick by an ancient council above eight hundred years ago’; Charles Wheatly, A Rational Illustration of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 7th edn, 1794), p. 404. He appears to be citing the Council of Nantes (Nannentens), c. 890. See Henry Charles Lea, Confession and Absolution: Volume 1 of A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church (Philadelphia, PA: Lea Brothers, 1896), p. 87.
62 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 443.
63 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 443.
64 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 443.
65 Hatchett explains: ‘The Rev. Dr. William Reed Huntington included this prayer in his work Materia Ritualis (1882); it was proposed for the 1892 revision among the occasional prayers under the title, “For Patience under Suffering,” but was not accepted. The 1928 revision adopted it for use as the collect for Monday in Holy Week, which previously had no proper collect.’ The text is taken from this exhortation, which Cranmer drew from Hermann’s Consultation (Hatchett, Commentary, p. 125).
66 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 444.
67 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 445.
68 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 642.
69 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 270.
70 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 265.
71 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 266.
72 See Exod. 32.35; Num. 11.31-34; 16.49; 25.9; 1 Sam. 5.9; 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 22; 2 Kgs 19.35.
73 In the revised Office lectionary, these two passages are read on the Sunday of Trinity XXIII: Luke 13 at Matins and John 15 at Evensong.
74 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 328.
75 Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p. 270.