Anglican Values 5: Restraint

Anglican Values 5: Restraint
May, 1997

Restraint is an ingrained custom for Anglicans: we wish not to do or say things too directly, too blatantly, too obviously. We are happiest with liturgy in which the facts of life are alluded to indirectly, in sermons that make their points discreetly, in church furnishing and decoration that are "in good taste", in clothing that is restrained, not to say dowdy, in colors that are not too bright, in theological conversation that is polite and non-confrontational. It has been said in jest that Anglicans do not have sins, but lapses of taste. This habit of ours sometimes drives non-Anglicans slightly crazy.

I am writing this essay on April 23, Shakespeare's birthday, April 23, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon. His dramatic works include some 16 comedies, 11 history plays, and 11 tragedies, produced between 1590 and 1613. Shakespeare is the premier dramatist and poet of the English language, and all of us have read at least some of his work, if only in high school. It goes without saying that his influence on every aspect of English-speaking civilization is incalculable.

Why introduce Shakespeare into a discussion of Anglican values? Because he is the most important and representative writer of the Elizabethan-Jacobean period in which the Anglican Church took its characteristic shape and form. And also because there is something important about his dramatic work that bears on Anglican restraint.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), to avoid bloody and unnecessary religious conflict, it was forbidden to discuss theology and the Christian religion directly in plays produced for the stage. And so Shakespeare had to find other ways of treating the great moral questions of human life. He found them in stories from the past, in far-away locales, and most of all, in presenting them indirectly through the experiences of his characters in the drama. He treats of sin, but without direct theology: pride in Othello, greed in The Merchant of Venice, ambition and despair in Hamlet, deception in Much Ado About Nothing, the lighter and darker sides of patriotism in the history plays, and so on. But at no point does he preach, or state directly his points.

And this is exactly the Anglican style: when we want to make a point about faith or sin, we tend to tell a story, look for an example displaced from our own context, avert our eyes from the thing itself and trust in people's innate intelligence to apply the moral.

This may not be helpful to everyone in contemporary American culture. People flock to churches with more direct ways of expressing the faith. But it is our way, and it has produced something valuable in Christian civilization: space for difference, room for a person to make up his or her own mind without coercion, and most of all, an ample appreciation for the universality of God's love, laws and revelation that transcends religious language and is at home in palaces, humble homes, enchanted forests, battlefields, town squares and every other imaginable human habitation.

In Shakespeare, and in Anglicanism, Church is not the only place to look for God's plenty and God's truth.