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Barbara Pym and the Sermon Barbara J Barbara Pym and the Sermon Barbara J. Dunlap Paper presented at the North American Conference of the Barbara Pym Society Harvard University, 2 April 2005 Barbara Pym had a keen and critical interest in sermons, as her diaries and novels attest. At the end of her first year at Oxford, she dismissed a University Sermon as “somewhat dull and full of blaa [sic] and waffle.”[1] In her ongoing novelistic presentation of the Church of England she uses sermons to illustrate the characters of her clergy and to imply how they may starve or nourish their parishioners’ spiritual lives. I am sure that everyone here recollects Archdeacon Hoccleve’s sermon on the Judgment Day in Some Tame Gazelle. I want to look briefly at the development of the sermon within the Anglican tradition and at the popularity of the Judgment Day as a topic. Then I will address the Archdeacon’s handling of this theme and examine the sermons of the two priests he perceives as his rivals, Father Plowman and Mr. Donne. Barbara Pym continued to look narrowly at sermons in Civil to Strangers and in Excellent Women, presenting alto- gether four types: the literary sermon; the Scriptural exegesis; the instructional homily and the inspirational talk. If the sermons reported in the novels fail to satisfy her most reflective characters, a consideration of Barbara Pym’s own long-standing interest in John Henry Newman may offer insight into the kind of sermon that would have satisfied her and her creations. Be warned: I shall often speak of her characters as if they were real people listening to real sermons! Early Christian Period Let me step into Mark Ainger mode for a moment. Those of you who have visited the catacombs of San Giovanni Evangelista at Syracusa will have seen the altar there—a large flat stone, from which St. Paul is said to have preached during his visit to that city (Acts 28: 11-13). He may have made the first critique on sermons when he told the congregation at Corinth: “Seeing that we have such hope, we use great plain- ness of speech” (2 Cor. 3: 12). John Henry Newman wrote that in its earliest three centuries, Christianity first developed worship, then a theology, and finally an “ecclesiastical polity”—the Church. For the young Church, as for the Anglican Church in Pym’s time, preachers were challenged to adjust Christian teachings to people of varying circumstances and education. Justin Martyr, a second century saint, described under- ground Sunday meetings at which there were readings from the “Memoirs of the Apostles,” or the New Testament, and from the writings of the prophets. These were followed by a homily by the presiding pres- byter or bishop which contained the “admonition and exhortation “ to the congregation to imitate the noble things it had just heard about. “Homily” is from a Greek root meaning a “conversation” or “familiar dis- course”; the Latin word “sermo” originally denoted a simple style as “distinguished from the rhetorical speeches of the heathen orators and philosophers.”[2] When Mildred Lathbury hears a Lenten preacher at the bomb-damaged St. Ermin’s in 1946, she suggests that he used this plain, direct style and made her feel part of a community, such as that reported by Justin Martyr: “The preacher was forceful and interesting. His words seemed to knit us together, so that we really were like the early Christians having all things in common.” [3] Two centuries after Justin Martyr comes St. John Chrysostom, the “golden mouthed, ” who wrote over 600 homilies. He chose to expound on all the books of Scripture rather than write topical discourses.[4] The homiletic tradition in England goes back to the Roman Christian mission in 547, though the earliest surviv- ing manuscripts of those written in Old English date from the tenth century. These preaching texts were probably adapted for use in the ensuing Norman period. At the service of Mass they were usually delivered after the reading of the Gospel for the day; they may have been the only part of the service spoken in the vernacular and thus completely understandable to lay people or religious who did not understand Latin. Surviving texts offer homilies that draw out implications of the Gospel text and homilies that exhort listen- ers to change their behavior or to repent.[5] In one of the early years of the English Reformation, 1547, Archbishop Cranmer sponsored a book of homilies designed to raise the level of preaching in the churches. This book included an exhortation against the fear of death and other homilies exhorting against such sins as idolatry, swearing and adultery. A second book, issued in 1563, gives model homilies on fasting, prayer, and the Passion.[6] The Judgment Day is not dealt with specifically, although meditations and homilies on the Four Last Things—Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell—had been staples of late medieval preaching. Writing in 1522 on “The Four Last Things,” Sir Thomas More called daily meditation on these topos, or “herbs,” a “sure medicine against the seven deadly sins and ultimately eternal damnation.”[7] The Seventeenth Century Divines By the time of Barbara Pym’s favorite poetic century—the seventeenth—the Anglican Divines were creating an important preaching tradition. While this was a various group, they shared veneration for the writings of the Fathers of the Church and a massive learning. Their theology centered on the Incarnation and many were strongly interested in liturgy.[8] Their connection to the Reformed tradition ensured that the sermon would be primary at the main Sunday service. Whereas the homily was theoretically a short medi- tation, the Anglican Divines preferred the longer and often more free ranging discourses now associated with the word “sermon.” The Divines had usually been trained in classical languages and rhetoric, and so moved away from the “plainness of speech” recommended by St. Paul. After Rocky Napier leaves London, Mildred Lathbury seeks consolation inside her church, St. Mary’s, a Victorian building. She reflects that it lacks the canopied tombs of the Seventeenth Century, but asks herself: “Ought I not to be consoled by the thought of our first vicar…as by any seventeenth century divine (167)?” If the sermons of these men were often top-heavy with “conceits of fancy, plays on words, antitheses [and] paradoxes,” they were also “thoughtful and based on a solid knowledge of Scripture.”[9] The best-known Anglican Divine is John Donne whose eschatological sonnet “At the round earth’s imagined corners” vividly imagines the Judgment Day. It was a popular sermon theme with the Divines; representative among many are Thomas Goodwin’s “The World to Come” of 1655 and Andrew Jones’s “Doomsday, or The Great Day of the Lord Drawing Nigh” of 1665.[10] The tendency of some Divines to show off their learning, both sacred and secular, did not go uncriti- cized. John Wilkes, Bishop of Chester, was greatly concerned with preaching style and wrote in1646 that “To stuff a sermon with citations of Authors [sic] and the witty sayings of others, is to make a feast of vinegar and pepper.”[11] By contrast, Archdeacon Hoccleve would have agreed with Wilkes’s contempo- rary, Owen Felltham, who liked to see a sermon “well-dressed” in fine language.[12] The Archdeacon seems to have had an earlier incarnation in a certain Francis Atterbury whose preaching has been characterized as “showy rather than profound” and of a “contentious and arrogant spirit.”[13] More on the Judgment Day When his parishioners discover that Hoccleve’s Judgement Day sermon is to be just a mass of old quotations, many “tune it out.” Surely this can have nothing to do with them. He does not draw on the Anglican Divines, but mostly recycles poetry he read at Oxford. Hoccleve is obviously interested in this topic only as it affords him an opportunity to show off his ability to string quotations together. That he regularly relies on the words of others is suggested by Harriet’s remark as she and Belinda get ready for church on the Sunday of the Judgment Day sermon: “I never heard anything so depressing in my life as that horrid thing he read last Sunday—all about worms and such stilted language.”[14] Several days earlier Belinda had seen the Archdeacon wandering among the tombstones in the churchyard (20), and his first words to her were about yew trees. The yew was used often, perhaps too often, in the eighteenth century as a symbol of death and melancholy. He might have quoted to her the words of Thomas Parnell’s “Night Piece on Death”: Now from yon dark and fun’ral yew That bathes the charnel-house with dew, Methinks I hear a voice begin… (1722; ll. 53-55). Though Pym does not use the quotation, she does use the name Parnell for one of her visiting librarians. While the figure of Death in Parnell’s poem comes to reassure the living that death is not terrible, Hoccleve offers nothing but terror and denunciation in his sermon. According to Belinda, he works his way through the seventeenth century and then fixes on Edward Young’s long philosophical poem, The Complaint; or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality. In 10,000 lines of blank verse Young reflects “on life, death and human nature” and defends the Christian faith on intellectual grounds.[15] Night Thoughts enjoyed tremendous popularity at the time of its publication in the 1740s and for decades thereafter. Barbara Pym was “very fond” of it.[16] Large swatches of the poem are addressed to a figure conventionally named “Lo- renzo,” her private name for Henry Harvey, the Oxford contemporary who used her affection but did not return it.
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