ANOINTING THE KING HALLOWING HOPE FOR THE WORLD IN THE ENGLISH CORONATION A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of The School of Continuing Studies and of The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Liberal Studies By Susan E. Bond, M.A.T.S. Georgetown University Washington, D.C. November 27, 2018 ANOINTING THE KING HALLOWING HOPE FOR THE WORLD IN THE ENGLISH CORONATION Susan E. Bond, M.A.T.S. D.L.S. Chair: Gregory C. Havrilak, Ph.D. ABSTRACT By means of her anointing, in an order of service that dates to the anointing and crowning of King Edgar at Bath in 973 as the first King of All England, Elizabeth II carries into the present age a profound theology of kingship first articulated in the early 1100s by the Norman Anonymous and more fully by John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, in which the sovereign is the living embodiment of Christ the king: Rex imago Christi. Great Britain is the last Christian monarchy to anoint its sovereign. The thesis is that the ideal of Christological kingship continues to obtain today although in a radically different historical and political context than that of its beginnings. History and liturgical theology are the methods of approach. As a history, the paper looks to the historical context of anointing, which leads to an examination of anointing the king in the modern context. As liturgical theology, the paper examines the meaning of imago Christi as it pertains to the anointing and hallowing of the image of the human person (imago hominis) in the eternal image of Christ the king. As liturgical theology, this examines the significance of the symbols and rituals of the anointing, vesting, and ii crowning of the British monarch. In the beauty of holiness the coronation stirs up the hope for our humanity embedded in our birthright as human persons made in the image and likeness of God. The hallowing of anointing the monarch is the living prayer that the love of God be manifested and generously poured out on crown and kingdom. The thesis includes a discussion of the human values embedded in the crown: duty, sacrifice, and faithful love. The ideals of human rights and ruling with justice and mercy slowly grew out of this hope for holiness—generally unrecognized as such—in the leadership of an anointed monarch. Paradoxically under the impact of democracy, the tenth-century ideal of Christological kingship is well-realized in Elizabeth II. iii For my mother Patricia Grace Hornbrook Bond, with thanks for being my first reader. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...................................................................................... ii DEDICATION .................................................................................. iv INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 1 Christological Kingship ......................................................... 2 Issues and Arguments ............................................................ 16 Chapters and Methods ........................................................... 17 Coronation Order of Service ................................................. 19 CHAPTER 1: HISTORY OF ANOINTING ..................................... 25 Linen Coif Vestment ............................................................. 30 In the Sacraments .................................................................. 38 Latin West ............................................................................. 56 Constantinople ....................................................................... 69 CHAPTER 2: REX IMAGO CHRISTI ............................................... 72 Imago Dei and Imago Christi ................................................ 75 Saint Dunstan and Saint Benedict ......................................... 88 Norman Anonymous (fl. 1096–1106) ................................... 97 John Wycliffe (1324–84) ....................................................... 104 Political Theology ................................................................. 116 CHAPTER 3: LITURGY ................................................................. 121 v Modern Liturgical Theology ................................................. 123 Symbol, Body, Imagination, Poetics, Music ......................... 152 CHAPTER 4: CORONATION AND COSMOS .............................. 182 Westminster Abbey ............................................................... 185 Stone of Scone ....................................................................... 196 Coronation Chair ................................................................... 202 Cosmati Pavement ................................................................. 209 CHAPTER 5: IMAGE IN THE AGE OF SPECTACLE .................. 216 Dupré: Passage to Modernity ................................................ 219 Debord: Society of the Spectacle ........................................... 224 Adorno: Mass Culture ........................................................... 230 Boorstin: Pseudo-Events ....................................................... 234 1953: Coronation and Spectacle ........................................... 241 CONCLUSION ................................................................................. 252 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................. 259 vi INTRODUCTION Let thy most sacred unction flow upon his head and descend into his heart, enter his soul. ——Coronation of Aethelred II (c. 10/11th century)1 Be human in this most inhuman of ages, guard the image of man for it is the image of God. ——Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (1966) On June 2, 1953, Elizabeth II was anointed and crowned “by the Grace of God, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith” in a service at Westminster Abbey officiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher.2 Great Britain is the last Christian monarchy to anoint its sovereign. 1. Leopold G. Wickham, ed., English Coronation Records (New York: Dutton, 1901), 14. Aethelred is more commonly spelled Ethelred, and Ethelred II is also known as Ethelred the Unready, or Ill-Counseled. In this paper he will be referred to as Aethelred the Ill-Counseled or Aethelred II (978– 1016). Over time the Anglo-Saxon term unræd, which means ill-advised, came to be translated as ill- prepared or unready, so Aethelred the Ill-Counseled is a return to original meaning and spelling. Levi Roach, Aethelred the Unready (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 7. 2. The queen’s official title. Bruce Ingram, ed., The Illustrated London News: Coronation Number, Queen Elizabeth II (Strand, London: The Illustrated London News and Sketch, 1953), frontispiece. 1 Christological Kingship By means of her anointing, in an order of service that dates to the anointing and crowning of King Edgar at Bath in 973 as the first King of All England, Elizabeth II carries into the present age a profound theology of kingship that was first articulated in the early 1100s by the so-called Norman Anonymous and more fully by John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, in which the king (a queen regnant but not queen consort is understood to be king in this context) is the living embodiment of Christ the king: Rex imago Christi.3 At the anointing he or she becomes persona mixta, a person with both spiritual and secular duties, and more importantly, gemina persona, that is, a twinned person, human by nature and divine by grace, a reverse image of Christ, who is divine by nature and human by grace.4 In the first place, this ideal of kingship marked a shift 3. Queen, but not prince, consorts are anointed for two reasons: the queen consort produces the heirs to the throne and it was presumed that an anointed prince would, by reason of his nature, take over the throne. Thus Elizabeth II’s mother was anointed as queen consort of George VI but Elizabeth’s husband Prince Philip was not anointed, rather he pledged his fealty to the queen as her “liege man of life and limb.” There have been six queens anointed queen regnant or heirs to the throne in their own right: Mary I, Elizabeth I, Mary II (of William and Mary), Anne, Victoria, and Elizabeth II. Before Mary I, Jane Grey ruled for nine days but was neither crowned nor anointed. In the medieval era Matilda (1102– 67), daughter of Henry I, and Holy Roman Empress as wife of Henry V, made an effort to claim the English throne but was neither crowned nor anointed. William and Mary were the exception proving the rule of male dominance: Mary was queen regnant but she was anointed and crowned with her husband William, who was the real force on the throne while Mary’s role was limited. Edward C. Ratcliffe, The English Coronation Service (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1936); Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). 4. “Through him . you may become participants of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). See also Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016 [1957]), 87. My inspiration for the thesis came from Kantorowicz’s work to which I was led by a passing comment in an introductory article on John Wycliffe proposing that Wycliffe has been lately re-discovered by scholars of Western political thought because he provides