A Following Holy Life. Kenneth Stevenson

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СКАЧАТЬ background was neither impoverished nor well-to-do. His father, Nathaniel, was a Cambridge barber, who sent him to the Perse Grammar School, when he was six years old. Stephen Perse was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and Taylor went there at the age of fifteen in 1628. We do not know the details of his course of studies, but we can be sure that they involved being steeped in the classics, an experience from which Taylor would have emerged fully accomplished in Latin and Greek. In many respects, a mind-frame shaped by the Renaissance in this way suited him well. In 1633 he was appointed to a Fellowship. Such a move required him to be ordained, in his case at the tender and technically uncanonical age of twenty (he should have been twenty-three).

      In the following year, Taylor had what would nowadays be called a lucky break, when he had to stand in for a friend who was supposed to preach in St Paul’s Cathedral. Someone with his talents in language and communication was bound to attract notice. It began with William Laud (1573–1644), Archbishop of Canterbury, who appointed him as one of his chaplains, and it led to being noticed by the King as well, and a move to Oxford, where Laud engineered a Fellowship for him at All Souls. There was some opposition to this, which may have been as much about Laud’s way of working as about Taylor himself. One of the more influential Fellows was Gilbert Sheldon (1598–1677), who was to develop a somewhat cautious attitude towards Taylor, which probably explained why as Archbishop of Canterbury after the Restoration he did nothing to secure him an English diocese.

Among other contacts in Oxford, Taylor met William Chillingworth (1602–44) and the ‘Great Tew Circle’, whose theological views were for more ‘latitude’ in dealing with religious controversy, a recurrent theme in Taylor’s later writings. Chillingworth did not doubt Taylor’s ability but observed an unfortunate opinionated streak: ‘he slights too much many times the arguments of those he discourses with’.[3] This may have been another cause for reserve in some quarters about him, perhaps added to by his suave style and good looks. But in that remark can be seen something else in Taylor: the makings of a man who sometimes needed to clear his mind while speaking and then express it primarily by writing.

      The next stage in Taylor’s life saw him appointed to the livings of Uppingham, Rutland (1638), and then Overstone, near Wellingborough (1643). Uppingham, according to John Evelyn (1620–1706) the diarist, whom Taylor was soon to befriend, was a poverty-stricken parish where he put into practice the liturgical customs of the ‘Laudian’ school, with a fully appointed chancel, altar-table, an organ, and more frequent (probably monthly) celebrations of the Eucharist; and he will have relished its elegant Elizabethan pulpit. He married his first wife Phoebe Landisdale there in 1639. He does not seem to have spent much time at Overstone, where he was presented after being extruded from Uppingham as the Civil War gathered momentum and his association with the Royalist cause made him unacceptable.

      His Gunpowder Day Sermon delivered in Oxford in 1638, a workmanlike performance but no more, had allied him to the King; and this was even more the case with ‘Episcopacy Asserted’ (1642), written at a time when Presbyterians and Independents were renewing their attacks on the office of bishop, so that figures like Taylor and Henry Hammond (1605–60), another staunch and open defender of the episcopal office, whose influential ‘Practical Catechism’ first appeared in 1644, were bound to meet with decisive opposition. ‘Episcopacy Asserted’ is a notable, thorough work. While lacking some of the inspiring qualities of Taylor’s later output, it expounds the biblical and patristic evidence for episcopacy, in succession to the apostles, and separate from the presbyterate; he also makes a strong link between king and bishop – and Charles I is supposed to have encouraged his being made an Oxford DD for it.

      When the Parliamentary forces took Cardigan Castle on the Pembrokeshire coast in 1645, Taylor was among those taken prisoner. This was probably because he was a Royalist army chaplain, but it may have been that he was in Wales already, seeking a livelihood away from Oxford, where he no longer felt welcome. Taylor was now to all intents and purposes about to enter a spell of living as an internal exile, not far from Cardigan. Initially, he helped run a school at Newton Hall in Llanfihangel-Aberbythych, to the west of Carmarthen in the Tywi valley. In the vicinity was Golden Grove, the large residence of Richard Vaughan (?1600–86), Earl of Carbery, Royalist commander in Pembrokeshire, in whose household Taylor soon went to serve as chaplain. In the comparative peace and tranquillity of this base, and with the friendship of Lady Frances Carbery, Taylor embarked on the most fruitful phase of his writing career. Had history turned out otherwise, he might have been given higher office in the Church at this stage in his life. So the works – and they are many and varied – kept flowing from his pen. It was a case of turning adversity into creativity, and it made his reputation for future generations.

      Confined from the outer world, but aided by his teeming brain and amazing memory for facts and quotations, Taylor set to work in a way that could not be interpreted as trying to curry favour with his oppressors. In 1646, ‘Prayer Ex Tempore’ appeared, intended as a counter-blast to the official ‘Westminster Directory’ (1644/45), which both outlawed and superseded the Book of Common Prayer in a Reformed direction. With quiet but firm courtesy, Taylor rehearses the arguments against ‘free prayer’ in public and those in favour of a set liturgy, as the possession of the whole Church; he expanded it into a much larger work three years later, ‘Apology for Authorised and Set Forms of Liturgy’ (1649), the year of the King’s execution. But his first really major work was ‘The Liberty of Prophesying’ (1647), in which he argued against any kind of persecution for religious reasons, a liberal approach that may well have owed something to his friendship with Chillingworth and his circle. It is Taylor at his most judicious and fair, setting out the views of Anabaptists and Roman Catholics, refuting them where necessary, but pressing for generosity and liberality in an age that on the whole did not find such an approach congenial. The King was said not to be over-impressed by it. It was but one example among others where Taylor was ahead of his time.

      Taylor was also working on a major project that had a less ‘occasional’ flavour, which embodies Taylor’s whole theology – ‘The Great Exemplar of Sanctity and Holy Life’ (1649). The ‘exemplar’ in the title is, of course, Christ himself. It was a bold venture; while devotional books of various kinds were frequent best-sellers in the seventeenth century, this one was far more lengthy and complex. In genre, it is a kind of extended variation of the late mediaeval tradition, well-known through the ‘Imitation of Christ’ of Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471). It does, however, have the unique distinction of being the very first of its kind to appear in English that is based throughout on a narrative of the life of Christ, and Taylor leaves his own stamp on it. The starting-point is not where it might have been for the time: the human condition, our sinfulness, our need for salvation, and the ways to deal with that through faith and forgiveness, or rather (to use more theological language) justification and sanctification. Taylor instead places us within the narrative that the Gospels provide, and he enfolds it with discussions on baptism, Eucharist, repentance, hints of his view on original sin, and much else, including the practical application of the faith to daily life. ‘Great Exemplar’, partly because of its subject, scope and length, contains the main features of Taylor’s theology, which re-appear and become developed in his later works.

Unwieldy as the book is, it succeeds through the constant sequence of narratives, reflections (which he calls ‘considerations’), and discourses – these last probably based on sermons preached from his time in Uppingham, and possibly even earlier. According to Jessica Martin, this threefold, almost Trinitarian pattern is derived from Bernard of Clairvaux’s ‘Memory’ (Father), ‘Understanding’ (Son) and ‘Will’ or ‘Love’ (Holy Spirit), and is intended to give shape to the reader’s approach to the work as a whole, helping to make Christ’s life accessible to us. She sees the same three processes appear in the ‘Discourse’ on Meditation, where memory is about instruction, understanding directed to consideration, and will concerns reception. There are also copious prayers, christologically focused, which are appropriate for this kind of work, and a feature of Taylor’s liturgical compositions to come. McAdoo likes to summarize Taylor’s description of the work near the opening СКАЧАТЬ