Restless search for Sanctity

This is a book of considerable achievement and many delights; a meticulously researched work, which provides a deep insight into the religious culture of the Protestant community in Britain from the early years of the Reformation up to the beginning of the English Civil War. Alec Ryrie argues that to understand what it meant to be an early modern Protestant in Reformation Britain, it is necessary to understand the intense, dynamic, broad-based quality of the religious culture of this community. It was a community composed of earnest Protestants of all opinions united by their ardour.

At the heart of their religious experience was a sense of contact with something other; a presence distinct from themselves which could, “surprise, disturb, unnerve, frighten, comfort or exalt”. His sources are extensive: diaries, letters, journals, sermons, autobiog-raphies and polemical works written by Protestants who lived in this period. He examines them with a compassionate respect for his subjects, allowing them to tell him and us how they interpreted these experiences and expressed them in their daily lives.

We hear their religious beliefs, concerns, scruples and tears as clearly as if they were voicing them today. Their primary experience of faith was a passionate inner one, an intimate conversation with self and with God which shaped and made sense of their outward expression of it. This intense lived experience of faith and their single-minded pursuit of validating emotional experience together with their sustained efforts to maintain it, he argues, was their life’s work.

Their relentless, dynamic search for God’s promises and the intensity of this lived exper-ience has tended, until now, to pass below the radar: marginalised or lost in the avalanche of print on Protestant doctrine and polemic which dominates the canon. Ryrie rectifies this and opens his study with an exploration of Protestant emotions: the joy, despair, misery, dryness, dullness, repentance and desire which shaped their spiritual life. It was vital to capture the right emotions: they were a gift from God, an indication of his will and, crucially, the individual’s standing with him. Assurance was the most important, the sign that they were among the elect. But a spiritual black hole hovered, security was easily mistaken for assurance and security was nothing more than self-deluding, spiritual self-confidence which, one preacher warned, “will rust us, undoe us, and eate out all that is good in us”. Emotions, therefore, had to be controlled, tamed, and for this their most powerful spiritual weapon was prayer.

The sources open up for us their understanding of prayer and the reality of its practice in public and private: how often and for how long they prayed, the range of postures they adopted, the words they used and their intentions. Praying aloud was the ideal and it was often noisy and emotionally intense. They groaned and wept in their efforts, in their ongoing struggle with the world, the devil and, in the manner of Jacob and the Angel, with God himself. The use of the written word too, both for readers and writers, was a powerful religious practice. But the sheer intellectualism of early Protestantism reveals what must have been a drawback for the majority of them. They were illiterate and, consequently, excluded from self-consciously Protestant culture. We have only a few glimpses of them in the sources, but these tell us a good deal about Protestantism as an educational force. The lack of access to the Scriptures because of illiteracy was a powerful spur that led many of them to learn to read.

The sermon therefore dominated the act of public worship. Ryrie describes it as “the defining event of early modern Protestant worship”. It was seen as crucial for salvation, an encounter with God, to be memorised for recall, repeated to others, discussed in the home and meditated on in order to obtain the maximum benefit from the encounter. And here we get a sense of their relentless search for sanctification, their fear of idleness and permanent sense of crisis, the sheer dynamism which, as Ryrie notes, must have been exhausting. The Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper too were occasions of public worship, the latter often causing concern to many who were convinced of their personal unworthiness. They undertook a long and arduous preparation before receiving and even then were snared by scruples. Nehemiah Wallington went to church on Communion day but was so full of self-doubt about his worthiness to receive the Sacrament that he “burst into tears, ran home and shut himself in his chamber”.

Ryrie closes with an examination of the early modern Protestant’s life course. It was not the stages of life from birth to death, shared by all humanity, which marked it out. Rather it was each individual’s personal pilgrimage, from childhood, through conversion, onwards and upwards to death and his or her final pre-ordained destiny which mattered. Ultimately and inescapably it was the individual who would stand alone before God to learn his or her eternal fate.

There are some gaps in the vast, detailed canvas of the religious culture presented here and Ryrie strengthens his argument by flagging them up and discussing the reasons for their absence. The voices of the majority are missing: this was a community composed of an educated, literate minority and an uneducated majority whose religious practice Ryrie describes as “a sermon-heavy strongly ritually patterned Protestantism”. This does not invalidate Ryrie’s definition of his Protestant community; there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the uneducated were as ardent in their practice as their literate neighbours, but they are silent. Similarly, those located at the extreme ends of the Protestant spectrum, the Laudians and the separatists, are barely represented here, and neither Welsh Protestantism nor the differences between English and Scottish practices receive much attention.

This is an important, landmark book in Reformation studies. Ryrie has painstakingly located and assembled his sources, listened to voices they contain, the practices and exper-iences they describe, their restless creative zeal, and their faithful, painful, scrupulously self-doubting attempts to grow in virtue day by day “until we come to perfection” as John Brinsley wrote. Ryrie has shown for the first time with affection, wry humour and scrupulous regard for his sources and his subjects what it was like to live as a Protestant in Reformation Britain.