(Un)Holy Hierarchy
What Should Die in Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living
For my Lenten study I decided to read Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living. In which are described the means and instruments of obtaining every virtue, and the remedies against every vice, and considerations serving to the resisting all temptations. Together with prayers containing the whole duty of a Christian and the parts of devotion fitted to all occasions and furnished for all necessities.
I chose this book primarily because I rather need the spiritual direction at the moment. But in addition I take opportunities as I can to read Anglican classics, and Taylor is someone I’ve found rewarding to read. His A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying is an understudied treatise on theological comprehensiveness and toleration, and his Great Exemplar is a learned work that straddles the line between medieval and modern lives of Christ.
A friend of mine suggested I’d be better served by reading Taylor’s more well-received Holy Dying but I am a completionist at heart and prefer the “logical” flow of doing living before dying.
As I’m primarily interested in one aspect of Holy Living for this post, I hope I’ll be forgiven for not giving a detailed description of the work. I will mention a few things that I enjoyed about it, and finish on something that left a lingering sour taste.
The structure of Holy Living is itself fascinating. Traditional works in this vein tend to jump right into virtues and vices, with perhaps an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer or the Beatitudes. Taylor instead situates holy living in the context of a life of work and social justice. So after the opening chapter he jumps into “Christian Sobriety,” which covers chastity, humility, contentedness, and so on, in the day-to-day life of a Christian. Chapter two is on “Christian Justice,” those duties of rulers, of inferiors, of married persons, and so on. The final chapter is on traditional religious virtues: faith, hope, and love above all, but also alms, fasting, prayer, repentance, and preparation for receiving the Lord’s supper and so on. It has the effect of democratizing holiness, attempting to make it available to every person of every class rather than the achievement of only those with the means or vocation to live a separated life.
“For we must remember that we have a great work to do, many enemies to conquer, many evils to prevent, much danger to run through, many difficulties to be mastered, many necessities to serve, & much good to do, many children to provide for, or many friends to support, or many poor to relieve, or many diseases to cure, besides the needs of nature & of relation, our private & our public cares, & duties of the world which necessity & the providence of God hath adopted into the family of Religion”
Many sections had me questioning to what extent I want to live a holy life, if living it takes the hard lines Taylor takes. I welcomed this challenge, yet his general liberality seems to be veiled at most times in this work. The section on contentedness in the death of children, or nearest relatives and friends was particularly fascinating in that he give hard, cold counsel following the logic of necessity if we believe in heaven. People have no business grieving the loss of a loved one, Taylor says. To do so betrays a lack of faith in the rewards of heaven. “To cure [grief] we may consider that all the world must die, and therefore to be impatient at the death of a person concerning whom it was certain and known that he must die, is to mourn because thy friend or child was not born an angel.” Grief is “impertinent…serves no end of life, and end[s] in they own funeral.” What a reminder of the different assumptions between his age and ours! It’s not so much that this section scandalized me, as that it hit in an unexpected way. I would consider it a breech of pastoral counsel to say such a thing to someone grieving.
Yet many sections were enriching and full of charm. Taylor describes humility as knowing the truth about oneself without fantasy, embellishment, or excuses. So while he assumes one will find themself a miserable, weak creature, he doesn’t think acquiring humility lies in emphasizing weakness en se. Hence Christ, though sinless, models perfect humility in that he knew exactly who he was. Humility is truth.
Some narratives about modern theology seem to believe that trinitarian theology was lost and had to be rediscovered by 20th Century theologians, but I loved this line:
“God dwells in our hearts by faith, and Christ by his spirit, and the Spirit by his purities: so that we are also cabinets of the mysterious Trinity”
Cabinets of the mysterious Trinity. Love it.
Another great zinger:
“He that is proud of riches is a fool. For if he be exalted above his neighbors because he hath more gold, how much inferior is he to a gold mine?”
It was the chapter on Christian Justice that I was most excited to read. To include an entire section on society in a devotional book on holiness feels thoroughly modern. It was perhaps my excitement that led to a powerful gut punch of disappointment. The opening paragraph seemed to me to go in a great direction. There are two types of justice, Taylor says. The first is “commutative justice…which supposes exchange of things profitable for things profitable, that as I supply your need, you may supply mine.” This is a universal kind of justice that applies to all in equal measure. He seems to pick up on a theme from II Corinthians.
“Thus God gave necessities to men, that all men might need: and several abilities to several persons, that each man might help to supply the public needs, and by joining to fill up all wants, they may be knit together by justice, as the parts of the world are by nature…and hath given to us all a sufficient stock of self-love and desire of self-preservation to be as the chain to tie together all the parts of society, and to restrain us from doing violence, lest we be violently dealt withal ourselves.”
One of the gifts of the other is the gift of their need.
Yet this is the last we hear of commutative justice. Taylor introduces “distributive justice,” the rule of which is to “render to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.” The rest of the chapter is on this “natural” and “divine” hierarchy. Hitherto Taylor’s strongest words were against “uncleanness” in the section on chastity. But even that zeal pales in comparison to how powerfully he condemns those who do not obey their superiors. Disobedience is the highest possible sin, more severe even than idolatry. If we are wronged by a judge, complain to God, but don’t speak about the judge. Obedience is due even to unjust or evil rulers because their rule as such is ordained by God. “There is very great peace and immunity from sin in resigning our wills up to the command of others.” So long as a command is not against the law of God, one’s conscience, one’s religious duties, one’s judgments are all better abandoned to the will of one’s superior. Don’t wonder whether a law is prudent, wise, or reasonable, just be obedient.
In 1872, Hippolyte Taine published his Notes sur l’Angleterre, in which he describes England “as still haunted by the ghost of the feudal spirit, a country governed by 100,000 to 120,000 families with an income of 1,000 pounds a year and upwards, in which “the lord provides for the needs of his dependent, and the dependent is proud of his lord.”1 But one need look no further than Homily X “An Exhortation concerning Good Order and Obedience to Rulers and Magistrates, in three Parts” published by the Church of England to see that deference to authority sits squarely at the heart of Anglican religion. A conviction which certainly has not yet been totally shaken even in a democratic age except in certain parts.
It was, perhaps, naive of me to think that even Jeremy Taylor would be immune from Anglicanism’s original sin. And yet the structure of the work remains quite suggestive to me, even if the content of this one is a mixed bag. I’m still gonna read Holy Dying, though.
Quoted in Equality, R. H. Tawney