Lambdaphagy

femmenietzsche:

It’s more about the image of Anglicanism I have in my head than what Anglicanism was ever really necessarily like. I was imagining a period a few generations ago when England is still fairly observant but the winds are changing. The intellectual elite is still Anglican but the fires are going out. “Well, sure our religion was founded so that Henry VIII could get pussy” (they probably didn’t use these exact words) “and it’s not like we take all that doctrinal stuff too seriously these days, but we’re still loyal to Crown and Church!” Before the terminal lassitude began to set in, but not by too much.

In that world, I was imagining someone who still kind of felt the longing for full-on religion, looking across the Channel to Catholic Europe and seeing what (wrongly) appeared to be much greater vibrancy. Thus, the notion of conversion is toyed with but never seriously considered. “After all, there are social considerations, and after all there’s plenty of unserious doctrinal weirdness and plenty of baseness among Catholics… And I don’t truly believe, but Catholicism certainly is a complete religion isn’t it…“

Or something like that. Now that I’ve fleshed the scenario out from a vague intimation, I’ve probably taken it away from being a good parallel for whatever it was I was describing in @lambdaphagy. I think what I was getting at is that I didn’t just detect a desire for religion, I also detected a desire to desire religion. Idk, that part was a non-central aside.

The Reformation never really took in England, on account of the flimsy pretext plus the quarter-century of hysteresis between Henry and Elizabeth.  Thus you had, in addition to actual recusants, a high church strain within CoE that understood themselves to be in the position of Orthodox Christians– separated from the Roman pontiff but still very much on the same theological and liturgical page.  Just as doctrinally weird, in fact, with its Marian devotions and elevation of the Host.  This is the “Branch Theory”  argued for by the Oxford Movement in the mid-19th century, which kind of lost its oomph when its greatest defender gave in and went Papist.

Since then I think there’s been a kind of evaporative cooling within Anglo-Catholicism, where the most conservative members convert, leaving the rump church even weirder on average, causing the next-most-conservative members to flee, &c.  What’s left today is, uh. 

When I once attended a meeting of an Anglo-Catholic devotional society, my Catholic-Catholic friends insisted @pistachi0n come along to “protect my virtue”. 

“What,” she asked, “from all the Anglo-Catholic girls?”

“Oh no,” they explained, “you don’t have to worry about the girls.”