Commemoration of Lancelot Andrewes

a sermon preached by Carl Daw at the Society of St. Margaret, 26 September 2009 (STH Faculty Retreat)

In the second scene of the second act of Hamlet, the supposedly mad young prince enters reading a book, and the rather supercilious old courtier Polonius tries to strike up a conversation with him in order to determine whether the young man is sane or not. So after other pleasantries, he asks, “What do you read, my lord?” And Hamlet replies with calculated misunderstanding, “Words, words, words,”

When Shakespeare wrote this play, probably sometime around 1601, that answer would have seemed extremely au courant, because the waning years of Elizabeth’s reign and the opening years of the Scottish king James who succeeded her were a time when fascination with language, especially the still-evolving English language, was especially keen. Perhaps the nearest equivalent nowadays is the great eagerness that awaits each new electronic marvel du jour. In the opening decade of the 17th century, discovering new words was no less exciting than the contemporary explorations that were discovering new worlds. Incredible energy and innovation centered on language, and writers of all sorts were continually stretching the boundaries of received terms in order to coin new ones. Shakespeare himself was especially adept at incorporating such neologisms into his plays, but in such a careful way that each new venture emerged as a natural extension from words already known. So in Antony and Cleopatra, for example, Antony bemoans how he has been betrayed by one who “spanielled me at heels,” in other words, Cleopatra who followed him around like a puppydog. No one had ever used the noun “spaniel” as a verb before, but Shakespeare made it seem both appropriate and inevitable.

Keeping Shakespeare in mind helps to orient us to the great Anglican bishop we remember today. Lancelot Andrewes was born nine years before Shakespeare and lived ten years longer than Shakespeare, and his significance is similarly intertwined with the Elizabethan-Jacobean absorption with language. In his own day, Andrewes was regarded as the greatest preacher in England, partly because of his immense rhetorical skill and partly because he usually preached in places of great influence, especially at the royal court.

As the master of six ancient languages and fifteen modern ones, Andrewes brought considerable linguistic ability to his sermons, but this very knowledge was also something of a trap to him. If we attempt to read his sermons now, his incessant wordplay in multiple languages is more likely to annoy (perhaps even repel) us than his argument is to persuade us. In a 1609 Christmas sermon, for example, on “The Meaning of Immanuel,” he explains the Hebrew term by glossing it in Latin. He says that immanu is the equivalent of nobiscum, and El corresponds to Deus. Then he continues in a manner intended to make the general term more personal: “I shall not need to tell you, that, in nobiscum, there is a mecum; in nobiscum, for us all, a mecum, for every one of us. Out of this generality, of with us, in gross, may every one deduce his own particular; with me, and me, and me. For, all put together make but nobiscum.” This sort of thing may well have worked in an assembly that knew Latin and that reveled in multilingual wordplay, but it is almost needless to say that it would not work today, even in the most academic situation.

In 1928 T. S. Eliot published a very influential essay in which he claimed that Andrewes’ sermons “rank with the finest English prose of their time, of any time.” Yet he also admits that “his sermons are too well built to be readily quotable; they stick too closely to the point to be entertaining.” Perhaps even more famously Eliot used almost verbatim a passage from Andrewes’ 1622 Christmas sermon as the first five lines of his evocative poem, “The Journey of the Magi”:

“A cold coming we had of it.

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.”

How much we want the rest of Andrewes’ sermons to sound like this, and how little of them does!

Yet Andrewes’ fascination with and facility in language does have a wonderfully redeeming application, for this learned divine was one of the leading forces in the monumental work of scriptural translation that became the enduring legacy of his age, the Authorized Version of the Bible, which we often call the King James Version in memory of its royal patron. Andrewes is known to have been the captain of one of the six teams that worked on various sections of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha. His own group was assigned the first twelve books, from Genesis through 2 Kings. But it is generally assumed that he was also responsible for convening the final group of redactors who worked to make the overall production as consistent and as seamless as possible. This is where his narrative gift that peeks through so rarely in the sermons could rise to full flower and where his linguistic curiosity could be channeled into making this English version the culmination of the translations that had preceded it: Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale, The Great Bible, The Geneva Bible, The Bishops’ Bible, and even bits of the Douai-Rheims version.

But there is another part of Andrewes’ character that remained largely hidden during his long life, a private core within the word-rich preacher and the polisher of translations: Andrewes was a person of regular and rigorous prayer. He customarily devoted every morning to private meditation, self-examination, and petition. This pattern was so much a part of his life that it was well known that he did not like to deal with any other business before noon. (He is reported to have said that anyone who disturbed him before noon must not believe in God.) This was not a discipline undertaken for show, but for his soul’s health. It was clearly a time of deep personal piety and intense spiritual wrestling. When Archbishop Laud published the outlines of Andrewes’ daily devotions after his death, he described the manuscript as blurred by much handling and stained with many tears. All those words that this preacher loved to dissect and reassemble and that this translator delighted to rearrange and burnish really did become flesh in these hours of spiritual grappling and growth.

Lancelot Andrewes’ spirituality is not likely to fit us any better than his word-shredding sermons, but we cannot discount the sincerity of his dedication or the challenge of his example. In a different age and a different land we understand both the Bible and the faith it describes and inspires in comparably different ways. But we still face the timeless question that engaged Andrewes then and confronts us now: how can we faithfully let God’s word become flesh in our lives?