Confessing Evangelical

I love church architecture, and am never happier than when poking around in a medieval parish church somewhere in the English countryside. The constant refrain one hears on the subject of the English parish church is what a tragedy the Reformation was, how much we lost thanks to these Bible-bashing Protestant fanatics, etc, etc. All rather dull, though from a Lutheran point of view I now have more sympathy for the view that much was destroyed in the name of "smashing idols" that could, and should, have been preserved; and it is always magical to discover a medieval painting or carving that somehow escaped the travails of Reformation, Civil War and Commonwealth.

But I was fascinated to read, in Owen Chadwick's book The Reformation, the suggestion that the Reformation - in being universally blamed for all destruction of medieval church art - may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice:

It is an extraordinary fact that we find more of medieval art and architecture in countries which became Protestant than in countries which remained Catholic at the Reformation ... [I]n general it is the hand, not of the looter, but of the restorer which is chiefly responsible for pulling down. The baroque movement swept southern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, transforming the medieval churches. The baroque movement came likewise, though more slowly, through the countries of the north, creating the great churches, from St Paul's Cathedral downwards, and incidentally destroying more traces of the medieval art and architecture than the Protestant Reformation had attempted.

The least conservative of congregations are those which have most money, the most conservative are those which have least money. In the southern baroque countries, the Church still possessed much land and endowments, and its ecclesiastics could afford to build with magnificence. In many Protestant countries the comparative loosening of old endowments in the Reformation, partly through the action of the governments and partly through the inflation of the sixteenth century, meant that most Protestant congregations had enough to do to keep in repair the old churches which they inherited. They preserved the ancient jewels, not because they loved them, but because they could not buy new and could but keep the old. (p.389, emphasis added)

The italicised words are, of course, capable of much application in today's church environment, but this is, as they say, left as an exercise for the reader. As for Chadwick's central point, that's certainly backed up by the evidence in England. There's nothing more depressing than walking into a parish church in a town that "got rich" during the Victorian era, only to find that it was, as John Betjeman puts it:

Restored (with a vengeance) circa 1883

with all the medieval character and charm ruthlessly smothered and suppressed in fresh, pristine 19th Century stonework, dark carved wood and slightly stomach-turning stained glass. Give me a whitewashed, but otherwise intact, ancient church any day.

Anyway, tomorrow's my last day blogging before I go on holiday for a week, and the one book I must remember to take with me - um, apart from the Bible of course, he added hastily :-) - is Simon Jenkins' Thousand Best Parish Churches in England. Bliss.