August 14, 2007. 3rd Month of the Last Sabbatical

OLD ST. PAUL’S, EDINBURGH: OUTLAW’S HIDE-OUT OR CAVE DWELLING?

The “Royal Mile” in Edinburgh, Scotland, is an historic urban thoroughfare that has adapted successfully to the demands of postmodern tourism and commerce. Its shops specialize in Scottish paraphernalia, cuisine, and whiskey, and street performers do a brisk business among summer crowds that bulge out into the traffic. The “High Street”, as its’ known, runs up the side of a mountain, a dormant volcano, with Holyrood Palace (where I believe the Queen stays when in Edinburgh) at the lower end and Edinburgh Castle on the commanding heights, and numerous alleys and narrow by-ways intersect with it all along its length.

Located on one such obscure side street is Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, its existence noted only by a small sign on the High Street. There is no church building in sight, however, and those who wish to find it must proceed with considerable faith down a sloped alley cluttered with the usual signs of urban excess and dereliction to where a weathered door marked by another small sign identifies Old St. Paul’s as having been a “center of Jacobite politics in the Eighteenth Century, and later of Anglo-Catholic religious activity…”, or words to that effect. Like Harry Potter seeking admission to a Wizards-Only rendezvous, one must summon their courage and push on this door with some authority in order for their quest for Old St. Paul’s to be fulfilled.

There may be another, more conventional point of entry for this church, but entering it as I did reinforces the impression of a clandestine meeting place, a catacomb, or cave dwelling, for the door opens onto a space of astonishing depth and height, built as it is into the side of a cliff. Little daylight penetrates, since other buildings surround and conceal it, and so the large stained glass windows admit only a pale greenish version of daylight, barely enough to make out the faintly glowing shrines and altars scattered about the space below.

On the walls of certain European caves are crude paintings of animals that are regarded as the oldest evidence of religion among human beings. It is supposed that prehistoric hunters created these icon-like paintings to express gratitude, wonder, and hope with regard to the animals that sustained their lives. Like all hunters, they spent a lot more time story-telling, than they did hunting, and the cave-paintings were probably the result of winter nights made shorter by tales and memories of wooly mammoths slain and eaten, and of the miraculous renewal of their numbers that occurred every Spring. This sense of kinship with other species and gratitude to whatever it is that produced them is the primal source of religion, and (I am convinced) remains with us still, though few of us hunt, and those who do engage in a highly modified, ritualized version of this ancient struggle for survival.

As I have said, Old Saint Paul’s struck me as cave-like, and had its stained glass contained imagery of hairy bison and wooly mammoth instead of saints and angels I would not have been surprised. Those who worship in this place are delving deep into the primal elements of faith and human community, and when they emerge from their prayers into Sunday-morning sunshine they are reenacting a Navajo creation-myth wherein human beings emerge into this world from a crack in its surface. That was in Arizona, of course, and this is Scotland, so you might have to forget about the sunshine. But cosmic rebirth can occur anywhere, right?

The Jacobites were partisans of the Scottish house of Stuart, adherents of those royal politicians known to the British establishment as “Pretenders.” The Scottish Episcopal Church has this tendency in its pedigree, since its bishops were “Non-Jurors” who believed they could not in conscience rescind oaths of allegiance made to James II, the Stuart King deposed in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689. Of his successors, the most famous was “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” whose efforts to regain the crown were definitively overthrown at the Battle of Culloden in 1742, the last pitched battle to be fought on British soil.

So it appears that Old Saint Paul’s was, in times past, a center of conspiracy and dissent, a gathering place for outlaws and rebels. No wonder this church is so hard to find! In former times it would not have been wise to be seen entering Old Saint Paul’s publicly. Better to make one’s way furtively down the alley, unseen by officials of the Hanoverian kings.

In some ways Anglo-Catholicism may be to postmodern culture something of what the Jacobite-ism was to Eighteenth Century British politics. To those who know enough about Anglo-Catholicism to criticize it, its adherents often seem like “pretenders” who crave the pageantry of catholicism but have no appetite for its disciplines. Like the “Non-Juring” stance taking by Scottish Bishops of the past, places like Old St. Paul’s can seem out of step with the times, attractive only to mavericks, waifs, and strays. Like Prince Charlie’s doomed cause, there is something quixotic about the effort to melt capitalism’s stony heart by waving incense at it.

I am told there is still a Stuart Pretender to the throne, and nothing could be more irrelevant (or ridiculous) with regard to the current state of British politics. But outlaws have their place in history, an example being found at Old St. Paul’s, where one of the more modern stained glass windows shows three Scottish bishops in the act of consecrating Samuel Seabury, the first Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA. It is a relatively well-known historical fact that Seabury sought episcopal ordination from the Scots because English Bishops were unwilling to elevate to the episcopate a representative of England’s rebellious former colonies. Perhaps, along with the apostolic succession, those renegade Scottish bishops conveyed to America’s first bishop some their subversive spirit, and a measure of “up yours” defiance that is not uncharacteristic of Scotland to this day.

Anglo-Catholicism had its beginnings in the “Oxford Movement” of the mid-Nineteenth Century, but in the contemporary scene of ecclesiastical life and politics it continues to wield influence, not so much as a movement as an attitude. Perhaps a parallel observation could be made regarding the Jacobite cause of former times, which could be understood as having evolved into an attitude of cultural resistance to English dominance. In the past, this has taken the form of distinctive Scottish music, customs, and speech, but more recently has shown a more overtly political face, as evidenced by ubiquitous Edinburgh graffiti that reads “END LONDON RULE,” and the like. Anglo-Catholicism persists like the reverent stories told by hunters as they huddled around campfires in icon-studded cave dwellings. It haunts the halls where synods and conventions meet, manifesting itself wherever partisans of any stripe are inspired to take the long view, identify with the underdog, or learn to tolerate ambiguity. In all its diffusion, and even absurdity, Anglican catholicity continues to become incarnate in places like Old Saint Paul’s: obscure, odd, as deeply rooted in human consciousness as it is in the side of its volcanic cliff.