A Following Holy Life. Kenneth Stevenson

encouraged by his episcopal colleagues to write the last main publication of his life, ‘A Dissuasive against Popery’ (1664), a challenge he took up with reluctance. It is not difficult to see the background to this particular work, given the deeply embedded character of Irish Catholicism. But from it emerges the kind of broad-based, tradition-centred Anglicanism that is the hallmark of much of Taylor’s theology. There is, understandably for the times, a negative edge of polemic that the modern reader, in more ecumenical times, finds hard to take. But the heat of Reformation controversy was still intense, and Taylor’s answer to the perennial question, ‘Where was your Church before the Reformation?’ is strong, confident, lucid, and unyielding, as he argues against the doctrinal innovations, moral weaknesses and political subversions, as he sees them, of the Roman Catholicism of the time.

      We cannot, however, simply leave Taylor there. His last years, though tough going, were spent on visiting his parishes, rebuilding churches, and caring for those who would allow him to do so. After Bramhall’s death, he was without doubt the key theological figure in Irish Anglicanism. But his health was declining. Of his two sons, one was killed in a duel, and the other died of a fever. It was shortly after his second son’s funeral that he himself took ill after visiting a sick person, and he died at Lisburn on 13 August 1667. He was buried in Dromore Cathedral, which he himself had built, and the funeral sermon was preached by his old friend, George Rust (+ 1670), who was to succeed as bishop – a bold preaching of the gospel of hope and a fine account of Taylor’s life, personality, and ministry.

When Sheldon heard of his death, although he had helped secure him financial assistance when he needed it, he still described him as ‘a man of dangerous temper, apt to break into extravagance’.[7] Quite a lot may lie behind this verdict, both personal and theological. Fortunately, however, that is not the overall view of history. Taylor may have got across people in authority through his personal style – many great men do that to some extent or another. And he certainly rocked the theological boat over a few matters at a time when the anxiety level in the Church was understandably high. But he did, said and wrote many things that badly needed doing, saying and writing, and we in posterity are indeed the richer for it.

      The main aspects of Taylor’s theology

      Style

      There are two ways of approaching Taylor’s style. One is to appreciate the sheer breadth of the reading-audiences he has in mind. Like other writers of his time and before and since, he recognizes the importance of the medium in communicating the message. Thus, ‘Worthy Communicant’ (1660) is written for the devout layperson, whereas ‘Real Presence’ (1654), for all its lively, sharp style, is intended for a more scholarly audience. While the ‘Discourse on Friendship’ (1657) has the inevitable format of a personal letter, ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ (1660), his longest work, reads like a resource to be consulted, and – unlike most of his works, which were published in octavo or, increasingly later in his life, in quarto – this one appeared in folio form. And while some of the earlier works, such as ‘Episcopacy Asserted’ (1642) show signs of an aspiring author still coming to terms with how to write clearly and fluently, by the time we reach ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649) and ‘Holy Living’ (1650), he seems to have mastered his trade. Reginald Askew has some of his quotations from Taylor’s writings laid out in a kind of blank verse. At times it seems a little contrived, but it certainly brings out some of the linguistic devices in Taylor’s use of words.

On the other hand, as many others have shown, while the verve and imagery of Taylor’s prose at times seems unstoppable, there is a considerable amount of light and shade, with contrasts between the lengthy sentence and the pithy oneliner. ‘His language comes with a rush . . . the style swoops and soars with the freedom of a bird.’[8] Some of the purple passages in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649), with those repeated references to ‘the holy Jesus’, and the constant use of the imprecise plural, for example in ‘eucharists’ (which must have non-sacramental as well as sacramental references), keep carrying the reader along. And his dramatic, almost ‘off-stage’ passages capture the imagination, whether he is indulging in a gentle flight of fancy (the Virgin Mary’s ‘burden’ in the young child in her womb is a light one, because it is Christ himself), or articulating a vivid understanding of the Trinity (as in the Baptism of Christ at the Jordan).

      Taylor as the pastoral theologian comes across powerfully in the funeral sermon for Lady Carbery (1650). Product of the age as it is, it manages to express a depth of emotion that avoids a too overt display of it. The handsome man who was perhaps a passionate lover was someone who appreciated beauty both in other people and in the art of prose. And here, unsurprisingly but doubtless to his disappointment, while he could write prose that had poetic resonances, he was not himself a gifted creator of poetry! His efforts at hymn-writing were not successful.

Some of those long sentences that occasionally slip into anacoluthon, when he loses the thread of what he is trying to say as he presses on with the ideas he is trying to convey eventually give birth to a short and memorable ‘bon mot’. A good example is in his ‘Discourse on Prayer’ in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649): ‘He [God] measures us by our needs, and we must not measure him by our impatience’; and in the accompanying exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, equally full of one-liners, he follows the Syriac text at ‘daily bread’, which helps him produce the sequence, food for today, forgiveness for yesterday, protection in the future.[9] But although Taylor knew and thought deeply about what is often called the spiritual life, it did not give him the same kind of inside knowledge of sin as other writers such as John Donne (1571/72–1632), who perhaps had more direct personal experience of living torridly on the edge of Christian practice. At times, Taylor – by any standards – ‘overdoes things’, but the underlying repetitions of important themes have the cumulative effect of bringing the reader along, and keeping their attention.

      Theological position

Taylor’s overall place in the Anglican spectrum can best be described for his own times as ‘Laudian’ and ‘Latitudinarian’, or what would nowadays be described as ‘liberal Catholic’.[10] This comes across in the sacramental and ecclesiological slant in his theology and the amount of attention he gives to baptism and Eucharist and the controversies of his age that surrounded them. He will quote Augustine and John Chrysostom. But he is very much his own man, writing and preaching for his own age, and in a much plainer style, and the questions and questionings of his time are often uppermost in his mind. His Trinitariansm is deep-rooted, coming across in a number of contrasting ways, from his treatment of the baptism of Christ to his assertion that God dwells among mortals, making us ‘cabinets of the mysterious Trinity’ – in a strong passage near the start of ‘Holy Living.’ That in turn produces an equally strong pneumatology, not just in his sacramental theology, but in the Christian life.

      This trait must have made him a congenial (if talkative!) companion at the Great Tew Circle, with William Chillingworth. Towards the end of his life, in the ‘Dissuasive from Popery’ (1664), he can lace his discussion with patristic references, but can still assert boldly that ‘it is false that the testimony of the fathers . . . is infallible’. These are hardly the words of a patristic romantic. They do, however, come from someone who relied heavily upon them but who was prepared to take theological risks as well. This stemmed from a firm conviction about the use of reason, as an imaginative, God-given faculty, both in theological and moral discourse. So the parallel with later Anglicanism is probably more with the Liberal Catholic Charles Gore (1853–1932) than with the Tractarian Edward Pusey (1800–82). At a time when Anglicanism was experiencing acutely the need for self-definition, Taylor proved to be an uncomfortable (and even prophetic) figure. In the period since, those who have tried to combine the love of tradition and an openness to new questions have not always been easy to live with. But they have frequently stood the test of time.

      Platonism

Like many of his generation, such as Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), John Smith