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Primate who fought his corner

by
07 May 2008

Ussher was a champion of provincial autonomy, says Judith Maltby

Archbishop Ussher: c.1654 portrait, after Sir Peter Levy (detail from the book cover) NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

Archbishop Ussher: c.1654 portrait, after Sir Peter Levy (detail from the book cover) NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

James Ussher: Theology, history and politics in early-modern Ireland and England
Alan Ford

ACCORDING to a recent book on the Christian Right by Stephen Bates, a new museum in the American South dedicated to proving the truth of Creationism contains an exhibit with an animatronic of the 17th-century Irishman Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656).

Ussher’s presence in such a dubious setting is due to the one fact that most people who have heard of him know about him: that by calculating the ages of the patriarchs, he determined that the earth was created in October 4004 BC.

This is a regrettable thing to be chiefly remembered for, and does not begin to do justice to this remarkable and scholarly man, who played a key part in the most tumultuous period in Anglicanism’s history to date, whatever current doom-merchants say. Alan Ford’s important study of this remarkably under-appreciated Irish archbishop will go a long way to restoring his reputation.

Ussher was a scholar of formidable proportions and, as Archbishop of Armagh, the leader of the Irish Church during the catastrophic period when Charles I’s three kingdoms caught up with Europe and finally produced a “war of religion” of their own devising. He was a moderate in immoderate times — the acceptable face of episcopacy even to some zealous Puritans in the Westminster Parliament who were busy locking up Archbishop Laud and his lieutenants for their “prelacy” in the run-up to the English Civil War.

Ford’s study is a scholarly one, and his impressive achievement is to do justice to the diverse qualities and interests of Ussher — as an intellectual, historian, and theologian, as well as a key figure in the politics of not only the Irish Church, but the British Churches.

As a historian of the 17th century, I can warmly recommend this book to other specialists. But I also hope we will see it in paperback, because it will be of interest to anyone wishing to put the current complexities of the way the sister Churches of the Anglican Communion relate to each other into some badly needed historical perspective.

We usually think of the origins of the Anglican Communion as lying in the emergence of the Atlantic colonies, but the roots are much closer to home. Archbishop Laud conducted a determined campaign to impose his brand of orthodoxy not only on the Church of England, but on the Scottish and Irish Churches as well. I most admire Ussher for his dogged persistence in maintaining that he was Laud’s peer and equal (he even suggested to the English Primate that they were not so much brother metropolitans, as brother patriarchs!) in the face of a determined, at times ruthless, campaign to subject the Irish Church to the English. As Ford puts Ussher’s vision, “the Church of England and the Church of Ireland were engaged, not in a parent-child, but in a more equal, sisterly relationship, which entitled them to defend their own rather different version of ecclesiastical orthodoxy.”

Ford’s excellent study of this archbishop provides some food for thought on the current pressure towards greater centralisation and uniformity in our Communion.

Canon Dr Judith Maltby is Chaplain and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford.

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