Patrick Comerford
I am staying this weekend in Clare College, Cambridge, before moving on Sidney Sussex College where I am spending the week during the annual summer school organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies.
There was a wedding in the Clare College yesterday. But because we are out of term time, there are no Sunday services in the chapel this morning [28 August 2016]. So I am probably going to Saint Bene’t’s Church, where the Revd Anna Matthews is the Vicar.
Saint Bene’t’s has become the nearest thing to a parish church I have when I am in Cambridge, and I hope to be at the early morning Eucharist at 8 a.m. there throughout the week.
The Chapel in Clare College was built in the 1760s to a design by the amateur architect and Master of Caius, James Burrough. The Chapel is at the heart of the college in Old Court, and it is a place of quiet and beauty and of daily prayer throughout term time. With its simple beauty and light-filled space, the chapel is an oasis for peaceful reflection, and all are welcome, even outside term time.
The worship and reflection in the Chapel is an integrated part of college life, seeking to serve and build up the community in peace and virtue, in mutual respect, and with a commitment to the holistic flourishing of every person. There is a daily Eucharist each morning during Full Term, when Choral Evensong is also sung by the College Choir.
According to instructions left by the college founder, Lady Elizabeth de Clare, the chapel, as with the whole college, is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The painting above the altar is The Annunciation by Giambattista Cipriani, and was commissioned for the chapel by the Duke of Newcastle in the 18th century.
In the early 20th century, two stained glass windows were installed at the West End of the Chapel. The window on the south commemorates Richard de Badew, sometime Chancellor of Cambridge University and the original founder of the college, which was later re-established, renamed and endowed by Lady Elizabeth de Clare. He is shown offering his foundation, then known as University Hall, to the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child.
Below them is a a map of Europe, with Ireland and Britain comfortably close to the European continental landmass, long before anyone thought of Brexit.
The window opposite on the north side of the chapel commemorates two of the college’s most distinguished alumni: Bishop Hugh Latimer, a martyr in the reign of Queen Mary Tudor; and Nicholas Ferrar, founder of the community at Little Gidding just before the English Civil War in the 17th century. To the left is a small image of the church built by Nicholas Ferrar and referred to by TS Eliot in his poem ‘Little Gidding.’
The antechapel has memorials to the members of Clare College who died in the two World Wars, including Hamo Sassoon, brother of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon.
The Dean of Clare College, the Revd Dr Jamie Hawkey, is also Director of Studies in Theology. He studied at Girton College and Selwyn College and at Westcott House in Cambridge, and at the Angelicum University in Rome. He came to Clare having been Precentor of Westminster Abbey and a Minor Canon there since 2010. Before that, he was a curate in Saint Mary’s, Portsea, in inner-city Portsmouth. His research interests focus on ecclesiology and ecumenical theology.
In addition to his work at Clare, he serves on the International Anglican-Reformed Dialogue, as a member of the Malines Conversations Group, and he chairs the UK Appeal Committee of the Anglican Centre in Rome.
Previous deans of Clare College include Archbishop Rowan Williams (1984-1986), later Archbishop of Canterbury (2003–2013). He succeeded the theologian and biochemist Canon Arthur Robert Peacocke (1924-2006) who was Dean, Fellow, and Tutor and Director of Studies in Theology of Clare College (1973-1984).
Before them, one the best-known clerical Deans of Clare College was the theologian and New Testament scholar, Bishop John AT Robinson (1919-1983). He was the Dean of Clare College (1951-1959) and a fellow, and Lecturer in Divinity at Cambridge University before becoming Bishop of Woolwich (1959-1969).
He studied theology at Westcott House, Cambridge, and after retiring as Bishop of Woolwich in 1969, he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in theology and Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was the author of In the End, God (1951) and Honest to God (1963). He preached his last sermon, ‘Learning from cancer,’ to a packed college chapel six weeks before he died.
The Robinsons are an outstanding clerical, theological and missionary family from Monaghan. They were descended from a family that lived in Seagoe area of Co Armagh from the 17th century, and later in Monaghan and Clones. John Robinson’s father, Canon Arthur Robinson, (1856-1928), was a canon of Canterbury Cathedral and the author of several books, and he inherited a house called The Wood just outside Monaghan.
He in turn was a son of the Revd George Robinson (1819-1881), the vicar of a poor Somerset parish near Bristol and Bath. George Robinson was born in Monaghan where his father, Joseph Robinson (1782-1866), a printer and bookseller. Joseph Robinson lived at No 1 The Diamond, Monaghan, beside Saint Patrick’s Church, where he is buried in the vault.
George Robinson was educated at Trinity College Dublin and was ordained deacon (1844) for Donaghcloney in the Diocese of Dromore by Henry Pepys, Bishop of Worcester, and priest (1845) for Barr in the Diocese of Clogher by John Leslie, Bishop of Kilmore. In 1847, he moved to England, where he was curate in Saint James’s, Clapham, Vicar of Keynsham, Somerset and Vicar of Saint Augustine’s, Everton, Liverpool.
George Robinson was back in Ireland in 1854, when he married Henrietta Cecilia Forbes in Collon, Co Louth. She was a daughter of Arthur Forbes and Caroline (Armitage) of Craigavad, Co Down. George and Henrietta had 13 children, including six sons who were priests and two daughters who were deaconesses. He died in 1881 in Marseilles, where he was buried.
But Clare’s association with key Anglican thinkers spans the centuries.
In the early 16th century, when religious debate in Cambridge was fierce, and Hugh Latimer (1485-1555) was one of the principal leaders of the Reformation. He was elected a Fellow of Clare in 1510 while still an undergraduate. Latimer became a chaplain to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1534 and Bishop of Worcester in 1535, and was one of the king’s advisers on the dissolution of the monastic houses.
During the reign of Queen Mary (1553-1558), Latimer refused to recant his beliefs. He was burned at the stake with Nicholas Ridley in Oxford on 16 October 1555. While he is known to history as one of the ‘Oxford Martyrs,’ he was a product of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare.
Despite the turmoils of the Reformation, Clare Hall, as it was then known, continued to grow in size and wealth in the 16th century. Later, in the early 17th century, Nicholas Ferrar (1593-1637) came into residence at Clare the age of 13, and in Cambridge he became a close friend of the poet George Herbert. With the outbreak of the plague in 1625, Ferrar established the Anglican retreat at Little Gidding that is commemorated by TS Eliot’s in ‘Little Gidding’ in his Four Quartets.
Later in the 17th century, the college fellows at that time, including John Tillotson, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury (1691-1694).
In the mid-19th century, the hymn-writer and historian the Revd Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) graduated from Clare (BA, 1857; MA, 1860). He is remembered for hymns such as Onward, Christian Soldiers and Now the Day Is Over.
At the end of the 19th century, a distinguished fellow of Clare was J. Rendel Harris (1852-1941), a Biblical scholar and curator of manuscripts who was instrumental in bringing back to light many Syriac scriptures and other early documents. His contacts at the Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt led to the discovery by the Cambridge twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson of the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the oldest-known Syriac New Testament document.
Harris, who was a Quaker, accompanied the sisters on a second trip, with Robert Bensly and Francis Crawford Burkitt, to decipher the palimpsest. He also discovered three other key manuscripts on Mount Sinai. His Biblical Fragments from Mount Sinai was published in 1890. Their story is told by Janet Soskice, Professor of Philosophical Theology at Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College, in The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Lost Gospels (London: Chatto and New York: Knopf, 2009). This was Book of the Week on Radio 4, and in the Best Books of the Year lists of the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and the Library Journal.
The New Testament scholar, CFD (‘Charlie’) Moule (1908-2007), was Dean of Clare (1944-1951), before becoming Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity, the oldest chair in the University of Cambridge, and he remained a Fellow at Clare until his death. Like his great-uncle, Handley Moule, first Principal at Ridley Hall and later Bishop of Durham, he was known affectionately as ‘Holy Mouley.’ He was succeeded as Dean of Clare by John Robinson.
Maurice Frank Wiles (1923-2005) was the chaplain at Ridley Hall, Cambridge (1952-1955), and then succeeded John Robinson as Dean and Fellow of Clare College (1959-1967) before becoming Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford (1970-1991). His son, Sir Andrew John Wiles, the mathematician and Oxford Professor, completed his PhD at Clare and is known for solving Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Maurice Wiles was succeeded as Dean of Clare by Mark Santer (1967-1972), later Principal of Westcott House (1973-1981) and Bishop of Birmingham (1987-2002). He was followed at Clare by Arthur Peacocke (1973-1984) and then by Rowan Williams (1984-1986).
While he was the Dean of Clare, the future Archbishop of Canterbury was an active member of Christian CND in Cambridge; at the same time, I was chair of Christian CND in Ireland and completing a postgraduate dissertation at the Irish School of Ecumenics for Trinity College Dublin on Roman Catholic teachings on the nuclear arms race. Rowan Williams took a leading part in a Christian CND protest at RAF Alconbury near Huntingdon, climbing the barbed-wire fence and holding a brief service of penitence, with the imposition of ashes, on the runway. He was arrested and detained for 12 hours before being released without any charges, but his arrest left the Chapel of Clare without the Dean for Ash Wednesday that year.
That radical tradition of speaking out against injustice was continued by his successor, Canon Nicholas Sagovsky (1986-1997), who went to court in 1990 for refusing the pay the Poll Tax.
As I stood in the chapel of Clare College this weekend, I was reminded of TS Eliot’s reflections on Nicholas Ferrar and his community in ‘Little Gidding’:
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
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