Lancelot Andrewes: The Private Prayers

Rating:
Summary: Poetry for God
Review: Lancelot Andrewes was one of the great figures in the Church of England after the Reformation. One of the key figures in the translating and editing of the King James Bible, he was also a great theologian and, as this collection reveals, a great poet as well.

Andrewes' poetry is rich with Scriptural quotations and allusions. Not only does he quote the Scriptures, weaving them seamlessly into his poems, but the poems themselves breathe a certain Biblical life that can only come about through a substantial engagement with the Biblical texts themselves. The Psalms, in particular, seem to have resonated deeply with Andrewes.

The most unique - and oftentimes the best - sections of his poems are those where he takes disparate Scriptural quotations and weaves them together into a poem or stanza. David Scott, who translated and edited these poems, has been gracious enough to list direct Scriptural references and this is particularly helpful when Andrewes' poems weave snippets of the Psalms, Gospels and other text to "create" a prayer that is at once his and others'.

Given to a post-Reformation English sensibility, however, the creeds, sacraments and liturgies of the Church also bear heavily upon the poems present here. Several of the poems are poetic rephrasings of the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds; the liturgy of the Prayer Book also saturates many of the poems present, revealing that Andrewes not only participated in the liturgy, but let it inform his thought and living in some very deep and spiritually significant ways.

My only complaint with this edition is that Scott does not explain the layout of the poems. The poems are printed as combinations of columns and brackets, sometimes centered in the page and oftentimes spaced out in unusual ways. This does let the poems take on a level of meditative meaning - the text does, quite literally, take you outside of yourself - that they would otherwise not have. But, did Andrewes originally write his poems this way? If so, they show him to be a creative genius, using the layout of the poems as a medium in addition to the words themselves (and it works wonderfully well!). The late deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who attempted to disrupt the flow of printed text by laying out the text/s in his books in new ways, is shown to have little creativity when it comes to the layout that Andrewes(?) gave to his own poems.

For those familiar with the Anglican tradition, they will find much to savor here and much to admire as well: Andrewes is among the greatest Anglican thinkers ever. Those who are foreign to Anglicanism would do well to investigate this book as an entry into some of the larger contours of Anglican spirituality. Regardless of who you are, you do well to let these private prayers enrich your own prayer life and, in reading them, let them take you outside of yourself to the God who gives poetic imagination.