bls mentions in her post today the incident in Chapter XIV of Tess of the D'Urbervilles depicted in a BBC adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel being shown on PBS last Sunday and this coming Sunday, in which Tess baptizes her dying baby Sorrow privately according to the form given in the Prayer Book, because her father has locked the house against the parson.
I'm afraid as far as I can tell that even in the era during which the novel is set, the parson was in the wrong to deny Sorrow burial in consecrated ground. Hardy unfortunately glosses over the parson's exact justification for his actions and the BBC production tries to fill in with a little hemming and hawing to imply that Tess could not be a lawful minister of Baptism, perhaps because she is a woman. The early 17th century canons of the Church of England do discourage private baptism, perhaps less for the theological grounds we would cite today (the importance of the local Christian community showing visible support for the incorporation of the child into the Body) than as a form of repression upon non-conformity. However, the ancient Patristic precedents support Tess. Some of these even allow baptism in the proper form of words by pagans and heretics to be valid Reading them more restrictively as the Roman Catholics do to exclude those baptizing in the correct form of words with heterodox beliefs concerning their meaning, Tess still would be empowered to baptize in extremis as was clearly the case. Renton and Robertson's Encyclopedia of the Laws of England quotes Bingham's Scholastical History of Baptism , "[The Church of England] forbids laymen or women by its laws to baptize: but if it be done in due form, she does not wholly disannul or order it to be repeated as entirely null and void." These authors also quote ecclesiastical law reports from as early as 1809 in support of this position, even allowing baptism by Dissenting ministers to be valid.
Hardy's account of the incident doesn't really give much insight into the priest's motivations, noting only that he was new to the parish and so not acquainted with the devout and reasonably well educated Tess (for a rural working class woman) or her unfortunate circumstances. His attitude may be punitive and malicious, treating Tess as a "loose woman" who locked him out of her house in the cold night while he was trying to do his duty and now expects him to believe she baptized the child according to the Prayer Book rite (which Hardy actually says she did). His attitude may stem from simple ignorance and the obligation to enforce his misunderstanding of canon law. After all, Tess does get him to admit "sinner to saint" that Sorrow is properly baptized. This rather misty business suggests that Hardy finds his Anglican clergymen easier to portray one dimensionally, whereby they may be more easily pilloried. But I think it's fair to say that situations like this easily could arise in a world where a poor rural woman could not be expected to have recourse to a canonist or even any kind of second opinion.
It's not a situation that could arise in TEC today, where emergency baptism is a little more clearly explicated in the Prayer Book and the funerary offices of the Church are more freely offered in recognition of the deep theological truth that even non-Christian human souls and bodies have kinship with the Triune God and are worthy of being put to rest with dignity and good order. But I suppose such things still depend on who the priest is.
8 comments:
Thanks for the elucidation.
It's not only baptism, of course, about which attitudes and actions concerning burial have changed - but also suicide, I believe. And of course even today, quite famously some Catholic priests have denied "practicing" gay people the Rite of Burial.
I was just pointing out that many things have indeed changed over the centuries. You're right, of course, that Hardy is using the priest as a literary device - but I'm fairly sure that kind of thing did happen.
I'm sure such things did happen, too, but I wanted to point out that the problem was not the rules, which Tess knew and understood and were far more reasonable than implied, but in the person who applied them.
Hooker has a passage in which he defends the freedom of a midwife to baptize a child in danger of death. Don't know if this was something Hardy would have known. Clearly there was division of opinion on the rightness of such baptism, and Hardy's priest may represent the other view...
I think the priest in question made a point of saying, "I'm sorry, but there are rules....", either before or after he privately admitted the baptism was proper - didn't he?
I thought that's what I heard, anyway - so he must be referring to some canon law in this regard, no? (Or, perhaps, he's merely a literary device after all....)
It's unclear. The novel says "reasons" rather than rules.
As he's about to tell her that it is just the same:
"How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he supposed himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman's power to tell, though not to excuse."
Now that was a good movie....
I do have a question, though; what's the deal with Stonehenge? Is that somehow significant?
(I was supposed to have read this book in sophomore year of high school, but apparently I never finished it....)
I can't say I've read much of it. I despise Hardy's prose, but apparently the Stonehenge scene is supposed to suggest she's some sort of Earth goddess or human sacrifice. I suppose this makes sense. She's a sort of Persephone, in touch with nature and animals, especially when she's driven into her family vault and longs to die. And so very soon she does.
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