Of Canon Law and Kings

The Legal Thought of James Ussher (1581-1656)

James Ussher was a complicated man. In the seventeenth century, during the English Civil War, he was an archbishop in the Church of Ireland (think “Church of England” but on a different island). His reputation for learning is hard to overstate. In our day, Diarmaid MacCulloch has said that Ussher’s “genius for original research set the highest standards of assessment of ancient documents,” and in his day, John Selden called Ussher “ad miraculum doctus,” or learned to a miracle. His languages included Arabic, Armenian, Farsi, Gaelic, Ge’ez, Gothic, Greek, Latin, Old English, and Syriac. And yet poor Ussher. It’s become his fate to be known for one benighted calculation: he is the person who dated the creation of the world to 6 pm on a certain day in 4004 B.C. This combination of stupendous learning and ignorance is only one of the many contradictions in this man.

Christianity and the Making of Irish Law: Violence, Virtue, and Reason was published this month. It’s a collection of chapters on seventeen figures in Irish history with a connection to law and religion, from Admonán of Iona in the seventh century to figures like Richard O’Sullivan QC and even Herbert McCabe in the twentieth. Most surprising entry? The startling but persuasive reading offered in Nicholas McBride’s chapter James Joyce (1882-1941) as a Great Irish Christian Jurist.

Drew Keane and I contributed a chapter called Of Canon Law and Kings: The Legal Thought of James Ussher (1581-1656) (a near final draft is available here). We had to get it right: another contributor to this volume and participant in its symposium was Alan Ford, who is Ussher’s leading modern biographer and the author of his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Our chapter was specifically on Ussher’s contributions to thinking about law, including canon law. These are threefold.

First, Ussher was an advocate of absolute monarchy, preceding Hobbes and writing contemporaneously with and independently of Filmer. That view was ill-timed with the fall of the House of Stuart, but it also offers a glimpse into the porous boundary between apocalyptic theology, biased history, and political consequences in the time of the English Civil War.

Second, Ussher was an advocate of “reduced episcopacy,” which promised to take Anglican bishops down a peg and flatten the ecclesiastical hierarchy. That view was not influential at the time, but its day was coming.

Finally, Ussher thought that every national church had the autonomy to establish its own canons. That idea might have been radical when Ireland was under the thumb of England, but it would later come to mark what is now called the Anglican Communion, a family of churches that share bonds of faith, liturgy, and law but who have a considerable degree of autonomy in their self-governance.

Here is our conclusion to the chapter:

James Ussher has a Janus-like quality. His attention to detail, and his inattention to detail, are both worthy of comment. As a scholar, he was praised in his day and in ours for his massive erudition, his linguistic range, and his relentless pursuit of primary sources. He is among the legitimate claimants to being the founder of Irish history, and many sources have survived to this day precisely because he preserved them—from the Book of Kells to the letters of the English presbyterian Walter Travers to autograph notes and sermons by Richard Hooker. Yet those who delve into his scholarship will find a steadfast polemical purpose, and he is most remembered today for what he did not know.

As a bishop, he was reputed to be a most moderate man in a most immoderate age. There was almost nothing that could be agreed upon by royalists and anti-royalists, by King Charles I and the men who beheaded him, except that they respected James Ussher. And so, on the English side of the Irish Sea, where the belligerents were different kinds of Protestants, Ussher was an ecumenical consensus-builder. But on the other side of the sea, in his native Ireland, Ussher was an advocate of repression toward the Catholic majority, and he showed little urgency about persuading Gaelic-speakers with his scholarly arguments or reaching them with his clergy. Yet even in these religious and cultural conflicts, where Ussher can seem like little more than an Anglo-Irish Protestant partisan, his scholarly pursuits made him a congenial correspondent for Franciscans and Jesuits. The anti-Roman polemicist mellowed with time.

In law, too, his contributions seem multi-sided. He was a theorizer of absolute monarchy—precisely at a time when that view was out of favor with an assertive and rebellious Parliament. He was a theorizer of a humbler episcopacy, staking his claim in an ecclesiastical no man’s land, too episcopalian for the presbyterians and too presbyterian for those who wanted bishops, kings, and pawns. He stood for the distinctive identity of the Irish national church, both in doctrines and in canons, though compared to their English counterparts, he wanted the Irish articles to say more and the Irish canons to say less.

For each of these ideas related to law, Ussher was oddly out of his time. He was a student of chronology who, by the end of his life, was himself chronologically dislocated. The recurrent sense of dislocation that animates Ussher’s life, dislocation that was not only temporal but geographic and cultural and religious, only adds to the wonder that it was he alone who seemed to unite so much of his fractious age.

You can read the whole thing here.