Essay
Comment
Royalty
5 min read

Coronation vows and the relationships they make

The coronation contains significant words that are cornerstones for the state and much more. M. Ciftci explores their implications.

Mehmet Ciftci has a PhD in political theology from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on bioethics, faith and politics.

A painting shows a young Queen Victoria, in her coronation dress, resting one hand on the bible, taking her oaths
Queen Victoria taking the coronation oath, by George Hayter..
George Hayter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What is the point of the coronation ceremony? Many, such as Orwell, have praised the monarchy for absorbing our desire to exult those who rule us, so that we do not fawn over the politicians who hold real power, as they do in some presidential regimes. Instead, we treat politicians with no fanfare, but as mere ministers of the Crown, and hence as ministers of the good of the entire country. But why do we need an explicitly Christian coronation ceremony, taking place in the middle of an Anglican service of Holy Communion?  

We can find an answer in The Meaning of the Coronation, an appreciative essay written after the last coronation by two left-leaning sociologists, Edmund Shils and Michael Young. Every society, they claim, relies on an implicit consensus around certain moral values. “What are these moral values which restrain men’s egotism and which enables society to hold itself together? A few can be listed illustratively: generosity, charity, loyalty, justice in the distribution of opportunities and rewards, reasonable respect for authority, the dignity of the individual and his right to freedom.” 

 The apparently ordinary nature of these values should not deceive us.  

“The sacredness of society is at bottom the sacredness of its moral rules, which itself derives from the presumed relationship between these rules in their deepest significance and the forces and agents which men regard as having the power to influence their destiny for better or for worse.”  

Our sense that moral rules and values ought to be respected calls us to use all the power of rite and ritual to invest them with the authority of the sacred. The monarchy is eminently suited to serve this purpose, since “the monarchy has its roots in man's beliefs and sentiments about what he regards as sacred,” albeit in a vague, and hence more inclusive, way that can be appreciated without membership of the Church of England (to which I do not belong either), or Christian belief of any defined sort. Therefore, Shils and Young argue, the

“Coronation is exactly this kind of ceremonial in which the society reaffirms the moral values which constitute it as a society and renews its devotion to those values by an act of communion.” 

We can better appreciate how the Coronation reaffirms various political and moral principles by considering some key parts of the ceremony. One of them is the taking of the Oath to “solemnly promise and swear to govern … according to their respective laws and customs” the UK and Commonwealth Realms. These words are the cornerstone of our tradition of common-law constitutionalism. As the Queen takes the Oath, according to Shils and Young, she “acknowledges that the moral standards embodied in the laws and customs are superior to her own personal will.” Historically, as H.L. Morton wrote,  

“The king’s task was to uphold the law, not to make law, still less to govern by personal will as an autocrat.”  

The Oath, then, stands in judgement over the ministers of the Crown: have they acted in accordance with existing laws, or did ministers rule by personal decree? A question always worth asking, as Lord Sumption reminded us during the pandemic. 

Another key moment is the presentation of the regalia, the symbols of how the monarch should reign. The most important regalia to be handed to the King by the Archbishop are the Sceptre with Cross and the Sceptre with Dove. The Archbishop will then say a new and somewhat clumsy prayer to ask: 

“that you might exercise authority with wisdom, and direct your counsels with grace; that by your service and ministry to all your people, justice and mercy may be seen in all the earth.”  

By contrast, in 1953, the Archbishop said:  

“Receive the Rod of equity and mercy. Be so merciful that you be not too remiss; so execute justice that you forget not mercy. Punish the wicked, protect and cherish the just, and lead your people in the way wherein they should go.”  

This conveys more clearly and artfully the significance of the Sceptre and Rod, which is to circumscribe the purpose of the state, defined simply as that of upholding justice and public order. All those who act in the King’s name, such as parliamentarians, judges, magistrates, and members of the armed forces or police, are thus entrusted with authority to carry out the King’s Oath to “cause Law and Justice, in Mercy, to be executed”. By implication, if they do or desire anything that does not strictly serve this purpose, such as gaining power and influence for its own sake, or interfering with society arbitrarily, then they go beyond their commission.  

But law is also meant to be tempered with mercy. Hence one of the ceremonial swords, the curtana, carried into the Abbey at the beginning of the ceremony has a blunt tip. The ceremony is embedded with the Christian belief that we must be humbled by knowing we are sinners presuming to judge others. Our sense of justice is imperfect. What fallible judgements we mete out to others should, where possible, be open to reintegrating the wrongdoer back into society.    

Finally, there is the anointing itself, the central act following the taking of the Oath and before the presentation of the regalia. This is the most archaic part of the rite, hearkening back to prophets, priests, and kings of Israel who, according to scripture, were anointed with oil to signify that God had dedicated them to perform a role for the good of the whole people.  

The anointing was one of two moments in the ceremony that were not televised in 1953, a precedent that will be followed again this year. For the anointing is an act that is really a prayer – and who likes to have people gawping at them when praying? The King removes his Robes of State before the anointing because this is the moment when he asks humbly to be given divine aid to dedicate himself to the service of his people.  

There are too many examples of failed and collapsed states to make us doubt that the continued existence of any state is not something we can guarantee by our ingenuity.

The Sovereign’s dedication to public service is one side to the covenant that binds the country together. Rather than a social contract between individuals to protect their self-interest, in our Constitution there is an exchange of vows, binding one to another with rights and obligations. The monarch and those acting on his behalf swear to serve us (and condemn themselves when they fail to do so), and we swear to bear true allegiance in return.  

Whether those promises will be kept is not a matter of effort and skill alone. Just as in a marriage, the weightiness of the promises makes us naturally feel unequal to the task and in need of strength greater than we can muster. There are too many examples of failed and collapsed states to make us doubt that the continued existence of any state is not something we can guarantee by our ingenuity. Hence, at the heart of the Coronation is the unfashionable but humbling idea that to remain faithful to the vows pledged, and for there still to be a United Kingdom in future generations, are gifts given by something above us and beyond our ability to control. 

Article
Books
Comment
Language
5 min read

Reading Don Quixote is making me a better person

Learning from Cervantes’ mistakes
Statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza point toward a windmill
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza statues, Tandil, Argentina.
Alena Grebneva, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I love reading, but I’m not very well read. As is often the case, a curmudgeonly teacher quashed any interest I had in literature in my last few years of school; the increasing creep of technology and social media into my life means my diminishing attention span often makes reading seem a herculean task. It’s a long time to sit still and not doomscroll.  

It’s only in recent years that I’ve rediscovered a love of reading. As part of this, I’m trying to right some literary wrongs.  

Okay, confession time: I’ve never read anything by Jane Austin, the Bronte sisters, George Elliot, Tolstoy, or Proust. I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings or Moby Dick nor To The Lighthouse or Heart of Darkness. I know. Bad, isn’t it? I could go on, too … 

I love reading, but I’m not very well read.  

And so I’m making an effort to read some of the Great Books of the canon. At the moment, I’m reading Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Crucially, I’m reading Edith Grossman’s 2003 translation of the novel. It is an absolute joy.  

I had heard that it was deeply funny, and a work of genius; neither aspect of the text has been a surprise to me. But there’s something about Grossman’s translation in particular that has caught me off guard: the mistakes.   

Not any mistakes by Grossman. I know nothing whatsoever about Spanish, let alone 17th Century Spanish (another dream crushed by another teacher), but the English text is a marvel. Eminently readable and funny without compromising the occasional complexity of Cervantes’ prose.  

No: I mean the mistakes by Cervantes himself. Early on, a footnote from Grossman points out that Sancho Panza (Don Quixote’s long-suffering squire) refers to his wife using several different names throughout the text. Without Grossman’s footnotes, I’m sure I would have overthought this. What is the author trying to say about Sancho Panza? Is it a comment on his intelligence? Or the character’s view of women, perhaps? Am I just too dense to understand what’s going on here? 

Grossman’s assessment? It’s just “an oversight”. A mistake. And quite a basic one, at that. Later on, Cervantes divides up his chapters, using those brief sentences summarising their contents that are common in this period (“Chapter III, In which …”). But they’re all wrong. Things are said to happen in Chapter X that don’t actually happen until Chapter XV; the chapter summaries are a mess, frankly.  

One of the things that made me reluctant to read Great Books for so long is that they’re intimidating. They are certified Works of Genius and therefore probably a bit much for my little brain to digest. Many of the archetypical Great Books compound this by being incredibly long, too: think Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, or even more recent candidates like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. Don Quixote itself runs to nearly 1,000 pages long; it carries a literal and literary heft to it. 

But there it is. Full of mistakes. 

It turns out to have been quite an opportune moment for me to read Don Quixote. I’m in the final stages of preparing for my second book to come out. (It’s an academic Christian theology book, so will probably sell slightly less than Don Quixote but will certainly cost much more to buy). This means it’s been quite a stressful season for me, as I try to catch any lingering mistakes that might have somehow slipped through the myriad rounds of copyediting, or find myself wondering if the book isn’t just so bad that I’m going to be forced to return my PhD, leave academia forever, and by sued by my publisher for besmirching their good name by association.  

This has also been a time of being deeply frustrated with my own humanity. Why aren’t I a better writer? Why can’t I spell properly? Why aren’t I more creative? Why aren’t I better at this? Why am I so … limited

As an academic, imposter syndrome never really goes away. You just learn to cope with it. And reading Don Quixote and seeing these mistakes in the text has helped me reframe who I am, and my own limitations. Here is a text that is human; completely and utterly human. And so, naturally, here is a text with mistakes; text that is imperfect and flawed. And therein lies its part of its charm. It is rough and coarse, and I love it for that. The mistakes in Don Quixote haven’t detracted from my enjoyment of the text, they’ve enhanced it. They’ve underscored the beautiful humanity that is so evident in Cervantes’ work.  

The Christian Bible is at pains to tell me that I am “fearfully and wonderfully made,” as the Psalmist puts it. I can be so quick to forget this when I focus all my attention on my limitations, and flaws, and missteps. This is why I’m so grateful for Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote. Above all else, I’m grateful for its mistakes. Like me, it is utterly human. Like me, this means it is utterly flawed. Like me, that makes it a work of utter beauty. 

Don Quixote is helping me to recognise the inherent beauty of my limitations as a creature. In doing so, it’s helping me to recognise the inherent beauty of the One who created me. It’s helping me to fall more in love with the God who sent His Son to Earth to become human like me, to revel in and live alongside me in my humanity. Warts and all. 

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