[Ricardo Reis]

I. FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

Si jamais les chrétiens se rapprochent, comme tout les y invite, il semble que la motion doit partir de l’église d’Angleterre . . . elle peut être considérée comme un de ces intermèdes, capables de rapprocher des éléments inassociables de leur nature.

—Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France

It is easy to form a distorted impression of the growth of the Anglo-Catholic Movement in the Church of England and those churches in communion with it. The dramatic story is that of the Oxford Movement. The dramatic character is Newman. The dramatic moment is his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Evangelicals, Low and Broad Churchmen, and Roman Catholics, have always seen the movement as a Romanizing one, reflecting in its theology and ritual orthodox Roman Catholicism, and have defined its objectives as implying “submission to Rome” as a necessary consequence. Nothing could be less true. Even to this day, many Anglo-Catholic clergy have never been inside a Roman Catholic Church or read a “Romanist” theological work written after the Council of Trent.
The growth and development of modern Anglicanism stems from seeds dormant in the Anglican church from its beginning. Newman’s theory of development of doctrine may or may not apply to the evolution of post-Tridentine dogma, but it certainly applies to the Church he left. On the other hand, the influence of the Oxford Movement, and the ritualist revival which succeeded it, has had a profound influence on Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism all through the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth.
Today the devotional and liturgical life of both Protestantism and Catholicism have been assimilated to a worldwide movement of purification and restoration which unquestionably first began with the Oxford reform. This influence of course did not only operate externally. Again and again Catholicizing priests, and sometimes whole religious orders, “swam the Tiber” from Canterbury to Rome, having lost hope of defending the Catholic heritage of the Church of England against militant Protestants, politically-appointed bishops and a secular Parliament. Once they got there however, many of their old practices and beliefs slowly reasserted themselves and acted to purge the Roman Catholic Church in England of many of the distortions and abuses and superstitions which had crept into the practices of the Church in the long dormant period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Looking back over the controversies that drove many an embattled and despairing priest to renounce the Anglican Communion and deny the validity of his own priesthood, and even question that of his baptism, it is tragic and ironic to realize that many, perhaps most, of these were over points of practice and doctrine then considered hopelessly Protestant or even sacrilegious which are now common in the Roman Catholic Church since Vatican II — the vernacular liturgy, open communion, communion in both kinds, birth control, divorce, married clergy, the redefinition of scriptural, traditional and magisterial authority, of baptismal regeneration, and justification. Once the now apparently inevitable permission for a married clergy is granted, many Anglican and even some Lutheran churches and priests and ministers will be considerably more “High Church” than their Roman Catholic fellows.
The importance of Anglican Catholicism is precisely that it worked out, for over a century in a far from authoritarian environment, most of the implications of a free Catholicism and demonstrated that even in so touchy a subject as the Higher Criticism of scripture, liberty was the mother, not the daughter, of order; that at the end of the process of freedom for development within a Catholic context, hardly defined except as a way of life based on a way of prayer, true Catholic orthodoxy would not be weakened but immeasurably strengthened. It is for this reason that the developments in Anglicanism since the beginning of the Oxford Movement are of such crucial importance and are so illuminating of the problems now confronting the Universal Church.
In all this history the coming and going of John Henry Cardinal Newman is only a minor episode. It would be tempting to be defiant and try to write the story of the Oxford Movement without mentioning him. That would be a foolish thing to do. Distortions of history cannot be corrected by equal and opposite distortions. It should be borne in mind in studying the Oxford Movement that Newman is a separate problem, just as it should be apparent on inspection that he represents a divergent tendency. He “went to Rome.” The other leaders did not. Certainly it was after his conversion that he became that special theological and even philosophical influence that is his unique contribution.
Historians of the Movement commonly represent it as saving the English Church from an abysm of sloth, indifference, simony, slovenliness, and secularization, into which it had sunk in the eighteenth century. This is only partially true, and it was nothing peculiar to the Church of England, but characteristic of religion in eighteenth-century Western civilization taken as a whole. The eighteenth century was not only the heyday of a secularizing rationalism, but it was the heyday of Erastianism as well. The State was supreme in secular affairs in Sweden as well as in Bavaria; in Prussia as in Spain; obviously, as we all know, in France and England, but also, as we forget, in Rome.
In the Papal States the State as such was as “value neuter” as anywhere else. It was just far less efficient than most, and was responsible for the Balkanization of central and southern Italy. Had the Borgias established the Papacy as a hereditary monarchy, things might have been different, but since the secular power of the Papacy was actually powerlessness, the Papal States were the victims of the maneuvering of great powers whose interest it was to keep the heart of Italy barbarous and weak. We forget that only a few generations ago the city of Rome was a wilderness of half-buried classical ruins, ill-kempt churches, ruinous Renaissance palaces, cow pastures and slums. The Light never went out in the Church, true. But it never went out in Canterbury either, although in both cases its rays shone far more from the Inner Light than from the radiance of the cathedra.
We forget too, that William of Orange was an aggressive Presbyterian and Calvinist publicly, and devoid of religion privately, and that from the death of Queen Anne the throne of England has been occupied, until recent years, by rulers who were not really members of the Church of England at all, as it had been defined by the Elizabethan Establishment, or by the great theologians of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline days. For two hundred years the entire tendency of the secular authority, whether throne or Parliament, was against the Anglican heritage. This did not mean that the heritage was forgotten, or that the Christian life died out, or went underground in the eighteenth century.
Samuel Johnson is a perfect example of a devout but worldly Anglican layman of those times. His religious opinions and prejudices can be found in Boswell, distorted by Boswell’s worldly and secular bias — as is the whole Boswell-Johnson — but his religious life is revealed in the rare entries in his diary, always at least at Easter, the anniversary of his wife’s death, and usually his own birthday and New Year’s Day and in his prayers and few personal poems. True, he only went to communion on Easter. That’s all anybody else did, anywhere, except for a few specially devout persons and members of religious orders. Coleridge is another example at the end of the century. As a theologian and philosopher he may be very confused, but the tremendous importance of religion in his life could not have existed in a completely irreligious milieu, nor even grown out of it by reaction.
Religious life in the Church of England was pretty well confined to the Nonjurors, the Evangelicals, the old High Church party and the pietists who were influenced by French Quietism, German piety, and the writings of William Law. Again the eighteenth century was the flowering time of Quaker piety, when Quakerism turned from an apocalyptic Pentecostal sect into a society of lay monastics. The printed literature of spiritual diaries kept by Friends in the eighteenth century is immense, and reveals the continued existence in England on a very wide scale of that lay monasticism that is the characteristic form of the English religious life. Of course the Society of Friends were a people apart, an alternative society; nevertheless, they existed within the dominant culture, would have been something very different without it, and radiated an influence all about them.
This kind of devoted, “concerned” Friends call it, life appears in the first English religious writing. It can be found in Bede as well as Walter Hilton, The Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, Marjorie Kempe and all the other great English mystics of the end of the Middle Ages. It can be found in the devotional literature of the English families who remained true to the old religion, and where, in an underground church, the religious life was necessarily the family life. It can be found in the poetry of Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and even Herrick, and it is perfectly expressed in Walton’s Lives of Donne, Herbert, Sanderson, Hooker, Wotten. All of them were distinguished by a domestic monasticism, a cheerful piety and a gentleness of disposition. At least three of them — Donne, Wotten and Herbert — were fishermen, wanderers by quiet streams and flowered meadows, contemplating the mysteries of life in moving water. The Compleat Angler itself is a book about the contemplative life, under the symbolism of fishing. This is not a witticism.
To understand the profound changes which took place in the Church of England through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it is necessary to establish the sympathy of a special mood, and that mood can be found in Roper’s Life of Sir Thomas More and in The Compleat Angler as well. England’s special contribution to monasticism was the Order of St. Gilbert of Sempringham. The Gilbertine villages or city communities were organized with a convent of nuns at one end and of monks, both contemplative and active, at the other, and in between the homes of lay monastics whose religious life was the fulfilment of family life. I myself have always hoped to see, amongst the many other revivals of a purified medieval monasticism within the Anglican Church, a revival of the Gilbertines. Perhaps as we enter the Apocalypse that will be the final resolution of aggiornamento.
Contrary to popular belief, Henry VIII was not interested in founding a “Church of England.” Nor was he interested in reforming the Church. He was interested in robbing it. The looting of the monasteries was occasioned by the impending bankruptcy of a vastly overextended international policy. The coming and going of Henry’s wives reflected political forces, and policies national and international, not unlike the coming and going of prime ministers in later days. As Henry’s chancellors and queens succeeded each other, the doctrinal position of the Church under its royal head swung like a pendulum. As long as Henry was alive it did not swing very far. The succession of official formularies from the parliamentary declarations of 1529 to 1536 summed up in the Ten Articles, The Institution of a Christian Man (The Bishops’ Book), the Act of Six Articles, 1539, The Necessary Doctrine and Erudition of a Christian Man (The King’s Book, 1543), Archbishop Cranmer’s Primer issued in the last year of Henry’s life, were all considerably more orthodox and more specifically Roman than much of the liturgics and theology popular since Vatican II — always saving the Royal Supremacy. It should be borne in mind that quarrels of king and throne were nothing new in the history of either the Western or Eastern Church. The extreme lengths to which Henry had pushed the Royal Supremacy fell far short of the claims of most Byzantine emperors. Had the personal revolt of Henry VIII not coincided with the Reformation on the continent and the attendant political struggles of the German states, France, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, the schism of the English Church would have quietly healed over with changes in the occupants and policies of the throne. The Communion Service of the first Prayer Book of Edward VI was still unmistakably a Mass. Even the second Prayer Book was susceptible of a Catholic interpretation and would be reformed drastically in that sense by Elizabeth’s bishops.
There was a great deal of iconoclasm and destruction throughout all these years, but it is extraordinary how much of the artistic heritage of the Middle Ages survived to be destroyed by the Protestant revolt in the next century. Nothing shows the comparative superficiality of the Henrician and Edwardian Reformation than the comparative ease with which Mary was able to restore the Roman obedience. The persecutions of Mary have made her name a household word. In fact the majority of the clergy and the vast majority of the populace quietly submitted. Serious revolt did not begin until the marriage to Philip of Spain.
In those years the Council of Trent was in session (1545-1563) and those doctrines that we think of as specifically Roman were then far more rigorously defined. The council did not attempt to ameliorate any of the differences with the reformers, but attacked them head on. Practices and doctrines that were peculiar to the contemporary Western Church were made binding for all times and places. Behind its counterattack in the field, the Church became a fortress church. What this meant in actual fact was that what had hitherto been considered the Universal Church, the body of all Christian men, synonymous with society as a whole, in Western Europe at least, accepted a position as a subculture or a sect. As on the continent, many of the persecutions and burnings of the later days of Mary’s reign were for doctrines and practices which had been matters of dispute amongst the fathers and doctors of the Church until the sixteenth century. Many of the abuses, for example, the sale of indulgences, had been attacked by the entire consensus of medieval Europe, from the great scholastics to Chaucer and Langland.
The intransigent policies of Cardinal Pole, Mary’s archbishop and cousin, bear comparison with the Papal suppression of the Jesuit Mission in China two centuries later. There was a brief chance to make the Catholic Church truly catholic without sacrificing doctrine to the more intransigent Lutherans and Calvinists. Under the driving intolerance of Mary, Philip, and Cardinal Pole, and with occasional gentle, ineffectual demurrers from Rome, the universal church in England was turned into a sect and so remained. It is necessary to understand this to appreciate more the psychology than the doctrines of the Anglo-Catholic divines under Elizabeth, James and the two Charleses, who built up a philosophy of the English Church as a via media, a “bridge church” between Rome, Orthodoxy and Protestantism, a branch of the Church Universal — which, ironically sheltered under the royal supremacy, they hoped, would someday restore true universality to Christendom.
Throughout the sixteenth century all Western European churches were becoming national churches, whether Protestant or Papal in their allegiance. The Spanish Church was and remained until Vatican II essentially a national church, less markedly so than the English but more than the Gallican French church, for the simple reason that over vast periods of time the Spanish throne alone or in combination with that of the Holy Roman Empire controlled the Papacy, not the other way around. Ironically only Calvin in Geneva kept alive the idea of a theocratically ruled divine society which had been at least the putative vision of Hildebrand.
Similar processes of course had gone on in the Eastern churches. Northern Orthodoxy was nationalist — Serbian, Russian, Bulgarian, etc. — while nationalist and ethnic tendencies in the South had produced schismatic churches — Monophysite, Monothelite, Nestorian — in Syria, Egypt and the Orient, all denying, incidentally, the Orthodox charges of heresy against themselves — denials that were later to be accepted by the Roman See in some instances, by Canterbury in others in admitting various Uniat Churches to communion.
Hooker, Laud, Hall, Andrewes, Cosin, Bramhall, Bull, Stillingfleet, Shillingworth, Pearson, Morton were amongst the most learned theologians of their day. Parallel with their theology was reborn in the English Church its characteristic piety — John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Herbert, Nicholas Ferrar, Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Traherne, Henry Vaughan, as well as Andrewes and Laud, were all devotional writers of a type more meaningful to us today than most of the contemporary Counter-Reformation mystics on the continent. They are only the more articulate few out of many. It is the capacity of the English Church to produce so rich and deep and manifold a life of prayer which nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-Catholics considered the principal sign of her catholicity, because it reflected the continuity of her sacramental life.
The theologians constructed an apologetic for a reformed Catholicism, protestant only against what they considered specific Roman abuses and claims. Baptismal regeneration, confirmation, the Real Presence as distinguished from trans-substantiation, the Eucharistic sacrifice, the reservation of the Eucharist, auricular confession, unction, invocation of the saints and the Blessed Virgin — all can be found in the Caroline divines.
This entire theological edifice was constructed not by appeal to recent Roman Catholic theology or the medieval doctors but was based solidly on Scripture, the apostolic Fathers, the patristic period, to and including St. Augustine, and the Councils of the undivided church. In every instance the emphasis is on the apostolic life. Christianity is envisaged as the pattern of life shown forth by those persons who had been in intimate contact with the incarnate Lord, who had walked and talked and eaten and drunk with the living Jesus. The Church is thought of as itself a sacrament, social, but embodied like the Eucharist, of the Christ-life.
The brief interlude of James II only consolidated the Anglo-Catholic tendency amongst bishops, priests and laity. Archbishop Sancroft and six bishops remonstrated against the liberties granted Dissenters and Roman Catholics, were brought to trial and acquitted. This crisis was used by essentially irreligious forces to overthrow James and deliver the crown to William of Orange, husband of James’s sister. He was one of the wealthiest men in Europe, the leader of an essentially economic revolution. Once again, Sancroft and eight bishops refused the oaths to William and Mary. They considered that even though he was a Roman Catholic, their oaths to James were personal and so still binding. The archbishop, five bishops, and four hundred clergy were deprived and were followed by a large but unknown number of laymen. From then on the throne was no longer in fact head of an Anglican church, but a Protestant, continental power over against it. Certain of the bishops consecrated others and the most irreconcilable of the Catholic party went into schism — the so-called Nonjurors — which lasted as an effective body all through the eighteenth century. Towards the end of the century there were some 50 congregations in London!
Most of the Episcopal Church of Scotland refused the oaths. That Church as such became and has remained disestablished. (William established the Presbyterian Church in Scotland.) The Scottish Prayer Book and the English Nonjuring liturgy returned to the first Prayer Book of Edward the Sixth, with considerable improvements in the Catholic sense taken mostly from eastern liturgies. These included the epiclesis or invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the elements of bread and wine, lacking which the Roman rite is considered defective by the Orthodox. Incidentally, the Book of Common Prayer of the American Episcopal Church and American Orders are derived from the Scottish Church and the Nonjurors, not from the English Church.
The Nonjuror schism is extremely important in the background of the Oxford Movement. Bishop Ken and the great eighteenth-century mystic, William Law, profoundly influenced Pusey, Keble and Newman. The later generation of Young Turks around Newman — Ward, Oakley, Pattison, the Romanizers — were specifically in revolt against the old Anglo-Catholic tradition, quite as much as against the Evangelical and Broad parties.
As the years went by, and its distance from the Church widened, the little schism of the Nonjurors came, in the polemical writings of its apologists, to be more and more sacramentally oriented. The Apostolic Succession was looked on as a succession of the sacraments, the episcopacy an enduring channel of the divine life blood. It was the sacraments with their all-pervading gift of grace which bound the Church together with an authority far surpassing Pope or king. Isolated as they were from their parent body and totally unknown to the Church as a whole, the Nonjurors emphasized the purely transcendental and mystical universality or catholicity of the Church. It was for this reason that the Alexandrine and Cappadocian Fathers, but especially the Syrians, appealed so greatly to them. There had been plenty of exterior authority of all sorts in the Roman Empire in the East. The Church was still loosely knit, with long and easily broken lines of communication. The appeal against imperium to charisma was to limited supernatural communities, the congregations of faithful whose power preceded others’ because it operated on a higher plane.
It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of William Law. The household of William Law was a direct descendant of Little Gidding, the household of Nicholas Ferrar, as both were of the household of St. Thomas More. The principal difference is the increasing strictness forced by the effort to distinguish a devotional community from a world in which prayer, meditation, contemplation and asceticism were at ever increasing discount.
William Law is only the most famous of the Nonjuring divines, due probably to the cogency of his literary style and the conscious attempt to avoid sectarianism in his writings. He was a late-arrived Nonjuror who refused the oaths to George I. In spite of the strictness of his own life, his controversial writings against deism, against the egoistic morality of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, against Protestantism, against Roman Catholicism are for their time singularly liberal in tone and echo the judiciousness of Richard Hooker. It was on Law’s controversial writings and some of the more orthodox ruminations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that in the next century F.D. Maurice was able for his own purposes to erect a bridge back to the main Anglo-Catholic tradition of the seventeenth century.
It is Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by which he is known in the history of English literature and by which he profoundly affected the course of religious development in England. It was a seminal book for the Evangelical Movement, a turning point in the spiritual life of the Wesleys, but it also deeply influenced, in their notions of a dedicated life, people as unlike as Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon. It is a devotional manual of the type popular in Catholic circles on the continent in the eighteenth century and amongst the Quakers and other Pietists in England and the Germanic countries. Today its asceticism seems impossibly strict for anyone living in the world unsupported by a monastic regimen. Yet it is a direct descendant of the works of the medieval English mystics who were anchorites, hermits or even housewives but almost never conventuals.
Law was more learned in the mystical tradition than most English pietists, and so his book describes a more systematic cultivation of the interior life than any other English work of his time. Then, too, his influence was much greater because more public, and not so closely confined to the audience of a sect, due to the great literary merit of A Serious Call. It is still read by thousands of people of different religions, or none. In his fifties, after a life of occasional curacies and many years in the home of Edward Gibbon’s father, where he lived first as a tutor, and then as a kind of chaplain and spiritual counselor to uncounted people of all parties in the Church, or none, who came to consult him, he retired to a cottage in the country at Kings Cliffe, his birthplace, and established a kind of little convent with two ladies, Mrs. Hutcheson and Hester Gibbon, the aunt of the historian. Until his death twenty-one years later, the three devoted themselves to a strict religious life of prayer, contemplation, teaching in two schools for poor boys and girls, and charity, the latter so undemanding as to seriously disturb the neighboring rector.
It is in this later period that Law wrote the bulk of his mystical works and published his beautiful edition of the works of Jakob Boehme. With his hierarchic cosmogony and his dynamic vision of the supernatural world and the soul’s place in it, Boehme verges on Gnosticism. Although he takes over much of Boehme’s mythology, Law is in fact less gnostic than the pseudo-Dionysus or Scotus Erigena. The total impression given by his visionary writings is his close kinship with St. Bonaventura and the long tradition of “By Light, Light” — going back to Philo, Christian Neo-Platonism, and the Merkabah mysticism of Judaism and its later descendants in the Kabbalah and Hasidism. What Law does is to adjust the ancient Gnostic emanationist melodrama to the interior life as a set of symbols of the progress of the soul, what in our day Martin Buber or even Carl Jung have done. This is not the highest level of mystical experience, but it is a most effective propaedeutic, and when it is adjusted to Catholic Christianity and to life modeled on the historic Jesus, a most captivating one.
Law’s influence on Evangelicalism and on the revival of Anglo-Catholicism would be hard to overemphasize. It is more than a taste in reading matter in the Fathers of the Church. It is even more than a witness to the special lay monasticism so specially English. It is above all else an apocalyptic vision of the Church as the body of Christ, the manifestation of the Creative Word, and itself a great Sacrament whose body and blood is concentrated and communicated at the altar. Law spoke from Patmos. To him the Trinitarian process, the Incarnation and Atonement were of the substance of which the great cosmogonies of the pagan Orient had been but dim rememberings. Although no one would know of them for two hundred years, Law’s direct visionary experience, rising from his meditation on Boehme and on the Fathers, was a kind of redemption of the Memphite Theology, the earliest tractate of Egyptian religion, and of the cosmological dramas of Mesopotamia and Syria. Viewed from the vantage point of William Law the endless polemic of Fraser’s The Golden Bough falls quietly into place as prophecy not only of the Christian myth but of the Christian life.
It is relatively easy for us, sophisticated with all the writings of comparative religion of two centuries, to absorb Law’s transmuted Boehmenism. What it gave to Pusey, Keble and Newman could have been little else than the mood, the tone arising from a kind of physiological conviction that they lived in the tissue of the Living Body.
Law’s contribution to the more systematic apologetic of later Anglo-Catholicism was of more considerable importance, although the influence was seminal rather than at large. He established the appeal to experience, what today we would call existentialism, as the effective answer to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and from him stems all the anti-rationalistic polemic of Coleridge, Newman, Butler, down to the Modernists. As, in a sense, a corollary of this appeal to experience, his doctrine of the Atonement follows naturally. He demolishes the forensic theory, that the sacrifice at the cross was a debt to be paid to the bookkeeping of heaven, with a direct appeal to the experience of at-one-ment, the divinization of human nature by its lifting up into the Incarnation. This appeal is as ancient as the early Fathers and is reiterated again and again in the semi-Platonic mysticism of English Franciscan philosophy and poetry —

Honde by honde then schulle us take
Ant joye & bliss schulle us make
For the devil of Hell man hagt forsake
And Christe our lauerd is makit our make.

This is a theological tradition which would come to flower in the combination of Bishop Charles Gore’s theory of kenosis and the generally prevailing Anglican doctrine of the incarnation and atonement which begins to gather force with G. Mauberly, then L.S. Thornton, Coleridge, F.D. Maurice, Frank Weston, the Bishop of Zanzibar. In later years the mystical, semi-gnostic notion of the equivalence of macrocosm and microcosm would be forgotten, but in Law it is the essential explanation of the experienced fact — “The divine drama is in you.” And last of all, Law reestablished a specific kind of devotion still characteristic of Anglican piety. A Serious Call has often been compared to St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life. It is most interesting to read them together, supplemented with Law’s final devotional works — The Spirit of Prayer, The Way to Divine Knowledge and The Spirit of Love. They led one of his editors, the Quaker S. Hobhouse, to claim him as a Quaker. It would be just as easy for someone saturated in St. Thomas More and the late medieval English mystics to claim him as a Roman Catholic, more traditional by far than the rococo devotional manuals of his time.
Much could be written about the saintly Nonjuring Bishop of Bath and Wells, Thomas Ken. His devotional writings would best be read in the idyllic setting of the cathedral he occupied for so short a time, along “Ken’s Walk,” by grassy battlements and greenish moats and swanny pools, with the splendid cathedral in the background. His hymns are the most deeply devotional of their kind, poetry of great simplicity and power, although the enormous bulk of verse, not hymns, which he left behind him in manuscript is seldom poetry at all. It is tragic that so gifted a bone pastor should only have held his see for three years, and significant that he is still the legend of the place. But the most significant thing about him is that he is the only man in the history of theology ever to write an explication of the catechism, titled, and most deservedly, The Practice of Divine Love. Ken is a divine far better quoted than discussed.

When the love of God is produced in my heart, and is set on work, my last concern is to preserve and ensure and quicken it; It is preserved by Prayer, the pattern of which is the Lord’s Prayer; It is ensured to us by the Sacraments, which are the Pledges of love; and more particularly it is quickened by the Holy Eucharist, which is the feast of Love; So that the plain order of the Cathechism teaches me the rise, the progress, and the perfection of Divine Love, which God of his great mercy give me grace to follow.

* *

O thou whom my Soul loveth, I would not desire heaven but because thou art there, for thou makest heaven wherever thou art.
I would not, O Jesu, desire life everlasting, but that I may there everlasting love thee.
O inexhaustible love, do thou eternally breathe love into me, that my love to thee may be eternally increasing and tending towards infinity, since a love less than infinite is not worthy of thee.

* *

Lord, what I need I labour in vain, to search out the manner of thy mysterious presence in the Sacrament, when my Love assures me thou art there? All the faithful who approach thee with prepared hearts, they will know thou art there, they feel the Virtue of Divine Love going out of thee, to heal their infirmities and to inflame their affections, for which all Love, all Glory be to thee.
O merciful Jesus, let that immortal food which in the Holy Eucharist thou vouchsafest me, instil into my weak and languishing Soul, new supplies of Grace, new life, new Love, new Vigour, and new Resolution, that I may never more faint, or droop or tire in my duty.
To God the Father, who first loved us, and made us accepted in the Beloved; to God the Son who loved us, and washed us from our Sins in his own Blood; to God the Holy Ghost, who sheds the Love of God abroad in our hearts, be all Love and all Glory for time, and for eternity. Amen.

—from The Practice of Divine Love

* *

Forty-five years old, just before the swift decline of his powers, Coleridge was to write in Biographia Literaria:

The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish towards these men [George Fox, Jacob Behmen, and William Law] has caused me to digress further than I had forseen or proposed; but to have passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions, would have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the concealment of a boon. For the writings of these mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of DEATH, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter.

Coleridge was certainly the most influential — what shall we call him — certainly not theologian, but rather, theological speculator — of the early years of the nineteenth century, but it is difficult to isolate any stable and consistent ideas, much less a system from his work. His literary remains are an immense mass of notes. Like “Kubla Khan,” they begin in dream, emerge into reality, and are interrupted by the unwelcome appearance of persons from Porlock before they have become completely realized.
His opinions evolve steadily from deism or Unitarianism to an acceptance of what he claimed was Anglican orthodoxy, but all along the way and in the final summation he is never worried if he contradicts himself — like Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.” But, like Whitman, there certainly can be no question but that Coleridge was a man with a system, but a physiological system, a temperament, a tone, a way of coping with life and its problems. And there is no question but that he is often very muddled reading. His opponents have called him “muddied,” and have put down the confusion of his thought to the effects of a lifelong opium habit. The major Broad Church theologians of the nineteenth century looked back to him as an ancestor, practically a founder, and his influence on the greatest of them, F.D. Maurice, was very strong.
However, it is only an accident of history, of politics, the extreme Fundamentalism, in the modern sense of the word, of the Oxford Movement, that prevents him from being acknowledged equally as an ancestor of latter-day Anglo-Catholicism. After the defection of Newman and “the Romanizers” — Ward, Oakley, Manning, and the rest — from the Oxford Movement, it was F.D. Maurice, the Coleridgean, and the Cambridge group under his influence, along with Pusey and Keble, who provided the synthesis, such as it was, that guided the intransigent so-called ritualists in their slum parishes in the last half of the century.
The point-to-point visibility in Coleridge’s speculations may be low, but it is possible to triangulate the whole field of his thought from the few clear, outstanding summits achieved in his maturity.
What Coleridge accomplished was a qualitative change. His inchoate speculations are incomparably more profound than the rationalistic, scholastic, or sentimental theology of the eighteenth century. He was also infinitely better read in the philosophy and theology and literatures of several languages. He was a voice of the revolution in sensibility paralleled abroad by persons as widely separated as Baudelaire and Hegel — both of whom he resembles. Like Blake, Baudelaire, Hölderlin, Stendhal, Coleridge is talking about what we talk about, or at least did until it became apparent in the middle years of the twentieth century that Western civilization was not sick, but had ceased to be alive.
He brought Anglican theology up to date and out into a wider world. Few clergy indeed in his time were familiar with the German language, much less German philosophy and theology, and probably none with the significant literature of the continent. Few, strange as it may seem, read the Cambridge Platonists, Cudworth, Henry More, Whichcote, John Smith, and the rest, the most significant counter-movement to English empiricism and rationalism. This possibly was due to the sheer badness of writing of both German and English idealists. The combination of their two turgidities goes far to account for the opacity and disorder of Coleridge’s own prose. Biographia Literaria, Aids to Reflection, The Friend, Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, and On the Constitution of the Church and State must be read in a context that includes Baudelaire’s notebooks and even the decadent diary writers, Amiel, Bashkirtsiev and Barbellion.
Coleridge was penetrating the world of romantic alienation finally defined by Rimbaud and Proust. The argot of technical divinity conceals this from himself. Unfortunately he could no longer transmute the quest for illumination into poetry. The poems of his latter years only say badly what is already formless enough in his prose, but they lead straight to Baudelaire’s “La Cloche Fêlée,” the first major poem of spiritual alienation.
Coleridge tirelessly and passionately attacked the eighteenth-century inventors of evidences and proofs for God or Scripture, always with the appeal to the unalloyed experience of faith, the confrontation of the contingent I Am with the absolute It Is. He was quite right to characterize this as purified Lutheranism.
He took over from the Cambridge Platonists and Kant the distinction between two kinds of knowing, which he called reason and understanding. Today we would probably reverse the meanings of these two words as Coleridge uses them. This is an unfortunate habit of Coleridge’s; his distinction of act and potency suffers from the same fault. However his “reason” is not emotional intuition. He carefully distinguishes the whole man, acting in comprehension, from the anti-intellectualism of the bigot, the emotionalism of the enthusiast, or the rationalistic, religious apologetic of the orthodox — especially as the latter was represented in the external, mechanical rationalism of Paley, famous for his watch and watchmaker “proof,” the argument from design. God, Coleridge pointed out, is not a watchmaker deduced from a watch found in the road, but an experience far more veridical than the watch itself, an experience which blasted away the sensate prudence of the British man in the street to whom Paley appealed. Until the banality of Paley had been banished from the theological universe of discourse, there could be no room for the supernaturalism of the Oxford Movement, not even for the conventional piety of Keble, much less for the sophisticated skepticism of Newman.
Coleridge dismissed the epistemological dilemma which still bedevils British empiricism by simply denying the initial assumption of Locke — “Nihil est in intellectu sed quod fuerit in sensu” — with the quip of Leibniz’s “Praeter ipsum intellectum.” The orthodox had been accepting the terms of the deists; Coleridge denied them altogether and moved the dispute to another court. This is his primary importance. English philosophy had continued to attack Hume’s skepticism from positions Hume had demolished. Kant and Coleridge after him (and more confusedly the Cambridge Platonists) accepted Hume’s attack on rationalism and empiricism, and began over again with Hume’s skepticism as the foundation for a new definition of a different kind of “reason.”
Justification, whether by faith or the sacraments, had not been a pressing issue for generations. After violent controversy, the Establishment had come to rest content in the contradictory XI and XXVII Articles of Religion, “Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only, is a most wholesome Doctrine and very full of comfort.” “Baptism is . . . a sign of Regeneration or New Birth. And the Baptism of young children is retained.” The Protestants took one article, the High Church the other, and rested content.
In Aids to Reflection Coleridge put justification by faith in the center of his subjectively validated religion. God is known as the beginning of thought, by an integral response, not by ratiocination or the association of experiences. This response is a moral assent, the assumption of responsibility of the absolute by the contingent — Faith, which justifies and saves prior to any good works, or any works at all. The epistemological process is moral, and begins directly with God. This is philosophical Methodism, without the emotional crisis of Wesleyan “conversion,” without the “enthusiasm” of the Methodist and Evangelical revivals, and of course without “merit.” So it is not surprising that Coleridge can find no place for the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist except in sentiment, as symbols of Church Order and tradition, and very little place for the Incarnation of the actual historic Jesus.
This judgment may be unfair to Coleridge. His great magnum opus was to include a large section on Baptism, the Eucharist and the historic Jesus, the notes for which were either never written or have not survived. All of his notes are now being published by the Bollingen Foundation, and Coleridge, already complicated enough, turns out to be even more complex and difficult. But his theological influence can only be discussed in terms of what was available then in his published writings. Still he says, “I hope to be saved, not by my faith in Christ, but by the faith of Christ in me.”
Kant’s “pure speculative reason” becomes Coleridge’s “the Higher Reason,” operative in the noumenal realm, its object the self. The subject becomes its own object. As Coleridge says in The Friend, “Thus God, the soul, eternal truth, etc., are the objects of reason: but they are themselves reason.” The Theoretic Reason mediates noumenal (Higher Reason) and phenomenal knowledge (understanding) and validates the latter with the former. With this modified dualism Coleridge escapes from the rigorous monism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at least to his own satisfaction. Since the Higher Reason operates in the world of self, God, freedom, immortality, the realm of morals, it is the true instrument of the Will and the Will is cut off from the phenomenal world. So the Higher Reason becomes faith.
Initially this would establish a system of double truth, but powerful conceptual entities like these — Will and Higher Reason — tend to devour all around them. Coleridge drifts towards the will mysticism of the late nineteenth century. “As If” creates “Is.” This is the metaphysic of radical pragmatism, and lies behind most theological speculation, except Neo-Thomism, from then on. The enemy will say, “The head has surrendered unconditionally to the heart.” Coleridge shies away from the ultimate consequences embraced by some of his successors, in favor of the existential confrontation of total experience, but the practical consequence endures. The Higher Reason is an eye opening on the immediate vision of God of the mystics and that eye is opened by the will.
A hundred years would pass before it became common again to say, “Since the statements about the noumenal order have no phenomenological basis, they are pseudo-statements.” Coleridge’s descendants can only retort, “The same to you and many of them.” In Coleridge are foreshadowed most of the post-Kantian disputes.
If faith is not objectively negotiable but dependent on each man alone, the direct communion of the faithful on earth is dissolved in transcendent individual communication coming only through God. The Incarnation, and still more, the sacraments become unreal, and there is only the conversation of omnipotence and contingency. This is the road out of Coleridge or Kant taken by Kierkegaard and the neo-Lutherans, Barth and his followers. Newman, action Catholicism, the neo-Catholics and the Catholic Modernists took another.
In practice Coleridge simply emotionalized the reason and gave it over to the rule of the will confronted with the life of faith. “TRY IT,” says Coleridge. This is precisely the “grammar of assent.” The will after all is stimulated by the phenomenological world. Does Coleridge choose one of these alternatives consistently? No. But no philosophical system can be closed in perfect consistency. Gödel’s Proof applies to metaphysics as well as mathematics. Coleridge clings to the Church.
Coleridge shifts his ground completely to say that proofs in the noumenal realm of the Higher Reason are only reflections of processes which hold for the understanding in the phenomenal realm and cannot be logically final — only convincing — by a leap — of the will. The rationality of the universe, the order of nature, the law of contradiction, the unity of thought and being, are only plausible revelations, like the ontological proof of the existence of God, or the specific revelations of Scriptures and Church. This way lies a Humean, if not a simply skeptical, Catholicism. It is permissible to believe anything that works, can be plausibly proved, cannot be disproved, and satisfies the will via the emotions. All that is necessary is to purge Christianity of errors of fact and disprovable notions, and move religion bodily into the realm of its own transcendental consistency. Faith sees all being with the anagogic eye.
This is etherialization, the climax of the movement from tribal cult to world religion. It had already happened on a minor scale at the critical point when Christianity moved out into the wide world of Classical civilization. Origen and St. Clement, although always saving the literal meanings, did the same thing by treating Scripture as an inexhaustible system of metaphors. After Coleridge, the main task of theology becomes, in one guise or another, etherialization, or, as Marx and Engels would call it, the transformation of quantity into quality.
Since an etherialized system cannot violate the mundane understanding, it becomes easier to believe mysteries and impossibilities — that the infant Jesus came through the maidenhead of his mother like light through glass — than to believe in the troubled factual narrative of the latest Gospel synthesis. So Lord Acton could say, “I have never been troubled by an intellectual doubt,” to the confusion of simple minds ever since. The only rule is “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum” — a matter of taste — not certainly of the logic of the understanding, because nature too obviously multiplies entities beyond necessity.
Coleridge introduces into the indeterminacy he had created a determinant which is in fact esthetic and socially conditioned — “the law of conscience which peremptorily commands belief.” Following on this, the voice of God calling in the garden, and the Will responding, come all the religious emotions, the loneliness of the soul in the abyss of contingency and the welcome comfort of the accepted Fatherhood of God. “TRY IT,” says Coleridge, “Christianity is not a theory or a speculation — not a philosophy of life, but a life, and a living process — TRY IT.” “The facts of Christianity are not invented by imagination, but they are transmuted by it from a lower to a higher form.”
Coleridge’s speculations about the Trinitarian process follow naturally from his will philosophy, and lead to a triadic dynamism much like that attributed to the Hegelian dialectic. Like most theogonies, Coleridge’s is really a disguised psychology, a projection of the processes of the self. This may be interesting reading, but its influence was minimal and much of it has not been published until today.
Many critics have made a great deal of Coleridge’s theories of the relations of Church and State. They are unreal because they are posited on the assumption of a Christian society which had ceased to exist in his day, and has vanished in ours. He thought of the Church as two churches, an Establishment of the clerisy, the responsables, the liberal professions and arts, and the administrators of policy, and this body intertwined between, and nourishing and being nourished by, the purely secular power and the Church of the spirit. This is Plato’s Republic as worked out by Thomas Arnold and the nineteenth-century British Public School mystique. No doubt many members of the British Establishment still exist who think of society in these terms, but alas, it is, and probably always was, a hoax, the institutional form of the Social Lie. It assumes what does not exist, a Christian society. Via F.D. Maurice, William Morris, Ruskin, and the like, Coleridge might be called the originator of Christian Socialism, Guild Socialism, and other more benign theories of a sanctified, corporative state. This is a beautiful dream and something like it doubtless would have come to be, if the Catholic Church had won the world. Today, as the Church faces apocalypse and an underground life, it is an irrelevant pattern for the Christian community, although medievalists of the older generation may well think it by far the most Catholic of all Coleridge’s ideas.
Coleridge taught apologetics how to talk to the alienated clerisy — the clerkly class dispossessed and prostituted by a predatory society. Newman summed up Coleridge’s qualitative change of venue for all English theology after him:

And while history in prose and verse was thus made the instrument of Church feelings and opinions [by Scott], a philosophical basis for the same was under formation in England by a very original thinker [Coleridge], who, while he indulged a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate, and advanced conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian, yet after all instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept.

—The Prospects of the Anglican Church