[Ricardo Reis]

II. FROM THE OXFORD MOVEMENT TO LUX MUNDI

History seems to occur according to the theories of the philosophers of history who are contemporary with its facts. Certainly the early years of the nineteenth century were very Hegelian times. Again and again social forces and organized movements were pushed to critical points where they turned into their opposites, or where “quantity turned into quality.” This was especially true of the Little Counter-Reformation that accompanied the Holy Alliance’s restoration after the fall of Napoleon. In the case of Lamennais the whole process was embodied in the life of one man, developed consistently and in a straight line. In England things moved slower. Development depended on the resolution of conflicting forces and the influence of antagonistic individuals. Furthermore, England, with Austria and Russia, was the source of reaction, not as France, or the Rhineland, or North Italy, the victim. But it was socially and economically a peculiar kind of reaction. England was the most industrially advanced state in Europe, and the ideologue, or at least rhetorician, of British reaction was completely a man of the Enlightenment — Edmund Burke. Whatever his political maneuvers, he was the voice of a secular society ruled by an oligarchy of aristocratic capitalists, who were great entrepreneurs of the oncoming industrial civilization because, as great landowners, they possessed almost unlimited resources for capital investment. The economics of the Manchester School, the belief that the sum total of private evils would result in the public good, was not only secular and immoral; in practice it shattered the structure inherited from the old feudal society and created one of hopelessly antagonistic classes tending towards final, total atomization.
It is this irreparable schism in society that produced, by immediate reflex, the schism in the soul of what might be called the Romantic Left — Sade, Blake, Hölderlin, Stendhal, Baudelaire, and not least, Lamennais. In England the secular society was larger than on the Continent, more democratized; its material benefits seeped lower down the hierarchy of castes and classes. Reflecting this consent of the majority was the almost complete secularization of religion. By far the most conspicuous things on the British landscape, urban or rural, were the steeples of churches, and dotted amongst them were almost as many chapels of the Dissenters. The architectural symbols of a homogeneous society have misled many even to this day. England had ceased to be a Christian state.
Coleridge had envisaged a reorganized England, once again socially dense, hierarchically structured, and governed by a supernaturally sanctioned clerisy, a system which curiously enough greatly resembled the Enlightenment’s notion of the Confucian polity of the Chinese Empire with the addition of the mystery and ritual of a revamped medievalism. This idea, a kind of metaphysical Radical Toryism, was never to die out in England. Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris, Belloc, Chesterton, Eric Gill, Herbert Read — it survives to this day and remains at the heart of the vision of most Anglo-Catholicism.
That is not the way the Oxford Movement, the mother of the Catholic revival, started out. It started as reaction pure and simple, but reaction committed to an unassimilable principle — the idea of a Christian society. The hysteria of the response of the Oxford Reformers to the first moves of the secular state strikes us today as comic, a tempest in a vicarage teapot, until we understand that behind bigotry and old-fogeyism, these men were the survivors of a cohesive society which they thought still existed around them. They were oblivious to the fact that society was in the process of atomizing itself and that the process was irreversible and would continue for a century. In such a context any theory of, any movement towards a coherent, cohesive social order was bound to be revolutionary if pushed to conclusion. They did not know this. They thought they were conservatives, counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries.
In 1832 the Established Church in England, long incompatible with the secularizing society, had become in detail intolerable. In 1833 there appeared anonymously the extraordinary Black Book, an exposé of abuses of the state church almost incredible to us today. Many bishoprics, cathedral chapters and certain great churches were immensely wealthy and disposed of thousands of livings and benefices with income sufficient to move their recipients immediately into the lower echelon of the upper classes. The aristocracy, even the landed gentry and many old feudal corporations disposed of other livings — perhaps the majority — which ranged in income from a modest competence to modest wealth. Evelyn Waugh once pointed out that the standard of living of a successful Hollywood movie star or director did not differ greatly from that of an early nineteenth-century country rector with a well-endowed living — the differences were alcohol, sexual promiscuity and a swimming pool. These livings were awarded, except in rare instances, with little or no regard to learning or religion, commonly to the younger sons of the aristocracy.
In most of the wealthiest benefices and in almost half of all the others the vicar or the rector was not resident. The duties of his pastoral care were discharged by curates, seldom more learned or religious than their employers, who were paid a poverty wage, a hundred pounds a year or less. Such a minister was dependent upon his house, the produce of a few acres, “stole fees,” and the gifts of his congregation to keep his usually large family above the level of destitution. The Russian Church in 1830 might seem to us to be very exotic and very barbarous. Economically the situation of the pastors was much the same, just a different flavor of ignorance, superstition, semi-literacy, Erastianism, and lack of sanitation. Perhaps the Russian clergy preserved more vestiges of piety.
The picture drawn in the Black Book has established itself in history, but it is overdrawn. Things were like that, but they weren’t all like that. The Established Church had preserved the idea and the form of a supernaturally sanctioned clerkly class, a caste of responsables, devoted to learning, prayer, and the cure of souls. Scattered all through the body of the English Church, like white blood cells in the bloodstream of a very sick man, were dedicated men who spent their lives living up to their priestly vocation, piously unaware that their colleagues looked on them as fools, or at the best, fossils.
It was not the theology of the Established Church or its pastoral relations, however defective or nonexistent in many instances these were, but its structure, which was intolerable to a society entering the era of free competition and capital accumulation. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Irish Anglican Church, where the old bishoprics were supported by the full power of the state and the enforced tribute of the entire population, Roman Catholic or Presbyterian. In the early summer of 1833 Parliament moved to suppress ten of the most redundant of the Irish Anglican bishoprics. And on July 14 John Keble of Oriel College preached a sermon on the national apostasy — the church in mortal danger. For the rest of his life John Henry Newman was to say that this sermon marked the beginning of the Oxford Movement. Reading it today it seems to us hysterical and hypocritical rant, yet John Keble was a gentle soul and far from being a hysteric or a ranter. The secular state had moved to remedy a terrible injustice — at considerable profit to itself. The parliamentary agitation for reform of the Established Church was motivated by sentiments of profitable equity and respect for the religious liberties of Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews and nonreligious people, whose numbers already were approaching a majority even in England — if we include the bulk of the population who were really indifferent and who conformed to the Church only rarely for convenience. Parliament was beginning, in practice and with maximum pious hypocrisy, to recognize that Great Britain was not really a Christian nation, much less an episcopal one, and that the Church as the spiritual executive arm of the society had lost its monopoly of power. Keble ignored all this. He attacked Parliament, and the organs of the state, and behind them the consenting population, on moral grounds. There was no hint that the Establishment itself was, by its very nature, profoundly immoral. For Keble it was the other way around. The indifferentism and infidelity and even mockery with which the unsanctified viewed the Established Church was due to their own evil; in fact to their allegiance to a personal devil.
The Church is a supernatural institution whose officers are the direct descendants of the Apostles; their authority is guaranteed and made holy by sacrament, by the direct physical action of the Holy Spirit descending, by physical imposition of hands, from the flame of Pentecost. England is a Christian nation, absolutely bound in all matters spiritual, and in many temporal, to love, honor and obey the voice of the Third Person of the Trinity speaking through the Living Apostles — amongst whom of course are the Irish Bishops.
Hildebrand could not have been more forthright — as a matter of fact, he was less so, and he spoke from more substantial grounds. It is easy to see why Newman felt the national apostasy sermon launched the Oxford Movement. Behind the pious rhetoric it is all there. Society cannot escape its Christian nature, except into conscious sin. Spiritual authority is supernatural, hierarchic, and in its own realm, absolute. The Church is the guardian and purveyor of embodied grace, of the sacraments which place the Christian in direct communication with God. Outside this sanctified body there can be no salvation.
The function of the state in all its organs — the British state in 1833 — is to enforce the communion of the citizens in this supernatural body. Anything outside it is simply sin. Authority is finally vested in the living representatives of the Apostles and that authority in any final confrontation overrides any other authority whatever.
Here are all the claims and contradictions of the Oxford Movement. Its primary fallacious assumption that nations in the nineteenth century were still Christian; its oblivious blindness to the world of ordinary affairs around it — Keble spoke with the unworldly isolation of a medieval anchorite — its glorification of what after all is only an administrative structure — episcopacy — to the point where not Baptism or the Lord’s Supper but Holy Orders, the apostolic succession, becomes the principal sacrament, and last, but not least, what seems to us its unfortunate tone of hysterical self-righteousness.
It is easy for us to think of the Oxford Reformers as bad men. They were not. They were simply innocent, sealed away from the social and religious realities of the world around them by the peculiar monastic life of the Oxford colleges of their day. They were no more priggish or bigoted than the other Christians of their time. As their movement grew, they certainly demonstrated that truly religious values were still matters of life and death importance to vast numbers of Englishmen. The unreality of the world which they constructed for themselves was eventually to prove their salvation. Confronted with the facts of life, the Oxford Counter-Reformation would turn into its opposite. Beginning as the most intense reaction, it would eventually become the most active and comprehensive and enduring movement of Catholic liberalism.
The story of the Movement has been told innumerable times. It is a historical romance played out on a limited stage and full of the most intense drama. To judge from the immense number of successful books still being published, it fascinates thousands of people who have no interest whatever in religious questions. I have no desire to retell the story but it would be to the point to summarize the characters and careers of the leaders of the Oxford Movement and define the relation of each to the growth of a New Catholicism.
Even in the heyday of Newman’s leadership, and certainly after he left, adherents of the Movement were known not as Newmanites but as Puseyites. Dr. Edward Bouverie Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew, was the only professional theologian of the group and one of the few who came to the movement from a High Church, rather than Evangelical, background. He was also the only one familiar with contemporary European theology. In fact he had deliberately gone to Germany to study “infidelity” at its sources for the purpose of combating it. He was also the only leader of the Movement whose family were wealthy aristocrats.
Pusey spent only four and twelve months studying in Germany altogether, but that was sufficient to make him far more of a scholar in Biblical criticism and patristics than anybody else in England. He gave bottom to the movement, for his contributions were nothing if not weighty. His first contribution to the famous “Tracts for the Times” was the thirty-fifth, on Baptism, a tract of over three hundred pages, inexpressibly dreary reading today. Pusey has been shut out from posterity by his prose style. Even his most controversial sermons are unbearably dull and his own translations of the Fathers of the Church make those passionate men so boring that today we can read them only by the most powerful exertion of the will, no mean accomplishment in the translation of Augustine, Clement, or Origen, masters of classical rhetoric. Nevertheless it was Pusey’s concentration on Scripture, on the Fathers and on the Apostles that gave the Movement a content that could be passed on to the next generation of Anglican Catholic reformers.
He inaugurated comprehensive projects of translation of the Fathers and republication of the great English divines which would take final form in the many volumes of the Library of the Fathers, the Ante-Nicene Christian Library, the Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, and the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Although schoolboys in England were caned if they could not write bad Greek and Latin verses, there is little evidence that the English clergy read extensively in the Fathers and Doctors of the Church in the original tongues, but the huge sets inspired by Dr. Pusey can be found in most large secondhand bookshops in the English-speaking world to this day, and give evidence of once having been thoroughly read.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this availability of the past. Pusey’s sermons may be uninspiring, even Newman’s may sometimes depend on a bygone religious sensibility, and a bygone taste in style, but it is impossible to read the powerful minds that put together a Church, a communion, a polity and a philosophy that would survive both the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the establishment of the Church by Constantine without being deeply moved. The Oxford Reformers themselves never spoke of themselves as Puseyites, or Newmanites, or Anglo-Catholics (least of all High Churchmen, which they most certainly were not) but as Apostolics, and their appeal was to the Apostolic life, and the life of the Church of the Fathers, when the Church was very far from being an establishment, but was a saving remnant in a dissolute and dissolving society — a position in fact almost exactly like that, did they but know it, of the Church of the faithful in the days of George IV and William IV and of the horrors of what Marx called the period of the primitive accumulation of capital.
Each of the Oxford Reformers was an ancestor of a type of clergyman that would endure in the Anglican Church until well into the twentieth century. Pusey was the only one from an aristocratic family or one that remained wealthy — Newman’s father went bankrupt. This harsh, uningratiating man made the movement fashionable. Before his wife’s death he was in the process of becoming a society clergyman of the common type. After her death he became convinced that God had punished him for loving her more than Himself. Pusey turned into a disheveled fanatic, wore a hair shirt and subjected himself to penances that embarrassed the conventional and domestic Keble, who he insisted on making his confessor. This of course only made him more fashionable.
About the time of Newman’s defection, the members of the movement reestablished auricular confession as a general practice of their lay followers, and soon as a matter of obligation. They had almost from the beginning gone to confession to one another. Pusey became a fashionable confessor, although penitents had to seek him out in his isolated parish.
It is usually said that the obsession of the Oxford Reformers with the depravity of man was an inheritance of their evangelical youth, but only Newman was raised as a typical twice-born evangelical. Furthermore a glance at Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or High Church manuals of devotion of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century reveals that conviction of utter sinfulness was no monopoly of the followers of the Wesleys and Whitefield. For that matter, it is the constant reference to the sinfulness of the congregation that distinguishes, over and above the comparative triviality of liturgies, the language of the Book of Common Prayer from that of the Roman or Orthodox Mass and breviary.
Pusey, Keble and Newman all wrote devotional works. They all, but Pusey’s most of all, are top heavy with guilt. Prayer, meditation, and contemplation show little progression. Anyone who took them literally would find it almost impossible to get beyond the logjam of his own sin and into the unruffled waters of contemplation. Yet none of the leaders who, as far as the Ten Commandments were concerned, led practically blameless lives, seem to have been aware of their own besetting faults, spiritual pride, social irresponsibility, and willful ignorance. This was precisely the kind of piety members of the English upper and middle classes found most congenial in the days of the dark, satanic mills.
Pusey more than anyone else was also responsible for a relentless emphasis on fundamentals of Catholic doctrine and practice. He was anything but a Ritualist. For most of his life he was content to celebrate the Eucharist in surplice and scarf, long after chasubles, candles and incense had become common in the city parishes of the Movement. Similarly he avoided the hundred flowers of post-Tridentine doctrine and devotion which became popular after the middle of the century. He was uninterested in the Sacred Heart or the Immaculate Conception. As Newman became hypnotically fixed on the authority of the Papacy, it is obvious that Pusey ceased to be able to understand him. Pusey was content with the Church of the Fathers and the early Councils that he had constructed around himself and surrounded by an impenetrable wall. Again this might be called pride and ignorance, but it was also rigorous insistence on fundamentals. The basic flaw in Pusey’s system was the terrific tension set up in its narrow prayer life, at once intense and impoverished.
What did John Keble contribute, not to the movement but to the future of the Catholic revival? Really very little, except again, an enduring clerical type. He was unbelievably bigoted, but his bigotry had a certain comic charm. He would cut dead or overtly insult lifelong friends for petty differences of theology or even for churchly political divagations. He was unable to recognize the validity of any intellectual differences with himself. Those who did not agree with him were both sinful and stupid. Since his intellectual capacities were of the slightest, this confined his social contacts to a narrow world. Keble did not think of the materialists and utilitarians and positivists of his day as stupid and sinful. If he thought of them at all it was very rarely and with a shudder for the hopelessly damned. His condemnations were reserved for members of the Church who showed tendencies toward monothelitism and Oxonians who voted for Broad Churchmen for professorships.
Within his extremely limited world Keble was a sweet and good-humored man, who loved everybody who agreed with him and minded him. Can we say he established the type of simple-minded Anglo-Catholic country clergyman? Perhaps the qualifications are unnecessary. Keble was just a typical clergyman of any socially acceptable denomination. Without this type the Church would not have endured past the first century. Ironically he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a position at least as respected as the laureateship. He seems to have had no feeling for poetry whatsoever, and his religious verses show no feeling for religion in the deepest sense either. Geoffrey Faber, whose Oxford Apostles is corrupted by too much amateur psychoanalysis, places his finger on a serious defect in all the leaders of the movement. They wrote terrible doggerel. Newman and Keble had reputations as poets, Newman even to this day in some circles. The others wrote occasional verse. Only John Mason Neale, of the more or less independent Cambridge Catholic revival, who translated an immense number of Greek and Latin hymns, had any real feeling for poetry whatever. The poetry of Anglo-Catholicism would not come until Christina Rossetti. It’s not just that they wrote doggerel; if they appreciated poetry they did so for the wrong reasons, wrong even for early Victorian times.
Richard Hurrell Froude was the older brother of the historian, J.A. Froude, who early left the movement for skepticism. Froude again established a type, the young Anglo-Catholic, interested above all else in outraging the Establishment, who, if a layman, rattles his rosary against the pew during Holy Communion in a Low Church, and who, if a clergyman, uses immense quantities of incense and preaches sermons on the miracle of Fatima and venerates both Pacelli and Charles Stuart, King and Martyr. When he came up to Oxford from Dartington in Devon, a passionate sportsman and rider to hounds, his beauty and vitality struck everyone with awe. Already he was well advanced with tuberculosis. It was probably Koch’s bacillus rather than principle which accounted for the febrile, impassioned, deliberate defiance of his behavior and his writings. When after his death Newman published his manuscripts, the Remains of Richard Hurrell Froude, in two volumes, he caused a major crisis in the Church.
Froude was the only member of the group who from the beginning was Romeward set, in both theology and practice, and he was the only one who commonly went to Roman Catholic services, not only on the Continent but in England. Most of not just the Oxford Reformers, but members of the Catholic Revival until recent years, never attended Roman Catholic services. Many of them had, and have, never entered a Roman Catholic church. Froude was to have many descendants, most of whom would eventually leave the Anglican Church, from the group of young Turks around Newman to Father Ronald Knox. A characteristic common to all has been a compulsive obsession with inconsequentials, as can be discovered by reading Knox’s A Spiritual Aeneid. Ronald Knox was not the first person of whom it was said around Oxford that he was two weeks ahead in the Breviary and two months behind in the Prayer Book, both of which he felt bound in supernatural obedience to read simultaneously.
Yet had it not been for the “Romanizing” tendencies set in train by Hurrell Froude, the Anglican Church today might still be a rather stark but holy spiritual environment. Froude was a High Tory of a purely mythological sort, as unlike Disraeli or the Chamberlains as it would be possible to imagine. He knew that England was bourgeois through and through, and he was out to épater the bourgeois with all the ritual and romance and colorful superstition he could muster.
Froude was an actor on a far wider stage than the narrow parochial and academic one of Keble and Pusey, the stage of romantic revolt, alienation and rejection of all the values of the acquisitive society. In some ways he could be called the most influential of the first leaders of the movement — except that in fact his actual influence pretty much died with him, to revive as Ritualism after 1850. Its grave danger was its tendency, especially in controversy, to confuse the instruments of Catholic life with its meaning, to confuse ends and means. Far more than any of his colleagues, Froude was aware of the terrible social evils of his time. His answer was that of a romantic reactionary, but at least it was an answer. In the next generation it would turn into its opposite. By the middle of the next century priests would be saying Mass in the streets at sit-ins and demonstrations.
Newman has been called not only the greatest, but the only Catholic theologian of the nineteenth century. He has been called not a theologian at all. He has also been called one of the founders of anti-rationalism and anti-humanism, along with the Marquis de Sade, of a line that leads straight to Nechaev, Nietzsche and Lenin. Carlyle said he had the mind of a rabbit. Many who shared none of his beliefs read him for “the most beautiful English prose in two hundred years,” others considered his style syrupy and evasive. What this all means is not that Newman was a neurotic bundle of contradictions, but that his was a most complex character; a personality more sensitive and sophisticated, and a mind broader and deeper, than his colleagues’.
Although he was the public spokesman — today we could call him the public relations man — of the movement and its political organizer, his development only paralleled the movement and eventually diverged sharply from it. Newman was engaged in creating a new orthodoxy. Keble and Pusey were quite confident they were in possession of one which only had to be uncovered. Newman was seeking a religion. The others never lost it. Although he wrote the majority of the “Tracts for the Times,” preached and published his tremendously moving sermons, and wrote at least three theological works that are still of great importance during the years that he was considered the leader of the movement, his real and enduring influence was to come later. At the time he was simply over the heads of almost all his audience. Not least was this true of the little group of young men, children of Hurrell Froude, or for that matter, de Maistre, defiant, dramatic, jeunesse dorée of political reaction and romantic Catholicism, obviously Romeward bound. They entered the Roman Church with him and almost immediately became his enemies, for their Catholicism was essentially political and esthetic — not in combination but in compound, esthetic-politics or political esthetics. It is significant that once they cut loose from the middle-class life of the Establishment, most of them moved far to the left of Newman.
Bourgeois-baiting was the last thing in the world Newman was interested in. Although he was the only middle-class member of the original leadership he scarcely knew the middle class existed. The very special aristocratic mercantile family-centered life of the Newmans provides a strong support for the very shakily substantiated notion that his father was Jewish. Also that his father failed in business after Newman had enjoyed a childhood in surroundings of quite considerable and very gracious wealth is significant. The number of great aliénés of whom this is true is astonishing. An established and thoroughly cultivated capitalist family which loses its wealth seems to explode and blow its children completely out of the social pyramid, where they become members of a new aristocracy of the intellect, a clerkly caste of responsables, suspended outside the class structure.
In the harbor of Marseille, on his trip to Italy with Froude, Newman may have refused to even look at the detested tricolor flag on a nearby vessel of the French navy, but he was not a real Tory, even an archaizing Tory like Froude. He was an anomaly. It was only after the Established Church, thoroughly Catholicized by the inheritors of the Oxford Movement, became a refuge for anomalies, that Newman, so to speak invisibly, returned to it.
In the later nineteenth century there were probably more philosophical Newmanites in the French Church than in the English, either Roman or Anglican. The opening of early nineteenth-century Anglicanism to a large new spiritual world is Newman’s primary contribution to the early years of the Catholic revival. Had it not been for him the Establishment could have assimilated the religion of Pusey and Keble. They never realized it, but when Newman left the Oxford Movement he made it unassimilable. At first it did not leave Toryism. Toryism left it. As the movement had begun in reaction to a maneuver of the state, so it came to an end, not with Newman’s defection, but with a change in phase in the state. Toryism became Victorian Toryism. That was something that bore little resemblance to the high Toryism of the eighteenth century and the Regency, and none whatever to the idealized Stuart and Laudian Toryism of the old guard of the Oxford Movement.
As a young man the most dynamic leader of the next generation, Stewart Headlam, listened to but one sermon of Pusey’s and found him a crashing bore. Already things had changed so much that Headlam was unaware that he would never have existed as what he was, had it not been for Pusey. On this dichotomy and generation gap Newman, safe across the Tiber, was to have an indirect, underground influence. So it is most profitable, I think, to treat of Newman by himself, in the much wider, and at the same time much more intensely personal, context which he created for himself, and which is his real contribution to “the development of doctrine.”
Where had all the flowers gone? After Newman crossed the Tiber, religion, all the rage for fifteen years, suddenly became unfashionable at Oxford. All the bright young men who had become Roman Catholics were gone. They could not then be members of the Oxford Colleges, even had they wished, without provoking the wrath of the “magisterium.” As any movement does when suffering a severe tactical defeat, the Catholic Revival consolidated its position, and operated on interior lines. It also shifted its base. The stark domestic monasticism which was Catholic practice as understood by Keble and Pusey survives even to this day, but it does not provide a way of life negotiable at large in the vast, secularized modern world.
What had the Oxford Movement gained? Whatever Parliament or Cabinet or throne might think, it had freed the Church from its Babylonian captivity as a department of State. It had returned to the Church its own authority, a collective rather than an absolute authority, deriving from the traditions of a collective authority — “the Councils of the undivided Church” and the Apostolic Succession, the latter a supernatural community in which Peter and his descendants were only primus inter pares. It had restored the liturgy to not just “decency and order” but to dignity, beauty, and wonder. It had made the sacrament of Holy Communion central to the life of the Church and of the individual Christian. It had restored the rites of passage, birth, death, puberty, vocation, eating and drinking, conversion, sexual intercourse as moments when transcendence, through the community, suffused and glorified human life.
The sacramental life is the essence of Catholicism, and holds people to the Church long after they have ceased to believe in its more indigestible dogmas. After 1845 the sacramental life was available to any member of the Anglican Church who wished to seek it. Most specially, the Tractarians, but above all the now so boring Pusey, brought together their leading principles and merged them in one vision — the life of faith as lived in, as in air, a transformed world. The Incarnation, the Atonement, the communion of the saints, the sacramental system, they were all one being — the living Body of Christ. They presented the Church as itself a Eucharist. To put it mildly, this was not a common notion elsewhere, least of all at Rome, in those days, as Newman would find out. Time would come when with Teilhard and others its full implications would be drawn out — being is prayer. “If I be lifted up, I will draw all things to Me.”
The movement made prayer central to the daily life of the devout Anglican in a different way than the evangelical movement had done. Prayer was not founded on conversion and did not culminate in pentecostal possession. It began in penance and moved from petition to contemplation, and with daily practice left the orant in a habitude of abiding meditation. This was the state of soul that the doing of Catholic religion had produced in Nicholas Ferrar's community at Little Gidding, in the household of St. Thomas More, and in the lives of the medieval secular mystics. In other words it had restored to the treasury of the English Church its own special talent, distinguished by its lineaments, and marked with its values.
Incidentally it had purged Catholic belief and practice of nonessentials — whether “Romish” or “corrupt following of the Apostles” or not. It demonstrated that Catholic life was possible with collective authority, with a married clergy, alongside of voluntary celibacy and monasticism, with communion in both kinds, with a national vernacular liturgy, and without grossly superstitious practices. Considering the state of affairs in the Church in 1830, this was a tremendous accomplishment — considering the state of society in 1845 on the brink of famine, economic crisis, social breakdown, revolution, in the heyday of Liberal economics and moral hypocrisy. Yet however deep the prayer life of the Catholic revival, it was still narrow and isolated.
As with so many other institutions and movements it was 1848, the year of revolution everywhere, that was to break the shell of Tractarian Anglo-Catholicism. The new force was to come from the most unexpected quarter, the leaders to be men whom Newman had looked upon as hopelessly benighted or willfully malevolent. The first edition of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua started off with an attack on Charles Kingsley, the Broad Churchman and Christian Socialist, so uncharitable that Newman, little given in his Anglican days to mercy to his theological opponents, later suppressed it. Kingsley was a young associate of Frederick D. Maurice and the Quaker John M. Ludlow, founders of Christian Socialism and English disciples of Lamennais. Maurice was also the greatest of the descendants of Coleridge and may have been the leading Anglican theologian of the nineteenth century after Newman’s departure. Even more than Newman he spent his life at the turmoil center of the most violent controversy, with the significant difference that his controversies, unlike Newman’s, were always foci of ever widening issues, whose ramifications extended out into, and permeated, the secular society. It is from Maurice that twentieth-century English Catholic modernism stems, quite as much as from the Oxford Movement.
John Frederick Denison Maurice, the son of a Unitarian minister, was raised in a religious environment of radical Dissent. His early years were spent with Quakers and Unitarians and he had friends amongst the founders of the Irvingite “Catholic Apostolic Church,” all three properly called anti-Protestant Dissent. Ordained in 1834, by 1837 he had become a sacramentalist, but of his own special kind, and was looked upon as one of the leaders of the Tractarian movement at Cambridge. As the Oxford men embodied their university’s authoritarianism, so did Maurice the empiricism of Cambridge. He was possibly the first Englishman to believe that Catholicism might justify itself empirically as a way of life without the support of absolute conviction in the existence of God or the future life or a revealed Scripture. He himself of course believed, but at least he openly and consciously admitted religious pragmatism as a reasonable argument. Newman was of the same opinion, but he so disguised and confused it in his own mind that it emerges only in the writings of his more radical followers. From Pascal to the present, those who admit the argument of a purely pragmatic, “agnostic Catholicism” seem always to have been those whose own direct mystical awareness of God was most intense.
To Maurice, Catholicism was a way of life, lived in the world but over against it, as witness and catalyst. He took Catholicism as he found it, largely in a purged Roman practice. He was little interested in an historical continuity with the liturgics and dogmatic theology imagined for the Apostles. John Mason Neale had made the study of the great Cappadocian theologian poets popular in Cambridge religious circles. It is remarkable how much Maurice’s fundamental conception of the sacramental life resembles that of the Russian Orthodoxy which descends from the Cappadocians. For him the sacrifice of the Mass was a temporal appearance of the eternal sacrifice of Calvary. The cross is central, not in an actuarial way, but in a metaphysical one not unlike that of the crux and flagrat of Jakob Boehme and his descendants, Saint-Martin and von Baader. For Maurice the actual rite, as he said it in a church in a poor slum, was more immediately symbolized, as it was in Russian Orthodoxy, by the phyloxeny of Abraham. We offer to God his creatures, and through them ourselves, and He enters the offering and makes it Himself the embodiment of the absolute act of love. The three Persons of the Trinity partake of the nourishment offered by a herdsman, “just a wandering Aramaean,” under a shade tree at the edge of the desert, before a tent that smells of camels and sheep and garlic, and of hard-worked men and women, and the herdsmen partake of Them.
“The world is charged with the glory of God,” “Turn but a stone and start a wing / ’Tis you ’tis your estranged faces that miss the many splendored thing.” Maurice saw the glory of the supernatural all about him, not least, hovering like the Shekinah over the tabernacle in the desert, over the slum parishes into which he led the third generation of young Anglo-Catholic priests, and for which he fought so passionately. Pusey inspired respect; Keble, affection; Newman, in his Anglican years, the love of disciples for a master; Maurice inspired simply love, which, when it is so simple, is supernatural love. We can feel it glowing through the Victorian prose of his sermons and theological works to this day. His followers could say with the Psalmist, “Lo my cup runneth over,” for he opened them up with his own love, to be filled with the honey and oil and wine of charity, hope, and faith.
Faith — faith for Maurice was the Catholic life of supernatural love. He was very little troubled by the dilemmas of credal belief. For him the mysteries of Scripture or the Church were images embodying its wonder. Everything was miraculous to his eyes, most of all the orders of nature and supernature which converge and cross in the soul of man. So he welcomed the discoveries of science, whether geology, paleontology, or biology, or the application of the methods of science to the criticism of the Bible, and was fond in sermons of holding up Darwin as a model of patience and humility in the devotion to truth. Early in his career he was deprived of his professorships at Cambridge for advocating a modified universalism, for expressing the hope that the souls in hell would eventually cease to be punished and would come to enjoy, not the glory of heaven, but happiness according to their own lights. Far more than the evolution controversy and the literal inspiration of scripture, this was the touchstone of nineteenth-century orthodoxy. Disbelief in a deity, less moral than most men, who would condemn weak and fallible souls to eternal fire, made one a Broad Churchman. From then on, his life was a series of controversies and the root of his trouble was always the same — the catholicity of his life and concern, the all-inclusiveness of his ideal of Christlike responsibility. For this reason the main body of the Catholic movement fought shy of him. His popularity was largely amongst Broad Churchmen until the last years of the century saw the growth of a conscious Catholic Modernism. He parted with his early Christian Socialist associates because they were making their movement an exclusive, intolerant sect.
Stewart Duckworth Headlam and the group of extreme Ritualist slum priests around him on one hand, and on the other Charles Gore, head of Pusey House, and then Bishop of Oxford, with the other contributors to the theological symposium Lux Mundi, represent the two wings of development of a modern Catholic faith and practice out of the teaching and example of Maurice. Headlam was certainly an enfant terrible. In the days when priests were being sent to jail for putting candles and crucifixes on the altar and wearing chasubles, Headlam, in a series of churches, St. John’s Drury Lane, St. Matthew’s Bethnal Green, St. Michael’s Shoreditch, introduced immediately a full assortment of contemporary Roman Catholic devotions — rosaries, stations of the cross, eventually benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Even far more outrageous to the Establishment, he founded the Church and Stage Guild, welcomed actors and actresses at communion, and got himself temporarily refused a license by the archbishop for his pains. He not only introduced public devotions to the Blessed Virgin and high Masses on her feasts, including the Assumption and Immaculate Conception, he founded and sheltered in his parish halls the Guild of St. Matthew, the first organized socialist group in England. Fully as much as Teilhard de Chardin in a later day, Headlam and the group of priests associated with him welcomed not only the discoveries of physical and biological science, the immense age of the earth and the evolution of man, but the destruction by the Higher Criticism of the literal truth of an infallible Bible. Headlam saw nineteenth-century science as freeing man for a pure religion suffused by the divine power of Jesus Christ — the Word of God inspiriting all scientific study, the wisdom in Lyell or in Darwin, the same wisdom which danced in the Solomonic hymns — the Truth. This was bourgeois-baiting with a vengeance and helps to explain the irrational malignancy of Parliament’s persecution of the parochial Anglo-Catholic clergy. God was good to Stewart Headlam and rewarded him with the opportunity to strike a Christian blow of charity at the Establishment. In old age he went bail for Oscar Wilde.
It’s a wonderfully moving experience to contemplate the activities of these passionate priests, incense pot in one hand and red flag in the other, awakening the souls of men in the smoky, filthy slums of late Victorian London and subverting the Establishment. Their type of course still exists, and has spread across the world, but they are the first, and are undeservedly too little known today.
Lux Mundi was the testament of another world altogether, although it is significant that most of these Oxford theologians and scholars were Socialists. The old High Toryism of the Tractarians had withered away. Under the influence of German Higher Criticism, Broad Church theologians in England had evolved a liberal theology of the sort that was to find its final statement in Harnack, best represented for us by Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma. The miraculous and the eschatological passages were shorn from the New Testament. Jesus was called the “greatest ethical teacher who ever lived.” This of course was not the historic Jesus but the Jesus of the liberal historians. Nor was the Church at any time an association for making men good. An attentive and unprejudiced reading of the Gospels would convince any outsider that the preaching of the historic Jesus was saturated with eschatology and that he was emphatically not, in the Liberal sense, a great ethical teacher. His ethics, based on the imminence of the Kingdom, would destroy not only Victorian society, but even the noblest Victorian utopias, altogether. But an eschatological Christ raises the question immediately of the limitations of his human knowledge. He said he did not know the hour of the coming of the Kingdom. He quotes from the Pentateuch and the Psalms and the Book of Daniel with the assumption that they are by their traditional authors. He apparently believes that the Queen of Sheba really visited Solomon, and that Jonah and the whale really happened. Reacting to the blows of the Higher Criticism, the orthodox position, especially the Roman Catholic, became more and more docetic. The humanity of Jesus became more and more phantasmal. The suspension of the omniscience and omnipotence of God in the God-Man became a kind of pretense or even hoax — a position morally intolerable. We forget that devotion to the Sacred Heart was introduced to restore the humanity of Jesus to a central place. The devotion increased in popularity directly in proportion to the mythologizing of its object, until the Sacred Heart became a Gnostic statue representing a mysterious and inhuman minor deity.
The essays in Lux Mundi group themselves naturally around Charles Gore’s “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration.” Gore accepts the Higher Criticism of the mid-century Cambridge theologians Wescott, Lightfoot and Hort, who had turned the rationalistic criticism of the Germans against them and had demonstrated conclusively that the Old and New Testaments were inspired, not literally, but by the guidance of the Holy Spirit of the fallible and slowly evolving religious capacities of men, to culminate in the messianic evangel not only of the Gospels and the Epistles but of Acts — of the life and faith of the infant Church. The message of Scripture was supernatural, or it was nothing. As presented by Gore, this was not new, although more radically stated. The novel and still controversial element enters when he applies the same concepts of evolutionary revelation to the career of the historic Jesus as the Incarnate Lord. Gore takes over from the Danish Lutheran Martenson’s Christian Dogmatics, and from A.J. Mason, the disciple of Wescott and Lightfoot, the notion that God in the Incarnation emptied himself of omnipotence and omniscience to become man, in all things like unto us. The term kenosis, emptying, is derived from Second Philippians where the kenotic doctrine of the Incarnation is stated most clearly. What Gore did was to substitute for an irrelevant logical puzzle a new and believable mystery, the self-limitation of the divine love in incarnation for the redemption of mankind. No doubt St. Paul believed something very like this, but the tradition of the Church gives it little support. It is the doctrine of Origen, but Origen was a semi-heretic.
Bishop Martenson was relatively unknown in England and the kenotic implications of the Cambridge theologians had not been noticed. Lux Mundi struck the Church as a revolutionary document. Its mythological treatment of the Fall and of Original Sin, its communitarian theory of baptism, and Gore’s kenosis created disturbances which are still resounding. At the same time they implied an entirely new cosmogony and theophany, fundamentally both mystical, and collective in inspiration. In the kenotic theology God empties Himself out of omniscience, omnipotence, eternity and infinity into Time, into His humanity, which is our humanity. In response the Christian soul empties itself into Him, empties itself into timelessness and so is emptied of contingency. The spiritual maturity of such a conception moves Christian theology up alongside the discoveries of the great Christian mystics with whom hitherto orthodoxy had always been unable to cope. After Charles Gore, who was to develop his ideas in a succession of books and his mystical vision in sermons and devotion, Anglo-Catholic theology grows largely around its doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement, defining one in the terms of the other, so that Atonement is read at-one-ment. Eventually and independently this would become the background presupposition of the most influential modern theology, whether Frank or Berdyaev, Schweitzer or Teilhard de Chardin, or for that matter the syncretists who came into prominence during the Second War and who first popularized in non-occultist and scholarly terms, the mystical theologies of the Orient. (Alan Watts is still an Anglo-Catholic priest. “Holy Orders is a sacrament conferring indelible grace.”)
The contributors to Lux Mundi overlapped the turn of the century and the emergence of Catholic modernism, and the next influential Anglican symposium, Essays Catholic and Critical, is really a comprehensive statement of the Modernist position, better organized and more at home in the Anglican than the Roman Church. The rise of Catholic Modernism, its condemnation and its underground existence and its eventual emergence, greatly transformed, is another story. By 1890 the foundations had been laid in Anglo-Catholicism.

KENNETH REXROTH
1973