Foundations of the Church of England CXXX

The original Tractarians were interested not so much in ritual in as in refocusing the Church of England on its Patristic heritage which had been somewhat overwhelmed, on the right by the evangelical revival of the Low Church in the wake of Methodism and, on the left, by the rationalism of the Enlightenment.  The revival of ritualism in the Church of England after the publishing of the Tracts For The Times  is more a by-product of the Tracts than an effect, but it is the revival of ritualism that has come to define the Tractarians in particular and the Oxford Movement in general.  Within twenty years of the Tracts chasubles, thuribles, crucifixes and even monstrances were make their reappearance from Yorkshire to Cornwall. 

Ritualism gained ground for a variety of reasons and probably the most significant one was Sir Walter Scott.  England was being swept by a romantic revival that in reaction to the Enlightenment contempt for the Middle Ages, looked upon the Medieval world as infinitely fascinating and even as the apogee of Western civilization.  To the romantic mind anything medieval not only had an irresistible draw, but was ipso facto infinitely superior to anything modern.  In art the pre-Raphaelite school became the heart and soul of Victorian taste.  In architecture, it was the neo-gothic of Pugin and Sir Charles Barry.  And this overflowed into the Church with an incredible abandonment of the Puritan contempt for all traces of papism. 

A second factor in the success of the Ritualists was their willingness to take posts that no one else wanted, usually because the salaries were deemed insufficient by the more ambitious clergy or because the ministry was among the working or lower classes.  Many parishes, including those that in the nineteenth century served the working classes had sufficient endowments to support clergy and even to pay for the liturgical gewgaws required for ritual upgrades, but, especially in the new industrial cities, there were many parishes that did not.   Clergy who had independent means—and not an inconsiderable number did—did not have to rely on the parish for support—or for approval of their liturgical innovations.  Ritualists actually got a reputation for working among the under-classes and this enhanced their reputation—especially among the politically liberal sections of society.  William Gladstone, three-times Prime Minister, was perhaps the most notable liberal politician supportive of the Ritualist Restoration.  Lord Halifax (Charles  Wood, 2^nd Viscount Halifax) was another.  

One person who was not supportive—to the contrary was so anti-ritualist that the bishops dare wear only their black chimeres over their rochets when officiating in her presence—was Queen Victoria whose taste in liturgics ran to the Presbyterianism of the Church of Scotland.  Victoria was ever-mindful that she was a Protestant Sovereign reigning over a Protestant England but ultimately, much like her predecessor, Elizabeth I, was not able to exercise her influence over Church ceremony far beyond her own chapel.  Similarly while many of the old aristocratic families clung to low-Church tastes, the new blood and new money was quite gung-ho for smells and bells. 

The ritualist revival drove a deeper and more clear wedge between the High Church and the Low Church.  Just entering a church or seeing its clergy vested told you exactly where they stood.  Before the ritualist revival, liturgy was fairly standard throughout England; as a result or the revival it ran the spectrum from low church quasi-dissent to high church quasi-Romanism.

The apogee of Ritualism was All Saint’s Margaret Street.  It had begun as a dissenters’ chapel in the 18^th century, plain and Spartan in its architecture, later coming into communion with the Established Church.  In 1829 William Dodsworth was named as incumbent.  Dodsworth was a Low Church Evangelical who was converted to High Churchmanship by the Tracts for the Times and won his congregation over to the Tractarian position.  Dodsworth eventually “swam the Tiber” and became a Roman Catholic.  He was succeeded by Frederick Oakeley who also—as a result of the Gorham Case—would become a Catholic but not before proposing that the chapel be rebuilt in a more suitable, i.e. pre-Reformation, style and raised £30,000 (today about 3.2 million dollars) for the project. 

Oakley’s successor, William Upton Richards, decided to see the project through and enlisted the assistance of the Cambridge Camden Society, to build the quintessential Anglo-Catholic house of worship.  The result was an exuberant tribute to romantic eclecticism.  Inside is a kaleidoscope of mosaic, glass, painting, marble and tile.  The Church is fitted out with brocaded dossals and antependia, gorgeous vestments and sacred vessels, candelabra, and altar crosses on a scale worthy of a Spanish cathedral.  The final cost was over £70,000 (or approximately 8 million USD in today’s money.  There was an attached school to provide the choristers for services and a parish house. 

Just as an aside, All Saint’s Margaret Street has a reputation for being not only “gay-friendly,” but “gay swamped.”  Years ago I read an amusing little book by Father Colin Stephenson entitled Merrily on High.  It is an entertaining, if campy, collection of anecdotes about some of the second and third generation leading lights of the Oxford Movement were    There has always been a gay subtext to ritualism.   This is not to accuse any individual of inappropriate behavior—indeed the moral tone set by the early Tractarians, both married and celibate, set a standard that remained unbroken for over a century.  Nevertheless, high-Church parishes such as All Saints, Saint Mary the Virgin in New York, The Church of the Advent (Boston), and Ascension/Saint Agnes in Washington all have easily accommodated themselves to the more liberal views of the Anglican and Episcopal Churches in their respective countries wile correspondingly low-Church congregations such as Saint Helen’s Bishopsgate in London, The Falls Church (Falls Church, VA), or many of the parishes associated with the various new Anglican fellowships in the United States would take a more conservative approach to LGBT parishioners.  Ironically the Church could survive the doctrinal and liturgical divergences created by Tractarianism, but are finding themselves torn apart on contemporary social issues such as the inclusion of women and of LGBT people.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXVII

Edward Bouverie Pusey 

Newman’s 1845 conversion to Catholicism shook the Anglican world and while both before and even more after Newman’s reception into the Catholic Church there was a veritable wave of defections from the Church of England with prominent Anglicans, clergy and lay alike, not all leaders of the Oxford Movement “swimming the Tiber.” 

The most prominent of those who stayed rooted in his Anglican convictions was John Keble whose sermon “National Apostasy” to open the Oxford Assizes of 1833 triggered the Tractarian Movement.  Keble was the son of an Anglican clergyman, also named John Keble.  The senior Keble was vicar of Coln Saint Alwyns.  The younger Keble was born in 1792 and as a young man attended Corpus Christi College Oxford.  He took Holy Orders in 1815 and became a fellow of Oriel College Oxford.  He served a number of years as University Examiner before leaving academia and devoting himself to pastoral work.  Before giving up Academia for parish ministry, however, he had written his Magnum Opus, The Christian Year, a collection of poems for every Sunday and the major feasts of the Church of England.  It captured the romanticism of the early 19^th century and even today a number of the poems remain popular in hymn form.  The Christian Year won for Keble a professorship of Poetry at Oxford which he held for about thirteen years before taking up parish ministry.  He continued to write both poetry and prose through the remainder of his life.  During the publication of the Tracts For The Times, Keble wrote Adherence To The Apostolical Succession The Safest Course, On Alterations In The Prayer Book, The Sunday Lessons, The Principle of Selection, Richard Nelson III, Baptism, Sermons For Saints’ Days and Holidays No. 1 Saint Matthias, Sermons for Saints’ Days and Holidays, No. 2 The Annunciation Of The Blessed Virgin Mary, Sermons for Saints’ Days and Holidays No. 3 Saint Mark’s Day, Sermons for Saints’ Days and Holidays No. 4 Saints Philip and James, and On the Mysticism Attributed To The Fathers Of The Church.  His younger brother, Thomas Keble, was also a prolific contributor to the Tracts.  John Keble had tremendous influence on sparking a renewed interest among Anglicans in their patristic heritage and he knew how to capitalize on the Romantic Movement of the 19^th century to awaken an appreciation for so much of what had been jettisoned from Anglicanism both during the Puritan years and the Latitudinarian captivity.  His interest in the feasts of the Church and his ability to bring them to popular devotional attention through his poetry was particularly helpful in awakening a liturgical piety in the Church of England. 

The other Anglican Divine who remained faithful to the Church of England and took leadership in the Oxford Movement when so many others were becoming Roman Catholics was Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882).  Pusey was a member of the junior branch of the Viscounts Folkestone but was himself a commoner.  He studied at Eton, matriculated at Christchurch Oxford and was elected to a fellowship at Oriel (as were Keble and Newman).  He studied Oriental Languages at Göttingen and when he returned to England was named Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christchurch to which position was also attached a canonry at Christchurch Cathedral.  His time at Göttingen exposed him to the German pietists and insured his alienation from the rationalist trends in theological reflection espoused by the Latitudinarians.  He was somewhat of a latecomer to the Tractarians but came to publish the following Tracts: Thoughts on the Benefits of the System of Fasting Enjoined by Our Church, Supplement to Tract XVIII Thoughts on the Benefits of the System of Fasting Prescribed by Our Church, Scriptural Views of Holy Baptism, Scriptural Views of Holy Baptism (continued), Scriptural Views of Holy Baptism (concluded), An Ernest Remonstrance to the Author of ‘The Pope’s Letter,’  and Catena Patrum. No. IV. Testimony of Writers in the later English Church to the doctrine of the Eucharistic Sacrifice with an historical account of the changes in the Liturgy as to the expression of that doctrine.  In addition he gave a number of remarkable sermons that challenged the Latitudinarian mediocrity into which the Church of England had fallen as well as renouncing the Calvinist doctrines of the sixteenth century.  His 1843 sermon “The Holy Eucharist, A Comfort to the Penitent” was so marked a departure from the Calvinist approach to the Sacrament that it led to having his license to preach suspended for two years.  He preached two sermons entitled “The Entire Absolution of the Penitent” in 1846 calling for a revival of sacramental confession and absolution in the Church of England. In 1853 he preached a sermon “The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist” which led to drastic changes in liturgical practice as the developing High Church party summoned the courage to abandon the bland trappings of Calvinist worship and restore pre-Reformation practices in the Liturgy.  He also wrote a number of books on the Eucharist as well as on the Hebrew Scriptures.  His Eirenicon was an attempt to find sufficient common ground for reunion of the Church of England with the Catholic Communion.  He didn’t succeed in winning either side to his argument. 

Ironically while his works on the Eucharist led to a ritualistic revival in the Church of England, Pusey himself remained quite Protestant in his own liturgical style and was not in favor of wholesale copy of Catholic or Pre-Reformation ritual.  The liturgical exuberance—and even excesses—for which the High Church party would become (in)famous were for the disciples of Pusey and Keble more than for the masters themselves but they did provide the theological framework for a “Catholic Revival.”

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXV

The young John
Henry Newman

 The “Father of the Oxford Movement” was really John Keble who preached the famous sermon “National Apostasy” on July 14, 1833 in the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Oxford, but the main driver behind the movement—and the best known of its proponents—was John Henry Newman.  Indeed it was Newman who made the claim—which has stuck—that it was Keble’s sermon that gave birth to the movement. 

Newman had not always been a member of the High Church party and, in fact, was for the first thirty years of his life tied to the Low Church or Evangelical Party.  The oldest of six children of a prosperous London Banker he was sent to George Nicholas’ Great Ealing School where the faculty included Louis-Philip Bourbon (future King of France), and George Huxley (father of Thomas Henry Huxley, the English Biologist and advocate of Darwinism).  Fellow alumni included Thomas Huxley and W.S. Gilbert.)  The school was something of a hotbed of Evangelicalism and the Classics Master, Walter Mayers, loaned the young student books on Calvinism.  To be fair, Newman also read the religious skeptics at this point—Voltaire, Rousseau, Paine, and Hume.  And more significant for his later career, he became immersed in the romantic novels of Walter Scott.  The skeptics had little influence on him other than to give him a life-long horror of Enlightenment liberalism, but Calvinism pierced his soul immediately.  Scott was only a seed that would later bloom as Newman moved away from Evangelicalism into High Church theology—but that is still a way off. 

The particular type of Calvinism to which Newman was exposed was, in the day, referred to as “Clapham Sect” Calvinism.  It was a movement within the Church of England that was classically Calvinist with its emphasis on double pre-destination and justification by faith alone but, perhaps somewhat incongruously, it was tied to social progressivism with opposition to slavery and the slave trade as well as to concern for England’s underclass.  Newman went on to Oxford, Trinity College, where his desire to succeed produced an anxiety that led him to flub his exams—graduating with only third honors.  Nevertheless, he was elected a Fellow of Oriel College the following year. A colleague at Oriel was Edward Bouverie Pusey who was to play a significant role in the Oxford movement as well.  In 1824 Newman was ordained deacon in the Church of England and ordained priest the following year. At Oxford he met Hurrell Froude, another young priest of the Church of England.  Froude and Newman developed a particularly intimate friendship which, while there is no evidence of sexual intimacy, would fall today at least under the theme of “bromance.” 

Our modern word, “homosexual” only appears in the last third of the 19^th century.  The word is a hybrid of the Greek (‘ομοσ, “same”) and the Latin (sexus, “sex” or “gender.”).  The creation of a word to describe same-sex attraction permitted people to organize their thoughts in a new way: understanding the difference between a person normally attracted to members of the opposite sex having sexual relations with a member of their same sex and a person whose sexual attraction was normally towards a person of their own sex.  In other words, the creation of the word “homosexual” helped people understand that sexual attraction to members of the opposite sex is not universal and same-sex attraction needs to be considered on its own terms rather than as an aberration form some imagined heterosexual norm.  Of course, this century and a half later, there are still some—notably in the backwoods of Kentucky—who just don’t get it, but I don’t want to wander down that path right now.  For the moment we will concentrate on John Henry Newman who, like his contemporaries, did not have the tools to understand the deeper levels of the human psyche but who were able to choose to conform the moral norms of both religion and society in that day. Newman and Froude could not have understood the probable complexities of their relationship but they did have clear sense of moral right and wrong and there is no evidence of them crossing the moral boundaries of the day. 

Froude was, tragically, ill with tuberculosis and Newman had accompanied him and his father on a tour of the Mediterranean in 1833 returning only just in time to hear the famous sermon that changed the course of the Church of England. 

In the latter 1820’s and 1830’s Newman’s own theology had gradually been evolving as his scholarship led him into reading the Fathers of the Church.  He came to see the weaknesses of Calvinism, in particular in its ecclesiology.  Calvin saw the Church as an invisible association of those pre-destined to salvation rather than the visible and concrete communion of the Baptized.  This overly spiritualized notion of Church made the Church irrelevant to salvation as, since it was known only to God who were in and who were out, the Church was of no human use.  Everything that mattered lay simply in the relationship of the individual soul to God—had God chosen that person for salvation or for damnation.  In Calvin’s scheme Church, sacraments, piety, prayer—all is quite irrelevant to the final outcome and Newman came to recognize that Calvinism offered him only that blind alley. 

Moreover, Newman and Froude—both fellows at Oriel—took a new approach to their role as tutors, offering spiritual guidance as well as intellectual vision to the young men entrusted to them.  This did not go over well with the liberal establishment in the University where Enlightenment secularism still held sway.  As Newman’s views grew more and more “High Church,” the Evangelical wing grew equally alarmed with his influence. 

As stated in a previous posting, Keble’s sermon “National Apostasy” triggered a series of tracts outlining and defending the High Church position.  Newman was most assiduous in his contribution to the Tracts For The Times, writing almost a third of the 90 Tracts.  Newman wrote the final “Tract 90” in which he asserted that there was nothing in the 39 Articles of the Church of England that could not legitimately be interpreted in a manner consistent with the Catholic Faith.  This was too much and the outcry caused the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Bagot, to insist on there being no further tracts published.  Bagot was actually sympathetic to the High Church party and ordered Newman and the other “Tractarians” to desist in order to protect them from being disciplined by the Church and even possibly by the Government as the Church was Established by Law as the State Church and the government, from the newly ascended Queen, Victoria down to her ministers, were quite avidly Protestant in their Churchmanship.

In all this it must be remembered that Newman’s role at Oxford was not primarily academic but priestly.  He held the vicarship of Saint Mary the Virgin, the University Church, which was a benefice in the gift of Oriel College.  In addition to the Tracts, Newman’s Sunday afternoon sermons were exceedingly popular with the undergraduates and his influence over the spiritual life of the University was quite marked.   This alarmed the Evangelical Faction and Newman was increasingly isolated from the Academic side of the University. 

In all this Newman was no ritualist.  His focus was always on the theological principals and he was no liturgical innovator but stuck quite close to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the official rites of the Church of England. While many others of the High Church party were rapidly introducing Catholic practices into their Anglican parishes: Eucharistic Vestments, candles and crucifixes on the altar, incense, processions, statues and even counterfeiting the rubrics of the Roman Mass upon the Anglican Holy Communion, Newman was sticking to his surplice and hood and a reverent but plain liturgy.  He would later write Edward Pusey about this stage in his spiritual journey.

The utmost delicacy was observed on all hands in giving me advice: only one warning remains on my mind, and it came from Dr. Griffiths, the late Vicar-Apostolic of the London district. He warned me against books of devotion of the Italian school, which were just at that time coming into England; and when I asked him what books he recommended as safe guides, he bade me get the works of Bishop Hay. By this I did not understand that he was jealous of all Italian books, or made himself responsible for all that Dr. Hay happens to have said; but I took him to caution me against a character and tone of religion, excellent in its place, not suited for England.

Newman never did embrace the Italian version of Catholicism which would appeal to so many of the Tractarians, both those who remained in the Church of England and those who “swam the Tiber” to become Catholics.  The faith into which he was evolving and the faith to which he would cling as a Catholic was the old English recusant Catholicism, understated and discreet without the bells and whistles so cherished by Mediterranean Catholics. 

As Newman’s influence declined in official Anglican circles (it was only growing among the High Church Party) he retired to a row of cottages in the dependent parish of Saint Mary, Littlemore—an Oxford suburb which was part of  his parish of Saint Mary the Virgin.  He was joined here by several friends who were each growing less comfortable with the Church of England and its Protestant history.  The other men at Littlemore were John Dobree Dalgairns, Ambrose Saint John, Frederick Oakeley, William Lockhart, and James Christie.  Like the Wesleys and the first Methodists, they adopted a sort of schema for piety with certain times for fasting, for Holy Communion, for various prayers.  Unlike the Wesleys and the Methodists, they were then suspected of being a “monastery.”  And in fact to some extent they were trying to adopt a common life though more on the model of Saint Augustine’s Rule for clergy than Benedict’s for monks. 

Lockhart was the first of the group to become a Catholic.  His conversion shook Newman who, about eight months later, preached his famous final sermon as an Anglican “The Parting of Friends” and resigned as Vicar of Saint Mary’s Oxford.  He continued living at Littlemore for two more years until his own conversion.   To be continued.