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.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXIV

All Saints, Margaret Street London
built during the Oxford Movement
and archetype of the "Catholic
Restoration" in the Church of
England

On July 14, 1833 John Keble, a forty-one year old Church of England priest and professor of Poetry at Oxford, mounted the pulpit of the University Church at Oxford, Saint Mary the Virgin, and preached the sermon that began the Assizes—the semi-annual sitting of the circuit courts for Oxfordshire.  The sermon, entitled “National Apostasy” was to be as momentous a declaration for reform of the Church as had been Luther’s 95 thesis nailed on the doors of Wittenberg Castle Church some 316 years earlier. 

The immediate provocation was the “Church Temporalities (Ireland) Act of 1833” which was then before Parliament.  The Whig government—which remember was tied to the languid Latitudinarian faction in the Church—proposed a reform of structure and economics for the (Anglican) Church of Ireland.  Less than 10% of the population of Ireland was members of the Church of Ireland.  The overwhelming majority of the Irish were Catholics and the few who weren’t were more often Presbyterians or Methodists with the occasional (very occasional) Quaker and even more rare Baptist.  Yet the majority (the Catholics) and the various minorities (non-Anglican Protestants) were tithed for the support of the Bishops, clergy, and buildings of the State Church.  This was causing a political crisis in as that the privileged position of the Anglican Church and its ties to the Royal establishment was encouraging a nascent nationalist movement to separate Ireland from British domination.  To counter the resistance to English authority the Whigs proposed to reduce the number of Archbishoprics from four to two and Bishoprics from 22 to ten.  This would save some £60,000 (in today’s money some 400 million dollars).  Money for the Church was no longer to be derived from a tithe on the general population but from a tax on the landowners who rented to the (mostly Catholic) farmers and who were themselves predominately communicants of the Church of Ireland.  It all sounds very reasonable—unless you believe that the Church is a Sacred Institution ordained of God and thus not subject to the machinations of Parliament or other civil governments for their own political ends.  Keble and others of the High Church party saw the “Church Temporalities (Ireland) act of 1833” to be a subordination of the Church to the secular power and were determined to resist it.

The High Church movement, if you recall from earlier postings on this subject, was not yet primarily a liturgical movement but a theological one to restore and preserve the Patristic Tradition in the Church of England against the Enlightenment rationalism of the Whigs and their Latitudinarian friends on the Episcopal Bench.  Keble’s sermon stirred them into action and a series of publications known as “The Tracts for the Times” surfaced issue after issue where the High Church faction thought the Church of England had slipped its historical anchors and compromised its theological integrity.  The Tracts eventually numbered 90 and as they were published they began to articulate ever more Catholic positions first in theology and later in liturgical practice.  The last Tract published, Tract 90, was a brilliant essay by the then still-Anglican John Henry Newman reinterpreting the Protestant doctrines contained in the 39 articles of the Book of Common Prayer in a Catholic sense. It made it clear that there were two Churches in the Church of England: an evangelical and Protestant “Low Church” and a theological and Catholic “High Church.”  The High Church party also published The Library of the Fathers, 48 volumes in English Translation of the Church Fathers which gave the theological foundations for many of their catholicizing practices.   Richard Bagot, the Bishop of Oxford, himself somewhat of a High Churchman theologically, stopped the publications because he realized that the growing reaction to the Tractarians on the part of the Evangelicals was threatening to bring down all sorts of legal and ecclesiastical censures on them.  For the movement to survive they would have to prove themselves by routes other than polemics.    

Corresponding to the Tractarian movement in the Church of England was a larger cultural movement sweeping Europe which we often call “Romanticism.”  In reaction to the cold agnostic emotional sterility of the Enlightenment there was a desire for a return to an idealized past for which the High Middle Ages became the ground zero of cultural fantasy. 

Within just a few decades the face of the Church of England was radically transformed.  While there continued to be—and still continues to be—“Low Church” parishes which retain much of their Protestant identity, the combination of a romantic idealization of the Medieval period and the theological work of the Tracts found many priests putting the communion tables back against the east wall of their churches and covering them with heavy tapestried drapery to make them look like altars.  Indeed, in many churches stone altars would be rebuilt along with elaborate reredos behind holding candelabra and crucifixes. In some of the more extreme “High Church” sanctuaries even tabernacles and hanging lamps were introduced.  Surplices gave way to full Eucharistic vestments.  Incense was being used again.  Feast days were celebrated. Processions were held.  And books were published to show priests how to celebrate the Anglican Liturgy in ways that looked like a Catholic Mass. 

Some parishes were more extreme than others in this “Catholic revival” and the bishops often didn’t know what to do the check this undoing of the work for which Archbishop Thomas Cramner and other reformers had shed their blood three centuries earlier.   Many bishops refused to appoint High Church clergy to established parishes and this created a very curious dynamic.  The priests would go to slum areas where other clergy wouldn’t serve or to newly developed areas in industrial communities where there were no existing parishes and there open churches.  It created a tie between the High Church faction and social work among the poor.  The Low Church got a reputation for being “Low and Lazy” as part of the old establishment while much of the evangelical energy went to the High Church party.  

Origins of Radical Catholicism XXIV: The Ultramontanes

On the morning of July 14, 1833, Anglican clergyman John Keble ascended the pulpit of Saint Mary’s—the university Church at Oxford and preached a sermon entitled “National Apostasy” that changed the course not only of Anglicanism but sent shock waves through every major Protestant denomination in Europe and North America as well as having a profound effect on Roman Catholicism.  Keble’s sermon, meant to mark the opening of the courts, did not reach its goal of calling England to account in protecting its established Church from outside forces determining its future but it did generate an about face in the Church of England as many bishops, priests, and laity began to see how far the philosophical rationalism and political liberalism had driven the Church from its evangelical mission.  Keble’s sermon is reckoned as the beginning of what is known as the Oxford Movement. 

Originally the Oxford movement was not a call for “smells and  bells” in Anglican worship but to return to the solid patristic tradition of classic Anglicanism, a tradition that had been largely abandoned during the Enlightenment and the successive Whig ministries in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.   Doctrine requires discipline and is only for the energetic.  It was not long before the Oxford Movement—despite the best intentions of its leaders: Keble, Newman, Pusey and others—got caught up into a world of medieval restorationism as chasubles and incense and plainsong  and processions created a vortex in which English Protestantism was magically transformed into a non-papal Catholicism with all the pomp and ritual of its Continental model. 

This sudden burst of ritualism caught English Catholics by surprise.  Theirs had long since been a discreet Catholicism—a Catholicism of the home and domestic piety.  Due to the anti-Catholic legislation of the Elizabethan and Stuart eras English Catholicism had morphed into a religion without a public face—no processions, no capes or funny hats with pompoms, no roadside shrines.  It was a Catholicism of Mass in small out of the way chapels or drawing rooms of private (wealthy) Catholic citizens.  It was a religion of quiet prayers and spiritual reading.  It had a depth to it, but lacked the colour of Continental Catholicism and now was being outshown by its old and once-so-Calvinistic foe, the Church of England. 

This Catholic revival was very much influenced by the whole Romantic era and its rejection of the Enlightenment rationalism of the previous era.  Suddenly “Gothic” was all the rage and Pugin was building churches faster than bishops—Catholic and Anglican—could consecrate them.  Moreover, this Gothic revival spread from England to its very Protestant step-child, the United States and to the Episcopal Church where, especially in the North East, faux medieval and Catholic-wanna-be were all the rage.

As Anglicanism became more Catholic in its style, some Catholics thought that in order to distinguish themselves from the Anglican copycats, they should become more “Roman.”  Converts such as Henry Manning, the dour former archdeacon of Chichester, were determined to abandon the Gothic of Anglican Revival for the baroque Catholicism of Rome.  One simply could not be Roman enough.  This movement was called Ultramontanism, from the Latin for “beyond the mountains.”  It referred to those Catholics beyond the Alps who were more Roman than the Romans themselves. 

In the United States, many American Catholic clergy who rejected the Americanism of Gibbons and Ireland, began to embrace the Roman fashions.  American bishops began appearing more often in the elaborate court-dress of the papal household.   Papal honours were sought for clergy (monsignorates) and prominent laity (papal knighthoods).    Bishops applied to have certain churches designated as “basilicas.”  Prelates began to live like princes and lords of the Church, bishops having elegant mansions, monsignors having well staffed-and elegantly appointed rectories.  Some prelatial residences even featured throne rooms as did the palaces of Rome’s Black (papal) nobility with the throne turned to the wall until the day the Popes were returned to their rightful sovereignty as Kings of Rome.  This was not the Church of the democratic Maryland Gentleman, Archbishop John Carroll of Baltimore or the on-horseback circuit-riding bishop Edward Fenwick of Vincennes.   It is somewhat ludicrous to think of these sons of carpenters and brewers dressing in silk robes and wearing jewelled rings over begloved fingers as they paraded through the streets of a Midwest farm town or an east coast slum to confirm children whose parents’ pennies had built their cathedrals and bought their fur capes and silk trains.  At the time though it made sense.  It was a huge spit into the face of bland, Protestant, and supposedly egalitarian America as we proclaimed we are Catholic and we, despite our poverty and being outsiders, have something that you sons of the Puritans have not. 

The image today is Henry Cardinal Manning, convert from Anglicanism, Archbishop of Westminster, and leader of the English Ultramontanes.