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.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXIII

The Hon. Frederick
Cornwallis, Arcbishop
of Canterbury at the
time of the American
Revolution and uncle of
the famous General

Well, let me get to the next chapter of the Church of England and then I will revisit the challenge the Church faces in preaching the Gospel in this “Postmodern” culture.  I also need to return to my series on why the Liturgical Reforms of and since the 1970 Missal are an improvement over the preconciliar rite.  But that in time.

By the end of the eighteenth century the Church of England still had its Latitudinarian leadership but there was a strong Evangelical movement that had over time morphed into what we generally call “Low Church.”  Today “Low Church” and “Evangelical” are somewhat synonymous terms.  I should also like to clarify my personal prejudices at this point.  I tend to prefer the Low Church/Evangelical approach, at least when it doesn’t shy away from sound Biblical scholarship in favor of a somewhat crazed fundamentalism.  I find, in my limited experience of Anglicanism, that the Diocese of Sydney and a number of Churches in the “Global South” are somewhat religious Neanderthals when it comes to a biblical literalism and gross ignorance of Christianity’s theological and intellectual heritage.  But then every religion has its Raymond Burkes and the accompanying entourage of flying monkeys.  I have always felt comfortable with the Church of Ireland brand of Anglicanism which has a tradition of theological (and musical) quality but avoids liturgical exaggerations.   In fact, when in Dublin I tend to prefer Sundays at Saint Patrick’s over the pro-Cathedral.  I especially like Sunday Evensong after a few gins and tonic and a plate of smoked salmon for lunch; it gives one a cozy feeling, especially when the Dean seems to have had his gins and tonic as well and officiates with that blasé indifference one can only find among the smarter set.  One gets all the sentiment of piety without any sort of ugly demands to take a serious look at one’s life.  

The Evangelicalism of 18^th century Anglicanism was not so much a return to the biblical roots of Christianity as it was a resurrection of its Calvinist heritage which had more or less been abandoned in the Anglicanism of the Anglican Divines and then whatever trace remained shoved into schism with some of the Non Conformist sectaries after 1660.   The theological cross-pollinizing of the First Great Awakening reintroduced to the Anglican evangelicals from the New England Congregationalists a terror that one might be among the pre-destined damned and a certainty that one’s neighbors of differing religious persuasions most definitely were.  Suddenly and once again the Pope was the Antichrist and the flames of hell were already licking the toes of anyone who was not prepared to give himself or herself totally and personally to Jesus in total repentance of sins, real and imagined. 

Now the Achilles’ heal of this sort of Evangelicalism is that it is so personal a religion that it does away with any role for the Christian community and the means of grace (such as the Sacraments) which we Catholics (and moderate Protestants) believe Christ has endowed his Church to assist us on our pilgrim journey.  It is pure “Jesus and Me” experience.  The Church is not a visible and tangible fellowship of believers but a spiritual and invisible association known only to God and comprised of those who are marked for salvation.  No wheat and tares growing together in this field, only the righteous.  No sinners need apply.  (It is interesting how this Calvinist ecclesiology has infected the Katholik Krazies and their desire for a “Church of the Pure” that pushes out the gates of heaven any one who does not conform to their particular moral code.)

Nevertheless Evangelicalism grew strong in late 18^th and early 19^th century Church of England.  It resonated with the English sense of propriety and at the same time gave some release to emotions the English so normally hold in reserve.  Since it stressed private—rather than corporate—devotion, this emotionalism was something most often expressed in one’s private prayer rather than in public.  It was usually intensely moralistic and quite black and white when it came to sin, especially sin of an alcoholic or sexual nature.  As it was linked to the banking and merchant class it didn’t trouble itself with most social sin, save for its abhorrence of slavery.  Most in this socio-economic class did not depend on slaves for their economic well-being though some did make their fortunes in the slave trade.  (The American situation was quite different, of course, but in the period after 1782 we need to examine the Episcopal Church in the United States separately from the Church of England.)

The Low Church party with its commitment to a Calvinist theology undermined the very nature of “Church.” But the doctrine of double predestination not only made the Sacraments in general somewhat superfluous practices, it abolished the doctrine of baptismal regeneration.  It was unnecessary to be “born again” if one was destined for salvation from all eternity and fruitless to be “born again” in baptism if one was damned from all eternity.  By the opening decades of the 19^th century the Church of England had removed itself from the heritage of the Church of the first millennium.  Yes, it had the prayer-book and its liturgy, children were still being baptized and Holy Communion was still being administered.  But the prayer-book was no more than a set of bland prayers and ceremonies to bring English order to chaos; baptism was a social convention; and Holy Communion was only for the pious who still took seriously the doctrine of the Atonement.  At Oxford, the few and bookish remnants of High Church Anglicanism realized that their Church had gone off the rails and severed its lifeline with classic Christianity.  Change was no longer an option.

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXII

John Wesley (1703-1791)

I was going to do my next posting continuing on the theme I began several posts back of the Church facing Postmodern culture, but Peter Williams has called me to task for not doing enough straight history.  So I will do my next posting on the History of the Anglican Church and then look at the Church and Postmodernism.  Just as well as I am still not sure that I am grasping the geist of Postmodernism whereas 18^th century Anglicanism is more a matter of dissecting a corpse, 

I had already covered how the Church of England, so vibrant under the influence of the Caroline Divines and particularly in the Restoration phase (1660-1688) went into a malaise after the Glorious Revolution replaced James II with his Protestant daughter and son-in-law, William and Mary.  The Low Church/Evangelical faction had pretty much abandoned Anglicanism for the non-Conformists in 1660.The High Church party was decimated—actually far worse than decimated—when the non-Jurors refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchs and were replaced in their leadership by the Latitudinarian prelates favored by the Whigs.  It was Enlightenment Liberalism at its worst.  There was neither the theological continuity of the High Church nor the evangelical fervor of the Low Church but only the sort of blasé Gentleman’s Club culture of the ecclesiastical arrivistes.  The traditional doctrines of the Christian Church were subjected to the rational autopsies of men who were more inclined to the physical sciences and natural philosophy than metaphysics and mysticism.  The empty positivism of the Enlightenment allowed no room for Original Sin—or subsequent sin except on the most general levels of social disorder.  Without a strong notion of sin, original or otherwise, Christianity collapses into little more than feelings of universal good will.  I think it was H. Richard Niebuhr who went after the liberal Protestantism of his day (the fifties and early sixties) with the caricature of its theology:

A God without anger

Led a People without sin

Into a kingdom without judgement

Through the ministry of a Christ without a Cross. 

18^th century Anglicanism devolved into this vapid moralism of a natural ethics society.  Sermons were long and tedious, read in a monotone and concerned with the most abstract of ideas. Liturgy was perfunctory at best.  The sacraments were largely uncelebrated.  And religion became no more than a support for the established order and irrelevant in the lives of the underclass. 

Perhaps most tragic is that God had become more or less impersonal, a somewhat elegant abstraction not much unlike that to which “The Crown” had been reduced from the sort of charismatic leaders who had once worn it.  And just as the Georges I, II, and III had been more or less relegated to domesticated fops, Jesus was no longer Saviour but only the speaker of inoffensive aphorisms of a general good will. 

Such as situation was bound to trigger a reaction and it came with the First Great Awakening.  In 1729 a group of Oxford scholars led by the brothers John and Charles Wesley, formed “The Holy Club.”  Other members included John Clayton, James Hervey, Benjamin Ingham, Thomas Brougham, George Whitfield and John Gambold.  The members of The Holy Club were in some way a revival of the Caroline Divines in as that they were serious High Churchmen of not inconsiderable piety.  “High Church” at this point of Anglican history has not the significance about “smells and bells:” that would only come in the 19^th century.  To our taste today they would be impossibly Low, with black gowns and tabs and never a surplice to be found.  In the 18^th century to be High Church meant to be serious scholars of Patristic theology, familiar not only with the scriptures but how they had been interpreted in the Tradition of the Church before the East/West schism of 1054.  This Patristic heritage made them aware of the centrality of a rich sacramental life as well as the role of Christian mysticism in the faith.  Unlike run of the mill Anglicans who might dine at the Holy Table three or four times a year,  High Church Anglicans favored frequent reception of Holy Communion and members of the Holy Club celebrated the Eucharist several times a week.  They also encouraged fasting on the traditional days of Wednesday and Friday.  Such pious customs as the examination of conscience and meditation were re-introduced.  Some went so far as to reintroduce a form of confession of sin, either private or within the group.  They also understood the relationship between faith and good works, visiting the sick, educating orphans and children of the poor, assisting those incapable of supporting themselves. 

The movement spread within the Church of England and became highly evangelical as some of the leading members began preaching to huge crowds, mostly of the underclasses who had been feeling somewhat estranged from the Established Church because of its ties to the rich and the powerful. 

Eventually Wesley’s followers would separate from the Church of England as the Methodists, another non-conformist denomination, but that would only be at the end of the eighteenth century.  By that time there had been somewhat of a revival in Anglicanism spurred on by the success of the Wesleys and others in what is known as the First Great Awakening.  While the Wesleys were High Church in their orientation towards Patristic Theology and sacramental life (though a fairly unritualistic sacramental life), many of their successors at the end of the 18^th century were more “Low Church,” sticking to the biblical text without patristic commentary and somewhat indifferent to any sacramental piety.  The Low Church party also embraced a return to the Calvinism of early Anglicanism with an emphasis on the depravity of human nature and the idea that God predestined some to eternal life and others to eternal punishment.  In a religion with such predestination, sacraments lose their importance as they cannot be of any help when one’s final disposition is already predetermined.  Also predestination makes any work among the poor—other than the “spiritual ministration” of preaching irrelevant as charity is incapable of saving one, and indifference to the needs of the poor won’t change one’s final destination either.  By the end of the eighteenth century then the Church of England had its Latitudinarian hierarchy with its colossal indifference to things religious and its preoccupation with gentry life; its High Church party centered among the educated elite and at the universities, and its Low Church party of evangelical preachers.  Methodism had robbed the Church of England of many in the working class who wanted an evangelical emotionalism but found the doom and gloom of Low Church evangelicals too joyless.  But a major revival was at hand.