The Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Transcription

1 The Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

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3 The Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century Timothy Maxwell Gouldstone

4 Timothy Maxwell Gouldstone 2005 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gouldstone, Timothy, 1946 The rise and decline of Anglican idealism in the nineteenth century / Timothy Gouldstone. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Church of England History 19th century. 2. Idealism, English 19th century. 3. Green, Thomas Hill, I. Title. BX5126.G dc

5 For my wife Jane and our children Rebecca and David domus et placens uxor who have lived with their father s obsession with dead Anglicans.

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7 Contents Acknowledgements Introduction ix xi 1 Reaction to Reform The legacy of Newman and Arnold 1 2 The Formation of Parties 9 3 Essays and Reviews 17 4 The Rise of British Idealism 23 5 Idealism Embraced: Thomas Hill Green 40 6 Idealism Popularised: Mrs Humphry Ward 64 7 Idealism Assimilated: Frederick Temple 82 8 Idealism Transcended: Aubrey Moore Idealism Marginalised: Charles D Arcy Idealism Assaulted Realism and Aestheticism Gathering Up the Fragments Epilogue 195 Notes 198 Bibliography 219 Index 229 vii

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9 Acknowledgements This project began as a PhD thesis which investigated the effects of British idealism on the development of the Church of England s theology between 1870 and The work would not have been possible without the encouragement of the former Bishop of St Germans (now Bishop of Norwich), the Rt Revd Graham James, and a generous grant provided by the Philpott and Boyd Educational Foundation (Diocese of Exeter), and I am grateful to Canon David Ison of Exeter for his assistance. At Exeter University, Professor Terence Copley provided much support and stimulating conversations concerning the cultural setting of Victorian Christianity. Exeter University Library was most helpful in tracing obscure material, and latterly the resources of the University of East Anglia library have been very useful for filling out the historical context. In Truro the Philpott Library in Diocesan House is a mine of Victorian biographical and periodical material, particularly its series of The Guardian. Joyce Creba of Newquay provided invaluable advice and was a discerning reader. James Moore, then at Cambridge, provided pointers to Elder s book on the doctrine of Providential Evolution ; Angela Williams at St John s College Oxford and Lois Fischbeck of the American Philosophical Library, Philadelphia provided information on Aubrey Moore s scattered archive material. Patricia J. Williams of St Deiniol s Library, Wales and Claire Breay of Lambeth Palace Library provided information on the whereabouts of archives relating to Archbishops Tait, Benson and Frederick Temple. Michael Webb of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, provided information on letters of H.P. Liddon to Aubrey Moore, and further information on Moore was provided by The Revd William Davage, Custodian of Pusey House. I am also indebted to conversations with Dr Richard England, now of Salisbury University, Maryland, whose thesis on Aubrey Moore has cast valuable light on the way in which Anglo-Catholic thought assimilated the findings of science. The Revd Dr Geoffrey Rowell, then Bishop of Basingstoke, indicated the liberalising effects of idealism on Victorian theology and provided information on Pusey s visit to Germany and the influence of pantheism on S.T. Coleridge. The Revd Dr D.H. Dupree of Balliol College, Oxford spent time at very short notice discussing Frederick Temple and R.L. Nettleship. Jack Kolb of the University College of Los Angeles provided information on Tennyson. James Alexander of Boston University, ix

10 x Acknowledgements Steven Jones, Melinda J. Harrison, Kathleen McConnell of Dalhousie University, California, Susan Wolfson of Princeton University and Charles Robinson provided information on P.B. Shelley and the Platonism of the painted veil. Thanks finally to Professor Tim Gorringe of the Theology Department at Exeter University for comments on the relationship between philosophical idealism and moral idealism. Grateful acknowledgement is due to the following publishers and organisations for permission for quotations in the text: to The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf and to Harcourt Inc. (USA) for an excerpt from Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, 1976: to the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge for permission to quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell (1958): to A.P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael B. Yeats for an excerpt from The Autumn of The Body.

11 Introduction The story of the Church of England over the past one hundred and fifty years has been a story of how its institutional framework failed to adapt to cultural changes, despite continual attempts at structural reformation. Over thirty years ago P.T. Marsh in The Victorian Church in Decline Archbishop Tait and the Church of England (London: RKP, 1969) contrasted the undoubted abilities of Tait with the decline of the Church of England in his archiepiscopate. Tait s achievements would appear in a more distinguished light were it not for events in national life which failed to bring out his particular gifts. His time as archbishop ( ) represented a period when Parliament rapidly lost interest in ecclesiastical concerns, a process which signified increasing cultural marginalisation of Christianity in the life of the nation. However, Marsh s view of Tait s personality and achievements was not a negative one. He claimed rather surprisingly that Tait was the most powerful archbishop of Canterbury since the seventeenth century. 1 Political respect for Tait was to be found in all shades of opinion. He was concerned with important developments in English education and, in the latter part of his time, with an exhausting and ultimately futile debate about what was and was not permissible in ritual in Church of England worship. There were also important principles at stake over the established status of the Church of England, highlighted in debates in Parliament in the late 1860s concerning the (ultimately successful) disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. Tait also had to deal with very public theological arguments related to the limits of permissible belief. The principal features of this are well known and well documented the publication of Essays and Reviews (1860), subsequent conflicts over Bishop Colenso s writings which were held to undermine the authority of the Old Testament, and the controversy over the use of the Athansian Creed in public worship. Liturgical disputes rumbled on for years, and in 1874 almost an entire session of Parliament was given over to consideration of arcane liturgical practices which were interpreted through a framework of ecclesiastical laws which were ill suited to such disputes and received ferocious criticism from the growing number of articulate thinkers who believed that Christianity had run its course. This nineteenth-century saga over liturgy and ritualism showed glaring inconsistencies between arguments about doctrine and practice xi

12 xii Introduction and the means of ensuring their legal status in an Established Church. The more outspoken clergy of the day such as Mark Pattison and Benjamin Jowett joined with unbelievers and agnostics in seeing these debates as a waste of time. Pattison and Jowett represented a type of cleric who felt marginalised by their own Church. Some moved outside the Church altogether such as the agnostic Leslie Stephen. These men believed that ecclesiastical controversies were a sober indication of the lack of theological expertise amongst the general mass of Anglican clergy. The occasionally very public and bitter disputes in the Church of England raised awkward questions concerning a widespread feeling that theological debate was no more than irrelevant antiquarianism. The arcane nature of the debates looked like a smokescreen enabling churchmen to hide from new intellectual challenges and the necessary task of articulating Christian belief in a meaningful engagement with a changing culture. Not surprisingly, Parliament lost interest in odium theologicum. Matters concerning the niceties of Christian belief were no longer of interest to the vast majority of thinking Englishmen, be they in positions of political influence or not. How did these matters ever become national concerns? Turning the pages of the moderately Anglo-Catholic Guardian weekly newspaper of the time, there are hundreds of columns of close-printed debate on the historical and legal precedents for this or that obscure liturgical custom, or about the morality of marrying one s deceased wife s sister, or the legality of flowers on the altar. That the governments of Disraeli and Gladstone, as the country approached the height of its influence over a worldwide empire could find time to debate such matters looks incredible from the perspective of the twenty-first century. We ask today why so much effort and emotional energy was put into such matters as opposing the burial of Nonconformists in Church of England Churchyards between 1875 and 1880, despite Tait s noble efforts to see that the Established Church was causing great offence to its fellow Christians by its refusal. As a result of these many disputes, Marsh stated that by 1880, Parliament was pushing church affairs aside. 2 The Church of England during Tait s time retreated rapidly from its role as schoolmaster and spiritual tutor of the nation. The exaggerated claims on Parliamentary time created a mirage which convinced many leading clergy that the Church was still a national force to be reckoned with. This was also the period when the Church of England was being rapidly displaced from its immemorial authority in the ancient seats of learning of Oxford and Cambridge. A.J. Engel, in From Clergyman to Don The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford

13 Introduction xiii (Oxford: Clarendon 1987) traced the manner in which reforms and reorganisations within the University of Oxford transformed the institution from one where the Church of England was a dominant force into one where academic representation was largely made up of non-ordained members of the rising professions of science and the humanities. Engel sees the Tractarian movement as a social disaster for the Church of England as it fatally undermined any confidence that the university would maintain loyalty to the Established Church. 3 Paradoxically, a movement which was designed to renew the national Church became the greatest hindrance to its future influence, and assisted in the declericalisation of the university. Over 20 years after Newman s defection to Rome in 1845, one defender of the Church prophesied gloomily in 1868 concerning proposed reforms that it is proposed that our Colleges should hereafter be liable to be composed of men selected simply for intellectual gifts, no two of whom may agree upon questions vital to Christianity itself. 4 By then it was much too late to save Oxford for the Church of England. In 1854 dissenters in Parliament had already ensured that it was possible to matriculate and take the BA without signing the Thirty-Nine Articles and in 1871 religious tests for advanced degrees at Oxford were abolished by Parliament. In 1877 there followed the virtual elimination of clerical fellowships and clerical headships. The parlous state of Anglican influence is evident from the fact that the evidence before the Commission contained virtually no mention of the claims of the Church. 5 In the quarter century after 1850, the Church of England lost almost all its direct influence over Oxford University, and this was paralleled by a similar development at Cambridge. In 1985, Jeffrey von Arx in Progress and Pessimism Religion, Politics and History in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Harvard UP) described the mid-century transformation of the Christian faith of Leslie Stephen, James Morley and William Lecky into a pessimistic scepticism about the possibilities of social and political progress. Abandoning Christianity for a more secular creed was no answer for these men. Von Arx shows how such people became disillusioned about the political scenario which developed after the early promise of the 1867 Reform Bill introduced greater parliamentary representation. They came to believe that the result of the Bill in national political life was that politics degenerated into a battle between various party-political factions which mirrored the parties that had grown up in the Church of England since around The effect of increasing the suffrage had been that democracy had undermined the old patrician elite intelligentsia and there were too many lowly born demagogues. Von Arx showed that

14 xiv Introduction Leslie Stephen and the historian James Anthony Froude believed that revived Catholicism, a fervent Anglo-Catholicism and zealous evangelicalism were triumphing over their hopes for a secular clerisy which would eliminate religious strife from national and cultural life. The Evangelical revival exploited the very emotions and enthusiasms that the freethinking philosophers had been unable to overcome. 6 The resurgent public religious rhetoric could therefore be interpreted by contemporary observers as implying that the Christian faith occupied a vital and necessary place in national culture, a place which Stephen, Froude and Lecky deplored. However, I shall show that the nature of the partisan religious debates, linked as it was with institutional turmoil and uncertainty, was not always helpful for a Christian apologia which could meet the changes and challenges of fin de siècle English culture. Marsh showed that despite Tait s noble efforts, the Church found itself in a much weaker state in the 1890s than it was 50 years earlier. The work of Engel showed how it was that during Tait s time the Church finally lost any semblance of control over academia. Von Arx showed how religious rhetoric created illusions of religious power in the newly created atmosphere of mass-movement politics and strife in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This study adds to these considerations of the political and organisational aspects of the decline of the Established Church. The nineteenthcentury divisions which arose as the Church formed itself into various parties was a movement more indicative of how the Church viewed itself than illustrative of effectiveness in mission. As the ancient Christian privileges of Oxbridge dissolved, many were being deeply challenged by new discoveries in science and new achievements brought about by technological advances. The appearance of a powerful incarnational theology represented by the contributors to Lux Mundi (1889) was a concerted effort on the part of a new generation of talented Oxford divines to meet contemporary challenges of historical, philosophical and scientific study. However, the contributors to this movement were more indebted to philosophical developments at Oxford than is generally realised, and in particular Thomas Hill Green s theistic version of idealism proved to be particularly attractive. The broad pieties of idealism and incarnationalism, when allied to a vision of Christian progress would prove to be a mixed blessing to the heirs of Oxford Tractarianism. An alternative vision, which had been displayed by the contributors to Essays and Reviews in 1860, sought a rapport with new discoveries which involved them in rejection of dogmas held dear both to Tractarians and evangelicals. Frederick Temple, with his heritage of liberal Arnoldian

15 Introduction xv comprehensiveness from Rugby sought to meet these challenges, but together with his fellow contributors was met with a hostility by those members of the Church who believed that their efforts at an inclusive Church were undermining the faith. During the 1890s a sense of fin de siècle hedonism allied to growing doubts about the validity of progress became a feature of national culture. The vision of progressive social development in a broadly theistic cosmos receded from view as nationalistic sentiments in Europe and doubts about Britain s empire and place in the world grew. Just as Tait, despite his abilities, presided over the political marginalisation of the Church of England, and the various Parliamentary Commissions presided over the disintegration of Anglican influence at Oxford, so the Lux Mundi writers, for all their talents, presided over the intellectual marginalisation of faith. Lux Mundi has been greatly valued in the history of Anglican theology, but to read it today is to encounter a theology strangely isolated from its culture and in some of the contributions expressed in near-unreadable prose. The political and spiritual renewal in the Church met in various forms of Christian socialism, but this was to prove no more than the Church s response to movements already at work in wider English society which had been brought about by various political reforms dating back to In this study we see these processes at work in five prominent figures of the period. First, there is Thomas Hill Green, a neglected influence on Anglican thinking. Green s philosophical idealism meant that he could not accept Christian dogma and take Holy Orders. Nevertheless, his inherited piety from an evangelical childhood gave him an integrity that many Christians (and non-christians) found impressive. Second, Mrs Humphry Ward, a close friend of Green, accomplished the incredible feat of popularising Green s obscure and tortured philosophical prose in her novel Robert Elsmere. In this book Ward summed up the influence of idealism on the Church of England and touched a nerve in current uncertainties about the place of religion in public life. Third, there is Frederick Temple, who under the influence of the Rugby School tradition inaugurated by Thomas Arnold, sought to forge a credible Christianity which was both radical and believable. This was an age when science was becoming a force to be reckoned with in English intellectual life, and Temple s liberal Anglicanism combined theology s encounter with science with progressive idealism. Fourth, there is Aubrey Moore, the neglected genius of the Lux Mundi authors. His early death in 1890 meant that his writings on science and belief have rarely been given the attention that has been paid to J.R. Illingworth on

16 xvi Introduction philosophy, Charles Gore on the incarnation and Scott Holland on the social significance of faith. Moore, like all the Lux Mundi writers, was influenced by Green s idealism, but reflected a different approach to science from that of Temple. His Anglo-Catholic orthodoxy and his writings on science and faith represent an impressive attempt to combine faith, science and idealist philosophy. Lastly, Charles D Arcy illustrates the necessity of paying close attention to the social context of idealism and its influence on Anglican thought. D Arcy wrote a now-forgotten work, Idealism and Theology (1899) whose small influence illustrates the limited appeal of this philosophical movement on Anglican theological thought outside the confines of Oxbridge and Green s Balliolised secular theism. Nevertheless, in company with both Gore and Frederick Temple s son William, D Arcy s progressive idealism survived into the darker times of the early 1930s. In the long twilight of idealism, Temple, Green, Moore and D Arcy contributed to the construction of an Anglican apologetic framework that was to prove very vulnerable to subsequent political and social developments as Victoria s reign gave way to Edwardian England, the First World War and the later collapse of Empires on a Europe-wide scale.