The Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

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

The Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

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

© Timothy Maxwell Gouldstone 2005 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 1988. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 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 1–4039–3828–8 hardback 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. ISBN 1–4039–3828–8 (cloth) 1. Church of England – History – 19th century. 2. Idealism, English – 19th century. 3. Green, Thomas Hill, 1836–1882. I. Title. BX5126.G74 2005 283⬘.42⬘09034—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne.

2004056781

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.

Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

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

109

9

Idealism Marginalised: Charles D’Arcy

134

10

Idealism Assaulted – Realism and Aestheticism

147

11

Gathering Up the Fragments

175

12

Epilogue

195

Notes

198

Bibliography

219

Index

229

vii

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 1900. 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 email 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

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.

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 1868–1882 (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 (1868–82) 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

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

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 1850. 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

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

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 1828. 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

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.

1 Reaction to Reform – The Legacy of Newman and Arnold

When I mean religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion but the Church of England. Fielding, H. Tom Jones (1749 (1996)), III (3), p. 109 So spoke Pastor Thwackum in Fielding’s novel. Until well into the nineteenth century the fictional Thwackum’s opinions could serve as a concise summary of the religious atmosphere of the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which were effectively seminaries for the Church of England; between 1752 and 1765 three quarters of Cambridge graduates became clergymen.1 In the early nineteenthcentury dissenters could matriculate at Cambridge but could not obtain a BA without declaring their membership of the Church of England. At Oxford a dissenter could not even matriculate. However, religious observance was not necessarily a serious business. In the early 1800s behaviour in Cambridge college chapels was often far from decorous: ‘The Dean generally goes through the first part of the service to a single auditor. Towards the beginning of the first lesson, “the students come in right frisky”; some running, some laughing, some staggering. The lessons are not infrequently read by a drunken scholar. … The rest of the men are, perhaps, in the meantime, employed in tossing the candles at each other, in talking obscenity… .’ In 1813 Charles Simeon, the evangelical vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge and high-profile leader of ‘serious’ evangelical religion, said of the services at King’s College Chapel that they were almost at ‘all times .… very irreverently performed’.2 Nevertheless, the nineteenth century gave new religious reasons for undergraduates to think of themselves as men being called to become the moral, cultural and religious guardians of the nation and 1

2

Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

to exercise their authority as ‘serious’ citizens. Through the efforts of the Evangelicals and the Tractarians, this emphasis was combined with a new elitism of the privileged which characterised English society well beyond the Church. In 1829, Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term ‘clerisy’ to signify those, ordained or not, whose responsibility it was to act as guardians of the national cultural and moral interest. Until 1854, at the ancient universities a young man had to be, at least notionally, a member of the Church of England. On matriculation it was necessary to sign agreement to the Thirty-Nine Articles. The Articles were designed to keep the peace in the age of Elizabeth I and perceived or actual political threats from a reviving Catholicism in Europe and the rising dissenting versions of Christian belief at home. Sixteenth-century theological disputes appeared to many to be more important than what kind of faith could be held with integrity amidst nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural questions, in the world of steam, industrialisation, world travel, and rising historical and scientific consciousness. Most Oxbridge fellows were in holy orders under the requirements of the various ancient statutes, and even as late as 1830s at Oxbridge ‘about half the undergraduates aimed to become parsons’.3 All this was to change in the years after 1850, and within 20 years most of the privileges enjoyed by members of the Church of England in the ancient universities were swept away. These changes reflected a changing nation. In many of the larger industrial towns, particularly in the north, the Church of England was already a minority church, in competition with the growth of Nonconformity and with the challenges of caring for a population that was drifting from the country to the towns. It was also competing with the growth of the Catholic population, swollen by immigration from Ireland, particularly after the economic disasters of that country in the 1840s. Men and women trapped in poverty and squalor realised that enshrined in the word ‘reform’ were possibilities of change for the better which did not necessarily involve the Church of England. In 1828 the Test and Corporation Acts were repealed by Parliament. Now Protestant dissenters could (at least in theory) sit in the House of Commons. It was no longer possible to entertain any romantic (or actual) notion that this House could act as a Lay Synod of the Church of England, although the illusion that it could fulfil this role persisted for many years. In 1829 Robert Peel, the Tory MP for Oxford, backed political realism against the principle of Anglican superiority. Not to emancipate the Catholics would court political disaster with Ireland, where Daniel O’Connell had been elected to Parliament in a by-election

Reaction to Reform 3

and was actively promoting the repeal of the Act of Union. As a Catholic, O’Connell could not sit in Parliament, and Peel and his colleagues feared that if emancipation was not granted there would be civil war in Ireland. Peel resigned his seat, but was not re-elected on account of the backlash from Oxford, appalled at his change of mind. To re-elect Peel would effectively ask the clergy of Oxford to ‘change their minds at the behest of the government’.4 Nevertheless, the Emancipation Act was passed in 1829. The paradox of these reforms was that dissenters and Catholics could take their place in the political life of the nation but were excluded from Oxbridge, and even the newly founded University College in London, which had been specific about excluding religious tests, could not award degrees and did not possess a Royal Charter until 1835. At Oxford, the young Newman sensed unease. In 1829 he wrote to his mother, ‘We live in a novel era. … Men have hitherto depended on others, and especially the clergy, for religious truth; now each man attempts to judge for himself. … The talent of the day is against the Church.’5 The ideas of the Enlightenment – break free of inherited authority, religious or otherwise, and think for yourself – were taking hold. Should Oxbridge be regarded as a national or an ecclesiastical foundation? Newman wrote years later in his Apologia: ‘The truth is, I was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral; I was drifting in the direction of liberalism.’6 In order to counter what they perceived as an erosion of faith, Newman and his followers reached out towards the distant world of the early centuries of the Christian era, to authorities earlier than the Elizabethan Settlement, to a new quest for the historical apostolicity of the Church of England. The Oriel logician and divine Richard Whatley, later to part company with Newman, saw what was happening. Newman wrote, ‘Whatley, then, an acute man, perhaps saw around me the signs of an incipient party of which I was not conscious myself. And thus we discern the first elements of that movement afterwards called Tractarian.’7 The new movement was one way in which Anglicanism would seek to recover a plausible interpretation of the role of the Christian faith as interpreter and guide over all human affairs. But was it to be the only plausible way? A great door was opening, and through it came many fundamental questions about the nature of religious faith. These questions concerned the basis of religious and ecclesiastical authority as well as the relationship of Church and state. The Reform Bill debates of 1831 divided Parliament, the nation and Oxford – in what sense, if any, could the older, patrician authority by which the nation was governed be changed or challenged without

4

Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

danger to the Church? There were those such as the Duke of Wellington, the staunch Tory Prime Minister, who fiercely opposed such reform, and in October 1831 the Bill was defeated in Lords. Violence broke out in the country, with riots in Nottingham, Derby and Bristol. The Bishops were popularly supposed to have brought about the failure of the Bill by their blind Tory opposition, and at Bristol the mob burnt the Bishop’s Palace and riots in the town resulted in many casualties. The Church of England’s popularity sank far lower than today’s gentle toleration of a marginalised and politically powerless establishment. In June 1832 the new Reform Bill became law. Thomas Acland, the west country landowner, illustrated the manner in which this event was received by the older landed and Tory magnates in England: ‘Three of the great embankments of our Constitution have recently been cut through-one in 1828, another in 1829 and a third in 1831 [sic]. The first broke down the long established qualification for office in our Christian state; the second let in, as legislators, men implacably hostile to the great living principle of all our institutions; the third, as a natural consequence of the two former poured into the House of Commons … the turbid waters of sheer mammonry, democracy and republicanism.’8 This inflammatory and apocalyptic manner demonstrated and fostered insecurity in both state and Church. Writing 50 years later, the historian James Anthony Froude expressed the fears of transition and change which many clergy felt at the time: ‘The constitution was to be cut in pieces and boiled in the Benthamite cauldron, from which it was to emerge in immortal youth.’9 However, the reforming Whigs under Lord Grey, who had succeeded Tory Wellington, hardly thought of themselves as introducing what is commonly meant by the word ‘democracy’ today, and ‘republicanism’ was anathema to most Englishmen of any political persuasion at that time except for some vocal radicals. The total electorate, even after the Bill of 1832, was probably still only 650,000 in a population of 16 million, Ireland included. But it was the symbol rather than the substance of the changes that brought about these criticisms and shook the Church of England. Further, as Richard Brent has shown,10 it was simply not the case that the reforming Whigs despised the Church of England or sat light to Christian beliefs. Their reforming zeal was directed, not at dismantling the Church of England, but by changes which, for example, would provide adequate financial foundations and an equitable distribution of clergy for a new age. Indeed, despite Tory apocalyptic rhetoric, some churchmen saw the changes in the nation’s perception of religious and political enfranchisement brought about by the reforms of 1828–32 as inevitable and just.

Reaction to Reform 5

The young Oxford cleric Edward Pusey, at the time as a result of visits to Germany holding liberal views in theology which he would later disavow, believed that concessions to other Christians in the life of the nation were long overdue. He thought that the Test and Corporation acts ‘… more than anything else, keep alive the bitterness of party spirit among Christians, agreeing in the same essentials of faith, in England’.11 Significantly, amidst the upheavals of reform in both Church and state, Pusey saw bitter partisanship as a cause of scandal. These were sentiments which bore a close relationship to a very different expression of Christian mission, that of Thomas Arnold, the energetic and reforming headmaster of Rugby and vocal supporter of radical changes to the Church of England. Arnold was acutely aware of the shaking of the foundations. In 1832 he stated that, ‘The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save.’12 The following February, he bade farewell to a friend leaving for India as a missionary, ‘You are going from what bids fair, I fear to deserve the name of a City of Destruction. When I think of the Church I could sit down and pine and die.’13 From 1815 to 1819 Arnold had been one of a group of men at Oriel College called the ‘Noetics’14 a term we have already met in Newman’s mentor, Richard Whatley, a man deeply committed to the ‘march of mind’, the progress of knowledge and rigorous reflection on the foundations of knowledge itself. Whatley’s influence meant that ‘candidates for Oriel fellowships were not examined for what they knew, but how they knew it’.15 Tradition was subjected to a constant process of probing interrogation. Even though he was a strong churchman, rumour had it that Whatley regarded both High and Low Church as ‘equal bigotries’ which must give way before the progress of rational enquiry, and his Bampton Lectures of 1822 were significantly entitled The Use and Abuse of Party Feeling in Matters of Religion. Whatley and Arnold believed that interchurch squabbles and ‘parties’ were irrelevant and damaging to the urgent task of commending the Christian faith. New discoveries in geology attracted Whatley’s attention, and he was moved to write that the Bible had been designed to teach religion and not science, and that ‘it was not intended to preclude enquiry, or to supersede the exercise of our natural faculties … on subjects within their reach’.16 Far from rejecting the Creeds, the questioning Noetics valued them as potentially revisable forms reflecting the constructive work of the human mind as much as divine revelation. The Creeds were the ‘various results of the necessary actions of our minds on the truths made known to us by the Divine word’.17 They believed that fears about the future of the Church of England could be allayed by a new rapport between expanding

6

Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

scientific, historical and technical discoveries and theological debate: ‘They saw their task not so much as fighting an internal battle for the soul of Anglicanism, as reviving and defending a national Christianity, capable of opposing secularising liberalism. The Anglican Church was to become Christianity’s national corral and not its bullring.’18 Thomas Arnold shared this Noetic anxiety about how the Church of England was to be an effective national Church. As summed up by Sue Zemka, Arnold aimed ‘to save the Church by mollifying sectarian dispute, to save the Bible by providing it with an historical basis, and to save the intellectual dignity of Christianity by emphasising God’s moral principles over his alleged intrusions into the natural order’.19 This was an old latitudinarian idea of the reunion of all Christian bodies on the basis of a few fundamental doctrines: ‘Civil Society aims at the highest happiness of man according to the measure of its knowledge. Religious society aims at it truly and really, because it has obtained a complete knowledge of it. Impart then to civil society the knowledge of religious society, and the objects of both will be not only in intention but in fact the same. In other words, religious society is only civil society fully enlightened: the State in its highest perfection becomes the Church.’20 Arnold read the book of history in a completely different light to Newman and his friends. For Arnold, the Christianity of his day was the culmination of a cultural teleology linked to the experience of Israel and Greece and fulfilled in the progressive historical development of the Christian tradition. This gave a peculiar missionary urgency to Arnold’s vision. He gave an urgent and eschatological note to his plea: ‘[M]odern history appears to be not only a step in advance of ancient history, but the last step; it appears to bear the marks of the fulness of time, as if there would be no future history beyond it .… and what neither Greece nor Rome could furnish, the perfection of moral and spiritual truth, has been given by Christianity.’21 The Christianity of his day was ‘the last reserve of the world’.22 It is a vision, moreover, in which action in the world is much more a bond of Christian unity than unity in belief, for Arnold boldly claimed that the latter grew out of the former. Unlike Newman, this was linked to an explicitly Protestant interpretation of the Christian tradition, and Arnold’s calls for a rejection of ‘priestcraft’ shocked Newman and his friends who had rediscovered what they conceived to be the catholic and apostolic foundations of the Church. Arnold’s protestantised vision of the Christian Church, its acceptance of Christian differences as inevitable and its close relationship with the state was anathema to the Tractarian divines. Arnold was suspicious of the Tractarian desire to revive the past in the name of an apostolic

Reaction to Reform 7

authority focussed on the visible ministers of the Church. He believed that this was an unhistorical and romantic idealisation of the past, a view shared by the learned Archdeacon of Lewes, Julius Hare, who despised the Tractarian criticisms of Luther and his followers for their lack of scholarship and misplaced romanticism. In 1843 Hare accused the Tractarians of ‘pampering their fancies with delusive visions of former ages and with fantastical wishes for their revival’.23 Arnold’s visionary and idealistic religion, which combined social vision and a comprehensive spirituality in which dogma was eclipsed by moral and spiritual improvement, would find a ready home in those who a few years later formed the amorphous group of divines known as the ‘Broad Church’ movement. In opposition to Newman and the Tractarians, appeals to priesthood and to valid succession were meaningless: ‘The church freed from the notions of priesthood and apostolic succession, is divested of all unchristian and tyrannical power; but craves by reason of its subordinate condition the power of sovereign government, that power which the forms of the free state can alone supply healthfully.’24 The followers of both Arnold and the Tractarians sought the renewal of the Church as a means by which society could be transformed into God’s kingdom; the difference was in the way they thought that should be achieved. Both were influenced by a belief that an elite cadre of Christian thinkers could act on the life of the nation to bring about spiritual and social renewal. Both therefore exemplified the Coleridgian emphasis on an elite clerisy who would be in the vanguard of national renewal and progress. However, unlike Arnold, Newman could never allow the Church of England to sell its soul to the movements of thought of the new age of industry and science or what he fervently believed were the errors of those dissenting Christians who could not accept membership in the Church of England. In a sermon of March 1829 he said, ‘Without meaning, of course that Christianity is in itself opposed to free enquiry, still I think it in fact at the present opposed to the particular form which that liberty of thought has now assumed … the spirit at work against it is one of latitudinarianism, indifferentism, republicanism, schism.’25 Here is an echo of the Tory Acland’s effusions against the Reform Bill. Newman and Arnold illustrate that curious mix of conservatism, fear and irrational paranoia that can overtake institutions at times of transition when it is no longer possible to ignore social and cultural changes, new discoveries and expanding worlds of knowledge. The flavour of Newman’s rhetoric resembles that of Arnold at least in this respect, that he is aware that the Church is in a time of transition. It is especially

8

Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

difficult to fix one’s mind on eternal verities when other minds appear to be marching past your own towards a cosmos of their own making which you fervently believe will bring not only disappointment but apostasy and ruin to the Church. The effect of the disagreements between those who stood for the apostolic authority of the Church of England and the ‘march of mind’ men, the Whatleys and Arnolds of the age, would eventually bring about militant hostility on the part of the new order against any Christian interference in its discoveries or conclusions. Voices would be raised from the rising scientific and technological professions against the perceived gulf between the privileges of the clergy on the one hand and their obscurantism and increasing isolation from new ideas. Some more radical and braver Christian spirits cried ‘forward’ with reform, a cry to join the ranks of those who followed the progressive platoons marching towards the betterment of society and the freedom of intellectual inquiry. The answer of many other Christians involved an apologetic romanticism, where they cried ‘back’. Faith’s roots were to be sought not in rational and free enquiry but in that more certain and more chivalrous world of foundations so distant in time that they bore no relation to the burgeoning world of industry, steam and ‘useful knowledge’. Thomas Arnold’s despair over saving the Church of England in 1832 was to receive not one, but many replies in the next half-century. Forty years after Newman and Arnold formed their visionary plans their different idealistic visions would encounter a friendly philosophical framework in the shape of the idealism of Thomas Hill Green and his school at Oxford. The rise and influence of this school of philosophy on the Church of England was not negligible, and it influenced a wide variety of churchman of differing theological opinions and different understandings of the role of the Church of England and its relationship to its traditions.

2 The Formation of ‘Parties’

Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the trouble of thinking. Morley, J., Nineteenth-Century Essays, ed. Stansky, P. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 36, quoted in Turner, F.M. (1993d), 36 The reactions to changes in society typified by Newman and Arnold’s differing ecclesiastical visions continued to exercise members of the Church of England as the century progressed. The immense significance of the Tractarian revival has meant that much of the subsequent history of the Church of England has been the story of ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ and the various reactions to this movement. This has even been seen as a normative framework by which the Church’s fortunes should be evaluated. Bertrand Russell once said jokingly that his own Whig family believed that history started with the Reform Act of 1832, and at times a similar attitude has been taken, in some cases unwittingly, by historians of the Church of England who see Keble’s ‘Assize Sermon’ of 1833 in a similar light. The rise of the constellation of divines who stood in the Tractarian and later Anglo-Catholic tradition has to some extent been used to cast what preceded it into the gloom of worldliness and lack of spiritual impact in a manner similar to some Protestant histories of the Reformation which until recently denigrated the spirituality and achievements of the pre-Reformation Church. Thus, as Frances Knight has observed, Anglo-Catholicism and its various forms have been interpreted as that which saved the Church of England for the nation in the century after 1833.1 The standard partisan accounts had an exceedingly long shelf life. For example, R.W. Church’s The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833–1845 was reprinted regularly from 1891 to 9

10 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

1970. On the other hand, the Evangelicals, with their strong emphasis on personal conversion and their many different crusades to improve the moral tone of the nation through their political connections and benevolent ‘societies’ were also a dominant force, portrayed in G.R. Balleine’s significant ‘party’ account, The History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England (1908 and reprinted as recently as 1951) and later in David Bebbington’s Evangelicalism in Modern Britain – a history from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989). After Newman’s voluntary exile at Littlemore after 1841, the original Tractarians were without the magnetism of a leader who could enable their individualistic and volatile compasses to point in one direction. They were also being ground down by an ecclesiastical rumour mill which put about scare stories concerning popery and romanisation of the Church of England. Through the British Critic, William Ward and Frederick Oakeley attempted to continue the movement, but increasingly outspoken articles offended older High Churchman and the British Critic closed in 1843.2 The more liberal tradition represented by the Arnoldian heritage also began to make itself felt, though because of their independence of mind they never formed such a cohesive group as the other two main strands of Anglicanism. It has been traditional to see Benjamin Jowett at Oxford as a focal figure for liberal-minded divines, but this is to forget the influence of what Susan Cannon has called the ‘Cambridge Network’ of men such as J.C. Hare and Connop Thirlwall and the geologist Adam Sedgewick. The liberal theology of this group was in fact a powerful counterbalance to the Oxford Movement, and Arthur Stanley, who was to become Dean of St Paul’s, summed up their approach in a sermon delivered in 1871 at the funeral of the astronomer John Herschel: One should trust, ‘the grand and only character of Truth – its capability of coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair discussion’.3 Their influence on the Church of England has received much less attention than the Tractarian revolution at Oxford, and further investigation would probably assist greatly in putting Tractarianism and its aftermath in a more realistic focus, especially in relation to the group which was forming around Benjamin Jowett and radical divines such as Baden Powell4 at Oxford. The ‘Cambridge Network’ was dominated by Trinity College, where there was a ‘heady combination of historical scholarship, German Idealism, and Romantic poetry, along with the best of modern science, and all this in a Christian context’.5 Their work reflected the same trend as Jowett and his friends at Oxford where, as Peter Hinchliff has indicated, ‘Baden Powell and Thomas Arnold believed that science and theology were two

The Formation of ‘Parties’ 11

independent spheres of enquiry and favoured free discussion and openness to secular and lay culture’. This is also represented by the foundation of the famous conversatzione group called ‘The Apostles’ at Cambridge, who sought within their debates a humane admixture of Christian piety and free discussion in the context of deep friendships that frequently lasted for the lifetimes of the members. We shall see the importance of this group re-emerge at the end of the century when it had shed virtually every vestige of its Christianity, but nevertheless formed an important feature of fin de siècle and Edwardian intellectual culture. What of the Evangelicals? Clearly Balleine believed in 1898 that they formed a ‘party’ and a strong one at that. He traced the origins of the evangelical ‘party’ in the Church of England to the eighteenth century, when it was used to describe those who were broadly influenced by the Methodist revival but remained loyal to the Church of England and its parochial system6 although their diffuseness was highlighted by Wesley’s comment to the Methodist conference in 1769 that they were but ‘a rope of sand’. Balleine also makes the distinction between ‘Low Church’ and ‘Evangelical’, describing the former as the heirs of the Latitudinarianism of the early eighteenth century which sat light to doctrine and to the Articles.7 However, evangelicalism was in fact a protest against such lassitude. By 1829 about one-eighth of the clergy of the Church of England could be classed as ‘Evangelical’. However, there was a feeling that the quality of men in this ministry was not as consistently good as in the previous generation, when members of the ‘Clapham Sect’ and Charles Simeon had risen to fame and considerable significance in the Church. R.W. Church overstated the case when he said that, ‘The Evangelical School presented all the characteristics of an exhausted teaching and a spent enthusiasm,’8 but this indicates that a certain lassitude developed the movement. Ford K. Brown in his study of the effects of William Wilberforce’s generation believed that after 1820 there was an influx of the type of evangelical that was disliked by William Wilberforce and Henry Thornton and the older ‘Clapham Sect’ luminaries.9 In 1845 Sir James Stephen, the son of Wilberforce’s brother in law, lamented the hardening of spiritual passion into doctrinal rigidity and moral effort into high-minded crusading for righteousness: ‘Oh where are the people who are at once really religious, and really cultivated in heart and understanding – the people with whom we could associate as our fathers used to associate with one another. No “Clapham Sect” nowadays!’10 Brown’s polemical and contested thesis is that the efforts of the Clapham Evangelicals had bred (in his words) a

12 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Frankenstein monster of pious and ineffective cant in national society that pervaded the entire Victorian period. In his 1979 book Evangelical Theology 1833–1856: A Response to Tractarianism (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott) Peter Toon regrets the absence of a well-documented history of the evangelical movement from 1830 to 1860. It must be said that such a history is a more challenging task than that presented by the history and subsequent influence of the Tractarian movement. This is a problem that arises directly out of the fact that much evangelical writing at this period was a reaction and response to the sharply focussed Tractarian campaign, and Evangelicals were cast in the role of polemical response rather than as creative and forward-thinking men in their own right. This trend persisted to the end of the nineteenth century. For example, the popular works of Bishop Ryle of Liverpool in the 1870s and 1880s were shot through with anti-Roman and anti-Ritualist comments, and as late as 1898 the Protestant body the Church Association published Walter Walsh’s Secret History of the Oxford Movement. The aim of this book was to expose ‘secret ritualistic societies’ which were ‘increasing in number every year’ and whose purpose was ‘the Corporate Reunion of the Church of England with the Church of Rome’. In rather lurid prose, Walsh believed ‘These secret plotters are the real wire-pullers of the Ritualist Movement.’11 Perhaps in the end the ‘evangelical party’, because of its Protestant heritage of the value of the individual soul, was never going to rally round authoritative leaders in the way that rapidly became characteristic of the Tractarians. John Wolffe believes that the evangelicalism of this period owed much to Enlightenment challenges, the influence of the Romantic Movement and to the social instability of the years following the Napoleonic period, which encouraged Christians to seek for a greater certainty and confidence in their faith.12 They were more likely to resemble a disparate group of individuals held together by a common belief in conversionist theology and, negatively, by a tendency to define their polemic as that which served to combat what they believed was a dangerous catholicising of the Church of England. Toon believes that there was a strong tendency to misread the reformers and that this in turn made the renewal of evangelical theology a difficult process, a problem that still influences the movement in the present day.13 However, there are dangers in simply letting the Church’s own self-definitions dominate the historical story of the Church of England in the nineteenth century. What has often been forgotten is that partisan divisions were essentially self-referential; they were used by members of

The Formation of ‘Parties’ 13

the Church of England about themselves, as a means to define their own position, or as labels in an increasingly introverted debate about who were the legitimate heirs of Church of England doctrine and practice in an era of uncertainty. Thus the rhetoric that accompanies the apologetics of party allegiance is connected closely with efforts to retain power and authority within the institution’s structures. Such a move can significantly endanger the mission of the Church; religious argument can be so much more satisfying than the hard work of attempting to make the message of Christianity relevant and challenging to its contemporary environment. As John Morley, the nineteenth-century political writer remarked about this strategy, ‘Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the trouble of thinking.’14 Partisan interpretations of the Victorian Church of England had become entrenched by the last years of the nineteenth century, and such a pattern can still be seen even in the late twentieth century in Kenneth Hylson-Smith’s Evangelicals in the Church of England 1734–1984 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1992). Knight indicates that the eventual move away from ‘partisan’ history was fostered by studies which focussed on the ‘institutional’ revival of the Church and the manner in which its structures became part of the Victorian drive for utilitarian efficiency and restructuring of national institutions. The Church was under pressure to develop ‘institutional norms’, as described by K.A. Thompson in Bureaucracy and Church Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970, particularly pages 28–55). This process was rooted in the eighteenth century, but was accelerated by the reforms of the 1820s and the 1830s which had the effect of forcing the clergy to examine the foundations of their authority and the content of their beliefs, pressures which manifested themselves in the formation of distinct Church ‘parties’, Olive Brose in The Church and Parliament: The Reshaping of the Church of England 1828–1860 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1959) described how reforms which gathered momentum in the late 1820s and continued in successive decades produced a ‘kind of chronic condition of crisis which was dealt with piecemeal as each pressure became extreme’.15 Others have gone behind the magical year of 1833 and described the influences of political liberalism and radicalism and the growth of dissent as being major contributors to the Church’s attitudes to its mission in the nineteenth century.16 This period also saw the transformation of the role of the clergy and the episcopate as indicated by studies such as Anthony Russell’s The Clerical Profession (SPCK, 1980). Russell maintained that the nineteenth century saw the ‘professionalisation’ of the clergy along the lines of the emergent parallel developments in science, medicine and other secular professions, but

14 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

this has been contested by Rosemary O’Day who believes that there is a continuum of development from the Reformation period to today, and that many of the characteristics of nineteenth century ‘secular’ professions actually drew upon much older clerical traditions. Far from representing an accommodation to new developments in the nineteenth century, the clergy formed a template which the newer class of professionals used to formulate their codes of conduct.17 O’Day maintains that in the nineteenth century, the clergy ‘wanted control of the profession in the interests of the role which they thought the clergy ought to be playing in a Christian society’.18 By this means the clergy could define their role in society at a time when the Church of England perceived itself to be under assault from the state and their spiritual authority under assault from the growth of professional disciplines which saw no need for divine sanction. All this gave reason for Newman’s exhortation in Tract 1: ‘Magnify your office’. As O’Day comments, the decline of state interest in the Church’s affairs was matched by a rise in the interests of the clergy in determining the locus of their authority. Such a trend will clearly foster the rise of partisan spirit as disagreements arise amongst the clergy over the locus of authority in the Church and the means by which they were to sustain themselves as an effective and influential force in national life. By the 1850s the language of ‘party’ had become entrenched in the controversies of the Church of England. It attracted the attention of a hitherto obscure writer whose combative style, although scarcely endearing him to his contemporaries of any ecclesiastical hue, has meant that his contribution is exceptionally readable today. This was W.J. Conybeare (1815–57), whose analysis of ‘parties’ dates from 1853 in an article in the Edinburgh Review. (Later reprinted in W.J. Conybeare, Essays Ecclesiastical and Social, 1855.) Conybeare had been at Trinity College, Cambridge where he had formed friendships with liberal divines of the ‘Cambridge Network’. This had given him a rather jaundiced opinion of partisan theology, which is evident in his analysis. For example, he described the Tory High Church Bishop Phillpott of Exeter as ‘a shrewd and worldly churchman, violent by calculation, intemperate by policy, selfish in his ends, and unscrupulous in his means’.19 The influence of via media and the liberal opinions of Thirlwall and his Cambridge friends led Conybeare to say, ‘the object of every wise Churchman should be to keep each of the main schools of opinion from extravagance of the one hand and stagnation on the other; and the existence of counteracting parties is a check acting providentially for this end’.20 His desire was to see partisanship as acting as a creative spur to intelligent debate instead of

The Formation of ‘Parties’ 15

sterile party polemics. Conybeare believed that party rhetoric that was directed towards mere ecclesiastical disputes was a severe hindrance to the Church of England: ‘While civil discord thus convulses the Church, many of her children are falling away from her, and abandoning the distinctive doctrines of Christianity.’21 Graphically he stated that the ‘stagnant’ sections of each party were ‘the dying remnants of Hanoverian sloth’, thus indicating that even he, with only a very qualified approval of ‘parties’, had that common tendency to cast the Church of the eighteenth century into the darkness of Erastian compromise. After an entertaining if somewhat polemical discussion, Conybeare set out the following classification: Low Church

High Church

Broad Church

Normal Type (‘Evangelical’) Exaggerated type (‘Recordite’) Stagnant type (‘Low and Slow’) Normal type (‘Anglican’) Exaggerated type (‘Tractarian’) Stagnant type (‘High and Dry’) Normal type Exaggerated type (concealed infidels) Stagnant type

3,330 2,500 700 3,500 1,000 2,500 2,800 20 (?) 700

Conybeare’s methods of analysis were decidedly haphazard by present-day standards, (it rested mainly on extrapolation from 500 known members of a clergy directory to the entire clerical population of the nation) and Burns points out the significant differences between his original analysis and the final version of 1855. However, this survey indicates in outline form how large numbers of mid-Victorian clergy saw themselves.22 Conybeare produced his work as the different parties in the Church of England were becoming distinctive entities, and his work served to popularise the relatively new term, ‘Broad Church’.23 Conybeare sees this group as limited in its effect on account of the individualism of its members: ‘The Evangelicals were united closely with one another, they acted as a compact body, they combined to carry common objects, and their views were advocated in Parliament by able representatives … whereas those whom we now describe have so little organisation or mutual concert of any kind, that they can scarcely be called a party at all.’24 After Conybeare’s death in 1857, the ‘High Church’ forces were mobilised in the English Church Union in 1859,

16 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

followed in 1865 by the evangelical Church Association. Significantly, it is difficult to find a parallel movement within those liberal divines who found these bodies uncongenial to their theological position. By the time Conybeare was writing in the mid-1850s, the dismantling of the Anglican Church’s political privileges (and with it what Basil Willey called a pervasive Anglican ‘cosmic toryism’25) after 1828 had resulted in a reassertion of ‘politics’ in the ecclesiastical and partisan sense. As the Church lost its influence in the wider cultural sphere, so imploding theological arguments sought to legitimate its message through internal manoeuvring. Was it that Christian truths were now under too much threat to be chanced on the open stage of the world, and did this increasingly condemn theological debate and argument to the narrow realms of private preference or of exclusive ecclesiastical concern rather than that of public debate? The rhetoric of party defence appeared to some members of the Church of England as an effort to reassert ancient theological legitimations in an age of rapid change without the necessarily painful process of revision. Even though they were the newest of the major groupings in the Church of England, the disparate strands of the ‘Broad Church’ section were seeking a means by which their revisionist opinions could be brought before the reading public on a wider scale.

3 Essays and Reviews

… facts are idealised, dogmas are transformed; creeds are discredited as human and provisional; the authority of the Church and of the Bible to establish any doctrine is discarded; the moral teaching of the Gospel remains … Frederic Harrison, ‘Neo-Christianity’, Westminster Review, August 1860 The desire for an adequate apologia for ‘Broad Church’ views resulted in 1858 in a plan for a book of radical ‘Essays and Reviews’ concerning the impact on Christian belief of the new perspectives on history, on the natural world and on the place of Scripture in the life of the Church. The essayists did not seek to present a broad and united front in their endeavours, and they trusted, naively as it turned out, that their various findings would commend themselves to the mission of the Church. The focus of this group was the classical scholar Benjamin Jowett (1817–93), Professor of Greek at Oxford and later Master of Balliol, who was a key figure in the introduction of the teachings of Plato to English intellectual life. The American scholar Frank Turner believes that the mission of Jowett and the essayists was to reinterpret Christianity ‘… to mesh with Plato and Plato to mesh with Christianity and both to mesh with polite Anglicanism, moderate social hierarchy, a strong state, and a sense of shared community’.1 Turner’s comment shows how the Arnoldian desire for comprehensiveness and a Church open to the changing world is combined with the more ancient and traditional framework of classical studies which (it was hoped) could preserve the best of the past with the knowledge of the present. However, both Jowett and the other contributors were treated with suspicion and hostility by conservative Christian voices. Many years later, Herbert Asquith reported a saying 17

18 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

about Jowett which expressed the fears of many about the type of Christian practice which arose from this liberal approach: ‘There was a legend, widely circulated and believed in country parsonages, that Jowett was wont to gnash his teeth when he saw from his window the undergraduates filing across the quad to morning or evening chapel.’2 The suspicions arose because of Jowett’s Platonism and classical emphasis, which was suspected of subordinating Christian revelation and doctrine to a broad religious base in which learning reflected an idealised eternal truth. Jowett would certainly have sympathised with Thomas Arnold’s belief that doctrinal conclusions could never be conclusively demonstrated, and that therefore it was inevitable that there would be differences of opinion within Christianity. His significant base in Balliol College enabled him to reassert the authority of Oxford Christianity but also at the same time to legitimate an open approach to new knowledge. Despite rumblings of opposition, he and his friends believed that the alliance of open-mindedness with the priority of the classical tradition would enable a credible Christian apologetic to be built to replace the discredited post-1845 debacle which had resulted from the collapse of Tractarianism. His Christian liberalism was friendly towards his ‘Broad Church’ fellow contributors to Essays and Reviews such as the Headmaster of Rugby Frederick Temple, and his classical learning favoured all who sought to maintain the supremacy of the classics over the rising professions representing science and technology. In fact this emphasis on the classics was to be a mixed blessing for the future. The ensuing decades would see the prestige and relevance of the classics increasingly challenged by the new disciplines arising from the advance of scientific knowledge, utilitarian technological progress and the rise of the science-based professions. The aim of the Christian Enlightenment preached by Jowett and his friends was to preserve moral and intellectual integrity rather than to impart a ‘scheme of salvation’ whether of the Tractarian or evangelical variety. This was evident in his views on education: ‘A large proportion, some say the greater number of our Artisan Class are the enemies of religious belief. If they are to be regained and restored to religious influences at all this must be accomplished not by repeating the letter of Scripture or by insisting on their belief in miracles or on Genesis versus Science and History but by presenting to them Christianity unawares or the moral aspect of the Christian faith.’3 This sentiment which elevated the moral seriousness and significance of the Christian life over doctrinal statements was to be a constant feature of the ‘Broad Church’ apologetic. As Susan Cannon has said,4 they believed

Essays and Reviews 19

that the central problems of the day were not in metaphysics but in morality. The conservative old-style divines had been horrified when in April 1850 the government announced a Commission to enquire into the state of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This was the same political interference that had shocked them in 1833 when the secular powers took upon themselves the suppression of a large number of Irish bishoprics. Never mind that the bishoprics were surplus to requirements in a largely Catholic country. The fact that the government stepped in to suppress them was regarded as sacrilegious. It was not so much the principle of reform that was questioned, as the manner of its execution. What business had the state to interfere with the divine rights of the Church? The Commissioners’ reports of the 1850s touched similar raw nerves. They highlighted what the conservative divines would prefer to forget, that what Jowett called ‘the imposition of subscription, [i.e. to the 39 Articles] in the manner in which it now imposed in the University of Oxford, habituates the mind to give a careless assent to truths which it has never considered …’.5 Jowett’s liberal clerical colleagues heartily agreed. They did not perceive themselves as heretics betraying an ancient trust, but as heralds of a new age of spiritual freedom. Concerning the genesis of Essays and Reviews, in August 1858 Jowett wrote to his friend Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, who had the previous March been installed in the cathedral in Oxford as a canon of Christ Church: ‘We do not wish to do anything rash or irritating to the public or the University, but we are determined not to submit to this abominable system of terrorism, which prevents the statement of the plainest facts, and makes true theology or theological education impossible.’6 Suspected by most clergy, Jowett and his friends nevertheless represented a growing trend in English society. These were people irked by the bondage imposed by religious tests. Their moral sensibilities were offended by the way in which ancient doctrines were fenced off from the possibility of reinterpretation, aware as they were of the dubious moral values enshrined in such shibboleths as substitutionary atonement and priestly claims to apostolic authority. The terroristic and authoritarian methods of those who wished to preserve ancient and traditional beliefs at any cost were perceived as a threat to the coherence of faith and ultimately to the integrity of the Church’s mission. Essays and Reviews caused a storm of protest on its publication in 1860 which raised questions concerning the nature of the theological foundations of the Church of England. The leaders of the Church were believed by these radicals to be out of touch with developments in

20 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

philosophy, frightened of renewed interest in historical scholarship which asked awkward questions about the Bible, and largely ignorant of the challenges posed by the rise of sciences such as geology, zoology and botany. Conservative clerical defenders of Oxford still lived in the world described by Frederick Copleston of Oriel College as far back as 1810: ‘Never let us believe, that the improvement of chemical arts, however much it may tend to the augmentation of national riches, can supersede the use of that intellectual laboratory, where the sages of Greece explored the hidden elements of which man consists, and faithfully recorded in all their discoveries.’ This was a world dominated by the authority of Christianity as mediated by the Church of England and the hegemony of the ancient classics. Everything else was dross compared to these intellectual and spiritual realities. Mark Pattison (1813–84) was another of Jowett’s Oxford friends of the 1858 plan to overthrow the ‘abominable terrorism’ of the clerics. Pattison had taken his BA degree at Oriel College at Oxford in 1836. For a time he had come under the influence of Newman’s magic, but came to regard Tractarianism as a disaster for the relationship of the Christian faith to contemporary questions. In a statement made at the end of his life in 1885 which could be taken as a credo for many Victorians who made the pilgrimage from religious zeal to bleak agnosticism, he wrote, ‘But … I had been drawn into Tractarianism, not by the contagion of a sequacious zeal, but by the inner force of an inherited pietism of the evangelical type; so I was gradually drawn out of it, not by any arguments or controversy against Puseyism, but by the slow process of innutrition of the religious brain and development of the rational faculties.’7 Pattison wrote of the Oxford of his youth in the 1830s: ‘Probably there was no period of our history during which … the ordinary study of classics was so profitless or at so low an ebb as during the period of the Tractarian controversy. By the secessions of 1845 this was extinguished in a moment. … Science was placed under a ban by the theologians, who instinctively felt that it was fatal to their speculations.’8 All these problems are laid at the door of the ‘Tracts’ party, which ‘… desolated Oxford life, and suspended, for an indefinite period, all science, humane letters, and the first strivings of intellectual freedom which had moved in the bosom of Oriel.’9 Although written many years after the events, and in Pattison’s case certainly coloured by his views on the way he had been treated by the university, these remarks convey something of the dismay that many people found at the disintegration of open theological debate amidst the cries of the partisans in the years before and after Newman’s defection to Rome in 1845. Jowett, Pattison

Essays and Reviews 21

and his friends, alongside the ‘Cambridge Network’, wished for liberation of thought from the straightjacket of inherited dogma and a greater degree of academic freedom to re-examine the Christian faith in the light of the mushrooming knowledge of the natural world and of other cultures. While the Essays and Reviews authors were writing their contributions, the Bampton Lectures for 1858 were being given by Henry Longueville Mansel, the Waynflete Professor of moral and metaphysical philosophy, on ‘The Limits of Religious Thought Examined.’ The Bampton Lectures had been held since 1779 as a result of the bequest of John Bampton (1690–1751). Amongst other things, they were supposed ‘to confirm and establish the Christian faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics – upon the divine authority of the Holy Scriptures …’. Mansel certainly fulfilled this particular aspect of Bampton’s intentions; in fact it resulted in the virtual banishment of revelation from all other sources. Alarmed at what he believed to be a fatal undermining of the Christian doctrine of revealed truth, Mansel set about demolishing the pretensions of philosophy and human reflection as a means to salvation. This he did in style, and there were those who believed that his lectures were the best thing in Oxford since the days of Newman’s teaching from the pulpit of St Mary’s. His second lecture was prefaced with a quotation from the first epistle to Timothy: ‘Keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called; which some professing have erred concerning the aith.’ (1 Timothy 6: 20–1) Mansel expressed scepticism concerning the supposed progressive attempts at a liberalising of faith by adulterating the truths of revelation with philosophical speculations: ‘But to admit that God may make His own Revelation more perfect from time to time, is very different from admitting that human reason, by its own knowledge, is competent to separate the perfect from the imperfect, and to construct for itself an absolute religion out of the fragments of an incomplete Revelation.’10 For Mansel, the sophistries of the liberal revisers of revelation were classed with the apostolic condemnation of ‘profane and vain babblings’. Mansel put the matter bluntly: ‘Do we want a Redeemer to save us from our sins or a moral Teacher to give us a plausible theory of human duties?’11 The increasingly sceptical but recently ordained Leslie Stephen at Cambridge was quick to point out the problems of Mansel’s methodology, which implied that ‘faith is to be sited only in the void of agnosticism’.12 Mansel’s elegant style was not enough to commend itself to F.D. Maurice, who believed that the incarnation was a visible demonstration to all men of their divine character,

22 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

and that it was the role of the churches to demonstrate this in word and deed and bring all to the realisation of the privileges and state which God had already granted to them.13 Mansel had assured the place of revelation, but at the price of excluding humanly acquired knowledge which might dare be impertinent enough to question received ideas concerning the mode of revelation. Mansel believed that the new pieties of philosophically minded theology were not only inadequate as a means of expressing the Christian revelation, but were also couched in an imprecise and cloudy language whose meaning was anything but clear. He attacked the new vogue for the Hegelian rhetoric of philosophical idealism, comparing its mode of expression with the uselessness of Job’s comforters: ‘… if rationalizing philosophers have not made much progress since the days of Job … they have at least not gone backwards in the art of darkening counsel by words without knowledge’.14 With triumphant irony Mansel concludes, ‘These be thy gods, O Philosophy: these are the Metaphysics of Salvation.’15 The fact that Mansel was driven to make such a clear statement for the primacy of the Christian revelation over speculative thought shows that it was not only Evangelicals who felt uneasy at the new ideas. Even Waynflete professors felt it a necessary task to place a check on speculative theology and remind the Church that it was charged with the task and duty of transmitting the revelation of God in Christ rather than become a new school of philosophical reflection. Mansel would not be the last Christian theologian to meet the challenge of secular knowledge by constructing an apologia which argued for the primacy of revelation. Nevertheless, despite his controversial answer to the challenge of what kind of faith could be plausible in his age, Mansel at least recognised the stresses and strains which new ideas were imposing on the churches. What he failed to realise was that no age can simply rely on a revelation which is unrelated to its cultural and intellectual setting. At Mansel’s Oxford, there were those who were friendly to the Christian message, who were beginning to realise that developments in philosophy could perhaps be a means of expounding the word of God more perfectly.

4 The Rise of British Idealism

[Idealism provided] … a defence of the Christian religion sufficiently respectable to confront the ever more formidable scientific influences that were working to undermine religious belief. [Secondly] … the need for a politics of social responsibility to set against triumphant laisser-faire … Quinton, A.M. (1971), pp. 305–6 Mansel had clearly seen the challenge confronting Christian apologetics in the 1850s, that the new interest in German idealism and the prevailing utilitarian mood of English philosophy posed a threat to the relevance of traditional Christian apologetics. Mansel also attacked ‘Modern German Philosophy’ in 1859, in which he said that this movement was based ‘on assumptions which it is impossible to verify if true, and impossible to convict if false … the reality of which we are in search can never be attained in the form of an absolute unity’.1 A few years previously, Mansel had written a satirical sketch entitled, The Phrontisterion, or Oxford in the 19th Century that had been occasioned by the appointment of a Commission to ‘enquire into the State, Discipline, Studies and Revenues of the University and Colleges of Oxford’. Some feared that undue weight would be given to developments in German universities with a result that the spiritual nature of the English system would be undermined by godless ‘usefulness’: I have it now! the Universities. Long as those monkish rookeries exist They’ll be a drag upon us go a-head men; At least with Church Establishment. Abroad They manage these things differently: The Burschen 23

24 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Fight at the barricades; and Herr Professor Will sketch you twenty Paper-Constitutions Shall only cost the foolscap. No subscribing To Articles, no tests of Church Communion; But good Free Trade, religious and political, Progress and Agitation. But at Oxford There’s nought but bigotry and priestcraft. Professors we From over the sea, From the land where Professors in plenty be; And we thrive and flourish, as well we may, In the land that produced one Kant with a K And many Cants with a C. Where Hegel taught, to his profit and fame, That something and nothing were one and the same; The absolute difference never a jot being ‘Twixt having and not having, being and not being. But wisely declined to extend his notion To the finite relations of thalers and groschen. Where, reared by Oken’s plastic hands, The Eternal Nothing of Nature stands; And Theology sits on her throne of pride, As Arithmetic personified; … Such influences would introduce a cloudy and ill-defined metaphysical rhetoric in the place of Christian revelation: With deep intuition and mystic rite We worship the Absolute-Infinite, The Universe-Ego, the Plenary-Void, The Subject-Object identified, The great Nothing-Something, the Being-Thought, That mouldeth the mass of Chaotic Nought, Whose beginning unended and end unbegun Is the One that is All and the All that is One.2 Such empty and overblown musings represented by these vain philosophisings would for Mansel result in ‘… the deity owned by the mind reflective/Is human Consciousness made objective’. Despite these broadsides, in his Bampton Lectures and other writings, Mansel was not able to stem the tide of renewed interest in philosophical developments

The Rise of British Idealism 25

from the continent. Hegelianism, or at least some revision of it, appeared to offer a lifeline to theologically minded academics and clergy worried by the rise of more materialistic traditions such as the prevailing Utilitarianism of J.S. Mill (1806–73). Embracing idealism also provided a means by which those who could not accept Christian doctrines for scientific or moral reasons could retain a coherent moral outlook based on a broad theism which grounded morality in the structure of the cosmos rather than in the inventiveness of mankind. Put at its simplest, idealism is a broad term for a philosophical movement that defines ultimate reality as mental or ‘spiritual’ rather than physical; the mind and spiritual values are more fundamental than material ones. Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753) maintained that nothing could be known to exist or did exist except as ideas in the mind of the percipient; in Berkeley’s famous phrase, esse est percipi (‘To be is to be perceived’). Although Berkeley preferred the term ‘immaterialism’ for his theory, subsequent generations favoured the term ‘idealism’. Idealists do not deny the existence of physical objects, but deny that they exist independent of minds; they do not exist unperceived or unthought. What exists, exists only within consciousness. For Kant (1724–1804), God’s existence was not proved by argument; God was a ‘postulate of practical (or moral) reason’, and his existence was incapable of logical demonstration. Such an attitude was hostile to those who wished to hedge their theism about with the careful dogmatic definitions of an authoritative theology. The Kantian God’s existence was deemed a necessary deduction from the fact that the highest good is the necessary highest end of a morally determined will. In ourselves, we cannot bring about the ‘highest good’. Only God can bring about this latter state in eternity. The status of Kant’s postulates has been the source of considerable debate summed up by John Hick: ‘What, I think, Kant means is that to take our ethical nature fully seriously, accepting moral obligations as having objective and binding validity, is to presuppose that the universe in which we exist has a particular character, the basic features of which are indicated by the metaphysical postulates of God, freedom and immortality.’3 Whatever the philosophical status of ‘God, freedom and immortality’, Kant’s formulation of them had a great influence on a whole sequence of philosophies and theologies in the century-and-a-quarter after his death. However, the influence of Kant and that of Hegel and German idealism generally on early nineteenth-century English intellectual life was initially relatively slight. One of the reasons for this was a suspicion of revolutionary fervour which, especially in the troubled social world

26 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

of the 1840s, surrounded imported continental concepts.4 At this period, British philosophy was somewhat insular and was dominated by the empirical tradition following from Locke and Hume in the eighteenth century. An imported continental philosophy carried with it more than a whiff of revolutionary fervour, be it that of 1789 or 1848. Nevertheless, the tradition of Kant and Hegel provided for those in the Christian tradition who inherited a belief in the unity of the created order and the destiny of mankind a possible means of reconciling the ‘moral law’ with the material world. This could be a means of a rapport between the life of the spirit as interpreted by the Christian tradition and the life of Kant’s ‘starry heavens’ as revealed by the discoveries of science. Maurice Mandelbaum’s definition of idealism emphasises this alliance with a quest for holism: ‘within natural human experience one can find the clue to an understanding of the ultimate nature of reality, and this clue is revealed through those traits which distinguish man as a spiritual being.’5 The idealist tradition thus provided a fruitful means which in the minds of some was a godsend for a theological restatement of the Christian message, as well as a resonant system for a spectrum of Victorian theists and agnostics who wished to salvage moral imperatives from an orthodoxy to which they could no longer subscribe. Describing the introduction of Hegelian idealism into Britain, Willis says, ‘from roughly 1875 to 1915 Hegelian thought dominated the professional study of philosophy in Britain’.6 This general trend is described in two recent books by Sandra den Otter7 and A.P.F. Sell8 which are part of a revival of interest in idealism after decades of neglect as a result of the rise of linguistic and analytic traditions, which frequently involved an explicit hostility to idealism and its associated Christian values, even if those values were no longer directly inspired by authoritative theological dogmas. Den Otter describes how idealist assumptions were used to formulate social policies and societal explanations that were in opposition to the utilitarian and materialist tendencies which characterised the empirical traditions of English social thought. Idealist concepts in social thought were often combined with a theological perspective, and together these two developments gave a legitimating strength to Christian apologetics faced with materialistic and positivist theories of cultural development. A key question was how a ‘science of society’ should be established, and if that explanation could (or should) contain religious themes. Den Otter’s survey shows how idealism became an important part of political culture, with an emphasis on the primacy of community life and the moral qualities of the state. Such themes were to find a ready home not only in political thinking

The Rise of British Idealism 27

but also amongst theologians who saw in these themes a means of developing a relevant understanding of the role of the Church and a coherent role for a distinctively Christian ethic at a time when these roles were in danger of being marginalised. Why did mid-century Victorian Christians find idealism such an attractive philosophical ally? F.M. Turner believes that idealism was a Zeitgeist by which orthodox Christian members of the intelligentsia (or ‘clerisy’, to use Coleridge’s term) countered empiricism and materialism, and utilitarian threats: ‘[Idealism] represented an outlook that emphasised metaphysical questions in philosophy, historicist analysis of the past, the spiritual character of the world, the active powers of the human mind, intuitionism, subjective religiosity, the responsibility of individuals for undertaking moral choice and action, the relative or even absolute importance of communities and communal institutions over individual action or rights, and the shallowness of any mode of reductionist thought.’9 This apologetic when combined with an idealist interpretation of the classics was utilised to preserve spiritual and intellectual credibility against advancing materialism. This was especially valuable in a period which saw the rapid laicization of academic posts. Turner continues, ‘The spirituality inherent in late century philosophical idealism provided to university-educated men by then recruited across a broad spectrum of religious beliefs and social backgrounds a similar bulwark against the dissolvents of radical individualistic politics, religious scepticism, reductionist empiricism, and scientific naturalism.’10 He quotes the example of the work of George Grote (1794–1871) on Plato: ‘Grote’s analysis of Platonic Philosophy carried out in the context of the ancient world the attack on idealism that characterised Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865) and the later portions of his Autobiography (1873).’11 One of the main reasons for Jowett’s considerable significance was that his work on the classics was to have a much longer influence than that of Grote: ‘[J]ust as Grote attempted to make Plato conform to Enlightenment rationalism, Jowett sought to make him conform to German idealism.’12 However, the cultural context of the rise of idealism is also important. The acceptance of this particular philosophical movement at Oxford was greatly aided by the legacy of the Romantic Movement. Mandelbaum describes the rise of idealism in this broader context: ‘It was out of the new conviction concerning the inner spiritual forces in the individual, in natural objects, and in cultures, and out of a conviction that there was a unity in all of these forces, that German idealism arose. The forms of argumentation within idealism may have originally been parasitic on

28 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

the Kantian system, but it was not that system, and its difficulties, which can be said to have engendered what was new in this movement.’13 This is effectively a rebellion against the dominance of enlightened reason, by which mankind can forge a future out of the application of his own rational thought to the world around him. No longer does the individual stand over against the cosmos which is treated as an impersonal material entity whose main purpose is to serve the needs of the race and be exploited for the needs of mankind’s onward and upward progress. Idealism enabled the material world to be charged with messages of spiritual meaning. This Romantic rebellion was a revolt against the deadness of nature and a mechanistic attitude to creation. Although Kant had himself famously dared people to think for themselves and break free of the limitation of inherited political and religious authority, his own philosophy also provided the means which could result in human reason being put firmly in its place. As early as 1795 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) had planned a translation of Kant, the result of his interest in German literature which he rated above that of France or England and which helped him break free of eighteenth-century mechanistic philosophy. During his stay in Germany, Coleridge became acquainted with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason about 1799, and combined this with the Cambridge Platonists’ concept of reason being the ‘the candle of the Lord’.14 What Coleridge desired was that metaphysical ideas should have more than the postulated validity envisaged by Kant; they must have the ontological reality which was provided by the Platonists. This was not just the utilization of human reason for its own ends, but a combination of reason with a philosophical tradition which facilitated the spiritual development of mankind. Commenting on this, Bernard Reardon states how ‘Coleridge asserted the existence of a “higher reason” for which the great truths of the spirit were truths indeed, not simply plausible assumptions. Kant’s “practical reason” thus becomes something more than what he himself was content to understand it.’15 The Romanticism of Coleridge and Wordsworth could blend with the philosophical idealism that sought a resolution in Christian beliefs. Stephen Prickett’s detailed work has shown how these two writers had a considerable influence on Christian thought in Britain, an influence which included Keble, F.D. Maurice and J.H. Newman. Indeed, Prickett says that Wordsworth was the ‘unofficial poet laureate of the Oxford Movement’ and that Coleridge’s Church and State is an apologia for the Church; ‘a counterpoise or polarity of the civil power within the state’.16 Coleridge’s second child, born in 1798, was named Berkeley, indicating his affinity with the founding father of British idealism.17

The Rise of British Idealism 29

Coleridge’s writings are full of the rediscovery of the spirituality of the natural world, a rediscovery that when allied to holistic idealism would prove to be a valuable means by which the material world could be Christianised in the face of the bleakness of an advancing materialism. Coleridge’s vision was, ‘… in poetry, to elevate the imagination & set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated, as with a living soul, by the presence of Life – in prose, to the seeking with patience & a slow, very slow mind … What our faculties are and what they are capable of becoming. I love fields and & woods and mountains with almost visionary fondness’.18 Coleridge was thus captivated by both the moral law and the starry heavens and entranced by the beauty of the natural order. He understood Kant’s sense of mystery at the heavens above and the moral law that he found in his own conscience, and these themes are found in his co-operation with Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. In his poem Frost at Midnight (February 1798) Coleridge mused on what his infant son Hartley will learn from the world which speaks the ‘eternal language’ of God in terms of his immanent presence in all creation: But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself.19 This fusion of natural order and religious faith combined vaguely pantheistic tendencies with orthodox Christianity as the foundation of a moral order that no dry ‘proof of God’s existence’ could provide. Faith is grounded in experience rather than argument. It also shows that behind poetic images of wild and untamed creation was a deep sense of indebtedness to an emotional encounter with philosophy which could only be satisfied by an attempt to reflect on philosophical questions from a religious standpoint: ‘I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in; broke upon me “from the fountains of the great deep” and fell “from the windows of heaven”. The fontal truths of natural religion and the books of Revelation alike contributed to the flood. … I began then to ask myself, what proof I had of the outward existence of any thing? Of this

30 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

sheet of paper for instance, as a thing in itself, separate from the phenomena or image in my perception. … I became convinced that religion, as both the corner-stone and the keystone of morality, must have a moral origin; so far, at least, that the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will. … A more thorough revolution in my philosophic principles, and a deeper insight into my own heart, were yet wanting … .’20 This was a very different religion from that taught by Paleian ‘proofs’ of religion. Paley had famously used the image of a watch to infer that the designed characteristics of much of what he observed around him inferred the existence of a creative transcendent mind that had imparted that design. Paley’s argument can be construed not as simply inferring from a designed object that there must exist a divine designer, but that the nature of the watch displays the existence of various factors which work together for a common end. This kind of unemotional rational approach to God’s existence was unattractive to Coleridge; it had an inadequate understanding of the divine personality and had nothing to say to the emotional effects of encounter with God. Coleridge believed Paley’s natural theology implied that a man could be argued into faith by logical means. Such a God could be construed as a comfortable servant of mankind, who lived in the best of all possible designed worlds. Rational evidence of the mere existence of a God, however benevolent, could never satisfy the emotional needs of mankind. Coleridge felt himself bound ‘in conscience to throw the whole force of my intellect in the way of this [Paley’s] triumphal car, on which the tutelary genius of modern idolatry is borne, even at the risk of being crushed under the wheels’.21 The triumph of imagination and feeling over ‘evidence’ is summed up in one of Coleridge’s most famous remarks: ‘Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him if you can to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to his own evidence.’22 This fervent evangelistic creed must be spread abroad, but in what way could this urgent task be carried out? Coleridge coined the term ‘clerisy’ for those who would provide the necessary leaven for a needy society. The purpose of this group of elitist enlightened souls, who in some ways resembled Plato’s ‘guardians’, was to maintain social cohesion and to create a society in which the rampant and ever-spreading discoveries of science and technology would be held in check by a positive desire to preserve the best of the past. The intention was ‘… to preserve the stores, to guard the treasures, of past civilisation, and thus to bind the present with the past; to perfect and add to the same, and thus to

The Rise of British Idealism 31

connect the present with the future; but especially to diffuse through the whole community, and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensible both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent’.23 ‘To bind the present with the past … connect the present with the future.’ Here the Coleridgian vision connects with that of liberal Christians such as Thomas Arnold and the ensuing ‘Broad Church’ divines who sought to restate faith in the light of new knowledge. It also applied to those at least outwardly more ecclesiastically minded enthusiasts of the Oxford Movement. In Coleridge’s vision, the ‘clerisy’ served as a model for a spiritual elite who could provide a new vision of the world united in ‘progress’ which, under the influence of the incarnation, moved inexorably towards the fulfilment of God’s purposes. Coleridge’s On the Constitution of Church and State, published in 1830 just after the Catholic Emancipation Act, strongly emphasised the way in which the national Church was to promote itself as the transmitter of a divine and civilising vision which was the final destiny of the nation: ‘The proper object and end of the National Church is civilization with freedom … .’24 In 1867, J.S. Mill described how his views represented a reaction to those of the previous century: ‘The Germano-Coleridgian doctrine .… expresses the revolt of the human mind against the philosophy of the eighteenth century. It is ontological, because that was experimental; conservative, because that was innovative; religious, because so much of that was infidel; concrete and historical, because that was abstract and metaphysical; poetical because that was matterof-fact and prosaic.’25 This combination of both poetical and religious insight appealed to a holistic vision of the cosmos which fostered spiritual and personal values. Thomas McFarland, in a study of the influence of the pantheist tradition on Coleridge believed that much of Coleridge’s work was an attempt to illuminate what he called the contest between a Spinozistic and Kantian vision – the contrast between the platonic ‘I am’ tradition, which in Spinoza resulted in the identity of the one and the many, and the ‘It is’ tradition represented by Aristotelian analysis. McFarland stated that, ‘… we have forgotten how to think in systematic of organic terms in the sense that those terms had validity for philosophical minds from Descartes to Hegel’.26 The challenge that Coleridge presented to himself was to reconcile the ‘I am’ with the ‘It is’, in McFarland’s words, to ‘resolve the moral law and the starry heavens which Kant had wondered at’.27 In a discussion of the ‘I am’ tradition of Berkeleian idealism,

32 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

McFarland states that ‘Berkeley’s thought … dramatises the inadequacy of the mere “I am” starting point as a guarantee against pantheism; the starting point must be bulwarked by ontological and cosmological dualism’.28 For Coleridge, this was (at least partially) resolved in his acceptance of Trinitarian Christianity which enabled him to reconcile ‘I am’ and ‘It is’ in a ‘personalised extramundane deity’29 in which he could recognise himself as a moral agent. This tension is evident in Coleridge’s early (1795) work The Eolian Harp where his longing for a Neoplatonic Spinozism is quickly countered by a reassertion of Christian commitment: And what if all animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? But thy more serious eye a mild reproof Darts, O beloved woman! Nor such thoughts Dim and unhallowed doest thou not reject, And biddest me walk humbly with my God. Meek daughter of the family of Christ!30 Coleridge’s mind reflected the tension between Christianity and pantheism, between philosophical inferences and orthodox Christian theism, and in this it bears a strong resemblance to later idealist philosophers who felt acutely the tension between their idealistic and holistic vision of the cosmos and the particularities that are a necessary part of orthodox Christian revelation. Coleridge also believed in the rational arrangement of creation: ‘… in such a Being there could exist no motive to the creation of a machine for its own sake; that, therefore, the material world must have been made for the sake of man, as once the high-priest and representative of the Creator’ and that members of the human race were ‘destined to move progressively towards that divine idea which we have learnt to contemplate as the final cause of all creation, and the centre in which all its lines converge’.31 Many years later, this progressive vision of mankind as the final cause and purpose of all creation would be utilised by idealist theologians in their emphasis on incarnational Logos – theology as the essential ground for a rational Christian theism. This powerful and influential Christian apologetic would be so filled with the teleological implications of optimism and progress that its exponents came to see mankind as the

The Rise of British Idealism 33

terminus of God’s created purposes and even to confuse those purposes with the achievements of their own age and the worldwide spread of a ‘globalised’ version of Oxford theology. Coleridge had prepared the ground for this vision. Even his insistence that idealist philosophy was not enough on its own did not always serve as a warning to later idealist Christian apologists that they could not just embrace this philosophy without asking hard questions about the scandalous historical particularities of the Christian faith. This tension was to be a feature of the relationship between philosophical idealism and the Christianity throughout the nineteenth century.32 However, the cultural influences which favoured idealism were not confined to literature. In the rising importance of the natural sciences, a significant contribution was made by William Whewell (1794–1866). Whewell began a lifelong career at Trinity College Cambridge in 1812, being ordained priest in 1826 and appointed Master of Trinity in 1841, a post he held until his death. Whewell developed an interest in Platonic philosophy and even wrote a translation of Plato’s Dialogues but such was the dominant influence of Jowett’s classicism at Oxford that it ‘received almost no commendations from reviewers’.33 His early life was devoted to various scientific pursuits (he coined the word ‘scientist’) but after 1830 he wrote mainly on the history and philosophy of science (History of the Inductive Sciences, 1838: The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History, 1840).34 Whewell’s approach to scientific methodology was that induction was essential to scientific method, but observations could only be given meaning by virtue of ‘Fundamental Ideas’ that were independent of perception and past experience and were a priori: ‘The Senses place before us the Characters of the Book of Nature; but these convey no knowledge to us, till we have discovered the Alphabet by which they are to be read. … The Alphabet, by means of which we interpret Phenomena, consists of the Ideas existing in our own minds; for these give to the phenomena that coherence and significance which is not an object of sense.’35 These Fundamental Ideas, especially the ‘Alphabet’, are similar to Kant’s ‘Concepts’. Whewell thought they were necessary truths, as were Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics, a conclusion which he shared with Kant. He countered Hume’s objection that experience provided no necessary connection between cause and effect by stating that our idea of necessary connection must also be a Fundamental Idea independent of experience. Whewell is important not so much for his own deductions about Fundamental Ideas, but for his recognition that science is not just pure induction from observation. Thus he could

34 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

dissociate science from undue reliance on empiricism, and extend the range of necessary truths from mathematics to the physical world. Richard Yeo states that Whewell employed both Platonism and Kantianism in his apologetic which formed a link between the physical and the spiritual worlds: ‘Whewell wanted to prove that “the Creator and Preserver of the world is also the Governor and Judge of men; that the author of the laws of nature is also the Author of the Law of Duty.” ’36 Also, Whewell was one of the ‘Cambridge Network’ which we have seen was concentrated at Trinity College and included the geologist Adam Sedgewick, Julius Hare, Frederick Maurice and Connop Thirlwall. Again, we have the characteristic Victorian interest in linking the physical and moral worlds, of the importance of the starry heavens above and the moral law within. This emphasis was congruent with the fact that Whewell had contacts with Wordsworth and the Romantic Movement,37 and his Platonic emphasis led him to postulate that our ability to decipher the laws of God proved that our minds were of the same nature as God’s mind. This displays a return to the concepts of the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century in which reason was the illuminating power of God. Richard Yeo illustrates how Whewell’s theories of science were therefore more in tune with those of the idealists than with the tradition of English empiricism: ‘[H]is philosophy of knowledge was a very significant contribution to the British form of idealism. Whewell attempted to repudiate empiricist philosophy without sacrificing the empirical dimension of physical science. At the same time, he was anxious to dissociate himself from Continental idealist thought which endangered philosophical realism. He rejected both the a priori science and pantheistic religion which stemmed from German idealism and hoped to avoid these consequences by emphasising the interdependence of intuitive and empirical elements in all knowledge.’38 Nevertheless, as den Otter has pointed out,39 Whewell was not always acceptable to the idealists, because of his innate political and religious conservatism and the manner in which his philosophy emphasised the individual at the expense of the value of community identity. Further, Whewell belonged to the ‘intuitionist’ school of philosophy. This school was related to idealism in that it would agree with the general claim that the visible world is a veil which conceals spiritual reality. However, most idealists were suspicious of what they believed was the somewhat mystical and arcane trends in intuitionist thought, and for that reason Whewell did not have such a significant effect on the development of idealism in Britain as might be thought. Despite den Otter’s strictures on the intuitionist influence on the rise of British idealism, this relationship

The Rise of British Idealism 35

is an area which might well prove a fruitful area for further research, especially in relation to the nineteenth-century debates between philosophy, theology and the developing sciences. Idealism in its British form was therefore assisted by both the literary and Romantic Movements and from reflections within the natural sciences. Such powerful influences could be combined to enable theistically minded members of the intelligentsia to counter the sense of change and decay that many felt was a constant characteristic of the times. Certain churchmen would also be entranced by the idealist programme, and its influence cut across the self-defined ‘parties’ in a manner which displays how cultural forces outside the sphere of received theological discourse can affect all those who wish to find a credible intellectual framework for the Christian gospel. The literary and philosophical influences on the rise of British idealism have received much more attention than the reaction of men like Whewell and his colleagues; the interaction of philosophy with the rise of scientific endeavour in this period in Britain is still an under-determined area and would benefit from future research at a greater depth than can be discussed here. Nevertheless, the attitude of Christians towards science was to be profoundly influenced by idealist presuppositions for the remainder of the nineteenth century. However, the vogue for idealism did not last. Frank M. Turner sums up the reasons for this loss of interest: ‘[T]he new directions taken by continental philosophy, the general separation of philosophy and theology, the collapse of the broader culture of liberal Protestantism grounded in idealist theology, the general abandonment of idealism in scientific thought, and the reorientation and distortion of much intellectual activity resulting from the establishment of the Bolshevik regime in Russia in 1918 led to the neglect by historians of late Victorian idealism in virtually all of its settings.’40 To this we should add the pressures of cultural pessimism about ‘progress’ resulting from the political and social chaos of the period culminating in the First World War, and increasing doubts about the philosophical status and meaning of phrases like ‘the ultimate nature of reality’. Further, idealism was often a philosophy which paid close attention to its cultural context, and its exponents were men who frequently expressed concern about the standards of education and social welfare of their age. In the analytic tradition, there was more emphasis given to the detailed nature of philosophical problems coupled with close analysis of the meaning of the language in which these problems were expressed. Peter Hylton, who has written a detailed study of the decline of idealism and the rise of the analytic

36 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

tradition, says that, ‘It is characteristic of much history of philosophy written within the analytic tradition to presuppose that very little of the context is relevant, that the problems and assumptions of another age are to be assumed to be the same as ours ….’41 This perceptive remark explains what den Otter and Turner see as the lack of interest in the social context in much historical writing about philosophy. Den Otter’s conclusion is that, ‘From the vantage-point of the late nineteenth century, idealism appeared to be much more pervasive than is often acknowledged, and rather more than an idiosyncratic expression of a broader continental reaction against the bêtes noires of unbridled positivism and naturalism. Further, philosophic idealism survived longer than is suggested by the very public challenges of logical positivists and other critics in the first decade of the twentieth century.’42 James Patrick has given an interesting account of the survival of idealism at Oxford, after the First World War, amongst the group he terms the ‘Magdalen Metaphysicals’. The most well-known member of this group was not primarily a philosopher but the writer C.S. Lewis.43 Nevertheless, despite idealism’s persistence, the undoubted influence of German philosophical predecessors was a matter of concern. Den Otter describes how ‘the extreme “liberalism” and the extreme “authoritarianism” apparently sanctioned by German philosophy were perceived to be alarming’.44 These characteristics were believed to form an apologetic foundation for authoritarian regimes related to the rise of nationalisms in Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. There was also the vexed question of style, which we have already encountered in Mansel ‘s early broadside about the language in which these ideas were expressed. Continental philosophy was supposedly not congenial to British thinkers: The British idealist Thomas Hill Green, obscure writer though he was, criticised Hegel’s own writings as, ‘… that ill-organised compilation of notes of lectures in which alone his doctrine is preserved [which forms] a barrier to profitable study …’.45 There is an important distinction in idealistic philosophy which is relevant to the debates about the coherence of personality and is therefore relevant to Christian debates about the relationship between divine and human nature. This is not only relevant to the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, but to the existence of finite human personalities. ‘Absolute Idealism’ was promoted in England by F.H. Bradley (1846–1924) who, following Hegel, concerned himself with the totality, the ‘Absolute’. Copleston, in his discussion of Hegel and Bradley, states that Hegel was more optimistic in his opinion than Bradley in that the Absolute was within the capacity of human reason: ‘He endeavoured to

The Rise of British Idealism 37

lay bare the essential structure of the self-developing universe, the totality of Being; and he showed an overwhelming confidence in the power of dialectical thought to reveal the nature of the Absolute both in itself, and in its concrete manifestations in Nature and Spirit.’46 Bradley had less optimism about this conclusion; ‘the world of discursive thought was … the world of appearance …’ which resulted in ‘a peculiar combination of scepticism and fideism’.47 A further problem was that idealistic philosophy raised the problem as to how there could be genuinely finite individuals. Langford, in his work on the foundations in English theology from 1900 to 1920 states that according to the Absolute idealists, ‘Man’s dignity was to be found in the fact that he was a reflection of Ultimate Reality.’48 God could not be, as orthodox Christianity had taught, a metaphysically distinct person. As Sell says, ‘It was … the fear that individual selves would be annihilated by absolutism which prompted the response of the personal idealists.’49 What was perceived as a lack of clarity about human individuality in Green and Bradley resulted in the development of ‘Personal Idealism’ towards the end of the nineteenth century and is seen in Andrew Seth (Pringle-Pattison ) (1856–1931) and C.C.J. Webb (1865–1954). PringlePattison believed that the Hegelian viewpoint effectively destroyed the existence of individual human personalities. In Hegel’s thought, ‘… there is room only for one self-consciousness; finite selves are wiped out, and nature, deprived of any life of its own, becomes … the still mirror in which the one Self-consciousness contemplates itself’.50 Clement C.J. Webb stood closer to Christianity than most idealists, and throughout his long life endeavoured to integrate Christian insights with his philosophy, notably in his Gifford Lectures of 1918–19, significantly entitled God and Personality (London: Allen and Unwin, 1918). Although Pringle-Pattison did not embrace orthodox Christian beliefs, both he and Webb’s observations were very similar to those of orthodox Christians, that much idealistic thought effectively denied the existence and value of the individual and obscured the distinction between creature and Creator. As we shall see in later chapters these criticisms were fundamental to Christian objections to the idealist’s project that, in the words of A.E. Taylor’s criticism of Green, the divine being was only ‘a half-baptised Aristotelian God’.51 A further area of interest is the relationship between moral and ethical belief and the rise of idealism, resulting in what might be termed ‘moral idealism’. There was a marked tendency in Victorian theistic writing to speak of the ‘Moral Law’ in highly objective terms, even to the point of elevating the importance of the concept above scientific ‘laws’. This was

38 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

in part a result of the enormous influence of Kant on nineteenthcentury thought, and in particular his discussion of morality in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Kant offered a duty-based theory of personal ethics, which separated morality from religion by making ethics autonomous, ostensibly based on self-evident rational truths. Kant influenced Jowett at Oxford: ‘Jowett believed that it was possible to hold together religion and the external world by means of a belief in God the law-giver, responsible for both the moral and physical laws’52 and Jowett’s Platonism and classical studies created at Oxford a favourable climate in which idealism could flourish, exemplified most strongly in one of his brightest pupils, Thomas Hill Green. What Jowett had started, Green continued. Despite the more personalist turn in idealism towards the end of the nineteenth century, this type of philosophising was on the wane as both philosophical methods and cultural atmosphere changed in fin-de-siècle England. Edward Caird (1835–1908), Jowett’s successor as Master of Balliol in 1893, expressed concisely the problems and challenges that idealism faced, and said wistfully about its declining influence that, ‘I am afraid that the lectures will only address a very small number of people who have already drifted away from ordinary Christianity, but who are anxious to preserve its moral essence.’53 This is a remarkably concise summary of the decline of idealism in theistic thought in the preceding decade. Idealism was a powerful movement at Oxford which assisted those who were concerned about the validity of the Christian message at what was a period of ‘acute symbolic change’54 when the centuries-long influence of the Church of England was under attack, and when its influence over the older universities was being rapidly eroded. In such an atmosphere, idealism was a useful legitimating narrative by means of which both Christians and other less orthodox theists could foster a vision of a static order of truth behind the rapidly developing scientific and technological revolutions of the time. Utilitarianism, with its materialist emphasis, appeared to contain little comfort for those who sensed that times were rapidly changing and who were apprehensive about the dissolving Christian cosmos. Mill had himself seen that his ideas were little comfort to his own faith as well as being a threat to others. As early as the 1840s he commented on the nature of the early Victorian intellectual ferment: ‘… the controversies to which I had listened had unsettled me. Difficulties had been suggested which I need not have heard of, but out of which some road or other had now to be looked for. … None of the ways in which … mental regeneration is sought … Bible Societies, Tract Societies,

The Rise of British Idealism 39

Puseyism, Socialism, Chartism, Benthamism, etc. – will do, though doubtless they all have some elements of truth in them.’55 ‘Benthamism’ had been a formative influence on James Mill, and his son John Stewart Mill was himself indebted to Bentham’s influence, but still Mill sensed confusion in the Zeitgeist. If it was enough to unsettle Mill the utilitarian, it was much more significant to other members of the intelligentsia who found utilitarian ideas lacking in the ability to supply their spiritual needs. They found that idealism provided a refuge against an age in which scientific and technological aggrandisement threatened to drown their desire for a more spiritual interpretation of life. Cultural instability also increased as fin de siècle society became embroiled with rising nationalisms and militaristic movements in the early years of the twentieth century, which coincided with a vigorous attack on idealism from philosophical developments, but before this happened its influence was profound and significant on Christian thinkers of a whole variety of spiritual traditions.

5 Idealism Embraced: Thomas Hill Green

Green’s philosophy … met exactly the spiritual needs of young men brought up in some orthodox Christian faith who, like Green himself in his youth, could no longer accept without qualification both their faith and also the religious vocation which, for university students, so often went with it. Gordon, P. and White, J. (1979), p. 9 Rain poured down incessantly on the spires and colleges of Oxford on a cold March morning in 1882 as the long funeral procession extended along Beaumont Street. Two thousand people congregated at the cemetery as the bells of several of the college chapels and churches tolled out their respects, whilst many of the tradesmen in the City either wholly or partially closed their places of business. As well as the worthies of the university, the Mayor and Corporation of Oxford and the boys of the High School and the Central School were also present. Who could call forth such an appreciative and devoted crowd on a cold morning, a gathering which involved not only the ‘gown’ of the university, but also the ‘town’ of Oxford? The fact that they were remembering an Oxford philosopher might seem strange, for academics, especially those with a reputation for the arcane abstractions of philosophy, do not usually spring to mind as being likely candidates for high ranking in the popularity stakes. However, Thomas Hill Green had combined the traditional academic life of a philosopher with a concern for the civic and educational welfare of Oxford which made him a respected figure well beyond his chosen home of Balliol College. This serious-minded mid-Victorian young man moved both intellectually and socially outside the dogmas and practices of his inherited evangelical faith, yet at the same time in the manner of many Victorians he retained a moral seriousness and 40

Idealism Embraced 41

personal integrity that he believed was its greatest fruit. Green displayed a combination of faith, reason and citizenship that impressed a wide spectrum of people. He was in tune with his times, in which fundamental doubts about the coherence and truth of Christian doctrines was often combined with a moral seriousness which struggled to hold on to the fruits of the Christian moral code. Green had been born in 1836 at Birkin, a small village in rural Yorkshire. His father, Valentine Green, was the evangelical rector of this tiny community. After a slow start at school he went up to Rugby in 1850. Here, his love of mental independence and a certain social isolation, probably a consequence of his isolated rural childhood, gave the impression to one of the masters in 1853 that he was ‘constitutionally indolent’.1 As a consequence of this trait he seldom gained much distinction. However, his daydreaming was not just idling away the time. He was developing considerable independence of mind, for he says concerning himself that he failed to gain a prize essay because another boy’s ‘… essay showed more labour, i.e. came out of thirteen books instead of his own head’.2 Later hearers of his philosophical lectures at Oxford would remember how his manner of articulating philosophy owed more to an almost visible personal struggle with thinking aloud than it did to describing or repeating the views of the major figures of the past. His Rugby studies introduced him to Charles Kingsley and F.D. Maurice, and the strong social conscience of these Anglican writers began Green’s lifelong interest in the relationship of social action to Christian faith. Green’s studies, and indeed his whole life, were pervaded by the serious influence of his evangelical home. In fact R.L. Nettleship’s Memoir shows that while at Rugby Green’s abstemiousness represented an attitude that was characteristic of Victorian religious evangelical ‘seriousness’ without apparently being sanctimonious. A preliminary visit to Oxford before he started on his undergraduate career was something of a shock to this quiet and studious young man, and resulted in a censorious judgement from the eighteen-year-old scholar: ‘The finest colleges are the most corrupt, the functionaries from the heads to the servants being wholly given to quiet dishonesty, and the undergraduates to sensual idleness.’3 He entered Balliol College at Oxford in October 1855, but the new freedom meant that indolence reasserted itself – a friend recalled that he had that habit of undergraduates in all periods, of never sending in his essays on the right day. The result was an eventual second class in ‘moderations’, and this incurred the criticism of the great Benjamin Jowett, who spotted that despite the apparent daydreaming and indiscipline Green had something in him which promised much better things.

42 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Jowett awakened him from his indolence by telling him, ‘If you do not get your First, Green, I shall have a great deal to answer for.’4 Already Green was asserting his independence of mind and his willingness to lay aside many of the requirements of Christian orthodoxy in the name of what he perceived was an authentic spirituality for the times. For Green, this involved him in a lifetime’s quest which investigated how philosophical idealism could be a means by which a credible theism could be retained despite doubts about Christian beliefs. Melvin Richter underlines the importance of the evangelical background of Green’s thought, a factor which was influential in many Victorian lives even though they came to reject this particular expression of the Christian faith: ‘[T]he fortunes of Idealism were determined by the intellectual situation which challenged the grounds for belief of a generation brought up under the discipline of evangelical piety. Green adapted Idealism to the needs of those who wanted justification for the moral code and values of their parents; he gave conscience a political and social meaning, and gave an outlet to the strong sense of duty and obligation to serve, so characteristic of his generation.’5 Such developments enabled spiritually minded members of the intelligentsia to share in a broad quest for a theistic view of life which was an agnostic parallel development to Thomas Arnold’s Christian vision embracing the whole nation in a sense of moral duty. They could draw strength from Green’s eventually explicit disposal of the ‘mythological’ elements of Christianity which disengaged matters of belief from scientific discussion about matters of fact. The result was the replacement of the authority of Christian dogma with the imperative of an ethical obligation, and a characteristic mid-Victorian tendency which manifested itself in the ethical seriousness of hard work and social action. As well as giving an intellectual grounding for those who could not accept Christian dogma, Green’s work was to encourage both ‘Broad Church’ thinkers and the heirs of the Tractarians in their work. This atmosphere created a revived interest in what Green called the ‘spiritual principle’ as a background to both social and political thought at a time when more materialistic attitudes were beginning to prevail and when the Churches were beginning to sense that their voices were being lost amidst alternative views for society. As R.L. Nettleship pointedly said in his memoir concerning Green’s transformed Christian ethic, ‘… in the creeds of modern liberalism and modern evangelicalism [Green] found a congenial language, which he had no difficulty in translating when he wished into that of German metaphysic’.6 It was not only concerning his developing radical theism that Green was beginning to find his voice. He was not afraid to speak out in favour

Idealism Embraced 43

of politically radical views, and as early as 1858 at the Oxford Union he bravely took the side of the MP John Bright, the scourge of aristocratic privilege and fearless critic of the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny. The fact that his championship of radicalism was overwhelmingly defeated frustrated and depressed the young Green’s enthusiasm for initiating changes in society: ‘I am almost ashamed to belong to a university which is in such a state of darkness.’7 The revolution in the government of Oxford colleges of the 1850s did not seem to have had much effect on the conservatism and reactionary political life of the university. Jowett and his friends continued to appreciate the latent ability and growing evidence of talent in this young scholar. Green’s efforts as a result of Jowett’s ‘constant stirring me up’ resulted in a first class in the literae humaniores in 1859, which was followed by election to a fellowship at Balliol in 1860. In 1864 Green competed for the chair of moral philosophy at St Andrews but was not appointed. The following year he became an assistant commissioner for a Royal Commission enquiring into the state of national education. He was surprised to learn that Frederick Temple had recommended him, a sign of Green’s acceptance by one who was eminent in Anglican educational circles but who was suspected of consorting with heretics because of his association with the radical theology of Essays and Reviews in 1860. A sign of the greater freedom in academic appointments consequent upon the continuing reforms of Oxford University was that in 1866 Green became probably the first layman to be appointed tutor at Balliol, and in 1867 contested unsuccessfully for the Waynflete professorship of moral philosophy at Oxford. He continued to serve as a tutor until 1878 when he was elected Whyte’s professor of moral philosophy. His Oxford career took him beyond the walls of his college into active participation in the work of the town council, and although he created enemies amongst its more conservative elements, by the time of his early death at the age of 46 his standing was such that, as we have seen, his funeral was a notable event both in the university and city of Oxford. As early as 1858, in an essay read to ‘The Old Mortality Essay Society’ the 22-year-old Green expressed religious views that show a considerable departure from his family’s evangelicalism: ‘The point, however, for us specially to observe is that in the age of the creeds, Christian truth has reached quite a different phase from that presented to us in the writings of the New Testament. … In them, Christian truth is no longer the immediate expression of the highest possible spiritual life; it has become a theology … .’8 Green believed that Christians had unthinkingly read the Creeds as a development of ideas that were latent in the

44 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

New Testament. He was already saying that in fact these were radically incompatible ways of understanding the Christian tradition, and this was a challenge to traditional formulations of the relation between scripture and dogma. This is not ‘development of doctrine’, but a separation of apostolic source material, conceived as the Gospel narratives, from subsequent development. Green showed little interest in the emerging tradition of critical Biblical scholarship, even though there are some fragments in his writings which comment on the Gospels. He was thus largely unaware of the rising emphasis on the creative nature of the Gospels, even though there is an extant fragment of a lecture of his on the Gospel of John.9 In this fragment, Green shows a marked tendency to use the Johannine development of the synoptic tradition as a vehicle for his own scepticism about miracles. His favourite character is the doubting Thomas. Thomas’s doubts are construed by Green as the evangelist’s means of pointing towards a more sophisticated faith than that which is based on mere credence of historical events: ‘To the evangelist, however, the occurrence of such events seems essential, though (a) faith is not derived from them, but is a condition of the right interpretation of them, and (b) the highest faith can dispense with these, see xx.29, “ blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.” ’ 10 Green’s apologetic was expressing a very different Christian theism from that being advocated at the same time by Mansel in his Bampton Lectures, who as we have seen was proclaiming the futility of philosophical argument as a means of preserving Christian belief. Green was already devising an alternative which would not reinforce doctrines based on the necessary authority of divine revelation enshrined in dogmatic statements but would hopefully supplant them by a theistic idealism. He utilised his knowledge of the idealist tradition by embarking on an extended critique of the English empirical tradition which went back to Locke, who at the time did not feature in the Oxford philosophy syllabus. R.L. Nettleship, Green’s biographer, notes that, ‘The teaching of philosophy in Oxford at this time centred round certain works of Aristotle, to which portions of Plato had recently been added. Modern philosophy was scarcely recognised officially as part of the course, but the writings of J.S. Mill, especially his Logic, were largely read … .’11 Green’s attraction to Locke was shown in his later 1868 essay Popular Philosophy and its Relation to Life. Green believed that in the mid-nineteenth century the empirical inheritance from Locke had not yet been conquered by the new evaluation of morality given by Kant: ‘In modern times it is the philosophy of nature and knowledge inherited from Bacon and Locke that appears in the numerous “Natural

Idealism Embraced 45

Histories of Ethics” with which the world has been beset during the last century and a half; and, conversely, it was a moral interest – the desire to find room for freedom and immortality – that moved Kant to attempt a more profound analysis of knowledge. The moral philosophy which he set himself to reform is still the popular philosophy.’12 Green’s further critique of the empiricists is shown by his editorship of The Philosophical Works of David Hume, and in his lengthy Introduction to Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1874–45).13 Green believed that Locke, Hume and Butler failed to provide adequate grounds for morality and that, ‘The practical reconstruction of moral ideas in England was to come, not directly from a sounder philosophy, but from the deeper views of life which the contemplative poets originated, from the revival of evangelical religion, and from the conception of freedom and right. … In England, it was specially Wordsworth who delivered literature from bondage to the philosophy that had naturalised man.’14 As R.L. Nettleship said concerning the springs of Green’s thought, in a comment which reiterates a Coleridgian theme, ‘It was not within his own breast that he had read what he was, but in the open scroll of the world, of the world, however, as written within and without by a selfconscious and self-determining spirit.’15 Green was aware of the influence of Romanticism, and that Wordsworth saw the world as a manifestation of the spiritual. He had became the enemy of all calculating utilitarian attitudes; instinctively if not philosophically believing that these resulted in a much too self-centred attitude to life, whether from the point of view of the individual or from the aspirations of society. Green’s inherited piety, even a piety shorn of its Christian dogmatic foundations, sought to undermine the individualistic naturalism which failed to provide a spiritual rationale for social ethics. This was a consistent feature of his thought throughout his life, and the first two sections of his posthumous Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) are entitled ‘The Spiritual Principle in Knowledge’ and ‘The Spiritual Principle in Nature’, and in his ‘Introduction’ to this work he challenged the post-Lockean empiricists that their system ‘… logically carries with it the conclusion, however the conclusion may be disguised, that, in inciting ourselves or others to do anything because it ought to be done, we are at best making use of a serviceable illusion’.16 The fundamental question of the Prolegomena was this: ‘Can the knowledge of nature be itself part or product of nature, in the sense of nature in which it is said to be an object of knowledge?’17 Although this question was articulated at the end of his short life, it is a summation of much that animated his entire output. Green never believed that it was

46 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

possible to explain our knowledge of the world by any materialistic philosophy. His whole life was lived in what he defined as a ‘consciousness of a moral ideal’ which was not just the product of natural forces. ‘Reality’ for Green was necessarily constituted by a consciousness which gave meaning to the multitude of relations within the natural order: ‘We can attach no meaning to “reality”, as applied to the world of phenomena, but that of existence under definite and unalterable relations; and we find that it is only for a thinking consciousness that such relations can subsist.’18 It was not possible to deduce moral purpose by an empirical examination of nature, a position which Green reiterated widely in his Prolegomena: ‘[N]ature, in its reality, or in order to be what it is, implies a principle which is not natural. By calling the principle not natural we mean that it is neither included among the phenomena which through its presence to them form a nature, nor consists in their series, nor is itself determined by any of the relations which it constitutes among them. … We are most safe in calling it spiritual, because, for reasons given, we are warranted in thinking of it as a self-distinguishing consciousness.’19 For Green, nature points beyond itself to a spiritual unity not derived from observation of nature itself. All knowledge and human consciousness becomes a participation in the ‘eternal consciousness’. Speaking of the ‘eternal consciousness’ as a pointer to Green’s view of citizenship, Vincent states that, ‘Nature and knowledge thus imply through their uniform system of relations an eternal consciousness, a non-natural principle independent and not reducible to the relations for which it is a precondition. This is not a causal proof of God’s existence, but rather one based on sufficient reason i.e. a knowable world necessarily implies an eternal consciousness.’20 In the Prolegomena Green offers a definition of the eternal consciousness, given in his characteristic labyrinthine prose: ‘There must be eternally such a subject which is all that the self conscious subject, developed in time, has the possibility of becoming; in which the idea of the human spirit, or all that it has in itself to become, is completely realised. This consideration may suggest the true notion of the spiritual relation in which we stand to God; that He is not merely a Being who has made us, in the sense that we exist as an object of the divine consciousness in the same way in which we must suppose the system of nature so to exist, but that He is a Being in whom we exist; with whom we are in principle one; with whom the human spirit is identical, in the sense that He is all which the human spirit is capable of becoming.’21 The status of this ‘eternal consciousness’ has been one of the most controversial features of Green’s thought, and there have

Idealism Embraced 47

been those who see it as Green’s agnostic compromise with his lost evangelicalism whereby he can save the cosmos from the onslaughts of materialism by constructing a relational philosophy which necessarily needs a transcendent order to guarantee both the truth of our thoughts and the moral basis of our judgements. Further, Green’s definition raises considerable questions as to how change and progress in consciousness can be related to a divine being so conceived. One is reminded of Paul’s speech on the Areopagus recorded in Acts, chapter 17. Here Paul quotes an anonymous source which may well combine both his Jewish background and his Greek culture, that God is the one ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). This divine immanence was proving an increasingly attractive doctrine to Christians anxious to invoke the relevance of their doctrines to a changing world, but for them, as for Paul in Athens, the stumbling-block to a complete acceptance of immanence was the necessity of an historical event in which God had revealed his personality in the specificity of the man Jesus of Nazareth. Green does not explore what it means to make the human spirit ‘one’ with the divine Spirit, even though there are clear implications for the traditional Christian understanding of God’s personality as distinct from the world he has created. There were also philosophical differences. Geoffrey Thomas has pointed out that Green’s doctrine of ‘participation’ in the ‘eternal consciousness’ is different from a Berkeleian belief that God has a causal relationship with human observers and that ‘God causes those ideas in which human knowledge exists’.22 Thomas believes that Green’s doctrine is one whereby humanity can ‘know in part what the eternal consciousness makes knowable’. Peter Hylton hints that in his formulation of this doctrine Green was influenced by his Christian beliefs, and it is likely that Green’s thoughts were still being driven by the engine of his inherited evangelical piety. A doctrine such as the ‘eternal consciousness’ was an idealised and secularised version of theological parallels in Christian thought which relate to the presence of the Holy Spirit as the means by which we are given understanding of the world and God and of the relationship of the creator to the created order. Also in the background are Christian parallels concerning the New Testament vision of Christ upholding the creation, as can be found in passages of Scripture such as Colossians 1:15ff. Melvin Richter, in the course of a detailed discussion of Green’s metaphysics, points out that his doctrine of the ‘eternal consciousness’ was a priori and that it was supposed to be ‘a secure base on which to build a new structure of belief embodying the essentials of Christianity’.23 By such a process Green attempted to

48 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

construct a Christianity which is a rationale for the exercise of Christian principles without the necessity for Christian dogma. Green’s adoption of a binding ‘eternal consciousness’ is reflected in his belief that the moral ideal is not conceived as being limited to individualistic endeavour, but extends to what he calls ‘The Common Good’. Such moves reflect the influence of Green’s Christian heritage, and mirror the importance in orthodox thought of concepts such as the ‘Body of Christ’ and even ‘The Communion of Saints’. These concepts have been transposed by means of idealism into a commonwealth of citizens who are bound together by the transcendent ideal of being partakers of the ‘eternal consciousness’. Green clearly believed that his revised philosophical theism necessarily invoked the principle of social responsibility and served as a check on the prevalent utilitarian philosophy of J.S. Mill: ‘Having found his pleasures and pains dependent on the pleasures and pains of others, he must be able in the contemplation of a possible satisfaction of himself to include the satisfaction of those others, and that a satisfaction of them as ends to themselves and not as means to his pleasure. He must, in short, be capable of conceiving and seeking a permanent well-being in which the permanent well-being of others is included. … To a man living under its influence the idea of the absolutely desirable, the effort to better himself, must from the first express itself in some form of social requirement.’24 The Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick was critical of Green’s advocacy of concepts such as the ‘spiritual principle’ and ‘eternal consciousness’. Sidgwick’s personality was a kind of Cambridge mirror image of Green, both in his reputation for personal integrity and in his struggles with the Christian faith. For a time he toyed with the ideas of the writers of Essays and Reviews, but in 1869 he resigned his Cambridge fellowship as he believed he could no longer hold it with integrity, as he could no longer subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. However, his biographers show that like Green, he was ‘deeply influenced by the morality of the Biblical narrative, even if he could not accept Christian dogmas’.25 Sidgwick had heard it rumoured that Green might take deacon’s orders in 1862: ‘I talked with Green in Oxford; I was horrified by his idea of diaconising; it is only in such a milieu as Oxford that a high-minded man could think of it.’26 In fact Sidgwick could never come to terms with Green’s idealism: a philosopher in the utilitarian tradition, he once described the post-Kantian tradition of Green as a ‘tower of Babel’.27 Despite these strictures on Green’s methodology, his philosophical system reflects a necessary interaction of the individual with society.

Idealism Embraced 49

There can be no such concept as the ‘common good’ for the isolated individual: ‘The idea, unexpressed and inexpressible, of some absolute and all-embracing end is, no doubt, the source of such devotion, but it can only take effect in the fulfilment of some particular function in which it finds but restricted utterance. It is in fact only in so far as we are members of a society, of which we can conceive the common good as our own, that the idea has any practical hold on us at all … .’28 This framework was favourable to a broadly Platonist alliance of spirituality, education and society. It is a society composed of individuals whose thoughts are constituted by their relations in the wider world, both human and natural. It is a cosmos in which a modified theism can give meaning to those relationships and to the thoughts of mankind. It is a philosophically sophisticated version of the belief of the sixteenthcentury astronomer Kepler, who reflected that his investigation of the natural world involved thinking God’s thoughts after him. However, the question remains as to the nature of the God in whose reality we are participating. Questions of this nature lie at the heart of Green’s appeal to those who sought to retain a theistic outlook on life even though they could not accept orthodox Christian beliefs. Green’s emphasis on the necessity for moral seriousness, even when it was a seriousness that could no longer rest on doctrines concerning the Christian God, shows why he was able to capture the imaginations of many people despite his convoluted and difficult literary style. The questions asked by his philosophy were an articulation of the doubts and difficulties felt by a wide range of people, believers and otherwise, both in Oxford and elsewhere. It was also a form of spirituality which reflected Green’s own personal pilgrimage in which he attempted to combine the moral imperatives from his evangelical past and his desire to unite this with a coherent intellectual framework. The relationship between Jowett and Green illustrates the creative tension between Christian doctrines and the problems that can result from imposing an alien philosophical framework on the Christian revelation. During Green’s formative years at Balliol in the late 1850s, Jowett was well on his way to becoming a seminal figure for the rising influence of philosophical idealism and for ‘Broad Church’ sympathisers such as Frederick Temple, the former Headmaster of Rugby. Despite these influences of progressive thought, Jowett also represented an older tradition, that which sought to maintain the supremacy of the classics over the emerging professions representing science and technology. Peter Hinchliff in his biography of Jowett believed that throughout his life Jowett retained a rather snobbish attitude to scientific development.

50 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Indeed, he saw that it would be a battle to preserve classics from the encroachments of science: ‘It seems to me that all those who, like ourselves, are entrusted with the care of ancient studies, have a hard battle to fight against the physical sciences which are everywhere encroaching, and will certainly lower the character of knowledge if they are not counteracted.’29 This was to be a continuing problem for liberal theology; despite its intention to meet the challenges of the new age, it was still essentially captive to a much older academic tradition which implied that the achievements of the men of science and technology who gained their prestige outside the orbit of Oxford privilege were inferior in culture and intellect. As time passed, this meant that there would be serious defects in the Broad Church reply to the implications of the new disciplines for questions of faith. Certainly Green never showed much interest in science, and it could be that this was due to the great influence of Jowett over the developing philosophy of his formative years and perhaps to his participation in the inheritance of the Rugby classical traditions. Despite these strictures, Jowett’s influence was especially attractive to young men such as Green from a conservative Christian background, who were becoming anxious about the relevance and coherence of their faith. Green’s growing interest in the well-being of society and the social aspects of morality were sympathetic to Jowett’s liberal idea of divinity as ‘personality clothed in laws’.30 R.L. Nettleship quotes an early undergraduate paper of Green’s on ‘Loyalty’, which summarises much of what Green stood for throughout his life: ‘Recognising the duty owed by all to the supreme power and common good of the state, the loyal man is bound to his fellow-citizens in the unity of a common object, which gives to the private pursuits of his daily life their value and spiritual meaning.’31 Some critics have pointed out that this vision could degenerate into an austere and bleak form of spiritual life which in its concentration on good works elbows out the living springs of what remained of Christian spirituality. Melvin Richter in his study of the influence of Green on the political conscience of his times states that ‘Jowett’s attitudes … [are the] … final phase … of the Protestant ethic and its dissolution into a secular asceticism. The emphasis on hard labour as duty, the importance of the will, the obligation to destroy all sensual impulse by methodical discipline, the investing of one’s calling with religious sanctions – these were all aspects of Jowett’s gospel of work.’32 This is a severe judgement, which is more characteristic of Jowett than it is of Green. It sits uneasily with the evident attractiveness that Green’s friends felt about his modified evangelical piety, and with

Idealism Embraced 51

the demonstration of popular respect paid to Green at his funeral. It certainly appears that Green was a more attractive personality than his mentor Jowett, and that Green was gifted with an ability to ignore the machinations of university politics which was not given to Jowett. Frank Turner is also critical of Jowett’s methodology and like Richter finds the resultant austerity unattractive. For Turner, Jowett’s popularisation of Plato after 1847 is a means by which morality is given a sound philosophical base without recourse to the doubts and difficulties consequent upon historical and scientific criticism of the Bible. His opinion is that there is something almost disingenuous about this type of moral endeavour, which seeks to retain only those parts of Christian tradition that can be transferred without too much modification to a doubting faith: ‘Jowett’s conscious use of the language and rhetoric of the Authorised Version … allowed his translations to strike a responsive chord amongst the religiously minded, as did his vindication of undogmatic Christian ethical values, spiritual truth, and idealist metaphysics. … His portrayal of Plato as both a religious thinker and a political reformer opened an intellectual and vocational path that commenced with religious humanism but ended in civic service.’33 It is true that Green did share with Jowett a lack of interest in basic theological questions such as how one could model faith on a Jesus about whom one was excessively sceptical, and how that person could be related to ‘God’, but the personalities of the two men were very different and their consequent influence on the academic and spiritual life of Oxford was also different. This was manifested in Green’s social and political interests in and around the city and his experience as a member of the 1864 Royal Commission investigating secondary education. Jowett’s austerity at times became that of an embittered academic. Green’s character was the creative austerity of the ex-evangelical, with interest not only in the springs of knowledge but in its practical application and outworking in the life of city and nation. As well as Jowett’s philosophy and personal influence, Green’s idealism may have been fostered by the radical German Biblical scholarship of F.C. Baur via Jowett’s edition of Paul’s epistles. In 1863 Green had begun (but never finished) a translation of F.C. Baur’s Geschichte der christlichen Kirche.34 Geoffrey Faber believed that this combination of German theology and Jowett’s Plato scholarship was the means by which Green (and his idealist successor at Oxford Edward Caird) ‘directly learned their Hegelian alphabet’.35 Such influences meant that the stage was set for Green’s growing philosophical confidence that would for a short time make him a considerable influence in both the

52 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

university and town of Oxford. Both Christian believers and more sceptical theists could see in the promise of Green’s pious character and theistic idealism a personal vision and an intellectual content which could provide an alternative metaphysics to the bleak materialism of Mill and the utilitarians. Frank Turner has described the Zeitgeist produced by idealism, by which those members of the intelligentsia who were favourable towards Christianity countered empiricism and materialism and at the same time produced a vision for society that gave an alternative theistic framework than that provided by the established Church which was fast losing its power and influence in Oxford: ‘[Idealism] represented an outlook that emphasised metaphysical questions in philosophy, historicist analysis of the past, the spiritual character of the world, the active powers of the human mind, intuitionism, subjective religiosity, the responsibility of individuals for undertaking moral choice and action, the relative or even absolute importance of communities and communal institutions over individual action or rights, and the shallowness of any mode of reductionist thought.’36 These factors highlighted the conflict between those who believed in the necessity of historical evidence as foundational for Christianity and those who moved away from historicism and dogma towards a more abstract philosophical restatement of theistic beliefs in a broadly Christian framework. The cosmos engendered by philosophical idealism may have been theistic, but it was certainly not a necessary part of this movement that it remained fully Christian. Precisely because of this tendency, it could be a more potent dissolvent of the Anglican cosmos than more naturalistic movements; it could appear as a spiritual sheep in philosophical wolf’s clothing when it came to a reassessment of the place of Christian dogma and doctrine. We have seen the developing tendency in Green (which was characteristic of idealism generally) to undermine the value of the historical evidence for Christianity and to emphasise the disjunction between the Biblical accounts and later dogmatic formulations of faith. Hence as well as providing a tempting philosophical framework for those seeking ordination, the thought of Jowett and Green could also have the opposite effect. Jowett himself, though of course in orders, represented the mid-Victorian tension between subscription to a creed and freedom of expression. By 1867 he believed that really great men never become clergymen. Jowett was clearly disillusioned with the Church of England, largely as a result of controversies of the early 1860s over Essays and Reviews. He began to be an influential representative of an increasing group who felt that moral seriousness and service to mankind based on a loose commitment to

Idealism Embraced 53

Christian theism was more worthwhile than participating in partisan arguments concerning doctrine and Church order. In a similar manner to Green, Jowett felt that the best thing for a great man of the Church to do is ‘to drop all dogmatic theology – and to fill his mind with great schemes for the regeneration of mankind which used the Church as an instrument for effecting’.37 Partisan controversies were held to represent an irrelevance to the progressive moral regeneration of mankind in the broad spirit of the Christian tradition, a view with which Green would have been in agreement. Nevertheless, Green and Jowett began to drift apart. Green’s characteristic habit of appearing to be in ongoing dialogue with himself puzzled Jowett, who began to worry that Green’s students were becoming confused by both the style and content of his lecturing. In spite of this obscurity and the ever-present threat that he often seemed to lose his way in dense thickets of prose, Green entranced his hearers with his idealist rhetoric. However Jowett could not agree with the way in which Green’s thought became increasingly influenced by idealist metaphysics,38 and could never get used to Green’s labyrinthine prose. He thought verbose idealism caused people to forget about enquiring as to how words are used, and issued this word of warning: ‘The plague of metaphysics is as bad as the plague of logic among the Greeks. The words law, force, necessity, evolution, development, cause and effect, the oppositions of mind, reason, and feeling, have the greatest power over us; and yet even philosophical writers have never asked themselves the meaning of them.’39 This is a prophetic remark, made apparently around 1877–79 which foreshadowed the criticisms that would be made of idealism by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore as the century drew to its close. Although Jowett’s explicit criticism of Green was made much later in Green’s career, its origins are perhaps reflected in Green’s earlier correspondence of 1869 with the ardent young Christ Church don Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918). Holland became a prominent member of a group of second-generation Tractarians whose work would become known through the publication of Lux Mundi in 1889, but he had struck up a friendship with Green during his period at Balliol from 1866 onwards. The friendship between Green, Scott Holland and R.L. Nettleship (1846–92), appears in Stephen Paget’s biography of Holland.40 Green had for some years been unable to accept Christian dogma, together with what he believed was a negative attitude towards the world on the part of many Christians. This is evident in a letter from Green to the 22-year-old Holland in 1869. Holland had confessed

54 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

‘a lurking admiration for Jesuitry’, earning the following criticism from Green: ‘A morality that reflects on itself must needs refer itself to God, i.e., be religious. If there seems now to be a reflective morality, which yet is not religious, this is not really unreligious, but its religion is for the time dumb; and this dumbness mainly results from the action of philosophy upon the dogma of the revelation of God in Christ. When it is found that this dogma (tho’ in a wrong, because dogmatic form) embodies the true idea of the relation of the moral life to God, the morality of speculative men will find its religious tongue again. … Whether the outcome will be a new form of religious society or a gradual absorption of all forms in simple religious citizenship, I do not predict: but I have faith that the new Christianity, because not claiming to be special or exceptional or miraculous, will do more for mankind than in its “Catholic” form, hampered by false antagonisms, has ever been able to do.’41 It is clear from this that Green wished that the Christian faith could be expressed by using concepts such as the ‘eternal idea’ without recourse to dogma and that it would thereby be made more relevant to the actual practice of mankind in the real world of human relationships. What counts is ‘religious citizenship’, the development of which is unrelated to partisan doctrinal and ecclesiastical squabbles which only hinder the true work of the churches. In a letter from Green to Holland, Green pleaded, ‘that you should keep in view the distinction between what is temporarily edifying and what is true: between the eternal idea on which the religious life rests, and theological dodges’.42 Here is the tension between the mind in love with philosophy, the conflict between the ‘eternal idea’ and suspicion of ecclesiastical dogma, the stress arising from free intellectual enquiry and that bright passion of faith that was later to be expressed by Scott Holland in his sermons and in his long ministry as Dean of St Paul’s. Green and Holland were separated by the latter’s insistence on the necessary historical particularities of the Christian tradition, but despite their differences, Holland was anxious that their friendship should last: ‘Whenever we are together, I always feel that there is an essential harmony which is good for both and will survive differences of opinion.’43 Green’s philosophical work had led him well outside orthodox Christianity, yet there remained an attractiveness about his personality that made him an amiable if sometimes somewhat disturbing friend of Christians such as Scott Holland. There is a revealing remark made in a letter from R.L Nettleship’s brother to Mrs Green, describing Green’s rejection of the miraculous about 1860, and therefore nine years before his correspondence with

Idealism Embraced 55

Holland: ‘He had, at this time definitely abandoned his belief in the miraculous, and therefore in the commonly accepted historical groundwork of Christianity. Many men go through this stage, but the peculiarity, as it seemed to me, of Green’s mind was the fact it in no way affected the basis of evangelical piety which lay at the root of his whole life. … At no time did Green lose … his effective desire for spiritual advancement in the ordinary Christian sense, and his complete belief in the code of ethics universally accepted as Christian as a practical guide. All this he retained in full force until the day of his death.’44 That Green’s thought led to problems in understanding the miraculous is also evident from a long letter from Green to Scott Holland at Holland’s ordination in 1872. Green sympathised with the clerical profession, probably more so than his ordained teacher Jowett, but could not identify with it: ‘… you must not think that I have any animosity to the clerical profession as such. All the best influences of my life have been due to those who belonged to it. … There can be no greater satisfaction to me than to think that I at all helped to lay the intellectual platform for your religious life. … I hold that all true morality must be religious, in the sense of resting upon the consciousness of God: and that if in modern life it sometimes seems to be otherwise, this is either because the consciousness of God, from intellectual obstacles, cannot express itself, or because the morality is not the highest – at any rate has for the time being become mechanical.’45 This rejection of dogmatic theology for a purely philosophical understanding of Christianity meant that for Green miracles were derived from ‘ideas’ about faith, not the reverse as traditional beliefs affirmed. Therefore whereas he was alienated from credal belief, he was sympathetic to what he termed ‘prayer, and the ordinances of Protestant worship’. Green shared a Coleridgian scepticism about Christian ‘evidences’ but he also went on to reject the historical particularities of the Christian story which he sought to overcome by passionate spiritual commitment which makes a man feel the want and need of faith with an emotive intensity that brooks no practical doubts about its application even if it has theoretical doubts about its contents. Green’s debt to the sceptical temptations inherent in Coleridgian sentiments about Christian ‘evidence’ is seen in his remark about miracles: ‘It is only when they begin to argue about “evidences”, making the Christian life rest on a basis which, as I conceive, cannot stand, that I feel called on to resist them.’46 R.L. Nettleship wrote to Holland: ‘You look back to a figure in the past; I look forward to a realisation in the future. To you the reconciliation of that which is the absolute and that which is not

56 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

absolute is possible: I can understand their infinitely near approach to each other, but not their fusion.’47 Nettleship’s idealism looked forward to the unfolding march of progress in the world as the spiritual evolution of mankind led onward and upward. He had correctly seen that Holland’s more orthodox faith could never let go of the scandal of historical particularity that the Gospel narratives proclaimed as a necessary part of a faith, and which also looked to the failings of mankind as well as to its bright potential for improvement. For Holland the authority of the moral demands of the Gospel were inextricably bound up with the historical Jesus and the dogmatic formulations of the Church, whereas Green could lay these aside as being ultimately irrelevant for the development of a viable Christian spirituality. The intensity of the friendship between Green and Holland when coupled with the influence of Jowett are compelling reasons why it is important to view Green as theological thinker and not simply as a romantic idealist whose philosophy so dominated his thought that matters of prayer and spiritual discipline became unimportant to him. Green has often been read by philosophical critics who have little interest in Christianity as though his faith could be dispensed with, resulting in a strangely dualistic view of his influence, in which faith and philosophy are treated as two separable aspects of his development and his achievements. This cannot be the case – as Newman said of himself and his own development, it is the whole man who moves and develops and what is recorded in ‘paper logic’ is but the record of it. It is possible that this separation of religion from philosophy in accounts of Green has arisen from the fact noted by Peter Robbins, that ‘he rarely uses overtly religious language, and nowhere does he explicitly equate the eternal consciousness with the God of religion’.48 Despite this, there was something magical about Green’s personality, about his piety and integrity that intrigued and fascinated his admirers. Writing in 1918, H.H. Asquith looked back nearly 50 years and wrote concerning Green that: ‘A certain Puritan austerity and fervour streaked his intellect as it dominated his life. … But in teaching authority – in controlling and moulding influence over the ductile academic material – he was among the most potent of the Victorians.’49 Apart from his correspondence with Holland, what more can we learn of Green’s approach to Christianity? There is considerable evidence in his Essay on Christian Dogma read to an Oxford group, ‘The Old Mortality Essay Society’ in 1858,50 and in his ‘Lay Sermons’ entitled The Witness of God 51 (1870) and Faith 52 (1877). These works have not received the attention they deserve, and have often been treated either as subservient to his philosophy or even as irrelevant to its main

Idealism Embraced 57

features. Again, these writings show that we cannot separate Green the radical theologian from Green the idealist philosopher, a move that would surely be anathema to this most moral of thinkers. One of his main themes in his theological writings is that separating the ‘idea’ of Jesus from later doctrinal development divided Christianity into a religion of personal acquaintance with Jesus on the one hand and religion of speculative thought on the other. From St Paul onwards Christianity was expressed in assent to a ‘system of ideas’ which replaced personal faith. For Green, even the Biblical testimony is not immune from the disease of dogma. There can be no identification of Christianity with ‘the collection of propositions which constitute the New Testament’.53 In the Gospel of John, Green’s favourite evangelist, already the ‘immediate intuition’ of the knowledge of Christ is being occluded by dogmatic formulation. In John, personal encounter with Christ is supplemented by ‘the eternal indwelling of God in the natural universe’.54 The much more sophisticated doctrinal development represented by the Chalcedonian Definition ‘marks the final rupture between Christian dogma and the personal experience in which it originated’.55 The Church moved from a ‘datum of experience’ to ‘the medium of an authoritative declaration’ and he considered this to be a decline from the example set by Jesus. Green believed that this provoked the spiritual revolt of Luther, but he went far beyond Luther, cutting himself loose from all dogma: Christian ‘orthodoxy’ has now no future, because although ‘Christian dogma … must be retained in its completeness … it must be transformed into a philosophy. Its first characteristic, as an intuition become abstract, must vanish, that it may be assimilated by the reason as an idea.’56 This is an example of Green’s use of nontheological language to express his faith, which is also seen in his view of St Paul. In The Witness of Faith, Green says that he has tried to speak ‘without any conventional use of theological language’ in order to show how the eternal meaning of faith has been shrunk (in his view) to a mere historical representation, ‘reducing the eternal act into a merely historical one, and the substitution of the new man for the old within us to a forensic substitution without us of Christ’s merits for our sins …’.57 Green has clear difficulty in reconciling the historical events of the Gospels with his neo-existential concept of faith as the outworking of an eternal idea which is a truth independent of the authority of historical verification. Speaking of the death of Christ, he says, ‘The sacrifice is already made – made for us from eternity; the lamb has been slain from the foundation of the world; but we have to perpetuate the sacrifice in ourselves.’58 This is the complete subordination of historic

58 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Christianity to an ethical ideal of conduct. However, it was a stumbling block for Christians such as Holland who could not accept such a sidestepping of the challenges concerning the historical origins of the faith. The problem was that Green sacrificed on the altar of spirituality both the historical and dogmatic developments of the Christian faith. In the late twentieth century, the radical theologian Don Cupitt calls this tradition ‘Protestant Ethical Idealism’ and sees it as a reaction against various forms of oppressive realist views of God. For ethical theistic idealists such as Green, ‘God was the Good, the goal of the moral life and the unity of all values, rather than a distinct personal being over against us.’59 It was an intellectual validation of the increasing rejection by elements of the mid-Victorian intelligentsia of all ecclesiastical pretensions to authoritative dogma and social control symbolised by Oxbridge’s captivity to the Church of England. Philosophical idealism was called upon to provide an alternative interpretation of the cosmos to that provided by the Christian churches. This was a price that many Christians would be unwilling to pay, despite admiration for Green’s integrity and character. At the same time, it is indicative of the way in which many nineteenth-century thinkers and writers were increasingly absorbed in exploratory questions of how to retain a sense of human dignity and human integrity amidst a rapidly expanding cosmos of scientific and technological achievements. There is an exploratory element in Green’s spirituality, which could well benefit from closer study. For example, in a daring statement which reflects the existentialist emphasis of the middle of the twentieth century, Green said, ‘God has died, and been buried, and risen again, and realised himself in all the particularities of a moral life.’60 The orthodox God has died, but is resurrected in a Kantian sense of moral seriousness which combined with a deep social dimension to his thought found ready hearers both inside and outside the churches in the second half of the nineteenth century. In The Witness of God and Faith Green showed how the moral example of Christ inspired the moral life of man. Christianity must be lived in the light of the crucified rather than arising out of a taught creed. In language of much greater clarity and passion than he used in his more philosophical writings, Green said that the Church ‘has been the witness of Christ in another than the conventional sense: not as the depository of a dogma reflecting but faintly that original intuition of the crucified and risen one. … but as the slowly articulated expression of the crucified and risen life’.61 Green’s Christ is similar to that of F.D. Maurice; an example of humanity in which the moral law of God is displayed so that all mankind can live in imitation of that law and not

Idealism Embraced 59

just as individual Christians. His view of Paul is that ‘it was moral and personal experience that gave reality in his eyes to the supposed historical events … leaving no room for faith in the secondary sense of an acceptance of certain propositions as true upon trust’.62 In his sermon on Faith he stated that ‘The true, or highest faith … takes Christ, as the manifestation of God, into the soul without waiting for conviction by sensible signs.’63 Faith transforms cosmic vision into moral action and witness: it is ‘the expression of a common spirit, which is gathering all things together into one. … We do wrong in making it depend on a past event, and in identifying it with a creed of a certain age, or with a visible society established at a certain time’.64 Green regretted that that people like Spinoza had been excluded from the church on account of their unorthodoxy. The essential message of Christianity cannot be enshrined in a creed: ‘it is only … to the intellectually dead that the creed of the present is the same as the creed of the past’.65 Green ended Faith with an appeal to the moral law as being both product and proof of the life of prayer; although we cannot commit ourselves to the Creeds of Christendom, we can prove its essence in the use of its prayers: ‘The true verification of the consciousness is the life of prayer and self-denial which expresses it. Though the failing heart cries out for evidence, at the worst live on as if these were God and duty, and they will prove themselves to you in your life.’66 This veneration of duty could find a home in the literature of scepticism as much as in Christian apologetics. It is, for example, reminiscent of that description of Dorothea in the coda to George Eliot’s Middlemarch; it is an aspiration to be part of ‘the growing good of the world … that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’.67 Although they must have sounded highly unorthodox to their hearers, these neglected ‘Lay Sermons’ show a sense of integrity which even his Christian readers would admit fitted Green’s character and piety; they realised that in considering Green’s thought they could not regard the individual’s intellectual opinion as separable from his personal character. When this was combined with his passion for moral obligation and duty it influenced many of the new generation of Anglicans who sought to relate their faith to the ever-expanding knowledge and capabilities of the later Victorian era. Thus Green’s thoughts represent part of the intellectual and social background which set an agenda for both the ‘Broad Church’ apologists such as Frederick Temple and for the more catholicminded Anglicans of Lux Mundi and beyond; how was it possible to build a Christocentric metaphysic which was both faithful to Christian

60 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

tradition and congruent with modern knowledge? Green’s social conscience shone through all the doubts and difficulties his Christian friends had about his attitude to faith, and after his death in 1882, Holland wrote to his widow indicating the depth of her late husband’s influence on his social conscience: ‘It will, I trust, take me nearer to work that he would hold dear, among the working men of that great city [London].’ Concerning the influence of Green’s last and greatest work, his posthumous Prolegomena to Ethics of 1883, Holland said, ‘Materialism appeared to have been absolutely displaced out of the field.’68 Green’s idealism was no armchair philosophy. Much of his writing consists of philosophical reflection on social and political matters, and on what constitutes political and moral obligation. Just as his dialogue between philosophy and religious belief was manifested in his character, so his political and social writings manifested his vision for society. Nettleship’s biography describes a man who could be taciturn and silent, but, ‘While averse, perhaps too severely averse, from whatever was luxurious or frivolous in undergraduate life, he had the warmest interest in, and the strongest sympathy for, the humbler classes. No man ever had a truer love for social equality, or a higher sense of the dignity of simple human nature.’69 Such a sense of obligation pervaded Green’s writings on social and political subjects, in which the roots of moral obligation played a large role in his judgements.70 It is also clear that Green knew that the concept of rights has an essential social dimension which includes obligations to wider society. It was through the exercise of these rights that individuals contributed towards the ‘common good’. In his Principles of Political Obligation Green defines a ‘right’ as ‘a power claimed and recognised as contributory to a common good’.71 In fact as many critics have pointed out, the ‘common good’ is one of the major features of Green’s discussion of rights and obligations. For example, in Section 202 of the Prolegomena to Ethics, Green states, ‘There is an idea which equally underlies the conception both of moral duty and legal right … which must have been at work in the minds of men before they could be capable of recognising any action as one that ought to be done. … This is the idea of an absolute and common good.’ There has been considerable discussion as to what precisely Green means by this concept, and it has frequently been observed that, in a similar manner to his ‘eternal consciousness’, he never gives a coherent account of its foundations. It would be tempting to see in this instance that Green’s social idealism is in fact a descendant of his Christianity and that the resulting inconclusive discussion about the ‘common good’ in his works is a result of his inability to find a philosophical alternative to ethical

Idealism Embraced 61

demands which in his case were once rooted in the Christian revelation. Thus in both his philosophical and social thought Green displays a wistful non-dogmatic theism that originates from his evangelical background and was actively expressed in the practical holiness of his puritan piety. This was to be one of the reasons why many thoughtful Christians such as Scott Holland and his colleagues in the Lux Mundi group could not finally accept Green’s philosophical system. As well as the complexities and disagreements over the coherence of Green’s philosophical meditations on society, there was a more pressing reason why his project was to be of limited application. What both Jowett and Green failed to realise was that the growing egalitarianism of society made a Coleridgian elitism based on a renewed intelligentsia increasingly impossible to realise. As time passed the academic and social milieu in which such men lived and worked became less and less amenable to ecclesiastical and spiritual authority. This vision of an elite intellectualist clerisy founded on a gentlemanly polite Anglicanism infused with platonic ideals became less and less plausible. Green had stated in his early essay of 1858, entitled Force of Circumstances: ‘The spiritual energy of the liberated few introduces an element of good into the force to which the many are subject.’72 This was not the democratic vision of the masses, but the rule of an enlightened clerisy by example and by responsible service to society. This elitism meant that both Green and Jowett contributed to the increasing rift between Christian authority, the developing diversification of Oxford academic life and the rise of mass politics in the years after the 1867 Reform Act. Geoffrey von Arx73 showed how members of the clerisy who were rooted in Oxbridge intelligentsia became extremely disillusioned with the way in which national politics and ecclesiastical life became dominated by mass movements which disregarded their elitism and instead turned towards what they despised as demagoguery. In such a society an outmoded and detached elitism was increasingly bypassed in national politics by the rising articulation of the enfranchised masses and in the Church by narrow partisan rhetoric that slowly parted company with the real issues being faced in national life in both its social and cultural aspects. The problem for Green’s legacy was that he belonged to this clerisy, despite his increasing practical involvement with the developing civic life of Oxford and the challenges of a new age of education. There were those who did not share Green’s and Jowett’s visions and saw how they could potentially destroy credible religious beliefs. Years later, there is a fascinating remark by the Revd J.L. Davies of Kirkby Lonsdale about Jowett’s malign influence on Christian belief: ‘Many

62 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

years ago I happened to meet my friend Mr. Huxley [T.H. Huxley] when he had just returned from paying a visit to the Master of Balliol at Oxford. He was much interested by Jowett, and, like many other persons, could not make out distinctly what his beliefs were; and he wound up his talk about him by exclaiming, “I call him a disintegrator!” ’74 (Mary Ward, who was to immortalise T.H. Green as ‘Mr. Grey’ in Robert Elsmere, also describes Jowett as a ‘disintegrating force’.75) There were those in Oxford, less entranced than Scott Holland, who might well have wanted to say the same thing about Green, knowing from both personal experience and common opinion how difficult and obscure he could be in his lectures. Green’s attitude to the Church was similar to that of Mark Pattison, though there was a radical difference between the two men. Pattison was never very friendly towards Green’s idealism, and in his Memoirs accused Green of ‘exempting Man from the order of nature, and making him into a unique being whose organism is not to be subject to the uniform laws which govern all other Beings that is known to us’.76 Pattison grew sour and rancorous at the treatment meted out to him by Oxford, where his Memoirs exhibit that narrow sarcasm of the university don who feels that he has been badly treated by his colleagues. Henry Sidgwick described these Memoirs as ‘an unconscious confession of sordid egotism. … In spite of my sympathy with his views, I cannot but admit that his life is a moral fiasco, which the orthodox have a right to point to as a warning against infidelity’.77 At the end of his life, Pattison regretted his brief flirtation in the 1840s with the Tractarians, and could not bring himself to believe that he had ever been interested in the question as to whether the Church of England was in schism. In a similar manner to Pattison, Green tired of the inconclusive and moribund debates of theology: ‘I find it impossible to get up much interest in ecclesiastical affairs. The dead may bury their dead. Saving souls is one thing; making a fuss about an institution and a creed quite another.’78 Green’s temperament, which displayed a more eirenical personality than the embittered Pattison, managed to keep in view that it was the life of the spirit that was important, a life that transcended all dogmas. This was a transformed understanding of what ‘saving souls’ meant, detached from the institutional church, its dogmas and social prestige. In a similar manner to Jowett, Pattison’s character was scarred by the Church in a way that was never true of Green or Sidgwick, who enjoyed the layman’s freedom of expression. In many ways Green was fortunate to have lived and flourished at Oxford in the period from the late 1850s to the early 1880s. Reflecting

Idealism Embraced 63

a Coleridgian ‘clerisy’, Green’s alternative to Anglican hegemony became an all-embracing spiritual life which included both civil and ecclesiastical thought at its best, a vision which was a secularised version of Thomas Arnold’s plans for Anglicanism that he had expressed in the 1830s. The weakness of the vision is that the growing numbers of those who did not make religious or spiritual matters a priority, even though a broad spectrum of philosophical and theological opinion found common ground in Green’s life and thought. Green was at the height of his influence when the gap between a denial of Christian doctrine and the maintenance of Christian morality had not widened to the point where thinking men and women sensed that the gulf was unbridgeable. Maintaining that God is the constitutive principle in thought, Green made the principle of reason and morality in man the basis of radical developments in theological opinion which allowed idealists and the liberalising movements in Christian theology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to see the incarnation as the religious expression of the principle of immanence. Influential second-generation Tractarians reflected the same tendency by placing a theological emphasis on the significance of culture and civilisation in the purposes of God. R.W. Church (1815–90), who has been described as the Church of England’s answer to Newman, extended the Biblical ‘gifts of the spirit’ far beyond its New Testament environment. ‘Church wrote as one who, while adhering to his old principles, recognised a whole world of new truths to which partisans taken up with the Oxford Movement had been oblivious.’79 For Church the ‘gifts of the spirit’ are no mere religious charismata confined to the ordering and inspiration of the Church of the New Testament: they are ‘… applied in the most extended sense to all the powers with which men have been endowed; to make the words of apostolic truth and soberness stretch beyond the temporary interest of the religious question with which he dealt, to the universal interests of human society, which is not indeed coextensive with the Church, but which the Church was founded to embrace and restore, and St. Paul preached his gospel to fill with life and hope’.80 By this bold move the whole world of intellectual ideals and endeavour was imbued with Christian principles in a manner that would have been pleasing to both Coleridge and Green. This was to be a vision which inspired both Broad Church divines and those children of the Tractarians who formed the close-knit fellowship which resulted in the production of Lux Mundi in 1889.

6 Idealism Popularised: Mrs Humphry Ward

It is, I apprehend, a complete mistake to suppose, as appears to be the supposition of this remarkable book, that all which has to be done with Scripture, in order to effect the desired transformation of religion, is to eliminate from it the miraculous element. Gladstone, W.E. ‘Robert Elsmere: The Battle for Belief’ in Later Gleanings A New Series of Gleanings of Past Years (theological and ecclesiastical), London: John Murray, 1897, 90 Our discussion of Green’s idealism prompts the question as to whether his philosophical transformation of the faith had fatally weakened its message. ‘Green had shown, or appeared to show, that Christianity was not only compatible with reason: it was rational through and through. For he sought, in Thomas Arnold’s Broad Church Tradition, to shift the focal point of Christian doctrine away from the fundamentalist attachment to literal biblical truth … away even from the figure of Christ himself, to the more general conception of the necessary spirituality of the world which he derived from idealism. … Religion could not be proved false by empirical means: its truth was vindicated a priori.’1 From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it might seem incredible that such abstract matters of theology could be popularised in a fictional work which would not only result in a best-seller but give rise to a great quantity of literary and historical analysis. Nevertheless, this was what happened with Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, published in 1888, six years after Green’s death. Green’s climactic funeral was both a commemoration of his life and work in the city of Oxford, and evidence

64

Idealism Popularised 65

of the still-potent force in public life of matters concerning religious belief. The fact that six years after Green’s death Mrs Ward’s novel could attract such attention indicates that Green had been able to articulate questions concerning Christianity which many believed were still relevant to English culture as the century approached its end. Could the truths of Christianity be treated in a way which involved a downgrading of the historical significance of the faith? What was the relationship between spiritual experience and its application to the world and the faith ‘once delivered to the saints’? In what ways were the structures of the churches related to the expression of that faith in wider culture in the service of the needs of humanity? Such questions have a strangely contemporary feel, but were felt with the same force over one hundred years ago. Robert Elsmere memorialised not only T.H. Green’s philosophy and personality, but also the price paid in both personal anguish and professional integrity that was felt by many late Victorians as they battled with doubt and change, especially if that change meant a relinquishing of the social and cultural legitimation of Holy Orders. It is broadly correct to say that Green had transformed Thomas Arnold’s particular form of Christian expression, but there was also the fact that in the hands of Thomas Arnold’s granddaughter Mary Ward his vision was in fact entirely stripped of its foundation in history and its supporting structure of doctrinal statements. The characters in Robert Elsmere have little time for ‘Broad Church’ restatements of Christianity, believing that they have moved beyond them and judging them to be just one more partisan rationale for the preservation of a nowredundant ecclesiasticism. Mary Ward’s earliest memory was that of a girl of five, arriving in 1856 at Fox How in the Lake District, the house that Thomas Arnold had loved and frequented during the vacations from his duties as Headmaster of Rugby School in the late 1830s and early 1840s. She had come there with her mother, Mary Arnold, from Tasmania. Her father was Thomas Arnold’s second son, also called Thomas, who had emigrated to New Zealand to try his hand at farming. This venture was not a success, and Mrs Ward in her Writer’s Recollections says, ‘He was born for Academic life and a scholar’s pursuits. He had no practical gifts, and knew nothing whatever of land or farming.’2 Young Thomas Arnold therefore left New Zealand and took a post in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) where he accepted an offer from Sir William Denison to organise primary education. He married in 1850 and Mary was born in 1851. In 1854, to everyone’s astonishment, Tom Arnold junior became

66 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

a Catholic at Hobart. This meant that Tom had to return home, and hence Mary’s arrival at Fox How in 1856. In a fascinating aside in her Recollections, Mary Ward sees this event as ‘one incident in the long bout between two noble fighters, Arnold and Newman’.3 In her old age she was using this creative metaphor as a means to illustrate the results of her own pilgrimage, in her case from Arnoldian Christianity to sceptical idealism, a journey reflected in Robert Elsmere’s own fictional story. Tom found employment at Oxford, and although he left the Catholic Church in 1865 he returned to it in 1876 for good. During her father’s temporary alienation from Catholicism, there were limits to his liberalism. Mary remembers him indicating to her the rooms at Balliol where Jowett resided – ‘There lives the arch-heretic!’ Mary, however, admired ‘Mrs Pat’, the vivacious wife of the ‘bitter, fastidious’ Mark Pattison. ‘Mrs Pat’ was determined not to be dominated by the narrow politics and frequently life-denying aspects of academic life. Was this also a viewpoint that would later find expression in Mrs Ward’s novels, as she described the torments of belief of her characters? Life was for living, rather than for a continual obsession with dry scholarship or the state of one’s soul, or the state of the ‘parties’ in the Church of England. Nevertheless, the staunch sense of Arnoldian duty and correctness was still present in Mary’s early life, and she remembered that she would never ‘dress up’ for Sunday meals with the Pattisons out of homage to her ‘low church’ background. Mrs Ward was also the sister-in-law of Thomas Huxley’s eldest surviving son, Leonard Huxley. Thus her family connections included both liberal Church of England tradition, the rising and often articulate secularising world view of the developing scientific professions and the effects on Oxford clerical dons of too much time spent bowed over dusty tomes and indulging in academic politics. In 1872 Mary Arnold married T. Humphry Ward, who was a Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford and who in 1881 became a leader-writer and art critic for The Times.4 The Wards lived in Oxford for nine years, and Mary’s Recollections indicate that under the influence of men such as Walter Pater (at Brasenose College) there gradually arose increasing tolerance towards those who could not accept the beliefs and authority of the Christian Church. Mary Ward’s view of Pater is that he returned to faith later in life, but it was a transformed understanding of what belief entailed, much as Ward herself was to undergo a transformation of faith in her life. Ward’s novels were highly regarded in the nineteenth century, and there were critics who placed her work on a level with that of Thomas Hardy. However, changes in public taste were not kind to works

Idealism Popularised 67

in which the characters were delineated by the intellectualism of their religious or aesthetic opinions. By the time of her death in 1922 she was almost forgotten, her later novels having nothing like the public impact of her earlier work. In Tom Arnold’s Oxford of the early 1870s Mary Ward became acquainted with the dons of Balliol College, of whom T.H. Green was one. She also remembers Jowett with considerable affection, despite her father’s deep antipathy to his views, and recounts that his later days appeared to be filled with a prayerfulness which is in stark contrast to the hostility which was being shown to him by the ‘High Church Party’ centred on Pusey and Christ Church. Ward saw, as did Green, that piety and orthodoxy are not always to be equated, and that holiness and the fruits of Christian character are no necessary partners of complete orthodoxy of belief. Ward sums up the Oxford of the 70s, of the time of Green and the ascendancy of the Tractarians and their friends. They were ‘still in sight and hearing of the great fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched by their dying fires. Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln – the Liberal and utilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarship camp – with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as the growing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour – they were the signs and symbols of mighty hosts, of great forces still visibly incarnate, and in marching array’.5 This terse statement contains all the symbolism of warfare between the competing claims of religion and science, the rise of the new professions and the quarrelling sections of the Church of England, a reminder that it is not quite such an easy business to dismiss ‘warfare’ metaphors from the late Victorian intellectual and ecclesiastical scene as might be imagined. Admittedly writing from the perspective of the end of the First World War, Ward sees the intellectual life of Oxford in terms of battle and strife. Is Ward saying that that is what it was like at the time she was writing Robert Elsmere between 1885 and 1888, or is her choice of phrase affected at least partly by the confrontational nationalism which had brought about the European catastrophe which cast its shadow over the period when she was writing her memoirs? The Wards and the Greens were close friends,6 and Green’s rational theism affected Mary Ward’s personal beliefs to the extent that it became a major theme of Robert Elsmere.7 What is notable about Mary Ward’s Recollections is her memories of moving in a galaxy of talent and culture in Oxford of the 1870s and the 1880s. It was an Indian summer of a particular vision of the university, as the old forms of debate with

68 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

their ecclesiastical and spiritual foundations were giving way to different forms of expression, an atmosphere which pervades Robert Elsmere in that the development of the characters is dominated by their intellectual and cultural viewpoint. Robert Elsmere was essentially the product of the use of Mary Ward’s literary gifts in depicting the attitudes of her own circle of Oxford acquaintances towards the Church and Christian belief generally, and it may well have been written for them as well. It thus became a snapshot of the cultural power of the intellectual clerisy surrounding Oxford University and the crises of faith being experienced within that same social circle. What is remarkable is how the abstractions of Balliol philosophy and the trials of academic study when transformed into a novel could attract such attention. Viewed from a later perspective, it is hard to see how such a six-hundred-page story about metaphysical anguish could excite such interest and have such a large circulation. Mrs Ward reckoned that over a million copies had been sold by 1911. It is evident that many nerves were touched by Ward’s portrait of the personal and emotional turmoil which resulted when orthodoxy journeyed towards agnosticism. Those who did not have Ward’s gift for articulating this Zeitgeist and who never read Green’s tortured philosophical prose were fascinated by Ward’s characters. The novel acted as a spur to those who sensed that the Church was out of step with the times, and gave confidence to those who hitherto might have kept quiet because they feared denunciation. They could recognise in the tormented cleric Robert Elsmere the personal dilemmas of their own lives. Robert Elsmere is an account of spiritual pilgrimage from evangelical Christianity to a faith which is no more than a struggling theistic agnosticism. It added a sense of personal crisis to the calm of Green’s transformed evangelical piety. It impressed even those who made the opposite journey. In 1889 Scott Holland said: ‘I had an interesting Jew come to me the other day – an Oxford graduate, of Balliol and Clifton: and he said, “It is curious, but I have gone through exactly the reversed process of Robert Elsemere [sic]: I began where he leaves off, in a broad Jewish Theism; and I have slowly become convinced of the absolute reliability of the Gospel narrative.” ’8 Such a tour-de-force of current cultural options goes some way to explain both the huge sales and the very large number of reviews.9 Its date of publication was exactly right – a decade later, and the public was fast losing interest in biographical novels so heavily dependent on themes of religious pilgrimage. Robert Elsmere represented the culmination of a popular theme in the literature of the age, that of an emotional crisis attached to religious doubts. By

Idealism Popularised 69

1900 the events and personal crises of faith portrayed in Mrs Ward’s novel would seem to many to belong to an age which was passing away, when the dilemmas of faith were becoming less and less relevant to the spirit of the age. Certainly the public taste for the anguish of lost faith paraded in lengthy novels was rapidly fading as the Victorian age gave way to the Edwardian, and the genre was effectively extinguished as a popular form by the crisis of the First World War. The public display of failed faith had by then become a private matter, to be endured in silence or shelved as a matter between the individual and their God; the decline of popularity of novels of the style of Robert Elsmere is also a testimony to the rapid retreat of faith from the public sphere into private preference. The novel is a compendium of themes of Christian doubt and Christian commitment as seen from the perspective of the late nineteenth century. Mrs Ward sets the scene by a long introductory section describing the Westmoreland life of the Leyburn family, whose eldest daughter Catherine has become something of a local saint on account of her devotedness to the poor and needy, a disposition which is portrayed as being due to her fervent evangelicalism. Robert Elsmere, the central character appears in the parish as an assistant to the vicar prior to taking up the family living in Surrey at Murewell. Robert has just come from Oxford; although he is full of the zeal and seriousness of the moderate evangelical clergyman, he is also aware of other, less orthodox, impressions on his mind. Ward describes the courtship and marriage of Robert and Catherine, each unaware that their future will entail both of them in major crises of faith. On moving to Murewell in Surrey, Robert reveals that he has been deeply impressed by the intellectual integrity of ‘Mr Grey’ at Oxford who has ‘abandoned Christianity for pure philosophic theism’. ‘What did the Apostle [Paul] mean by a death to sin and self? What were the precise ideas attached to the words “risen with Christ”? Are his death and resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain alleged historical events? Or are they not primarily … even in the mind of St.Paul, two aspects of a spiritual process perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man and constituting the veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting witness of the Father: the spiritual history of the individual and the world, or the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attributed such importance?’10 It is not difficult to see how Ward puts into the mouth of Grey many of the questions that had been discussed by T.H. Green and whose friendship she had valued in her time at Oxford. Like many people, Ward had been captivated by Green’s piety and his commitment to service of both the university and

70 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

the city of Oxford, and in Robert Elsmere writes of Grey’s activities as a ‘… a devotion of years to the policy of breaking down as far as possible the old venomous feud between city and university’.11 Ward’s personal view of Green is given in her Recollections, a portrait which was to find its way into Robert Elsmere: Green was ‘the simplest, sincerest, and most practical of men – which Oxford will never forget, so long as high culture and noble character are not dead to her’.12 He was a man who in a time of religious upheaval could show a way forward when ‘a religion which can no longer be believed clashes with a scepticism full of danger … ’.13 In the course of a description of Mr Grey’s funeral which is very similar to that of T.H. Green’s farewell in 1882, Ward sums up his religion as that ‘… we should be certain of nothing – but Himself’.14 Grey’s integrity in the novel is the result of Ward ‘s critical appraisal of the work of the ecclesiastical figures of Oxford. In her Recollections she compares the work of Green and Arnold Toynbee with the very limited achievements of Liddon, Pusey and their colleagues, who seemed more interested in the date of the Book of Daniel than in the ‘condition of the poor’ and great questions relating to the need and provision of education for the newly franchised masses, or to questions of industrial reform and the provision of tolerable living conditions for the multitude whose efforts and work had built the wealth on which the Empire rested. Ward’s criticism of orthodoxy is an uncomfortable reminder of how the Church of England in the 1870s and 1880s was perceived by an increasing number of articulate people to be out of touch with contemporary life and occupying a marginal and irrelevant religious sub-world. One is reminded of Green’s dismissal of the relevance of ‘saving souls’ when so much needed to be done to achieve social justice. Ward recollected, ‘Who can doubt now which type of life and thought had in it the seeds of growth and permanence – the Balliol type, or the Christ Church type?’15 Such a comment raises interesting questions about the scope and nature of Christian mission and the relationship of that mission to Christian doctrine. Was it, as the Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics claimed, necessary to evangelise the nation from a foundation of traditional doctrine, or were there other ways of furthering the mission of Christ which needed to be implemented to meet a changed society? Ward’s Robert Elsmere was an attempt to answer the question which is in the minds of many even today: What is the most effective way of ‘being church’? As well as the evangelical voice portrayed in Catherine, there is also the occasional appearance of the fanatical Anglo-Catholic priest Newcombe, who chides Robert for his wavering between full-blooded belief and idealistic philosophic theism. Newcombe implores Robert to

Idealism Popularised 71

‘fling away the freedom that is your ruin’.16 Only in bondage to the belief of the Church is safety and salvation to be found, and in Newcombe’s speeches Ward brings out the worst kind of world-hating and self-denigrating aspects of fanatical religion. Another more acerbic influence on Robert is Edward Langham, who had been Robert’s tutor. Langham was perhaps a composite of Ward’s knowledge of Green’s friend R.L. Nettleship, the French sceptic Amiel who was known to Ward through her involvement in translating his works, and possibly also the aesthete Walter Pater, whose emotive (not to say carnal) spirituality would have shocked a figure such as Elsmere. Grey contrasts with the cynical Langham, who shocks Elsmere’s evangelical piety, dismissing Grey’s political views as ‘cant’; ‘[T]he difficulty lies in preaching anything. One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.’17 Later, Langham’s views of Grey’s ideas became ‘languidly sarcastic’ – ‘Nothing particular is true … and all action is a degrading pis-aller. Get through the day somehow, with as little harm to yourself and other people as may be; do your duty if you like it, but for heaven’s sake, don’t cant about it to other people.’18 ‘Duty’ for Langham could be but a hair’s-breadth from sanctimonious hypocrisy, another frequent theme of Victorian literature. Langham believes Elsmere’s real source of spiritual strength is shown ‘by moral passion, by love, by feeling, by that mysticism, in short, which no healthy person should be without’.19 There is at root no intellectual foundation to Robert’s faith, and when the argument moves from religious commitment based on belief and doctrine to questions of historical verification of Christianity and the value of historical testimony Elsmere senses a deep threat to his faith. Langham cannot abide the evangelicalism of Elsmere’s wife, Catherine, who is dismissed as ‘the Thirty-Nine Articles in the flesh’.20 Langham ‘could not stand it that Elsmere should be so much narrowed and warped by … her prejudices’.21 Langham is utterly unable to appreciate any aspect of faith other than the intellectual; he never has words of praise for Catherine’s good works, which Ward makes abundantly plain flow from a deep faith in Christ. His abstract, impersonal and dry academic habit is a far cry from the warm approachability of Grey. His main interest is in the history of ‘testimony’: ‘In other words, did the man of the third century understand, or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man of the sixteenth, or the nineteenth?’22 Clearly the reply to this question is bound up with another theme of Victorian religious debate, the trustworthiness or otherwise of miracle stories. Under attack from Langham and influenced by Grey, Robert is caught between his orthodox beliefs and the consecration and integrity of Mr Grey’s

72 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

unorthodoxy, a tension is observed by Catherine: ‘Why would he [Elsmere] seem to glorify rebellion against the established order in the person of Mr Grey? Or why, ardent as his own faith was, would he talk as though opinion was a purely personal matter, hardly itself to be made the subject of moral judgement at all, and as though right belief were a blessed privilege and boon rather than a law and an obligation? When his comments on men and things took this tinge, she would turn silent, feeling a kind of painful opposition between his venturesome speech and his clergyman’s dress.’23 Thus as the novel develops, Grey becomes a kind of central focus for the characters – on the one side are the dry and frequently embittered academics, on the other side the religious faith of Robert and Catherine, with Grey combining in his personality both responsible active piety and an intellectually respectable theism. Such was the picture of T.H. Green formed by Mary Ward’s pen. Robert gives ‘a dramatic account of a sermon on evolution preached by the hermit – veteran Pusey, as though by another Elias returning to the world to deliver a last warning message to men’.24 This may be a reference to Pusey’s sermon of 1878, ‘Unscience, not Science, Averse to Faith’ and in her Recollections, Ward mentions the tragedy of Pusey’s sermon on Darwinism, and is deeply critical of the elderly ecclesiastic’s attempts to come to terms with science. ‘Oxford at least, was no longer in tune with Pusey’s message’, and she describes the occasion as tragic and pathetic.25 It is possible that she believes this to be true of Robert’s attempts to preserve his orthodoxy amidst the pressures of historical scepticism and philosophical assimilation of Christian beliefs. Robert becomes increasingly aware of the great tensions between the ambiguities and frustrations of his country parish, the memory of Mr Grey, the simple piety of his beloved Catherine and the infidel hostility of another major character of the novel, the very conservative village squire, Wendover, who is immensely learned in German critical scholarship.26 Wendover was modelled on the sceptical and soured character of Mark Pattison, Master of Oxford’s Lincoln College. Wendover/Pattison believed that the ‘Broad Church’ efforts of F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley were futile, and that this movement represented an unacceptable compromise in which there was an irrational attempt to modify Christian beliefs in order to ‘fit in’ with new discoveries. It is evident that this bitterness is in part fuelled by a personal reaction to the fact that in his earlier days Wendover had been a fervent follower of Newman: ‘… when Tractarianism began I was one of Newman’s victims. Then, when Newman departed, I went over body and bones to the Liberal reaction which followed his going.’27 However, no party in the

Idealism Popularised 73

Church could satisfy this man, whose intellectual obsessions are even more sharply drawn than those of Langham. Cynically, Wendover says of the developing Elsmere, ‘His religious foundations are gone already, if he did but know it … but he will take so long finding it out that the results are not worth speculating on.’28 Wendover spends his days as an isolated and embittered academic, slowly accumulating material for his ‘history of testimony’. Like Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Langham and Wendover represent the Victorian portrait of the abstract and devoted scholar whose work results in despair and social isolation. It is as if the making of many books caused intellectual autism, with great harm to any ability to enter normal human relationships. If Mark Pattison were only half as bad as Ward’s portrayal of him as Wendover, he would have been a monster. At least Langham’s intellectualism is tempered by some aesthetic appreciation, as he shows when he is pained that the talk of the day is of ‘dirt, drains and Darwin’ when he would have preferred a conversation about the merits and demerits of Ruskin.29 The various pressures on Robert eventually bring on a crisis of faith, and he resigns his orders and gives himself up to the vision of a life in London, serving the poor of the East End. Part of this is due to his recollection of Grey that ‘God is for ever reason: and His communication, His revelation is reason.’30 For Robert, the combined effects of Langham, Grey and Wendover reduced his beliefs to a chaos: ‘He thought of the feelings with which he had taken orders, of Oxford scenes and Oxford persons, of the efforts, the pains, the successes of his first year at Murewell. What a ghastly mistake it had all been!’31 Catherine is caught up in this torment of vocation and meaning, a crisis which forever distances her faith from that of her husband. Robert has now rejected the historical foundations of faith based on the possibility of miracles and the factual nature of the resurrection. Significantly, he has not adopted the soured academic view of Wendover and retains his veneration for Grey. In this he differs from Wendover, who spoke of ‘… the strong dislike of the idealist, devoted in practice to an everyday ministry to human need’; what he preferred was the ‘intellectual egotist’.32 Grey exhorts Robert to trust in God in his turmoil, and quotes an excerpt from Emily Bronte’s poem No Coward Soul is Mine: Life, that in me has rest, As I, undying Life, have power in Thee! A fascinating setting for Robert’s work in London is the contrast between the friends of Rose, Catherine’s beautiful and musically

74 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

talented sister, and Robert’s colleagues in the East End. Rose has a set of friends who represent the new superficially sophisticated ‘chattering classes’ of fin de siècle London. In particular there is Flaxman, whose place in the novel has not attracted much critical attention. ‘Flaxman’s Epicureanism, the easy tolerance with which, now that the effervescence of his youth had subsided, the man harboured and dallied with a dozen contradictory beliefs, were at times peculiarly antipathetic to Elsmere.’33 Here is a different kind of antipathy to Christianity from that found at Oxford. It is not an intellectual rejection of faith, it is a cultural superciliousness which cannot take seriously the foolishness of a life devoted to Christian discipleship. Ward describes a social gathering which, to the fervent Christian, appears as a world of illusions: ‘It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certain stratum of London. When, every now and then, in the pauses of their own conversation, Elsmere caught something of the chatter going on at the other end of the table, or when the part became fused into one for a while under the genial influence of a good story or the exhilaration of a personal skirmish, the whole scene – the dainty oval room, the lights, the servants, the exquisite fruit and flowers, the gleaming silver, the tapestried walls – would seem to him like a mirage, a dream, yet with something glittering and arid about it which a dream never has.’34 Such a gathering is reminiscent of a scene that might be depicted by Oscar Wilde, and it is not an environment which resonates with either Oxford academia or Christian commitment. It is another alternative world view, and its easy tolerance was diametrically opposite to Catherine’s evangelicalism with its restricted horizons and its inability to accept new avenues of thought and conduct. It was also, significantly, just as unacceptable to the revised theistic idealism of Robert, and, by implication to his Oxford hero Grey. Ward thus illustrates that, despite her admiration for the work of Green, she was still aware that this revision of Christianity would not be popular. The adoption of revisionist beliefs by Christians dissatisfied with what was on offer from the orthodoxy of the day did not mean automatic popularity in the eyes of the intellectualist Wendovers or those who belonged to the aestheticism of fin de siècle culture. This important observation shows how, through the medium of literature, Ward was able to indicate that idealism was no easy pathway to progress for a Church increasingly embattled by cultural changes. Ward’s depiction of the reaction of sophisticated London culture to Robert’s vision was a foretaste of much more strident criticisms that would be made of idealism as the century drew to its close.

Idealism Popularised 75

Robert and Catherine eventually find a kind of acceptance in difference, and his work culminates in the formation of the Elgood Street ‘Brotherhood of Christ’, which acts as an umbrella for his aspirations for a revisionist Christianity and for various radical and socialist groups who had no necessary connection with Christianity. Despite this life of social service, Robert still has a fervent belief in the importance of religious commitment: ‘Our present religion fails us; we must, we shall have another!’35 Significantly, one of the watchwords of the new society is ‘this do in remembrance of me’. However, what is done in remembrance of Christ is not a sacramental act charged with spiritual significance by centuries of practice and the strata of theological deposit. It is the service of the poor, the giving of hope to the downcast and the powerless and the effort to raise their sights to a more noble vision of themselves and their place and influence in society. This work finally wears Robert out, and he dies with the vision unfulfilled but still growing. The writing of Robert Elsmere was a major ordeal for Mary Ward, and there was considerable cost to her in both mental and spiritual health. The original novel was vastly over-length, and Smith Elder, her publishers, reckoned that it would in its uncut form amount to 1358 pages!36 Most of the cuts were in Elsmere’s speeches in defence of his Anglicanism. Gladstone was later to point out in a famous review which circulated widely as a pamphlet that the cuts made Robert a much weaker character than his opponents.37 These cuts reflected Mary Ward’s own religious preferences, in that her rejection of orthodox Christianity also led her to excise from her book any arguments which could be used in its favour. The result was summed up by Gladstone in one brilliant comment: ‘Reasoning is the weapon of the new scheme; emotion the sole resource of the old.’38 Gladstone remarked on the weakness of Elsmere’s character, a man dominated by emotive attachment to traditional Christianity. There is little exploration of the rational or even theological foundations of his faith, which means that in the course of Mrs Ward’s narrative his views are easily demolished by the likes of Langham and the acidity of Squire Wendover’s criticisms. It would be possible to be so impressed by Elsmere’s sense of duty and his moral (and theological) integrity as to lose sight of the fact that, as Gladstone said, his decision to renounce his orders was ‘taken under the influence of forces wholly emotional’.39 The lumber of theology is discarded by Elsmere but he retains ‘the whole personal, social and spiritual morality’.40 Nevertheless, Gladstone’s criticism of Elsmere’s rejection of the miraculous is unsatisfactory and was strangely out of touch with beliefs being expounded by otherwise orthodox churchmen in the 1890s.

76 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Gladstone writes, ‘Looking for a comprehensive description of miracles, we might say that they constitute a language of heaven embodied in material signs, by which communication is established between the Deity and man, outside the daily course of nature and experience.’41 Gladstone revealed that his theology belonged to a past age, when miracles were regarded as ‘an invasion of the known and common natural order from the side of the supernatural’. Far from accepting Green’s belief that miracles were the product of faith, Gladstone, in the very last years of the nineteenth century, sees them as necessary proofs of distinctive revelation. We have already seen that Green rejected the miraculous in favour of philosophical rational theism, and Gladstone might have been on more creative ground if he had engaged in a debate with Green’s thought. What did Mary Ward’s novel achieve? It’s popularity at the end of the 1880s highlighted that faith had come to an impasse which could not be solved by the adoption of a philosophical theism, a point that Ward herself recognised in the criticisms of ‘Mr Grey’ found in the book. Robert Elsmere also illustrated that what idealism gave to the thinking of Church of England divines with one hand, it took away with the other. For earnest and moral Victorians, to hear that God has died and been reborn in the particularities of a moral life could seem like a deliverance from theological problems concerning history and miracles and yet enable them to retain Christian morality.42 It could be construed as a means of bypassing the Tower of Babel engendered by party strife in the Church and the arguments about historical matters of faith and ecclesiastical matters of worship. It could, however, also lead to abandonment of orthodoxy and an agnosticism in which enemies of theological dogmas such as Thomas Huxley found ‘the problem of existence’ to be insoluble. This was no mere intellectualist reasoning for those who participated; it also involved emotional turmoil. This sense of loss was articulated by Mary Ward’s ‘Uncle Matt’ (Matthew Arnold) who had abandoned his father’s morally earnest Rugby Protestantism for a faith which, although shorn of its supernatural framework, sought to act as a moral preservative for ‘high’ culture which would combat the philistinism of modern life. Faith as a cultural preservative is made the centre of a scheme in which Christ is indeed a moral exemplar, even if about matters of eternity we can only be agnostic: Hath man no second life? Pitch this one high! Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see?More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!

Idealism Popularised 77

Was Christ a man like us? Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!43 In 1851 in these Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse Matthew Arnold combined doubt with a sense of living in an ‘age of transition’. He was fascinated by the world of orthodox Christianity, yet sensed that he was part of a new world, the world of the ‘Great Exhibition’, with its attendant questions concerning the coherence of religious beliefs: Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head … In Obermann Once More, written in 1865–68, Arnold expresses the sense of frustration at the old order of Christianity: ‘ “Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead, Your social order too! Where tarries he, the Power who said: See, I make all things new? “ ‘The millions suffer still, and grieve, And what can helpers heal With old-world cures men half believe For woes they wholly feel? “ ‘And yet men have such need of joy! But joy whose grounds are true; And joy that should all hearts employ As when the past was new. “ ‘Ah, not the emotion of that past, Its common hope, were vain! Some new such hope must dawn at last, Or man must toss in pain. “ ‘But now the old is out of date, The new is not yet born, And who can be alone elate, While the world lies forlorn?” ’ Wheeler44 analyses references to this poem in Ward’s Robert Elsmere, along with other references to her ‘Uncle Matt’, even though Matthew Arnold, despite not living long enough to have read the complete novel, had little

78 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

sympathy with those such as Elsmere who ‘went out’ from the Church of England to continue their spiritual mission. The poem ends with the breaking dawn of an Alpine morning, symbolic of faith’s renewal. But it is a new form of spiritual expression rising from the death of the old creeds and a celebration of an immanent ‘world-spirit’ that owes as much to Romanticism as to historic Christianity. Robert Elsmere initiated a considerable debate about the place of modern knowledge in relation to Christian verities. The Guardian, a moderately Anglo-Catholic weekly newspaper criticised a timid reviewer of Robert Elsmere who hinted that Christian people should be guarded against these malign influences: ‘[But] with regard to books and society generally, it is absurd to talk of fences and holding aloof. It is not by closing eyes and ears to what is passing around us that the victory over the forces of scepticism is to be gained; it is by confronting them with a fuller knowledge and stronger reasoning powers. It is hopeless to think of banishing books as well as persons … What we can do is adapt our religious teaching to the modern conditions of the controversy … .’45 Even within Church newspapers with as conservative a stance as the Guardian’s definite Anglo-Catholicism there was a growing impatience with what was perceived as a conspiracy to silence awkward questions. It indicates how Robert Elsmere acted as a catalyst in enabling many thoughtful church members to come out of the closet and express in public sentiments that had previously been held in private. This growing honesty would entail the risk of being interpreted as a further sign of apostasy and the undermining of ecclesiastical credibility at a time when this had already been weakened by the inroads of the state into national education, by the secularisation of the ancient universities and by the growing awareness of the social plight of the enfranchised masses. It was the pilgrimage from concern for privilege to compassion and action for poverty portrayed by Elsmere when he walked away from the old orthodoxy towards his new mission: ‘One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in Parliament Square, on his way towards Westminster Bridge. The beauty of a sunset sky behind the Abbey arrested him. … Carrying the poetry and grandeur of England’s past with him, he turned his face eastward to the great new-made London on the other side of St.Paul’s, the London of the democracy, of the nineteenth century, and of the future. He was wrestling with himself … .’46 In Robert Elsmere, the West End of London symbolises the grandeur of the Christian privilege represented by Westminster Abbey and the glittering social privilege of Flaxman and his friends; in the East End there are the disaffected, helpless masses, hostile to these realisations of religious and social privilege.

Idealism Popularised 79

This earnest but moral agnosticism is reflected in works such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), published near the beginning of the rise of idealism, but reflecting the new-found quest to find the spiritual amidst this world: ‘Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’47 This is an illuminating sidelight on Elsmere’s journey, as he turns his face to the busy secularised London of the 1880s. Eliot’s arresting final sentence points to an immanent spirituality, shorn of any transcendent reference, and with a hint that the journey would not be easy for those whose Christian formation had ill prepared them for the challenges of the new age. It could take on the shape of an overwhelming experience, a frightening spiritual revolution. George Eliot, Mrs Ward and others proclaimed in their literature the personal crises that could be engendered in the individual by the adoption of a theistic morality shorn of its dogmatic foundations. The image of an Edward Casaubon in Eliot or of Wendover and Langham in Ward could show what human wreckage results when faith is overwhelmed by intellectual cynicism. Amidst this turmoil, Green had shown how it was possible to express a respectable piety and deny the force of orthodox Christianity and at the same time live a deeply impressive life. But at what great loss to Christianity? Frank Turner severely indicts Green: ‘Green in a very real sense demeaned the Christian faith. He sought to rescue what he understood to be the moral substance of Christianity by severing it from historical Christianity. Whereas previous commentators had attempted to make the Greeks look like Christians or like proto-Christians, Green attempted to portray the later Christians as children of Greece.’48 Philosophy had triumphed over history in the name of a new piety. A century later the philosophical theologian Donald Mackinnon stated that the force of British idealism relegated the ‘journey of Jesus’ to ‘an episode in the last years of the Jewish state’. Nevertheless, it was ‘an episode indicative of the very order of the universe’.49 Mackinnon had been impressed by a paper by J.S. Boys Smith in the Modern Churchman for 1941, one of the first analyses of the influence of idealism on theology to be written after the Barthian rejection of natural theology

80 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

eclipsed progressive idealism, partly as a consequence of the trauma of the First World War. Boys Smith showed how idealist Christians of the nineteenth century attempted to reconcile a rapidly changing cosmos with the ‘unchanging truths’ of faith: ‘The thought of the century was dominated by the ideas of process and change, that is by the conception of development. … It was not easy to attribute to a moment in a process at once continuous and undergoing unceasing change an importance of the kind ascribed to Christian theology to the life of Jesus. The difficulty was, of course, greatly increased for those who tended to assume that development was equivalent to progress.’50 Green and those who followed him were very influential in forming both the words and deeds of those Christians who became enamoured of socialism in the later nineteenth century – those men and women who were the real-life equivalents of Robert Elsmere. The history of ‘Christian Socialism’ has been widely studied.51 But was the vigour of Christian Socialism a major positive contribution to the strength of the Church of England or was it a reaction and alignment to forces which were already active in society?52 If it was the latter, it was an admission that the Church of England’s place in society was becoming reactive rather than proactive; there was no longer an authoritative world view which was the preserve of the Anglican establishment which could enable the ecclesiastical world to meet the changes of late Victorian society. Throughout the 80s and 90s British society was increasingly dominated by forces which were unsympathetic to Ward’s romantic and undogmatic theism. Idealism’s themes were taken up by political philosophy, but the influence of theistic idealism as a philosophical movement would prove to be a passing phase in the increasing marginalisation of the churches in English society. The attempt to adapt philosophical idealism to the Christian revelation combined a sense of the value of the past, and the idealists’ intensity for the spiritual worth of the present moment, while simultaneously ignoring the insistent questions being asked by historical criticism. Certain souls, even at Oxford, believed that this was an impossibility, and with the passage of years their criticism grew even more trenchant. Looking back 40 years, in 1910 the positivist Frederic Harrison delivered a devastating judgement on the partnership of theology with idealism: ‘Unfortunately, these unverified and unverifiable hypotheses – or, rather, pseudo-scientific phrases to label a sort-of-a-something, that may mean anything or nothing – fell into a soil peculiarly fitted to assist in their mushroom growth. The vague dissolving vapours of orthodox theology (for history and science had undermined the old creeds of the Church) were exactly

Idealism Popularised 81

the atmosphere in which the metaphysical jargon was the native tongue. And the result was that much of the old Oxford philosophy and the old Oxford theology got amalgamated into a sort of sonorous ontological Pantheism, which called itself philosophy to thoughtful minds, and called itself Christianity to Churchmen who wanted to go with the age.’53 After Green’s death, idealism was increasingly challenged by movements which were much more hostile to religious beliefs, and many voices would assent to Harrison’s strident attacks on its claims. However, before the foundations of idealism were undermined by new developments in philosophical fashion and cultural changes, idealism was to prove a significant influence in the writings of many leading Christian thinkers.

7 Idealism Assimilated: Frederick Temple

[Temple’s] view of providence was thoroughly British, as if the Almighty had created a universe on the model of an enlightened colonial regime, a vast empire protected by the principles of government by constitutional law. Elder, G.P. (1996), 146 A remote Cornish parish in the late eighteenth century would not normally come to mind when considering the origins of the nineteenth century ‘Broad Church’ movement. However, the descendants of two successive vicars of the benefice of St Gluvias near Falmouth were to play a major part in the life of the Church of England in Queen Victoria’s reign. In 1776, William Temple (1739–96) was presented to St Gluvias, which was rumoured to be ‘the best living in the [then] diocese of Exeter’,1 with a revenue of over £500 per annum. William’s grandson, Frederick, as Bishop of Exeter, would be the guiding influence on the foundation of the new diocese of Truro a hundred years later in 1877. The second link with the nineteenth-century Church of England came from William’s predecessor at St Gluvias, John Penrose. Penrose was the grandfather of Mary Penrose, who was later to become Mrs Thomas Arnold, the wife of the famous Headmaster of Rugby whose career was immortalised by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. William Temple of St Gluvias came from a family associated with the Scottish Borders and was associated with Edinburgh University where he struck up a friendship with Boswell leading to an extensive correspondence which was later published. Following his time at Edinburgh, William took up residence at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and was ordained deacon and priest in the space of one week in September 1766 to serve the isolated but ‘modest and agreeable’ rural parish of Mamhead near 82

Idealism Assimilated 83

Dawlish in Devon. He rapidly became unhappy there, probably because, as he confided to Boswell, his marriage was under strain. Boswell wrote to him in 1767, ‘brace your mind, and you will be convinced that, although you deserve a better situation, you have no reason to be dejected. … I cannot approve of your wishing to leave your family’.2 Perhaps William was frustrated and isolated at Mamhead, situated high on the Haldon Hills between Exeter and Teignmouth, away from any cultural stimulation, let alone from Boswell and his circle. There would be little opportunity for him to indulge his considerable intellectual ability. His move to St Gluvias in 1776 must have come as a relief, and before long he was ‘reading Greek and Latin, French, Italian and Spanish with his children, and [moving] in the best literary and social circles in town and country’.3 Octavius Temple (1784–34), who was to be the father of the future Archbishop, was the youngest of his eight children, serving in the army from 1799 which took him to the Ionian Islands from 1819 and to Corfu in 1828. Octavius returned to England in 1830 to farm at Culmstock in Devon. This was not a financial success and he accepted the Lieutenant-Governorship of Sierra Leone in 1833, where he died in the following year. On 8 July 1805 Octavius, recorded at the time as being a Captain in the 38th Regiment, had married Dorcas Carveth from the village of Probus, about six miles east of Truro. The Temples may have become acquainted with the Carveths through Sir Christopher Hawkins MP, of Trewithen in the parish of Probus, who was Octavius’ godfather, and Bartliver Farm, then tenanted by the Carveths, still forms part of the Trewithen estate. Frederick had no formal education until the age of 12 except from his mother Dorcas, who recognised her son’s intellectual gifts. Her personality remained a dominant and very influential feature of Temple’s subsequent life. At the age of 12, Temple entered Blundell’s School at Tiverton, where his classical and mathematical gifts prospered and he was nominated to a close scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. This enabled Temple, who was a poor scholar from a humble background, to gain a double first. In May 1842 he was appointed a fellow and lecturer in mathematics and logic in succession to the noted and flamboyant Tractarian W.G. Ward. On the death of Thomas Arnold, A.C. Tait, who had been one of Temple’s tutors at Balliol, became the new Headmaster of Rugby, and on Temple’s ordination in 1847 he offered Temple a teaching position at the school. Temple turned this down and became instead a member of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education from 1848 to 1857, followed by a period as Principal of Kneller Hall, a small college which trained schoolmasters to

84 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

teach workhouse boys. Caught between the difficulties of educating such people and the lack of interest of the government, Temple became increasingly frustrated and resigned in 1855 to become an Inspector of Training Colleges. His old friend Tait at Rugby had a high opinion of Temple, and, assisted by Tait’s recommendation, Temple became Headmaster of Rugby in 1857. While Headmaster, Temple was involved in controversy over his contribution in 1860 to Essays and Reviews entitled ‘The Education of the World’. This was an unexceptional restatement of the Christian mission in terms which owed much to the influence of Thomas Arnold, but he was associated with the bolder speculations of Baden Powell and Benjamin Jowett on the veracity of the Gospels and the nature of the miraculous. Despite these strains, he retained popular support at Rugby. A letter home from one of his pupils during this controversy said, ‘Dear Mother, Temple’s all right, but if he turns Mahometan, all the school will turn too.’4 In 1869 Temple rejected an offer of the Deanery of Durham and was appointed to the see of Exeter to succeed the aged and reactionary Tory Henry Phillpott. Those of a more liberal turn of mind secretly rejoiced,5 but their voice was lost in the ensuing controversy, when conservative divines such as Samuel Wilberforce, Shaftesbury and Pusey mounted an ultimately futile campaign of objection to this episcopal appointment. The work in Exeter diocese was onerous, as it also included the Duchy of Cornwall which became the Diocese of Truro in 1877 with Temple’s close friend Edward White Benson as its first bishop. From 1885 as Bishop of London, Temple gave himself to the drudgery of administration and diocesan duties. Could he have had a lurking regret that his intellectual powers were now being crowded out, a feeling that would have been familiar to his grandfather William in his isolated Devon parish? Frederick would have been neither the first nor the last bishop to think along these lines. However, he maintained links with Balliol College, largely through his friendship with successive masters Scott and Jowett,6 although Jowett, true to his cynicism about the Church of England, regretted that Temple’s intellectual gifts had been wasted in ecclesiasticism and the demands of official duty as a representative of the Church. Temple became Archbishop of Canterbury at the age of 75 in 1896: ‘[The clergy’s] terribly earnest bishop, so overbearing and angular, could move them profoundly when he preached about the cross of Christ, or about righteousness in English life, or about the mission to the world. They knew all about his humble origins. … But they revered him, and they welcomed him as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896. Amidst all the worldliness of imperial London as

Idealism Assimilated 85

the Victorian age reached its sunset, Temple’s integrity exerted an appeal. Here was a link with the early morning simplicity of an older England. So blind that extra large cards had to be printed showing him his words, Frederick Temple crowned Edward VII (but put the crown on back to front).’7 That was on 9 August 1902, and he died on 23rd December. Temple’s ministry was not just concerned with academic theology, the nature of the Church and its authority in a changing society. He demonstrated a new expression of the call to ordination, that of a man of affairs moulded in the tradition of Arnoldian comprehensiveness and influenced by an idealist’s vision for the transformation of society. Describing the controversies that Temple endured over Essays and Reviews, Ieuan Ellis says, ‘Temple showed the emergence of a new professional clergyman, an administrator on whom the Church drew for its leaders for the next half century and more, with a role in the world, a headmaster who was a man of many parts and not simply a priest.’8 In Temple’s time as a young man at Oxford in the 1840s, the Church of England was being influenced by the tensions generated by the differing visions of the Church of England proclaimed by Arnoldian liberalism from Rugby and from the fervent Tractarian debates at Oxford itself. At Oxford Tait enjoyed friendship with Temple in his time at Balliol and also tutored Benjamin Jowett and A.P. Stanley, both of whom later became notable liberal divines in the Church of England. At Balliol Jowett enjoyed Temple’s friendship and conversation ‘more than that of any other man’.9 Temple’s reflections on his time at Oxford shows how not everyone was entranced by the romanticism of the Tractarian revivalists. Neither Tait nor Temple were charmed by Newman, and Tait spent many hours in argument with the ardent Tractarian W.G. Ward ‘who used to say he was made a deacon as an Arnoldian and a priest as a Newmanite’.10 In the middle 1840s Stanley’s famous hagiographical biography of Thomas Arnold gave Arnold a place in the Victorian pantheon of ‘great lives’ and made certain that his broad Anglicanism became well known and influential. Shortly afterwards, Ward’s The Ideal of A Christian Church put forward a very different vision of the Church from that championed by Arnold or Stanley and their friends. Ward’s book brought censure from the Convocation of Oxford University in February 1845. Many had found its open and laudatory praise of what was believed to be little short of blatant Catholicism a betrayal of Ward’s Anglican orders. Owen Chadwick says that in its admiration of the Roman Catholic Church and denigration of Anglicanism, Ward’s Ideal of A Christian Church was ‘the book of a man whose heart has left his Church before his reason knew whither he was moving’.11 As a reaction

86 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

to Ward’s views, the Vice-Chancellor proposed that the Thirty-Nine Articles must be accepted in the sense intended by their original framers, but the problem which was being posed by both Ward and Newman showed that for some articulate members of the Church this was now a very open question indeed. So Ward’s trial before the university was not just that of an independent-minded and incautious clerical don; it was a trial of the limits of Anglican comprehensiveness and the tolerance of Anglican culture in a world after the emancipation of Catholics in 1829, the admission of dissenters to Parliament in 1828, and the suppression of the Irish bishoprics, not to mention the controversies over the reform of Parliament. Temple’s reaction to these matters was a significant demonstration of the way in which he was to regard Christian controversy throughout his life, and is a telling example of the influence of temperament on Christian ministry. After listening to the debates, he sided with tolerance, and Ward ‘retained the friendship of Temple and the Fellows of Balliol’.12 Temple could not agree with Ward’s vision of the Church, but his vote against Ward’s degradation was a defence of comprehensiveness and demonstrated loyalty to a friend with whom he had shared his moral, spiritual and intellectual development at Oxford. For Temple the principle of doctrinal tolerance was of greater importance than the maintenance of uniformity by casting out the opposition from the Church. In Temple’s Oxford this Arnoldian liberal vision of comprehensiveness struggled with the Tractarian recovery of apostolic and Catholic ideals, all against a heady cultural background of Romanticism and contemporary social instability in English society. Temple, always something of a private man, wished all these feverish ecclesiastical arguments would go away; what was at stake was the future plausibility of the Christian faith, which could not be advanced by internal squabbles about ecclesiastical authority. These differences between Ward and Temple illustrate an important factor in explaining why Temple never came under the spell of Newman. In the early 1840s Temple recognised a genuine spiritual fervour in the Tractarians. He could applaud their earnestness and their religious seriousness, but there always remained features of their beliefs and agendas which were alien to Temple’s own vision of Christianity: ‘Dr. Pusey preached before the University last Sunday one of the most beautiful sermons I ever heard … but I was pained to see that though his sermon was decidedly orthodox and right as far as it went, yet by stopping short he gave us directions which are neither more nor less than those of the Council of Trent.’13 The beauty of Tractarian holiness was

Idealism Assimilated 87

undeniable, but it was an allure that for some Christians was not quite in tune with the times and possessed a dangerously unworldly quality. There is no doubt that Temple was entranced by the spiritual fervour and Christian character of Newman and Pusey, and impressed by the warmth of Ward’s friendship, his moral and spiritual discipline, and his firm rejection of scientific materialism. But Temple was never a man who could work himself up into a passionate interest in theological controversies which to him appeared to be irrelevant to the major questions being asked by his sceptical contemporaries. He was anticipating Mark Pattison’s later, much more outspoken and acerbic rejection of Tractarianism as a damaging and delusory distraction from the real work of the university. For Temple, Tractarian controversies assumed a dangerous and ill-disciplined life of their own, unrelated to the rest of culture and dominated by arcane theology. He wearied of the Oxford theological furore, and wrote to his mother concerning Tract 90 in 1841: ‘The pamphlets, letters, denunciations, explanations and replies, etc. that have come out are innumerable; and it would hardly be fit to anyone to enter into the controversy without reading all.’14 Despite this dislike of storms in ecclesiastical teacups, he was attracted by Newman, not so much by the direction of his thought as by his method – ‘I subscribe with the most hearty faith to Newman’s doctrine, that in change only, in perpetual progress, can truth be sought.’15 Even then, the strongly individualist trend in his character which his colleagues noted in later life was manifesting itself. His interaction with the fevered theological controversies of Oxford, his hard work and personal discipline was also allied to an overpowering moral obligation, fostered by his discovery of the philosophy of Kant. This interplay between intellect and duty produced considerable tension in Temple’s developing spiritual life. Apart from his own feelings, it was also a tension endemic to the vision of Thomas Arnold. The historian Walter Houghton said that Arnold displayed ‘the voice of a man who possessed an absolute set of principles and a doubting heart’.16 It must be asked if this was not at least partially true of Frederick Temple, a tendency which would also have been fostered by his friendship with Benjamin Jowett. Partly under this influence, after 1842 Temple ‘read a good deal of German philosophy, and was one of the few Englishmen who understood what he read’.17 Coleridge’s romanticism also stirred Temple: ‘Reading Coleridge excites me so much that I can hardly do anything else after it: I am obliged never to read it except just before I am going for a walk.’18 Thus Temple’s formative years were influenced by a heady mixture of Kant, Coleridge, Newman, Arnold and a

88 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

desire to see the Gospel in a form that took contemporary culture seriously. All this was held together by his emphasis on personal and intellectual integrity. This was often at cost to his own personal peace of mind, both in his Oxford days and in his subsequent career as headmaster, bishop and archbishop. This was at least in part due to his desire to respect the integrity of those who differed from himself, such as Ward. In later life Ward was to regret the ‘forcing’ of the poet A.H. Clough’s mind with ecclesiastical controversies, which he saw as contributing to the distress and doubt of Clough’s later years. But Temple was made of stronger stuff; he was not to be ‘forced’ by dominant and extrovert personalities such as Ward or entranced by the beauty of Newman’s prose. When the fever of theological debate was at its height in 1843, Temple wrote again to his mother, ‘I am tired of the aggressive Theology altogether, and I should not be sorry if it were laid aside for ten years or so till men were calmed.’19 The results of this difference of temperament are fascinating. Tait and Temple became Archbishops of Canterbury; Ward and Newman seceded to Rome. Tait and Temple remained true to the Arnoldian vision of a national Church with its implied challenge of unresolved tension concerning comprehensiveness and disagreements. To Newman and Ward that was an unacceptable compromise, and they could not remain within the Church of England. Although impressed by each other’s Christianity, these men were ultimately unable to meet ecclesiastically. It was characteristic of a large number of thoughtful members of the Church of England at this period, a tension which often resulted in different paths which brought pain and parting to deeply held friendships, as described in David Newsome’s account of Henry Manning and the Wilberforce family’s pilgrimages which he aptly called ‘The Parting of Friends.’20 But Newman was also a controversialist in a manner which Temple found intriguing. Newman’s apparent conservatism concealed methods that were likely to lead to a theological adventurousness and avenues of thought that the Tractarians would find hard to accept. F.M. Turner21 points to the ‘cultural apostasy’ of figures such as Newman, Darwin and Ruskin in the 1830s and the 1840s. The polemic of these men served to further undermine Anglican control of ‘high culture’ after the political and social revolutions of the late 1820s and 1830s. This is seen in Newman’s case in the radical nature of Tract 85 of 1840 (Lectures on the scripture proof of the doctrines of the Church). Although part of the Tractarian revolution, the method of argument in this document opened the door to radical new interpretations of the relationship of the

Idealism Assimilated 89

Bible to the Church. By pointing to the inadequacy of ‘the Bible, and the Bible alone’ as a source of authority, Newman gave opportunities to those who were approaching these documents with other, more liberal, aims: ‘If it be a good argument against the truth of the Apostolical Succession and similar doctrines, that so little is said about them in Scripture, this is quite as good an argument against nearly all the doctrines which are held by any who is called a Christian … .’22 Temple understood this, and saw in Newman a Biblical radicalism: ‘[I]n one place he goes so far as to call the Bible unless coupled with tradition, “A jejune frame of words.” ’23 Ward’s ‘apostasy’ had raised the question of the status of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and Tait saw that Newman’s approach ended any simplistic appeal to them: ‘[T]the Bishop of London’s theory of a literal adherence to every iota of the formularies is blown to the winds of heaven.’24 (Bishop Blomfield; possibly a reference to an 1840 Parliamentary debate over the status of the Articles.25) Turner points out that Charles Darwin, in the privacy of his Notebooks, was simultaneously undermining the rationale of natural theology.26 Darwin’s thoughts were not widely influential in mainstream Anglican debate until their publication in 1859, the year before the publication of Essays and Reviews, but Newman’s were disseminated through the Tracts in the 1840s and his voluminous later writings. Turner believes that ‘Newman interpreted the Bible as a work without clear divinely predetermined content in the same fashion that Darwin interpreted nature without divinely predetermined pattern. The former outlook dissolved the Anglican evangelical reading of scripture; the latter outlook dissolved the Anglican reading of nature.’27 Nevertheless, Temple’s reading of Scripture and nature was to become an attempt at saving Anglicanism’s credibility rather than undermining it. He realised that Newman had undermined the sola scriptura authority for doctrines such as the atonement and original sin, as well as the Protestant notion that everyone may gain faith from the Scriptures for themselves and that the Bible contained all things necessary for salvation. In fact Newman rejected any system of sola scriptura. It is dismissed by him as ‘the nondescript system of religion now in fashion’.28 In Newman’s opinion: ‘[T]hough the Bible is inspired, and therefore, in one sense, written by GOD, yet very large portions of it, if not far the greater part of it, are written in as free and unconstrained a manner and (apparently) with as little consciousness of a supernatural dictation or restraint, on the part of His earthly instruments, as if He had no share in the work.’29 A statement such as this could lead some to travel very far from answers which relied on any form of scriptural or ecclesiastical authority. For Newman,

90 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

convergence of Scripture and dogma comes with fifth-century developments, which implied that there could be no direct appeal to Scripture alone as a source of doctrinal authority. Tract 85, as with so much of Newman’s writing, gives the impression that he was using his great dialectical and argumentative skills to prove a position that his heart had already reached, and his serpentine mind was opening up pathways in theology which were considerably at variance with his conservative ecclesiastical desires and inward longings. Even for Newman, once the Pandora’s box of doctrinal change and speculation is opened, no prophecy can say with certainty what the results will be. Tract 85 contains a deeply autobiographical remark from Newman about the apostle Peter’s reaction to Christ; ‘His ways might be dark, His words often perplexing, but still he found in Him what he found nowhere else – amid difficulties a realisation of his inward longings.’30 Despite his desire to stay with tradition and orthodox Christianity, Newman perfectly expressed the quest of the sceptic who sought to retain a sense of moral integrity amidst a dark and perplexing world, where he could pray ‘lead, kindly light’. Thus the apologetic intentions of Newman, which were designed to recover a form of ecclesiastical authority at variance with contemporary Anglicanism, had a paradoxical effect of introducing a view of tradition and Scripture that was to be more akin to the more liberal aspirations of what was later to be called the ‘Broad Church’ movement. Ironically, the moderate Biblical criticism espoused by people such as Charles Gore in the 1890s would cause more controversy than Newman’s radical handling of the Bible in Tract 85 in the 1840s. However, Gore wrote at a time when the cultural position of the Church of England was very different to that of Newman’s Oxford. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the social and academic role of the national Church was being increasingly contested by other professions and disciplines and by the general secularising of intellectual life. A theological closing of the ranks was a perceived necessity in order to confront a world which many clergy found threatening to their message and place in society. The irony of Newman’s teaching in his tracts is noted by Sheridan Gilley: ‘[Newman] wished to restore the authority of Bishop and priest to teach the Catholic faith, through the Book of Common Prayer. The ultimate effect of Tract 90, however, was to confirm the Church of England’s development into a liberal institution tolerant of diversity and even heresy within itself. … Newman was doing the liberals’ work rather better than the liberals themselves.’31 When the heat is turned up in theological debate, everyone tends to feel threatened by what is being

Idealism Assimilated 91

said and done, and the young A.P. Stanley, a man of liberal theological opinions, saw a potential problem. The disapproval of the Oxford authorities was threatening not only Newman but also the views of those more moderate men such as Stanley and Temple who wished for dialogue rather than confrontation. Stanley’s concern is reflected in a concerned letter to Tait at the time of the controversy over Tract 90 and the pronouncements of the Heads of Oxford Colleges: ‘Do not draw these articles too tight, or they will strangle more parties than one. I assure you, when I read the monition of the heads, I feel the halter at my own throat.’32 By the time of Stanley’s remark (1841), the exponents of the various theological opinions at Oxford had known each other well for a considerable period, and socialised together even though they disagreed with each other. Temple records a meeting with Stanley and Ward: ‘… I went to breakfast with Mr Ward the other day, and met there the great ornament of the younger portion of Oxford, Stanley, the son of the Bishop of Norwich; he is a man of most astonishing talent … .’33 The characteristics of Temple’s character that we have seen in his dealings with Ward and the Tractarians are also evident in his reaction to criticisms about his contribution to Essays and Reviews in 1860. This radical volume of ecclesiastical essays had been some time in the making. In a personal communication to the Masters of Rugby in February 1861 Temple said that Essays and Reviews ‘[o]wes its origin to some conversations between Mr. Jowett and myself, as far back as eight or nine years ago, on the great amount of reticence in every class of society in regard to religious views. We frequently talked of the melancholy unwillingness of people to state honestly their opinions on points of doctrine.’34 Temple was well established as Headmaster of Rugby, and his successful promotion of the traditions of Thomas Arnold meant that the post carried a combination of professional prestige and spiritual authority which earned him a great deal of respect. Nevertheless, the old questions of his days at Oxford, the arguments with Ward, the impression of Newman and the influence of Tait and Jowett would not go away. His venture into theological controversy unsettled Rugby School, and both parents and staff became anxious that the school was in danger of becoming associated with unacceptably radical and unorthodox theology. Temple’s contribution has been described as ‘a university sermon of no particular importance’35 yet it was more than this; it demonstrated his commitment to the tradition of historical enquiry set out by Thomas Arnold 20 years before. The arguments and pamphlet war that followed the publication of Essays and Reviews illustrates the wide gap between most Christian apologetic of the age and the

92 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

questions being asked by thoughtful people, who although not always actively hostile to Christianity wished to see a more honest and wideranging debate about the credibility of their beliefs. The existence of these questions was enshrined in the preface of Essays and Reviews, which stated that the book was ‘an attempt to illustrate the advantages derivable to the cause of moral and religious truth, from a free handling, in a becoming spirit, of subjects peculiarly liable to suffer by repetition of conventional language and from traditional methods of treatment’.36 For many Christian people, this handling proved to be much too free. Some of the reasons for this can be seen from the contents of Temple’s contribution to the volume. Temple’s essay, ‘The Education of the World’ described a cosmos revealed in spiritual laws, and relied heavily on themes which Arnold had set out in his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of History in 1842. The Christian faith was God’s final means of bringing civilisation to the world. Mankind was subject to spiritual laws as the physical world was subject to mechanical laws. ‘First come Rules, then Examples, then Principles. First comes the Law, then the Son of Man, then the Gift of the Spirit.’37 In a very revealing metaphor, Temple says, ‘The world, as it were, went to school, and was broken up into classes.’38 Temple was ever the schoolmaster, fusing progressive optimism about the role of education with a quasi-evolutionary understanding of divine revelation. This was an extension to the system of education inherited from Thomas Arnold at Rugby. It was an attempt to legitimate nothing less than nineteenthcentury Anglican culture as the means of civilising the human race. All other cultures and historical epochs were subordinate to the present day moralising Christian imperialism which through the work of the nation was in the process of conquering the world, subduing lesser peoples and conforming them to the Christian vision. Speaking of Rome, Greece, Asia and Judea, Temple said: ‘Each of these contributed something to the growth of the future Church. And the growth of the Church is … the development of the human race. It cannot indeed yet be said that all humanity has united into one stream; but the Christian nations have so unquestionably taken the lead amongst their fellows, that although it is likely enough the unconverted peoples may have a real part to play, that part must be plainly quite subordinate; subordinate in a sense in which neither Rome, nor Greece, nor perhaps even Asia, was subordinate to Judea.’39 The essay thus highlighted three factors which were to become important in the mid-Victorian debates about the nature of faith. First, Temple’s apologetic reflected that of Arnold. The Church of England was

Idealism Assimilated 93

not simply a community whose sole authority rested on apostolic and Biblical foundations. It was also a means of advancing Christian civilisation through its alliance with the state, an advance which was to be fostered through a vision of Christian education. Arnold had said, ‘… the state, being the perfect church, should do the church’s work; that is, that it should provide for the Christian education of the young … the sovereignty of the state makes it necessary to embrace all points of human life and conduct.’40 In the second place, Temple was the heir of Arnold’s belief in the unity of knowledge under a spiritual principle, a belief that was close to the developing idealist assertion that there is a supreme spiritual consciousness in the cosmos. In the third place, Temple reasserted the powerful dominance of the classical heritage of the English educational elite of the time, of the Arnoldian belief that, ‘[The classics are] the image … of our highest natural powers in their freshest vigour. It is the unattainable grace of the prime of manhood. It is the pervading sense of youthful beauty. Hence … we never find again that universal radiance of fresh life which makes even the most commonplace relics of classical days models for our highest art.’41 Classical education thus played a seminal role in this cosmic purpose which in the fullness of time produced the nineteenth-century Anglican Church whose duty it was to civilise the world. Reflecting Arnold’s Inaugural Lecture, Temple maintained that law and political duty were the legacy of Rome, reason and taste that of Greece. Asia could not compete with Europe and the might of the Christian civilised world; ‘she is paralysed in presence of a gigantic strength younger yet mightier than her own’.42 It was a moral legitimation for the nineteenth-century expansion of the British Empire, using a Christian metaphysics that was means of cultural globalisation, calling to perfection not only the races of the world but also the nature and form of the Christian message itself. Temple’s understanding of the historical process led him to believe that Jesus lived in the period of the world’s youth, and he openly stated that Christians of the nineteenth century were better informed about ‘the truth’ than those of apostolic times. In 1841 Arnold attacked those who had retreated to the past. He thought this type of theology was an increasingly irrelevant retreat of the Church of England into antiquity, and this is reflected in Temple’s opinion that, ‘It is not really following the early Church, to be servile copyists of her practices.’43 The present age was that of ‘Manhood’; the time of free independent thought. Temple believed (to use a phrase of the 1960s rather than the 1860s) that mankind has ‘come of age’. His uncompromising acceptance of progress and his willingness to accept

94 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

the necessity of evolution and change meant that his theology could never be acceptable to Evangelicals with their emphasis on the final authority of Scripture or the Tractarian heirs with their veneration of the apostolic tradition and the Fathers of the Church. Temple gave more freedom to the creative use of reason: early dogmatism is no more than a hasty generalisation: ‘But the fact that so vast a number of the early decisions are practically obsolete, and that even many of the doctrinal statements are plainly unfitted for permanent use, is a proof that the Church was not capable, any more than a man is capable, of extracting, at once, all the truth and wisdom contained in the earlier periods. In fact, the Church of the Fathers claimed to do what not even the Apostles had claimed – namely, not only to teach the truth, but to clothe it in logical statements … for all succeeding time.’44 Such an attitude encouraged Christians to give up constructive and developmental thinking because of fear of what others would say, or for fear of apostasy: ‘They content themselves with so much of the truth as they find necessary for their spiritual life; and though perfectly aware that the wheat may be mixed with the tares, they despair of rooting up the tares with safety to the wheat, and therefore let both grow together till the harvest … such men are sometimes tempted to prescribe for others what they need for themselves, and to require that no others should speculate because they dare not.’45 This bold statement would return to haunt Temple in his controversy with Tait over the contents of Essays and Reviews in early 1861. Such sentiments are strikingly similar to T.H. Green’s undogmatic Protestantism of his later Lay Sermons, and of Green’s early undergraduate work which dates from the same time that Temple was working on his essay. Both Temple and Green were enemies of ecclesiastical authoritarianism untested by critical thought. Temple saw the dogmatic Papacy as a reversion to childhood, even though historically necessary because of the influx of pagan nations. He believed the Reformation represented a reassertion of conscience as the supreme guide in the guise of toleration, and it implied that (as Thomas Arnold had taught) there really are insoluble problems in theology and that what is needed is a concentration on the moral imperative of the words of Christ. The consequence of these ever-present problems in doctrine meant that Temple believed that the Scriptures express a moral law rather than express a doctrinal authority. As in Arnold, so in Temple and Green; action takes precedence over dogma. The Bible could now be investigated with all possible philosophical, scientific and historical means, even welcoming inconsistencies and ‘forgeries’ in the Biblical text: ‘Even the mistakes of careful

Idealism Assimilated 95

and reverent students are more valuable now than truth held in unthinking acquiescence.’46 As progressive civilisation is moving us on to maturity we should not fear the use of intelligence and investigation in matters of faith; these are powers that are features of the age of the Spirit in which we now live. In Temple’s case, the idealistic emphasis on the spiritual foundation of the moral and physical cosmos enabled him to advance a Christian apologetic which combined the ever-widening sphere of historical and scientific knowledge with cultural progress. The contemporary Christian world of nineteenth-century European thought, headed by England’s educational vision, unfolded as the paradigm case of the progressive will of God, focussed in a tolerant and broad established Church, whose mission was not only to be a light to the nation but also a light to the world through the expansion of empire. This was to be the triumph of toleration over dogma and Anglican inclusiveness over the narrow vision of the sectarians and the exclusiveness of an authoritarian Church of Rome. Temple’s argument was a defence of classics-based Anglican cultural supremacy in an age of rising scepticism and science-based materialism. It was argued from an ancient basis; the primacy of the classical cultural inheritance over the rising professional and scientific cultures. Temple belonged to the ‘old school’; and its name was Rugby! Ieuan Ellis said that the resulting controversy over Essays and Reviews was, ‘an exercise in the pathology of Victorian religious thought which has nothing to equal it’.47 The controversy illustrated the tensions resulting from the diverse opinions of the Liberal Anglican tradition, but also offered reasons why the individualism of the participants meant that liberal-thinking Anglicans could not on their own form a coherent Broad Church ‘party’ within the Church of England. This is illustrated by a sharp disagreement between Temple and Tait. Tait was now Bishop of London, and Temple was under the impression that his sympathies lay with the publication, if not with all the expressed opinions, of Essays and Reviews – ‘I suppose Tait will not attack us. I do not fear damage from any other attack.’48 This was a mistaken assumption. At about the time he was allaying the fears of the masters of Rugby school, Temple was shocked to find Tait’s name appended to an apparent blanket condemnation of the book issued by the bishops on 12 February 1861 which implied dishonesty in the writers’ subscription to the Articles.49 A painful correspondence culminated in a letter from Temple to Tait of 25 February 1861, written after Temple appears to have had a minor nervous breakdown. Temple recalled the Oxford days of 20 years before when he had been encouraged by Tait to undertake the critical study of

96 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

the Bible. Temple regarded Tait’s censure as treachery both to himself and to the integrity of theological study. For if the latter was to be governed by the expediency of buying unity for the Church, of what value could it be in meeting the contemporary challenges to faith? The letter of Temple contains a significant and moving personal credo: ‘I for one joined in writing this book in the hope of breaking through that mischievous reticence which go where I would I perpetually found destroying the truthfulness of religion. I wished to encourage men to speak out. I believed that many doubts and difficulties only lived because they were hunted into the dark, and would die in the light. I believed that all opinions of the sort contained in the book would be better if tolerated and discussed than if covered and maintained in secret.’50 Temple’s passionate letter shows the personal cost to himself of maintaining Christian truth whilst preserving integrity of conscience. This was a legacy of Thomas Arnold’s preference for an all-embracing Christian clerisy, and both Temple and Tait in their ecclesiastical careers came to illustrate a problem posed by this latitude and tolerance within the Church. How was it to be combined with an episcopal duty to preserve faith and to observe doctrinal boundaries? Even before he became a bishop, this tension is shown in Temple’s breakdown and the resulting personal and urgent tone of this letter to Tait. Nothing illustrates more clearly than this incident that the Liberal Anglican tradition was no mere cold intellectual response to conservatism. Tait’s own personal diaries also record his own spiritual turmoil. He too knew passion and costly discipleship in obedience to conscience. He confided in his diary at the height of his dispute with Temple: ‘Lord, fix my own heart and soul on the great Christian Verities. Thou knowest my failures. Breathe into my heart Thy Holy Spirit, through Jesus Christ Amen.’51 T.H. Green would have been impressed by this struggle for integrity. These conflicts gave evidence that Green’s project of non-dogmatic moralised faith allied to philosophical idealism in the service of education was a possible solution to the problems. However, this was easier said than done for those who occupied ecclesiastical office. Temple and Tait experienced the crisis of keeping the faith amidst change and dispute both inside and outside the Church, for unlike Green they were the Church’s ordained representatives. Their views were therefore a source of conflict with the more conservative clergy who took the opposite view, that to change long-held beliefs was to undermine the intellectual and cultural authority of the Church. Both conservatives and liberals within the Church of England believed that its integrity and effective

Idealism Assimilated 97

mission was threatened if their particular agendas were not followed. These tensions formed an inbuilt risk within the Church of England, that it must be a Church constantly in the process of reformation, a risk which was at variance with the vision of many who felt that old formularies of faith must be retained at all costs. In the light of this, the failure of Anglicanism to maintain centre stage in Tait’s archiepiscopate as described by Marsh52 was partly due to the powerful lobby of conservative theologians and traditionalist interpreters of the faith. These men forced the Church of England into discussions dominated by ecclesiastical questions largely irrelevant to the vast majority of the population, or indeed to the majority of Church members.53 Temple’s only other significant venture into sustained theological writing were the Bampton Lectures of 1884, The Relations between Religion and Science. Why did 24 years elapse between his contribution to Essays and Reviews and the Bampton Lectures? It may be that Temple remembered the controversy over his appointment as Bishop of Exeter in 1869 when the ghosts of the Essays and Reviews controversies appeared in the guise of accusations of Temple’s unfittedness for episcopal office because of his suspected heresy. More likely it was because his time was increasingly taken up with day-to-day diocesan management, the efficient execution of which he, with his experience as a headmaster, would undoubtedly have seen as a means of facilitating mission. Yet, as in his contribution to Essays and Reviews, Temple’s participation was not prompted by his diocesan work but through his connection with Balliol College and with Jowett in particular. Sandford, in the semi-official ‘Memoirs’ of Temple published in 1906 stated that he was ‘urged to the task by Dr. Jowett’.54 Hinchliff thought this was an over-statement, as Jowett was not enthusiastic about Temple’s ability, as shown by Jowett’s sharp observation that Temple was ‘ … one of those minds who run away from truth into practical usefulness, which if a man is capable of speculation, as he is, is a kind of treachery’.55 Temple would have been hurt by this remark, as that is precisely what he had been anxious to avoid in his earlier conflicts with Tait over his contribution to Essays and Reviews. Nevertheless, Jowett’s remark reflected an uncomfortable criticism of attitudes to be found amongst the Church of England clergy. Speculative theology can disappear into the background when the individual attains episcopal orders or indeed any form of prominent public ecclesiastical office. Temple stood accused of retreating into a busy life of ‘practical usefulness’ in which his well-stocked mind lay fallow amidst ecclesiastical duties. In the case of such a private man as Temple, it cannot be known how much this was deliberate and

98 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

how much it was the simple pressures of office. A perusal of the index to the Temple letters and papers held at Lambeth shows almost no material dealing with theological or intellectual matters except the everpresent late-Victorian obsessions with liturgical legalities. However, it is known that in his time as Bishop of Exeter, Temple did keep some contact with other disciplines which enabled him to reflect theologically on a changing world. Hinchliff was puzzled by Temple’s ability to stay in touch with the rapidly advancing world of science while being a diocesan bishop in a relatively remote part of the country, and that perhaps his membership of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Arts helped him. Although this may well be true, a perusal of his contributions shows very little in the way of original thought concerning the relationship of scientific disciplines to matters of faith. In his 1872 Presidential Address to this society Temple made some rather commonplace remarks about the relationship of science and classics: ‘For it is becoming less and less possible to maintain for those older studies an attitude of calm superiority, only needing resolute self-assertion to put aside all attacks.’ Temple still believed, as he had done in his 1860 essay, that the ‘old studies’ would ‘certainly be in a position of acknowledged pre-eminence’56 over the rising influence of the new professionalised sciences. Thus the classical education of 1830s Arnoldian Rugby found its apologist in the 1870s episcopal meditations on the upstart scientific professionals such as those represented by Thomas Huxley and his friends. This is a significant attitude, as Temple had been present at the famous meeting of the British Association in 1860 when Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce had clashed on the subject of evolution. Temple had even preached at the service held on that occasion. Twelve years later, Temple still thought that science needed to be put in its place in a progressive cosmos where nationhood, science, classics and Christianity went hand in hand: ‘ … it can never be otherwise than a fact of the deepest significance, that for centuries past, Science and Christianity have been given by God’s providence to the same nations’.57 Temple’s relationship to the evolving scientific professions was one of Olympian detachment. They were still being viewed from the heights of a traditional classical education. This gulf between the nascent scientific professions and the long-established dominance of an education in the classics affected Temple’s ability to enter into meaningful dialogue with the open-air geologist, the busy mechanics and the amateur scientistclerics who formed the membership of this West Country association. He had been unable to engage with a similar, if more professional,

Idealism Assimilated 99

audience in 1860 at Oxford, contenting himself with an attempt to demonstrate the essential harmony between Scripture and science: ‘The more the Bible is studied, and the more nature is studied, the deeper will be found the harmony between them in character, the more assured the certainty that whoever inspired the one also made the other.’58 In Temple’s attitude, the Anglican understanding of science was harnessed to a progressive providentialism, the philosophical implications of which were bolstered by an appeal to the primacy of the classics. Perhaps Hinchliff’s puzzlement has a relatively simple answer – despite his surface acquaintance with the members of the Devonshire Association, Temple did not enter into close friendships with the scientific world because of his belief that their culture was inferior to the world of the classics and the agendas set by Jowett and his friends at Balliol. Temple’s Bampton Lectures of 1884 are another re-publication of the religion of Arnold’s Rugby. They reflect not only the calm harmonisation of religion and science of Temple’s contribution to the British Association meeting, but also an attempt to harmonise intellectual integrity and moral imperative. The dominance of order in the cosmos did not mean that it is a replacement for God. As the uniformity of Nature is only a general characteristic, the existence of miracles cannot be denied (Lecture 1). In Lecture 2 on ‘The Origin and Nature of Religious Belief’, there is within ourselves that which ‘tells of a supreme Law unchanged throughout all space and all time; which speaks with an authority entirely its own … a direct communication from the spiritual kingdom … of things in themselves; which commands belief as a duty’.59 The conscience is subordinate to the will, and Temple showed his indebtedness to both Kant and the idealist tradition: ‘It is then to the man, thus capable of appreciating a law superior in its nature to all phenomena and bearing within himself the conviction of a personal identity underlying all the changes that may be encountered and endured, that is revealed from within the command to live for a moral purpose and believe in the ultimate superiority of the moral over the physical. The voice within gives this command in two forms; it commands our duty and it commands our faith.’60 ‘Moral Law’ (which Temple always refers to with capital letters) possessed universality and claims obedience from all else that exists, and is prior in importance to the laws being formulated by the sciences which relate to the visible world. But what if this visible world contained within itself events which contradicted a belief in an all-wise providential ordering of the cosmos? These puzzling aspects of the world can only be morally acceptable if there is a future life in which all shall be made well. ‘Almighty

100 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

God and the Moral Law are different aspects of what is in itself one and the same.’61 This statement places the Moral Law beyond the remit of science. ‘Science rests on phenomena observed by the senses; Religion on the voice that speaks directly from the other world.’62 For Temple the Kantian moral imperative could not deal with the external force of temptation acting upon our moral judgement, and Kantian moral seriousness needed the redemptive power of Christianity. Temple confined free actions to those which involve the struggle between right and wrong and the performance of duty, and in an intriguing metaphor, ‘the working of the machinery of the soul’.63 In Lecture 4 Temple continued his optimistic and progressive theme in discussing evolution. ‘He [God] impressed on certain particles of matter which, either at the beginning or at some point in the history of His creation He endowed with life, such inherent powers that in the ordinary course of time living creatures such as the present were developed. … He did not make things, we may say; no, but He made them make themselves.’64 God’s immanent power in creation is at work in evolution, but instead of dealing in detail with the difficulties this presents concerning the problems of evil and suffering, Temple simply declared that these problems arose out of our partial knowledge of God’s ultimate purposes. He was so convinced of providential progress that he was led to what seems to us a bizarre comment: ‘Beasts of prey are diminishing; life is easier for man … many species of animals perish as man fills and subjugates the globe, but those that remain have far greater happiness in their lives.’65 The triumph of progress over darkness, of providence allied to evolution, is so complete that Temple is quite unable to give a rigorous critique of the presence of evil in the world. He was not alone in this optimism. The year before these lectures, commenting on an earthquake in Ischia in Italy in 1883, an anonymous contributor to the Guardian said: ‘But it is not difficult to understand in the general that the highest forms of virtue would be impossible if there were no evil to elicit, test and perfect them; or to see in any particular case that some excellent qualities of endurance [and] active sympathy have been brought into play … The limits of our horizon are very narrow; it is only reasonable to imagine that there is much beyond which our sight cannot reach.’66 Agnosticism about final purposes is sacrificed to a complacent faith that despite appearances all will turn out well. Similar optimism was expressed in the same year (1883) by Mr Le Gros Clark, FRS, at the Church Congress discussion on science at which the Anglo-Catholic writer on religion and science Aubrey Moore was present: ‘Science and Revelation agree in assigning to man the final place in the order of existence.’67

Idealism Assimilated 101

This teleological view of evolution is assumed by Temple without further argument. Gregory Elder, in his book Chronic Vigour: Darwin, Anglicans, Catholics and the development of a Doctrine of Providential Evolution (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996) calls Temple’s exposition ‘providential evolution’.68 This concept was utilised to give the Church of England’s mission an imperialist triumphalism which was ultimately to prove a problem for its relevance to cultural developments, even when grounded in the Scriptures: ‘[T]he moral teaching of the New Testament recognises what we may now almost consider a proved necessity of our nature, or at least a sure characteristic of the government of the world, that perpetual progress without which nothing human seems to keep sweet and wholesome.’69 Morality, religion, and Matthew Arnold’s sweet reasonable culture form one evolving pattern, all of which is ‘bound up with conscious communion with God’,70 whose fulfilment is found in the Christian revelation: ‘As far as it is possible to judge, that union between Morality and Religion, between duty and faith … can only be secured … by presenting spiritual truth in this form of a Revelation.’71 This marriage of duty, faith and intellect is effectively a Christianised form of Green’s ‘eternal consciousness’. Lecture 6 deals with the dialogue between revelation and evolution. Temple did not believe that life is a ‘mere evolution from organic matter’72 and appealed to the popular concept of ‘protoplasm’,73 a Victorian term signifying living material as distinct from inorganic material. It was a concept that enabled Temple to formulate a means by which God could inject consciousness and human nature into the cosmos without answering awkward questions concerning the organic relation of humanity to the created order. ‘Protoplasm’ is a miracle, a ‘direct interference’ which is held to be congruent with the moral purpose of creation. Temple, aware that Darwin had no mechanism to explain variation, believed in the uniqueness of mankind’s ancestry; the spiritual faculty is a ‘direct creative act’,74 and so the origin of the soul will remain forever mysterious. Temple’s use of ‘direct interference’ sits strangely with his use of Kingsley’s remark that God allows freedom for things to ‘make themselves’ and for the material world to fashion its own wonders. What of miracles? (Lecture 7). Temple believed that the existence of revelation, moral force (as distinct from physical force) and miracles breach the uniformity of nature. He went so far as to say that a naturalistic explanation of all miracles, even the resurrection, would not nullify revelation, for the miracle would then consist in the interpretation put on the events at the time. It is not a necessary part of revelation

102 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

to ‘interfere’ with the course of nature. Christ’s miracles may have been the superior power of mind over body. The ‘Moral Law’ is better evidence for Christianity than miracles. No physical evidence can stand superior to the spiritual evidence of the voice of conscience. Despite Temple’s attempts to preserve an orthodox understanding of miracle, this view stood close to T.H. Green’s scepticism in his Lay Sermons, that belief in the miraculous followed from faith rather than confirming it. When challenged, Temple emphasised the overwhelming imperative of moral obligation rather than a reliance on evidence from supposed supernatural events. Even with the evidence of the New Testament, ‘the existence of God is certainly not to be proved by His interference with nature’.75 Temple’s preference for the ‘miracle’ of the ‘Moral Law’ is reminiscent of Green’s idealism, as shown in the desire for unity between moral and spiritual laws (Lecture 8): ‘In short, the unity of all things which Science is for ever seeking will be found not in the physical world alone, but in the physical and spiritual united. That unity embraces both. And the uniformity which is the expression of that unity is not a uniformity complete in nature, taken by itself, but complete when the two worlds are taken together. And this Science ought to recognise.’76 For Temple, Christ is the Moral Law translated into human action. Christ, in his own person, exhibits a perfect blend of intellect and duty, of Moral Law and Divine Revelation. Evolution is evidence that this grand design was in the world from the beginning. Failure and evil are effectively side-products of this unfolding process; they are to be explained by our as-yet-imperfect understanding of the cosmic process. This spiritual cosmos is Thomas Arnold’s religion of Rugby tempered by Green’s idealism: reason and faith lead to knowledge and progress in a community in which enquiry is tempered by the categorical imperative of duty. The Christ of the Gospels is the perfect example of the physical manifestation of what we believe. He rules our conscience, the ultimate ground on which scientific enterprise and spiritual law meet. It is a ground which entails the necessary modification of the apostolic faith to meet the demands of the day. It is the Liberal Anglican version of Green’s ‘eternal consciousness’, the language of Christian orthodoxy recast in the dominant philosophical school of Oxford. What is notable about these lectures is the surprisingly little reference to scientific writings and contemporary debates within the emerging scientific community. Temple’s lectures revolved around rather narrow premises and themes. For example he does not adequately deal with the difference in use of the term ‘law’ in the moral and physical realms; and he offers something of a hostage to a ‘god of the gaps’ argument by

Idealism Assimilated 103

admitting that naturalistic explanations may well advance much further in the future. Hinchliff in his biography of Temple believed that these lectures made evolution respectable in the Church of England, and similarly Elder highlights their place in the development of ‘providential evolution’. Grayson Carter, who completed Hinchliff’s work on Temple, believes that the lectures made little impact because they did not go beyond what was already being said by Darwin and by Herbert Spencer in his voluminous writings. Spencer had popularised a link between evolution and progress which caught the mood of Victorian optimism, and the Bamptons baptised a ‘providential evolution’ which had already gained respect from philosophy and science. James Moore and Gregory Elder77 have drawn attention to the problems in Temple’s understanding of divine agency and the way in which Temple avoided some of the materialistic implications of natural selection. Elder states: ‘The simple dictum that God uses evolution to create slowly was a reconciliatory appeal to the common sense of Englishmen rather than an examination of a world view which was based on violence, randomness and a struggle for survival. In Temple’s writing there was a ministerial glossing over of the deeper challenge posed by a brutal universe in order to present a God who was now seen to be even wiser than previously thought.’78 The lectures attracted at least three reviews: an anonymous (and hostile) essay from a rationalistic viewpoint in the Westminster Review,79 a more moderate account believed to be by St G.J. Mivart in the Edinburgh Review,80 and a critical but friendly essay by Aubrey Moore in the Guardian, which was subsequently reprinted in Science and the Faith.81 They also attracted some correspondence in the moderately AngloCatholic Guardian. There was support for ‘providential evolution’: ‘There is through all stages of the evolution of morality a constant element – the conception of duty … under the authority of a moral law of absolute validity … .’82 However ‘FRS’ pointed out that Temple could not ignore the relevance of evolution to the origin of the human conscience.83 It would not be possible to protect the providential evolution of conscience from the probing explanations of the materialists. One courageous correspondent recalled Baden Powell’s contribution to Essays and Reviews. Baden Powell’s scepticism and his open acceptance of natural explanations for apparently miraculous phenomena had shocked many, and he had only been saved from prosecution by his untimely death in 1860. This correspondent stated that ‘ … the clergy, if they desire to retain any hold upon the more intelligent sections of the community, ought to follow the example which was set them many

104 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

years ago by the Rev. Baden Powell … they ought to proclaim themselves ready to accept the dominion of natural causation as that to which the term “universal” may be truly applied. During the past history of science the clergy have been steadily driven back from point to point in their hopeless conflict with natural law.’84 Despite much recent revisionist writing about the relationship of science to Christianity which questions the ‘military metaphor’ of conflict, this contribution to the debate shows that adversarial terminology was alive and well in the 1880s. The correspondence continued for some time in the Guardian, indicating an appreciation by many Christians of the unsatisfactory nature of allowing providence to control the evolutionary process when the evolution of consciousness was fenced off from naturalistic explanations. The grand metaphor for the explanation of the cosmos based on idealism and Christian dogma was an attractive belief, but not if this involved certain areas of intellectual enquiry attaining the status of nogo areas. It is interesting that the courage of the correspondents to the Guardian is greater than the explicit opinions of Temple. But they had nothing to lose; they were not charged with apostolic leadership in an increasingly marginalised Church, and they illustrate the gulf that can easily open up between what loyal church members are thinking and the public rhetoric of the leadership. Temple’s arguments appeared plausible because of the contemporary lack of understanding of the mechanism of natural selection, which made appeals to morally and spiritually directed evolution more acceptable to a culture anxious to find a reinterpretation of the moral ground of the cosmos.85 These lectures display the tensions and difficulties that Christian thinkers found when they attempted to blend optimistic evolutionary ideas concerning the cosmic drama with their faith. Contemporary critics of Temple’s Bampton Lectures saw this as well: ‘It will not do in these days for teachers to attempt to palm off upon thoughtful men systems affecting a rationalistic form, under the guise of philosophic terms torn violently from their context and compelled to theologic service.’86 Temple’s approach recalls the calm optimism of T.H. Green’s sermons and the paths of these men had crossed in their common interest in education. Green was familiar with Temple’s contribution to Essays and Reviews. Much to Green’s surprise, he learnt that Temple had advised that he should be appointed to an assistant commissionership on the 1864 Taunton Commission investigating post-elementary education. There were some murmurings that the commissioners did not want such a supposed ‘ultra-radical’ in politics and theology.87 Nevertheless, the appointment shows how Temple looked to a man’s merits rather

Idealism Assimilated 105

than his orthodoxy. Both Temple and Green had inherited the Arnoldian emphasis on action rather than dogma, evident in Green’s involvement in the foundation in 1877 of the Oxford High School for Boys (he was an Oxford town councillor from 1876) and in the founding of the University College at Bristol in 1876. Praxis received more attention than theoria. Education was given a theistic (if not Christian) understanding by adoption of the philosophies of Hegel and Kant: ‘… reality is not to be identified with the physical world or even with a dualist combination of a physical with a mental world: reality is essentially mental or spiritual … [The] foundation is thought, not the thought of individual human beings, but an eternal consciousness (or God, or Absolute, or Spirit), existing outside time and space.’88 The Arnoldian Christian individual, whether expressed in Temple’s liberal theology or Green’s philosophical theism, was not separable from the state and society and owed a moral obligation to both. This was a plausible framework fostering a model of a Coleridgian clerisy that included the clergy in a new class of scholars who would lead civilisation forwards. This was amenable to the project of the idealists in which all knowledge and human consciousness becomes a participation in the eternal consciousness. Moral ideals are not limited to individualistic endeavour, but necessarily involve the welfare of others, in what Green calls ‘The Common Good’ and which Temple would have interpreted in terms of the visible Church of God. This framework was favourable to a broadly Platonist alliance of spirituality, education and society which was also amenable to the educational vision of Temple and Green. Just as it was used as a means for renewal of Christian doctrinal apologetic against materialist and utilitarian threats, so it was foundational for a Christian apologetic for educational reforms. The idealist emphasis on historical progress encouraged Temple to accept a progressive programme for planning which involved not only imparting knowledge but also laid considerable emphasis on the gradual unfolding of spiritual potential in society. Temple’s vision of the education of the world was a paradigm of the system of education introduced at Rugby by Thomas Arnold, which involved the primacy of classical training while treating ‘useful’ knowledge as a supplementary good. This was exemplified in Temple’s contribution to Essays and Reviews and in the calm optimism revealed in the synthesis of cosmic progress and Christianity in the Bampton Lectures. ‘Providential evolution’ was not simply a marriage between biological discoveries and faith, but a grand theory which legitimised English educational culture as a global programme of human improvement.

106 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

However, even as he was delivering his Bampton Lectures, society was telling another tale, which was far less amenable to these grand visions. The mid-1880s were in England a time of considerable social unrest and economic depression, but this never appears in Temple’s apologetics. It is as if the old deist arguments of the eighteenth century had found a new home in the advanced and sophisticated age of higher criticism, and were being used to justify a reasonable and optimistic reading of Christian culture as a means to address contemporary questions. However the awkward questions concerning the problems of society were avoided by Temple’s methodology. Adrian Desmond has pointed to a very different world of struggle and competitiveness which was being championed with brilliant and readable prose by Huxley at the same time.89 For Huxley, ‘In the cycle of phenomena presented by the life of man, the animal, no more moral end is discernible than in that presented by the lives of the wolf and the deer.’90 This is a serious objection to the idealist supposition that the cosmos is a manifestation of a transcendent spiritual reality which supported a progressive view of civilisation. Huxley’s ethical scepticism and non-moral world portray a different universe to that found in the Bampton Lectures. This not only reflects a difference of intellectual perception, but also a difference of cultural formation. Both Huxley and Temple originally came from humble backgrounds, but Temple’s view of the world was refracted through the debating chambers of Oxford common-rooms and the polite alliance of philosophy with faith, whereas Huxley’s had been forged outside the religiously privileged atmosphere of the ancient universities. Huxley had no time for the comfortable ideals of social progress which could form best of all possible worlds. The choice lay between Temple’s calm and liberalised Anglican cosmos and the anguished agnostic realism of Huxley’s perpetual struggle. It is ironical that Temple’s fitful and uneven theological forays had made the heirs of the Tractarians appear more radical than the ‘Broad Church’ liberals. By the time of his elevation to Canterbury in 1896, the ‘Broad Church’ Temple appeared more conservative than the postTractarian contributors to Lux Mundi.91 In 1939, when the world had been transformed by bloody world conflicts, the fall of empires and the rise of explicitly pagan and atheistic political systems, Frederick’s son William reflected: Who among the Archbishops of Canterbury were great thinkers? He said: ‘After St. Anselm, who? Perhaps Bradwardine, Cranmer, and before he was Archbishop my father.’92 (italics in original). William saw how his father never fulfilled his intellectual promise because of the pressures of his high office. This is not quite the same

Idealism Assimilated 107

thing as Jowett’s criticism that Fredrick Temple had run away from theology into diocesan activism. However, both statements show how the pressures of ecclesiastical politics can suppress the nagging questions of doubt and the difficulties of belief. Frederick Temple was never able to live up to the implications of his passionate outburst about the importance of theological integrity displayed in his correspondence with Tait in his personal crisis of 1861. He represented that branch of Liberal Anglicanism which, in its efforts to reconcile faith with knowledge, was not able to follow the path of those who were prepared to pay the price which uncertainty brought to their inherited dogmas. The conflict avoided in Temple’s theology is that between a liberalised Anglicanism and the alternative harshness of true agnosticism. He was caught between the demands and responsibilities of his office and his own private theological opinions, exacerbated by his personal privacy and seeming inability to disclose to others the deepest thoughts of his heart. Others noticed this reticence, that meant only the surface of the man’s thoughts were evident. Scott Holland, an acute observer of others, said, ‘ … there is always a certain aloofness and aloneness in the man himself. He is still looking at life, and noting it … but he remains somewhat detached. … The Bampton Lectures passed curiously out of sight and notice, yet they were a powerful contribution to the problem of the day. What was it that held it all back somehow … something isolated, something detached, something aloof was in it and withheld it. It was the thinking of a lonely man.’93 Although they ostensibly dealt with the relationship between religion and science, Temple’s Bamptons of 1884 were more of an attempt to justify the cultural authority of the Church of England in an age of increasing scepticism. Those who looked into the abyss, the Jowetts and Pattisons of the age, could not accept this route. Their spiritual isolation and personal bitterness was the outcome of the way they had been marginalised by an Anglicanism which, having lost its political sources of authority, came to see its legitimation in doctrine rather than in the realm of public theological debate. The honesty and outspokenness of Jowett, Pattison and others, though often judged as untimely, was no more than the honest articulation of thoughts held in private by many of the clergy. They paid the price of articulating their isolation, a price that Temple could not pay because of his office and because of his essentially private nature. His personality illustrates the tension between subscription to the dogmas which validate ecclesiastical office and the inner spiritual quest of the individual’s pilgrimage with God. As the last two decades of the nineteenth century progressed, the optimistic

108 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

scenarios built up by ecclesiastical apologetics were beginning to look less and less credible. The social order was increasingly becoming the domain of explanatory metaphors which no longer looked to a Christian inheritance, even if it was an inheritance which was actively supported by a reputable philosophical foundation. The cultural and professional world of the 1880s and 1890s was growing less amenable to idealist notions of cosmic unity. The decade after Temple’s Bamptons saw a revolution in philosophical traditions which increasingly marginalised the idealistic spiritual and apologetic world which had nurtured Tractarian and Liberal apostates and their progeny. In 1888, commenting on the world of Robert Elsmere, the conservative divine Henry Wace said concerning the British form of idealism, ‘Oxford is the place where good German philosophies go when they die.’94 The spiritual cosmos which depended so heavily on that philosophy began to show signs of sickness as well, but before it passed away it was to have its effect on the heirs of Newman who not only treasured the ancient deposit of faith but saw in it a means to produce a Christian apologetic which could successfully assimilate the findings of science to a credible belief and a coherent and fully catholic doctrine of the Church of England.

8 Idealism Transcended: Aubrey Moore

We have nothing to fear from the free air and the ultimate disclosures of science. What we have to fear is that the level of instruction among the clergy should fall, as it has in France, below that of the average of other professions and of literature. A clergy undisciplined in the method and principles of science, and trained only in theological casuistry, are a dangerous force armed against the interests of the community. Modern societies are regulated more and more by knowledge, and less by tradition. Pattison, M. (1885b), 191 (Sermon preached on 6.6.1869) On 30 June 1860 the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and Thomas Huxley, the flamboyant evangelist for the rising scientific disciplines, met in debate at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford. Huxley’s supposed victory over Wilberforce has become one of the myths of Victorian intellectual history, illustrating the triumph of clear-sighted science over the obscurantist forces of reaction represented by the unctuous episcopal authority of the Bishop of Oxford. But is this true? This story is one of the great legends of the Victorian age, but it was not the straightforward battle between reactionary religion and progressive science which has become the popular understanding of the event. This simple explanation is largely the invention of a later age. Mark Pattison’s remark shows that although there were considerable concerns about the ability of the clergy to understand ‘the methods and principles of science’ it is not correct to infer that this justifiable concern implies an implacable hostility between religious and scientific interpretations of the cosmos. Certainly one of the main reasons that models of conflict have survived for so long is that it provides scientists 109

110 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

who wish to be anti-religious with a useful platform from which to criticise theistic beliefs without having to pay too much attention to the historical perspectives which include the influence of cultural factors on their own discipline. The simple version of the ‘conflict thesis’ has been widely and successfully challenged in recent decades. J. Hedley Brooke has subjected the Wilberforce–Huxley debate to a detailed analysis. Far from being a scientific ignoramus motivated by the subjective sentiments of faith, Wilberforce was able to impress Darwin with his critical appraisal of the Origin of Species published the previous year. Brooke shows that the conflict was not so much a conflict between ‘science and religion as polarised entities as between two styles of science’.1 One style was epitomised by Huxley and new professional scientific communities, and the other was the older, clergy-dominated natural history which was often suspected by the newer men of harbouring assumptions based on natural theology rather than scientific observation. Brooke, in his historical survey Science and Religion, gave a summary of the late nineteenth-century apologists for conflict. He concluded that their arguments ‘… share a defect in common with all historical reconstruction that is only concerned with extreme positions. They neglect the efforts of those who have regarded scientific and religious discourse as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.’2 Much of the mythology surrounding the Wilberforce–Huxley debate dates from decades after the event; the main lesson to be learnt from this passage of arms was that the rising scientific professions were increasingly irked by what Huxley and others regarded as the ‘meddling of the parsons’ in their new disciplines. The occasion was more an illustration of whether intelligent non-specialists like Samuel Wilberforce had a right to pronounce on the findings of the new men of science. We have already seen that Frederick Temple was also a speaker at this 1860 meeting of the British Association, where he argued in the official sermon on 1 July 1860 that the activity of God was to be discerned in the laws of nature, a theme he developed in his Bampton Lectures of 1884. ‘Science and religion’ is a convenient shorthand, but it covers a multitude of complex cultural and intellectual activities that involve not only the credibility of the discoveries of the scientists but also the cultural authority of both religiously minded and scientifically minded people, and the authoritative status of ecclesiastical and scientific bodies. In fact Temple was not alone amongst Anglican writers to devote time to the challenges of science. At the same time a subtler and more comprehensive investigation was being undertaken by the Tractarian writer Aubrey Moore in various articles written between 1883 and 1890.

Idealism Transcended 111

Aubrey Lackington Moore has been unjustly neglected in accounts of the significance of the Tractarian revival and in the relationship of the Church to scientific thought. He was one of the few clergy who could have (at least partly) set Pattison’s sceptical and cynical mind at rest. In his friendship with scientists Moore was able to gain their confidence and reflect intelligently on their theories. In fact the relationship between science and Christianity was only one of a remarkably widespread range of subjects on which he wrote. Born on 30 March 1848,3 he was the second son of Daniel Moore, vicar of Holy Trinity, Paddington.4 He entered Exeter College at Oxford, in 1867 and obtained first class honours in classical moderations and literae humaniores in 1871 (MA 1874). He was a fellow of St John’s College from 1872 to 1876, and lecturer and tutor in 1874 before becoming assistant tutor at Magdalen College in 1875. On marriage in 1876, he became Rector of Frenchay near Bristol, but went up most terms to deputise at Oxford for William Bright, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History. His historical work, Lectures and Papers on the History of the Reformation in England and on the Continent (1890) has received almost no critical attention, but it sheds light on Moore’s apologetics which in turn affected his view of the scientific enterprise. ‘Theology, Ethics and Law are, if we may dare to use the phrase, a Trinity in unity.’5 This statement illustrates his passionate belief that if theology was to remain a credible discipline then it must form coherent links with other fields of knowledge, and Moore’s writings bear abundant testimony to this project. From 1881 he was a tutor at Keble College, examining chaplain to Bishops Mackarness and Stubbs of Oxford, select preacher at Oxford 1885–86, Whitehall preacher 1887–88 and an honorary canon of Christ Church in 1887. In 1885 Dean Church of St Paul’s, the ‘Anglican reply to Newman’, who himself believed strongly in the relevance of theology to other disciplines, wished to see Moore appointed to the Chair of Pastoral Theology. He advocated this move despite Moore suffering from a physical incapacity resulting from an accident in infancy: ‘He suffers from great physical deformity, which would be in the way perhaps of a conspicuous public office, though it has not prevented him from preaching with effect at St. Paul’s; but such defect would be of little account in a Professor lecturing to his class, or holding intercourse with his pupils in private.’6 During 1888 he gave the Holy Week addresses at St Paul’s, London. By this time his interest in the relationship between science and Christian faith was becoming well known, and just before his death Moore received a request from Bishop Potter of New York to speak on ‘The Religious Bearings of Modern Science.’ He died of

112 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

influenza at the early age of 41 on 17 January 1890, having contributed to the influential Lux Mundi collection of essays in 1889. His untimely death meant that his work exists largely in posthumous collections of essays and articles, and his considerable ability has passed largely unnoticed in comparison with that of his Lux Mundi contemporaries such as Charles Gore and Scott Holland. After Moore’s death, Gore paid tribute to Moore’s ability to speak of science without compromising his faith: ‘He lived primarily and with deepest interest in his religious life and theological study, but he lived also with intense reality in the life of science. … But he had done enough for our encouragement: enough to help us believe that the best minds of the future are to be neither religious minds defying scientific advance, nor scientific minds denying religion, but minds in which religion interprets and is interpreted by science, in which faith and enquiry subsist together and reinforce one another.’7 E.S. Talbot said of Moore in his memorial article in the Guardian, ‘He was not a “scientific man”, but he was recognised as the theologian who not only knew a good deal of science, but who saw as scientific men see it, and not with a mere outsider’s interest … .’8 G.J. Romanes (1848–94), who had forsaken ordination to study medicine and physiology at Cambridge,9 paid tribute to Aubrey Moore as a ‘link of union’ between the scientific and religious communities. The quality of Moore’s work is particularly shown by this tribute, as Romanes had in 1878 published A Candid Examination of Theism, in which he sought to destroy all theistic arguments, and Moore had been a close friend who with others had helped Romanes back to Christian faith.10 The Guardian of 12 March 1890 contained a short article about a memorial studentship to assist students who wished to ‘continue the study of theology, or of philosophy or science in their relation to theology’. Amongst the signatories were J.R. Illingworth, the idealist contributor to Lux Mundi, and G.J. Romanes, their differing backgrounds testifying to the breadth of interest and wide sympathy of Aubrey Moore’s work. Moore’s best-known paper is ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’ in Lux Mundi, published in 1889. The St Paul’s sermons of 1888 were published as Holy Week Addresses, and Some Aspects of Sin comprise three courses of Lent Sermons preached in St Paul’s Cathedral, Lincoln Cathedral and Keble College Chapel. From Advent to Advent is a published series of sermons from the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. Three of his sermons are preserved in Keble College Sermons, 1877–88. Most of his work relating to science and Christianity is found in Science and the Faith – Essays on Apologetic Subjects (1889) and Essays Scientific and Philosophical (1890).

Idealism Transcended 113

Some of this material had previously appeared in the Guardian and the Quarterly Review. His impressive link with the debate over the relationship of scientific discovery and ethical questions was shown by his critique of Weismann’s ideas on heredity, a review of A.R. Wallace’s Darwinism and G.J. Romanes’ book Mental Evolution in Man. His interest in ethical problems in the light of idealism was shown by reviews of Martineau’s Types of Ethical Theory, and a critique of T.H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics. There is even a paper on Chinese thought, given to the Aristotelian Society on 29 April 1889. There are also articles on Creatianism [sic] and Evolution and the Fall, and a tribute to Moore by the Revd W. Lock, Sub-Warden of Keble College, which appeared in the Guardian, and some miscellaneous short writings and sermons. One wonders how many theologians of the present day would be able to write authoritatively on such a wide range of subjects. In Science and the Faith – Essays on Apologetic Subjects Moore reviewed Drummond’s Natural Law and the Spiritual Word, The Unity of Nature by the Duke of Argyll, and presented a detailed critique of Bishop Frederick Temple’s Bampton Lectures for 1884, The Relations between Religion and Science, which contrasts the thinking of the Anglo-Catholic Moore with the ideas of the more liberal Temple concerning the relationship between scientific endeavour and faith. Moore also reviewed the positivist James Cotter Morison’s The Service of Man – An Essay towards the Religion of the Future, and the Unitarian theologian James Martineau (1805–1900) whose study of moral consciousness was set out in a Study of Religion (1888). Moore reviewed the recently published Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887) and included a sermon preached at the Reading Church Congress in 1883 on ‘Recent Advances in Natural Science in their relation to the Christian Faith.’ But this was not all. The relationship between morality, society and doctrine is given an ecclesiastical dimension in Aubrey Moore’s neglected History of the Reformation. This work serves to fill in the background to Moore’s writings on science and faith. It gives us a valuable window into Moore’s Tractarianism, and the reasons why he remained unconvinced by the liberal theology of Frederick Temple and his particular view of the relationship of science to faith. In his History Moore contrasted the ‘Papist’ and ‘Protestant’ views, and emphasised the conservative nature of the Reformation in England. Moore, standing in the post-Tractarian tradition, believed that Protestantism had undermined true expression of faith, and that it was false to say ‘that the farther from Rome the nearer to truth’, for this was ‘a theory which finds its logical development in pure rationalism on the one hand, or

114 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

pure mysticism on the other’.11 Over-emphasis on the Protestant nature of the English Reformation fed forces of secularism and materialism which culminated in the utilitarian atmosphere of Victorian public and intellectual life. In ‘The Influence of Calvinism on Modern Unbelief’,12 Moore accused Zwingli of saying that immoral acts become moral acts when commanded by God. He was critical of the ‘forensic fictions’13 and the questionable moral status of substitutionary atonement, and saw in Protestantism an undue emphasis on rationalism which would inevitably lead to scepticism: ‘If religion is seen to be immoral, its reign is over. We cannot have one kind of morality for God and another for man. Conscience, which is the formative principle of religion, is also the great destroyer of a religion seen to be immoral.’14 Aubrey Moore, like J.S. Mill, maintained that we could not have a God whose freedom is morally repugnant to the best interests of mankind. Mill had summed this up: ‘I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.’15 Moore concurred with this revolt of moral consciousness. Lux Mundi, published in 1889, was a book ‘Westcott and his friends had planned to write after Essays and Reviews.’16 Discussions concerning the project had been going on for a number of years, and the contributors and their friends originally formed what they styled the ‘Holy Party’. Their influence on the subsequent history of the Church of England was immense. They included Charles Gore, who had gone up to Balliol in 1871; Gore’s older friend Scott Holland, who had migrated from Balliol to Trinity in 1870; E.S. Talbot, who had been appointed as the first Warden of Keble College, and the Christian philosopher-priest J.R. Illingworth.17 All of these had to a greater or lesser degree imbibed the visionary idealism of Oxford of this period, and formed a close-knit group, a ‘clerisy’ of privileged and academic individuals. The fellowship and joie-de-vivre of this group was marvellously brought out many years later by a reminiscence of Canon Bickersteth: ‘…. As I turned the corner in Park Road, I saw Talbot, Aubrey Moore, H.S. Holland, J.R. Illingworth, Charles Gore, swinging out of the lodge of Keble College arm in arm as they marched down the middle of the road, talking and laughing.’18 This was in 1876, when the influence of Oxford’s sunny idealism personified by T.H. Green and his Anglican friends was at its height. In such an environment the formation of a Christian clerisy which sought to embrace all knowledge and culture in its apologetics seemed to this group and their friends a worthwhile and challenging way of promoting Christian mission to the world. After 1875 the original group began

Idealism Transcended 115

to dissolve as the participants moved away from Oxford, but their work bore fruit in the following decade in collaboration over the production of Lux Mundi. The meditations of the ‘Holy Club’ and the production of the book were concerted efforts on the part of a younger generation of confident Anglican clergy to combine the catholic inheritance of the Church of England with progressive ideas concerning the relationship of their faith to the changes and challenges of late Victorian society. In fulfilment of a Coleridgian vision they would harness the intellectual and spiritual treasures of the past to meet the challenges of the present and construct a vision of a Christian future. The book differed from Essays and Reviews, in that it was more concerned with the application of orthodox Christian beliefs than it was with the rational revision of belief in the light of secular knowledge. As its subtitle said, it was ‘A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation’, and an ‘attempt to put the Catholic faith into its right relation to modern intellectual and moral problems’. A summary of the intentions of the contributors to Lux Mundi is given by G.L. Prestige in his biography of Charles Gore: ‘[T]hough the essayists were not “guessers at truth”, but servants of the Catholic Creed and Church, they were sympathetically aware of the profound transformations that were taking place in thought and society … they were convinced that theology needed not only some restatement of its central truths, but also considerable changes in those outlying departments where its frontiers marched with those of other sciences.’19 The phrase ‘guessers at truth’ reflects the title of the book Guesses at Truth by Julius and Augustus Hare which had been published in 1866. Julius Hare20 was an independent-minded ecclesiastic and a follower of Coleridge who was concerned at the narrowness of the original Tractarian theological concerns. However, for some who stood in the Tractarian tradition the advances of the Lux Mundi writers were a step too far on the road to apostasy. Words like ‘development’ when applied to doctrine could shock the older men such as H.P. Liddon (1829–90), who in the tradition of Pusey (1800–82), stood against the perceived destructive influence of the new ‘Higher’ Biblical criticism and an increasingly sceptical attitude towards historical studies. Twenty-three years before the publication of Lux Mundi, in 1866 in the aftermath of the furore over Essays and Reviews, Liddon had delivered the Bampton Lectures on The Divinity of our Lord, a manifesto of conservative orthodoxy which, according to Owen Chadwick, was ‘a sustained effort to refute Renan, Baur and Strauss and other liberal views of Jesus’.21 But Lux Mundi also displayed other influences besides that of its Tractarian ancestry. Gore, in his ‘Preface’, pointed to the pervasiveness

116 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

of the idea of progress and development, especially in morality: ‘… it is of the essence of the Old Testament to be the record of a gradual selfdisclosure of God continuous and progressive till the incarnation of Jesus Christ’.22 Remove the reference to the incarnation, and this would have fitted quite closely with the views of the sceptical T.H. Green, who in the Prolegomena to Ethics devoted considerable space to a discussion of ‘Moral Progress’,23 and hinted at the optimistic visions of Temple and the Arnoldian tradition. For the confident contributors to Lux Mundi, contemporary science and the philosophical climate of Oxford were exciting challenges rather than threats to their faith. A young observer of the Lux Mundi group, the instinctively Protestant Hensley Henson, said in 1885 that: ‘I was never wholly accordant with the type of Churchmanship which they represented, but it attracted and impressed me. For the first time Anglicanism appealed to me as a reasonable, coherent, and attractive version of Christianity. … The conception of a National Church, Catholic, and free, appealed to my historic sense, to my patriotism, and to my local loyalty.’24 The significant words were ‘national, Catholic and free’. Henson’s remark shows that Broad Church insights into critical methods and the Tractarian emphasis on apostolicity were reaching a modus vivendi. This was also noted by the young Cosmo Lang’s comments on Lux Mundi: ‘It marks – especially Gore’s essay on Inspiration – the absorption of the best “Broad Church” thought with “High Church” – to me it is a specially interesting book.’25 Both Lang and Henson could see that the mid-Victorian ecclesiastical party definitions were out of date, and that the relationship of the Church of England to society and culture no longer required them. Their observations are evidence that to view the history of the relationship of the Church of England to the wider culture in this period in terms of ‘party’ dispute can result in missing important emphases. In this case, it is evident from these remarks that the argument has moved from a preoccupation with party strife to a focus on the integrity of the Gospel message. It is a considerable change from the arguments of the 1820s and the 1830s when the authority of the established Church was more strongly focussed on its political associations. The fact that these developments were taking place at precisely the time that party allegiances were being reinforced by the foundation of partisan theological colleges raises the question as to the effectiveness of these colleges in promoting the Church’s message. Was the rhetoric of party allegiance which they strengthened a hindrance or a help to the development of the Church’s ability to formulate a reasonable defence of Christianity in a changed world?

Idealism Transcended 117

Nevertheless, despite their anxiousness to preserve the treasures of the past, the new generation of Tractarians were accused of overreaching themselves. The greatest source of controversy in Lux Mundi (and in his subsequent Bampton Lectures of 1891) was Gore’s view that Christ was not omniscient, and his adoption of a kenotic view of Christ’s person. This particular expression is derived from Philippians 2:5–11, where Christ ‘who being in the form [morphe] of God, did not count it a thing to be snatched [or grasped] to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form [morphe] of a slave …’. The phrase ‘he emptied himself’ [ekenosen] gave its name to kenotic theories of the incarnation and interest in the meaning of this concept in both biblical and systematic theology has never waned.26 Gore said in his Lux Mundi essay on ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’ that concerning Jesus, ‘He shows no signs of transcending the history of His age. He does not reveal His eternity by statements as to what had happened in the past, or was to happen in the future, outside the ken of existing history. His true Godhead is shown in His attitude towards men and things about Him, in His moral and spiritual claim, in His expressed relation to God, not in any miraculous exemptions of Himself from the conditions of natural knowledge in its own proper province.’27 In his Bampton Lectures of the following year, entitled The Incarnation of the Son of God, Gore is at pains to discuss what he means by the human nature of Christ. Using adventurous language, he says, ‘… the Incarnation is the folding round the Godhead of the veil of the humanity, to hide its glory, but it is much more than this, It is a ceasing to exercise certain natural prerogatives of the divine existence; it is a coming to exist for the love of us under conditions of being not natural to the Son of God.’28 Here, the piety which was characteristic of non-dogmatic theists such as Green is transformed into the language of orthodoxy, which as a result is strained to the limit to preserve what was increasingly becoming a trend to emphasise aspects of the human nature of the incarnate Christ which displayed his empathy with fallible and sinful mankind. The marginalising of the miraculous and the emphasis on the moral integrity of the incarnate Lord is a Christian parallel to Green’s philosophical lay spirituality, remarkably paralleled in Green’s essay ‘Extract from Lectures on the Fourth Gospel’: ‘For religion to exist, we must in some mode imagine God, and the most nearly adequate imagination of him is as a man in whom that which seems to be the end of moral discipline and progress has been fully attained … .’29 However, even these forays into a more imaginative and relevant theology on the part of the Lux Mundi authors were not enough for some critics. Jowett indicated

118 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

that more was required: ‘The point of which the High Church party tend to give way is Scripture, and especially the Old Testament. They feel that as the Bible is seen more and more to be like other books, the greater the need of the Church, an aspect of the question which is not wholly displeasing to them. I have read a considerable portion of Lux Mundi, but am a good deal disappointed in it. It has a more friendly and Christian tone than High Church theology used to have, but it is the same old haze and maze – no nearer approach of religion either to morality or historical truth. I am convinced that the High Church party might do something much better for the world, and that without shaking the foundation of their own faith.’30 Moore’s contribution to Lux Mundi was the essay, ‘The Christian Doctrine of God.’ In common with the other authors, it is a theology which takes philosophy seriously. He quotes Clement of Alexandria: ‘Truth is an ever flowing river into which streams flow in from many sides.’ The work of Christ was not only a subject for philosophical debate, but was a means of ‘setting loose a power of moral regeneration’.31 This was more than mere Kantianism in Christian dress, for God is not just the ‘ultimate justification for morality’.32 Moore combined moral regeneration with the struggle-metaphor of evolution which is pressed into service to support a progressive and overtly anthropocentric view of the cosmic process, in which ‘the test of fitness is the power to assimilate and promote moral and intellectual truth and so to satisfy the whole man’.33 He was fully aware of the idealist’s emphasis on the moral ideal, and he appealed to the idealist successors of Green, such as A. Seth Pringle-Pattison’s Hegelianism and Personality and Edward Caird’s Philosophy of Religion, both of which were part of a reassertion within idealism of the value of the individual in contrast to Green’s tendency to merge the individual with more universal concepts. Christianity is the progressive development of reason in mankind and the cosmos, a truth taught by Aristotle, but brought within the sphere of divine revelation by the history of Judaism and Christianity. Although Moore’s dependence upon Christian doctrine is more conservative than Temple’s (and certainly more so than that of Green) he still needs to offer a justification of progress based on the fulfilment of the purposes of God in his Church. The cosmos of progressive idealism is once more linked to a vision of the Anglican project to civilise the world by means of the enlightened few. Moore would never have gone as far as Green, who wished to transform Christian dogma into a philosophical idea. Moore’s Tractarianism meant that he was anxious to defend the historical and doctrinal basis of his beliefs without compromising the catholic truths

Idealism Transcended 119

of Christianity. He combined his ideas of personality, moral progress, reason and doctrine in one fine sentence: ‘It [Christianity] teaches that He is the eternally righteous One, and therefore the Judge of all, irrevocably on the side of right, leading the world by a progressive preparation for the revelation of Himself as Infinite Love in the Incarnation of the Word, stimulating those desires which He alone can satisfy, the yearning of the heart for love, of the moral nature for righteousness, of the speculative reason for truth.’34 There could be no finer summary of what the Lux Mundi theologians were trying to achieve. Focussed on the incarnation, it appeals to the divine love which diffuses the entire cosmos, a love based on a revelation of moral law illuminated by reason. This is a Christianised form of Green’s ‘eternal consciousness’, which was combined with progressive revelation of truth, worked out in more detail in E.S. Talbot’s Lux Mundi essay, ‘The Preparation for the Christ.’ In this Talbot showed in a manner that would not have been strange to Thomas Arnold that Greek wisdom, Roman power and Jewish spirituality were preparatory stages for the coming of Christ. What of science? ‘[E]very new truth which flows in from the side of science … is designed in God’s providence to make that revelation real, by bringing out its hidden truths.’35 An evolving and organic nature replaced mechanical concepts which had been used as explanatory models since the time of Newton. The preference for an organic model is sympathetic to an idealist cosmos which was a spiritual unity which is not capable of being reduced to mere sense experience. The organic vision of nature also meant that reason had moved from being an external cause to an internal principle in creation. This rational unity and balance in the cosmic order was for Moore grounded in the Christian doctrine of the Logos. The immanence of God is that which gave ‘rationality and coherence to all that is, and [justifies] the belief in the universal reign of law’.36 To rationality and law Moore added morality: ‘In theology the moral purpose is more prominent; in science the rational cohesion; and partisans generally fail to see that these are the convex and concave of truth.’37 Moore quoted an illuminating comment of Athanasius, Contra Gentes §42: ‘He it is Who binding all with each, and ordering all things by His will and pleasure, produces the perfect unity of nature, and the harmonious reign of law. While he abides unmoved for ever with the Father, He yet moves all things by His own appointment according to the Father’s will.’ It would be hard to find a more telling quotation to illustrate the love of philosophical theory, the holistic spiritual seriousness and the incarnational emphasis of the idealist theologians of Lux Mundi.

120 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Moore shared with Temple a rejection of an interventionist concept of the miraculous as this implied the habitual absence of God from creation: ‘The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day, is that which represents Him as an occasional Visitor. Science had pushed the deist’s God farther and farther away, and at the moment when it seemed as if He would be thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. … Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere. … He cannot delegate his power to demigods called ‘secondary causes.’38 Appealing to Green’s criticisms of J.S. Mill,39 Moore concluded that ‘The counterpart of the theological belief in the unity and omnipresence of God is the scientific belief in the unity of nature and the reign of law.’40 He was faithful to the quotation from S. Clement with which he opened his article. How was this essay received? In 1901, Alfred Caldecott, Professor of Logic and Mental Philosophy at King’s College, London, described Moore’s theism as ‘Intuitivism, or Mysticism’. Caldecott questioned whether Moore’s aim of making doctrine the basis for unity is possible. He traced Moore’s intuitivism and mysticism back to the Cambridge Platonists41 in the seventeenth century, passing through a surprisingly diverse assortment of thinkers, who without this Platonising tendency might be thought to belong to a great assortment of schools: William Law, Wordsworth, Coleridge, F.D. Maurice, Francis Newman and B.F. Westcott. This observation of Caldecott’s points to a unifying theme between the Liberal Anglicans and the Lux Mundi school whereby the Platonism which lay behind the revival of idealism provided a common foundation for a spiritual view of the created order. Although Caldecott does not mention idealism, he believes that Moore retained orthodox faith by constructing an idealist cosmos viewed through the prism of the incarnate Logos and Christianised Platonism. He stated that for Moore, ‘the world was before him as it appears to the Christian believer in the light of the Incarnation’. Therefore ‘it was not of personal consequence to work out a Natural Theism’.42 The idea of God is intuitively gained, but ‘is the result of the joint action of our ordinary faculties interpreting the whole of our experience’.43 Caldecott believed that Moore’s desire for cosmic unity of knowledge was driven as much by his scientific interests as by his Christian theology. In fact he thinks that Moore’s science controlled his theological apologetics, so anxious was he to construct a world which demonstrated both divine handiwork in the material realm and divine grace in the human realm. It was Moore’s interest in science that gave him a penchant for ‘gathering phenomena

Idealism Transcended 121

into a cosmos’. There is only one cosmos and one incarnation, and in Moore and the Lux Mundi school these were brought together in a Christian apologetic that sought to meet the challenges of scientific materialism. Caldecott also believed that Moore was too willing to accept Christian orthodoxy: ‘It is, I think, the fact that Moore was so penetrated with the desire to show what Christian Theism could do, that he had not worked out what his own principles could contribute to Natural Theism … For Moore, too, his belief, as a matter of fact, came from authority and tradition, which when inquired into by reason he set out as “instinct”. Hence it is not unsympathetic to say that perhaps he was not equipped for any other work … he could hardly have done more than he did, which was, to set forth Christian Theism in historical connection with much, though far from all, the course of philosophical and religious history.’44 This is an unfair judgement which does not do full justice to the depths of Moore’s engagement with the Christian philosophical tradition, nor to his doctrinal apologetics. Nevertheless, we are reminded of a criticism we have seen applied to men like Ward, Newman and Temple, that the mind has been set to work to legitimate a position already reached by the heart. A much later critique of Moore’s Lux Mundi essay is that of S.H. Mayor on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Lux Mundi in 1964.45 By then the theological climate had changed. Moore’s philosophical approach had been eclipsed, and replaced by a much greater emphasis on ‘Biblical Theology’. Mayor accused the Lux Mundi authors of having no proper Biblical foundation, ‘such as theologians of any school would seek to establish in this post-Barthian age’, a statement which says a good deal about the perspective from which Mayor was writing. By the 1960s theology had travelled a long way in the 70 years since the philosophically based apologetics of the closing years of the nineteenth century. Mayor criticised Moore for producing a work of speculative theology which is in no sense Biblical exposition, but a series of orthodox assertions about Christ which are illustrated from the Bible. Mayor saw Moore’s grounding of religion in the idealistic implication that there is a moral relationship between man and God as being an insufficient foundation for his arguments. Significantly, he says that for Moore, ‘The secret of Christian ethics is in fact a Hegelian synthesis.’46 Mayor was writing towards the end of the neo-orthodox revival and the ‘Biblical Theology’ movement. He would hardly have been impressed with an apologetic which started, as did Moore’s contribution to Lux Mundi, with a philosophical quote from Clement of Alexandria, and then went on

122 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

to combine Athanasius’ great vision of a unified cosmos with scientific discoveries. The article is a fascinating illustration of how the brave theological presuppositions of one generation can become pilloried as unargued assumptions in the next. It also illustrates how vulnerable the Lux Mundi theologians could appear to a generation of thinkers formed in a very different world. In the introduction to his book Science and the Faith Moore reiterated the claim ( pace Caldecott’s criticisms) that there is no future in abandoning traditional Christian faith: ‘[I]t seems to me impossible to defend Christianity on the basis of anything less than the whole of the Church’s Creed.’47 Evolution ‘marks a real step onwards in the search for truth, and therefore cannot be, at heart, opposed to the Faith of Christ’.48 Nor can evolution be limited to the realm of biological interpretation. ‘[T]here is much more to come. Evolution cannot stop short where it is. The comparative method must be applied … to the reason and the conscience, and the will, as well as to the bodily structure.’49 Explanations of the cosmos for the Christian involve believing ‘that God is a personal Being, and in His innermost nature a God of Love, that the world is a moral world, and the goal of its movement the triumph of righteousness’.50 This is another of Moore’s daring statements, combining faith and an optimism that denies that there can ever be a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for life. In Moore’s world of the late 1880s, many believed that evolution was still strongly teleological and that this could temper the materialistic overtones of ‘natural selection’. At the time, there was no coherent scientific explanation for natural selection, and both Christian apologists and philosophers such as Herbert Spencer, then enjoying enormous popularity, could put forward optimistic scenarios in which cultural progress was harnessed to an evolutionary schema. Peter Bowler has shown how statements such as Moore’s helped evolution to coexist with ideas of purpose in the 1890s, and indeed until long after the turn of the century.51 This optimism was not simply a product of Christian faith. Speaking of books such as Henry Drummond’s Ascent of Man, published in 1894, Bowler says, ‘A theory of inevitable progress was the ideal basis upon which to argue that mental evolution up to and including mankind was part of God’s plan for generating higher levels of awareness in the material universe.’52 Further, ‘progress’ was used to foster a sense of inevitability about the historical process, a ‘Whig’ understanding of history which served to legitimise the present as a product of the divine will, working through history and culture. Bowler goes so far as to say that ‘Evolution meant progress along a predictable course towards modern civilization as its inevitable goal.’53

Idealism Transcended 123

It was within this context that Aubrey Moore saw faith expressed in an evolutionary atmosphere of universal law and Christian moral goals; there need be no necessary conflict between evolution and the spiritual realm. Such was Moore’s belief in the benign effects of evolutionary theory that he criticised the Duke of Argyll’s book The Unity of Nature because the Duke dismissed evolution on the grounds that it is necessarily connected with pure materialism.54 Evolution has ‘absolutely nothing’55 (Moore’s italics) to say to the dogma of creation. He believed (as did Frederick Temple) that the naturalistic implications of evolution could be countered by an appeal to metaphysics, and that science could not provide all the answers. For Moore, not only does evolution have nothing to say about original creation, but also the origin and nature of the soul is outside its remit. Apart from these matters, all is open to those who read the book of God’s work in the scientific enterprise.56 Nevertheless, in a review of Romanes’s Mental Evolution in Man Moore said: ‘The creation of the soul by God is neither more nor less true than the creation of the body by Him, and therefore, if science can by a patient application of its own methods tell us something here too of the modus creandi, we may hope that Christians have learned enough from the past to be ready to meet the attempt with something more than glum disapproval.’57 There are therefore four main aspects of Aubrey Moore’s cosmos. First, there is the necessity for orthodox Christian belief to actively dialogue with science in a confident manner. Moore was opposed the revisionism which fitted faith to the shifting ground of evolutionary theory. He accused Henry Drummond of just this tendency in his review of Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World, which was ‘the glorification of Darwin and Spencer’.58 Those who reject what God has provided for his Church mistake ‘for theology what is after all only physical science touched by religiousness’.59 Having given a brief outline of Darwin’s comments about his religious position and how religion ‘died a natural death’ in him, Moore pointed out that this was not the only aspect of Darwin’s life that became neglected. He quoted Darwin: ‘I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have almost lost my taste for pictures or music. … My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts … .’60 Moore saw this atrophy of the spirit as the result of a tendency to ‘draw everything round to the predominant pursuit’. It is at root a problem of priorities, in that the scientific man cannot understand the matters of theology, and the theologian cannot maintain an

124 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

interest in science. This is a significant observation. The fragmentation of culture and the specialisation of the sciences, coupled with greater professionalisation, meant that Christian apologists had an increasingly difficult time in explaining how their faith could be of universal significance. In previous ages, Christian faith had often been the assumed or explicit background for the investigations into natural history which were carried out by leisured gentleman clergy. By Moore’s time, faith was increasingly privatised as the strength of professional disciplines grew and the Church progressively lost its influence over the educational and cultural world. In fact, as Darwin’s comment shows, it was not only faith that was privatised – Darwin himself was finding it difficult to reconcile the various branches of knowledge in a personal credo. In a fascinating passage alive with reference both to evolutionary and Biblical imagery, Moore wrote: ‘The atrophy of faith is commoner than atrophy elsewhere. For men have come to think that while they must devote a lifetime to science, or philosophy, or art, or literature, they can pick up their religion as they go. And the result is that religion becomes like a tender exotic in their lives, and in the struggle for existence “the thorns spring up and choke it.” ’61 He clearly realised that there were factors at work which could strongly influence someone either for or against Christianity and emphasise faith as a matter of personal choice rather than public doctrine. In such an atmosphere, consciously realised or not, the unity provided by some form of rapport between idealism and theism was a convenient and prestigious framework which could serve to legitimate the failing Anglican hegemony over both professional and university culture. The second aspect of Moore’s apologetic was a belief that the universe was pervaded by a goal-directed positive moral purpose. Our relationship with God is governed by growth towards a vision of the divine. There is a unity of moral and natural law: ‘All natural law is moral, and finds its explanation only as part of a greater moral unity’,62 a unity which was itself the product of the fact that ‘Christianity knows of only one origin for all things … .’63 This morality of natural law was a feature which Moore shared with Temple, which gave rise to a basic question in discussing the relationship of the world of nature and morality: ‘Does the world of nature correspond to, and thereby justify, the a priori conception of God which conscience demands and religion declares?’64 Moore believed the atheists Cotter Morison and Charles Bradlaugh had attacked a moral system based on a degenerate Calvinism rather than ‘Christian morality’ as such.65 An illuminating statement brings out Moore’s Tractarian vision of the Church as cement binding mankind in a

Idealism Transcended 125

common cause of brotherhood and service, which is also close to T.H. Green’s vision of society: ‘With the loss or obscuration of the idea of the Church, the social side of Christianity and the idea of brotherhood fell into the background, and individualism in religion, in politics, in ethics, with its correlated atomism in science and philosophy became almost universal … the Christianity of Christ is not a mere “soul-saving system” for the individual, but a true regeneration of man as man.’66 The moral life is essentially a corporate one, lived out in the life of the divine society formed around the discipleship of Christ. This led Moore to react with horror to Cotter Morison’s extreme utilitarian concept of ‘homoculture’ combined with a rigid determinism which sought to regulate human life and culture ‘for the sake of the race’. Moore also wanted more than Green’s ‘superhuman’ basis for ethics.67 What was needed was a revelation of the divine moral law which was vouchsafed in the Christian faith. Evolution in a naturalistic form could clearly pose a challenge to such a belief, but such was Moore’s confidence that he was even prepared to give a cautious acceptance to those evolutionists such as Weismann and Wallace who championed the dominance of natural selection. Moore saw the assertion that the cosmos is both moral and teleological as forming ‘the battle-ground for our day’.68 The universe was moving towards a moral goal, a time when Christ would be ‘all in all’. In The Post-Darwinian Controversies of 1979 James Moore contended that those closest to orthodoxy (such as Aubrey Moore) understood most clearly what the implications of evolution were for theology. They became ‘Christian Darwinians’, whereas those who were of a more liberal or radical theological persuasion, such as Frederick Temple, became ‘Christian Darwinists’. The ‘Darwinists’ used evolution to legitimate a general expression of cultural liberalism that had little to do with theology, and was significantly more optimistic about human progress than Christian orthodoxy. James Moore states that, ‘Left to the devices of modernity, they solved their theological problems with concepts of divine immanence, human goodness, and social and religious progress, only to have their evolutionary speculations embarrassed and undermined by future turns of events.’69 For James Moore and many subsequent writers, the polarisation of religion and science was a rhetorical move which was employed to assist the cultural ‘victory’ of science over religion. Subsequent work by Frank Turner and others has shown that part of this rhetoric was due to the increasing power of the scientific professions who wished to dissociate themselves from the perceived cultural superiority of the clergy-dominated ‘clerisy’ that had been an important influence in the life of the ancient

126 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

universities. Rather than an expression of intellectual abstractions, it was as much a product of cultural transition. Richard England’s unpublished PhD thesis Aubrey Moore and the Anglo-Catholic Assimilation of Science at Oxford (University of Toronto 1997) has shown that James Moore’s ideal of ‘Christian Darwinism’ can only be coherent when Darwinian ideas are allied to a moral purpose which is no part of Darwin’s basic theory: ‘… reconcilers of evolution and religion add metaphysical conceptions to science, and see in evolution a progressive unfolding or growth of a divinely ordered plan’.70 Further, England says: ‘I think it is clear … that there were more philosophical differences than similarities between [Aubrey Moore] and Darwin. Moore was an idealist who believed in divine immanence. His notion of the evolution of morals was completely different from what Darwin proposed. His theodicy, depending as it did, on a future proof of evolution’s moral purpose, was again alien to Darwin’s rather more ambiguous vision of nature.’71 England thus points to the reason why ‘scientism’, the view that science is a sufficient explanation for the cosmos, was never taken seriously by those who believed that the spiritual dimension of human life was important and necessary. For Aubrey Moore and his friends their interaction with science was based upon the incarnate Logos supported by the immanentist tendencies of idealist theology. The third feature of Aubrey Moore’s cosmos was the immanence of God in all creation. Moore was indebted to T.H. Green for the latter’s championing of a metaphysical basis for morals over the contemporary trend for establishing morality on ‘scientific’ or utilitarian-based philosophies. Despite these attractions, Aubrey Moore understood that Green gave an independent justification for morals that was not bound to either science or dogma, and that this could not lead to an answer that was acceptable to Christians seeking to relate their faith to the world. As Moore said, ‘For metaphysics and theology fight side by side against any attempt to make ethics a part of natural science. It is only when metaphysics adopts … a sublimated Christianity in which the Christ of the Gospels and the Epistles is lost sight of in the Christian Idea, that theology is compelled to reassert the historical character of the Catholic faith.’72 Here is a direct rebuttal of Green’s anti-historical Christian theism. Moore denied that history can be submerged under the concept of ‘idea’, a tension which we have already seen in Green’s correspondence with Moore’s fellow contributor to Lux Mundi, Scott Holland. The idealists’ vision of nature as a unity which can only be so for a conscious intelligence which is not part of nature was a valuable support for orthodox Christians as they sought a personal ground to a

Idealism Transcended 127

cosmos threatened by the bleakness of materialism and scientific naturalism. Green’s alternative cosmos was one in which ‘our conception of an order of nature and the relations which form that order have a common spiritual source’.73 Moore’s review of Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics praised Green for considering metaphysical ideas in an age when realism and ‘touch and taste and handle’ were becoming the foundational ideas of philosophical reasoning. Moore is also aware that Green had published an extensive critique of the British empirical tradition which descended from Locke, and remarked how hard it was for people in England to grasp anything but commonsense realism: ‘To be told that all reality consists in relations, and relations are impossible except for an intelligence capable of relating, sounds strange to people whose common view of the real is that it is something which is independent of consciousness, that is, “unrelated.” ’74 Moore quoted with approval from paragraph 33 of Green’s Prolegomena in which Green’s Kantianism led him to say that ‘The source of our relations, and the source of our knowledge of them, is one and the same.’75 Consciousness, for both Green and Aubrey Moore cannot be explained by the nature that presupposes it. It is worthwhile here to quote an example of Green’s lumbering prose style in which he illustrated this holistic feature of the cosmos: ‘The true account of it is held to be the concrete whole, which may be described indifferently as an eternal intelligence realised in the related facts of the world, or as a system of related facts rendered possible by such an intelligence, partially and gradually reproduces itself in us, communicating piece-meal, but in inseparable correlation, understanding and the facts understood, experience and the experienced world.’76 Further, for Green personal fulfilment is only possible in a society in which the individual finds his full potential: ‘Language presupposes thought as a capacity, but in us the capacity of thought is only actualised in language. So human society presupposes persons in capacity … but it is only in the intercourse of men … that the capacity is actualised and that we really live as persons.’77 Under the influence of these idealist sentiments reinforced by Christian orthodoxy, Aubrey Moore and his Lux Mundi contemporaries constructed a unified cosmos which at the same time could do justice to the unfolding of the divine purpose though society over time. This immanence was most powerfully brought out in Lux Mundi by J.R. Illingworth’s contribution, significantly entitled ‘The Incarnation and Development’, but it is evident in all the essays. To combine Green’s idealist terminology with that of the Lux Mundi writers, the ‘eternal consciousness’ reproduces itself

128 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

in us so that the world becomes a coherent system of related facts which is legitimated in the divine society of the Church which is sanctified by the incarnation. Even though he was aware of the incompatibility between Green’s standpoint and his own, Aubrey Moore could use Green’s ideas to bring plausibility to his own Christian position in an age when faith was under attack. This is the Christian parallel to what F.M. Turner calls the ‘The Triumph of Idealism in Victorian Classical Studies.’78 Through the utilisation of philosophical idealism the authority of traditional classical studies was reasserted against materialism and rationalism. Jowett, in his translations of Plato and in other works, had used idealism as a framework by which classical studies could remain wedded to the older conservative traditions of Oxford. Jowett and Aubrey Moore were poles apart theologically, but both were endeavouring to preserve values which validated Christianity and classicism against the rise of utilitarian, empiricist and materialist science. In an age when the relationship between classical studies and theology was much closer than today, Jowett, Moore, Temple and Green, however much they differed in their theologies represented the rearguard action of a classicalChristian tradition over against the secularising trends in intellectual and cultural life and the rapid laicisation of Oxford University. Idealism, however wanting in theological rigour, provided a bridge between Aubrey Moore’s theology and his Christian interpretation of scientific advances. For example, evolution provided a clear example to Moore (at least in his understanding) of development which enabled him to combine spiritual progress with organic development, and allowed him to speak of the ‘evolution of morality’ to a stage unknown in the ancient world. Moore could even appeal to Green for an argument for the survival of the individual after physical death, for Green had said: ‘We may … justify the supposition that the personal life, which historically or on earth is lived under conditions which thwart its development, is continued in a society, with which we have no means of communication through the senses, but which shares in, and carries further every measure of perfection attained by men under the conditions of life that we know.’79 However, the Christian’s moral dynamic could not be satisfied with this naturalistic and philosophical triumph of human reason. There was a greater sense of moral dynamic than that given by the arguments of the idealists, and it was to be found in uniting belief in the Logos and the divine grace revealed in Christ with progressive evolution in a cosmos governed by moral law. Thus the fourth aspect of Aubrey Moore’s apologetic was the combination of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation with a rational

Idealism Transcended 129

vision of the cosmos. As we have seen, Moore rejected the materialistic implications of Darwinism for a teleological view of an organic evolving cosmos ordered by divine law, a divine immanence against a mechanistic Newtonian understanding. ‘[E]volution marks the transition from the mechanical to the organic view of the universe.’80 This rejection of a mechanical paradigm meant that Paley’s arguments are no longer sound, for they belong to a bygone age. Aubrey Moore’s criticism is a calmer version of Coleridge’s passionate rejection of Paley’s influence: ‘His argument … did its work for the age in which it was constructed. It assumed the facts of nature, as then known, and the theory which coordinated them. But it was steeped in mechanism, and by association at all events, suggested that deistic view of the relation of God to the world which is so impossible for us.’81 As early as 1883 Moore had criticised the ‘unconscious deism’ of the time which enabled believers and scientists to posit a simple solution by which science dealt with the region of the knowable, where law reigned and miracles were disallowed, and religion dealt with that of the unknown. Moore claimed that the end result of this dualism was that the religion of nature devours the religion of faith and we are left with a ‘God of the Gaps’: ‘And very soon those who have thus unwisely become the champions of the supernatural against the natural find that, as knowledge grows, they have to retire farther and farther back, and they either make frantic efforts at reprisals, or they settle down into a dull conservative protest against science as the enemy of faith.’82 Green, Temple and Moore were all opposed to the concept of divine ‘interference’ as it made it appear that God was usually absent from the world. As Moore asserted in his paper to the Reading Church Congress ‘There are not, and cannot be, any Divine interpositions in nature, for God cannot interfere with Himself. His creative activity is present everywhere.’83 However, in reflecting this aspect of the revisionist theodicy of Green’s Lay Sermons, Moore failed to engage rigorously with the meaning of miracle. The central miracle of the faith for orthodoxy is the resurrection. How was this event capable of reconciliation with his statement about the lack of ‘Divine interpositions’? There is a danger that the miraculous element of the resurrection is subsumed under a general incarnationalism. The sceptic Green, in his rejection of the miraculous, was more rigorous in his thought than the more orthodox Aubrey Moore. Moore also drew on the scientific writings of the philosopher of science William Whewell, who, as we have seen, believed that although induction was essential to scientific method, observations could only be given meaning by virtue of what he called ‘Fundamental Ideas’,84 which

130 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

were similar to Kantian concepts. Moore quoted Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences where he had described in a manner similar to the idealists that relationships and laws are more important than atoms. Moore stated: ‘… atomism had ceased to be an adequate metaphysic even for the inorganic sciences. The “atoms” were discovered to be less important and less real than the relations which were found to exist among them. The conception of “law” had become prominent, and was monopolizing scientific interest.’ The rise of the biological sciences indicated an inward unity of a living whole, held together by rational principle. The ‘power which holds all things together must be immanent and omnipresent’,85 an Aristotelian vision of a rational cosmos: ‘That nature is rational throughout, that there is nothing really useless or unmeaning in it, is a view which the Darwinian is as much pledged to maintain as the theist.’86 Thus the cosmos is rational and exhibits a divine teleology in which God is immanently active. However, this immanentism meant that Moore, in common with all theologians influenced by idealism, could not deal adequately with the problem of pain and waste in the natural order. It was necessary for him to fill the cosmos with ‘meaning’, giving rise to a problem in theodicy which was similar to that noted in Temple’s analysis of the presence of evil and sin in the world. Even though Moore, of all the portraits in this study, stood nearer to orthodox Christian tradition he could not escape from the prevailing optimism concerning what he believed was the destiny of mankind. As a means of validating this vision, Moore utilised an understanding of the Logos which was influenced by an optimistic idealism. Looking back many years later on theology at Oxford in the 1880s, C.J. Abraham, Bishop of Derby, said ‘The Logos meant something then, meant everything – even the freshmen felt that it did. It was all so near, quick and immediate.’87 For the Lux Mundi writers the doctrine of evolution was a means to effect a reconciliation between Oxford philosophical idealism, the findings of science, the incarnate Logos and the teleological sense of all things moving towards a fulfilment in Christ. As the idealist theologian J.R. Illingworth succinctly expressed this grand scheme with Tennysonian phraseology, ‘a teleological view of nature will again be possible, and the whole history of the world’s evolution will assume a new significance, as moving to one far-off divine event, of which the Incarnation is at once an anticipation and a prophecy’.88 This is an extremely bold statement, begging questions about evils in creation in a similar manner to those found in Frederick Temple’s Bampton lectures, and is illustrated by Frank Turner’s comment that, ‘Evils or examples of suffering in nature stood rationalised on utilitarian

Idealism Transcended 131

grounds. … [T]he wisdom of God displayed in the utility of contemporary social arrangements, which like certain paradoxes of nature appeared evil until properly interpreted, undergirded the correctness of the British social order and similarly foiled the mischief of social critics.’89 This optimistic reading of social progress resulted in a facile and simplistic view of the problem of pain and evil. As Michael Ramsey was to highlight many years later,90 it is not sufficient to say with Moore and the Lux Mundi incarnationalists that ultimately there is ‘an explanation for everything’. The rule of law is indeed a valuable and necessary part of Christian theology, but it can be so emphasised that it fails to recognise the full force of a faith struggling with pain and perplexity amidst problems that simply cannot be explained. The Logos ‘meant something’ at Oxford in the 1880s, but what about in darkest England, in the vast problems facing the real-life equivalents of Robert Elsmere in London and the great cities? Is it enough, to say with Moore, ‘our faith is not staggered by much which seems, as yet, like useless suffering’?91 Only a strong, and some would say blind, faith in the two words ‘as yet’ can salvage this theodicy. Charles Booth published his Life and Labour of the People in London in the same year that Lux Mundi was published. He claimed that almost half the 900,000 inhabitants of London’s East End were below the poverty line. Despite the heroic and spiritually inspired efforts of those clergy who toiled in the poorest parts of Britain’s cities, Moore’s arguments reflect too readily an apologia from the comfortable world of late-Victorian Oxford rather than an attempt to meet the problems faced by the urban clergy. At least Mrs Ward’s fictional if unorthodox Elsmere was confronting social problems with practical action. The ‘far-off, divine event’ could enthral the vision of those whose culture was comfortable, but was way beyond the horizon of the increasing millions who toiled in the burgeoning great cities of the nation and who were being given an increasing voice in the political and social life of the country. Moore’s idealist-Catholic vision was in tension with the possibility that evolution has a purely naturalistic explanation, which Moore sought to resolve by divine immanence which effectively minimised the problems of evil and suffering. What can this theodicy say about sin and imperfection? In his article ‘Creation and the Fall’ in Essays Scientific and Philosophical Moore skirted problems of theodicy without engaging in a detailed analysis: ‘It is because he is true to the facts that a Christian evolutionist refuses to acquiesce in the easy optimism of those who see but one side of human development, and ignore the fact of sin.’92 Moore still maintained a strong division between the methods of theology and science: ‘In a word, we are as little

132 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

prepared to consult Genesis on the order of the palaeontological series as to ask the high priests of modern science to solve for us the difficulties of our moral and spiritual life.’93 He could not then foresee the enormous increase in influence that psychological and sociological studies would have on explanations of morality which would be as naturalistic as those proposed by the physical sciences of the 1880s. Aubrey Moore combined evolutionary science with the Tractarian emphasis on the corporate nature of the Church as a divine society, the universal significance of which was a foretaste of the redemption of the cosmos in Christ. The ‘social organism’, the ‘Divine Society’ of idealism with its supernatural presence, lent support to the efforts of social amelioration replacing laissez faire economics. Combined with the idealism of T.H. Green this enabled Christians of Moore’s generation to construct an understanding of moral and ethical origins compatible with Christian theism. Reflecting the idealist Green’s view that the world has always been very good to him, they came to believe that the cosmos was moving towards the time when God shall be all in all, and the knowledge of God shall fill the world ‘as the waters cover the sea’.94 Moore’s cosmic teleology was strongly influenced by a particular view of the Church of England’s role in wider society: ‘Its ideal is unity, the unity of a visible organised society, which is as far removed from the mechanical uniformity of Rome or Geneva as from the formulated disunion of modern Congregationalism.’95 It was an apologia for the ordered cosmos of the established Church, an alternative to the competing claims of the rising professional and scientific disciplines and the less inclusive visions of Catholicism on one hand and dissent on the other. Gore, Moore, Illingworth, Scott Holland and the others, together with their ‘ritualist’ contemporaries, filled in the voids of T.H. Green’s vision with the colours of an immanent God, ever operative in creation. It was no accident that this attempt at a theologically unified vision of the cosmos went hand in hand with a liturgical revival of the symbolic element in worship and a love affair with the ‘beauty of holiness’. To this philosophical and aesthetic cosmos they added the ancient concept of the Logos in order to further their vision that the world was rational and coherent. Carried forward by their enthusiasm, they added dubious claims of invincible moral purpose and progress allied to ‘evolution’. Entranced by an Oxford where the Logos ‘meant something’, at the height of British world influence and in an atmosphere of optimism concerning the future, they realised in their apologetics the observation of Edward Norman, that, ‘The theologians have always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their

Idealism Transcended 133

version of Christianity correspond almost exactly to the values of their class and generation.’96 Was it all just too perfect? Was there no place for darker tones of sin, failure and evil? For a substantial number of those raised in Christian families, the insistence of these questions would come to overwhelm their faith. Rejecting cosmic idealistic visions, and liberal restatements of Christian faith, their divine cosmos collapsed amidst the probing questions of rationalism and science which treated religious questions as marginal and rejected the cultural milieu in which they still carried significant weight and meaning. They came to believe that the only rational position was a clear-sighted agnosticism, even if it was an agnosticism that was of necessity forged from the materials of their Christian forebears.

9 Idealism Marginalised: Charles D’Arcy

… the unity of creation, both inorganic and organic, and the order which can be discerned throughout the whole, can only be explained by the activity of a great Universal Intelligence, the nature of which can be more clearly indicated by man’s inner conscious life than by any other principle known to us. D’Arcy, C.F. (1925), Science and Creation – The Christian Interpretation, London: Longmans, Green, 105. The career of Charles D’Arcy illustrates the necessity of paying close attention to the social and indeed the geographical context of Christian theology. Philosophical idealism was very influential in the formation of D’Arcy’s apologetics, yet he remains relatively unknown when compared to the other personalities described in this book. Of course this could be construed as indicating that his status as a Christian thinker influenced by idealism was reduced on account of the relative shallowness of his contributions. Be that as it may, there were other factors which resulted in D’Arcy’s consignment to relative obscurity. The most significant of these was that his life was lived far from the centres of Anglican power and influence represented by the Arnoldian Rugby tradition, Oxford University and Balliol College which have figured widely in this book. Most of his life was lived within the Church in Ireland, that isolated epsicopal communion which had caused so much pain and passion in the 1830s and had been a major rationale behind the rise of the Tractarian movement. Despite the appalled reactions of Keble and Newman and their friends, the inevitable cause of justice to the Irish Catholics had been recognised and the Church was disestablished in 1869. A further reason for D’Arcy’s relative lack of influence is that most of his published work belongs to a slightly later period, when idealism was 134

Idealism Marginalised 135

in decline as a major philosophical influence. Nevertheless, his most explicit foray into philosophical idealism, his Idealism and Theology was published in 1899 and belongs very much to the nineteenth century although for reasons which are not altogether clear its influence appears to have been minimal. D’Arcy shared a common theme with Aubrey Moore and Frederick Temple, in that he had an abiding interest in the relationship between theology and science, and as in the case of these two men he used the framework of idealism to promote this alliance. Like Temple and Moore, he was not uncritical of the claims of idealism; nevertheless it was a formative influence on his theology well into the 1930s. The muted reception of his writings, and their neglect in comparison with the products of Rugby liberalism and Oxford Tractarians is striking. This aspect of his work is a useful pointer to the factors which enabled and constrained the Anglican theological response to the challenges of the fin de siècle. Far from the centre of established theological creativity, D’Arcy’s work remained marginal to trends in Anglican thought. Charles D’Arcy was born in Dublin in 1859 into a family which he says ‘had been one of the first to be influenced by the Oxford movement’1 in Ireland, and entered Trinity College Dublin in 1877. He was a studious child, for he says ‘I became a convinced Berkeleian at about the age of twelve.’2 This early introduction to philosophy grew into a lifelong interest in the relationship between idealism and Christianity and also influenced his apologetic interest in the scientific enterprise. An interesting comparison with Frederick Temple is that both he and D’Arcy spent a considerable time studying mathematics, philosophy and divinity. D’Arcy came under the influence of the idealists Edward and John Caird and what he terms Spencer’s ‘universal evolution’.3 He graduated from Dublin with a senior moderatorship in logics and ethics, and he ‘felt a strong desire to know why distinguished men of science could no longer believe …’.4 By this time he had left behind his residual Newmanism: ‘[Newman’s] strength lay in depth of emotional resources, in imagination, in captivating language. But he had no message at all for the mind which had really faced the problems raised by scientific thought. He ran away from the liberal movement; he did not dare to meet it. He ran so far that he had to forsake the via media.’5 He had therefore come to believe that Tractarianism was a blind alley. The appeal to antiquarian authority and ancient dogmatic formularies as if they were as relevant to the nineteenth century as to the fourth could not supply D’Arcy with the answer for the ‘men of science’. He believed that the Tractarians exhibited a culpable lack of nerve which made

136 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

their presentation of the faith seriously deficient as a viable missionary apologetic. After ordination he served at St Thomas’s church in Belfast and after a short incumbency at Billy he moved in 1893 to Ballymena, attracting attention with his first publication, A Short Study of Ethics (1895). His interest in philosophy and his knowledge of the debate between idealism and faith was shown in his Donnellan Lectures of 1897–98, published as Idealism and Theology in 1899. He was familiar with the works of the German idealist philosopher Hermann Lotze (1817–81),6 and also read Green and Hegel. He struggled with Green’s opacity in the Prolegomena: ‘… It had not the qualities of clearness, brevity and simplicity which seem to me to be demanded.’7 Like Aubrey Moore, D’Arcy’s understanding of Lotze gave him a sense of the importance of distinguishing organic from inorganic creation, which implied avoidance of the concept of ‘life-force’ or vitalism: ‘… the realm of life is divided from that of inorganic Nature, not by a higher force peculiar to itself, setting itself as something alien above other modes of action, not by wholly dissimilar laws of working, but simply by the peculiar kind of connection into which its manifold constituents are woven’.8 D’Arcy shared with Temple and Moore the necessity of preserving what Green would have termed a spiritual principle in mankind, which was not capable of being explained away by the threats of scientific materialism. His reading of Lotze and his idealist beliefs that there must be a spiritual principle in nature as well an in humanity fulfilled a spiritual need which formed the background for his reading of theology for the remainder of his life. This academic study was built on an early experience sometime in the 1890s which is recorded in his autobiography: ‘While walking down the little drive which led from the rectory to the public road, I found myself suddenly arrested by a thought which seemed to reveal a principle running through all human experience and affecting especially our conceptions of the relation of God to man. The suddenness of the revelation awoke an intense desire to pursue to the very end the way to a synthesis of theological and philosophical thought which it seemed to open. It is true to say that all the later work which I have tried to do in the fields of theology and philosophy has been the outcome of this vision.’9 In 1900 D’Arcy was appointed as Vicar and Dean of the new Cathedral at Belfast, and became Bishop of Clogher in 1903, Bishop of Ossory, Ferns and Leighlin in 1907, and Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore in 1911. After a very short period as Bishop of Dublin in 1919 he became Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland in 1920. The DNB

Idealism Marginalised 137

biographer says that D’Arcy as Primate ‘… soon became well known in England both in ecclesiastical circles and in the learned societies’. After an earlier interest in metaphysics and morals, as exemplified in the books mentioned above, D’Arcy set out his thoughts on the scientific enterprise in Science and Creation (1925), The Christian Outlook and the Modern World (1929) and God in Science (1931), but these were lightweight when compared to his work on idealism. His last work was Providence and the World Order (1932), which were the Alexander Robertson Lectures at Glasgow.10 He contributed to the Lambeth Conference of 1930, and the section on the ‘Doctrine of God’ displays his characteristic optimistic theology. The Conference of 1930 had a section on ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’ which included the following statement which testifies to both to the persistence of Logos-theology and the optimism of the Lux Mundi theologians despite the disasters of the first decades of the twentieth century. Reflecting the idealist’s project of forming a unified theology which could embrace all human experience as well as a coherent understanding of the material world, the Conference boldly stated that their faith proclaimed ‘… the attainment of the purpose of the whole cosmic process through the agency of the immanent Logos or creative thought of God’.11 D’Arcy was the chairman of the committee that drafted this statement. Elsewhere the Report attributes to the Logos ‘… the Source of the Upward movement which appears in the history of humanity’,12 a comment which echoes the optimism of the 1880s rather than the questions of the early 1930s. The optimism of this statement can easily be illustrated from the New Testament’s vision of the cosmic Christ, but cannot form a practical basis for mission if it does not take seriously the fact that Christians live in a world where the realities of imperfection and sin need to be integrated into a plausible theology of mission. Like the Christian idealists centred around Oxford University, D’Arcy was strongly influenced by T.H. Green, and praised Green’s ability to ‘cut down all the respectable dualisms which were so dear to our forefathers as well as the insolent materialism of a generation ago, [which] was frightening all the respectabilities’.13 D’Arcy was aware of what he calls a ‘new dualism of self and society’ which (he avers) even the idealism of T.H. Green cannot avoid: ‘Although … the idealist does succeed in solving the problem of matter by showing that every element in the material universe is spiritual in its nature and origin, he does not altogether dispose of the question; because, if he follows consistently his own methods, he only succeeds in shutting up all reality within the bounds of his own self-consciousness … the defect in the idealist argument against materialism leads directly to the dualism of self and

138 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

society, self over against a multitude of other selves.’14 For D’Arcy, Green’s attractiveness lay in his attempt to ‘find … a unification in the conception of a spiritual principle which reproduces itself in all human beings’15 but yet again like most Christian apologists for idealism he glosses over the problems of Green’s concept of ‘spiritual principle’, problems which were not so easily forgiven by philosophers such as Henry Sidgwick, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who as D’Arcy gave his lectures were undermining the idealist project at Cambridge. One gets the impression with D’Arcy that, in common with most Christian idealist apologetic, it became convenient to ignore the rigour of philosophical argument when its conclusions became too threatening to Christian theology’s attempt to relate faith to the world. D’Arcy’s belief in a kind of evolutionary optimism is also seen in his laudatory estimate of Green, whom he believed had brought to English theology a heightened emphasis on subject rather than substance, and in so doing enabled the thought of Hegel to reach a wider audience. In fact it ‘… marks one of the most important upward movements in the progress of philosophical thought’.16 The use of the phrase ‘upward movements’ indicated that D’Arcy shared with Temple and Moore an optimism about society, a belief increasingly abandoned towards the end of the century although as we have seen living on in the Lambeth Conference of 1930. ‘Progress’ was a laudable aim, but along with other Christian idealists D’Arcy believed that Green’s scheme could only be viable if the individual was sacrificed to the common good. D’Arcy saw this as a considerable weakness in idealism, although Green’s social theory would have repudiated this devaluation of the individual. Reflecting J.R. Illingworth and the Lux Mundi theologians, D’Arcy believed that this problem could only be overcome by consideration of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and by an emphasis on both divine immanence and divine transcendence. It was these doctrines that guaranteed the value of the individual: ‘The failure of idealism to fulfil its promise and yield a complete philosophy lands us then in a conception which is identical with the central thought of Christian theology. The innermost truth of things, in other words, God, must be conceived as personal; but the ultimate unity, which is His, must be believed to be super-personal. It is a unity of persons, not a personal unity … . For in Him all persons live and move and have their being.’17 This drew D’Arcy into a description of God as a ‘superpersonal unity’: ‘So God’s superpersonal unity enables Him to be the unifying principle of the multitude of spirits and exalts Him above that multitude. Our doctrine then, if from one point of view

Idealism Marginalised 139

it can be described as a doctrine of immanence, is also as much a doctrine of transcendence as any doctrine can be, and is far removed from any sort of pantheism.’18 This is in contrast to Green’s idealism, which submerged the individual in the ‘eternal consciousness’, a problem he fully realised was problematic for orthodox Christian Trinitarian belief. The Trinitarian doctrine is expressed by D’Arcy as a ‘transcendent unity which can embrace personal multiplicity’.19 Summing up his argument, he reiterated his belief in progress, in which ‘the whole course of development was lifted to a higher level in the scale of being’.20 Like other Christians influenced by idealism, he quoted Tennyson’s In Memoriam and speaks of the ‘far-off, Divine event to which the whole Creation moves’,21 a text which appears to have almost the status of a divine revelation for many Christian writers nurtured in the idealist tradition. D’Arcy believed that he had ‘… arrived at the idea of a universal community, including all persons, and bound together by the all-encircling sphere of the divine unity: a conception of the universe which is truly social, because while it emphasises the solidarity of the whole multitude of persons, it preserves the individuality of every member. Here is the thought of the universe as a kingdom of God, a kingdom not yet perfected, but moving on to that perfection which is the universal good.’22 D’Arcy constructed an idealism-plus-Christianity incorporating the incarnation, atonement and the possibility of miracle. The universe was not simply a spiritual order as idealism rightly maintained, but was enriched by a social order based in the life of the Trinity. This concept was used to address what for D’Arcy was an important question that combined a unified vision of the cosmos with a unified vision of society: ‘Why must the true good be always the common good? Why is the end of each the end of all?’23 The problem was to find a coherent answer to this question, and D’Arcy believed that Green’s ‘spiritual principle’ was inadequate and that the only possibility is the acceptance of a ‘concrete universal’ which for D’Arcy means the Christian God. Idealism also posed problems concerning the integrity of human freedom, which D’Arcy understood as being based on consciousness of moral behaviour. In an argument which fascinatingly touches on some modern theologies of a God who creates possibilities rather than actualities, D’Arcy stated that ‘… nature must be regarded as a great experience, an experience which exists for God. God is person. He gives possibility to nature.’24 Actions in such a universe are possible actions, but not inevitable actions. From this D’Arcy developed a rather laboured argument concerning human limitation as evidence for believing in the

140 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

personality of God on the basis that the individual’s experiences of the world must necessarily imply ‘a mysterious world which lies beyond the bounds of our panorama … [which] must be regarded as a spiritual world, a world of persons’.25 It is difficult to see how D’Arcy’s argument differs from Green’s postulate of a ‘spiritual principle’ which he is so anxious to undermine in the name of Christian orthodoxy. D’Arcy does not embark on an analysis of what he means by ‘person’. As it was, he limited himself to a critique of idealism that ‘… combines in one universe the whole multitude of spirits, and which at the same time preserves to every individual spirit its full prerogative of selfdetermination’.26 We have seen how both Temple and Aubrey Moore were drawn into a discussion of the status of miracle in the light of the influence of idealism, and D’Arcy also devoted a chapter to this subject. He developed an understanding of miracle as ‘interference’ based on the concept of the experience of the individual that his ‘rational sequence’ is disturbed by the ‘agency of other wills’.27 The old deistic concept of ‘interference’ was rejected by D’Arcy, along with its idealist framework of ‘a single rational principle’ governing the cosmos, and replaced by a concept based on an understanding of the triune nature of God: ‘As multipersonal, He transcends nature, and interferes in nature, just as one human interferes with another.’28 Thus he disposed of the argument that miracle is a necessary interference with law, for on these personal terms a miracle is no more an interference with the natural order of the world than is the action by which any personal agent produces a change in nature.29 It is the operation of a higher law, a concept widely used at that period in constructing a theology of the miraculous. D’Arcy maintained that the history of creation is a ‘blending of necessity and contingency’,30 a concept that has recurred in the discussion of the relationship of God to the world in recent writing on the relationship of the scientific enterprise to theology. Far from revealing a closed nexus of mechanistic cause and effect, if science could reveal more detail of the past history of the cosmos, it would reveal more of the ‘interference’ of God in the direction of ‘progress’. Yet this interference would be concealed in the creative process, as D’Arcy well knew that natural selection was explicable by chance alone. In summing-up his lecture series, D’Arcy sensed that the only way out of a closed and mechanistic view of the evolution of the cosmos was to claim that at certain times, ‘… at great turning-points there intervened a contingent element. The most likely explanation of this blending of the contingent with the necessary has been shown to be the joint operation of distinct personal agencies

Idealism Marginalised 141

which are ultimately one, one, that is, on a higher plane of being.’31 This statement may well be good devotion, but it is hardly philosophically rigorous. What is meant, for instance, by ‘a higher plane of being’? As in Temple and Moore, D’Arcy was making himself a hostage to fortune – if science could explain coherently the history of the cosmos, then God would be of necessity squeezed into the gaps. It is a statement that sits uneasily with D’Arcy’s vision of a Trinitarian cosmos governed by laws and ‘higher laws’ of the spiritual world, and illustrates how difficult it was for these idealist theologians to formulate a doctrine of divine agency which did justice to their philosophical assumptions and at the same time allow for identifiable divine actions in the world. In common with Frederick Temple and Aubrey Moore, there was tension between D’Arcy’s idealism-plus-Christianity schema and a coherent understanding of evil and suffering. His concept of a universe on its way to an optimistic closure in the purposes of God hindered his ability to give an acceptable moral purpose to the existence of suffering. This came out clearly in his later (1925) publication Science and Creation: ‘from the beginning, the course of evolution, along its main lines, has been directed by a definite purpose. It is not the outcome of a chance collision of atoms and the accidental competitions of living forms.’32 D’Arcy could gloss over the problems which were presented to Christian theology by natural selection because at the time he was writing the biological sciences had only just begun to formulate a theory as to how this selection worked. Thus there was a considerable space in his theology for a ‘God of the gaps’ in which the divine purpose for creation could be worked out without the necessity for too many awkward questions about materialist explanations for evolution. Optimism and purpose could be smuggled in as explanatory metaphors in the absence of any accepted scientific explanation for the workings of evolution. Only after the late 1920s did the ‘modern synthesis’ of neo-Darwinianism develop from the work of population geneticists and others, greatly extending the understanding of the mechanisms of natural selection. Prior to this it was easy to adopt a doctrine of ‘providential evolution’ which combined progress and explanation in a manner which could be congruent with Christian theism. Such a view of the progressive unveiling of the purpose of God from year to year meant that the doctrines of sin, judgement and atonement receded into the background. Astonishingly D’Arcy says as late as 1925, when cultural ‘progress’ had become an extremely questionable concept, that the scientific view of the world means that the problem of evil could be ‘shelved’.33 The concept of pain is rationalised away as being

142 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

‘useful’ in that it is inevitable in the evolutionary struggle for existence. As far as D’Arcy’s ultimate apologetic was concerned, the First World War had never happened; even in the 1920s his apologetic was dominated by the lost world of privileged Anglicanism in which all things appeared possible. Such a blindness to the political and social status quo meant that idealism had now become a hindrance rather than a help in formulating a theological apologia for the interwar years. Nevertheless, D’Arcy’s chapter on ‘Evil and the Atonement’ in Idealism and Theology shows that he laid a greater emphasis on the atonement than that shown by many idealist theologians. He claimed that ‘Moral evil is not to be explained as the imperfection which belongs to a passing stage in development.’34 He believed that Hegelianism could result in a philosophy where ‘the existence of evil is not at present inconsistent with perfection in the Deity, but is rather an element in that perfection’.35 For D’Arcy (at least in his 1899 apologetic), this is an unacceptable position and for that reason idealism cannot supply a satisfactory answer for the Christian. He was dissatisfied with the idea that evil is ‘good in the making’, and a manifestation of the imperfection of an early stage of development, for this would hardly be in accordance with the demands of an individual moral consciousness. This would appear at odds with his later view of the necessary existence of pain and concomitant evil as part of the purpose of God for the created order. However, D’Arcy’s argument is of interest, as he, along with the Lux Mundi school, represented a considerable modification of the idealist system, away from an optimistic cosmic viewpoint towards a more traditional Christian knowledge of sin and imperfection which needs explanation if there is to be a morally acceptable theodicy. For many of these Christian idealists there was a strongly teleological aspect to their theology. Yet far from being innocent victims of the drive for ‘progress’, they believed that sin and evil were irrational aspects of the created and human order and that God had by means of the incarnation and atonement met with the consequences of evil. In fact in his Idealism and Theology D’Arcy has a short but penetrating section on the significance of the atonement which, after a brief review of the major approaches, concludes that a fully understood ‘theory of atonement’ is not achievable because we cannot have a fully satisfactory explanation of evil.36 Yet for him ‘explanation’ is not a ‘solution’, for to reach the latter would be ‘to succeed in rationalising evil’.37 Throughout this discussion, D’Arcy was at pains to retain an orthodox Christian position in relation to his idealistic metaphysics. Although the latter led him into a more optimistic outlook on the possibilities of the human condition

Idealism Marginalised 143

than his theology would warrant, his treatment of the atonement remains an impressive summary. D’Arcy was aware that more needed to be said about the nature of the Trinity, and he quoted J.R. Illingworth’s Personality, Human and Divine as being an example of Augustinian metaphorical thought based on the human personality: ‘Our own personality is triune; but it is a potential, unrealised trinity, which is incomplete in itself, and must go beyond itself for completion, as, for example, in the family. [But God] … must, therefore, be pictured as One whose Trinity has nothing potential or unrealised about it; whose triune elements are eternally actualised, by no outward influence, but from within; a Trinity in Unity, a social God … .’38 He knew this cannot be the final answer, for there is a difference between three modes of a human personality: ‘It is impossible to find three persons in consciousness, only three modes of the one person’s activity.’39 The only way to avoid the twin pitfalls of Tritheism or Sabellianism is to utilise the idealist concept of a ‘unity higher than personality, a unity in which all spirits have their home and bond of union’.40 This is for the Christian a pure act of faith, God as the ultimate unity. Hegel could not solve the problem of how a self-conscious agent could ever understand an ‘other-self’; the latter must remain forever mysterious. As D’Arcy said: ‘The problem of problems is to harmonise the claims of the whole multitude of personal agents and reach a unity in which all their mutual oppositions are overcome. If such a unity were truly reached, the problem of epistemology would be solved, the puzzle of freewill would be explained, the mystery of evil would no more perplex.’41 This is a very large project indeed, which if successful would resolve most of the dilemmas which have perplexed the Western philosophical tradition for over twenty centuries, and D’Arcy believed that idealism’s answer was unsatisfactory. This is in part overcome by an appeal to the idealist F.H. Bradley and his concept of ‘degrees of reality’.42 According to Bradley, this final unification has a greater degree of ‘reality’ than the unities of which it is composed. For D’Arcy this is the only way in which this Kantian scepticism about the noumenal world can be overcome and he utilized Bradley’s concept in order to reach an ‘ultimate concrete totality’. For D’Arcy, ‘The faith that there is in the end a perfect harmony, that all must be one at the last [is] the alpha and omega of all thinking and living.’43 There are two problems with this extension of idealism by Trinitarian theology. First, although D’Arcy is aware that he is pushing the limits of language, he does not appear to see that terms like ‘person’, ‘concrete universal’ and ‘superpersonal’ need a more rigorous definition than

144 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

given in his account. As we have seen in our discussion of Temple and Aubrey Moore (and even in Newman), this style of apologia has the flavour of a man who is attempting to justify with his head a conclusion that he has already reached in his heart. Frederick Temple had felt the force of this in arguments with Tait over Essays and Reviews. If the conclusions were effectively laid down in advance, then rigorous intellectual questions would effectively be stifled. What was true in Oxford in 1860 was equally true in Dublin in 1899. Second, when these lectures were given, idealism was already being challenged by other traditions of philosophy much more hostile to Christianity. We shall discuss the significance of these in a later chapter, but note here that D’Arcy never discussed philosophical developments hostile to his arguments. He is totally unaware of the revival of realist philosophies hostile to idealism, a phenomenon that he shares with virtually all Anglican idealists. Rather, he was attracted to mysticism, even though this was an ‘effort to reach a spiritual fact by means of a concept which is confessedly inadequate’.44 Innocent of the rising schools of philosophy which would reject this as mere moonshine, D’Arcy appealed to a tradition within Christianity to justify his apologetics. He could not conceive of a world in which agnosticism and doubt played a creative part in Christian faith, for to admit this would be to open up the Christian culture of the fin de siècle to attack from materialism and naturalistic science. The proof of the doctrine of the Trinity ‘depends upon the Christian revelation’.45 When the going got tough D’Arcy moved from philosophical concepts to theological ones. Significantly he appeals from mysticism to similar uses of language in poetry and literature for support, thus moving away from a traditional base in Christian dogma to an appeal which could make use of the creative powers of humanity – ‘Poetry, romance, all the allusive kinds of literature are full of it … a line of poetry has more truth in it than a volume of psychology … Mere understanding suffers paralysis.’46 Yet was not the paralysis of understanding in the mind of D’Arcy and the Anglican idealist project? D’Arcy suddenly moves from philosophic rigour to romantic appeals to the power of literature when logical arguments become difficult. The aesthetic breaks through to fill the gaps left in argumentation. D’Arcy’s mysticism advocated a form of natural theology which reenchanted the world against the advance of de-Christianised professional scientific disciplines, and made it a fit subject for Christian investigation: ‘The existence of nature as a great system of relations implying a personal self-conscious subject seems to indicate the existence of a more

Idealism Marginalised 145

exalted plane of being on which the superpersonal unity realises the fulness of its concrete universality. … Nature reveals that blending of the contingent with the necessary which marks the presence and operation of agents personally distinct, but contributing equally to the realisation of the same design.’47 It is clear that D’Arcy realised the challenges presented to Christianity by the investigation of ‘Nature’, but he is reduced to cloudy speculation when he attempts to relate this to his faith. He neglected the fact that it was imperative that apologetics should have a strong sense of unity and coherence while presenting a cohesive explanatory framework which could embrace the rapidly expanding scientific and technological world. Furthermore, Christians needed to provide a means which would legitimate divine sanction for involvement in the increasingly complex questions of social action and society at the end of the nineteenth century. A subsequent Donnellan Lecturer, the Berkeleian philosopher A.A. Luce (1882–1977),48 regarded Idealism and Theology as D’Arcy’s finest work. This judgement stands despite the shortcomings mentioned above. He was never able to achieve such a sustained academic interest in his further work on religion and science, and did not have Aubrey Moore’s gift (or possibly opportunities) of entering into the mind of the scientific community. It could well be, as we have seen in the case of Frederick Temple, that demands made on his time as bishop meant that he was never again able to undertake anything more complex than books of popular theology. D’Arcy fell back on a form of calm and platitudinous episcopal apologetic in which the grand narrative of the purpose of God was worked out ‘as year succeeded year’, a purpose in which the European races were called upon to play the leading role. Writing in 1925, D’Arcy makes the astonishing claim that, ‘It appears, in fact, that Nordic man, the fair-haired Achaean, the great adventurous race, which in time subdued the fairest regions of the earth and created the noblest civilizations, was shaped and coloured not amid Scandinavian snows, but far back in the dim womb of time, and preserved, through countless generations, until the epoch of his birth had come.’49 Thus D’Arcy advanced his ideal of the historical process resulting in the superiority of the ‘Nordic’ race, which would advance the chosen purposes of God. This approach fails to take into account the challenge of difference and can lead, as critics of idealistic systems have frequently pointed out, to a disregard or even demonisation of dissent from the ruling paradigm. With the world changed beyond recognition from the academia of Trinity College Dublin and Oxford Balliol in the high days of the British Empire, this spokesman for Anglicanism was attempting

146 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

to legitimate racial superiority through a combination of philosophy, ‘Liberal Anglicanism’ and theology. It is an impressive testimony to the survival of this cultural apologia, and is a clear indication of the problems that this particular apologetic would encounter as the twentieth century unfolded. Despite the First World War, Anglican culture still yearned for a role as the God-appointed means of civilising the world through leadership amongst the inferior races of the planet. As fascism and communism cast their shadows into the future, Anglicans were still romantically in love with a vision which saw the world as an extension of Rugby School centred on its Chapel, a world where the cultural intelligentsia of the few would by their Christian idealism transform the civilisations of the globe into the Kingdom of God. They reflected Matthew Arnold’s nostalgic memory of his father’s example of leadership at Rugby. Fired by the example of the leadership of the great souls of the past, they lived and preached their pilgrimage which was to press ‘on, to the city of God’. Ye, like angels, appear, Radiant with ardour divine! Beacons of hope, ye appear! Languor is not in your heart, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow. Ye alight in our van! at your voice, Panic, despair, flee away. Ye move through the ranks, recall The stragglers, refresh the outworn, Praise, re – inspire the brave! Order, courage, return; Eyes rekindling, and prayers, Follow your steps as ye go. Ye fill up the gaps in our files, Strengthen the wavering line, Stablish, continue our march, On, to the bound of the waste, On, to the City of God. Thomas Arnold, Rugby Chapel, ll. 190–208

10 Idealism Assaulted – Realism and Aestheticism

At Oxford they have no time since Green died to contemplate the Universal, they are all so frightfully busy in deducing the particular. J.R. Illingworth to Wilfrid Richmond, 12.5.1884, in Illingworth, A.L. (1917), 88 Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand. Gilbert, W.S. (1881) There is a dark shadow behind the sunny optimism of Lux Mundi, which can easily be overlooked, such is the bright light of faith which pervades the contributions of all the authors. There are hints that those who sought to build the Anglican idealist vision of the Kingdom of God around an incarnational theology were already beginning to lose confidence in their project. In his contribution to Lux Mundi the preacher’s prose of Scott Holland brings this out and expresses the manner in which the challenge of the new worlds of scientific and historical knowledge was undermining old certainties: ‘The habitual ways of argument, the accepted assumptions … have been withdrawn – have become obsolete. Faith is thrown back on itself, on its own inherent, naked vitality; it is robbed for the moment of that sense of solidity and security, which fortifies and refreshes it. … The old world of things had been brought into this adaptation with the principles of belief. Faith was at home in it, and looked out over it with cheerfulness, and moved about it with freedom. But that old world is gone: and the new still lies 147

148 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

untested, unsorted, unverified, unassimilated, unhandled. It looks foreign, odd, remote. Faith … now feels chilly and exposed.’1 Holland understood that the ‘old world’ had passed away. Like all good preachers, his faith did not simply dwell on abstract doctrines, but also reflected accurately the signs of his own times. He was not afraid to ask questions of faith as well as being positive about possible answers. These questions grew more insistent during last years of the nineteenth century. Changes took place in philosophical method and there were major transformations of the moral presuppositions and traditions of the earlier Victorians. In some cases these changes were accompanied by an active and explicit revulsion towards what now appeared a repressive and authoritarian moral order. In such a climate, the Anglican Church struggled. Marginalised by Parliament and therefore deprived of much of its political influence, increasingly bypassed by the developing scholarship of the ancient universities and undermined by the coming of mass suffrage and the rising articulation of an increasingly educated population, the voice of faith faltered, knowing that what Holland called ‘the habitual ways of argument’ were increasingly ignored. The real challenge, and Scott Holland knew it, was to find new forms of expressing Christian faith. The difficulty of this is shown by the fact that his question as to what these might be is given no answer in Lux Mundi. What was happening to the philosophical idealism which flavoured so much of the later Victorian Christian apologetics? The relationship of the philosopher Henry Sidgwick at Cambridge to T.H. Green at Oxford is illustrative of some of the pressures that were slowly undermining the idealist project. In a letter of 1863 Sidgwick is clearly intrigued with Green’s thought, but cannot make it out: ‘I should like to get at this Oxford Hegelianism and see what it means. I used to talk with Green but did not draw much.’2 Sidgwick shared with Green the attempt to utilise philosophy in order to solve the problems of Christian belief. Like Green, Sidgwick was a product of Rugby School but from 1855 until his death in 1900 he made his home at Cambridge, where he was elected to the conversatzione group the ‘Apostles’, and later said that this had ‘more effect on his intellectual life than any one thing that happened to him afterwards’.3 His philosophy was influenced by the tradition of Mill’s utilitarianism which meant that he was deeply critical of what he believed was Green’s imprecise use of ‘spiritual’ principles and his generally ‘mentalist’ approach to philosophical problems. It is also interesting that he shared with his near-contemporary the agnostic Leslie Stephen a remarkable inability to understand the subtleties of religious language and could not accept that there could be any worthwhile

Idealism Assaulted 149

theology that was not based on a very literal reading of doctrinal statements: ‘I do not see that a bishop has any power of dispensing from the moral obligation to believe the Apostles’ Creed in its “plain grammatical sense.” ’4 His reading of Mill also moved him away from Christian beliefs, and he was not impressed by ‘the neochristianity of the Essayist and Reviewers’.5 Sidgwick also wondered what kind of God Green believed in, if the divine was no more than an ideal which is ‘completely realised’6 in us. Was the concept so empty that it was ‘not much worth establishing’? In 1869 Sidgwick resigned his Fellowship of Trinity College, for he believed that his agnosticism and his inability to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles was incompatible with his views. Less of a theist than Green, Sidgwick resembled the Oxford thinker in his sense of integrity which also impressed his colleagues. Cambridge was also breeding a philosophical tradition more radical than that represented by Sidgwick and his theistic doubts. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) had in his early life been greatly influenced by idealism and its holistic vision of the cosmos: ‘Everything is really an adjective of the One, an intrinsic property of the Universe; the Universe is not validly analysable into similar elements at all.’7 Russell was never directly influenced by Green’s brand of idealism, but in his early Cambridge days was particularly attracted by the thought of Green’s idealist successor, F.H. Bradley (1846–1924), and even more by the rather idiosyncratic idealism of J.M.E. McTaggart (1866–1925),8 who was with Russell a Fellow of Trinity College. McTaggart combined a doctrine of reality as consisting of spiritual immortal selves which are (to use a Christian term) in communion with each other, a belief which he managed to combine with atheism. This rather striking form of idealism perplexed not only his friends. Sidgwick said of McTaggart’s fellowship dissertation, ‘I can see that this is nonsense, but what I want to know is whether it is the right kind of nonsense.’9 Interestingly, McTaggart had clearly seen that idealism was no necessary friend of Christianity, and that Hegel’s views implied that ‘All finite things are incarnations of God, and have no existence except as incarnations of God. … The special significance of Jesus with regard to the incarnation is merely that he bore witness to that truth in a form which, while only partially correct, was convenient for popular apprehension.’10 McTaggart’s analysis of Hegel brings out a point we have seen in Green’s thought, that for most of these philosophers the primitive dogmas of Christianity are insufficient grounds for belief for those capable of speculative thought even if they retained some elements of theistic belief. As Green had said, the dogmas have to be ‘transformed into an idea’. McTaggart saw the

150 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

dangers of idealism more clearly than many Christians influenced by this philosophy: ‘The ally who has been called in proves to be an enemy in disguise – the least evident but the most dangerous. The doctrines which have been protected from external refutation are found to be transforming themselves till they are on the point of melting away … .’11 In a revealing phrase, McTaggart says in conclusion that idealism is ‘an antagonist all the more deadly because it works not by denial but by completion’.12 McTaggart reflects the criticisms of Sidgwick, that idealism can result in a view of the deity that is no more significant than the fading smile on the face of the Cheshire cat. The anti-idealist milieu in which Russell began to move is displayed in a letter from the ex-Quaker Logan Pearsall Smith (brother of Russell’s first wife Alys) written to Russell in 1893 and expressing scepticism about the claims of the idealists: ‘Don’t turn Hegelian and lose yourself in perfumed dreams – the world will never get on unless a few people at least will limit themselves to believing what has been proved, and keep clear the distinction between what we really know and what we don’t.’13 Nevertheless, Russell was entranced by McTaggart’s work and remembered ‘wondering, as an almost unattainable ideal, whether I should ever do anything as good as McTaggart’.14 But after 1898 he had abandoned Hegelianism as a result of the influence of G.E. Moore, despite writing Essay on the Foundations of Geometry in which he was indebted to McTaggart, to whom he dedicated the book.15 As Hylton says in his detailed analysis of the rise of analytic philosophy, in idealism, ‘It is only from the point of view of reality as a whole that we can appreciate the ultimate truth about anything at all. The view of Moore and Russell is in direct opposition to this holism. According to them, knowledge and understanding come piecemeal.’16 The mood of philosophy was changing, away from idealist holism towards a more restricted agenda concerning meaning and linguistic analysis. This has been seen as a retreat from the great questions of philosophy into a much more narrowly defined enterprise, but it could also be interpreted as a realisation that the tradition of grand philosophising was running out of steam. The new methods were for Russell ‘the power of logical analysis over Hegelian synthesis’.17 Writing in later life, Russell gave a strikingly picturesque account of how he gave up idealist ‘jelly’ for realist ‘shot’: ‘Hegel thought of the universe as a closely knit unity. His universe was like a jelly in the fact that, if you touched any one part of it, the whole quivered; but it was unlike a jelly in the fact that it could not really be cut up into parts. The appearance of consisting of parts, according to him, was a delusion. The only reality was the Absolute,

Idealism Assaulted 151

which was his name for God. In this philosophy I found comfort for a time. As presented to me by its adherents, especially McTaggart, who was then an intimate friend of mine, Hegel’s philosophy had seemed both charming and demonstrable. … In a rash moment, however, I turned from the disciples to the Master and found in Hegel himself a farrago of confusions and what seemed to me little better than puns. I therefore abandoned his philosophy.’18 Russell’s book from which this quotation is taken is entitled Portraits from Memory. It will become evident that Russell’s memory was not always reliable, but the passage is a valuable pointer to a cleavage in philosophical trends in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Writing much later, Russell summed up his philosophical approach: ‘I reverse the process which had been common in philosophy since Kant … [which] … tends to give to knowing a cosmic importance which it by no means deserves, and thus prepares the philosophical student for the belief that mind has some kind of supremacy over the non-mental universe … .’19 It was a direct attack on any theory of cosmic unity, on the holism of the idealists and by implication the belief that there could be a workable alliance between the claims made by the Lux Mundi writers and philosophical ideas. Russell’s metaphor of jelly and shot was a challenge to such grandiose schemes about ‘the unity of nature’,20 to use the title of the book by the Duke of Argyll (G.D. Campbell) which had attracted the attention of Aubrey Moore. Another colleague of Russell and McTaggart at Cambridge was G.E. Moore (1873–1958), like so many an example of a man from a pious family whose faith evaporated in his early manhood, despite (or because of ) a well-remembered conversion experience at the age of 12. Like T.H. Green, evangelicalism left G.E. Moore with an abiding interest in the relationship between intellectual integrity and moral rectitude. Levy brings this out in his biography of Moore; Moore says that his background in evangelicalism gave him a tendency towards ‘introspection, or consulting one’s own beliefs in order to establish the truth of some proposition … “What would Jesus do?” ’21 However, there is some controversy over whether G.E. Moore mourned his loss of faith. The last-noted sentiment indicates wistful religious attachment, but this is denied by Thomas Baldwin who quotes a letter G.E. Moore wrote in 1900; ‘For my part … I … never did get much comfort from religion, and never felt very sorry in disbelieving: indeed, I find it hard to understand how it can make much difference to most people.’22 Moore was also ‘shamed’ when he remembered that he had believed in his conversion without having been interested in the arguments for its truth.

152 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Moore was a considerable influence on Russell, even if in later years Russell’s accounts of his ‘conversion’ from idealism were not always as precise as one might expect. Russell’s later writings show a tendency to give an apologia that did not quite fit the facts, for example in his account of hearing a paper by G.E. Moore on 12 May 1894. According to Russell, Moore began with the startling sentence: ‘In the beginning was matter, and matter begat the devil, and the devil begat God.’ The paper ended with the death first of God and then of the devil, leaving only matter alone as in the beginning.23 This sounds like a very grand form of materialism, but Levy points out that the paper did not (as Russell thought) begin in this way. Levy believes the paper to be ‘muddled, confused and confusing’,24 and points out that Moore’s thesis had very little to do with materialism and was much more concerned with the defence of a form of hedonism. This is a significant pointer towards the influence on Moore and Russell of the importance of defending moral and ethical concerns in a manner that broke free of Christian traditions inherited from earlier generations. Through their membership of ‘The Apostles’, the work of G.E. Moore and his circle brought the discussion of intellectual problems of philosophy into contact with concepts which were of interest not just to philosophers but also to those who formed the artistic and cultural scene of the 1890s which was increasingly drifting from any Christian moral or intellectual consensus. As Copleston points out, for G.E. Moore, ‘one of the main tasks of moral philosophy [is] to determine values … to determine what things possess the quality of goodness …’.25 This involves such matters as the affection of personal relationships and the grounds of aesthetic enjoyment, which, although they were treated as abstract philosophical matters, were bound to have an influence on judgements concerning literary, artistic and religious culture. It undermined those who sought a theistic understanding based on the more holistic concepts of Oxford idealism and a belief in moral ideals that were part of revealed truth. The new trends in philosophy had no need of the ‘perfumed dreams’ referred to by Pearsall Smith or the semi-mystical conclusion of the idealist F.H. Bradley, ‘That the glory of this world … is appearance leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendour but the sensuous curtain is a deception and a cheat, if it hides some colourless movement of atoms … or some unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.’26 A second example of this tendency to misinterpret the past is pointed out in Allard and Stock (1994) in a quotation from Russell’s My Philosophical Development: ‘I felt it as a great liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot-house on to a windswept headland. I hated the stuffiness

Idealism Assaulted 153

involved in supposing space and time were only in my mind. I liked the starry heavens even better than the moral law, and could not bear Kant’s view that the one I liked best was only a subjective figment. In the first exuberance of liberation, I became a naive realist ….’27 To read these words of Russell to get the distinct impression that the mystical fogs of idealism and the remaining irrelevancies of Christian theism were suddenly dispelled in 1890s Cambridge by the rising sun of dazzling analytic clarity. It was not quite as simple as that, as Russell’s own accounts, Levy’s closer reading of Moore’s paper, and Hylton’s detailed analysis of Russell and G.E. Moore’s early philosophical development show. Despite these qualifications, there is no doubt that aspects of idealism appeared to Moore and Russell as confused. Not least were claims which they believed rested on both inadequate evidence and a questionable use of language. As Peter Hylton comments, ‘To accept Green’s philosophy one had to accept the existence of an eternal selfconsciousness, in which all human minds “partake” – where the sense of this last word remains, in the end, obscure.’28 We have seen how this aspect of Green’s thought has been questionable for several writers, including Geoffrey Thomas: ‘[Green’s] view is that objects in the external world are mind-dependent. But this is not to say that reality is dependent on the human mind, much less on the mind of any individual human knower … . Reality as system of intelligible relations, of knowable things, is constituted by the activity of the eternal consciousness. … In the light of this position Green changes Berkeley’s ‘esse is percipi’ to ‘esse is intelligi’ (Works I, 149).’29 This ‘eternal consciousness’ had been a useful concept which was especially amenable to the romantic Christian rhetoric of a Scott Holland and his idealist Christian friends. Nevertheless, it was an unacceptable ambiguity to those such as Russell and G.E. Moore. For them, the world is a ‘bag of shot’ – not so much a painted veil of appearance hiding greater splendour, but a bead curtain whose patterns are itself the reality. Green and his idealist successors had a concept of the universal self whose consciousness provides the underlying relations between our sensations and which is reflected in our moral and ethical worlds. It was an imposing philosophical rationale, despite the haziness of how we ‘partake’ of this reality. Its attempt to unite heaven and earth was especially attractive to those in the Church whose growing awareness of the lack of impact of orthodoxy on the rising cultures of historical and scientific study made them cast about for a more effective way of stating Christian apologetic. It had also been an ally to those who sought to retain a rationale for a broadly Christian morality while at the same time

154 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

continuing to question Christian doctrines. These Christians and their fellow theists did not deeply analyse and question the nature of language, let alone theological language, and this is enshrined in Jowett’s accusation that Lux Mundi was just ‘haze and maze’. Moore and Russell asked searching questions about this idealistic spiritual holism and linguistic innocence. Was the imposing edifice of Green’s ‘eternal consciousness’ founded on adequate presuppositions? Was Green’s ‘eternal consciousness’ no more than ‘a rational defence of his own version of nineteenth-century evangelicalism’, as claimed by Hylton?30 Questions arose about the meaningfulness of idealist propositions about ‘eternal verities’. The project of defending a Christian ‘world view’ on the foundations of idealism allied to a Logos-theology, so precious to the theologians of the Lux Mundi school, was under attack. The rise of critical arguments against idealism in the 1890s reflects Russell’s pithy phrase: Was the cosmos a bowl of jelly or a bag of shot? It would be possible to formulate answers to this question in a manner which concentrated only on the abstract argument of certain intellectuals and paid no attention to the culture in which they were articulated. Such an approach would be a mistake; as Newman had said, the whole man moves on, not just what he called ‘paper logic’, and that is as true of philosophers as much as it is of theologians. Newman’s own life illustrated the truth of his pithy saying. We are not just thinking machines, whose ideas come a priori out of our consciousness. As well as paper logic, there are the processes of emotion, the influence of surrounding cultural assumptions and perceptions of beauty, goodness, aesthetics and personal worth which make up the human journey. The cultural setting of the philosophical transition that we have outlined above is as important as the ideas themselves. As Peter Hylton has shown in his study of the relationship between Russell and idealism, the analytic tradition downplayed the importance of the cultural setting of philosophical activity and tended to regard the subject in intellectualist terms.31 A passing reference is made in Biletski and Matar (1998) to cultural factors: ‘The contrast between rationalist and romantic outlooks is thus captured as one between those reaching for a mythical hidden foundation and those insisting that in philosophy nothing is hidden ….’32 However, even though their work purports to explore the cultural setting of the origins of the analytic tradition, the book is dominated by the evolution of an intellectual tradition with hardly any reference to the wider world, and the relationship of the philosophy of this period to fin de siècle culture merits further investigation. Russell’s metaphor of ‘jelly or shot’ has a much wider resonance than the world of technical philosophy. This is especially true of the last years

Idealism Assaulted 155

of the nineteenth century, when the fragmentation of the intellectual world arising from the expansion of education and the development of professions was a severe challenge to the established Church, many of whose members could remember the time earlier in the nineteenth century when the place of the Church in national life was considerably stronger. As the century drew to its close there was a rapid increase in the tensions that had been building up between various aspects of Victorian intellectual and professional life. To use Matthew Arnold’s phrase, then twenty-five years old, was it to be culture or anarchy? Was the culture the ‘jelly’ and the anarchy the ‘shot’? What were the answers in a society in which ‘a little rioting, and what they call popular demonstrations’33 expressed what Matthew Arnold believed was a ‘weariness with the old organisation’?34 Claims to universal and monist explanations had come to look like safety curtains shutting out the increasing commotion in the social world backstage instead of coherent explanations which gave meaning to a theistic apologetic, idealist or Christian. In the years after Lux Mundi, the alliance between ‘providential evolution’, idealism and moderately critical Anglican Christianity began to seem an increasingly fragile platform from which to maintain the prestige of an established Church with its benevolent authority over all aspects of culture. The Christianised ‘clerisy’ of the Coleridgian tradition, so carefully nurtured by the clerical dons of Oxford and Cambridge, was rapidly losing its influence. The old order, based on a Christian monism, could no longer form a credible model for a university education: ‘[The idealists] believed unreservedly in the unity of knowledge. Each science was part of a greater whole and was of interest only in so far as it provided a deeper understanding of ultimate truth. There was a need, therefore, of a new type of university … where adepts of the different sciences would unite together to pursue the meaning of the universe.’35 But ‘the meaning of the universe’ was now becoming much more problematic, and there were those Christians in the older universities who were even alarmed at the imaginative use of the catholic tradition found in the young writers of the Lux Mundi team. Writing to the young Scott Holland in 1884, Canon Liddon said: ‘… I have feared sometimes that the younger Churchmanship of Oxford was undergoing a silent but very serious change – through its eagerness to meet modern difficulties with its facile adoption of new intellectual methods, without fully considering all the uses to which they might be put by others.’36 As early as 1875 the ultra-conservative Dean Burgon made a ‘Plea for the Study of Divinity.’ Reviewing Burgon’s call, a commentator in the Guardian described the crisis of Oxford Christianity: ‘He does not shrink from

156 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

noting those tendencies towards scepticism which have hung like a malaria over many university circles for some years past, and which have led to much grief and many a bitter disappointment in our homes. Few of us have not known those who went to Oxford intending to qualify themselves for ordination, and have come away again, thoroughly secularised; hardly Churchmen at all, perhaps even, doubtful Christians … . “Education” properly so termed, has been depressed at Oxford, which is fast becoming a place of Instruction merely.’37 This complaint, which has its parallels in present-day complaints about the role of universities, shows how there was a sense of loss at the new patterns of education which were substituting for the study of the ancients a course of ‘useful’ knowledge which disregarded any religious questions. This was an oft-repeated sentiment during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Speaking of a proposed memorial to Pusey, an anonymous contributor to the Guardian said of the established Church, ‘She has the apologetic look of one who is there only on sufferance; she has dwindled to that point at which it ceased to become worth the effort to dislodge her.’38 Such was Burgon’s defeatism that he feared that the new Divinity School at Oxford would undermine faith rather than commend it. The annual Church Congresses of the period furnish evidence of a sense of change at Oxford: ‘For Mr. Ince stated with great force some obvious reasons why theology cannot now occupy her old ascendancy at Oxford – namely, that other branches of knowledge have “come to the fore”. The physical sciences, for instance, have acquired during the last forty or fifty years a consistency and a compass, and produced results so astonishing and beneficial to all departments of life, that they justly claim a position altogether different from that which was anciently accorded to them.’39 At the 1876 Congress the Dean of Manchester, speaking on ‘Causes of Unbelief’ stated that they impacted upon ‘young men of the literary class, clever, rash, impulsive who seemed more important than they are, because they contribute largely to the periodical literature of the day’.40 Why did the Dean of Manchester, one of the recently created urban dioceses, explicitly reject popular culture and literary taste being outside the pale of Christian interest? He unwittingly contributed to the process by which the Church’s sphere of interest contracted into safe areas of ecclesiastical concern tinged with high culture and ignored the increasing influence of media, magazine and newspaper, and this in a diocese whose creation was part of the established Church’s response to changes in society. Yet the Dean is also worried about conservative gut-reactions to new thinking. He went on to criticise the ‘ignorant dogmatism’ of the theologians who

Idealism Assaulted 157

resisted new scientific theories, indicating how his argument wanted at the same time to embrace new thinking but also saw it as subversive of the plausibility of the Christian message. The superiority of Anglicanism also reasserted itself in a striking remark made in 1877 when a critic of C.A. Row’s Bampton Lectures berated the lecturer for using the word ‘scientist’ – ‘a horrible Yankeeism unworthy of the pulpit of St. Mary’s’.41 The word had been in use since at least the time of Whewell’s writings in the 1840s, but clearly the reviewer could not bring himself to believe that such studies were worthy to be placed alongside the traditional classical disciplines which had been the cradle of the Church of England’s theology over the centuries. Others took the opposite view, and saw that the writing was on the wall for the cult of St Mary’s pulpit, as an editorial observed at the death of Pusey in 1882: ‘It is obvious that fifty years ago the University offered a more favourable field for a great ecclesiastical upheaving that it would today: and it may be questioned whether history will ever again record such an “Oxford Movement”. … The questions which it raised could never so dominate the more varied life and interests and widely differing aims of modern Oxford, as they dominated the Oriel common-rooms and, through it and St. Mary’s pulpit, the University.’42 By 1882 its was a common sentiment to find writers who declared that the university was irredeemably secular, and years before in 1869 Mark Pattison had written of a sentiment abroad that ‘All universities are declared dangerous to faith and morals; and our own [i.e. Oxford] in particular, has recently been challenged in direct terms as giving an education which is infidel to the core.’43 However, not everyone believed that change at Oxford was for the worse. In ‘An Oxford Retrospect’ in 1894 ‘T.L.P.’ wrote: ‘The Colleges are no longer bodies of celibate clergyman waiting for livings. They have been “secularised”: but has religion suffered? I doubt it … the Church patronage of colleges is now exercised as a trust, not as a means of making vacancies and enabling Fellows to marry. … This, after all, is the most important aspect of University life; for the University exists not (as was once supposed) to be a stronghold of orthodoxy and the peculiar possession of the Church, not as a place of social enjoyment, but as a place of learning and education.’44 For some, the true successors of the Tractarians was not the ‘Holy Party’ but the Broad Church sympathisers, more akin to Temple than Aubrey Moore. A review in 1884 of the letters of J.B. Mozley, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, stated that: ‘The old Oxford Movement is succeeded by the new Oxford Movement, and the names of Newman, Pusey and Keble are succeeded, though not

158 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

replaced, by those of Stanley, Jowett and Matthew Arnold. … The old days of coercion by the University have passed away, and the same body which was terrified past all control by the positive and constructive teaching of the old school, has nothing whatever to say in its corporate capacity to the minimising and watering down of Christianity by the new. No one is deprived, no one is silenced.’45 This is a very significant statement. First, it strongly suggests that the future of theology at Oxford lay with those of considerable liberality in their views, ‘Tractarian’ or not. Second, the writer describes the diminished influence of the University as an arbiter of what was acceptable in Christian belief. In the new freedom from authority more liberal attitudes are allowed to assert their viewpoints as viable forms of Christian belief. This attitude is also found in 1897 in a comment at the Nottingham Church Congress on the contribution of Tractarianism: ‘It is only in our own days, under the influence of Broad Church teaching, that the narrow basis on which Calvinism rests has been swept away, and an effort has not unsuccessfully been made to bring home to men’s consciences the full teaching of the Incarnation.’46 But there were still those, like the arch-conservative Denison who could say of the ancient universities at the 1883 Church Congress, ‘… I say the civil power of England has placed these homes in ruins. … With the home the shrine is in ruins; because whatever may be said of the scholarship of the present day I confess I have very little faith in it.’47 For Denison, Lux Mundi was ‘… a concession to and an excuse for “The New Criticism”. … [It is] an unhappy and dangerous book’.48 Yet his was a voice of the past, even among the clergy. As a consequence of these developments, by the time of the emergence of the ideas of Russell and G.E. Moore, Anglicanism had become defensive and hesitant, dethroned in intellectual debate, removed from direct influence over the ancient universities, and in its schools fighting for survival in competition with those financed by the rates. This was precisely the period of idealism’s greatest influence on the Church, when it was pressed into service to legitimate a reading of the Christian tradition which would act as a coherent restatement of the faith to meet the needs of the age. Idealistic Christianity provided a safe haven from the storms of doubt and from the vocal criticisms from the new professional classes who had no need of religious sanctions to make their ideas known. Russell, G.E. Moore and their fellow Cambridge ‘Apostles’ illustrated the drift from explicitly Christian foundations. By the fin de siècle the Cambridge ‘Apostolic Tradition’ had lost all contact with the originally Christian origins of the group in the 1820s, and their debates were

Idealism Assaulted 159

pervaded by questions such as that which G.E. Moore was to ask in his Principia Ethica of 1903: what are the most valuable things we can know or imagine? His answer is ‘certain states of consciousness which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects’.49 It is only a short step from this to an attitude where aesthetic values and art considered for its own sake take centre stage and grand explanatory schemes such as those provided by idealist philosophy and the Christian faith are marginalised or even explicitly ridiculed. As Robert Elsmere was taking the literary world by storm in 1888, the Irish writer George Moore (1852–1933) wrote in his autobiographical novel Confessions of a Young Man: ‘I had shaken off all belief in Christianity early in life with Shelley’s help. He had replaced faith by reason. … Here was a new creed proclaiming the divinity of the body. … I would have held down my thumbs in the Colosseum that a hundred gladiators might die and wash me free of my Christian soul with their blood.’50 Even more gladiatorial in his opposition to Christianity, he added, ‘We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute. The old Gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left to us ….’51 This is the language of a cultural earthquake, when the old order is reviled and any new ‘order’ is submerged beneath the rhetoric of experiment. Paul Fayter describes the 1890s as forming ‘… strange new worlds of space and time [which] were landscapes onto which late Victorian writers and artists projected their devices and desires and mapped out their fin de siècle anxieties and enthusiasms’.52 Matthew Arnold, no supporter of this chaos, had looked forward to a considerably revised form of Christianity in which fanaticism and materialism would be checked by a refined artistic consciousness: ‘I persist in thinking that the prevailing form for the Christianity of the future will be the form of Catholicism; but a Catholicism purged, opening itself to the light and air, having the consciousness of its own poetry, freed from its sacerdotal despotism and freed from its pseudo-scientific apparatus of supernatural dogma. Its forms will be retained, as symbolising with the force and charm of poetry a few cardinal facts … .’53 Arnold joined with T.H. Green and Thomas Hardy in the hope that culture would quench the desire for dogmatism and supernaturalism in religious belief. ‘Miracles have to go the same way as clericalism and tradition; and the important thing is, not that the world should be acute enough to see this … but that a great and progressive part of the world should be capable of seeing this and of yet holding fast to Christianity.’54

160 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Matthew Arnold’s faith sought to retain an idealist picture of a culture whose function was to draw mankind towards knowledge of the ‘universal order’, where a moral ‘absolute’ could be regarded as an object of faith. James Martineau ridiculed Arnold’s methods – as morality had taken over from religion, it is necessary to ‘decorate it with the ostensible symbols of sanctity’. The supposed moral idea of Arnold is ‘a mere subjective exercise of imagination …’.55 Martineau’s comment was truer than he realised, for it was during this period when science and the imaginative life appeared in conflict that art and literature assumed a greater importance as a means of spiritual expression. The mediators of the spiritual were increasingly to be found in the creative arts. There was a conscious adoption of religious terminology, now decoupled from its anchor in Christian dogmas. As the young Yeats said in 1898, ‘We must take upon ourselves the method and fervour of a priesthood.’56 It was a short step from Martineau’s ‘symbols of sanctity’ to a vision of art existing for its own sake, as displayed in the Aesthetic Movement, which at Oxford had the vocal support of Walter Pater (1839–94). Pater had studied Greek philosophy under Jowett, but the effect of this on Pater was much more radical than on his master. In his controversial work The Renaissance (1873) Pater indicated the uselessness of systems such as those of Hegel and the idealists. Art exists for the sake of its beauty alone; it needs neither moral standards nor utilitarian functions to legitimate its existence and effects. Experience was primary; explanatory theories were of little account: ‘While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion … or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours. … With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or Hegel, or of our own.’57 Now idealism was grouped with ‘facile orthodoxy’. Such a cavalier attitude towards matters of faith explains why T.H. Green disliked Pater intensely.58 Pater’s views were echoed by Oscar Wilde: ‘Aesthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere.’ Echoing G.E. Moore and the ‘Apostles’, they believed that, ‘to discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive’.59 Mrs Humphry Ward, literary champion of Green’s idealist vision, believed Pater’s views spoke simply of the ‘glorification of the higher and intenser forms of esthetic pleasure, of “passion” in the intellectual sense – as against the

Idealism Assaulted 161

Christian doctrine of self-denial and renunciation’.60 Ward’s Robert Elsmere, although as we have seen enjoying enormous popularity, was criticised as belonging to a world which was lost. Wilde gave it a very hostile review, showing how Ward’s form of spiritual novel was beginning to go out of fashion almost as soon as it was published. Wilde blasted the book with devastating wit: ‘Robert Elsmere is of course a masterpiece – a masterpiece of the genre ennuyeux (boring type), the one form of literature that the English people seems thoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed, it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas. … It is simply Arnold’s Literature and Dogma with the literature left out.’61 All this introversion about the fate of the individual soul such as revealed in Robert Elsmere was for many now an irrelevant and neurotic survival from a past age, articulated by George Moore: ‘St. Augustine’s confessions are the story of a God-tortured, mine of an art-tortured, soul. Which subject is the most living? The first! For man is stupid and still loves his conscience as a child loves a toy. Now the world plays with “Robert Elsmere.” ’62 Robert Elsmere had also closed the door on the old world of individualised scholarship as a means to human fulfilment in its deeply subversive portraits of Langham and Wendover who appear cursed by their secular studies and incapable of sustaining human relationships. Wilde’s use of ‘lost ideas’, and George Moore’s description of Christian spirituality as childish indicate how for many the intellectual and cultural inheritance of the Victorian period looked stuffy and dated. The idealism of Robert Elsmere was decried, and its efforts to reconstruct a meaningful Christian ethic out of what appeared to be a watered-down form of Christian dogma were rejected. Christian spirituality had become nostalgic for a lost world, exhibited most noticeably in the luxuriant growth and romanticised rediscovery of liturgical practices which for some became a substitute for Christian dogma they could no longer accept, ‘liturgy for liturgy’s sake’. Anglican periodicals such as the Guardian filled many pages with arcane discussions of the legal status within the Church of England of liturgical obscurities which were being practiced by an increasing number of clergy. Although the 1874 session of Parliament had been dominated by this discussion, the interest of the MPs in matters ecclesiastical was, not surprisingly, on the wane, and the disputes and disagreements were fast becoming an in-house ecclesiastical affair concerned with what was and was not permissible practice for

162 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

what Anthony Russell has described as the new breed of nineteenthcentury clergy who had become ‘technologists of the sanctuary’.63 Although the revival of liturgical customs long dead in the Church of England was legitimated by appeals to ancient authority and practice, and in part encouraged by the rediscovery of the heritage of catholic traditions within the Church of England, there was much about this movement that was also in tune with the developing contemporary desire for artistic and aesthetic freedom which had no necessary connection with Christian dogma and practice. Thus for Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray: ‘The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the sense as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolise. … Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season … .’64 But only ‘for a season’. This was disdain for dogma coupled with an aspiration for the aesthetic appeal of the outward forms of the Christian religion, which also encouraged a romantic picture of Jesus which magnified his humanity and sympathy with the outcast and deviant without paying too much attention to the doctrinal claims of the Church. Mary Ward had already depicted such an epicurean sentiment in her portrait of Flaxman in Robert Elsmere. Wilde saw, ‘… in Christ not merely the essentials of the supreme romantic type, but all the accidents, with wilfulnesses even, of the romantic temperament also. … He felt that life was changeful, fluid, active and that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form was death.’65 Christian worship was beginning to reflect the voyeuristic and emotional culture of the times, interesting perhaps, but soon to be forgotten when the next entertainment came along. It seemed as if almost without anyone noticing it, the old doctrines of the Church were being quietly stacked away behind a veil of aesthetic stimulation whose introduction was justified by romantic appeals to historical precedents. Such tension between past glories and present crises is seen in the interesting attitude of the Broad Churchman Mandell Creighton. Creighton combined a great love for the ancient papacy with a still deeper love for the mission of the Church of England. Although his massive historical scholarship made him appear something of an antiquarian to some churchmen, he discerned that the national Church had squandered her assets in irrelevant party disputes and obscure theological hair-splitting. Creighton became increasingly frustrated at the heated nature of the liturgical disputes in the Diocese of London. He expressed

Idealism Assaulted 163

his impatience and boredom at such trivia: ‘The Church has adopted the method of politics. It has presented the appearance of parties contending against one another. It has injured its spiritual influence by descending to trivial disputes. It has not shown the English people a higher spirit or a better way.’66 The tension expressed in this statement of near-despair contributed to his early death, worn out by time-consuming irrelevancies in the Diocese of London which sapped the strength of Christian mission. However, Creighton was still a child of his early spiritual and academic formation. His classical background gained at Merton College in Oxford gave him a Temple-like suspicion about science and the rise of an industrial society. In 1871, after the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man, Creighton said: ‘Science always seems to me to forget that it is concerned only with things observed, and however much it may play upon men’s minds to get them to extend principles from the natural world to the spiritual, it only does so by appealing to one of the lowest of man’s intellectual qualities, viz. his desire for simplicity rather than for truth. Science is now in exactly the same position as metaphysics was in the Middle Ages – then men were content to speculate, and never took the trouble to observe the simplest things: now science is content to observe things outside man, and is angrily intolerant of any yearning attempt man makes to get inside himself.’67 The world of the rising scientific professions appeared to Creighton a bleak and hostile threat to a traditional education in classics and what we would now call the humanities. His remark recalls Ruskin’s fears about the clink of geological hammers sounding the death knell of the age of faith. In love with the traditional Anglican cosmos of classics and history, Creighton wrote flippantly to T.H. Green in 1871: ‘You have the advantage of me of reading Darwin: I am afraid I don’t take sufficient interest in the subject of his speculations. … the whole matter seems to me to be very ingenious and amusing, but I have not had time for it, and would rather read some Italian history.’68 Green’s writings reveal that he had little interest in Darwin, but Creighton’s attitude is positively dismissive. In Creighton’s world, history triumphs over the challenges posed by science, and his ideas about science did not change with time. At the Birmingham Church Congress in 1893 he stated that ‘Man has further questions to ask, to which no answer can be given by the methods known to natural science.’69 The implication is that the methods will never be known. Creighton, despite his immense scholarship, had a blind spot when it came to important contemporary developments in intellectual life connected with science and faith, a problem which is strangely at variance with his passion for the mission of the national

164 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Church. This was a failing Creighton shared with much of the contemporary Church of England. In his History of the Papacy did Creighton convince himself that modern problems were not directly relevant to the integrity of the Christian faith? This reveals narrowness of vision fatal to a viable Christian apologetic for the fin de siècle. Bemused by the brilliance of antiquity, Creighton stood for those classically trained churchmen who were tempted to see modern problems as but a pale reflection of ancient philosophical debates, a trend we have seen in Frederick Temple’s attitude to the superiority of classics over science. Despite Creighton’s friendship with T.H. Green,70 his scholarship did not share that complex engagement with the present age which was a feature of Green’s unorthodox spirituality. A rather acid insight into Creighton’s character was given by the Archdeacon of London after Creighton’s death: ‘Although in doctrinal questions a very Broad Churchman, he had great sympathy for medieval ritual and all kinds of pomp and magnificence.’71 Did Creighton think he was the Anglican cosmos personified? Creighton’s time as a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford from 1867 was influenced by Ruskin, Pater and the Aesthetic Movement as well as T.H. Green and the classics. Yet, liberal and Broad Church though he was, Creighton remained strangely unable to address the cultural shifts in fin de siècle England. The great contemporary controversies over ritualism in the Church of England were the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual battle which concealed deeper problems about how new knowledge was related to Christian doctrine and worship and how it would achieve satisfactory integration into Christian beliefs in a manner which would enable it to retain its cultural authority. Creighton, romantically in love with the past, succumbed to the temptation which, in giving answers to the past with one hand, took away with the other the ability to address the present. As with many of the clergy who were involved in the revival of liturgical practices, the combination of liberal Christianity, classical education and a love of the visual arts in secular and sacred display made him deaf to the advances of science. As David Edwards perceptively says, ‘… Creighton was out of tune with his own age as the popes had not been out of tune with theirs … .’72 In the 1890s the Church was increasingly unable to come to terms with the fact that culture had abandoned the vision of a universal order beloved of the idealistic tradition. The wider intellectual, literary and artistic culture lost interest in generalisations about the ‘Moral Law’ in favour of a more individualistic emphasis on hedonism and the value of personal experience. The quest for cosmic grandeur in philosophy,

Idealism Assaulted 165

denoted by men such as Green and Bradley, was being replaced by a new realism which scorned teleology and withdrew philosophy into a more limited area. In literature, this development is shown by contrasting the Christian-inspired moral seriousness of Robert Elsmere with a novel published only seven years later. The publication of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure in 1895 proved that popular culture could still be shocked by bleak amorality expressed by fictional characters who had explicitly rejected all that the serious Elsmere held dear. The book was a sharp attack on the idea that cosmic process was written into a society directed towards upholding the ‘Moral Law’.73 The hostile reception of this novel showed how difficult it was for many people to accept the full implications for morality of the loss of a Christian outlook, a difficulty being made clear in much more heated prose by Nietzsche at the same time. But Nietzsche was almost unknown in England – the English preferred their unpleasant cultural medicine in the form of the novel. Jude the Obscure, unlike Robert Elsmere, displayed considerable hostility towards the cultural dominance of Oxford. Hardy put into the mouth of Sue Bridehead a contempt and revulsion for ‘Christminster’ (i.e. Oxford), whose religious traditions were deemed no longer necessary for a coherent moral life:74 ‘I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side. … My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew; and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medievalism of Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times, one couldn’t help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!’75 This quotation from Swinburne’s Hymn to Proserpine would not have been lost on readers, for Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was regarded as a notorious infidel after the publication of his Poems and Ballads in 1866. (Swinburne had left ‘Christminster’ in 1860 without taking a degree, but his friendship with Jowett was an abiding feature of his early life.76) In the same work Swinburne lamented the grey world of Jesus, the ‘pale Galilean’, and was hostile to the general tone of spiritualised idealism, which he lampooned in his poem The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell, first published in 1880. Directly parodying the anguish and doubt expressed in Tennyson’s poem The Higher Pantheism, Swinburne

166 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

wrote about idealism in terms reminiscent of Mansel’s attack in his Phrontisterion of 1858: One, who is not, we see: but one, whom we see not, is: Surely this is not that: but that is assuredly this. What, and wherefore and whence? for under is over and under: If thunder could be without lightning, lighting could be without thunder. Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole is doubt: We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without?77 Swinburne’s message is clear. Anguished idealistic doubts masquerading as serious theism had become a laughable incoherence, and the language of faith had broken down. Hardy’s ‘Christminster’ represented a religious tradition which was now no more than a museum-piece, and no amount of philosophical or pseudo-agnostic tinkering could redeem it. Christminster was no more than ‘a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition’.78 So far had Oxford fallen in the 60 years since the Tractarians boldly announced a new dawn for the apostolic faith. There is a curious parallelism between Hardy’s vision of the church of the future, the vision of religion portrayed by Green in his Lay Sermons, and the loose attitude towards dogmatic formulations found in the writings of Matthew Arnold. Hardy’s letters echo Green’s liberal hopes for religious institutions: ‘I have sometimes had a dream that the Church, instead of being disendowed, could be made to modulate by degrees … into an undogmatic, non-theological establishment for the promotion of that virtuous living on which all honest men are agreed – leaving it to voluntary bodies the organisation of whatever societies they may think best for teaching their various forms of doctrinal religion.’79 Not only was he aware of the tension between dogmatic theology and moral integrity, Hardy was also aware of voices more strident and less diplomatic than Green’s which came from the young publicists for the new sciences such as Thomas Huxley. ‘What is forced upon one again, after reading such a life as Huxley’s, is the sad fact of the extent to which Theological lumber is still allowed to discredit religion, in spite of such devoted attempts as his to shake it off. If the doctrines of the supernatural were quietly abandoned tomorrow by the Church, & “reverence and love for an ethical ideal” alone retained, not one in ten thousand would object to the readjustment, while the enormous bulk of thinkers excluded by the old teaching would be brought back into the fold, & our venerable old

Idealism Assaulted 167

churches & cathedrals would become the centres of emotional life that they once were.’80 There are, therefore, major differences between Robert Elsmere and Jude the Obscure. The novels of Mrs Ward still inhabited the polite world of Oxford academia (the Anglican equivalent of Wilde’s nonconformist ‘meat tea’), even though their plots are worked out far outside the walls of the colleges. Elsmere sublimates Christianity in an idealistic service of humanity. Hardy’s Jude Fawley is a much more earthy individual, a man who eventually sees that Huxley and his friends had made ‘theological lumber’ implausible. Jude is ‘a more subversively powerful model of the common man’s experience of loss of faith than is saintly, uppercrust Robert Elsmere’.81 Idealism could provide an explanatory framework for those with the freedom and intelligence to accept it, but for the great mass of mankind, the innumerable Jude Fawleys of late Victorian England, force of circumstances and lack of social freedom to develop life to one’s own liking meant that holistic explanations were an irrelevance. In fact, Hardy explicitly attacks the idealism represented by Elsmere, and it has been said that Jude’s death ‘surely parodies the climactic funeral of Mr. Gray [⫽ T.H. Green] at Oxford in Robert Elsmere’.82 Jude’s meaningless death is an attack on the idealistic concept of self-sacrifice. Those who were attracted to idealism and its social implications found, as Elsmere did, that the lot for most people was much harder than it was for those who had the privilege of Anglican ‘Christminster’. Peter Dale points to the contrast between the progressive optimism of Ward and the bleakness of Hardy: ‘There is, at last, no approach either to a new, totalising creed or to a new aesthetic shape in which to embody it. Hardy is no Carlyle, no Tennyson, no Arnold, above all no George Eliot. For him they are, like the ghosts Jude finds amid the stones of Christminster, elusive shadows of an achievement that is unattainable, not simply for him personally, but, as Hardy now unambiguously says, for mankind.’83 Jude the Obscure (1895) and Robert Elsmere (1888) were published at the same period as G.E. Moore and Russell and their colleagues were undermining the reign of idealism in philosophy, and represented another means by which Christian belief and its moral framework was under attack. When Robert Elsmere was first published, the editorial in the Guardian warned against a facile rejection of the problems being faced by Christian belief: ‘It is not by closing eyes and ears to what is passing around us that the victory over the forces of scepticism is to be gained; it is by confronting them with a fuller knowledge and stronger reasoning powers. It is hopeless to think of banishing books as well as persons,

168 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

newspapers as well as agnostic companions. What we can do is supply the antidote, to adapt our religious teaching to the modern conditions of the controversy … .’84 But how much the official line of the Church would change to accommodate these bold sentiments was a very open question. In discussing T.H. Green, Frederick Temple, Aubrey Moore and Charles D’Arcy we saw how significant the concept of the progressive improvement of culture was to their understanding of the task of Christian apologetics. This optimism was a notable feature of the Victorian period, at least until its final decade. In the same year that Keble made his call for a recovery of apostolicity in the Church of England, William Whewell, the apologist for science and author of a ‘Bridgewater’ treatise, stated that his purpose in writing about religion and science was ‘… to lead the friends of religion to look with confidence and pleasure on the progress of the physical sciences, by showing how admirably every advance in our knowledge of the universe harmonizes with the belief of a most wise and good God.’85 In the 1850s and 1860s Buckley86 describes how Hegelian synthesis and ‘the relentless dialectic of change’ gave prominence to the concept of progress which was favourable to those theologians and philosophers who formulated idealist-based apologetics. He points to Frederick Temple’s essay ‘The Education of the World’ as an example. Temple had said, ‘… we are to look for that progress which is essential to a spiritual being subject to the lapse of time, not only in the individual, but also quite as much in the race taken as a whole. … This power, whereby the present ever gathers into itself the results of the past, transforms the human race into a colossal man, whose life reaches from the creation to the day of judgement.’87 Peter Bowler allies Darwinism with the contemporary vogue for the optimistic philosophy of Herbert Spencer: ‘Darwin himself allowed his theory to be seen as a new variety of progressionism, thus facilitating its incorporation into the Spencerian philosophy.’88 These men made it easier to believe that there was some immanent will dictating the progress of the cosmos. Even Comte saw himself as the harbinger of a new ‘religion’. Tennyson expressed this optimism: Not in vain the distance beckons, forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change. Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day; Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.89 This optimism went with the intellectual liberation which many believed they had found when they gave up the more negative aspects

Idealism Assaulted 169

of religious doctrines. There was also a change in emphasis in the aspects of God’s character. God was now less of a schoolmaster exercising judgement and acquittal towards a world embraced in the iron grip of sin; he was a more participative divinity who manifested himself in the world in the shape of a progressive evolutionism. For many this was a new-found spiritual freedom which involved a rejection of traditional Christian theism. Very early in the Victorian period George Eliot spoke of her soul ‘liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think’, and she looked forward to ‘that glorious crusade that is seeking to set Truth’s Holy Sepulchre free from a usurped dominion’.90 However, this crusade (again, note the ‘battle’ metaphor) was often shadowed by the anxiety of mental and emotional turmoil in the lives of those who threw off their Christian faith. There were many Elsmeres and Judes. The moral life remained; but what if a search for a rational and liveable basis for that life could not be found? What if ‘Truth’s Holy Sepulchre’ failed to deliver the sought-after utopia? As time moved on, doubts crept in about ‘progress’ and the optimistic idealism of Green and others, both in the realm of ideas and as a result of Britain’s changing economic fortunes and challenges to its myth of world domination through the spread of the empire. ‘During the years of the so-called “Great Depression” (1876–96) there was a marked general loss of confidence in liberal thought. It no longer seemed that peace, commercial prosperity and liberalism of the laissez-faire variety were indispensable allies to one another.’91 Such a climate undermined the sense that these late Victorians had a right to confident declarations about progress and encouraged an attitude of questioning and exploration. Green had expressed the transition of theistic thought from personal being to divine idea realising itself in our consciousness. For Green the world had a necessary spirituality pointing to a morality which could be equated with a sense of optimism and progress. He speculated that the existence of the ‘ultimate moral good … may have supreme influence over conduct, in moving us to that effort after the Better which, at least as a conscious effort, implies the conviction of their being a Best’. This means that ‘… it is not hard to understand how man has bettered himself through institutions and habits which tend to make the welfare of all the welfare of each …’.92 Reflecting Green’s own personality this is a calm optimism about an alliance between reason and revelation which challenges the social order and inspires its constituent parts with the will to improve society: ‘God is forever reason; and His communication, His revelation is reason; not, however, abstract reason, but reason taking a

170 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

bodily form, and giving life to, the whole system of experience which makes the history of man. The revelation, therefore, is not made in a day, or a generation, or a century. The divine mind touches, modifies, becomes the mind of man, through a process of which mere intellectual conception is only the beginning, but of which the gradual complement is an unexhausted series of spiritual discipline through all the agencies of social life.’93 Green’s optimistic temperament merged with Balliol privilege: ‘The world has always seemed very good to me.’94 Thus could Thomas Arnold’s concept of history as a progress from childhood to manhood and ultimate decay be superimposed upon philosophical idealism, which, because of its legitimation of the ‘eternal’, became the guarantor of eventual progress by which the Aryan stock of humanity made successive contributions to civilisation. This divine providence, rather than the laws of political and economic necessity lay behind Frederick Temple’s essay ‘The Education of the World’ in 1860. From Arnold in the 1840s to Drummond’s book of the 1890s there was an emphasis on The Ascent of Man, a title in conscious opposition to Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man. This meant that the nonteleological implications of Darwin were systematically ignored: ‘The majority of later-Victorian evolutionists did not believe in random variation and advocated selection only as a means of eliminating those who got left behind in the race for progress. … Darwinism was thus absorbed into the liberal progressionist view of things, providing the perfect natural foundation for the theory of social progress towards industrialization and the Whig interpretation of history.’95 James Moore and others have proposed that in the late nineteenthcentury orthodox defenders of the faith were more successful in assimilating science to their beliefs than their more theologically liberal colleagues. However, the debate was more complex than this. The orthodox, such as Aubrey Moore, did not necessarily exercise greater discernment in their methods than those who welcomed it as a platform on which to build ill-founded teleological theories concerning the progress of society. Exemplifying this trend, Dr. Bickersteth (Bishop of Exeter) said in 1895: ‘Overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie around us; and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing us through nature the influence of a free will, and teaching us that all living things depend on One Everlasting Creator and Ruler … .’96 Yet this robust optimism on the part of the Anglican clergy had been increasingly questioned for many years. In 1879 the biologist Ray Lankester97 had suggested that what (in nineteenth-century terms) were deemed to be ‘degenerate’ races were descended from superior

Idealism Assaulted 171

cultures, and that there was nothing to stop contemporary civilisation from following the same path. In a famous Romanes Lecture in 1893 Thomas Huxley took a pessimistic view of cultural advance. He noted that people ‘… have seen the cosmic process is evolution; that it is full of wonder, full of beauty, and, at the same time, full of pain. They have sought to discover the bearing of these great facts on ethics; to find out whether there is, or is not, a sanction for morality in the ways of the cosmos.’98 Huxley sought to fend off darkness by emphasising the ‘evolution of ethics’ instead of the ‘ethics of evolution’. Nevertheless, if ethics are part of the blind forces of chance and necessity, how can it be possible to formulate necessary or universal moral truths? Huxley envisaged two processes. These were natural selection and what might be called ‘ethical selection’. There is desperation in his statement that, ‘The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.’99 Huxley, for all his outspoken rejection of much Victorian religious apologetic still retained the ethical seriousness of an earlier generation. It has been said that he was the last of the Victorians. In an essay of 1886 on ‘Science and Morals’ Huxley expressed disdain for idealism, saying that he was ‘quite lost’ when he thought about a ‘spirit’ devoid of relation to space and time. Like many agnostics, he was no friend of abstruse philosophy, and believed that morality would survive the demise of Christian thought: ‘And, if morality has survived the stripping off of several sets of clothes which have been found to fit badly, why should it not be able to get on very well in the light and handy garments which Science is ready to provide?’100 Just as Huxley registered his ethical protest, so did Hardy through the mythical Jude Fawley. Jude is an evolutionary victim who is ‘registering [his] ethical protest against the cruelty of the cosmic process written into the institutions of their society …’.101 Huxley also understood that optimism and its accompanying comfortable ethics of progress were wedded to class structure. Just as Paley’s arguments from design worked much better if one was a reasonably comfortable English country parson with time on one’s hands and people to rely on, so ‘progress’ was a very amenable doctrine to the intelligentsia of the older Anglican-dominated academies. It was easier to believe in progress if you had a hand in controlling both your own destiny and through your influence the destinies of others. Huxley, perhaps because he was never a member of this charmed circle of Oxbridge, realised the matter could be viewed differently. ‘One does not hear so much of it [i.e. progress] as one did forty years ago’, he wrote perceptively in 1893; ‘… indeed, I imagine that it is to be met with more commonly at the tables of the healthy and wealthy,

172 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

than in the congregations of the wise’.102 (Or perhaps, we might add, at the tables of Wilde’s nonconformist ‘meat teas’ and the well-provided common rooms of Oxford.) The poet W.B. Yeats sensed a sinister change in the zeitgeist in Dublin in 1895; impressed by his friend McGregor Mathers’ concern at the coming of great wars, he was moved to write: The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes, And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.103 The developing world of science fiction also portrayed a mixed message about the future world, as exemplified in The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, published to great acclaim in 1894–95. Wells ended with a vision of a dead world in the far distant future of which the Time Traveller says, ‘A horror of this great darkness came on me.’104 This is a conscious echo of Genesis 15:12, of Abraham’s horror of darkness as the sun went down.105 As the sun set on the late-Victorian British Empire, there is for Wells no comforting voice from God, no promise of an eternal covenant with mankind. In an Epilogue to the book, the narrator stated that the Time Traveller ‘thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end’.106 It is as if in the mid-1890s Wells and Yeats saw that the signs of the times were a portent of major conflicts not only between nations but between the conflicting interests of different sections within individual nations which had mutually contradictory ideas of what progress and liberation involved. Wells’ scepticism about the triumph of progressive ideas became a widespread unease in sections of the community in the early years of the twentieth century that society was losing coherence and that violent change was a possible future. George Dangerfield believed that the First World War was the main reason why British society did not collapse into revolution caused by rebellion of the workers, the suffragettes and the Tory involvement in the ‘Irish Question’. Dangerfield believed that ‘liberalism’ had lost touch with developments in society, in particular with the rise of the labour movement: [The liberal party]: ‘… was an irrational mixture of whig aristocrats, industrialists, dissenters, reformers, trade unionists, quacks and Mr. Lloyd George: it preserved itself from the destructive contradictions of daily reality by an almost mystical communion with the doctrine of laissez-faire and a profound belief in the English virtue of compromise’.107 Dangerfield’s

Idealism Assaulted 173

polemical prose has not gone without challenge, but his scathing remarks about losing touch are relevant to the role of the Anglican Church in this period. His acid comment about the style of Georgian poets such as Rupert Brooke shows how romanticism was increasingly regarded as passé and degenerate: ‘The Romantic Revival, now senile to a degree, was on its death-bed and babbling o’er green fields.’108 We have moved a long way from the romantic clerisy of a Coleridge or the nature poetry of a Wordsworth; such sentiments seem tender plants when viewed against the realism of the world at war a hundred years later. It is the opposite of R.W. Church’s mid-Victorian Christian vision of civilisation permeated by the ‘Gifts of the Spirit’. Yet even as the new century began, idealist philosophers friendly to Christianity, such as Pringle-Pattison, were proclaiming the necessity of a philosophical teleology: ‘The antithesis of teleology and mechanism … is the old opposition of Idealism and Materialism more strictly expressed. And it is equally obvious that while the mechanical view, through looking ever backward, finds an explanation of things in reducing them to their lowest terms … the teleological or idealistic view seeks the true explanation of the lower in the higher, of which it is the germ.’109 Culture moved away from this confident and progressive tone which influenced Anglican writers who in the latter years of the nineteenth century gave divine sanction to evolution and cosmic morality. The gap between the cosmos of the sceptics and the world of polite Anglican progressivism widened into a chasm. Mr Le Gros Clark at the Church Congress of 1883, at which Aubrey Moore gave a paper on Christianity and Science echoed this progressive sentiment: ‘The recognition of purpose in Creation, and of unity of type in development is in no way inconsistent with the adoption of the theory of Evolution, which includes both teleology and morphology in its more comprehensive embrace: and this proposition is sustained by the moral certainty of such purpose existing; as the conception of an omniscient and omnipotent Creator working without plan or design, is a paradox.’110 An anonymous reviewer of Temple’s Bampton Lectures in the Guardian put the matter succinctly: ‘There is through all stages of the evolution of morality a constant element – the conception of duty – i.e. the conception of man as under obligation, under the authority of a moral law of absolute validity, irrespective of the consequences of pleasure and pain.’111 In the hands of men like the Cambridge theologian Brooke Foss Westcott and the Lux Mundi group, this optimism was explicitly bound to the incarnation. For Westcott, this created the ‘the crown of the whole finite order; that … contains a vision of unity which answers to the fulfilment

174 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

of the purpose of creation; that it is for us the sign of God’s good pleasure to sum up all things in Christ …’.112 The Lux Mundi writer John Richardson Illingworth believed that progress culminated in the human species: ‘the Incarnation may be said to have introduced a new species into the world – a Divine man transcending past humanity, as humanity transcended the rest of creation’.113 This argument was pressed to such an extent that Illingworth was even ready to assume that the human species was ‘virtually permanent’. Despite increasing disillusion in the wider culture, Anglican Christianity continued to be dominated by similar attitudes well into the next century, long after the First World War had called into serious question the accompanying emphases on progress and political movements which were, for good or ill, associated with this philosophy.114 This was because of the great influence of holistic idealism at Oxford, which even if increasingly challenged by the rise of alternative philosophies, still possessed academic eminence. In 1910, the historian R.G. Collingwood stated that idealism ‘obsessed Oxford philosophy, what I mean is that the work of that school presented itself to most Oxford philosophers as something which had to be destroyed …’.115 By the 1920s there were signs of the collapse of the social significance of idealism; ‘their subject was a “futile parlour game” which was very different from those who followed Green in an earlier generation’.116 In theology idealism had a much longer innings, and Frederick Temple’s optimism lived on in his son William (1881–1944), who became a notable exponent of the relationship of the optimism of Oxford-based idealism to the Christian faith. Nevertheless, the First World War dealt a fatal blow to these traditions. After the war, a ‘neo-orthodoxy’ arose which had little concern with any form of philosophical legitimation. The sense of crisis, easily read from the New Testament, was reasserted by Barth and his followers in reaction to the spiritual monism of the nineteenth century whose political and social apologetic had been held at least partially responsible for laying Europe in ruins. It was not only a continent that was in ruins; so were the Anglican attempts at forming an optimistic Christian vision based on philosophy and progress. To read a poem like T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland of 1922 is to see at once how far culture had travelled in the 40 years since the death of T.H. Green. Many now felt that Christian theism’s task could be no more than gathering up the fragments of the past in order to pass on the story of faith for a new and uncertain future.

11 Gathering Up the Fragments

The synthesis of reason and faith, of revelation and science, with the promise of which the eighteenth century opened, has passed away in a dream. A frightening gulf now yawns between religion and science, and a bridge between them is considered almost hopeless … . The Church of England has ceased to be an intellectual power in England – it is not at the centre of intelligence. It is to be feared that it is passing into a position of antagonism to knowledge. Pattison, M. (1885), Sermons, London: Macmillan & Co., 209,211 Individuals and institutions have a habit of becoming enmeshed in their own apologias, unwilling or even unable to escape from their presuppositions for fear of encountering that which may prove an unpleasant shock to the reasons for their existence. Nevertheless, it is only by an exercise of a faith which is prepared to confront hostility and difference that religious traditions can be stimulated to entertain new ideas, new methods of presenting their message, and alternatives to familiar ways of working. Unless this task is undertaken in every generation, the Churches will endlessly repeat to a diminishing clientele a static faith which, although once delivered to the saints, has lost its imaginative and creative faculties. There is the ever-present temptation for churches to concentrate on producing relevant user-friendly products which instead of bringing about change and insight act as a narcotic producing a delusion of security. Image, message and product cease to be a relevant or powerful element within the wider culture, and because of their blandness create a vicious circle in which a sense of tiredness and boredom affects those who inhabit the institution. Ludwig 175

176 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

Wittgenstein, at the beginning of the twentieth century, perceptively described how this captivity affected the very language we use about ourselves: ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’1 For the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Church of England repeated the consoling language of idealism, received orthodox doctrines, and the symbolism of a revivalist Catholicism. Such a combination of modified Hegelian dialectic and Christian theology appeared a tempting synthesis when confronted with the fragmentation of knowledge and the rise of ‘mass culture’. However, despite some imaginative and constructive arguments, and a significant attempt to practice theology in the market place of ideas and social changes of the late nineteenth century, the Church of England’s place in society was rapidly pushed to the margins of national life. The restatement of the faith could not make up for the destruction of the Church’s social, political and educational authority between the 1820s and the 1870s, which was the real foundation of its influence. Idealistic theology appeared to be a valuable ally where cultural and political influence was at stake, and idealist theism was at its height during the professionalising of science, the secularising of the ancient seats of learning and the beginnings of a rapid spread of education throughout the population. However, these developments could not halt the process described by James Moore, whereby ‘the locus of the sacral moved from the noumenal towards the phenomenal, from the eternal towards the temporal, from another world towards this world’.2 Thomas Hill Green, Mrs Humphrey Ward, Frederick Temple, Aubrey Moore and Charles D’Arcy showed how five thinkers of very different temperament and spiritual outlook attempted to communicate their theistic vision to the rapidly changing culture of late-Victorian England. All were influenced by an essentially optimistic outlook, characterised by an emphasis on the ‘upward progress’ of culture. In the 1830s Thomas Arnold had seen the historical process as an optimistic culmination of the triumph of British civilisation blended with gentlemanly Christian duty which could be adapted to act as a Christian rationale for the spread of the Empire. The classical cultures of public school education and its legitimation in the authority of Oxbridge’s Anglican ethos formed the frame of this venture, powerful enough to touch even Charles D’Arcy in Ireland. This positive view of progress and development was combined with a new cultural role for an established Church which had recently and rather violently been dispossessed of its political

Gathering Up the Fragments 177

influence. Temple inherited this optimistic ‘Liberal Anglican’ view of history, in which the cultural successes of Victorianism were the culmination of civilisation. He combined this with a quest to find a viable rapport between his perception of science as handmaid to the classics and Christianity, and at the same time vindicate the superiority of the Kantian–Christian ‘Moral Law’ over the claims of scientific rationalism. Aubrey Moore inherited through his Oxford friendships a privileged culture in which the Christian faith was the means by which civilisation moved onwards and upwards to fulfil the will of God for the cosmos. Although belonging to different strands within the Anglican tradition, Frederick Temple and Aubrey Moore sympathised in varying degrees with T.H. Green’s Balliol idealism. Green’s spiritual interpretation of Victorian ideas of ‘progress’ was in tune with his times. This was good news for the optimistic and privileged clerics of Oxford after 1870 such as the ‘Holy Party’ and those associated with the production of Lux Mundi. Their idealism was combined with a romanticised evolutionary rhetoric, assisted by the absence of any workable scientific consensus concerning the mechanism of natural selection, the naturalistic implications of which would not become clear until the twentieth century. A teleology of ‘progress’, an optimistic interpretation of Darwinian ideas and the expansive nature of British culture on a world scale appeared to be an answer to A.C. Benson’s prayer for the nation: ‘Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set; God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.’3 Philosophical and cosmic Anglicanism legitimated the progress and power of nation and empire, and became a means by which the national Church defended both its own perception of culture and its own authority. When allied to an overtly incarnational approach emphasising the Logos, it furnished the Anglican intelligentsia of the late nineteenth century with a means by which they could seek to maintain a plausible theological stake in all branches of knowledge in the face of the rise of autonomous scientific and technological professions. This vision persisted for many years and was alive and well in the late 1920s, when the Lux Mundi contributor Charles Gore could still say, ‘We should not look for … change of spirit to arise from any simultaneous conversion of men in masses. If we accept the teaching of past experience, we should expect the general alteration to arise from the influence in our society of groups of men, inspired probably by prophetic leaders, who have attained to a true vision … .’4 Gore was a progressive and discerning thinker, well versed in industrial and scientific developments from his experience as Bishop of Birmingham as well as being a compelling and challenging theologian. Nevertheless, he could still find

178 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

room for an elite clerisy on the Coleridgian model a century after it was first envisioned. Gore and his friends failed to realise in the hedonistic world of the late 1920s that the time had passed when an elitist intellectual spirituality based on a broadly catholic Christian consensus could maintain its influence over all professions and all aspects of national culture. Long before Gore’s vision was articulated ten years after the Great War, the vision of a clerisy-based Anglican elitism had faded from view. Thomas Huxley and his friends in the late nineteenth century had been asserting the autonomy of science and the role of the professional ‘scientist’ (itself a relatively new word) over what was perceived by them to be the amateurish views of the clergy-naturalists who used their nonspecialist leisure time to pontificate on the meaning of the cosmos. The scientists had long left behind the snobbery of the 1877 critique of C.A. Row’s Bampton Lectures which deplored the use of the word ‘scientist’ as yankee slang. No one now paid any attention to what was said from the pulpit of St Mary’s Oxford. Listening to Christopher Wordsworth’s Bamptons in 1881, Mrs Ward was appalled at the lecturer’s inability to come to terms with new and challenging world views which concentrated on the creativity of mankind and no longer reflected a Christian pessimism than saw mankind as in need of authoritative spiritual control. The secular basis of academia was given added vigour by the foundation of new academic establishments that did not share the Oxbridge history of Anglican hegemony. A new view of a university was taking shape, which was clearly stated by T.H. Huxley in 1892 in a letter to the biologist Ray Lankester. It was a vision of education that is more in tune with the early twenty-first century than the contemporary ecclesiastical fears of the remains of nineteenth-century ecclesiastical Oxford: ‘The mediæval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge, and except in the way of dialectic cobweb-spinning, its professors had nothing to do with novelties. Of the historical and physical (natural) sciences, of criticism and laboratory practice it knew nothing. Oral teaching was of supreme importance on account of the cost and rarity of manuscripts. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge: its professors have to be at the top of the wave of progress. Research and criticism must be the breath of their nostrils; laboratory work the main business of the scientific student; books his main helpers.’5 Although many found Green’s idealism attractive and sympathetic to Christianity, his anti-dogmatic stance also made many men think twice about ordination and an ecclesiastical vocation. The idealism of ‘duty’

Gathering Up the Fragments 179

replaced Christian culture with secular bodies whose prospects appeared to be more attractive than that offered by a clerical vocation in an embattled Christianity: ‘Green’s ethics were an expression of the secularised conscience of the Victorian middle class. Green played an important role in the institutional and intellectual secularisation of Oxford in the later decades of the century. He taught in a period of great uncertainty; the traditional, exclusively Anglican constitution and ideology of Oxford had been destroyed, and no clear alternative had yet been found. The rise of Green’s ethics helped solve the problem: it enabled the university to open its doors to the non-Anglican middle class, while avoiding a secularisation crisis of the type experienced in German universities a few decades later.’6 It was an attractive philosophy for those whose life and cultural opportunities gave them a wide choice in the matter, whether they espoused orthodox Christian belief or some form of revised theism. The growth of public service professions gave avenues of service to humanity which meant that no questions need be asked about an individual’s religious beliefs. However, this comfortable cosmos of Anglican idealism or even of Green’s calm theism was blasphemy to Thomas Hardy’s Jude and his obscure friends, excluded by lack of opportunity and class from active participation in its fruits. Green’s comforting world view was also being undermined by a change of mood in philosophy, away from dreams of cosmic holism towards what some believed were more important subjects connected with language and logic. Allied as these were with developments in aestheticism, literature and art, men such as Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, their ‘Apostolic’ friends at Cambridge and their aesthetic contemporaries at Oxford represented a new mood. G.E. Moore recorded of the ‘Bloomsbury set’ that the most frequently asked question was: ‘What exactly do you mean?’ This question implied a highly personal form of discourse, in which honesty was pursued in a manner which was not afraid to shock those who sought to live without too much reflection off the capital of a Christian moral code. Virginia Woolf caught the mood of this: ‘We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of the good.’7 Such was the effect of the new philosophy that moral and ethical subjects were now pursued in a very different environment to that which permeated the writings of T.H. Green. The fact that later idealists such as F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet (to say nothing of McTaggart) travelled much further from their Christian roots than T.H. Green should have been a warning to those Christians who attempted to cast their faith into forms which used idealism as a

180 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

philosophical foundation. Anxious as these Christians were for intellectual and philosophical respectability in the face of materialist and naturalist challenges, they did not always realise that to sell their theological heritage to idealism was to give up the authority of their historical tradition which rested on the assumption that the world’s creation and preservation was the sole action of the Christian God. They also failed to realise the implications of an idealism that marginalised that aspect of the life of faith which is supremely displayed in the Christian story in the darkness and abandonment of the crucifixion. What of the challenge of the God who seems absent from creation and from the affairs of mankind? Incarnational theology was ill prepared for the two World Wars and the horrors of the Somme and Auschwitz. This was forcibly expressed by Michael Ramsey in the late 1950s: ‘ … it proved possible for philosophical theologians so to pursue it [i.e. incarnational idealism] as to travel far from the sort of faith, which seeing no hope for a world sin-racked and frustrated, throws itself empty on the Cross of Christ, and knows that the world cannot be explained until it has been radically changed’.8 Many years later Donald Mackinnon made a trenchant criticism of idealism, in whatever form it was expressed: ‘It is the fault of the idealist always to seek escape from the authority of the tragic, to avoid reckoning with the burden of inescapable fact, to find in the supposed whole constituted by the history of the spiritual life of mankind the context not only within which individual essays after the Absolute have their meaning, but also their justification. Reference to an external standard is gone; meaning is defined in terms of conditions of assertibility, not in terms of truth-conditions.’9 Those who saw idealism as a port in a storm did not realise the historical and cultural force of Dean Wace’s remark about Oxford being the place where good German philosophies go to die. Wace was a conservative divine and keen champion of orthodox Christianity, and he could see the problems that arose when Christian tradition is allied too closely to a philosophical system which replaced Christian realism with unwarranted optimism. Just as T.H. Green and his contemporaries could appeal to a spiritual unity lying behind phenomena, so Liberal Anglicans such as Temple and post-Tractarian Catholics such as Aubrey Moore could appeal to the purposes of God manifested in the cosmos. This was allied to optimism and the progressive advance of British culture, expressed by Ainger in his hymn in of 1894, dedicated to Archbishop Benson, who had been a master at Rugby in the 1850s: What can we do to work God’s work, to prosper and increase The brotherhood of all mankind, the reign of the Prince of Peace?

Gathering Up the Fragments 181

What can we do to hasten the time, the time that shall surely be, When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God, as the waters cover the sea? The vision came too late to be realised. Even as the ‘Holy Party’ and the liberals such as Temple were constructing their apologetic, the wider culture of art, literature and philosophy was slowly leaving behind its remaining roots in Christianity. Developments in philosophy, a mounting literary critique of idealism, and a self-delusion by many Anglicans that retreat into the subjective and archaic world of ritualism would preserve their heritage served to tear apart the fabric of faith which had been carefully woven by the Oxford divines in order to unify science, philosophy and religion in one explanatory scheme which was consonant with orthodox Christian doctrine. There were many who were not convinced and sought a different way. George Eliot’s novels were a secular reflection of the demand from the Church for a ‘Call to Seriousness’.10 By 1885 it was openly stated in Christian periodicals that George Eliot offered a more satisfying alternative to the narrow ethical concerns of the religious apologists. A letter in the Guardian stated that, ‘There is the sense of the largeness of life, whether from the historical or scientific standpoint, to which popular religion is often painfully out of proportion in its childish and limited views of truth … the disgust at petty and illogical narrowness; and no presentation of religion will ever satisfy the highest minds which is not at once philosophical, historical and practical.’11 This is a powerful statement to find in a Christian periodical, especially in one which was generally pervaded by the Tractarian ethos, and indicates a realisation that the Churches were losing their engagement with diverging cultural patterns and ‘the largeness of life’. Walter Pater was composing his controversial history of the Renaissance in the same decade as T.H. Green was becoming an influential teacher at Oxford, but there appears to be hardly any critique by Anglicanism of attitudes such as that found in Pater’s clarion call: ‘To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. … Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. … What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own.’12 We have seen that Mrs Humphry Ward believed this represented an entire departure from the Christian tradition. Pater’s culture is being described in disapproving terms by one strongly influenced by T.H. Green and whose

182 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

own spiritual pilgrimage longed for more ‘largeness of life’ than could be given by the preoccupations of the Church. However, by the time Ward was publishing her last works, in the period of the First World War, there must have been many who were wondering what all the fuss could have been about; Sutherland has shown how Ward’s literary style went out of fashion as the Victorian era was replaced by the Edwardian and spiritual biography became unfashionable.13 Although it lingered in denominational popular literature, as a serious literary form its day was done. The world had moved on, and not even an attenuated Christian theism which dispensed with dogma could keep up. Idealism and romanticism could foster an Oscar Wilde as easily as a Lux Mundi. Wilde’s aestheticism combined with the humanity of the Gospel portrait of Jesus was as disdainful of dogma as Green’s more intellectual analysis of a rational faith. For Green, the dogma of Christianity was of secondary importance; what really mattered was the moral and ethical imperative of the Christian message. Wilde takes this a step further; both the dogma and the moral and ethical call of the Gospel have been assimilated to love of beauty and the importance of the experiential. An act of worship is not necessarily grounded in a grand system of Christian doctrine; ritual need no longer symbolise the doctrines that lay behind the veil of sense, but supplanted dogma in the symbolic and aesthetic significance of ritual for its own sake. For Wilde, the idealistically motivated Anglo-Catholic attempt to Christianise the world of art by means of symbolism resulted in an affirmation of the outward manifestation of Christian practice for its own sake. This process subtly shifted the locus of spiritual authority from the institution to the individual; the institutions may battle in the courts over ritualism and its historical legitimation, but this is ultimately an irrelevance to those who are in love with the drama. Ritualistic experience could also console the Christian by tempting enticements to escape into an idealised past, a religious reflection of those forms of literature where experience became an end in itself without the necessity for a vision of God. As John Lester has said, ‘ … since order had failed man in the external world, he had to fall back on the construction of an internal order in the world’.14 The ordering of holiness by ritual in the sanctuary was a reaction to the disordering unholiness of a fragmented world. This was not confined to the Church of England, but was part of a wider movement by which the culture of major social institutions, such as throne and altar were ritualised in the later Victorian age. Just as the Church faced a new world of democracy and the decline of its power, status and influence in society, so the monarchy’s place in

Gathering Up the Fragments 183

nineteenth-century English life moved from active participation to a more passive legitimating role. The change meant that both Church and monarchy were placed in a romanticised setting, where ancient heritage and precedent served to eclipse the growing irrelevance of both institutions in a democratised world. With the growth of utilitarian views of what was desirable in society in which ‘progress’ was often accepted as inevitable, both throne and altar progressed backwards in time. No longer able to maintain a credible reason for their existence in the present, they were driven back to re-emphasise their ancient lineage, legitimating themselves by appeals to their antiquity. With regard to the Church of England, the ritual politics and trials of the 1870s and 1880s were but a continuation of the calls for reassertion of apostolic authority heard from Keble’s voice as he denounced the Whig reformers of 1833. The result for both throne and altar was the development of a scenario in which both drifted further and further from the life of the nation. Ritual and history met in the revival of Coronation symbolism, prefigured in the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of 1897 and explicit in the detailed preparations for the Coronation of King Edward VII in 1902 which far transcended those for Queen Victoria’s Coronation in 1837.15 In the case of the Church of England, contrary to received ecclesiastical apologetics, the arguments over ritualism served to make it almost impossible for those who sought to serve their contemporary society in the Church to make any lasting impression. Men like the philosopher Henry Sidgwick and the man of letters Leslie Stephen were loud in their opinion that partisan debates within the Church of England were both puerile and irrelevant. The words of both traditionalist and radical Churchmen were heard through a cacophony of ancient argument, and far from expressing the Gospel afresh in its own generation, the Church of England lost contact with both the mood and culture of the nation. The visions communicated by Pater, Wilde and Hardy were far more accessible than the measured and introspective arguments of Elsmere and his friends, or the inflated romanticism of Scott Holland. Wilde himself had written a moving testimony to the person of Christ in his De Profundis; but his was not the Christ of ecclesiastical dogma. Jesus for Wilde was the friend of sinners, not only more human but also far more humane and accessible than the saviour of the Evangelicals or the Logos-inspired metaphysical construct of the Anglo-Catholics. Using phraseology that owed much to a Pater-like aesthetic, Wilde says that in Christ, ‘ … the very basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the artist – an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the Sphere of Art

184 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

is the sole secret of creation’.16 Jesus of Nazareth is reborn as a Romantic aesthete and the Gospels interpreted as a Romantic and tragic narrative. The passionate prose of Wilde is far from the tortured and convoluted style of T.H. Green. It could of course be said Pater, Wilde and Hardy wrote for a different audience than Green’s Balliol, but this simply shows how Anglican theology was rapidly losing touch with literary culture in its donnish preoccupation with Oxford academia. Our selected thinkers also illustrate how the Church of England assimilated new knowledge arising from scientific disciplines and the rising professions. Frederick Temple, away from the direct influence of the Oxford of T.H. Green, was less aware of the revolution in scientific thought than was Aubrey Moore at Oxford. Temple’s life as a public figure robbed him of engagement with academic developments and the ability to enter into meaningful intercourse with the scientific community, and it showed in his Bampton Lectures. It was certainly not the case that Broad Church and liberal theological sympathies were necessarily more in tune with scientific discovery, and Temple’s near-contemporary Mandell Creighton represented an ecclesiastical tradition that was so in love with classical antiquity that it was quite unable to come to terms with changes in the way the world was being understood. This was apparent despite Creighton’s manifest enthusiasm for the role of the national Church in the life of the nation.17 More perceptive than Temple, Aubrey Moore had read and understood Green and his thought, and grasped how a facile use of progressivism based on fashionable ideas about evolution could eclipse Christian doctrine. He also made close friendships with members of the scientific community. Yet although he was aware of the pitfalls of progressivism, his calm optimism was not sufficiently tempered by the dark forces the world’s evil. He did not fully understand that to marry idealism and the Logos-doctrine in an attempt to assemble a viable Christian apologetic would make his views appear unwarrantably rosy to a later generation of both secular and sacred thinkers. Charles D’Arcy’s forays into idealism and theology were almost completely ignored and played virtually no part in forming subsequent theological tradition, for he was never at the centre of Oxbridge religion. His fate shows how insular much Anglican theology of the period had become, still dominated by ancient seats of learning in a world of modern educational expansion. Idealism appeared a godsend to an Anglican Church increasingly aware of the diminishing influence of clerical leadership in the rapidly changing educational and social world of late Victorian culture. This was the framework within which the Oxford thinkers of this period,

Gathering Up the Fragments 185

privileged even by their own cultural standards, expressed their faith. Looking back on the 1870s and 1880s from the perspective of the First World War, the survivors wistfully and nostalgically remembered their carefree life, the days when the Logos ‘really meant something’. For a few years the sun shone uninterruptedly not only on the British Empire, but on a late Victorian vision whose idealism expressed itself in a quest for unity of knowledge and purpose flowing from the consciousness that the cosmos was an expression of a benevolent God. Just as the Empire of British Christianised culture would cover the oceans of the world, so the knowledge of the Lord would truly ‘cover the earth as the waters cover the sea’. In love with this vision, the most influential Anglicans of the fin de siècle were impervious to the widespread cultural changes around them, despite the parallel rise of ‘Christian Socialism’.18 By the end of the First World War, this idealistic zeitgeist of the 1880s appeared dated. The fears of Yeats and the secular prophets of darkness such as H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad were fulfilled in the carnage of the trenches. Many believed this disaster was in large part a result of the growth of the power of nation states influenced by a Hegelian view of history and philosophy. In 1915 The idealist James Muirhead defended his philosophical tradition in German Philosophy and the War. Muirhead argued that a debased nationalism rather than a Hegelian ‘Empire of the Spirit’ had been the cause of the conflict: ‘ … what has been called the “new barbarism” has its roots, not in the idealistic philosophy, but in the materialist dogmas that have come to take its place as the background of the thought of the governing class in Prussia’.19 However, Oscar Levi, in his passionate Idiocy of Idealism20 published in 1940 raged against the new messianism of the Communist and Nazi states, believing that this was a legacy of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Amidst this crisis, Frederick Temple’s optimism sank without trace; by 1939 his son William, although himself much influenced by Balliol idealism, confessed that it was no longer possible to build a coherent Christian cosmos on the basis of philosophical considerations. William Temple passed a harsh judgement on his father’s ecclesiastical world. He believed that the pre-1914 world of Church and society had become deaf to the need for change. Perceptively, he said, ‘[At] the root of this obstinacy was the habit of security.’21 William Temple knew that in his earlier writings he had himself offered a secure Christocentric metaphysic as a foundation for Christian culture, but that this had now been overtaken by darkening world events in which nationalism was harnessed to forces of inhumanity, intolerance and national conflict: ‘The world of today [i.e. 1939] is one of which no Christian map can be

186 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

made. It must be changed by Christ into something very unlike itself before a Christian map is possible. We used to believe in the sovereignty of the God of love a great deal too light-heartedly. … Our task with this world is not to explain it but to convert it.’22 Aubrey Moore fared rather better, but it was the particularly Christian element in Moore’s argument rather than his understanding of idealism that meant that he and his fellow-contributors to Lux Mundi survived to be a serious inspiration to a later generation of Anglo-Catholic theologians. However, Aubrey Moore’s synthesis of Darwin and faith indicated that even he, with the advantage of his first-hand acquaintance with the scientific community, did not manage to escape an over-optimistic assessment of Darwin’s ideas. Even his fruitful friendship with the scientists of Oxford did not prevent him from an insularity concerning wider cultural developments. To use Hardy’s metaphor from Jude the Obscure, the walls of the Oxford colleges made these optimistic Anglicans deaf to the outside world and drove a wedge between their apologetics and any hope of consolidating Anglicanism as a ‘National Church’. The cultural fragmentation of the 1890s fin de siècle was also a feature of the 1990s fin de siècle. A century later, postmodernist concepts have furnished new ways of understanding large-scale legitimating arguments (the Wittgensteinian ‘pictures’) and emphasised the historical interplay of culture and intellect. From this perspective, movements such as British philosophical idealism served simultaneously as an explanatory paradigm for faith and at the same time legitimate the cultural authority of those who used it. Postmodern perspectives enable us to move from intellectual history, history as the-progress-of-ideas, to a broader appreciation of the reasons why such ideas were held. Lyotard’s well-known broad-brush definition of postmodernism includes the well-known phrase ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. He goes on to say: ‘To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.’23 This inevitably leaves a problem as to how authority is defined and exercised, both within institutions and within society. If the authoritative figure, the ‘Great Teacher’ model, is now viewed with suspicion as a means of achieving a power-status within society or within a group, how are we to understand the relationship between society and ‘knowledge’? In view of our discussion of the significance of Oxbridge in nineteenth-century Anglicanism, it is indicative that Lyotard singles out

Gathering Up the Fragments 187

universities as a source of authority. Huxley saw in the rise of new universities and places of technical and scientific learning a way of making new models of intellectual and cultural life available to society which supplanted the older traditions which were dominated by religious authority. In Huxley’s vision, these new places of professional development were to derive their power from the use of scientific reason. In our own time, we have in turn increasingly questioned this scientific triumphalism by an analysis which treats systems built on the exercise of human reason as inevitably incorporating the rhetoric of persuasion, where a will-to-power is masked by appeals to the importance of truth. Thus the brave new world of secular progressive wisdom is itself undermined and called into question, together with the purpose and direction of its legitimising institutions such as the universities. These developments in the relationship of knowledge to society have enabled more recent historians of Victorian religious culture to break free of the view that their subject is simply a battlefield in which differing intellectual arguments fight for supremacy without regard to their cultural setting. Late-Victorian culture depicts differing landscapes of power and authority within and between the rising professional bodies of science, the increasingly bureaucratic society of the day and the older forms of society based on religious presuppositions. In 1890s fin de siècle England, these changes undermined the established strongholds of Christianity in the ancient universities. These institutions lost their centuries-old influence and foundational power over the Church of England and eventually had to learn to compete in a widening sphere of higher education. Oxford and to a lesser extent Cambridge became the stage for a struggle within the Church of England for a respectable apologia for faith in the face of intellectual assaults which made increasing inroads into the Church’s claims to represent a Christianised ‘clerisy’ with a stake in all knowledge. It was also a struggle for cultural power, and Thistleton’s recent comments about the ‘postmodern self’ are surprisingly relevant to the 1890s world of Wilde, Pater and aestheticism: ‘The postmodern self lives within a labyrinth of diversified networks, and suspects “order” and ordered structures as disguising power-interests on behalf of the privileged. Its multi-media linguistic world bombards the postmodern self with images, myths and signs; but these carry subtexts and multi-layered meanings which never reach “closure”. Signs point only to other signs, ad infinitum.’24 Terry Eagleton’s description of ‘postmodernity’ points to its sceptical deconstruction of teleological and optimistic models of cultural progress; it is, ‘ … suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of universal

188 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

progress or emancipation, or of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation. Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of scepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities.’25 In such an environment of suspicion, teleological explanations involving narratives which purport to describe the ‘way the world is’ will be lost ‘given a chronically short supply of purposive historical action’.26 Eagleton also points out that postmodernism is a trend in Western thought ‘when reviled and humiliated groups are beginning to recover something of their history and selfhood’.27 The case of Oscar Wilde and the sub-text of his sexuality is a case in point from the 1890s. The moral and ethical stance of the ‘Cambridge Apostles’ and the interaction of their social attitudes with their philosophy is another. These groups will not be enamoured of grand narratives and critiques put forward by bodies such as the Church which appear to be not only their opponents but also in league with their oppressors. These descriptions can be readily applied to the diversified culture of the fin de siècle Britain of the 1890s. Further investigation may reveal how far Christian apologetic has travelled in meeting cultural criticisms in the intervening century. The philosophical work of Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore and the subsequent movement away from idealism in English philosophical circles owes as much to cultural fragmentation as to pure intellectual considerations. The tendency for analytical philosophy to neglect the historical and cultural environment has suppressed the cultural background to these philosophical revolutionaries in which a defence of hedonism and cultural freedom from constraints was as important as a new and exciting venture in the life of the reasoning intellect. Even the austere world of analytic philosophy was as much a product of its cultural milieu as the perfumed Hegelianism it despised was a product of its particular time. We cannot have a ‘merely’ intellectualist history of ideas, either philosophical or theological, which neglects the wider cultural setting in which these ideas came to birth. Such an analysis is also relevant to the fin-de-siècle apologetic strategies put forward by the clerisy of Church of England fired by the twin visions of idealistic philosophy and the Logos theology of the Church Fathers. These gave them both present credibility and roots in the past. Doughty campaigners such as T.H. Huxley and Oscar Wilde resented such attempts to trawl up the entire universe into one explanatory system. Those who dissent from the grand idealistic picture can too easily see all these visions as oppressive apologias of

Gathering Up the Fragments 189

those who wish to control the future of cultural development from positions of authority. In the environment of the late Victorian age in Britain, those Christians influenced by idealism were, to use O’Rourke’s phrase ‘constructing assent’. O’Rourke says this cannot be done: ‘For the idealists want to make reality conform to their ideas. They move from discussions about the way things ought to be in the abstract right into decisions about the way things are actually going to be in the concrete, as though the move were as simple a one as a shift from one idea to another. It isn’t, and it can’t be, because the order of mind and the order of external reality are fundamentally different.’28 Such movements can, in the title of O’Rourke’s book, lead to the ‘demonisation of dissent’ whereby the powerful persecute those deemed to be deviant. The apocalyptic results of this demonisation have been identified as being all too clearly seen in the militaristic nationalism of the early twentieth century. O’Rourke is speaking of idealism as a political agenda rather than as a philosophical movement, but his remarks are still relevant to the Anglican cosmos of our period. The writers of Lux Mundi and their Broad Church contemporaries failed to realise that the order of the mind and that of external reality were different. What was acceptable in the sunny optimism of a college common room looked incredible to those in the less privileged wider world. The late-Victorian fragmentation of knowledge in this period caused a crisis of authority for metanarratives such as those formed by Christian apologetics which attempted a critique and relevance to the whole of culture. In the picturesque observation of Bertrand Russell that the world is either ‘a bowl of jelly or a bag of shot’ – is there a ‘Big Idea’ which can form a useful framework for legitimate authority, or are we faced with a multiplicity of irreconcilable narratives? Eagleton perceptively remarks that in the later novels of Hardy: ‘What looks like the action of some malevolent historical will … quite often turns out to be just [a kind of ] ironic process, by which our own tolerably free actions in the past now confront us in the present with all the enigmatic opaqueness of some metaphysical destiny.’29 Such an analysis is certainly relevant to the hapless characters in Jude the Obscure. What can appear to one person as divine teleology appears to another as the inevitable outcome of a personally chosen course of human action or simply the result of a ragbag of circumstances. There is no need to appeal to some divinely ordained metaphysical destiny beloved of idealist philosophy, ‘Liberal Anglicans’, Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’ and the Lux Mundi prophets. We make up the story, and we must accept responsibility for it. Idealism may just be a convenient counter-argument to the

190 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

apparent capriciousness of the cosmos, and a coherent framework within which the theistically minded could plot their understanding of the traditional faith in order to convince themselves that the cosmos was a comfortable place. Moreover, the use of idealistic philosophy in such as way as to minimise the relevance of the historical aspects of faith resulted in a move ‘from history to mystery’ on the part of Anglican thought: ‘For Anglicans, Anglo-Hegelianism was a climax. It was the last school of British philosophy to make the problem of religion even sub-central. Its notion of the Absolute, particularly as redefined by Bradley as Mystery, appeared a deeper rationale for religion than those presented by Wilberforce, Tait and Creighton. It was a dead end, because the Absolute was not God, even God beyond God, the mystery was never revealed and the philosophy provoked its reversal into the pseudo-opposite variously called Logical Positivism, Linguistic analysis … where religion ceased to be even sub-central.’30 The paradox of Anglicanism’s affair with philosophical idealism was that it actually hastened the day when theology no longer entered into constructive dialogue with philosophy and culture. It muted the cry from the heart represented by the helplessness experienced in the life-story of Hardy’s Jude and the seared conscience of Elsmere and his friends as they toiled in the slums of London. Although idealism may have a message for the intelligentsia, and those whose place in the established order enabled them to disseminate their ideas, it failed to touch the hearts and minds of the voiceless millions whose significance was just being recognised in the political arena. Even the rise of interest in socialism by Christians such as Scott Holland, fired by Green’s social idealism and an incarnational faith, would not be able to convert the masses to Christian belief.31 The Anglican fin de siècle dilemma of combining past doctrine and present discoveries brought into sharp focus the problems and opportunities posed by Christianity’s indebtedness to its own heritage of doctrine and history, problems which are still with us today. The significance of cultural ‘Heritage’ in the new millennium has manifested itself in strong demands for the preservation of worlds that we are anxious should not be submerged under the advancing flood of technocratic culture. At the end of the twentieth century David Harvey said that this emphasis on ‘heritage’ is a product of postmodernity and a sense that the past contains some indefinable nostalgic value: ‘Britain is rapidly turning from the manufacture of goods to the manufacturing of heritage as its principal industry.’32 If we don’t know where we are, it helps to see where we have been. It is possible to market Christianity as a world of

Gathering Up the Fragments 191

eternal orderliness which contrasts sharply with the cacophony of strident voices that bombard us from our globalised and confusing mediatainment society. Harvey quotes a comment of the contemporary social historian Robert Hewison which could equally apply to aspects of the Church of England in the 1890s: ‘We have no understanding of history in depth, but instead are offered a contemporary creation, more costume drama and re-enactment than critical discourse.’33 Today, ‘Heritage’ has an iron grip on the Church of England, and its result is the gradual transformation of Christian heritage into ‘heritage Christianity’. The Church is unable to formulate policies for the new millennium as it remains in thrall to a cosmos based on a framework which was a missionary structure for an age we have lost. Initiatives for new ventures go cap in hand to this system, grateful for the crumbs that fall from the table of an ecclesiastical maintenance programme that is itself dramatically underfunded. William Temple’s words about obstinacy to change being based on a habit of security remain a sober truth concerning the place of the Church of England in national society in the new millennium. The ancient buildings are rightly preserved as part of a national collection, but this act can itself accentuate their separation from the surrounding culture and the incomprehension of a people who, however much they may be soothed by the CD’s of plainchant on sale in the Cathedral shop, can no longer sing the Lord’s song for they are in a strange land. It conceals an emasculation of Christian doctrine under the cover of aesthetic expressionism. Having lost confidence in the ability of theology to survive in the public sphere, the Church now resorts to a romanticised spiritual re-invention of the past to protect us from the present. This aestheticisation of faith presents the contemporary Church of England with a dilemma. It is not new, but a dilemma that it has now faced for well over a century. Large areas of Christian tradition, especially those connected with its buildings and its liturgy, have become the permanent hobby of the heritage movement in which the concept of national and idealised spiritual nostalgia has replaced that of Creighton’s ‘national church’. It is the latest manifestation of the aesthetic romanticism demonstrated in the revival of the pageant of antique liturgical customs in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The colours of liturgical antiquity decorated the revived idealism which formed the intellectual framework of its Victorian Christian apologetics. The heart of worship was united with the head of belief – but at a price. The price was the Church of England’s loss of contact with the wider cultural trends, with movements in literature, with questions relating to

192 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

the development of the professions and with the exponential growth of secular knowledge and the advance of science and technology. This process was further hastened at the local level by the progressive loss of the Church’s control over many secular matters, culminating in the revolution in local government in the 1880s and the 1890s which meant for many communities an accelerating separation of local church concerns from social welfare and community responsibility. The result was an increasing concern with self-preservation and the maintenance of security of fabric and finance, of buildings and money, which can be traced in the changing matters which came up for consideration in the Vestry Meetings and the early Parochial Church Councils. There was slow fall in concern with what went on beyond the walls of the Churchyard and glebe and a rise in preoccupation with the maintenance and preservation of the building and, later on, the ministry. Throughout the nineteenth century the Church of England made a valiant attempt to build Jerusalem in England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ but at the cost of undervaluing unanswered questions raised by science and materialism and the dark agnosticism that shadows all faith. Aided by their strongly incarnationalist theology and a rational principle upholding all creation in the Logos, idealist theologians believed they could harness evolutionary theory to a model of divine agency which affirmed divine immanence and pointed towards a fulfilment of all things in Christ. Westcott, with his firm faith in the incarnation, could say, ‘ … behind the veils of sense, which perplex and distract us, burns the serene glory of the Divine Presence’.34 These Christian sentiments, allied to British cultural achievements and a progressive understanding of history popularised by the Arnoldian inheritance, gave a legitimate moral sanction for the expansion of the Church and Empire throughout the world. For if other cultures could be regarded as but in their infancy, then surely it must be morally right for the more advanced nations to bring them up to the next stage of civilisation, even though it may involve conquering and dispossessing them. Such a programme served to hide the decline of the Anglican cosmos from even its most ardent practitioners in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Church leaders sought to prolong the days when romantic idealism based on a classical education could control the life of the intelligentsia by means of the Coleridgian ideal of the clerisy. In love with an idealised vision of Greece and Rome, and attached to the optimistic elements in Christian theology which sought to envision a worldwide conquest of all nations, Anglican theologians became increasingly deaf to the challenges of utilitarian professionalised science and technology.

Gathering Up the Fragments 193

This waning power went hand in hand with failure to realise the challenges of hard-headed realism. It is parallel to what Correlli Barnett has described as the ‘The Collapse of British Power’. For Barnett, it was the baneful influence of the public schools and evangelical Christianity that subtly drove England away from its industrial pre-eminence in the world: ‘As a consequence of this spiritual revolution, English policy ceased to be founded solely on the expedient and opportunist pursuit of English interests. International relationships were no longer seen as being governed primarily by strategy, but by morality.’35 Concerning Jowett, a central figure of this study, Barnett says, ‘Jowett, like the great Headmasters, was a characteristic Victorian Englishman – characteristic in his concern for morals and ideals, his romantic love of the classical world and in his distaste for the jarring note of realism struck by science or other modern studies.’36 Jowett and his friends even appeared to take a pride in their ignorance of science,37 and when they did express a concern, it was with the condescension that such studies were always to be regarded as inferior to the world of the classics. Jowett should have taken his own advice about the changing times: ‘Few students of theology or philosophy have sufficiently reflected how quickly the bloom of a philosophy passes away; or how hard it is for one age to understand the writings of another … .’38 The result of not being aware of cultural changes is that even the efforts of scholars as eminent as Frederick Temple and Aubrey Moore were unable to bridge the gulf between the Anglican cosmos and the new worlds of science and technology.39 By the 1890s fin-de-siècle even the physical world was a much less ‘eternal’ reality than in the 1840s. A.P. Stanley had said: The everlasting mountains are everlasting, not because they are unchanged, but because they go on changing their form, their substance with the wear and tear of ages. ‘The everlasting Gospel’ is everlasting, not because it remains stationary, but because, being the same, it can adapt itself to the constant change of society, of civilization, of humanity itself.40 In Stanley the cosmos is a solid but changing metaphor for a solid and developing Gospel. Contrast this with Tennyson’s uncertainty and his shadowy and insubstantial vision of creation: The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.41

194 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

At the turn of the new century, 31 December 1900, Thomas Hardy expressed a wistful agnosticism which looked on the world with a doubting heart: An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.42 Most Christian apologists at the end of the nineteenth century had taken a more optimistic view of the cosmos than this. Although they were at times over-optimistic in their estimate of human possibilities of progress and overly dependent on certain passing philosophical moods, their faith nevertheless shines out in their Christian devotion. The starry heavens were not a threat to them but a promise. They shared the belief in the divine society eloquently expressed by the Cambridge scholar and bishop Brooke Foss Westcott. Westcott’s prose gave a hopeful meaning to the depths of the heavens: ‘Once again we are brought to Him, when our thoughts are turned to the widest mysteries of life. When we behold the depths of heaven opened about us, and the veil lifted from the living fullness of earth, He stands before our face … to welcome those who follow Him in hope within the Sanctuary of the Divine Presence.’43 In every age there are those for whom, despite all indications to the contrary, the divine presence is an unavoidable and all embracing security amidst the changes and chances of the world. From Newman to Westcott, behind the veil of sense lie the eternal truths.

12 Epilogue

A more detailed cultural analysis and critique of fin de siècle Anglicanism will enable the Church of England to reflect more realistically on its present troubles. It is clear that its present response to society needs to be liberated from internal frictions and disputes resulting from the ecclesiastical politics of Church ‘parties’ struggling for power over the institution. This legacy of the nineteenth century must now be discarded if the Christian message is once more to become effective. The pursuit of partisan conflict in the present day is a serious impediment to the formation of a coherent Christian encounter with the world and encourages those who participate in it to mistake victory in ecclesiastical odium theologicum for missionary relevance. The opportunities for constructive engagement are great, as in the last few decades in the West we have seen Thomas Huxley’s age of active secular confidence slowly disintegrate under the pressures of cultural and religious ideas which were not foreseen by the hopeful progressive thought of post-1945 Britain. Both global and local conflicts now possess religious questions as a significant factor in a manner thought to be inconceivable in the years of heady secular progressivism following the Second World War. An increasing number of voices have spoken up against what has been interpreted as the oppressive economic and cultural power of the secular West. Some of these voices have resorted to more ancient apologias for power, and the challenge facing the Churches is not only how to maintain a credible belief in the new global religious market; it is also to face up to the secular crusading power of the West in a world where there are a multiplicity of culturally religious answers. At the beginning of the new millennium, the radical theologian Don Cupitt published Reforming Christianity. The title is deliberately ambiguous, but a chapter is entitled ‘Throwing Off the Painted Veil’.1 Cupitt extends 195

196 Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century

the metaphor of the veil from idealism to the whole schema of the western religious tradition: ‘ … the whole picturesque world of mediated religion – doctrine, scriptures, organisation, the Calendar, rituals, art – all hangs like a painted veil or an iconostasis between us and something we are very afraid of, something we haven’t yet confronted, to which the only fitting response is the practice of immediate religion. … Now, however, the shield does not work anymore.’ Cupitt is a radical nonrealist about God, but it is not necessary to accept his approach in order to see the relevance of his observation. There is a sense in which the churches have lacked the confidence to creatively engage with the contemporary scene because it is more comforting for them to follow antique drums. In the light of this, it is tragic and sad that Church is still in thrall to internal squabbles over matters such as the meaning and practice of sexuality and the gender-determination of the validity of ministry that are of very limited interest to anyone who is not an insider to the process. This lack of meaningful dialogue with wider concerns is also displayed in the phenomenon of large sections of the most active Church members on the evangelical wing selling their critical and constructive Christian birthright for a mess of fundamentalist pottage which would be completely foreign to earlier generations of evangelical Christians. This is rightly despised as obscurantist and irrelevant to life in the twenty-first century. Such an idealised vision is harmful to a compassionate vision for the marginalised, the different and the excluded in society. The Catholic tradition of the Church of England has likewise expended much energy on questions of gender and ministerial legitimation that are similarly irrelevant to the wider mission of the people of God. One can only speculate how much thought is put into these matters which could be put to better purpose serving the world that Christians believe God loved so much. The Church of England squanders its riches in these introspective arguments and in vain attempts at small-minded ecclesiastical politics at precisely the time when the secular confidence in progress is wavering. It is in a position where it can undertake some real reflection on what the riches of the Christian tradition can bring to our world, but is tragically turned in upon itself, unable to respond because it all too often takes an adversarial line with those who do not share its presuppositions. Regrettably this has also pervaded, at least until very recently, much of the theological method by which the representatives of the Churches are trained. Ours is a time when theology must re-invent itself in the context of contemporary culture, or it will not survive except as the esoteric pursuit of marginalised sectarians.

Epilogue 197

There is probably a greater respect for the work of the Church now than there was in the 1960s, or indeed since the end of the Second World War. The media are often critical and uncomprehending, but also showing signs of sympathy and curiosity about what the Christian message could mean. However, the question remains whether this is no more than a romantic and nostalgic yearning for a Christianity whose basic story and terrifying sacrificial challenge is now largely forgotten by the rising generations. In 1939 Frederick Temple’s son William asked a question which may never have occurred to his father in his long nineteenth-century ministry. ‘One day theology will take up again its larger and serener task and offer to a new Christendom its Christian map of life, its Christo-centric metaphysic. But that day can hardly dawn while any who are now already concerned with theology are still alive.’2 But William’s day has not arrived; instead, the new millennium has a multitude of voices which bombard us daily with no coherent unity of purpose and deny meaning to our lives. There is no metanarrative which will give meaning to our meanderings. Amidst a world so very different from that of Green, Temple, Aubrey Moore, Mrs Humphry Ward and Charles D’Arcy, the Christian faith which they held still finds adherents who reflect a serene confidence in the purposes of divine grace, even where strident voices and the strife of tongues appear to be at war with the ancient faith that our chosen writers sought to proclaim to a strange world.

Notes Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Marsh, P.T. (1969), 9. Ibid., 280. Engel, A.J. (1987), 22–7. Ibid., 78. The writer was D.P. Chase, Principal of St Mary’s Hall. Ibid., 175. Von Arx, J.P. (1985), 49.

1 Reaction to Reform – The Legacy of Newman and Arnold 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Hofstetter, M.J. (2001), 3; see Brock, M.G. (1997), 12. Green, V.H.H. (1964), 231–2. Brock, M.G. (1997), 9. Ibid., 58. Mozley, A. (ed.) (1891), I, 204–5. Newman (1864 (1959)), 105. Ibid., 107. Quoted in Brendon, P. (1974), xv. Froude, J.A. (1881), 236. Brent, R. (1987), 4ff. Brent comments (p. 5) that ‘By 1800 not only Whig but also Tory politicians saw the necessity for extensive church reform as the prerequisite for a residential parochial clergy’. To Maria Barker, 21 Feb. 1828, Liddon, H.P. (1897), i, 133. See Brock, M.G. (1997), 54. Stanley, A.P. (1844), 253. Carpenter, S.C. (1933), 62–3. On the ‘Noetics’, see Brent, R. (1997). Brendon, P. (1974), 42. Brock, M.G.(1997), 48–9, Edinburgh Review, xlviii (Sept. 1828), 172. From R.D. Hampden, Observations on Religious Dissent, (2nd edn. 1834), 22, quoted in Brent, R. (1997), 74. Brent, R. (1997), 73. Zemka S. (1995), 430. Arnold, T., Principles of Church Reform, p. 332: quoted in Carpenter, S.C. (1933), 63. Arnold, T. (1841 (1874)), 9. Ibid., 31. Quoted in Forbes, D. (1952), 105. On Julius Hare and his criticisms of the Tractarians, see Avis, P. (2002), 280–7. Arnold, T. (1841 (1874)), 51. Ker, I. and Gornall, T. (1979), ii, 129–31 (13.3.1829). 198

Notes 199

2 The Formation of ‘Parties’ 1. Knight, F. (1995), 6. 2. See Chadwick, O. (1966, 1970), I, 202–11, for succinct description of the in-fighting. 3. Quoted in Cannon, S.F. (1978), 55. 4. On Baden Powell, see Corsi, P. (1988). 5. Cannon, S.F. (1978), 48. 6. Balleine, G.R. (1891 (1933)), 50–1. 7. Ibid., 209–10. 8. Church, R.W. (1891), 13. 9. Brown, F.K. (1961). 10. Stephen, Sir James, ‘Letters of the Rt. Hon Sir James Stephen’ (1906), quoted in Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, Cambridge: Cambridge UP (1961), 519. 11. Walsh, W.H. (1898), vi. 12. Wolffe, J. (1991), 31. 13. Toon, P. (1979), 205. 14. John Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, ed. Stansky, P. (1970), 36, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, quoted in Turner, F.M. (1993d), 36. 15. Brose, O. (1959), 207. 16. See Best, G.F.A. (1964), Brose, O. (1959), Thompson, K.A. (1970) for examples. 17. O’Day, R. (1988), 187. 18. Ibid., 188. 19. Burns, A. (1999), 230. Burns reproduces Conybeare’s paper on Church parties, including details of variant readings between various editions. 20. Ibid., 233. 21. Conybeare in Burns, A. (1999), 361. 22. I am indebted to Arthur Burns for personal communication of this research. He states that Conybeare’s article was ‘a polemical intervention in a debate about the future of English Christianity’. Thus it is a valuable source for understanding religious rhetoric of the period. 23. Although Chadwick, O. (1966), I, 544 states that Dean Stanley had used it in about 1847, and W.C. Lake heard it used by A.H. Clough before that: W. Lake, Memorials of William Charles Lake, Dean of Durham, ed. K. Lake, 1901. See also Burns, A. (1999), p. 241 where Conybeare states that the best cement for a party was a common hatred of the opposition, but the ‘Broad Church’ divines lacked this. 24. Conybeare in Burns, A. (1999), 346. 25. Willey, B. (1940 (1962)), 47–59.

3 Essays and Reviews 1. Turner, F.M. (1993b), 352. 2. Asquith, H.H. (1928), I, 14. 3. Prest, J.M. Jowett’s Correspondence on Education with Earl Russell in 1867, supplement to Balliol College Record 1965; quoted in Hinchliff, P. (1987), 105. 4. Cannon, S.F. (1978), 62.

200 Notes 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Green, V.H.H. (1964), 298. Abbott, E. and Campbell, J. (1897), II, 275. Pattison, M. (1885a), 208. Ibid., 237–8. Ibid., 100–1. Mansel, H.L. (1858), 250–1. Ibid., 253. Reardon, B.M.G. (1971), 238. For the resulting war of words between Mansel and Maurice, see Maurice, F. (1884), II, 327–45; Brose, O.J. (1971), 253–61, and especially Reardon, B.M.G. (1971), 223–37. 14. Mansel, H.L. (1858), 156–7. 15. Ibid., 161.

4 The Rise of British Idealism 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Mansel, H.L. (Chandler, H.W., ed.) (1873), 210. Ibid., 393–403 for ‘The Phrontisterion’. Hick, J. (1970), 55. In 1825 in a work entitled The State of Protestant Religion in Germany the conservative Anglican divine Hugh Rose said that it was ‘odious, painful and disgusting’. See Willis, K. (1988), 92. For an earlier review of the rise and fall of idealism, see Muirhead, J.H. (1931 (1965)). Mandelbaum, M. (1980), 2. Willis, K. (1988), 86. den Otter, S. (1996). Sell, A.P.F. (1995). Turner, F.M. (1993b), 322. Ibid., 350. Ibid., 339. Ibid., 353. Mandelbaum, M. (1980), 3. For a discussion of the relative importance of the influence of Kant and the Cambridge Platonists on Coleridge, see Reardon, B.M.G. (1971), 69ff. Ibid., 71. Prickett, S. (1976), 254–5; see also Sanders, C.R. (1942 (1972)), Fraser, H. (1986). Holmes, R.H. (1982), 11. Coleridge, S.T. in Griggs, E.L. (ed.) Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (6 vols.) (1956–71), I, 397, quoted in Holmes, R.H. (1982), 11. Coleridge, S.T. Frost at Midnight, ll. 54–62, in Abrams, M.H. and Greenblatt, S. (1962), 457. Coleridge, S.T. (1817), 200, 202, 205. Coleridge, S.T. (1825, 1831), 408. Ibid., 405–6. Coleridge, S.T. (1830), 43–4. Coleridge, S.T. (ed. Colmer, J.) (1976), ‘On the Constitution of Church and State’, p. 54, Collected Works of STC, vol. 10, London: RKP (Bollingen Series).

Notes 201 25. Mill, J.S. (1840 (1867)), 403. The whole article is a penetrating analysis of the movement of thought. 26. McFarland, T. (1969), xxviii. 27. Ibid., 110. 28. Ibid., 301. 29. Ibid., 220. 30. Coleridge, S.T. The Eolian Harp, ll.44–53, in Abrams, M.H. and Greenblatt, S. (eds.) (1962), 419–20, quoted in McFarland, T. (1969), 166. 31. Coleridge, S.T. (ed. Rooke, B.E.) (1969) ‘The Friend – I’, 516–17, Collected Works of STC, vol. 4. (1), London: RKP (Bollingen Series). 32. Cf. Reardon, B.M.G. (1971), 74 – ‘Idealistic monism could not be reconciled with Christian dualism. [Coleridge said] “In short, Schelling’s system and mine stand thus: In the latter there are God and Chaos: the former an Absolute Somewhat, which is alternately both, the rapid legerdemain shifting of which constitutes the delusive appearance of Poles.” (Unpublished Notebook, 28, ff.30v–31 quoted by Reardon from Boulger, J.A. Coleridge as Religious Thinker, (1961), 108.) The idealist Absolute was impersonal and abstract, whereas for Coleridge personality in man and in god, is a fact always of supreme value’. 33. Turner, F.M. (1981), 372 (Turner does not say whether this was because it was an inferior work or because Plato was more generally neglected in contemporary studies of ancient philosophy). 34. Butts, R.E., ‘Whewell, William’, in Gillespie, C.G. (ed.) (n.d.), 292–5. 35. Whewell, W. (1840), The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Aphorisms II and III, xvii. 36. Yeo, R. (1979), 496. The quote of Whewell’s intention is from his Astronomy and General physics considered with reference to natural theology (2nd edn. 1834, London), 254–5. 37. William Wordsworth’s brother Christopher Wordsworth was Master of Trinity from 1820 and effected an introduction between the two men. See Yeo, R. (1993), 65ff. 38. Yeo, R. (1979), 511. 39. See den Otter, S. (1996), 14–19. 40. Turner, F.M. (1993b), 323. 41. Hylton, P. (1990), 2. 42. den Otter, S. (1996), 4. 43. For a detailed account of idealism at Oxford after 1900, see Patrick, J. (1985). 44. Ibid., 13. 45. Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899a), III, 138. 46. Copleston, F. (1966 (1994)), 188. 47. Ibid., 188. 48. Langford, T.A. (1969), 76. 49. Sell, A.P.F. (1995), 140. 50. Pringle-Pattison, A.S. (Andrew Seth) (1893), 171. 51. Quoted in Sell, A.P.F. (1995), 112. 52. Hinchliff, P. (1987), 52. 53. Jones, H. and Muirhead, J.H. (1921), 182 quoting a letter of Edward Caird of 22.8.1892. 54. Knights, K. (1977), 20. 55. Quoted in Houghton, W.E. (1957), 11. (Dated about 1841/42.)

202 Notes

5 Idealism Embraced: Thomas Hill Green 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Nettleship, R.L. (1899b), xiii. Ibid. Ibid., xvi. Symonds, J.A., ‘Recollections’, 7th Oct. 1882 in Thomas, G. (1987), 9. Richter, M. (1964), 12. Nettleship, R.L. (1899b), xxix. Ibid., xxiv. Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899a), III, 163. Ibid., III, 207–20. Ibid., 219. Nettleship, R.L. (1899b), lxx. ‘Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life’ in Nettleship (ed.) (1899a), III, 96–7. Nettleship (ed.) (1899a), I, 1–371. For a summary see Hylton, P. (1990), 22–31. The sarcastic Mark Pattison objected to Green’s ‘Introduction’ which was considerably longer than Hume’s work: ‘Under the disguise of an introduction, Mr. Green has in fact issued a declaration of war, from an idealist point of view, against the reigning empirical logic.’ Pattison, M. (1876), 96. Nettleship (ed.) (1899a), 117–18. Ibid., 119. Green, T.H. (1883), para. 8. Ibid. Ibid., para. 51. Ibid., para. 54. Vincent, A. (1986), 58. Green, T.H (1883), para. 187. Thomas, G. (1987), 142. Richter, M. (1964), 180. Green, T.H. (1883), paras. 201–2. Sidgwick, A.S. and E.M.S. (1906), 125. Ibid., 105: Letter to H.G. Dakyns, March 1864. Ibid., 233. Green, T.H. (1883), para. 183. Abbott, E. and Campbell, J. (1897), II, 214. This is also an interesting use of fight and battle metaphor, this time in the conflict between science and classics rather than science and religion, and raises an interesting question as to the use of this metaphor in wider Victorian conflicts. Jowett, B. (ed. Freemantle, W.H.) (1901), 43: ‘We have given up the notion of the human personality of God, and we have not yet mastered this other conception of a personality clothed in laws.’ Ibid. (1899b), xxiii. Richter, M. (1964), 69. Turner, F.M. (1981), 415. Nettleship, R.L. (1899b), xxxvii. Faber, G. (1957), 180. Turner, F.M. (1993b), 322. Faber, G. (1957), 136.

Notes 203 38. ‘I wish that he [Green] could take a different line in his philosophical teaching. His pupils get confused, retain no interest in other kinds of knowledge, and after a few years find that they have lost much and there is no compensating gain.’ (Jowett to J.A. Symonds, 28.12.1880 in Abbott, E. and Campbell, L. (1897), II,199.) 39. Abbott, E. and Campbell, L. (1897), II, 110. 40. Paget, S. (1921). 41. Paget, S., op.cit., 31–2, Green to Holland 9.1.1869. Faith should be ‘freed from its pseudo-scientific apparatus of supernatural dogma’. This subject may have been raised in the Green–Holland correspondence because of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ conversion to Roman Catholicism. 42. Paget, S., op.cit., 29–30, Green to Holland 29.12.1868; see also a study of the influence of idealism on Hopkins, in Brown, D. (1997). Eagleton states that, ‘What else is Hopkins’s theory of inscape but the claim that to taste any object in its uniqueness is to grasp the universal spirit which sustains it? And why else should Hegel’s concrete universal return in this period so forcibly, just when that whole conceptual paraphernalia had been apparently discredited? The dream of the fin de siècle is to pass without mediation from the concrete to the cosmic, linked as the two realms are in their resistance to that analytic rationality which is the sign of social alienation.’ (Eagleton, T. (1996)), 18. 43. Green to Holland, 21.12.1870 in Paget, S. (ed.) (1921), 52. 44. Letter from Prof. Henry Nettleship to Mrs. Green in her copybook: quoted in Richter, M. (1964), 88–9. 45. Letter of Green to Holland, in Paget, S. (ed.) (1921), 65–7. 46. Ibid., 65. 47. Ibid., 64. 48. Robbins, P. (1982), 91. 49. Asquith, H.H. (1918), 19. 50. Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899a), III, 161–85. 51. Ibid., 230–52. 52. Ibid., 253–76. 53. Ibid., 160. 54. Ibid., 168. 55. Ibid., 175. 56. Ibid., 182. 57. Ibid., 235. 58. Ibid., 247. 59. Cupitt, D. (1986), 82. 60. Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899a), III, 184. 61. Ibid., 237. 62. Ibid., 258. 63. Ibid., 253. 64. Ibid., 241. 65. Ibid., 241. 66. Ibid., 273. 67. Eliot, G. (1872 (1994)). 68. Holland to Mrs Green, 1884: Paget, S. (ed.) (1921), 113. 69. Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899a), xix.

204 Notes 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

See, for example, Milne, A.J.M. (1962), 87–164. Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899a), II, 416. Ibid., III, 9. Von Arx, J.P. (1985). Guardian, 29.9.1897, 1524–25. The Guardian was a moderate Anglo-Catholic weekly founded in 1846 by R.W. Church, later Dean of St. Paul’s, Frederic Rogers, a lawyer in London, Times leader writer and intimate of Newman and Fellow of Oriel, and others such as James Mozley, Henry Haddan and Montague Bernard. The paper struggled at first but, according to Smith, was redeemed by a scholarly article by R.W. Church on the discovery of the planet Neptune in the edition of 14.10.1846, indicating the wide range of issues, both scientific and philosophical, which these Tractarian heirs believed was a legitimate area of Christian interest. Church also reviewed the controversial Vestiges of Creation ‘which attracted the notice and commendation of the late Sir Richard Owen …’ (Church, M.C. (1894), 63 – Vestiges is wrongly attributed to Lyell in M.C. Church’s biography). Concerning Neptune, Church said, ‘I shall be very proud of the planet all my life long.’ (Letter to James Mozley, October 1846 in Church, M.C. (1894), 64.) Ward, H. (1918), 127. Pattison, M. (1885a), 242–3. Sidgwick, A.S. and E.M.S. (1906), 404 (Sidgwick’s Journal, 12.3.1885). Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899b), xxxvi. Smith, B.A. (1958), 4. Church, R.W. (1891a), 154.

6 Idealism Popularised: Mrs Humphry Ward 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Gordon, P. and White, J. (1979), 23. Ward, H. (1918), 15. Ibid., 21. Chadwick, O. (1966, 1970), II, 141. Ward, H. (1918), 131–2. Sutherland, J. (1990), 62. There is evidence that Ward was prompted to write the book after hearing Bishop John Wordsworth’s Bampton lectures at Oxford in 1881, ‘with … strong likeness to his great-uncle, the poet of English pantheism … Who and what were the persons who either provoked the present unsettlement of religion, or were suffering under its effects?’ (quoted in Watson, E.W. (1915), 118). 8. Letter to J.W. Williams 5.1.1889 in Paget, S. (ed.) (1921), 280. 9. For analysis of the allusions in the book, see Wheeler, M. (1979), chapter 8, ‘Mapping the Victorian Age: Robert Elsmere’. Robert Elsmere was dedicated to T.H. Green and Laura Lyttleton. According to Sutherland, Laura was the model for Catherine in Robert Elsmere: Sutherland, J. (1990), 110. 10. Ward, H. (1888), ch. V, 58. Four years after the publication of the novel, Jowett wrote to Ward: ‘We must give up doctrine and teach by the lives of man, beginning with the life of Christ instead.’ (Letter to Mrs. Ward, 29.8.1892, in Abbott, E. and Campbell, J. (1897), II, 454.)

Notes 205 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Ward, H. (1888), 74. Ward, H. (1918), 132. Ward, H. (1888), XLIV, 532. Ibid., XLIV, 536. Ward, H. (1918), 134. Ward, H. (1888), XXV, 329. Ibid., V, 65. Ibid., XI, 155. Ibid., V, 66. Ibid., XI, 162. Ibid., XV, 205. Ibid, XIV, 199. Ibid., VI, 83. Ibid., V, 73. Ward, H. (1918), 138. The anonymous reviewer in Blackwood’s Magazine took a very critical view of Oxford: ‘We are certainly not prepared to believe that modern Oxford has much to be proud of when she sends forth a distinguished alumnus so indifferently equipped that when, as Rector, he presents himself in the squire’s hall, it resembles nothing so much as a lamb led to the slaughter.’ Anon. (1888), 6. Robert Elsmere was perceived as a publication which encouraged public criticism of Oxford Christianity. Ward, H. (1888), XXIV, 314. Ibid., XXIII, 310. Ibid., XII, 170. Ibid., XXV, 330. Ibid., XXVII, 347. Ibid., XXVII, 353. Ibid., XXXIX, 483. Ibid., XLIII, 522. Ibid., XLIX, 572. Sutherland, J. (1990), 117. Sutherland gives a detailed description of the process of writing the novel, ch. 10, 106–24. Sutherland, J. (1990), 121. Quoted in Moore, J.R. (1979), 66. Gladstone, W.E. (1897), 81. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 94. ‘Moral principles could exist, did exist without religion; even when they were the moral principles of the religion. The complicating fact for the late nineteenth century was the claim that you could have morality without Christianity, while the morality which you must have was Christian morality.’ Chadwick, O. (1975), 237. See also Houghton, W.E. (1957), ch. 10, ‘Earnestness’, 218–61. Arnold, M. ‘The Better Part’ ( original title, ‘Anti-Desperation’). Wheeler, M. (1979), 131–33. Guardian, 31.10.1888, 1633. Ward, H. (1888), XXXII, 411–12. Eliot, G. (1872 (1994)), 189. Turner, F.M. (1981), 362.

206 Notes 49. Mackinnon, D. (1984), 136. 50. Boys Smith, J.S. (1941), 258. 51. An excellent general account is Wilkinson, A. (1998) and also Reckitt, M. (1947). 52. For a detailed review of the relationship between the Church and society see Norman, E.R. (1976), 10–11, whose controversial verdict is, ‘ … the social attitudes of the Church have derived from the surrounding intellectual and political culture, and not, as churchmen themselves always seem to assume, from theological learning. The theologians have always managed to interpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond almost exactly with their class and generation.’ 53. Harrison, F. (1911), II, 136. Illingworth furnishes evidence of ‘sonorous ontological pantheism’, when he defines ‘Higher Pantheism’ as: ‘… the name of an emotion rather than a creed; that indescribably mystic emotion which the poet, the artist, the man of science … fell [into] in contemplating the beauty or the wonder of the world’. Illingworth, J.R. in Gore, C. (ed.) (1890), 191.

7 Idealism Assimilated: Frederick Temple 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

Seccombe, T. (ed.) (1908) xiv. Ibid., 127–8. Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906), I, 9. Quoted in Ibid., I, 176. The boy was R.W. Hanbury, later to become President of the Board of Agriculture. Matthew Arnold to Frederick Temple, 12.10.69: ‘I do believe, instead of passing away into a voluntary sect, [the Church] may become far greater and more national than it has ever yet been; few can do more for such a desirable consummation than you can, and therefore I so heartily rejoice in your appointment’ (in Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906), I, 279). Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906), I, 581. Edwards, D.L. (1971), 296. Ellis, I. (1980), 39–40. Abbott, E. and Campbell, J. (1897), I, 195. Edwards, D.L. (1971), 105. See Ward, W. (1889), 99ff. Ward says that W.G. Ward interpreted the articles in an entirely different sense at his priesting than he did at his ordination to the diaconate. Chadwick, O. (1966, 1970), I, 208. Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906), I, 66. Letter to his mother, 2nd October 1840 in Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906), I, 42 n 1. Ibid., I, 52. Ibid., I, 67–8: Letter to R. Lawson, 30.11.1847. Houghton, W.E. (1957), 160: see also Newsome, D. (1961), ch. 2: for a critical account of Stanley’s biographical work, see Hammond, P. (1987), 55–60. Stanley had been a pupil at Rugby from 1827–33, during Arnold’s headship (Ibid., 9–20). Memoir of Jowett to Temple’s sister, 13.2.1889 in Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906), I, 44. A letter of Lewis Campbell dated 4.4.1903, in Sandford, E.G. (ed.)

Notes 207

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

(1906), I, 78, stated that, ‘From the time of his becoming a Fellow until he went to be head of Kneller Hall, Temple’s intercourse with Jowett was close and constant … In particular they were seriously engaged on a joint translation of Hegel’s logic, which had made some progress before Temple left Oxford.’ Letter of 26.5.1841 in Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906), II, 656. Ibid., II, 467: Letter of 1.5.1843. Newsome, D. (1966 (1993)). Turner, F.M. (1993a) passim. Newman, J.H. (1840), 9. The occasion was Newman’s book ‘composed of Memoirs of the Early Fathers’. Letter of Temple to his mother, 4.4.1840 in Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906), II, 447. Tait on Newman in letter of Tait to Stanley, 16.4.1841 in Davidson, R.T. and Benham, W. (1901), I, 94–5. Chadwick, O. (1966 1970), I, 181–2. See also Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1992), ch. 16, for an account of Darwin’s musings from 1837 onwards. Turner, F.M. (1993a), 61–2. Newman, J.H. (1840), 25. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 113. Gilley, S. (1990), 204. Letter of Stanley to Tait, 30.3.1841 in Davidson, R.T. and Benham, W. (1901), I, 93. Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906), II, 416. Letter of Temple to his mother, 27.6.1840. Ibid., I, 223, recollection of Dr. Percival in letter to Sandford of 28.9.1903 about a Masters meeting at Rugby in February 1861. Chadwick, O. (1970), II, 76. Temple, F. et al. (1860a). Temple, F. (1860b), 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 15. Arnold, T. (1841 (1874)), 47,53. Temple, F. (1860b), 27. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 47. Ellis, I. (1980), 155. Altholz, The Mind of Victorian Orthodoxy in ‘Church History’, 51, 1982, reprinted in Religion in Victorian Britain – IV Interpretations, Manchester: Manchester UP (for OU), 1988, 28–40; for a recent discussion of Temple’s part, which uses letters not found in Davidson and Benham’s life of Tait or Sandford’s memoir of Frederick Temple, see Hinchliff, P. (1998), 52–89. Temple to Stanley 14.1.1861 (in Hinchliff, P. (1998), 70). The full text is reproduced in Davidson, R.T. and Benham, W. (1901), I, 282–3.

208 Notes 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

Temple to Tait 25.2.1861 in Davidson, R.T. and Benham, W. (1901), I, 290ff. Ibid, I, 281 and see also 306–7: Tait’s Journal, entry for 20.1.861. Marsh, P.T. (1969). A recent work (Hilton, B. (2000)) maintains that the effects of Essays and Reviews, together with The Origin of Species have frequently been exaggerated and that controversies over belief were in fact much sharper in Temple’s formative years of the 1830s and 1840s. This might help to explain why Temple was so hurt by Tait’s condemnation – he believed that the painful controversies of earlier decades could now be left behind and it came as a shock to him that his views should be so controversial. Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906), I, 582. Letter to Florence Nightingale, quoted by Hinchliff, P. (1998) from Quinn, E.V. and Prest, J.M. (eds.) (1987), 181. Temple, F. (1872), 19. Ibid., 28. Temple, F. (1860c), 17. Temple, F. (1885), 37–8. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 114–15. Temple was probably familiar with Charles Kingsley’s enthusiasm for the Origin of Species. Kingsley had written to Darwin on its publication. He found it contained, ‘ … just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self development … as to believe that he required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He Himself had made’. See Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1992), 477. Temple, F. (1885), 118. Guardian, 8.8.1883, 1165. Ibid., 3.10.1883, 1461–2. Elder entitled his study of Temple and others Chronic Vigour – Darwin, Anglicans, Catholics and the Development of a Doctrine of Providential Evolution – (Elder, G. (1996)). Temple, F. (1885), 146. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 168. This is also brought out in a much later letter of 3.6.1898 written to his son William preserved in the Sandford memoir: ‘Their [i.e. the scientists’] researches have never shown that Life has been evolved from Non-Life. Every living creature as far as prolonged investigation goes comes from a pre-existing living creature. Many scientific men are sorely vexed at this incompleteness in the Universality of Evolution, and some refuse to believe that there can be any such incompleteness. I am afraid I cannot sympathise with their vexation’ (Sandford, E.G. (1906), II, 686). This attitude of Temple had been noted by a hostile review of the Bampton Lectures: ‘He … is careful to reserve for himself a region outside the reach of scientific laws for the operation of his spiritual faculty in man.’ Anon. (1885), 382. The term appears to have been popularised by T.H. Huxley’s lecture ‘On the Physical basis of Life’ (1868) and an article in ‘Vanity Fair’ in 1871 credited Huxley as the ‘inventor of protoplasm’.

Notes 209 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

Temple, F. (1885), 186. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 230. Moore, J.R. (1979), 261–2: Elder, G. (1996), 157–60. Elder, G. (1996), 170. Anon. (1885) ‘Upon a ground of human philosophy is reared an intellectual Tower of Babel, intended to reach heaven, but ending in the clouds of metaphysical and theological nomenclature’ – Ibid., 367. Mivart, St G.J. (1885), 204–33. Moore, A.L. (1889), 56–106. Guardian, 22.4.1885, 602. Ibid., 15.4.1885, 558. Ibid., 6.5.1885, 694. Bowler, P. (1983) (1988). Anon. (1885), 385. Nettleship, R.L. (1899b), xlv. Gordon, P. and White, J. (1979), 3. Desmond, A. (1997), 177–80. Huxley, T.H. (1894 (1925)), 203. Huxley’s essay was written in 1888. Hinchliff, P. (1998), 240, 256–7. Iremonger, F.A. (1963), 259. Holland, H.S. (1915), 165,166. Wace, H., in a review entitled ‘Robert Elsmere and Christianity’, in the Quarterly Review, 167 (October 1888), 275, quoted in Helmstadter, R.J. and Lightman, B. (1990), 287.

8 Idealism Transcended: Aubrey Moore 1. Brooke, J.H. (2001), 132. 2. Brooke, J.H. (1991), 35. 3. Information from Middleton, R.D. (1948) (published to mark the centenary of Moore’s birth). 4. At least according to the DNB. England, R. (1997) states that he was ‘presiding curate of Camden church’ in London. England also states that Daniel Moore ‘distinguished himself as a religious apologist in essays which won him the Norrisian prize in 1837 and 1839, and the Hulsean prize in theology in 1838’ (ibid., 47). Daniel Moore’s three sons all became clergymen. 5. In the essay ‘Theology and Law’, in Moore, A.L. (1890a), 240. 6. British Museum Gladstone Papers, 44127, 344–5, 379: quoted in Smith, B.A. (1958), 208. 7. Gore, C. (ed.) (1890), 11th edn, xii. 8. Talbot, E.S. (1890). 9. See Moore, J.R. (1979), 107ff. for further details of Romanes’ pilgrimage away from faith and back again. 10. Chadwick, O. (1966, 1970), II, 21. 11. Moore, A.L. (1890b), 7. 12. Ibid., 501–15. The date and provenance of this paper are uncertain, but parts of it were used in Moore’s Holy Week Addresses given in 1888. 13. Moore, A.L. (1890b), 514.

210 Notes 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

Moore, A.L. (1890b), 515. Mill, J.S. (1865), 103. Carpenter, S.C. (1933), 536ff. for a detailed discussion of this project. for a discussion of Illingworth’s career and ideas, see Sell, A.P.F. (1995), 65–73. Stephenson, G. (1936), 171. Prestige, G.L. (1935), 99–100. For more details on the neglected Julius Hare, see Avis, P. (2002), 280–7. Chadwick, O. (1966, 1970), II, 75. Gore, C. (ed.) (1890), xxvi, xxxvii. See Book III of Green, T.H. (1883), ‘The Moral Ideal and Moral Progress’. For example: ‘It is the consciousness of possibilities in ourselves, unrealised but constantly in process of realisation, that alone enables us to read the idea of development into what we observe of natural life, and to conceive that there must be such a thing as a plan of the world’ (para. 186). Henson, H.H. (1943), I, 11. Quoted in Lockhart, J.G. (1949), 82. For discussion of the vast literature and numerous interpretations, see Wright, N.T. (1991), chs. 4 and 5. Lux Mundi, 1st edn., 360: Quoted in Edwards, D.L. (1971), 262. Gore, C. (1891), 158. Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899a), III, 219: in the ‘Preface’ to this volume Nettleship states that this work was delivered when Green was a Tutor at Balliol before 1877. Abbott, E. and Campbell, J. (1897) op.cit., II, 376–7. Letter to The Revd. J.D. La Touche of 4.5.1890. Evidently Jowett felt he could unburden himself to La Touche because the latter had been a supporter of the notorious Bishop Colenso in Natal in the latter’s controversies over the authority of the Bible. See also Abbott, E. and Campbell, J. (1897) II, 93, letter of Jowett to La Touche of 27.7.1884 for evidence of this. Moore, A.L., in Gore, C. (ed.) (1890), 76. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 102. Moore, A.L. (1889), 226. Moore, A.L., in Gore, C. (ed.) (1890), 100. Compare this with a very similar statement of the idealist Pringle-Pattison: ‘… the doctrine of evolution seemed at first … to thrust man ruthlessly back into the lower circles of nature and to make for an all-engulfing materialism. But, in another perspective … Man appears … as the goal and crown of nature’s long upward effort’ (Pringle-Pattison, A.S. (1917), 82, in Sell, A.P.F. (1995), 35). Although written 27 years after Aubrey Moore’s article, the similarity between the idealist philosopher and Catholic Christian is striking. Nettleship, R.L. (1899a), II, 284. ‘The conception on our part of nature as a system, of which every part or process is determined by relation to all the rest, is merely a development of [this] original determination of our feelings by relation to one thinking subject; and the reality of nature as a system consists in the relation of its multiplicity to one thinking subject, which

Notes 211

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

distinguishes itself from it, but determines it, makes it what it is, by the distinction of itself from it.’ Moore, A.L., in Gore, C. (ed.) (1890), 107. Caldecott, A. (1901), 274ff. Ibid., 322ff. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 324–5. Mayor, S.H. (1965). Ibid., 76. Moore, A.L. (1889), xii. This emphasis on traditional orthodoxy is brought out in an early sermon ‘Steadfastness in Faith’, preached at Keble in 1882: ‘Never can the sharp, definite outlines of Catholic Truth disappear in a beautiful indefiniteness, in which, as in one of Turner’s pictures, heaven and earth are blended, and the horizon lost in a strange mysterious haze’ (Moore, A.L. (1891), 22). Moore had no time for what he called ‘Broad-Churchism’ or belief which ‘… absolves itself from the trouble of understanding even the truths it assails, by speaking of them as if they belonged to an age that is gone’ (Ibid., 26). Ibid., xiv. Ibid., xxxix. Ibid., xli. Bowler, P. (1983), (1988), (1989). Bowler, P. (1989), 87. Ibid., 97. Moore, A.L. (1889), 33. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 230–1. ‘The original creation of the world by God, as against any theory of emanation, is a matter of faith. The existence of the soul – that is, the conscious relation of man with God – lies at the root of all religion. Guard those two points – and they are both strictly beyond the range of inductive science – and for the rest we are bound to concede to those who are spending their lives in reading for us God’s revelation of Himself in nature, absolute freedom in the search, knowing that truth is mighty and must in the end prevail.’ Moore, A.L. (1890a), 47. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 16. Darwin, C. (1887), Autobiography, II, 139; quoted in Moore, A. L.(1889), 218. Moore, A.L. (1889), 219. Ibid., 9. Moore, A.L. (1890a), 46. Moore, A.L. (1889), 150. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 129. Moore, A.L. (1890a), 84–5. Moore, A.L. (1889), xliv. Moore, J.R. (1979), 344. England, R. (1997), 136. Ibid., 178.

212 Notes 72. Moore, A.L. (1889), 113. 73. Green, T.H. (1883), para. 33. Green’s idealism may also have been attractive to Moore because of his antipathy to evolutionary thought, in which Green appears to have taken little interest. See Thomas, G. (1987), 26–8, who points out that if Green conceded too much to the materialistic view of evolution, he would have to admit that consciousness is a natural product. This tension also appears in the Lux Mundi theologians, but in them it is resolved by an appeal to theological arguments rather than philosophical ones. 74. Ibid., 115. 75. Green, T.H (1883), para. 33. 76. Ibid., para. 36. On this prose style see Isaiah Berlin: ‘I was brought up originally as an English Hegelian. I rebelled against that, because I couldn’t understand Hegelian language, and when I read the English Hegelians I found myself floating about in a land of mist which I really did not and still do not enjoy. … I derived no light from such prose’ (Jahanbegloo, R. Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, London: Peter Halban, 1992, 153; quoted in Marion, M. (2000), 503). 77. Ibid., para. 183. 78. Turner, F.M. (1993b), passim. 79. Green, T.H. (1883), para. 185. However, para. 188 indicates that for Green reason can only provide speculative ideas concerning eternity; he cannot, as a sceptic concerning Christian dogma, appeal to revelation. 80. Moore, A.L. (1889), xxxi. 81. Ibid., xxxvi. 82. Ibid., 224: Recent Advances in Natural Science in their relation to the Christian faith: A Paper read at the Reading Church Congress, 1883. 83. Ibid., 225. 84. Yeo, R. (1979), 496, and passim for a review of Whewell’s influence on Victorian scientific thought. 85. Moore, A.L. (1889), xxviii, xxix. 86. Ibid., 152. 87. Illingworth, A.L. (1917), 62. 88. Ibid., 276; quoting appendix to Sermons Preached in a College Chapel, 172. 89. Turner, F.M. (1993c), 109. 90. ‘It proved possible for philosophical theologians so to pursue [the Incarnation] as to travel far from the sort of faith which, seeing no hope for a world sin-racked and frustrated, throws itself empty on the Cross of Christ and knows that the world cannot be explained until it has been radically changed’ (Ramsey, A.M. (1960), 28). 91. Moore, A.L. (1889), 199. 92. Moore, A.L. (1890a), 66. 93. Moore, A.L. (1889), 221. 94. Habakkuk 2: 14 95. Moore, A.L. (1889), xxxv. 96. Norman, E.R. (1976), 11.

9 Idealism Marginalised: Charles D’Arcy 1. D’Arcy, C. (1934), 21. 2. Ibid., 34.

Notes 213 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 77. R.H. Lotze (1817–81) espoused a form of theistic idealism, in which the ‘world ground’ was that in which all things find their unity. This was allied to a teleological evolutionary world process. England, R. (1997, 59) points to the influence of Lotze on Aubrey Moore. den Otter, S. (1996, 59) also states that Bosanquet completed translations of Lotze’s works that Green had begun before his death. The influence of Lotze on British theology and idealism is an area which is worthy of further investigation. For a biographical note on Lotze, see Reardon, B.M.G. (1966), 125ff. D’Arcy, C. (1934), 103. D’Arcy, C. (1925), 55–6. D’Arcy, C. (1934), 117. Information from A.A. Luce, ‘Charles Frederick D’Arcy’, in DNB 1931–1940. The Lambeth Conference, 1930, London; SPCK (1930), 68. D’Arcy was the chairman of the committee that drafted this statement. Ibid., p. 67. D’Arcy, C. (1899), 6. Ibid., 20, 21. Ibid., 239. Ibid., 272. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 279. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 158. Exploration of the contexts in which this Tennyson quote is used by late nineteenth-century Christians would form a book in itself. Ibid., 145–6. Ibid., 238. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 282. D’Arcy, C. (1925), 6. Ibid., 112. D’Arcy, C. (1899), p. 179. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 192. Illingworth, J.R. (1894), 73–4. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 216–17. Ibid., 225. ‘The self is more real than any element of its experience. … Substance is more real than quality, and subject is more real than substance. The most

214 Notes

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

10 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

real of all is the concrete totality, the all-inclusive Universal.’ D’Arcy argued that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was the ‘final synthesis’ (Ibid., 230–1). Ibid., 231. Ibid., 241. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 242, 244, 245. Ibid., 255. Luce was a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and, in 1921, soon after his return to academic life following his army duties in the First World War, he was appointed Donnellan Lecturer. His first major research topic was the French thinker Henri Bergson, but in the early 1930s embarked on a study of the works of George Berkeley (1685–1753), by whom he was captivated for the rest of his life. D’Arcy, C. (1925), 130.

Idealism Assaulted – Realism and Aestheticism Holland, H.S., ‘Faith’, in Gore, C. (1890), 4. Ibid., 102. Sidgwick, A.S. and E.M.S. (1906), 32. Ibid., 356: Letter to J.R. Mozley, 16.5.1880. Ibid., 39. Sidgwick, J.B. (1905), 259–60. Russell, B. (1990), ‘Collected Papers’ (London: Unwin Hyman): quoted in Monk, R. (1996), 109. On McTaggart, see Copleston, F. (1966 (1994)), 240–7. Quoted in Levy (1979), 107. McTaggart, J.M.E. (1901), 245. Ibid., 250. Ibid., 251. Logan Pearsall-Smith to B. Russell, 29.10.1893 in Russell, B. (1967), 94. Russell, B. (1967), 127. Hylton, P. (1990), 89. Ibid., 113. Monk, R. (1996), 111. Russell, B. (1956), 21, quoted in Monk, R. (1996), 114. Russell, B. (1959 (1975)), 12. On G.D. Campbell, Eighth Duke of Argyll (1823–1900) see Moore, J.R. (1979), 221–2. Campbell had published The Unity of Nature (London: Strahan & Co.) in 1884 and it was reviewed by Aubrey Moore (Moore, A.L. (1889), 30–55) a paper previously published in the Guardian, 28.5.1884, 806–7. Levy, P. (1979), 41. Baldwin, T. (1996), 275. Russell, B. (1967), 73. Levy, P. (1979), 29. Copleston, F. (1966 (1994)), 411–12. Bradley, F.H. (1883 (1922)), 590.

Notes 215 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

Russell, B. (1959), 61–2: quoted in Allard, J.W. and Stock, G. (eds) (1994), ix. Hylton, P. (1990), 105. Thomas, G. (1987), 144. Ibid., 35. Hylton, P. (1990), 4. Biletski, A. and Matar, A. (eds) (1998), 74. Arnold, M. (1869 (1993)), 181. Ibid., 185. Brockliss, L.W.B. (1997), 106. Liddon to Holland, 19.2.1884: quoted in Paget, S. (ed.) (1921), 112. Guardian, 31.3.1875, 397. Ibid., 30.7.1884, 1123. Ibid., 13.10.1875. Ibid., 11.10.1876, 1325–27. Ibid., 3.10.1877, 1360. Ibid., 1.11.1882, 1529. Pattison, M. (1885b), 173 (Sermon dated 6.6.1869). Guardian, 14.11.1894, 1791–92. Ibid., 24.12.1884, 1963–64. Ibid., 29.9.1897, 524–5. Ibid., 10.10.1883, 1513. Ibid., 12.3.1890, 448. Moore, G.E. (1903), ch. 6. Moore added: ‘No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appropriation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having, purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that anything else has nearly so great a value as the things which are included under these two heads.’ Moore, G. (1888 (1952)), 41, 42. Ibid., 117. Fayter, P. (1997), 261. Arnold, M. (1879 (1972)), 334. Arnold, M. (1883), 143–4. Martineau, J. (1879 (1891)), 273, 281. Yeats, W.B., The Autumn of the Body, quoted in Lester, J.A. (1968), 106. Pater, W. (ed. Hill, D.) (1893 (1980)), 189. Green was also very hostile to Swinburne after the latter published his infidel Poems and Ballads in 1866. See Richter, M. (1964), 83 Wilde, O., The Critic as Artist, in Wilde, O. (1949), 996. Donald L. Hill in Pater, W. (ed. Hill, D.) (1893 (1980)), 446; he is quoting Ward’s A Writer’s Recollections (New York and London), I, 161. Wilde, O. (1949), 913. Moore, G. (1888 (1952)), 149–50. Russell, A. (1980), 40. Wilde, O. (1891 (1949)), 148. Wilde, O. (1949), 875. See also De Profundis (1897 (1996)): ‘[Christ] realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation’ (ibid., 58). Creighton, L. (1904), II, 420–1.

216 Notes 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99.

Creighton, L. (1904), I, 45: Letter of 17.11.1871. Ibid., I, 93: Letter to T.H. Green, 1.5.1871. Creighton, L. (1904), I, 45. Green stayed with Creighton when the latter was vicar of Embleton: Creighton, L. (1904), I, 128. Dant, C.H., Distinguished Churchmen (Treherne, 1902), 44: quoted in Edwards, D.L. (1971), p. 224. Ibid. Typical of the shocked responses was the review in the Guardian: ‘The hero, Jude Fawley, is a limp characterless creature, credited at the beginning with high-soaring aspirations after religion, and scholarship, and elevation to a more refined social world than he is born in. … Throughout the book, a great many insulting things are said about marriage, religion, and all the obligations and relations of life which most people hold sacred … .’ The reviewer stated, ‘… our taste is very much offended’ (Guardian, 13.11.1895, 770). According to Millgate, M. (1982), 68–9, some of the material in Jude the Obscure was autobiographical as Hardy wished to go to Oxford. Hardy, T. H. (1895 (1998)), 155. Chadwick, O. (1966, 1970), II, 115–19. The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell, in Swinburne, A.C. (1924), II, 787–8. Hardy, T. H. (1895 (1998)), 329. Hardy to John Morley, 20.11.1885, quoted in Millgate, M. (1982), 107. Letter to Edward Clodd, 27.2.1902 in Purdy, R.L. and Millgate, M. (1982), vol. 3, 5. Marsh, J. (1998), 273. Ibid., 276. Dale, P.A. (1989), 257. Guardian, 31.10.1888, 1633. Whewell, W. (1833), vii: quoted in Buckley, J.H. (1967), 44. Buckley, J.H. (1967), 32. Temple, F. (1860b), 3. Bowler, P. (1989), 195. Tennyson, A. Locksley Hall (written 1842), ll. 181–4, in Abrams, M.H. and Greenblatt, S. (1962), 1219–25. Letters to Mrs Pears, Feb. 1842 and Sara Hennell, 19.10.1843 in Houghton, W.E. (1957), 50, quoting Cross, J.W. (ed.) (1885), I, 80, 91. Peel, J.D.Y. (1971), 225. Green, T.H. (1883), para. 172. Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899a), III, 239 in the Lay Sermon ‘The Witness of God’: quoted in Fairbrother, W.A. (1900), 106–7. Quoted by Nettleship, R.L. (1899b), cviii. Bowler, P. (1989), 157; see also Bowler, P. (1983) and (1988). Guardian, 13.11.1895, 1781. Bishop Bickersteth, speaking at the Exeter Diocesan Conference, was reviewing A.J. Balfour’s Foundations of Belief which sought unification of thought on the grounds of a broad Christian theism. Lankester, R. (1880). Huxley, T.H. (1894 (1925)), 53. Ibid., 85.

Notes 217 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

Ibid., 146. Gilmour, R. (1998), 138. Huxley, T.H. (1894 (1925)), 78: quoted in Buckley, J.H. (1967), 56. Yeats, W.B. (1955), 336. Wells, H.G. (1895 (1958)), 83. Also reflected in Joseph Conrad’s pessimism in The Heart of Darkness, based on his experiences in the Congo in 1890 but not published until 1902. Wells, H.G. (1895 (1958)), 83. Dangerfield, G. (1935 (1966)), 70. Ibid., 349. Pringle-Pattison, A.S. (1902), 41. Pringle-Pattison (1856–1931), Cardiff 1883–87, St Andrews 1887–91, professor of Logic and Metaphysics, Edinburgh, 1891–1919. See Sell, A.P.F. (1995), 83–92 Guardian, 3.10.1883, 1461–2. Ibid., 22.4.1885, 602. Ibid., 14.10.1885, 1529. Illingworth, J.R. (1891), 207. ‘Epilogue’ in den Otter, S. (1996), 205–14, especially 211–12. Collingwood, R.G. (1939 (1978)), 19. Ibid., 50.

11

Gathering Up the Fragments

106. 107. 108. 109.

1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953 (1958)), sec. 115. For further discussion of the significance, see Thistelton, A. (1995), 28–32. 2. Moore, J.R. (1990), 155. 3. Benson, A.C. (1902) Coronation Ode (A.C. Benson was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, E.W. Benson.) 4. Gore, C. (1928), 156. 5. Huxley, L. (1900), II, 309: T.H. Huxley to R. Lankester, 11.4.1892. 6. Jenks, C. (1977), 482–3. 7. Woolf, V. (ed. Schulkind, J.) (1985), 196 (in section entitled Old Bloomsbury). 8. Ramsey, A.M. (1960), 28. 9. Mackinnon, D. (1979), 164. 10. Bradley, I. (1976). 11. Guardian, 4.3.1885, 337. 12. Pater, W. (ed. Hill, D.L.) (1893 (1980)), 186,188,189. 13. For example, Sutherland, J. (1990), 343, who states that by 1915 Ward’s novels were being sneered at as ‘Victorian’ and goes on to say that ‘As a term of contempt in 1915 it ranked with “Prussian” ’. Ward was also markedly conservative and out of tune with her times; witness her opposition to rights for women and anti-suffrage stance. 14. Lester, J.A. (1968), 185. 15. Hinchliff, P. (1997), discussed in great detail the intense discussions that took place over the precise form of this Coronation. 16. Wilde, O. (1897 (1996)), 56. 17. Fallows, W.G. (1964). 18. Wilkinson, A. (1998).

218 Notes 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

12

Muirhead, J.H. (1915), 102. Levy, O. (1940), passim. Temple, W. (1939), 327. Ibid., 330. Lyotard, J-F. (1984), xiv. Thistleton, A. (1995), 159. Eagleton, T. (1996), vii. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 121. O’Rourke, D.K. (1998), 11,13. Eagleton, T. (1996), 105. Adshead, S.A.M. (2000), 116. See Wilkinson, A. (1998), 74, who quotes a remark that Holland ‘was always on the outside looking in’ when it came to real understanding of Labour. Harvey, D. (1990), 86. Ibid., 87. Westcott, B.F. (1890), 111, in a sermon entitled ‘The Incarnation and the Creation’. Barnett, C. (1972), 24. Ibid., 39–40. Hinchliff, P. (1987), 191. Jowett, B. (1891) (ed.), The Dialogues of Plato, Oxford: Clarendon Press, II, 25. Ibid., 89. See above, n. 34, 24. In Memoriam, CXXIII, 1–18. Hardy, T., The Darkling Thrush, Abrahams, M.H. and Greenblatt, S. (eds) (1962), 1937–38. Sermon on ‘The Universal Society’ in Westcott, B.F. (1890), 61.

Epilogue

1. Cupitt, D. (2001), 89–92. In a personal communication about this trend, Cupitt lays much of the blame on the insularity and ignorance of English thought concerning continental developments in culture, art and philosophy in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. 2. Temple, W. (1939), 327.

Bibliography UP University Press CUP Cambridge University Press OUP Oxford University Press Abbott, E. and Campbell, L. (1897) The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (2 vols), London: John Murray. Abrams, M.H. and Greenblatt, S. (eds) (1962) The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2 (7th edn), New York: Norton. Adshead, S.A.M. (2000) Philosophy of Religion in Nineteenth-Century England and Beyond, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Allard, J.W. and Stock, G. (1994) F.H. Bradley – Writings on Logic and Metaphysics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Althoz, J.L. (1988) ‘The Mind of Victorian Orthodoxy’, in Religion in Victorian Britain – IV Interpretations, Manchester: Manchester UP (for OU), pp. 28–40. Anon. (1885) ‘Dr. Temple on Religion and Science’, Westminster Review, vol.123, pp. 366–85. Anon. (1888) ‘Robert Elsmere and Modern Oxford’, in Blackwood’s Magazine, vol.144, no. 878, July 1888, pp. 1–20. Arnold, M. (1869 (1993)) (ed. Collini, S.) Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, Cambridge: CUP. Arnold, M. (1879 (1972)) ‘Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism’, in Super, R.H., The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold – VIII – Essays Religious and Mixed, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp. 321–47. Arnold, M. (1883) Literature and Dogma, London: Smith Elder. Arnold, T. (1841 (1874)) ‘The Inaugural Lecture’, in Introductory Lectures on Modern History, London: Longmans Green. Von Arx, J.P. (1985) Progress and Pessimism – Religion, Politics and History in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge: Harvard UP. Asquith, H.H. (1918) Some Aspects of the Victorian Age, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Asquith, H.H. (1928) Memories and Reflections 1852–1917 (2 vols), London: Cassell. Avis, P. (2002) Anglicanism and the Christian Church – Theological Resources in Historical Perspective (2nd edn), London: T. & T. Clark. Baldwin, T. (1996) ‘G.E. Moore’, in Philosophy, 71, pp. 275–85. Balleine, G.R. (1891 (1933)) A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England, London: Longmans, Green & Co. Barnett, C. (1972) The Collapse of British Power, London: Eyre Methuen. Bebbington, D.W. (1989) Evangelicalism in Modern Britain – A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, London: Routledge. Best, G.F.A. (1964) Temporal Pillars: Queen Anne’s Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and the Church of England, Cambridge: CUP. Biletski, A. and Matar, A. (eds) (1998) The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and Heroes, Routledge: London. 219

220 Bibliography Brose, O.J. (1971) Frederick Denison Maurice – Rebellious Conformist, Ohio: Ohio UP. Bowler, P. (1983) The Eclipse of Darwinism, London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Bowler, P. (1988) The Non-Darwinian Revolution, London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Bowler, P. (1989) The Invention of Progress: the Victorians and the Past, Oxford: Blackwell. Boys Smith, J.S. (1941) ‘The Interpretation of Christianity in Idealistic Philosophy in Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century’, in Modern Churchman, vol.31, nos 5,6,7, pp. 251–73. Bradley, F.H. (1883 (1922)) Principles of Logic (2nd edn) Oxford: OUP. Bradley, I. (1976) The Call to Seriousness – The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians, London: Jonathan Cape. Brendon, P. (1974) Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement, Elek: London. Brent, R. (1987) Liberal Anglican Politics – Whiggery, Religion and Reform, 1830–1841, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brent, R. (1997) ‘The Oriel Noetics’, in Brock, M.G. and Curthoys, M.C. (eds) The History of the University of Oxford: Vol. VI, Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 72–6. Brock, M.G. (1997) ‘The Oxford of Peel and Gladstone, 1800–1833’, in Brock, M.G. and Curthoys, M.C. (eds) The History of the University of Oxford: Vol. VI, Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 7–71. Brockliss, L.W.B. (1997) ‘The European University in an Age of Revolution, 1789–1850’, in Brock, M.G. and Curthoys, M.C. (eds) The History of the University of Oxford: Vol. VI, Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 77–133. Brooke, J.H. (1991) Science and Religion – Some Historical Perspectives, Cambridge: CUP. Brooke, J.H. (2001) ‘The Wilberforce–Huxley Debate: Why Did It Happen?’ in Science and Christian Belief, vol.13, no.2, 127–41. Brose, O.J. (1959) Church and Parliament: The Reshaping of the Church of England 1828–1860, Stanford: Stanford UP. Brose, O.J. (1971) Frederick Denision Maurice: rebellious conformist, Columbus: Ohio UP. Brown, D. (1997) Hopkins’ Idealism – Philosophy, Physics, Poetry, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brown, F.K. (1961) Fathers of the Victorians – The Age of Wilberforce, Cambridge: CUP. Buckley, J.H. (1967) The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress and Decadence, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Burkhardt, F. and Smith, S. (1985) The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Cambridge: CUP. Burns, A. (1999) ‘Conybeare’s Church Parties’, in Taylor, S. (ed.) From Cranmer to Davidson: a Church of England Miscellancy, Church of England Record Society, 215–52. Caldecott, A. (1901) The Philosophy of Religion in England and America, London: Methuen. Cannon, S.F. (1978) ‘The Cambridge Network’, in Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, New York: Watson, 29–71.

Bibliography 221 Carpenter, S.C. (1933) Church and People 1789–1889, London: SPCK. Chadwick, O. (1954) The Founding of Cuddesdon, Oxford: OUP. Chadwick, O. (1966, 1970) The Victorian Church (2 vols), London: A. and C. Black. Chadwick, O. (1975) The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: CUP. Church, M.C. (1894) Life and Letters of Dean Church, London: Macmillan & Co. Church, R.W. (1891a) ‘The Gifts of Civilization’, in The Gifts of Civilization and other Sermons and Lectures, London: Macmillan & Co. (Sermon of 18.11.1866). Church, R.W. (1891b) The Oxford Movement – Twelve Years 1833–1845, London: Macmillan. Coleridge, S.T. (1817) ‘Biographia Literaria’, in Engel, J. and Bate, W.J., The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. 7, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. Coleridge, S.T. (1825, 1831) ‘Aids to Reflection’, in Beer, J. (ed.) The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. 9, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. Coleridge, S.T. (1830) ‘On the Constitution of Church and State’, in Colmer, J. (ed.) The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. 5, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976. Collingwood, R.G. (1939 (1978)) An Autobiography, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Copleston, F. (1966 (1994)) A History of Philosophy, Vol. VIII, New York and London: Doubleday. Corsi, P. (1988) Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1820–1860, Cambridge: CUP. Creighton, L. (1904) Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (2 vols), London: Longmans, Green. Cross, J.W. (ed.) (1885) George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, Edinburgh: Blackwood. Cupitt, D. (1986) Life Lines, London: SCM. Cupitt, D. (2001) Reforming Christianity, Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press. Dale, P.A. (1989) In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art and Society in the Victorian Age, Wisconsin: Wisconsin UP. Dangerfield, G. (1935 (1966)) The Strange Death of Liberal England, London: Macgibbon and Kee. D’Arcy, C.F. (1899) Idealism and Theology: A Study of Presuppositions, London: Hodder and Stoughton. D’Arcy, C.F. (1925) Science and Creation – The Christian Interpretation, London: Longmans, Green. D’Arcy, C.F. (1934) The Adventures of a Bishop, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Davidson, R.T. and Benham, W. (1901) Life of Archibald Campbell Tait (2 vols), London: Macmillan. Desmond, A. (1997) Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest, London: Michael Joseph. Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1992) Darwin, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Eagleton, T. (1996) The Illusions of Postmodernism, Oxford: Blackwell. Edwards, D.L. (1971) Leaders of the Church of England 1828–1944, Oxford: OUP. Elder, G.P. (1996) Chronic Vigour: Darwin, Anglicans, Catholics and the Development of a Doctrine of Providential Evolution, Lanham: University Press of America. Eliot, G. (1872 (1994)) Middlemarch, London: Penguin Classics. Ellis, I. (1980) Seven Against Christ – A Study of ‘Essays and Reviews’, Leiden: E.J. Brill.

222 Bibliography Engel, A.J. (1987) From Clergyman to Don – The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Oxford: Clarendon Press. England, R. (1997) Aubrey Moore and the Anglo-Catholic Assimilation of Science at Oxford, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Toronto. Faber, G. (1957) Jowett – A Portrait with Background, London: Faber and Faber. Fairbrother, W.A. (1900) The Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green, London: Methuen. Fallows, W.G. (1964) Mandell Creighton and the English Church, London: OUP. Fayter, P. (1997) ‘Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction’, in Lightman, B. (ed.) Victorian Science in Context, London: Chicago UP, 261. Forbes, D. (1952) The Liberal Anglican Idea of History, Cambridge: CUP. Fraser, H. (1986) Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature, Cambridge: CUP. Froude, J.A. (1881) ‘The Oxford Counter-Reformation’, in Short Studies on Great Subjects, IV, London: Longman Green & Co., 230–6. Gillespie, C.G. (ed.) (n.d.) Dictionary of Scientific Biography, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Gilley, S. (1990) Newman and his Age, London: DLT. Gilmour, R. (1998) The Victorian Period – The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1830–1890, Harlow: Longman. Gladstone, W.E. (1897) ‘ “Robert Elsmere”: The Battle of Belief’ in Later Gleanings, Vol.8, Theological and Ecclesiastical, London: John Murray, 77–117. Gordon, P. and White, J. (1979) Philosophers as Educational Reformers, London: RKP. Gore, C. (ed.) (1890) Lux Mundi – A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (11th edn), London: John Murray. Gore, C. (1891) The Incarnation of the Son of God, Being the Bampton Lectures for the Year 1891, London: John Murray. Gore, C. (1928) Christ and Society, London: George Allen and Unwin. Green, T.H. (1883) Prolegomena to Ethics (ed. A.C. Bradley), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Green, V.H.H. (1964) Religion at Oxford and Cambridge: A History, c.1160–c.1960, London: SCM. Griggs, E.L. (ed.) (1956–71) Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (6 vols), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hammond, P. (1987) Dean Stanley of Westminster, Worthing: Churchman Publications. Hardy, T. (1895 (1998)) Jude the Obscure, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford: OUP. Harrison, F. (1911) ‘Oxford in 1853 and in 1910’, in Autobiographic Memoirs, II, 132–9, London: Macmillan. Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell. Helmstadter, R.J. and Lightman, B. (1990) Victorian Faith in Crisis – Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Henson, H.H. (1943) Retrospect of an Unimportant Life: Vol. 1, 1863–1920, Oxford: OUP. Hick, J. (1970) Arguments for the Existence of God, London: Macmillan. Hilton, B. (1988) The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795–1865, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bibliography 223 Hilton, B. (2000) ‘The Politics of Anatomy and an Anatomy of Politics c.1825–1850’, in Collini, S., Whatmore, R. and Young, B. (eds) History, Religion and Culture – British Intellectual History 1750–1950, Cambridge: CUP. Hinchliff, P. (1987) Benjamin Jowett and the Christian Religion, Oxford: Clarendon. Hinchliff, P. (1997) ‘Frederick Temple, Randall Davidson and the Coronation of Edward VII’, in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol.48, no.1, 71–97. Hinchliff, P. (1998) Frederick Temple: A Life, Clarendon: Oxford. Hofstetter, M.J. (2001) The Romantic Idea of a University – England and Germany, 1770–1850, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Holmes, R.H. (1982) Coleridge, Oxford: OUP. Holland, H.S. (1915) A Bundle of Memories, London: Wells, Gardner, Darton. Houghton, W.E. (1957) The Victorian Frame of Mind, New Haven and London: Yale UP. Huxley, L. (1900) Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, London: Macmillan. Huxley, T.H. (1894 (1925)) Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, London: Macmillan. Hylton, P. (1990) Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Illingworth, A.L. (1917) The Life and Work of John Richardson Illingworth, London: John Murray. Illingworth, J.R. (1890) ‘The Incarnation and Development’, in Gore, C. (ed.), 181–212. Illingworth, J.R. (1894) Personality, Human and Divine, London: Macmillan & Co. Iremonger, F.A. (1963), William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (abridged edition), Oxford: OUP. Jenks, C. (1977) ‘T.H.Green, The Oxford Philosophy of Duty and the English Middle Class’, British Journal of Sociology, vol.28, no.4, 481–96. Jones, H. and Muirhead, J.H. (1921) The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird, Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson. Jowett, B. (ed. Freemantle, W.H.) (1901) Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, London: John Murray. Ker, I. and Gornall, T. (1979) Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. II – Tutor of Oriel, January 1827 to December 1831. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Knight, F. (1995) The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society, Cambridge: CUP. Knights, B. (1977) The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: CUP. Langford, T.A. (1969) In Search of Foundations: English Theology 1900–1920, Nashville, Abingdon Press. Lankester, R. (1880) Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, London: Macmillian. Lester, J.A. (1968) Journey Through Despair 1880–1914: Transformations in British Literary Culture, Princeton: Princeton UP. Levy, O. (1940) The Idiocy of Idealism, London: Hodge. Levy, P. (1979) Moore – G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Liddon, H.P. (1897) The Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey (4 vols), London: Longmans, Green. Lockhart, J.G. (1949) Cosmo Gordon Lang, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester UP.

224 Bibliography Mackinnon, D. (1979) ‘The Conflict between Realism and Idealism’, in Explorations in Theology 5, London: SCM, 151–65. Mackinnon, D. (1984) ‘Some Aspects of the Treatment of Christianity by the British Idealists’, in Religious Studies, vol.20, no.1 (March 1984), 133–44. Mandelbaum, M. (1980) ‘Philosophic Movements in the Nineteenth Century’, in Chant, C. and Fauvel, F. (eds) Darwin to Einstein – Historical Studies on Science and belief, Harlow: Longman, 2–44. (Previously published in Mandelbaum, M., History, Man and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971.) Mansel, H.L. (1858) The Limit of Religious Thought Examined: in Eight Lectures Delivered Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1858, Oxford: John Murray. Mansel, H.L. (ed. Chandler, H.W.) (1873), Letters, Lectures and Reviews, including the Phrontisterion, or Oxford in the 19th Century, London: John Murray. Marion, M. (2000) ‘Oxford Realism: Knowledge and Perception II’ in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol.8, no.3, 485–519. Marsh, P.T. (1969) The Victorian Church in Decline – Archbishop Tait and the Church of England 1868–1882, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marsh, J. (1998) Word Crimes – Blasphemy, Culture and Literature in NineteenthCentury England, Chicago: Chicago UP. Martineau, J. (1879 (1891)) ‘Ideal Substitutes for God’, (1879) in Essays, reviews and Addresses – IV, 269–91, London: Longmans Green. Maurice, F. (1884) The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Chiefly told in his own Letters (2 vols), London: Macmillan & Co. Mayor, S.H. (1965) ‘Lux Mundi: A Reassessment’, in Church Quarterly Review, 358, January–March, 74–80. McFarland, T. (1969) Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, Oxford: Clarendon. McTaggart, J.M.E. (1901) Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge: CUP. Mendelson, E. (ed.) (1976) W.H. Auden – Collected Poems, London: Faber and Faber. Middleton, R.D. (1948) ‘Aubrey Moore’, in Theology, vol.51, no.333, March 1948. Mill, J.S. (1840 (1867)) ‘Coleridge’, in Dissertations and Discussions, vol.1, 393–466, London: Longmans Green (previously published in the Westminster Review, March 1840). Mill, J.S. (1865) An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings, London: Longmans, Green. Millgate, M. (1982) Thomas Hardy – A Biography, Oxford: OUP. Milne, A.J.M. (1962) The Social Philosophy of English Idealism, London: George Allen and Unwin. Mivart, St G.J. (1885) ‘Bishop Temple’s Lectures on Religion and Science’, Edinburgh Review, vol.162, 204–33. Monk, R. (1996) Bertrand Russell – The Spirit of Solitude, London: Jonathan Cape. Moore, A.L. (1889) Science and the Faith – Essays on Apologetic Subjects, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. Moore, A.L. (1890a) Essays Scientific and Philosophical, London: Kegan Paul, Trench. Moore, A.L. (1890b) Lectures and Papers on the History of the Reformation in England and on the Continent, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.

Bibliography 225 Moore, A.L. (1891) Some Aspects of Sin – Three Courses of Lent Sermons, London: Percival. Moore, G. (1888 (1952)) Confessions of a Young Man, London: Heinemann (1952 reprint). Moore, G.E. (1903) Principia Ethica, Cambridge: CUP. Moore, J.R. (1979) The Post-Darwinian Controversies, Cambridge: CUP. Moore, J.R. (1990) ‘Theodicy and Society: The Crisis of the Intelligentsia’ in Helmstadter, R.J. and Lightman, B. (eds) Victorian Faith in Crisis – Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Belief, Stanford: Stanford UP, 153–86. Mozley, A. (ed.) (1891) Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman During his Life in the English Church (2 vols), London: Longmans Green. Muirhead, J.H. (1915) German Philosophy and the War, London: John Murray. Muirhead, J.H. (1931 (1965)) The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy, London: George Allen and Unwin. Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899a) The Works of Thomas Hill Green (3 vols), London: Longmans, Green. Nettleship, R.L. (ed.) (1899b) ‘Memoir of Thomas Hill Green’ in The Works of Thomas Hill Green, III, i-clxi, London: Longmans, Green. Newman, J.H. (1840) Tract 85; Lectures on Scripture Proof of the Doctrines of the Church, London: Rivingtons. Newman, J.H. (1864 (1959)) Apologia pro vita Sua, London: Fontana. Newsome, D. (1961) Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal, London: Cassell. Newsome, D. (1966 (1993)) The Parting of Friends – The Wilberforces and Henry Manning. Norman, E.R. (1976) Church and Society in England 1770–1990 – A Historical Study, Oxford: Clarendon Press. O’Day, Rosemary (1988) ‘The Clerical Renaissance in Victorian England and Wales’, in Parsons, G. (ed.) Religion in Victorian Britain – 1 – Traditions, Manchester: Manchester UP, 184–212. O’Rourke, D.K. (1998) Demons by Definition – Social Idealism, Religious Nationalism and the Demonisation of Dissent, New York: Peter Lang. Otter, S. den (1996) British Idealism and Social Explanation – A Study in Late Victorian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Paget, S. (ed.) (1921) Henry Scott Holland – Memoir and Letters, London: John Murray. Pater, W. (ed. Hill, D.) (1893 (1980)) The Renaissance – Studies in Art and Poetry, Berkeley: University of California Press. Patrick, J. (1985) The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901–1945, Macon: Mercer UP. Pattison, M. (1876) ‘Philosophy at Oxford’ in Mind, 1, 82–95. Pattison, M. (1885a) Memoirs, London: Macmillan. Pattison, M. (1885b) Sermons, London: Macmillan. Peel, J.D.Y. (1971) Herbert Spencer – The Evolution of a Sociologist, London: Heinemann. Prestige, G.L. (1935) The Life of Charles Gore, London: Heinemann. Prickett, S. (1976) Romanticism and Religion – The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church, Cambridge: CUP.

226 Bibliography Pringle-Pattison, A.S. (Andrew Seth) (1893) Hegelianism and Personality, Edinburgh: Blackwood. Pringle-Pattison, A.S. (1902) Man’s Place in the Cosmos and other Essays (2nd edn), Edinburgh: Blackwood. Purdy, R.L. and Millgate, M. (1982) The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Vol. 3, Oxford: Clarendon. Quinn, E.V. and Prest, J.M. (eds) (1987) Dear Miss Nightingale: A Selection of Benjamin Jowett’s Letters, 1860–1893, Oxford: OUP. Ramsey, A.M. (1960) From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between Lux Mundi and the Second World War, London: Longmans. Reardon, B.M.G. (1966) Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: CUP. Reardon, B.M.G. (1971) From Coleridge to Gore – A Century of Religious Thought in Britain, London: Longmans. Reckitt, M. (1947) Maurice to Temple – A Century of Social Movement in the Church of England, London: Faber and Faber. Reiman, D. and Powers, S.B. (1977) Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, New York: Norton. Richter, M. (1964) The Politics of Conscience – T.H. Green and his Age, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Robbins, P. (1982) ‘Idealism as a Substitute Religion’, in The British Hegelians 1875–1925, New York: Garland Publishing, 91–7. Russell, A. (1980) The Clerical Profession, London: SPCK. Russell, B. (1956) Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, London: George Allen and Unwin. Russell, B. (1959 (1975)) My Philosophical Development, London: Unwin Books. Russell, B. (1967) The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 1: 1872–1914, London: George Allen and Unwin. Sanders, C.R. (1942 (1972)) Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, New York: Octagon Books. Sandford, E.G. (ed.) (1906) Memoirs of Archbishop Temple – by Seven of his Friends (2 vols), London: Macmillan. Seccombe, T. (ed.) (1908) Letters of James Boswell to the Rev W.J. Temple, London: Sidgwick and Jackson. Sell, A.P.F. (1995) Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Sidgwick, A.S. and E.M.S. (1906) Henry Sidgwick – A Memoir, London: Macmillan & Co. Sidgwick, J.B. (1905) ‘Appendix to the Lectures on the Metaphysics of Green’, Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and Other Philosophical Lectures and Essays, London: Macmillan, 257–66. Smith, B.A. (1958) Dean Church – The Anglican Response to Newman, London: OUP. Stanley, A.P. (1844) The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., London: Ward Lock. Stephenson, G. (1936) Edward Stuart Talbot, 1844–1934, London: SPCK. Sutherland, J. (1990) Mrs. Humphry Ward – Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, Oxford: Clarendon. Swinburne, A.C. (1924) Swinburne’s Collected Personal Works, London: Heinemann. Talbot, E.S. (1890) ‘The Revd Aubrey Moore’, Guardian, 29 January.

Bibliography 227 Temple, F. et al. (1860a) Essays and Reviews, London: Longman. Temple, F. (1860b) ‘The Education of the World’, in Essays and reviews, London: Longman. Temple, F. (1860c) The Present Relations of Science to Religion. A Sermon Preached on Act Sunday, July 1, 1860, Before the University of Oxford During the Meeting of the British Association, Oxford: J.H. and Jas. Parker. Temple, F. (1872) ‘Presidential Address’ in Transactions of the Devonshire Association, V, 17–29. Temple, F. (1885) The Relations between Religion and Science, Bampton Lectures 1884, London: Macmillan. Temple, W. (1939) ‘Theology Today’, in Theology, vol. XXXIX, no.233, November, 326–33. Thistleton, A. (1995) Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self – On Meaning, Manipulation and Promise, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Thomas, G. (1987) The Moral Philosophy of T.H. Green, Oxford: Clarendon. Thompson, K.A. (1970), Bureaucracy and Church Reform: The Organizational Response of the Church of England to Social Change, 1800–1965, Oxford: OUP. Toon, P. (1979) Evangelical Theology 1833–1856: A Response to Tractarianism, London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott. Turner, F.M. (1981) The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, New Haven and London: Yale UP. Turner, F.M. (1993a) ‘Cultural Apostasy and the Foundations of Victorian Intellectual Life’, in Contesting Cultural Authority – Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life, Cambridge: CUP, 38–72. Turner, F.M. (1993b) ‘The Triumph of Idealism in Victorian Classical Studies’, in Contesting Cultural Authority – Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life, Cambridge: CUP, 322–61. Turner, F.M. (1993c) ‘The Secularisation of the Social Vision of British Natural Theology’, in Contesting Cultural Authority – Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life, Cambridge: CUP, 101–27. Turner, F.M. (1993d), ‘The Religious and Secular in Victorian Britain’, in Contesting Cultural Authority – Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life, Cambridge: CUP, 3–37. Vincent, A. (1986) ‘T.H. Green and the Religion of Citizenship’ in Vincent, A. (ed.) The Philosophy of T.H. Green, Aldershot: Gower, 48–61. Wagar, W. (1972) Good Tidings – The Belief in Progress from Darwin to Marcuse, London and Bloomington: Indiana UP. Walsh, W.H. (1898) The Secret History of the Oxford Movement, London: Church Association. Ward, H. (1888) Robert Elsmere, London: Smith Elder. Ward, H. (1918) A Writer’s Recollections, Glasgow: Collins Sons & Co. Ward, W. (1889) William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, London: Macmillan. Watson, E.W. (1915) Life of Bishop John Wordsworth, London: Longmans Green. Wells, H.G (1895 (1958)) ‘The Time Machine’, in Selected Short Stories, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 6–83. Westcott, B.F. (1890) Christus Consummator – Some Aspects of the Work and Person of Christ in Relation to Modern Thought, London: Macmillan. Wheeler, M. (1979) The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction, London: Macmillan.

228 Bibliography Whewell, W. (1833) Astronomy and General Physics, London: William Pickering. Whewell, W. (1840) The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, London: John Parker. Wilde, O. (1891 (1949)) The Picture of Dorian Gray, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wilde, O. (1897 (1996)) De Profundis, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. Wilde, O. (1949) Works, London: Collins. Wilkinson A. (1998) Christian Socialism: Scott Holland to Tony Blair, London: SCM. Willey, B. (1940 (1962) ) The Eighteenth-Century Background, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Willis, K. (1988), ‘The Introduction and Critical Reception of Hegelian Thought in Britain 1830–1900, Victorian Studies, vol.32, no.1, 1988, 85–111. Wittgenstein, L. (1953 (1958)) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell. Wolffe, J. (1991) The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829–1860, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wolffe, J. (1994) God and Greater Britain – Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945, London: Routledge. Woolf, V. (ed. Schulkind, J.) (1985) Moments of Being (2nd edn), London: Hogarth Press. Wright, N.T. (1991) The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clarke. Yeats, W.B. (1955) Autobiographies, London: Macmillan. Yeo, R. (1979) ‘William Whewell, Natural Theology and the philosophy of Science in mid-Nineteenth Century Britain’, Annals of Science, vol.36, no.5, 493–516. Yeo, R. (1993) Defining Science – William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain, Cambridge: CUP. Zemka, S. (1995) ‘Spiritual Authority and the Life of Thomas Arnold’, in Victorian Studies, vol.38, no.3 (Spring 1995), 429–62.

Index Abraham, C.J., 130 Arnold, M., 206 Obermann Once More, 77 on Christianity purged of doctrine, 159 reflects Robert Elsmere, 76 rejection of miracles, 159 Rugby Chapel, 146 Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, 76f Arnold, Thomas, xv, 64, 87 and ‘clerisy’, 31 despairs of Church of England, 5 view of history, 6, 93, 176 vision of inclusive Church, 7 Arnold, Thomas (jr), 65 Asquith, H.H., 56, 203 Athanasius, 119, 122 Baldwin, T., 214 Balleine, G.R., 11 Barnett, C., 193 Baur, F.C., 51 Bebbington, D., 10 Benham, W., 165 Benson, A.C., 177 Best, G.F.A., 199 ‘Bloomsbury set’, 179 Booth, C., 131 Boulger, J.A., 201 Bowler, P., 122, 168, 211 Boys Smith, J.S., 79 Bradlaugh, C., 124 Bradley, F.H., 143, 149, 152 Brendon, P., 198 ‘Broad Church’, 15, 49, 72, 82, 106 and Essays and Reviews, 17 origin of term, 15 rejected by characters in Robert Elsmere, 65 Brockliss, L.W.B., 215 Bronte, E., 73 Brooke, J.H., 110, 209

Brose, O.J., 13, 199, 200 Brown, F.K., 11, 199 Buckley, J.H., 216 Burns, A., 15, 199 Butts, R.E., 201 Caird, E, 51 deplores decline of idealism, 38 Caldecott, A., 120, 211 Cambridge ‘Apostles’, 11, 148, 152 ‘Cambridge Network’, 21 membership, 10 Cannon, S.F., 18, 199 Carpenter, S.C., 198, 210 Chadwick, O., 85, 115, 199, 206, 216 Church ‘parties’, xiv, 9ff as self-referential, 16 deplored by M. Creighton, 162 strengthened by theological colleges, 116 Church, R.W., 9, 11, 63, 173, 199, 204 ‘clerisy’ and Robert Elsmere, 68 definition of, 30 persistence in Church of England, 105, 178 Clough, A.H., 88, 199 Coleridge, S.T., 200 acquainted with Kant, 28 and romanticism, 28 Frost at Midnight, 29 On the Constitution of Church and State, 31 rejects Paley’s rationalism, 30 The Eolian Harp, 32 vision of ‘clerisy’, 30, 61 Collingwood, R.G., 174, 217 conflict thesis of science and faith, 109f, 125f, 169 Conybeare, W.J., 14f 1855 analysis of ‘parties’, 15 contacts with ‘Cambridge Network’, 14 229

230 Index Copleston, F., 36, 152, 214 Copleston, F. (Oriel College), 20 Corporation Act 1828, 2 ‘cosmic toryism’, 16 Creighton, L., 215 Creighton, M., 162f, 184 on ‘national Church’, 162 on ‘party’disputes, 162 on science, 163 Cupitt, D., 58, 195, 203, 218 D’Arcy, Charles (1859–1938), 134ff and Lambeth 1930, 137 influenced by T.H. Green, 211 life of, 135f on atonement, 142 on evil, 141f on miracles, 140 on mysticism, 144 on racial superiority, 145 publications of, 137 rejects Tractarianism, 135 Davidson, R.T., 207 Dale, P., 167, 216 Dangerfield, G., 172, 217 Dant, C.H., 216 Darwin, C., 110, 123, 211, 168 den Otter, S., 26f, 200, 201, 213 Desmond, A., 106, 208 Drummond, H., 122f, 170 Eagleton, T., 187, 189, 203, 218 Edwards, D.L., 164, 206 Elder, G.P., 82, 101, 103, 209 Eliot, G., 59, 73, 79 on liberation from dogma, 169 Eliot, T.S., 174 Ellis, I., 85, 95, 207 Engel, A.J., xii England, R., 126, 209, 211 Essays and Reviews, xiv, 17ff, 91f, 104, 144 Evangelicalism, 10f anti-Roman and anti-Ritualist polemic of, 12 origin of, 11 decline of lamented by Sir J. Stephen, 11

Faber, G., 95 Fayter, P., 159 Fielding, H., 1 Fin de siècle, xivf, 39, 135, 144, 154, 158, 164, 185f and Christian heritage, 190 and cultural fragmentation, 180 and late Victorian Church of England, 195 portrayed in Robert Elsmere, 74 postmoden interpretation of, 186 Forbes, D., 198 Fraser, H., 200 Froude, J.A., 198 Gilbert, W.S., 147 Gilley, S., 90 Gilmour, R., 217 Gladstone, W.E., 64, 7ff Gordon, P., 40 Gore, C., 90 and ‘clerisy’, 177 and kenoticism, 117 Gornall, T., 12 Green, 196 Green, T.H. (1836–1882), 40ff and ‘eternal consciousness’, 46, 48, 101, 119, 153 and rejection of miracles, 54f and Romanticism, 45 and the ‘common good’, 48, 105 as political radical, 42f Coleridgian scepticism about ‘evidences’, 55 criticised by Aubrey Moore, 126 criticised by H. Sidgwick, 48, 148 election to Balliol, 43 Essay on Christian Dogma, 56 Faith, 56 favours John’s gospel, 44 finds Hegel obscure, 36 Force of Circumstances, 61 friendship with H.S. Holland, 53f friendship with M. Creighton, 163 funeral of, 40 impatience with ecclesiasticism, 62 importance of Christianity to, 56

Index 231 Green – continued influence of B. Jowett on, 38, 41, 53, 79 influences Charles D’Arcy, 137 Introduction to Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, 45 Lay Sermons, 94, 102, 129 life of, 41f on corruption at Oxford, 41 on ‘death of God’, 58 on moral imperative, 49 on prayer, 59 on relation between Scripture and dogma, 43f, 57 on spirituality of idealism, 169f optimism of, 170, 176 Popular Philosophy and its Relation to Life, 44 Prolegomena to Ethics, 45f, 60, 113, 116, 127 role in secularisation of Oxford, 179 ‘spiritual principle’, 45 sympathy with clergy, 55 The Witness of God, 56 work ethic in, 50 Green, V.H.H., 200 Griggs, E.L., 200 Grote, G., 27 Guardian, xii, 100, 103f, 155f, 181, 204, 214f, 217 Hampden, R.D., 198 Hardy, T., 165f, 216 and Jude the Obscure, 165f, 179, 180 contrast of Robert Elsmere with Jude the Obscure, 167 critique of Oxford University, 165 on non-dogmatic Christianity, 166 The Darkling Thrush, 194 Hare, J., 115 crticises Tractarians, 7 Harrison, F., 80, 206 attacks idealism, 80 attacks Essays and Reviews, 17 Harvey, D., 190f, 218 Henson, H., 116 ‘Heritage Christianity’, 191f Herschel, J., 10

Hilton, B., 208 Hinchliff, P., 10, 49, 103, 201, 207, 217 Hofstetter, M.J., 198 Holland, H.S., 68, 155 correspondence with T.H. Green, 53f on Frederick Temple, 107 uncertain over future of Church, 147 Holmes, R.H., 200 ‘Holy Party’, 114, 177, 181 Houghton, W.E., 201, 206, 216 Huxley, T.H., 62, 66, 106, 166, 171, 178, 188, 208 criticises idealism, 171 on decline of ‘progress’, 171 Hylson-Smith, K., 13 Hylton, P., 35, 47, 150, 153f, 201, 214 Idealism, 23ff as agnostic substitute for Arnoldian Christianity, 42 as alternative theistic cosmos, 52, 184f as countering materialism, 27 as providing moral code, 42 attacked by Frederic Harrison, 80 attacked by H. Mansel in The Phrontisterion, 23 blamed for nationalism, 185 definitions of, 25 English suspicion of, 25 in Aubrey Moore, 128 influence on Charles D’Arcy, 137 marginalises historic Christianity, 190 R.G. Collingwood on, 174 rejected by B. Russell, 150ff rejected by W. Pater, 160 Idealism, Absolute, 36 Idealism, Moral, 37 Idealism, Personal, 55 Illingworth, A.L., 147 Illingworth, J.R., xv, 112, 114, 127, 130, 138, 143, 147, 174, 217 Iremonger, F.A., 209

232 Index Jahanbegloo, R., 212 Jowett, B., xii, 128, 218 and Essays and Reviews, 17 as destructive of Christianity, 62 believed that great men do not become clergy, 52 criticises Frederick Temple, 97 criticises Lux Mundi, 118 distaste for science, 193 divinity as ‘personality clothed in laws’, 50 encourages T.H. Green, 41f Kant, I., 28, 87 postulate of moral reason, 25 Keble, J., 28 Ker, I., 198 Kingsley, C., 41, 72, 101, 208 Knight, F., 199 Knights, K., 201 Lang, C., 116 Langford, T., 37 Lankester, R., 170, 216 Lester, J.A., 217 Levi, O., 185 Levy, P., 214 Lewis, C.S., 36 Liddon, H.P., 165 criticises Lux Mundi, 115 Liturgy aesthetic appeal of, 162 and romanticism, 161f debates in Parliament, 161f irrelevance of controversies, 183 O.Wilde on, 162 Logos, 132, 192 as ground for rational theism, 32 Lotze, R.H., 136, 213 Luce, A.A., 145 Lux Mundi, xivf, 53, 112, 126, 131, 138, 148, 151, 154, 173, 186, 188 denounced as ‘dangerous’, 158 H. Henson on, 116 limitations of, xivf origin of, 114 Lyotard, J-F., 186, 218

Mackinnon, D., 79, 180, 217 ‘Magdalen Metaphysicals’, 36 Mandelbaum, M., 26, 27, 200 Mansel, H.L., 23, 200 alternative theism to T.H. Green, 44 and ‘Bampton Lectures’, 1858, 21f The Phrontisterion, 23, 165f Marsh, P.T., xi Martineau, J., 160, 215 Maurice, F.D., 21, 41, 58 Mayor, S.H., 121, 211 McFarland, T., 31, 201 McTaggart, J.M.E., 151, 214 on idealism as enemy of Christianity, 149ff Middleton, R.D., 209 Mill, J.S., 23, 27, 44, 48, 120, 201, 210 and Victorian intellectual ferment, 38 on Coleridge as reaction to 18th century, 31 Millgate, M., 216 Mivart, St. G.J., 103 Monarchy, 182f decline of influence, 183 Monk, R., 214 Moore, Aubrey (1848–1890), xv, 109ff and idealist cosmos, 120 and miracles, 129 and moral purpose, 124f and ‘providential evolution’, 125 as Hegelian synthesis, 121f cosmic teleology in, 132 criticises T.H. Green’s Prolegomena, 126 defends orthodoxy, 122 History of the Reformation’, 113f idealism in, 128 life of, 111f on evolution, 123 on science, 119 on the Logos, 130 rejects ‘inteventionist’ God, 120 The Christian Doctrine of God, 112f, 118 theodicy of, 131

Index 233 Moore, G.E., 53, 138, 150, 215 abandons Christianity, 151f and defence of hedonism, 188 Moore, George, 159 Moore, J., 103, 125, 170, 208 Morison, C., 124 Morley, J., xiii, 9, 194 and Church ‘parties’, 13 Mozley, J.B., 157 Muirhead, J.H., 185, 218 Nettleship, R.L., 41ff, 50ff, 210 Newman, J.H., 56, 135, 207 criticises ‘indifferentism’ in doctrine, 7 drifts to liberalism, 3 Newsome, D., 88, 207 Noetics, 5 Norman, E.R., 132, 206 O’Day, R., 14, 199 O’Rourke, D.K., 189, 218 ‘Old Mortality Society’, 43, 56 Oriel College, Oxford, 3 Oxford University as unhelpful to faith, 156 limitations on entry, 1 Paget, S., 203, 204 Paley, W., 30, 129, 171 Pater, W., 66, 71, 160f, 217 Patrick, J., 36 Pattison, M., xii, 157, 171, 200, 211 as model for ‘Wendover’ in ‘Robert Elsmere’, 72 described by H. Sidgwick as ‘moral fiasco’, 62 rejects Tractarianism, 20, 87 Peel, J.D.Y., 216 Peel, R., 2 Powell, Baden, 10, 84, 103, 199 Prestige, G.L., 115, 210 Prickett, S., 28, 200 Pringle-Pattison, A.S., 37, 118, 173, 210, 217 ‘Providential Evolution’ (G.P. Elder), 101, 105, 155, 168

Pusey, E.B., 67, 86, 156f early liberal views, 5 Mrs. Ward’s reference to sermon on Darwin, 72 Ramsey, A.M., 131, 180, 212, 217 Reardon, B.M.G., 28, 200, 201 Reckitt, M., 206 Reform Act 1832, 3f, 9 social disorder and, 4 Reform Act 1867, xiii, 61 Richter, M., 47, 50, 202 Robbins, P., 56, 203 Robert Elsmere, xv, 64, 67ff, 159 and Jude the Obscure, 165 correspondence in The Guardian, 78 ‘Flaxman’ as sceptical aesthete, 74 futility of ‘Broad Church’ in, 72 Gladstone’s criticisms of, 75 ‘Langham’ as sceptic, 71 memorialises T.H. Green, 65 ‘Mr. Grey’ as T.H. Green, 69f ‘Newcombe’ as fanatical Tractarian, 70 reflects Green’s pilgrimage, 68 ‘Wendover’ as M. Pattison, 72 Row, C.A., 178 Russell, A., 13 Russell, B., 138, 151, 214 early idealism of, 149ff world as ‘jelly or shot’, 150, 154 Ryle, J.C., 12 Sanders, C.R., 200 Sandford, E.G., 206f Seccombe, T., 206 Sell, A.P.F., 26, 37, 200 Sidgwick, H., 48, 148 on J.M.E. McTaggart, 149 on T.H. Green, 148 Sidgwick, J.B., 214 Simeon, C., 1 Smith, B.A., 204 Spencer, H., 103, 168 Spinoza, B., 59 St. Gluvias, 82 Stanley, A.P., 10, 19, 193 Stephen, Leslie, xiiif, 148, 183

234 Index Stephenson, G., 210 Sutherland, J., 205 Swinburne, C.A., 165 Symonds, J.A., 202 Tait, A.C., 85, 88 and decline of Church of England, xif dispute with Fredrick Temple, 95f Talbot, E.S., 114, 119, 209 Taylor, A.E., 37 Temple, Frederick (1821–1902), xv, 49, 59, 82ff, 206ff and Rugby School, 84 as new type of clergyman, 85 controversy with A.C. Tait, 95ff, 144 criticised by B. Jowett, 97 criticised by H.S. Holland, 107 excited by Coleridge’s romanticism, 87 friendship with Jowett, 84 indebtedness to Kant, 99 influence of Thomas Arnold on, 92f, 94 lack of contact with scientists, 102f life of, 83ff ‘moral law’ superior to ‘scientific law’, 99 on Church of England as God’s civilizing influence, 95 on classics superior to science, 98f on evil, 100 on miracles, 101f on ‘providential evolution’, 100 rejects dogmatism as ‘childish’, 94 speak at 1860 British Association, 110 speech to Devonshire Association, 98 The Education of the World, 92ff, 184 The Relations between Religion and Science, 97ff tires of Tractarian ferment, 86 uses evolution to validate ‘progress’, 100, 125 Temple, Octavius (1784–1834), 83

Temple, W. (Abp. Cant.), 185 on demise of ‘progress’, 197 on Frederick Temple, 106 Temple, William (1739–1796), 82 Tennyson, A., 139, 193 Test Act 1828, 2 Thirlwall, C., 34 Thirty-Nine Articles, xii, 2, 19, 48, 71, 86, 89, 149 Thistleton, A., 187, 218 Thomas, G., 47, 153 Thompson, K.A., 13 Tract 1, 14 Tract 85, 90 liberal view of Scripture, 89 Tract 90, 87, 90 Tractarianism, 2, 10, 18 as dominant factor in Anglican history, 9f decline of influence at Oxford, 18, 157 Turner, F.M., 17, 27f, 35, 51f, 79, 88f, 125, 128, 200, 202, 207 Vincent, A., 202 von Arx, J.P., xiiif, 61 Wace, H., 108, 180 Walsh, W.H., 12, 199 Ward, Mrs. H., xv, 131, 64ff compares H.P.Liddon unfavourably with T.H. Green, 70 friendship with M. Pattison, 66 friendship with T.H. Green, 67 Writer’s Recollections, 65f Ward, T. Humphry, 66 Ward, W.G., 85f friendship with F. Temple, 85, 91 friendship with Temple, 132 The Ideal of a Christian Church, 85 Webb, C.C.J., 37 Wells, H.G., 172 Westcott, B.F., 194, 218 Whatley, R., 3ff opposed to church ‘parties’, 5 Wheeler, M., 204 Whewell, W., 33ff and idealists, 34

Index 235 Whewell – continued Aubrey Moore on, 129f on ‘progress’, 168 Wilberforce, S., 109 Wilde, O., 182, 215 critique of Robert Elsmere, 161 De Profundis, 183 Wilkinson, A., 217 Willey, B., 16 Willis, K., 26, 200

Wittgenstein, L., 176 Wolffe, J., 12, 199 Woolf, V., 179, 217 Wordsworth, W., 28, 45 Yeats, W.B., 160, 172 Yeo, R., 34 Zemka, S., 6